A Walker in the City Read online

  Down we go, down the school corridors of the past smelling of chalk, lysol out of the open toilets, and girl sweat. The staircases were a gray stone I saw nowhere else in the school, and they were shut in on both sides by some thick unreflecting glass on which were pasted travel posters inviting us to spend the summer in the Black Forest. Those staircases created a spell in me that I had found my way to some distant, cool, neutral passageway deep in the body of the school. There, enclosed within the thick, green boughs of a classic summer in Germany, I could still smell the tense probing chalk smells from every classroom, the tickling high surgical odor of lysol from the open toilets, could still hear that continuous babble, babble of water dripping into the bowls. Sex was instantly connected in my mind with the cruel openness of those toilets, and in the never-ending sound of the bowls being flushed I could detect, as I did in the maddeningly elusive fragrance of cologne brought into the classroom by Mrs. B., the imminence of something severe, frightening, obscene. Sex, as they said in the "Coney Island" dives outside the school, was like going to the toilet; there was a great contempt in this that made me think of the wet rings left by our sneakers as we ran down the gray stone steps after school.

  Outside the women teachers' washroom on the third floor, the tough guys would wait for the possible appearance of Mrs. B., whose large goiterous eyes seemed to bulge wearily with mischief, who always looked tired and cynical, and who wore thin chiffon dresses that affected us much more than she seemed to realize. Mrs. B. often went about the corridors in the company of a trim little teacher of mathematics who was a head shorter than she and had a mustache. Her chiffon dresses billowed around him like a sail; she seemed to have him in tow. It was understood by us as a matter of course that she wore those dresses to inflame us; that she was tired and cynical, from much practice in obscene lovemaking; that she was a "bad one" like the young Polish blondes from East New York I occasionally saw in the "Coney Island" dives sitting on someone's lap and smoking a cigarette. How wonderful and unbelievable it was to find this in a teacher; to realize that the two of them, after we had left the school, probably met to rub up against each other in the faculty toilet. Sex was a grim test where sooner or later you would have to prove yourself doing things to women. In the smell of chalk and sweat and the unending smirky babble of the water as it came to me on the staircase through my summer's dream of old Germany, I could feel myself being called to still another duty—to conquer Mrs. B., to rise to the challenge she had whispered to us in her slyness. I had seen pictures of it on the block—they were always passing them around between handball games—the man's face furious, ecstatic with lewdness as he proudly looked down at himself; the woman sniggering as she teased him with droplets from the contraceptive someone had just shown me in the gutter—its crushed, filmy slyness the very sign of the forbidden.

  They had never said anything about this at home, and I thought I knew why. Sex was the opposite of books, of pictures, of music, of the open air, even of kindness. They would not let you have both. Something always lingered to the sound of those toilets to test you. In and out of the classroom they were always testing you. Come on, Army! Come on, Navy! As I stood up in that school courtyard and smelled again the familiar sweat, heard again the unending babble from the open toilets, I suddenly remembered how sure I had always been that even my failures in there would be entered in a white, thinly ruled, official record book.

  On Belmont Avenue, Brownsville's great open street market, the pushcarts are still lined on each other for blocks, and the din is as deafening, marvelous, and appetizing as ever. They have tried to tone it down; the pushcarts are now confined to one side of the street. When I was a boy, they clogged both sides, reached halfway up the curb to the open stands of the stores; walking down the street was like being whirled around and around in a game of blind man's buff. But Belmont Avenue is still the merriest street in Brownsville. As soon as I walked into it from Rockaway, caught my first whiff of the herrings and pickles in their great black barrels, heard the familiarly harsh, mocking cries and shouts from the market women—"Oh you darlings! Oh you sweet ones, oh you pretty ones! Storm us! Tear us apart! Devour us!"—I laughed right out loud, it was so good to be back among them. Nowhere but on Belmont Avenue did I ever see in Brownsville such open, hearty people as those market women. Their shrewd open-weather eyes missed nothing. The street was their native element; they seemed to hold it together with their hands, mouths, fists, and knees; they stood up in it behind their stands all day long, and in every weather; they stood up for themselves. In winter they would bundle themselves into five or six sweaters, then putting long white aprons over their overcoats, would warm themselves at fires lit in black oil drums between the pushcarts, their figures bulging as if to meet the rain and cold head-on in defiance.

  I could hear them laughing and mock-crying all the way to Stone Avenue, still imploring and pulling at every woman on the street—"Vayber! Vayber! Sheyne gute vay-ber! Oh you lovelies! Oh you good ones! Oh you pretty ones! See how cheap and good! Just come over! Just taste! Just a little look! What will it cost you to taste? How can you walk on without looking? How can you resist us? Oh! Oh! Come over! Come over! Devour us! Storm us! Tear us apart! BARGAINS BARGAINS!!" I especially loved watching them at dusk, an hour before supper, when the women would walk through to get the food at its freshest. Then, in those late winter afternoons, when there was that deep grayness on the streets and that spicy smell from the open stands at dusk I was later to connect with my first great walks inside the New York crowd at the rush hour—then there would arise from behind the great flaming oil drums and the pushcarts loaded with their separate mounds of shoelaces, corsets, pots and pans, stockings, kosher kitchen soap, memorial candles in their wax-filled tumblers and glassware, "chiney" oranges, beet roots and soup greens, that deep and good odor of lox, of salami, of herrings and half-sour pickles, that told me I was truly home.

  As I went down Belmont Avenue, the copper-shining herrings in the tall black barrels made me think of the veneration of food in Brownsville families. I can still see the kids pinned down to the tenement stoops, their feet helplessly kicking at the pots and pans lined up before them, their mouths pressed open with a spoon while the great meals are rammed down their throats. "Eat! Eat! May you be destroyed if you don't eat! What sin have I committed that God should punish me with you! Eat! What will become of you if you don't eat! Imp of darkness, may you sink ten fathoms into the earth if you don't eat! Eat!"

  We never had a chance to know what hunger meant. At home we nibbled all day long as a matter of course. On the block we gorged ourselves continually on "Nes-sels," Hersheys, gumdrops, polly seeds, nuts, chocolate-covered cherries, charlotte russe, and ice cream. A warm and sticky ooze of chocolate ran through everything we touched; the street always smelled faintly like the candy wholesaler's windows on the way back from school. The hunger for sweets, jellies, and soda water raged in us like a disease; during the grimmest punchball game, in the middle of a fist fight, we would dash to the candy store to get down two-cent blocks of chocolate and "small"—three-cent—glasses of cherry soda; or calling "upstairs" from the street, would have flung to us, or carefully hoisted down at the end of a clothesline, thick slices of rye bread smeared with chicken fat. No meal at home was complete without cream soda, root beer, ginger ale, "celery tonic." We poured jelly on bread; we poured it into the tea; we often ate chocolate marshmallows before breakfast. At school during the recess hour Syrian vendors who all looked alike in their alpaca jackets and black velours hats came after us with their white enameled trays, from which we took Halvah, Turkish Delight, and three different kinds of greasy nut-brown pastry sticks. From the Jewish vendors, who went around the streets in every season wheeling their little tin stoves, we bought roasted potatoes either in the quarter or the half—the skins were hard as bark and still smelled of the smoke pouring out of the stoves; apples you ate off a stick that were encrusted with a thick glaze of baked jelly you never entirely got
down your throat or off your fingers, so that you seemed to be with it all day; knishes; paper spills of hot yellow chick peas. I still hear those peddlers crying up and down the street—"Arbes! Arbes! Hayse gute arbes! Kinder! Kinder! Hayse gute arbes!"From the "big" Italians, whom we saw only in summer, we bought watermelons as they drove their great horse-smelling wagons down the street calling up to every window—"Hey you ladies!Hey ladies! Freschi and good!"—and from the "small" ones, who pushed carts through the streets, paper cups of shaved ice sprinkled before our eyes with drops of lemon or orange or raspberry syrup from a narrow water bottle.

  But our greatest delight in all seasons was "delicatessen"—hot spiced corned beef, pastrami, rolled beef, hard salami, soft salami, chicken salami, bologna, frankfurter "specials" and the thinner, wrinkled hot dogs always taken with mustard and relish and sauerkraut, and whenever possible, to make the treat fully real, with potato salad, baked beans, and french fries which had been bubbling in the black wire fryer deep in the iron pot. At Saturday twilight, as soon as the delicatessen store reopened after the Sabbath rest, we raced into it panting for the hot dogs sizzling on the gas plate just inside the window. The look of that blackened empty gas plate had driven us wild all through the wearisome Sabbath day. And now, as the electric sign blazed up again, lighting up the words JEWISH NATIONAL DELICATESSEN, it was as if we had entered into our rightful heritage. Yet Wurst carried associations with the forbidden, the adulterated, the excessive; with spices that teased and maddened the senses to demand more, still more. This was food that only on Saturday nights could be eaten with a good conscience. Generally, we bought it on the sly; it was supposed to be bad for us; I thought it was made in dark cellars. Still, our parents could not have disapproved of it altogether. Each new mouthful of food we took in was an advantage stolen in the battle. The favorite injunction was to fix yourself, by which I understood we needed to do a repair job on ourselves. In the swelling and thickening of a boy's body was the poor family's earliest success. "Fix yourself!" a mother cried indignantly to the child on the stoop. "Fix yourself!" The word for a fat boy was solid.

  Pitkin Avenue weighs on me. As you go up from Belmont, the neon glare suddenly lights up all the self-conscious confusion of Brownsville's show street. Banks, Woolworth's, classy shops, loan companies, Loew's Pitkin, the Yiddish theater, the Little Oriental restaurant—except for Brownsville's ancestral stress in the food, the Yiddish theater, the left wing-right wing arguments around the tables in Hoffman's Cafeteria, the Zionist appeals along the route, it might be Main Street in any moderately large town. But as I walk it now, the people look strangely divided from each other as they pick, pick, pick at the lighted frippery in the windows, and I think of our one Emma Bovary, Mrs. E., whose wild longing for a nicer world than this led her to abandon her housework for half an hour every morning to sit at a table in the empty vegetarian restaurant; it made her feel so distinguished.

  No other Brownsville street brings home to me so many of the external things I once lived with. Pitkin Avenue is what Brownsville is most proud of, for walking down it on a Saturday night, when all the lights are ablaze and the sharpies in their wide-brimmed Broadway hats waiting to pick up a girl outside the old United States Bank building look as if their greatest ambition were to be mistaken for prosperous Gentiles from Flatbush, a stranger might almost be persuaded that Brownsville is not, after all, so different. But it is the street I felt most alien to, and which I secretly hated. I can never forget the surprise I always felt walking into it a block from our house. After Pitkin Avenue, the tenement side streets always seemed especially dark.

  On one side of Pitkin the landlords' protective association and the offices of the pious Tammany lawyers—the "leaders" of the community who could always sprinkle a few tearful words of Yiddish solidarity during the campaign and so deliver the vote to the organization. On the other, the gray marble savings bank in whose shadow the Communists and Socialists raged at each other alone under all their talk of France, Germany, Spain, India, China.

  Standing there I seemed to see two long processions of militant ghosts passing down each side of me. Even as they flung at each other the old catchwords, accusations, battle cries, they were united in giving my despair of both a harsh, contemptuous and unbelieving look. How well I know that cult of all significance, those eyes trained with hopeful sharpness on every public event in the world, those palms wet with daily uncertainty of the future, the abstractions, the abstractions that filled every hour of talk about the world situation those nights you could hear evicted families weeping on the street. How all those ghosts still surround me as in my trance I walk Pitkin Avenue again. Where now is Mendy, with the venomous cowlick over his eyes, who went off from the slums of Thatford Avenue to disappear on the Ebro, in defense of "Spain," and before he left dismissed me forever in rage and contempt—"intellectuals are not even worth shooting"—because I doubted the omniscience of Josef Vissarionovitch Stalin? And David, my excellent if pedantical friend David, with those thick lenses before his eyes severe as Marxist method, who dutifully suppressed his love of chemistry and poetry to go down into the wilds of darkest Georgia to advance the cause of the Negro oppressed?

  All bank corners on Pitkin Avenue were gathering places. Even banks that had failed in the depression and had closed their doors forever still kept their fascination for the groups that had always met outside them. Perhaps they hoped that by looking through the grilled windows long and intently enough they might see some of the money they had lost. In front of the old Municipal Bank on the corner of Stone—how my heart quickened as I went up to it—is a place where every Saturday morning about eleven my father and his fellow house painters gathered in one circle, carpenters and plasterers and bricklayers in theirs. The men came to talk shop, and if they were out of work, to get the nod from the union delegate or a boss, who walked about in the crowd calling hands to a new job. The men would stand around for hours—smoking, gossiping, boasting of their children, until it was time to go home for the great Sabbath midday meal. One of my greatest pleasures as a boy was to walk down Pitkin Avenue pretending I had no idea where my father was, and then to stand at his side listening to the racy, hard, pseudo-cynical painter talk. My father always introduced me around, very shyly but with unmistakable delight, as his kaddish. What an intense pride that word carried for him, and how it saddened me. Kaddish is the Hebrew prayer for the dead, read for a father by his son. Even among the hardened working-class skeptics—I never knew a painter who was devout; they all left that to their women—the term was kept up as a matter of course, out of fatherly pride: "See the one who comes after me!" But though I knew the word was only formally connected with death, I heard tbo much of death in our house, all through the year, to want to hear my father speak of it, even in jest; those meetings in front of the old Municipal Bank meant too much to me.

  I liked listening to the painters talk about their famous union boss, Jake the Bum, and to the unending disputes between left wing and right wing, which had been in friction with each other for so long, so automatically bristled and flared as soon as a word was said, that the embattled daily life of the union came alive for me. I liked especially hearing the men roll out those long curses against the "boss painters"—may a black year befall them, the miserable bastards— which made up, a little, for the insecurity of their trade. I was happy my father was a painter; I liked painters. They were not bent and cadaverous and pale, like my uncles and cousins in the garment lofts on Seventh Avenue; the smell of paint and plaster was still on their overcoats Saturday mornings; they had a kind of mock bravado that suited men who were always getting up on scaffolds and falling off scaffolds and rising off the ground with a curse to live another day; and who liked to think of themselves as great drinkers and boasters and lechers, knew how to laze on a job, how to drive an unpopular contractor crazy; thought of themselves all as great artists in their line; and never knew from one month to the next if they would be working, or where.
/>   I can still hear my mother's anxious question each time my father returned from that labor pool in front of the Municipal Bank—Geyst arbeten? Will there be work this week? From the early 'thirties on, my father could never be sure in advance of a week's work. Even the "long" jobs never seemed to last very long, and if he was on an "outside" job, a rainy day was a day lost. It puzzled me greatly when I came to read in books that Jews are a shrewd people particularly given to commerce and banking, for all the Jews I knew had managed to be an exception to that rule. I grew up with the belief that the natural condition of a Jew was to be a propertyless worker like my painter father and my dressmaker mother and my dressmaker uncles and cousins in Brownsville—workers, kin to all the workers of the world, dependent entirely on the work of their hands. All happiness in our house was measured by the length of a job. The greatest imaginable bliss was a "busy season." It was unfortunate, but did not matter too much, if the boss was a bastard, a skinflint, a cheat, a no-good, so sharp with his men that one might—God forgive us—doubt that he was a Jew. All that was to be expected of him, was of his very essence as a boss—for a boss, as my mother once offhandedly defined the type in a sentence that lighted up for me our instinctive belief in the class struggle—a boss was a man who did nothing himself, sat by idly, enjoying himself, and got rich on the bitter toil of others. It was far more important to us that the boss be successful, full of work to give out. Let him be mean, let him be unspeakable, let him be hateful—he kept us alive. I remember it was said of a young painter cousin of mine, who had somehow managed to work six months steady, that he lived on his boss, meaning that there was something suspect about him; it was as if he had morally deserted the working class by getting too close to the boss—for how else could he have managed that triumph?