THERE WERE TWO PREMATURE victory celebrations following Moodrow’s summary eviction of the undesirables in 4B. Sylvia Kaufman’s, in deference perhaps to her years, got under way first and combined two goals. There was the celebration, of course, but Sylvia Kaufman was too savvy to believe that all her problems would disappear just because Stanley Moodrow had strong-armed a couple of junkies. It was a relief to see the trash moving out for a change; the traffic had been going the other way for a long time, but the new super, an overweight, red-nosed Irishman who reeked of alcohol, hadn’t fixed the front door locks, citing the expense and the necessity of getting an estimate approved by Precision Management before the repairs could go forward. She’d complained, of course, only to have Al Rosenkrantz respond to her phone call by insisting on his own helplessness in the face of company policy. He urged her to be patient for a little while longer and “everything would straighten out.”
Sylvia, whose strategy for life had developed in the classrooms of New York, believed that patience was a luxury reserved for the properly prepared, and preparation was, therefore, the second aim of her celebration. Preparation for a tenants’ patrol that would, itself, accomplish two aims. The patrol, if not exactly girded for battle, would at least make sure the doors were locked and the junkies weren’t injecting themselves in the lobby, while the close, working relationships the tenants formed in the course of protecting their own homes would weld the small group into the nucleus of a much larger association.
Over the past few weeks, Sylvia Kaufman had come to realize that someone had forgotten to light a flame under the melting pot called Jackson Heights. Though the tenants (in deference, perhaps, to the neighborhood’s middle-class character) were publicly polite to each other, most of the ones Sylvia knew were privately scornful. It wasn’t just the old-timers, who were all white, against the immigrants, who were any number of shades. Sylvia could vividly recall standing near the broken mailboxes, open-mouthed, while one of the Korean women complained about the odor of the Pakistanis. “They no clean,” she had insisted in the face of Sylvia’s call for tolerance. “They no wash.”
“You notice who ain’t here, Sylvia?” Mike Birnbaum’s voice yanked her away from her speculations. “You notice who had such a big mouth, but ain’t here when it counts?”
Once again busy serving tea and her best peanut butter/chocolate swirl cookies (so fresh they could be molded like soft clay, which nobody seemed to notice), Sylvia responded with a sigh. “You know how sick Shirley is, Mike. Myron had to go.”
“All I know is when it was time to stand up and be counted, that cutey little faygelah went south with his mommy. This you can’t deny.” Having gotten the last, last word on Myron Gold, Mike Birnbaum settled back to enjoy his cookies. In some respects, the events of the past few weeks had been a tonic for Mike. Born Miller’s violence confirmed Mike’s belief in the imminence of personal danger while Moodrow’s muscle validated Mike’s own belligerent response to that danger. As a bonus, his growing responsibility to the tenants’ association kept him away from the “Lucy” reruns that had long dominated his old age and, best of all, Myron Gold had run away to Florida, the land of the dead.
“I think we should work out a schedule for the times of patrol,” Sylvia suggested. “We need to know who can volunteer on which days.”
“And we need a fire patrol, too,” Paul Reilly, the retired fireman from 3L, was determined to be heard and respected. “We have to go to each apartment and make sure everyone has working smoke alarms. By Jesus, the last ten years I was stationed in the Bronx, it seemed like every fire was started by a dope addict or an alkie squatter. They get stoned and forget about the candles they light. Or they break down the walls and splice into electric lines with hi-fi cable.”
The ice broken, they all began to come in with suggestions and Sylvia went back to the kitchen. Disagreements were part of the bonding process; let each fight for his own idea of how the patrol should be run. In the last analysis, they would come out of the meeting with at least one firm resolve: to save their homes. Already, Inez and Andre Almeyda were joining voices with Mike Birnbaum to suggest that patrolees carry baseball bats and look for an opportunity to “drive” their point home. The Almeydas had always been “new ones” (or “new scum,” when he was among friends) to Mike Birnbaum.
“I don’t go along with that kinda talk.” Paul Reilly, who, like many ex-firemen, had difficulty breathing, spoke with just the touch of a brogue. “By all that’s holy, I’m too old to go to jail,” he wheezed. “Besides, I confess to Father Patrick at St. Ann’s and he has the biggest mouth in the Diocese.”
“We don’t even know if there’s anything left to confront,” Jimmy Yo said. He was a student at Columbia University and lived quietly with his parents in 4G; so quietly that prior to Jimmy’s unexpected arrival at the meeting, the Yo family was no more than a trio of Oriental faces Sylvia occasionally passed in the hallway. “I want to hear a little bit more about the cop. What’s his name? Moodrow? I think we need to understand exactly how he got those people out of 4B; I live down the hall from 4B and I know, for a fact, that one of the dealers usually carried a gun. I don’t think they went easily.”
“Moodrow is an ex-cop,” Sylvia explained for the fourth time. “I witnessed his confrontation with one of the dealers. He was very forceful, but we agreed, when we spoke on the following day, that it would be better if I didn’t give out exact details.”
“Because what he done ain’t kosher with the real cops.” Mike Birnbaum winked at Paul Reilly. Maybe Paul wasn’t too anxious to bludgeon the perps, but he and Mike were old friends. Mike greatly admired the courage of anyone crazy enough to run into a burning building.
“I didn’t see anything of what went on upstairs,” Sylvia continued, smiling at Mike Birnbaum. “But the one downstairs had a gun. Moodrow took it away from him.”
“That’s the point,” Jimmy Yo broke in. “If this cop…”
“Ex-cop,” Sylvia reminded.
“If this ex-cop is going to stick around, it changes our strategy. For instance, Moodrow should set up the patrol routine; he must know much more about it than we do. He should advise us on the use of force, too. We’re just speculating, but he undoubtedly knows whether we can forcibly eject those who don’t belong in the building.”
“I think he has already told us this,” Muhammad Assiz, his voice as carefully composed as his delicate features, spoke for the first time. Unlike most of the Hindu and Moslem Asians, Muhammad was breaking through his instinctive dislike of Westerners. He’d twice come down to Sylvia’s apartment, unannounced, to discuss developments within the building, and Sylvia had been impressed with the core of resolution that lay beneath the brilliant smile and the musical voice. “I think by Mr. Moodrow’s action we have before us an example to be followed. We are the only ones with something to protect and that something is our lives in this place. Three families in my community have been served with eviction notices for failing to care for their apartments. This is the new way they attack us—after there are none left to evict for improper leases. The landlord thinks we will run without a fight, but we will not run. We have decided to stay and, by the Will of Allah, to prevail.”
Sylvia, her duties as hostess completed, took a chair next to Assiz. “Maybe we need an education committee,” she said, changing the subject. As a Jew, the “Will of Allah,” even when applied to the destruction of a common enemy, made her nervous. “I’ve done a little research over the past week and I found a group called the Metropolitan Housing Council that helps people with our problems. Especially with the education part. They’ll send someone down to advise us. Also, my niece, Betty, is a lawyer, though she specializes in criminal law.”
“Maybe I can help with this.” Jorge Rivera, fifteen years out of Lima, Peru, was short and incredibly thick, a barrelchested man who’d spent his teenage years as a porter in the Andes Mountains, working up high where the air is thin. Sylvia could remember the day he moved in. As the first of the Latins, he had not been welcomed. “I volunteer once a week for a Latino outreach program. Mostly our work has been with the illegals, but we also run a conversational English course. If you would like me to do this, I will meet with the Metropolitan Council and learn how to be in the Landlord-Tenant Court. Then I will set up an education committee to prevent illegal evictions.”
The meeting ended at nine o’clock, but it took fifteen minutes for all but Mike Birnbaum and Annie Bonnastello to leave. Even as she saw her guests off, Sylvia began to weigh the good and the bad. Only nine people, representing eight apartments, had come to her tenants’ patrol meeting. Not exactly an army, but Assiz, Almeyda, Birnbaum, Rivera, and the others represented every major ethnic group in the building (except for the Koreans), and were solidly behind the Association. If…
“Sylvia, wake up.” Once again, Mike broke into Sylvia’s speculations. “Where were you, huh? You had your head up in the clouds, maybe?”
Sylvia, silently reciting the day and date, turned back to Mike with her own question: “Tell me what went wrong tonight, Mike. You’ll know, if anyone does.”
“Too much waiting for the cop, Sylvia. Too much waiting for someone else to come and save us.”
“He’s an ex-cop, Mike,” Annie said. “He doesn’t actually have a badge.”
“My point exactly. To come and help us like this…I gotta say he’s a mensch, naturally. But that don’t give him no more right to say what goes in this building, than we do. I seen it all happen before. I seen the big machers kiss Hitler’s ass. ‘Oh, please, Mr. Hitler, don’t attack my country. I’ll be a good boy.’ I seen how, when the garment workers went over to the unions, some of the workers said, ‘Trust the boss, kiss his ass and he’ll let us keep our jobs.’ Okay, I’m an old man, but I’m not yet such a Chelmite I could swallow that baloney. What I say is break a few heads now, before it’s too late. We got nearly thirty apartments empty. How many more gotta be empty before the dope addicts start using the Jackson Arms for a hotel? Break heads and throw the scum out.”
Even as Mike Birnbaum defended his position, Rose Carillo and Betty Haluka, twenty-five miles away on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, were toasting Stanley Moodrow’s success. All three waited for Jim Tilley, who was delayed (as usual, according to Rose) by paperwork at Central Booking. Betty and Rose were drinking mimosas, a blend of orange juice and champagne that Moodrow, committed to a cloudy brown slop marketed as Oldfield’s Wild Turkey Bourbon, refused even to look at.
“What you’re drinking ain’t alcohol,” he explained, sipping at his own drink. “It’s not even a color alcohol could be. That’s a color rich people paint on their bedroom walls.”
“We’re toasting you anyway, Stanley,” Rose said.
“Right,” Betty echoed. “To your victory in Jackson Heights. May it be the first of many.”
“It was no big deal,” Moodrow protested. “If it wasn’t for Betty’s personal interest, I wouldn’t even mention it.” They were seated together, he and Betty, on a couch in Rose’s living room and Moodrow turned to look at her. “I shouldn’t really say this, but what’s going on in your aunt’s building is everyday life for a lot of the people who live in this city. Not that I’m putting your aunt down. Your aunt is a nice lady and I gotta admit she’s got heart. Like you and Rose. But that don’t make me a hero.” His eyes wandered across Betty’s features—the strong nose, full lips, prominent jaw. There wasn’t an inch of surrender in her face. Not an inch.
“But how about what you did for Betty’s client? And for me before that? And for a hundred people before that?” Rose cut a thin slice of Gruyere and placed it on a cracker before handing it to Moodrow. In spite of her longterm (and Betty’s recent) attempts to civilize him, Moodrow insisted on stuffing three or four different kinds of cheese, smothered with Pulaski’s Dark Mustard, between the largest crackers on the platter. Inevitably, when he bit down on the mess, crumbs drifted over his suit while little jets of mustard dribbled onto the tips of his fingers. “Face it, Stanley, you’re a hero. You’ve always been a hero.”
“Your husband calls me ‘Don Moodrow,’ ” Moodrow snorted. He was working on his fourth drink. “He thinks I got a complex.”
“What’s a ‘complex’?” Rose asked.
“That’s what they called obsessions in 1950,” Betty returned, squeezing Moodrow’s hand. She was pleased with him, both as a lover and an ally, and very grateful for the help he’d given to her aunt. Betty had been inside the bureaucracy for so long, people who could actually accomplish things were as exotic to her as creatures from Mars.
“What about the prostitutes?” Rose asked.
“I told the one, Connie, to let her pimp know I’ll be paying them a visit in the very near future,” Moodrow replied. “What I’m hoping to do is inform prospective perps that the Jackson Arms has an angel looking out for it. It’s like putting an extra lock on your door. Maybe it won’t keep out a master thief, but if you don’t have anything a master wants, the rest of the bums’ll go look for easier prey. Likewise, if I make it tough for the drug dealers, they’ll find a market that’s easier to crack. Get it? Crack?”