Good as Gold

  "I'm sorry," said Gold coldly, "if I embarrass you."

  "What then?" answered Weinrock. "Before you shame me in front of my salesmen, here you shame me

  340

  in front of my creditors. I will have to make apologies for you."

  "You filthy prick," said Gold quietly, losing all patience. "I changed my mind. Give me my fucking money and let me get the hell out of here. I don't even want to finish eating with you."

  44Sit, sit," said Weinrock with tranquility, his face wreathing in jocund crinkles, and Gold guessed just then that the healthy tan on his face was the product of the sun lamp at the gym. "I want to treat you to lunch if you'll lay out the money and lend me another five hundred for a good fur-lined raincoat."

  "I'll lend you shit."

  It was clear Weinrock was going to reproach him. "Filthy prick? Shit? Is that how they taught you to speak at Oxford on your Rhodes Scholarship? You never learned no language like that in Coney Island."

  "I never had no Rhodes Scholarship either," Gold mimicked him in a friendlier manner. "I was in Cambridge, and only for a summer. They weren't giving Rhodes Scholarships away to many Jews then. And I wasn't an athlete."

  "Like that other one, on the Supreme Court? What's the name of that prick on the Supreme Court?"

  "Rehnquist?"

  "The other one."

  "Burger?"

  "Whizzer."

  "Whizzer?"

  "White." Weinrock's large, soft, slumping body shook with lazy laughter. "Imagine growing up with a nickname like Whizzer and liking it. A judge yet they make of a naar named Whizzer."

  "Not like Spot."

  "What's wrong with Spot?" asked Weinrock with honest ingenuousness.

  "It's spotty, Spot." Gold was reveling in the momen­tary turn-about in advantage.

  "I earned it, didn't I? I took out spots in your father's tailor shop for a whole week. Then he fired me."

  341

  "You were too slow," Gold taunted. "He still says you're no good."

  "My mother says about you," said Weinrock, "that you can take a cow around the world—and you'll still have a cow. Tell me, who whizzes? Show me one man in the world who ever whizzed. If I was ever big enough to be a football player and someone called me Whizzer, I would put my fist through his brain. So now you want the money again, huh?"

  "Oh, forget the money—it ain't worth the trouble collecting it from you." Gold glowered darkly for several seconds. "I guess I'll have to write my book. Give me some help and I'll pay for the lunch. I'm doing a book, a serious one." Gold did his best to ignore Weinrock's wondering smile and obnoxious chortling. "In a way it's a big chance for me. It can be a killer if I grind it out right, an abstract autobiography."

  "What's that?"

  "I don't know yet. But I will by the time I finish. It will be about how much fun it was to grow up in Coney Island."

  "Fun?" Weinrock planted upon Gold an expression in which it would have been impossible to choose whether derision or disbelief was the ruling sentiment. "For you? Four-Eyes?"

  Gold winced slightly at the derogatory reminder. "That's one of my problems. I didn't do much. I'm supposed to write about the Jewish experience and I'm not sure I ever had one. I have to make up a lot. That's why I need you and some of the other guys, to give me information. Where were you going all those times when you wouldn't let me come along?"

  "Sometimes noplace."

  "Noplace? Then why wouldn't you let me come?"

  "We didn't want you."

  Gold swallowed this piece of information like a bitter pill. "That's the kind of thing I need to know, I guess. All I've got is my own memory and experience to work with and it ain't enough. I may be able to knock the whole country on its ass with a big best seller if I get the

  342

  right kind of help. What was it like for other people in the neighborhood? Like you and Fishy Siegel and Sheiky from Neptune Avenue. You still see Fishy. I don't remember their father or mother. What did his father do?"

  "He rode a bike."

  "Rode a bike?"

  "Sure. With a white beard and a funny hat with buttons and with holes cut out. Like Sharkey's father. Just as crazy."

  "Cheez!" Gold was quivering with serendipitious excitement. "See? I forgot all about Sharkey and his father."

  Spotty laughed. "Don't you remember the time Sharkey's father disappeared on his bike? The whole neighborhood was looking for him. They had the police. Somebody told him New Jersey was just over the bridge, so he took off on his bike to see his brother in Metuchen there. He made it across the Manhattan Bridge and then started back into Brooklyn on the Williamsburg Bridge and thought he was heading for New Jersey. Halfway across he ran out of steam and went to sleep there with a Jewish newspaper over his face to keep off the sun. When the police called, Sharkey had to get him with Sheiky in the car Beansie had bought from Smokey the Fighter and Scarface Louis without knowing it was stolen, and neither one of them even had a driver's license when they ran out of gas right in front of the station house."

  The genial reminiscence was just the spark needed to precipitate in Gold an explosion of loyal and merry attachment to the past such as he had not experienced in years. "Spotty, you bastard, I need you," he burst out. "I forgot all about those older guys. Listen, the next time you go back to Brooklyn to see Fishy or any of the other guys, I want you to bring me. It will be great getting together again."

  "Great?" Again Spotty Weinrock scrutinized him closely. "It was never so great for you before. We do a lot of drinking now. In an Italian bar."

  343

  "I do a lot of drinking now too," said Gold.

  "Lend me five hundred for some clothes for a little while," said Spotty Weinrock, "or I may not have the time."

  "Will you pay this back? I may need it in two weeks."

  "The minute you want," vowed Weinrock. "1*11 go into bankruptcy this very afternoon if you say the word."

  "Oh, never mind that," said Gold. "Now tell me. What was I like as a kid? What did you all really think of me and why?"

  "Bruce." Weinrock stopped as he was about to fold Gold's check into his wallet. "You wouldn't stop payment on this if you didn't like my answer, would you?"

  Gold was insulted. "Of course not. I don't want flattery. I want information I can use. Tell me truthful­ly. What was it like growing up with me?"

  "Well, to tell you the truth, Bruce," said Spotty Weinrock with his manner of lazy and presumptuous mirth, "we didn't really look at it that way."

  "When we were kids together," persisted Gold, feeling he was not getting his general idea across, "when we were growing up in Coney Island, did you and the other guys resent it because I was so much smarter than the rest of you?"

  "Frankly," came the congenial reply with an unhesi-tant chuckle underscoring the words like the accompa­niment of a basso ostinato, "we didn't think of you as smarter."

  "You didn't?" Gold could scarcely believe he had heard him correctly.

  "We thought you were a schmuck"

  The buoyancy in Gold took a sudden drop. "And now?"

  "Now?" said Weinrock with a long vowel. "Ho, ho, now? Now, of course, we're all very proud of you every time we read your name in the paper. But we still think you're a schmuck"

  344

  "Really?" Gold proceeded with strong resentment. "Well, would you like to know what we used to say about you?"

  "I don't even know who you mean by 'we,'" was Weinrock's nonchalant reply. "Who is this 'we' you're talking about?"

  "Me and the fellows," said Gold. "The gang."

  "Bruce," said Spotty Weinrock. "/was the fellows. / was the gang. You weren't."

  "I wasn't popular?"

  "You know that."

  "Not even a little?" Gold's voice was husky.

  "Not at all. You were an outsider, don't you remember? That's probably why you got so smart in school. You couldn't play ball and you had no perso­nality."

  "I didn't?"

&nbsp
; "None at all," said Spotty Weinrock. "You did a lot of boasting and sometimes you'd go out of your way to make yourself a pain in the ass."

  Very soon, said Gold to himself with a tristesse presaging a cafard, I will be the most renowned figure ever to come out of Coney Island. I am already a somebody and soon I will be somebody more. And I wasn't popular as a child and had no personality. "Was I as bad," he asked meekly, "as Lieberman?"

  Here Weinrock was reassuring. "Lieberman was the worst. Lieberman was a real zshlub. I'll bet not even Henry Kissinger was as bad as Lieberman. Hey—" Weinrock paused a moment and turned red with laughter—"imagine how long a Yid like Kissinger would have lasted with the gang at the poolroom on Mermaid Avenue."

  "Kissinger," Gold was constrained by fairness to mention, "made a lot of money."

  "Not," said Weinrock, "by impressing Jews. He's lucky he found all those gentiles to help him." Gold, with his kleptomania for ideas, was already inscribing a mental note: Kraemer, Elliott, Rockefeller, Nixon, Ford—not a one of these sponsors and patrons of

  345

  Kissinger was Jewish. "You even," Weinrock contin­ued, "wore glasses."

  "Glasses? Everyone wears glasses. Look at you."

  "But thenl" Weinrock sternly shook his head.

  "I couldn't see."

  "What kind of excuse is that?"

  "I couldn't see the blackboard in the classroom and I couldn't see a ball coming at me without eyeglasses when you let me play."

  "You couldn't catch it when you did."

  "Sometimes I caught it."

  "I bet," laughed Spotty Weinrock, "that if your family had dough, they would even have put braces on your teeth. You even started losing hair before every­one else. All the rest of us are still thick and wavy and curly. Gosh, Brucie, you really were a fucking misfit, weren't you? It's a lucky thing you're getting famous. Otherwise, you wouldn't have a thing going for you."

  "You're doing very, very much to cheer me up now," said Gold. "Listen, I want to meet you the next time you go into Coney Island to see Fishy Siegel or anyone else."

  "You can meet us Wednesday after dinner."

  "I was going back to Washington Wednesday. I've got a meeting with a very important Presidential aide and a date with a very beautiful tall girl."

  "That's up to you."

  Gold chos$ Coney Island and squeezed his way politely through a jammed, dark Italian bar on Mermaid Avenue to Spotty Weinrock, Fishy Siegel, and Fishy's son, Eugene, a clear-eyed, curious boy of twenty-four with an engaging, constant smile. Fishy was surprised to see him.

  "Didn't you tell him I was coming?"

  "I forgot," said Spotty Weinrock.

  Fishy Siegel's response to Gold was that same challenging lbok of insolent reserve that had been the infuriating bane of schoolteachers and other supervis-

  346

  ing adults since the day he walked. Emulating a mannerism of his older brother Sheiky, who'd set him up profitably in a number of illegally interlocking suburban automobile dealerships, he sank both hands into the pockets of his trousers rather than extend one in greeting. Clearly the evening was not going to be remarkable for nostalgia.

  "Sid says hello to your brother Sheiky," Gold lied with aplomb to bring about a thaw. "How'd Sheiky ever learn to make all that money, anyway?"

  "My name is Wheeler, not Squealer."

  Eugene blushed richly. "My mother goes nuts when he does that home."

  "I'm not prying," retreated Gold. "I was just wondering how a guy who never finished high school learns about things like mergers, reinsurance, acceler­ated depreciation, subordinated debentures, and all that other shit."

  "Your name is Goose, not Bruce," said Fishy Siegel. "You must be crazy if you think I'm going to tell anything to some scumbag who's going to work for the government."

  "Scumbag?" echoed Gold, feeling disemboweled.

  "Scumbag," repeated Fishy Siegel with a confidence that dared inquiry. "Can you think of a better word? My name is Tucker, not Sucker."

  "Oh, shit," said Gold in a long sigh of fatigue. "I'm getting sick and tired of people who are always running down the government."

  "I'm not," chirped Spotty Weinrock.

  "Me neither," said Fishy Siegel. "Hey, Eugene, you getting tired? What's it like in Washington, Goldy? I'll buy a round. But no bullshit."

  "My name is Meyer, not Liar," said Gold, and waited for the fresh drinks to arrive. These were not people with whom he could be circumspect. "Frankly, I don't know, Fishy. I'm having trouble figuring it out. They say things in Washington that I don't hear anywhere else. They say something funny and nobody

  347

  laughs. I say something serious and they think I'm joking. I say something funny and they think I'm serious. They don't find anything strange."

  "They know they're crooked?"

  "They don't know that's strange."

  "Neither do the muggers and rapists we got running all over now," said Fishy Siegel vengefully. A few of the Italians close by were muttering affirmatively. A woman in another corner of the room was inveighing against looters and burglars. It seemed to Gold that he and the boy Eugene were the only ones not smoking. "Don't shut me up, Eugene. We got muggers and rapists and murderers running around now like we never had before and they're going to keep running around whether I talk about it or not. Hey, Goldy, do you think I feel like a crook when I juggle my books? Why should they? Did you think we were criminals when we used to steal school supplies and had to work in the storeroom? Remember the time the box of penpoints fell out from underneath your sweater right in front of Mrs. Prosan? What a klutz you were." Fishy finally smiled.

  "What are penpoints?" asked Eugene.

  "Those are those small metal things that used to go into the bottoms of those wooden pens we'd chew on. You'd dip them into inkwells on your desk when you wanted to write."

  "What are inkwells?"

  "Things sure have changed if Eugene doesn't even know what an inkwell is," said Spotty Weinrock.

  "Don't go by him," said Fishy of his son Eugene with insult and boundless love present in the same breath. "He's dumb. He got married when he was twenty-two."

  "You didn't want me to live with her, either," said Eugene. "You wouldn't give us the money for a house until we got married."

  "I had warts one year," Gold remembered. "All over my fingers, about seventeen of them. I started

  348

  putting ink on them every day in school and they went away."

  "It's changed," said Spotty Weinrock. "All those stores boarded up closed. Where do the people shop?"

  "Sure, it's changed," Fishy Siegel grumbled with the impertinent surliness of someone middle-aged who was not used to giving an inch. "When we were kids the Italians used to try to beat us up. Now we have to hide in an Italian bar when we come here if we want to feel safe. When the Italians move away we'll have nothing. Raymie Rubin's mother was one of the old people killed last year."

  "We had this one Christian kid on our block," said Gold, "and his father used to get us free admission passes to Steeplechase, and then we'd go up to old people and ask for the rides on their tickets they were too scared to go on themselves."

  "Jimmy Heinlein," Fishy Siegel recalled. "His family had chickens. He had a joke. First it was Coney Island, he told me, now it's Cohen's Island, next it will be Coon's Island. He could have thrown in the spies too, they're getting just as bad, but we didn't know about them then. I told him I'd bust his head open if he ever told that joke to anyone again, and I must have scared him pretty good because he never did."

  "He told it to me," said Gold.

  "Maybe I didn't scare him."

  "What's Steeplechase?" asked Eugene.

  "It was a big famous amusement park around the Parachute Jump, Eugene," answered Spotty Weinrock. "Steeplechase, the Funny Place. We had another famous one that was even better, Luna Park. It had the Shoot the Chutes and the Mile Sky Chaser, maybe the highest roller coaster in the world. You k
now some­thing, Fishy. I could have picked up that Parachute Jump in guaranteed working condition for just a few thousand dollars. I think maybe I could have bought all of Steeplechase for just a little bit more."

  "Why didn't you?"

  349

  "I forgot."

  "You know something about Steeplechase?" asked Gold in a tone of significant meditation.

  "It wasn't such a funny place."

  "Luna Park was better."

  "The depths of the Great Depression," Gold an­nounced with profundity, and knew already, with a collector's instinct for everything usable, that he would include the proposition in his book whether it proved viable or not. "That was the best time of our lives, wasn't it?"

  "Not for me," said Spotty Weinrock in sprightly rebuttal. "The older I get the more fun I seem to have."

  "Me too," said Fishy Siegel. "Kids don't know how to enjoy themselves."

  "I'm enjoying myself," said Eugene.

  "What do you know?" answered his father. "You're just a kid. Why'd you get married, you dope? Nobody gets married any more."

  "Pop, that was two years ago." Eugene smiled.

  "What will you do with the baby when you get your divorce?"

  "We got no baby. Who's getting a divorce?"

  "Everybody, you dumb kid, that's what I'm trying to tell you. Everybody gets divorced now. You hold on to that baby for us, you hear? Or I'll throw you out of the business and won't give you a fucking penny. Let her have the house and car and all the other shit she wants, but you keep that baby for us."