A filly called Rhymes with Rope put me on a cross-country train out of Penn Station. That’s one story. Another story starts with thousands of dollars gone missing and ends with a dog lapping up a puddle of blood. I’ve told both. Truth is, I got on that train and headed west to stay with my sick friend, Alfred. He knew I was in a sea of troubles.
When I told Alfred the filly won and I had money for a ticket, he said, “Seems our lives are guided more by chance than by choice after all.”
Maybe he was talking about his life, his luck. He’d gone home to Spokane at Christmas and never come back. He was wasting away, and his doctors were baffled.
In Spokane, I told him I wouldn’t go home until he got better. He didn’t argue, but he had a proposition: take my winnings to the track and see if I could make it work. Sounded good until he hit me with the hard part.
“Tell your story. Write it down. Be honest,” he said. “Try to tell the truth.” Alfred liked my stories — especially the ones I wished were true.
I’m a guy who’ll take a bet if I can see an edge. And I can, because I have a story to tell. About horses, money, and trouble.
###
My story starts in the fall of ’76 back when the subway cars were still slathered with graffiti and “Born to Run” was roaring on the radio. I was seventeen and on the streets. I’d been living here and there for over a year, ever since my father, Ira, got remarried and the apartment walls started squeezing in on me. Grandpa Joe didn’t like the way it looked: his grandson doing homework at Burger King, hustling up odd jobs, and more often than not making his way betting horses. The old man saw fit to create a job for me at one of his Manhattan restaurants: Joe’s Pier 52 on Fifty-second and Seventh.
On my first day, Joe Kipness himself – restaurateur and Broadway producer - pal to boxers and ingénues, mobsters and congressmen - led me and the manager, one Max Goldberg, through the kitchen. We made our way past high-hatted chefs and aproned pot scrubbers. In the pantry, Joe went to the stainless-steel door of the walk-in. He disappeared into the whir of the cooler fan and reappeared a minute later with a piece of fish resting on the palm of his hand.
He didn’t say anything. He let the fish speak for itself.
Max piped up, though. “Xiphias gladius,” he said. “aka swordfish.”
Joe passed the fish to Max with one hand and pulled the handkerchief from the breast pocket of Max’s suit jacket with the other. Max didn’t even blink. It was like he’d put the handkerchief into his pocket that morning just so Joe would have a convenient way to get rid of the smell and slime of raw swordfish. Max slipped into the cooler, quiet as a magician’s assistant.
While Grandpa Joe wiped his hands, he told me, “We only serve the best here, Michael. Don’t spend my money on anything less than the freshest fish, freshest produce, freshest … anything. If you have a question … ” He cupped his hand and put the polished nails to his nose. “… or a whiff of a question about the quality or freshness of anything, send the crap back.”
When Max came out of the box, his glasses fogged up and his comb over blown to smithereens, Joe stuffed the handkerchief back where he got it, took a quick look at his watch, and without a word to either of us, made his way between the waiters and disappeared through the swinging kitchen doors.
Max wiped his glasses with his now-rumpled rag of a handkerchief. One eyebrow went up when he looked at me. “Got that, kid?”
Sure, I got it. I had to get it, and quick.
I’d been sleeping here and there ever since Ira’s new wife, Kathy, came into the picture. It was like a foreigner moved in. We spoke a different language. It drove her crazy when I called my father ‘Ira’. But Ira always called Joe ‘Joe’ and I called Ira ‘Ira’. I was always around him and his friends at the racetrack and he was Ira to them, so he was always Ira to me.
By the time I moved out, the only person who didn’t want me to leave was my brother, Robert. Everything is about ten times harder for Robert than it is for everyone else, except knowing the current top forty songs and their flip sides and the order of the presidents and being a great brother. But I had to leave him alone there in the apartment with Ira and Kathy.
To Kathy, me moving was a failure and a disgrace. She thought it was all about her, me moving. It wasn’t. She just showed up about the time I gave up hoping Ira might find my Bar Mitzvah money he’d lost at the races. You hear stories about guys who’ll bet on which way the wind will blow: those stories are about my old man. He bets on sports, plays some cards, but he loves the horses more than most men love women or whiskey.
So Grandpa Joe saved me with the assistant steward job. I thought the real steward, Carl, might have felt some threat at the idea of me coming in, but he never acted like he did. He liked the idea of being promoted to “head steward” since it freed him from the dirtier jobs of sorting and rotating stock, mopping the walk-ins, and breaking down the crates and boxes.
Max, though, was a different story. He got nothing out of the deal. As Joe’s long-time henchman and fix-it man, Max had enough trouble keeping Joe happy without having to babysit an “assistant steward” whose only qualification for the job was his last name.
I knew I had a make-believe job, but I didn’t just pretend to work. A job created out of thin air could disappear in the wink of Joe’s eye. So I scrutinized every delivery for the clear silvery eyes of freshly dead tuna, the shimmering scales and firm flesh of halibut and snapper, the groping claws of live crabs. Rarely — maybe five times in three years — did I have to send anything back. Word was out that Joe Kipness never paid for second-rate product. He had friends down at the South Street Seaport who would send up special catches or cull through the bins for the fattest, freshest oysters of the sea.
For those three years, Max scrutinized me from the smoky confines of his office. I was a mystery to the man. This is Joe’s grandson, who calls in sick, only to seek a cure at the track? Who shows up to work reeking of pot and desperation? Who filches steaks and uses his family connection to weasel veal Parmesan dinners from the chef, shots of vodka from the bartender?
That was me. Joe’s grandson and Ira’s boy.
Sure, I ate like a prince at the Pier, saving my meager earnings to keep a roof over my head and the hope of a winner alive with the occasional wager on a worthy horse. But who was mooching? I earned every nickel and then some, if you ask me.
In would come the wooden crates, a-slosh with ice, and from Max’s office, I’d hear a voice. “Hey.”
I was doing my job; I didn’t answer to “Hey”, so he’d yell, “Kid!”
He knew my name was Michael, but two syllables would have put undue strain on the man. ‘Kid’ was as good as a name after a while, and I answered to it. But I didn’t like it.
“Yeah, Max?”
“Whadja got?”
“Meat!”
“What kind?”
“Beef!”
“What cuts?”
“What you ordered!” I’d yell, consulting the invoice.
That’s how it was with Max.
But I had a few friends at the Pier. Phil, the piano tuner. He rented me a room in the basement of his workshop in the Village. The hat-check lady, Maggie, who’s known me since I was born, almost. The bartender, Greco. Ernie, the sous chef, who might send some prime rib or shrimp scampi my way on occasion.
And Alfred.
He was one of Grandpa’s accountants. He kept the books for the restaurants and shows. He worked in an office downstairs between the waiter’s locker room and Max’s office. I mostly saw him when he came to the kitchen after the lunch rush to pick up the money or when he got something to eat in the afternoon.
One day about a month after I started, while the lunch waiters slurped soup and counted their tips in the booth by the kitchen door, I sat at a table by myself enjoying a small bucket of steamed clams and trying to read a book for school called The Stranger. A man who looked like he was as old as Ira appeared, plate in hand, and asked if he might join me.
That’s how he said it: “Might I join you?”
It took me a second. Then I got it. I didn’t care.
“Go ahead,” I said.
“You must be Michael,” he said, “the young Mr. Kipness.”
That got my nose out of the clam bucket. I gave him the once-over. His paisley bow tie, his dapper tweed jacket, his too-trim, gray-flecked beard: they seemed almost as queer as the fact he knew who I was. He made a show of looking at his plate of sole and coleslaw and then cocked an eyebrow at the waiters’ table. “I don’t see anybody else feasting on steamers. Ernie treats you like royalty,” he said. “Dead give-away.”
“He had extras,” I said. He didn’t, but I had a habit of making excuses.
“Alfred.” He reached out to shake my hand, his smile brightening, like he had it on a dial control. You could tell he liked coffee and cigarettes, but the tinges didn’t matter when he smiled like that. He waited while I stuffed a piece of French bread in my mouth and wiped my hand on my pants. When I could get my tongue to work around the bread enough to talk, I said, “I’m Michael.”
“Indeed,” he said.
I watched him cut his sole with a knife and fork, like it was a slab of prime rib. Who does that? I added his dainty table manners to his paisley tie and the way he talked all “might I” and “indeed” and thought, this guy’s gay.
He looked up from his plate, like he knew what I was thinking. But he didn’t. He just said, “So what do you think?”
I knew he wasn’t asking about the clams. My book lay open beside my plate, pages down to save my place.
“It’s all right,” I said.
He waited, still smiling, like he really cared what I thought. His fish was getting cold, so what the hell? I told him.
“I liked the part when he goes swimming with his girlfriend and when he watches the soccer players and stuff. But I don’t get why he shot the Arab.”
Alfred said something about Marie, the girlfriend, in French, that I didn’t understand, but he smiled while he said it like he knew what parts I read more than once. Then he said, “The sun was in his eyes.”
I’d read that part a couple of times, too. The sun was killing the guy, so maybe it made him pull the trigger once. That first time. I could buy that. Maybe. “But he shot him five, six times,” I said.
Alfred picked up the book and let the pages flutter under his thumb like a deck of cards. He found a page he liked and gave it a few seconds of his time. I could tell he was thinking more than reading. He closed my book and slid it toward me. When the cover came up a little he pressed it down and smoothed it, like it was his fault it looked raggedy.
He said, “You’re right about the Arab, I think. Having the sun in your eyes isn’t a good reason to shoot anybody.” He smiled again but not like he did about Marie or my clams. This smile had an edge to it. Maybe two edges. “But sometimes it’s enough, don’t you think?”
After that, whenever he saw me, he’d say, “Hey, Stranger,” like we shared a secret that was still a secret to me. But that didn’t last long. Alfred figured out I only had that book for school and I didn’t care about it. He knew I’d rather talk about girls or horses or music. Alfred started calling me Michael when he saw me, pronouncing my name with pleasure, like it was a nickname he’d given to me.
But to Max, I was just “the Kid.” That’s all he ever called me. Whose fault was that? Mine, maybe some, but mostly I blamed Grandpa Joe, who hardly gave me the time of day after his pantomime with the swordfish. While he hobnobbed up in the dining room with his Broadway cronies, I was relegated to the basement to lug crates and weigh produce for minimum wage and practice my Spanish with the prep cooks and porters.
Max got the message because he got no message. All Joe had to say was, “Take care of Michael” and that would have been exactly what Max would have done. He’d been shadowing Joe since they worked in the garment district driving trucks. The details are sketchy, because Joe’s business stayed in the shadows and the side streets. All I know is, he left the trucks behind. Downtown restaurants turned into uptown restaurants. And here’s where Joe’s story goes from hush-hush to neon bright — one day in 1942 he walked into the office of Alexander Cohen, the theater producer, a total stranger, set a roll of bills worth fifty thousand dollars on the desk and said, “I want in.”
That’s how Joe operated.
And still, he didn’t give me the time of day.
Then about three years after he made me assistant steward, Grandpa Joe showed up on the loading dock. I didn’t see him at first. I was breaking down boxes, my headphones on, Springsteen blasting. Suddenly the prep cooks tossed their smokes into the alley and skedaddled. I turned to see what scared them off.
There he was — Joe Kipness himself — in one of his thousand-dollar suits.
I pulled my headphones off and wiped my hands on my pants in case he wanted to shake. He didn’t.
His eyes settled on the waist-high pile of cardboard and broken crate slats beside me. “Max tells me you’re a pretty good worker. When you work.”
I picked up a soggy box on the ground between us and tossed it on the pile.
“Max tells me you have an attitude problem,” Grandpa said. “But I know that.”
I shrugged. And then I regretted shrugging. I wanted to show him a good attitude, but — too late now.
“Max tells me you call in sick.” Out came his lower lip. “People get sick. Okay. He tells me you smell like pot sometimes.” That’s when he shrugged. “I hear young people like that stuff.”
I could hear scratchy sounds through the headphones around my neck.
“Here’s another thing Max tells me. He tells me you leave my restaurant without his permission.”
I didn’t dare open my mouth, but I shook my head a little.
“Max says you go to the OTB. What’s that stand for? OTB?”
I opened my mouth. “Off-Track Betting.”
Grandpa Joe straightened his tie. He shot his cuffs with a shrug, smoothed them. He sniffed.
“I told Max, I don’t believe you, Max. No. I don’t pay Michael money to throw away on horses. I said, His father does that kind of thing. His father throws his money away by the shovelful. But Michael’s not like his father.”
Joe raised his head, took a deep breath, and filled his nose with the odor of fish and smoke and vegetables gone rotten.
He said, “That’s what I told Max.”
Then he walked up the alley toward a waiting limousine, his shiny shoes making tapping sounds on the pavement.
I slid my headphones over my ears. The Boss’s voice, the drum, the sax and guitar roared inside me. I picked up a wooden lobster crate, turned it bottom side up and sent my fist right through it.
Then one day about four months before the lobsters, before Rhymes with Rope, before the train trip, Max called: “Hey, Kid.”
That surprised me. He was in his office. It was elevenish, maybe later, and he was usually long gone on his pre-lunch rounds through the kitchen and dining room. But his main purpose was to slip out the side door and scurry up Eighth Ave to the OTB.
I knew what Max was up to. I was up to the same thing. I didn’t slip out that day, though. I didn’t find a horse to my liking, and truth be told, I only had a couple crumpled bills and some pocket change to my name.
Max didn’t look up from the Post when I came to the door.
“Yeah, Max,” I said. Still he didn’t look up. He had his pen poised over the graded entries for the day’s card at Aqueduct. It looked like he was picking out his bets on nothing more than horses’ names and the published odds. I looked down at the top of his head, at his wispy comb-over, and even though he was a snitch and a hypocrite, I almost felt sorry for the guy. Take it from me, who pretty much learned how to read from my old man’s Daily Racing Form: it’s pathetic to see a guy picking horses based on nothing more than hunches and hope.
“Yeah, Max.”
He squinted up at me through his glasses, looking annoyed, like he’d forgotten who called who. Then he put his pen down next to a mess of pipe cleaners and invoices, dirty soup bowls and spoons. He pulled open his desk drawer and took out an envelope. He held it in two hands and bobbed it up and down, like he was weighing it.
“Johnnie’s late. I gotta go. Here.” He waved it at me. Again, he said, “Here.”
I reached for it, but he didn’t let it go. While we played a gentle little tug o’ war, he said, “Go up to the bar and wait for Dio. He’s on his way.”
“Who?”
“Joe’s guy. Johnnie. Johnnie Dio. I can’t wait forever. Go.” He let his half of the envelope loose. I didn’t have to look at it to know what I was holding. That package felt an inch thick with bills. And when I did look at it, I could see the bald head of Ben Franklin through the flimsy paper of the envelope.
“Greco’s behind the bar. He’ll point him out. Just put that in Johnnie’s hand. Can you do that, Kid?”
I could do that.
But I couldn’t figure out what was up. Max might bet like a fool, but would he risk Joe’s wrath just because Dio was late? Was he setting me up? I was spooked, but I stuffed the envelope in the pocket of my sweatshirt and headed upstairs.
Greco had a mustache that flew out from the side of his face like a pair of wings. When he saw me, he slid a small green bottle of Poland Spring water my way.
“He ain’t here yet,” he said. So Greco knew about my errand. Who else knew?
I couldn’t shake that spooked feeling. The noon-time bar didn’t feel like a bar with the lights up and the music off, boxes of booze on the tables, the linens piled up. But a bar it was, because when I sipped my water, I found it spiked with a heavy shot of vodka, Greco’s ‘Russian Spring,’ a little something stealthy he’d concocted just for me. I lifted it to him in thanks and drained it.
“Top of the morning to you,” Greco said. And his mustache spread its wings.
Then I heard Maggie laughing clear from the cloakroom up front. That’s what she’s famous for, Maggie, her laughter and her red hair dyed as dark as a pomegranate. Her girlish giggle makes her popular with the jokesters, but she’s one of those nervous women who’d laugh just as hard if you told her the time.
“Here’s your man,” Greco said, as Dio rolled in. Johnnie was a short guy who rocked on his toes when he walked. His bowling ball of a head shined with Vitalis and his jowls were so smooth it looked like he finished shaving five minutes before he walked into the bar. He made his entrance with the cocky grin of a man enjoying his own joke, but it didn’t take him long to realize Max was nowhere to be seen. That was no joke to Johnnie, I could tell, because he gave Greco a sudden stony glance that wasn’t open to interpretation. Greco got it. He lifted the bar rag in his hands in my general direction. Johnnie looked me over from the hood of my sweatshirt to my faded jeans, to my high-top Converse and back up the same slow way to my face. When he got there, his eyes locked onto mine. Just when I wanted to glance away, he closed his eyes and let them stay closed for the time it took to nod his head, once, then twice, satisfied by something.
I caressed the envelope in my sweatshirt pouch with both hands. I gave it a final gentle squeeze before pulling it out, like I was passing over my own life savings. When I put it on the bar Johnny bellied up and covered it with his hand.
“What happened to Max?” He didn’t look at me when he said that. He squinted across the bar, like he was trying to read the labels on the bottles.
“I dunno,” I said, thinking I should probably leave Max’s Aqueduct wagers out of it. I didn’t like Max and he didn’t like me, but I wasn’t about to give him up. I almost said he was busy with a problem in the kitchen, but that didn’t sound good in my head, either. Johnnie didn’t seem like a guy who’d be happy playing second fiddle to a broken dishwasher. Again, I said, “I dunno,” which sounded even worse.
“This is Joe’s idea, maybe?” Johnnie asked. He looked down at his hand, which was so big it buried the envelope.
How would I know? But I wasn’t going to argue with Johnnie Dio. “Maybe,” I said.
And that was the right thing to say, because Johnnie let loose a sudden laugh, an explosive Ha!
Then he gave me a good long look, like I was not just worth noticing, but worth actually thinking about. “See, thing is, I remember you.” He showed me a row of perfect teeth, capped like Grandpa Joe’s. “Remember me?”
I didn’t.
He leaned toward me, bringing all the smells of a barbershop with him, and whispered, “I gave you an envelope once. Remember? At your thing … you know … your Bar Mitzvah thing. At the Hampshire House, come to think. Yeah. Fancy-schmancy, it was.”
I didn’t remember this Johnnie Dio guy. But I remembered that day alright. And I remembered a parade of men in ties and suits and cuff links, their wives hovering above me smelling powdery and pungent in the August heat. Every last man stretched out his arms to shake my right hand and press an envelope into my left. A parade of envelopes, a pile, a goddamned pyramid by the end.
But thanks to Ira, I never saw what was inside a single one.
“Yes, sir,” I said. Why did I lie? And where did that “sir” come from? I hadn’t “yes, sirred” anybody since boarding school.
“Thank you, sir,” I added. But for what, I didn’t know.
As he stuffed the envelope into his front pants pocket, he said, “Tell Max I said get well soon.”
Then Johnnie Dio rolled out of there like he rolled in, a man amused by his own wit.
I didn’t have a chance to convey Johnnie’s well wishes to Max until later that afternoon. I took a breather in Carl’s cubbyhole of an office and imagined a future without Max in the picture at all. What if this was Joe’s idea? What if he had plans for me? What if I could leap over Carl, the “head steward”, right out of his cubbyhole and into Max’s office, into Joe’s inner circle, to rub shoulders with the likes of Johnnie Dio?
A rattle and clang from the loading dock brought me out of my day dreams. My big little brother worked at newsstands uptown on Broadway, but he came to the Pier once or twice a week to sort cans and bottles for Grandpa Joe. At nineteen, Robert was a bear of a man, thick-armed and broad-backed. He greeted me with the open smile of a boy. His hug wrapped me up like I was the younger brother, not him. He smelled like mustard and sweat.
“Call Me,” he said, “number one.” He laughed like he wrote the song himself. The next second, he was elbow deep in glass and tin, mumbling, “Cover me with kisses, baby, cover me with love.” Robert made a world out of whatever was in front of him — a bucket of bottles, a song on the radio. I decided not to tell him about Dio and the envelope. He was content with the prospect of the twenty bucks Max would toss him for his trouble. Ira said I was the lucky one. But there I was, stuck in the basement of the Pier, my pockets empty, worse off than Robert.
All afternoon, while I loaded carts for the kitchen, that envelope kept coming to mind: the heft of it, the way it filled the pouch of my sweatshirt. How much was there? Four grand? More? All I knew was once upon a time it was Joe’s money, now it was Johnnie’s. But for a minute, it was my hand. I felt solid. Wasn’t I owed something? Max owed me enough respect to learn my name. Joe owed me more than minimum wage. And Ira, he owed me hundreds. Wasn’t that my edge? Didn’t Dio see it in my eyes? I carried the cash. Sure, I handed it over, and sure, Johnnie waltzed out of the Pier with every last dollar, but I held on to something. I held on to my edge.
I could smell Max coming in a cloud of smoke. He stuck his head into the cubbyhole, pipe first. I made him wait, savoring my little secret win against him. He plucked the pipe out of his mouth and said, “So?”
I told him all he needed to know: “Dio said get well soon.”