Norwegian ships, back in the forties, were generally agreed to be, by the longshoremen and stevedores, scalers and painters who worked on the Brooklyn and North River piers, the filthiest afloat. This may or may not have been true, but it was accepted as such, until even the Norwegian seamen who sailed on these tubs came to believe it, and, in a perverse way, to flaunt their ships’ squalid conditions. They may not have been any cleaner than those sailing under different flags, but their reputation for egregious feculence had been solidly fixed.
My father and I walked about half the length of the pier, and when we were about even with the fo’c’sle of one of the ships, he struck up a conversation with a man called Joe the Ice. He was in a powder-blue gabardine suit, white shirt and navy tie, and wore a little teardrop diamond in his lapel. I had come to learn that Joe had something to do with what my father called “collections,” not that it here matters. He seemed to me benign and rather affable, but he had an air of being, so to say, all business. There was a story that my Uncle Ralph told about a deckhand on a Moore McCormack tug who was still paying the weekly vig to Joe on a loan he’d made some eleven years earlier. He rarely complained, so my uncle said: he was whole and working.
I suddenly realized that my father had a wad of cash in his hand, and he said to Joe that five grand was jake with him. Joe took out a handful of cash from a tattered red manila portfolio, and counted out five thousand dollars. My father called Sorrow over, all three spoke briefly in Sicilian, and Sorrow took the ten thousand. I was astonished and bewildered, amazed, really, at having seen ten thousand dollars produced, so to speak, out of the air, in the oily heat of the Red Hook summer afternoon. My father smiled at me, and told me, in as few words, that he’d made a bet with the Ice, even money, that he could walk through the Trondheim, from the holds, up through all the decks, onto the main deck and the bridge — walk through the whole ship — without getting a spot or smudge or smear of oil or dirt or rust on his clothes or hat. Then he left me to Sorrow and Joe, and walked up the gangplank. I stood with the men, and, by now, a few scalers who were coming off shift. In a minute, the entire pier knew of the bet, and men waited patiently to see my father appear at the gangway. My father insisted that an electrician who worked for the Navy accompany him to make sure that everything was done right.
My father won the bet, came out spotless, and then took me to Foffés on Montague Street, where he had a scotch or two, and I drank 7Ups, and then we drove to Phil Kronfeld’s, a haberdashery near the old Latin Quarter. He bought me a dozen lusciously soft, white broadcloth shirts, and, deferring to my somewhat dim taste, a half-dozen silk ties, the latter spectacularly “Broadway,” ties that my mother called “bookmaker” ties. She swore that my father had no sense at all, buying a high-school boy such expensive things, but then told me a story about his spending his last twenty dollars on a hat to impress her before they were engaged. I had heard this story, with subtle and loving variations and embellishments, many times.
When I think of that sweltering Brooklyn, so long dead, and my father in his beautiful clothes, with his strong face and huge hands; and when I think of the casually arrogant way in which he bet five thousand dollars, on a kind of whim; and when I, still and always amazed, realize that he had that money in his pocket, I sometimes get up and look at myself in the mirror. I look like my father, but I am not, not at all, like my father. What would he have said about my deformed relationship with the Sterns? About Clara standing me up God knows how many times? About the weakness or lack of will or courage that prevented me from abandoning the whore, prevented me from marrying some woman whose flaws were, at the very worst, the flaws of sanity? What?
When I dream of my father in his spotless hat and, waking, wish that I could have somehow appropriated the authority and confidence that I, of course irrationally, think it to have possessed, I am unfailingly left with the truth that it was my father’s Borsalino. And only his.
Patsy Manucci, one of my father’s drivers and a kind of sidekick who provided my father with a gin-rummy partner and a brand of raucous and mostly unintentional comedy, had a brother, Rocco, of whom, as a boy of fifteen or so, I was in awe. He was a horse of a man, almost, indeed, as thick through the chest and shoulders as a horse, and he spoke in a gravelly voice that was, as the phrase has it, too good to be true. Patsy possessed the same voice, and when the brothers had a discussion or argument about handicapping, the din of their colloquy could be heard through closed doors and even walls. My mother, who liked both brothers, said that their voices were the result of years of shouting the results from the candy store out to the street corner. I did not know what “the results” meant, but I knew that Patsy loved this crack, as he worshiped my mother, and thought it so funny that he repeated it everywhere.
He often said, with the most solemn and respectful of faces, that Rocco was a graduate of Fordham, where he’d studied medicine, a lie so preposterous that nobody ever had the heart to call him on it, or for that matter, even to laugh: people would listen to this wistful, crazy revelation and nod their heads in understanding. Life! their nods regretfully said, Ah, that’s how life is. Once, my father, in a context I no longer remember, broke this unspoken rule of solemnity, and said that Rocco had graduated from Fordham’s “upstate campus,” which caused the men with whom he’d been talking to burst into laughter. I laughed too, but had no true idea why.
Rocco was a runner for a policy operation headed by a man named Jackie Glass, who was always dressed beautifully in oxford gray or navy blue suits, white shirts, repp-striped ties, and French-toed shoes that seemed as soft as gloves. He was married to an exshowgirl, a tall, hard redhead, and they had two spoiled blond children, Marvin and Elaine, who got everything they wanted, or so it appeared to me. His wife’s name was Charl, short, I discovered, for Charlene. Jackie was connected, as the phrase had it, with one of the New York families, I don’t know which one, which gave Rocco, in my adolescent eyes, the most weighty authority: he worked for a man who worked for serious people who had a great deal to say about the running of many things, including the city.
But this was the lesser part of what enthralled me insofar as Rocco was concerned. Rocco was a gambler, but a gambler who existed in a kind of Paradiso, an Eden, an empyrean of gambling that was wholly unreal to me. One night he won sixty thousand dollars in a crap game up on Pleasant Avenue. Even in this time, when people who can barely sing, dance, act, hit a ball, or throw a punch make millions for barely doing these things, sixty thousand dollars is a lot of money; in 1944, when a seventy-five-dollar a week job was thought to be the key to a big apartment on Easy Street, it was, simply, a fantasy amount. Rocco lost the sixty grand two days later in another crap game on Elizabeth Street.
To win it. To have it. To let it all go. To say to hell with it. That’s what fascinated me about Rocco. It’s the way I’ve always wanted to live, the way I’ve wanted to act with the men and women I’ve known, with, of course, especially Clara. I’ve never had the courage, that is to say that I’ve never had the courage to act on my belief that the world, beyond all its endlessly rehearsed wonders and beauties, is absolute shit, that life is best when ignored, or somehow turned away from, and that nothing should be taken at face value. In sum, that everything is a pathetic bust. But I have always acted otherwise, as if there is, perpetually, the possibility for change, for amelioration, for friendship and love. I have, that is, always and unforgivably, acted as if there is hope. But to say: Fuck life! I’ve never managed it, or if I have, it was momentary, melodramatic gesture, empty and contemptible. I think, in effect, of losing sixty thousand dollars, and, without fail, make my craven accommodations. I will not, ever, let it all go.