Businesswise, everything was jake. The swag was rolling in. As long as we kept delivering at the ballot box and stayed out of the newspaper headlines, just about anything the Gophers did was okay by the Tiger. The Winona was renowned far and wide as the best clubhouse on the West Side, with the choicest onions and tomatoes—which is what we called dames back then—the most scrumptious chow and the best music this side of Broadway. I demanded it.
Speaking of which, I was spending more time on the White Way than before, as the theater was exerting an increasing fascination on me, as was the prizefights at the Garden, not to mention the picture shows which were now all the rage; maybe little Georgie had something there. I figured there was dog biscuits to be made in both them rackets if only I could figure out how, and so I decided to start working on that problem right after the elections of 1912.
First thing was we had to get Jimmy Hines elected district leader over Ahearn, and so Joe Shalleck and I threw ourselves into that particular task. Now, here was the problem: Jimmy Hines was a good-looking lad, but he was a by-God-terrible public speaker, as tongue-tied a paddy as ever lived.
Joe and I tried everything we could think of to improve Jimmy’s speechifying, but he was still a blacksmith up there on the stump and you woulda thought he was after shoein’ horses instead of tryin’ to win votes. Even with this handicap, Jimmy had lost to Ahearn by only twenty-seven measly votes the previous election, which to me was an indication not so much of failure of delivery but lack of muscle at the polling place, which I was in a position to deliver and how.
“Okay, so Jimmy, you gotta be more effective is what I’m trying to tell you, more mellifluous. You can’t just stand up there waxing platitudinous and whatnot when your audience is down below looking up at your trousers and half the men are wonderin’ if you’re packing and half the women are wondering how much you’re packing, if you get my meaning, which I’m sure you do ’cause even you Irish must have sex once in a while, otherwise how could there be so many of you?”
“What Joe’s trying to say—” I began.
“What Joe’s trying to say is exactly what Joe is saying,” said Joe. “You gotta look the part. Why the hell should a bunch of dumb Jews and Irish elect you to anything if you rodomontade like the village smithy or maybe the village idiot? People don’t want their pols to look like them, they want them to look like pols, but not too much, you understand, you still gotta have that man-of-the-people crap, makes ’em feel better, makes ’em feel that any one of them could be standing up there on the stump flapping his jaws, except that you look a little too much like any of them, if you catch my drift, and that’s what I’m also here to fix, besides and in addition to your speech patterns.”
“Plus you lack muscle,” I said edgewise.
“Plus you lack muscle, which is what Madden’s here to fix. Their sluggers have been better than our shtarkers, but that’s gonna change. Heads gotta be busted and I’m talking theirs not ours, right, Owney?”
I nodded.
“I mean fer chrissakes, that’s the American way of story and song, do unto others before they can do unto you. So we’re gonna do unto. Think of Ahearn’s head as one of those anvils you used to pound on.” Shalleck’s head rotated and looked at me. “What’s that big mug’s name what runs Ahearn’s gang?”
“Spike Sullivan,” I supplied.
He spat. “Jesus, don’t you micks have any imagination? Spike Sullivan, for crying out loud. Who thought that up, his mother? Anyway, here’s what we’re going to do—”
“Here’s what I’m going to do,” I took over, because if you didn’t remind Joe who was the shyster and who the client once in a while, he could get confused about the relative positions of each. “We’re going to tie up Sullivan and his gang forty-eight hours before the votin’ begins. Your mistake in the past was going after them after the polls opened. Let me tell you, that’s too late. We gotta put him out of commission long before that.”
“How’re you going to do that?” asks Jimmy. For a Tammany fella he pretty much didn’t know his arse from his elbow sometimes.
“Why, have a drink with him of course,” I replied as if that was the most obvious thing in the world. “Bury the hatchet on your behalf down at Degnan’s saloon. Tell him no hard feelings and so forth, we’re all Irishmen here and what the hell’s the difference between a Ahearn and a Hines, and business is business, we can work together no matter who wins.”
“Then what?” asks Jimmy.
“He’ll agree if he’s smart.”
“Then what?” asks Joe.
“Then the boys are going to come in and beat him to a pulp. The night of the election he’ll either be in Hell or attended by the Sisters of Mercy, unconscious. And who votes for a dead man unless we want them to?”
Jimmy’s speeches improved. His organization improved. A couple of days before the voting, I met Sullivan for a drink; Spike wound up in hospital minus one ear, with two broken arms and a concussion. On election night Jimmy won by fifteen hundred votes, most of them cast by the living. I gave Johnny and Art a bonus, which was election night off.
Which is what I was intending to celebrate when Loretta spoke up. I’d gone home after it was clear that victory was in the bag, intending to change and then step out on the town with Margaret, who was pretty much cleaned up by this point.
“How come I never see ya?” my wife whined. “We’re married, ain’t we? All I get from you is the old frozen lamp.”
“You oughta know.” I went over to baby Margaret’s crib and looked down at her. I loved the way she gurgled when I picked her up. She seemed to like me, but I didn’t know enough about kids to be sure.
“Well, what choice did I have? You know you can’t get a girl in a condition and not act like a man.”
“Maybe I shoulda thought a that. Maybe you shoulda too.”
Loretta poured herself another drink. Truth to tell, the sauce wasn’t agreein’ with her. She was starting to get that puffy look dames do what drinks too much, and her beam was most definitely broadening.
“You promised to take me out on the town tonight.”
“I changed my mind,” I said, jiggling Margaret, which always made her smile. “Besides, I gotta go back uptown, for Jimmy.”
She started throwin’ things. Loretta always chucked whatever was handy, which is why I kept the breakable furnishings to a minimum. It mighta been an ashtray, I forget. I covered the baby’s noggin just in case her aim had improved.
“Oh Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy. You’d think he was a dame the way you spend so much time with him.” She stopped flingin’ stuff and flashed me a little smile she must have thought was sexy, but wasn’t. I put Margaret safely back in her crib, and couldn’t wait to get out of there.
“Don’t ya love me no more?” she whispered.
Didn’t that make me feel like a real heel? I sorta did love her, in a sisterly way, and while I sure preferred the company of my old girlfriends, I still had a little tiny soft spot for Loretta, because after all she was the mother of my girl child.
She put her arms around my neck and pushed her chest close to mine. Baby or no baby, she still had swell headlamps and I was always a sucker for a healthy pair of lungs. The next thing you know we’d done it, the kid none the wiser, and now she was up and getting dressed I could fully appreciate how wide in the beam she had got, and began to feel disgusted with myself and her and us.
Loretta pulled her best dress—and with my money let me tell you it was plenty good—over her head and wriggled into it. She spun around and modeled it for me as I was shaving.
“Where we going?” I asked, because I knew I was stuck. With any luck, I figured we could step out for an hour or so, by which time she’d be stinko and then I could have one of the boys wheel her home and go have some fun.
“The Arbor,” she said.
I don’t know which is worse: that I wasn’t paying attention or that I was. The Arbor was at 52nd Street and Seventh. Used to be called the Eldorado but then one of the waiters, a Tammany man named Dave Hyson, bought it and fixed it up nice with some Tiger boodle. Even way back then there was drinkin’ laws, closing times and such, which tended to crimp a lad’s style, but they was easy to get around as long as somebody formed a social club. So the Arbor’s attraction, in addition to its dance floor, was that it was the Dave Hyson Association, which meant it could stay open to all hours, and it did.
“For sure I ain’t goin’ to that ballum rancum,” says I.
“Aw come on,” she wheedled. “Gimme a little cush.”
I wasn’t crazy about going to a racket like the Arbor, but I figured Hyson knew which end was up and there wouldn’t be no trouble. To tell ya the truth, there was one other reason I said yes to Loretta, which was that the Arbor was a hangout of Little Patsy Doyle, who’d taken Freda away from me, and I figured that if I ran into him, it wouldn’t be the worst thing that ever happened. Which just goes to prove that even I could figure wrong from time to time.
I rang up May on the telephone and she came over to sit with baby Margaret, and Loretta and I got into the car and drove uptown.
“This is going to be swell,” said Loretta.
“If you say so,” I said.
She nuzzled my neck with her head and rubbed her bosoms against my arm. They may not have been what they were before the baby, but they were still something.
“Trust me,” she said.