“Yeah, you sent me copies of your work, kiddo.”
“It’s mostly boilerplate according to the unions and the producers’ association. About a hundred
“But when you get up there, it’s dizzy time. When are you coming home?”
“I kind of want to, Daddy, but what I need right now is a real show-runner client like Blake Lewis. A big fish who can pay me a big commission. I need you to help me reel him in.”
“You should have called me, Wendy.”
“Where would that have got me? You would have blown me off, right?”
“Not necessarily.”
As soon as I say this, I know she’s got her foot in the door. And I know she knows that I know.
“Listen, Daddy, this is a good piece of business. It gets me in solid with the biggest thing going out here.”
“What’s that?”
“Reality TV.”
“There’s an oxymoron for you.”
I have got many things on my mind this morning in the November drizzle that’s making my shoes squeak. Not only that, I accidentally step on a liverwurst sandwich somebody dropped on the sidewalk. So this is not a good omen.
I am on the way from my place on the Concourse over to the office on 161st Street around the corner from the marble glory of the Bronx State Supreme Court. This is where it’s my calling to help little people through the meat grinder of their lives and take from the big people what the market will bear.
When it looks to me like they can hack the payments, the working stiffs pay me with their little credit cards. Or else I take IOUs, which I almost never collect on. The big people—your old-fashioned wiseguys, your rap music moguls, your disgraced politicians—they pay cash, and lots of it.
In case you hadn’t noticed about the times we are living through, weirdness and rudeness is rampant. And it’s not just up there at the top, either, it’s now trickled down to the bottom of the food chain. Never mind, for me business is brisk.
So here I am running a healthy enterprise for which I could use the help of somebody I can trust, namely my kid. I wrongly thought she was happy being molded into the person who would take over everything her mother and I built up in the Bronx. Which is not a bad little empire.
For instance, I own the building on the Concourse where I have lived since pulling up to the curb in a yellow Cirker’s moving van back when Ike was the president. I’ll never forget that Saturday afternoon.
My old man was delirious with joy about leaving the Lower East Side behind us for a new life in the North End, which is what you called the South Bronx back then.
“Can you believe it, Stanny-boy, I got us a big apartment with sun in the windows where rich people used to live,” he said to me that Saturday. He’d gone to the library to read about the new neighborhood. “Right on the Grand Concourse, copied off the Champs-Elysees in France and built in 1909 in the Bronx—by an immigrant. Imagine that. An immigrant just like me. You know, I was in Paris after the war, Stanny, and I painted. And I don’t mean houses.”
Right across the hallway from our sunny apartment I met a chubby girl my age with blue eyes and red cheeks and frizzy black hair.
Her name was Miriam Smart, which was perfect for her. Some people get named like that. Like Billy Strayhorn just had to be a jazz musician, and Johnny Stompanato had to be a wiseguy.
Anyhow, I called her Mimi. We were married on her nineteenth birthday.
Mimi and I were the first ones in our families to go through all twelve grades. After Morris High School, we graduated City College together in the days before tuition. I went on to law school and wound with a job in the domestic violence bureau at the Bronx D.A.’s office, where mostly I sent up slobs who fell in love with a dimple but couldn’t handle the fact that a whole girl came with it.
Mimi, she was the brains of the Katz family operation. She went to work in the real estate business on account of being sadly inspired by her grandfather, who had a little farm stolen out from under him back in Romania.
“You should never leave your place,” Mimi would say, repeating her grandfather’s stern counsel, “no matter how they try to run you out, which they will try to do over and over in different ways.”
Sometime in ’78 or ’79, when a Hollywood movie actor was running for president—such a gag, everybody thought—he brought a gang of reporters along with him to the South Bronx on a campaign tour. Which didn’t make sense to people in the neighborhood because we don’t vote for actors.
Up until then, I appreciated Hollywood for the movie memories I own, like the first time I held Mimi’s hand in the mezzanine of Loew’s Paradise up at 188th Street. But this mutt running for president, he said right in front of the cameras on the evening news that my own neighborhood was the worst place you could ever be in the United States of America.
Okay, we had problems. In those years, who didn’t? But scaring people so they’ll vote for you?
I was angry at this actor. Being the brains of the operation, Mimi figured something besides an insult was going on. “Aha! Now they send in the scary clowns to run us out,” she said. So we did not leave our place.
But just about everybody we knew did.
As the neighbors on our floor left, Mimi took over their leases one by one—at quite favorable terms, thanks to a landlord dumb enough to be scared by an actor who played second banana in a picture about a chimpanzee.
On our dime, Mimi kept our floor beautifully maintained and sublet to nice people who were just like the old neighbors except their skin was darker. She never worried how the dumb landlord let the other floors go to hell and
