Even at age seven (which is what I was at the time) I knew Pa wasn't much of a businessman; school supplies and dime novels and such made for a steady, day-to-day sort of income, but nothing more. And while he was a hard worker. Pa had begun to have headaches what years later might have been called migraines- and there were days when his stall did not open for business. The headaches began, of course, after Mother died.
It couldn't have been easy for him, but Pa went to Uncle Louis. He went, one Sunday afternoon, to Uncle Louis' Lake Shore high-rise apartment in Lincoln Park. Uncle Louis was an assistant vice-president with the Dawes Bank now; a rich, successful businessman; in short, everything Pa was not. And when Pa asked for a loan, his brother asked, why not go to my bank for that? Why come to my home? And why, after all these years, should I help you?
And Pa answered him. As a courtesy to you, he said, I did not come to your bank; I would not want to embarrass my successful brother. And an embarrassment is what I would be, Pa said, a Maxwell Street merchant in ragged clothes, coming to beg from his banker brother; it would be unseemly. Of course, Pa said, if you want me to come around. I can do that; and I can do that again and again, until you finally give me my loan. Perhaps, Pa said, you do not embarrass easily; perhaps your business associates, your fancy clients, do not mind that your brother is a raggedy merchant- an anarchist- a union man; perhaps they do not mind that we both were raised by a whorehouse madam; perhaps they understand that your fortune was built upon misery and suffering, like their fortunes.
With the loan, my father was able to start a small bookstore in the part of North Lawndale we knew as Douglas Park, a storefront on South Homan with three rooms in the rear: kitchen, bedroom, sitting room, the latter doubling as my bedroom; best of all was indoor plumbing, and we had it all to ourselves. I went to Lawson school, which was practically across the street from Heller's Books. And the school supplies Pa sold, in addition to the dime novels he continued to stock, kept his store afloat. In twelve years he'd paid Uncle Louis back; that would've been about 1923.
I didn't know it then, because Pa never showed it, but I was the center of his life. I can see that now. I can see that he was proud of the good grades I got; and I can see that the move we made from Maxwell Street to Douglas Park had mostly to do with getting me in better, safer schools and very little to do with improving Pa's business- he still wasn't much of a businessman, stocking more political and economic literature than popular novels (Pa's idea of a popular novel was Upton Sinclair's The Jungle), refusing to add the penny candy and junk toys that would've been the perfect commercial adjunct to the school supplies he sold, that would've brought the Lawson kids in, because the school supplies and dime novels were the only concession he'd make to commerce, the only room he'd sacrifice to his precious books. And he didn't stock the religious books that would've sold well in this predominantly Jewish area, either; a taste for kosher food was about as Jewish as Pa got, and I guess the same has proved true for me. We're that much alike.
He wanted me to go to college; it was his overriding dream. The dream was no more specific than that: no goal of a son as a doctor, or a lawyer; I could be anything I wanted. A teacher would've pleased him. I think, but I'm just guessing. The only thing he made clear was his hope that business- either on Uncle Louis' high scale or his own low one- would be something I'd avoid; and I always assured him that he needn't worry about my following either of those courses of action. The only thing I had tried to make clear, since I was about ten years old, was my desire to be a detective when I grew up. Pa took that as seriously as most fathers would; but some kids do grow up to be firemen, you know. And when I kept talking about it on into my early twenties, he should've paid attention. But that's something parents rarely do. They demand attention; they don't give it. But then the same is true of children, isn't it?
To his credit, when he gave me the five hundred dollars he'd been saving for God knows how long, he said that it was a graduation gift, no strings, though he admitted to hoping I would use it for college. To my credit, I did; I went to Crane Junior College for two years, during which time Pa's business seemed to be less than prospering, with him alone in the shop, closing down occasionally because of headaches. When I went back to help him there, he assumed I was working to save up and go on for another two years of college. I assumed he realized I'd decided two years was enough. Typically, we didn't speak about this and went our merry private ways, assuming the hell out of things.
We had our first argument the day I told him I was applying for a job with the Chicago P.D. It was the first time Pa ever really shouted at me (and one of the last: he reverted to sarcasm and contempt thereafter, the arguments continuing but staying low-key if intense) and it shocked me; and I think I shocked him by standing up to him. He hadn't noticed I wasn't a kid, despite my being twenty-four at the time. When he finished shouting, he laughed at me. You'll never get a job with the cops, he said. You got no clout, you got no money, you got no prayer. And the argument was over.
I never told my father that my Uncle Louis had arranged my getting on the force; but it was obvious. Like Pa said, you needed patronage, or money to buy in. to get a city job. So I went to the only person I knew in Chicago who was really somebody, which was Uncle Louis (never Lou), who was by now a full VP with the Dawes Bank. I went to him for advice.
And he said, "You've never asked anything of me, Nate. And you're not asking now. But I'm going to give you a present. Don't expect anything else from me, ever. But this present I will arrange." I asked him how. He said, "I'll speak to A.J." A.J. was Cermak, not yet mayor, but a powerful man in the city.
And I made the force. And it was never the same between Pa and me, though I continued to live at home. My role in "cracking" the Lingle case got me promoted to plainclothes after two years on traffic detail; and it was shortly after that that my father put my gun to his head.
The same gun I had used today, to kill some damn kid in Frank Nitti's office.
"So I quit" I told Barney.
Barney was Barney Ross, who as you may remember was one of the great professional boxers of his time, and that time was now; he was the top lightweight contender in the country, knocking on champion Tony Canzoneri's door. He was a West Side kid. too. another Maxwell Street expatriate. Actually, Barney still was a kid: twenty-three or twenty-four, a handsome bulldog with a smile that split his face whenever he chose to use it, which was often.
I knew Barney since he was baby Barney Rasofsky. His family was strictly Orthodox, and come Friday sundown could do no work till after Saturday. Barney's pa was so strict they even ripped toilet paper into strips so the family wouldn't be tearing paper on the Shabbes. For about a year, when I was seven or eight, right before we moved out of Maxwell Street, I turned on the gas and did other errands for the Rasofskys, as their Shabbes gov, since I was as un-Orthodox as my pa. Later, when I was a teenager in Douglas Park, I'd come back to Maxwell Street on Sundays, to work with Barney as a "puller" a puller being a barker working in front of the door of a store, shouting out bargains supposedly to be found within, often grabbing a passerby and forcing the potential customer into the store. We worked as a team, Barney and me, and Barney was a real trombenik by this time, a young roughneck; so I let him do the pulling, and I handled the sales pitch. Barney had turned into a dead-end kid after his pa was shot to death by thieves in the little hole-in-the-wall Rasofsky's Dairy. That's what turned him into a street fighter, and the need to provide for the family his pa had left behind eventually turned him into Barney Ross, the prizefighter.