in calamine lotion like a mad zombie. When I finally got out they were glad to see me go, let me tell you. You in a gang?”
“No sir.”
“Well how you expect to get anywhere, how you expect to learn anything? I hire from gangs. That’s the training ground. You ever hear of the Frog Hollow gang?”
“No sir.”
“Jesus. That was the most famous of all the old Bronx gangs. What’s the matter with this generation? That was the gang of the first Dutch Schultz, don’t you know that? The toughest street fighter who ever lived. He’d bite your nose off. He’d pull your balls out by the root. My gang named me after him I got back from the reform. It was a honorary thing. It showed I’d done my time and gone through it, and come out of my training a son of a bitch in spades. So ever since that’s why I’m called the Dutchman.”
I cleared my throat and looked out through the screen over the privet hedges to the water, where a small boat with a triangular white sail seemed to be sailing the shimmering mesh. “There are some gangs now,” I said, “but they are dumb fucking kids, mostly. I don’t want to pay for no one’s mistakes but my own. I think these days for the real training you got to go right to the top.”
I held my breath. I didn’t dare look at him, I looked at my feet. I could feel his gaze on me. I could smell his cigar.
“Hey Otto,” he said, “wake the hell up, you’re really missing something.”
“Oh? That’s what you think,” Mr. Berman said from under his hat.
It didn’t all happen at once but it happened night and day, there seemed to be no rule of time, no plan except the possible moment and whatever it was we drove to it in a car, and when you look out the window at the life you’re going through to get to this moment it takes on an odd cast, so that if the sun is shining it’s shining too brightly, or if it is night it is too black, all the organization of the world seems part of the conspiracy of your attention, and whatever is naturally around you becomes unnatural by the peculiarly absolute moral demand of what you are doing. This was my wish, I was training at the top. I remember for instance being dropped off at the corner of Broadway and Forty-ninth Street and told to hang around and keep my eyes open. That was all that was said, but it was momentous. One of the cars sped off and I didn’t see it again, the other, the one with Mr. Berman, kept coming around the block every few minutes, a single black squarish Chevrolet sedan inconspicuous in the traffic of black cars and the yellow checker cabs cruising for fares and the double-decker buses and streetcars, relatively empty, and neither Mickey the driver nor Mr. Berman looked at me as they passed, and I derived from that not to look particularly at them. I stood in the doorway of Jack Dempsey’s restaurant that had not yet opened for the day, it must have been nine or nine-thirty in the morning, and Broadway was fairly fresh, the newsstands and coconut-drink and hotdog stands were open and a couple of the stores that sold little lead Statues of Liberty but not much else. There was a second-floor dance studio across Forty-ninth Street and the big window was tilted open and someone was playing “Bye, Bye, Blackbird” on the piano. There is a local Broadway, a community of Broadway that you see in the morning before the penny arcades and bars open for theday, the people who live upstairs in the tenements above the movie marquees, who come out with their dogs on the leash to get the Racing Form and the Mirror and buy a bottle of milk. And the bakery delivery men who pull up and carry the racks of breads and big bags of rolls into the groceries, or the butcher trucks with the guys loading big raw sides of beef on their shoulders and dumping them on the roller chutes leading down to the basements underneath the restaurants. I kept watching and saw the street sweeper with his big broom and his summer white with the
“No sir.”
“Well how you expect to get anywhere, how you expect to learn anything? I hire from gangs. That’s the training ground. You ever hear of the Frog Hollow gang?”
“No sir.”
“Jesus. That was the most famous of all the old Bronx gangs. What’s the matter with this generation? That was the gang of the first Dutch Schultz, don’t you know that? The toughest street fighter who ever lived. He’d bite your nose off. He’d pull your balls out by the root. My gang named me after him I got back from the reform. It was a honorary thing. It showed I’d done my time and gone through it, and come out of my training a son of a bitch in spades. So ever since that’s why I’m called the Dutchman.”
I cleared my throat and looked out through the screen over the privet hedges to the water, where a small boat with a triangular white sail seemed to be sailing the shimmering mesh. “There are some gangs now,” I said, “but they are dumb fucking kids, mostly. I don’t want to pay for no one’s mistakes but my own. I think these days for the real training you got to go right to the top.”
I held my breath. I didn’t dare look at him, I looked at my feet. I could feel his gaze on me. I could smell his cigar.
“Hey Otto,” he said, “wake the hell up, you’re really missing something.”
“Oh? That’s what you think,” Mr. Berman said from under his hat.
It didn’t all happen at once but it happened night and day, there seemed to be no rule of time, no plan except the possible moment and whatever it was we drove to it in a car, and when you look out the window at the life you’re going through to get to this moment it takes on an odd cast, so that if the sun is shining it’s shining too brightly, or if it is night it is too black, all the organization of the world seems part of the conspiracy of your attention, and whatever is naturally around you becomes unnatural by the peculiarly absolute moral demand of what you are doing. This was my wish, I was training at the top. I remember for instance being dropped off at the corner of Broadway and Forty-ninth Street and told to hang around and keep my eyes open. That was all that was said, but it was momentous. One of the cars sped off and I didn’t see it again, the other, the one with Mr. Berman, kept coming around the block every few minutes, a single black squarish Chevrolet sedan inconspicuous in the traffic of black cars and the yellow checker cabs cruising for fares and the double-decker buses and streetcars, relatively empty, and neither Mickey the driver nor Mr. Berman looked at me as they passed, and I derived from that not to look particularly at them. I stood in the doorway of Jack Dempsey’s restaurant that had not yet opened for the day, it must have been nine or nine-thirty in the morning, and Broadway was fairly fresh, the newsstands and coconut-drink and hotdog stands were open and a couple of the stores that sold little lead Statues of Liberty but not much else. There was a second-floor dance studio across Forty-ninth Street and the big window was tilted open and someone was playing “Bye, Bye, Blackbird” on the piano. There is a local Broadway, a community of Broadway that you see in the morning before the penny arcades and bars open for theday, the people who live upstairs in the tenements above the movie marquees, who come out with their dogs on the leash to get the Racing Form and the Mirror and buy a bottle of milk. And the bakery delivery men who pull up and carry the racks of breads and big bags of rolls into the groceries, or the butcher trucks with the guys loading big raw sides of beef on their shoulders and dumping them on the roller chutes leading down to the basements underneath the restaurants. I kept watching and saw the street sweeper with his big broom and his summer white with the
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