Old man Sammy takes the same route whenever he walks anywhere in his Morningside Heights neighborhood. It might not be the shortest way, but it’s the one he takes. Maybe the route used to run past a cigar shop or there was a bad block he wanted to avoid. Maybe it’s for luck.
You never saw anyone nurse a cigar like Sammy. He’ll have it perched in one side of his mouth and the thing will look stone cold out. Then, his leathery cheeks puffing like fish gills, there’ll be a wisp of smoke, a tiny glow. He’ll take a few draws, exhale the smoke. Then he’ll let the thing nearly die again.
Sammy has a face full of schemes and triumphs, like in the game of life he’s got the house percentage. He wears glasses with thick gold gridwork supports that ride down his nose when he does the ledger at a show and there’s always a hint of Seagram’s about him.
“It’s Seagram’s No. 9 makes me smell so good,” he cackles. “Just nick ’em, trim ’em, boys. Small items at affordable prices.”
Hawk limps into Sammy’s apartment with a three-day stubble and a painkiller buzz. He shakes hands with Norman and kisses Flo’s cheek. Old Flo’s wearing blue polyester slacks and a black button-down shirt tied in a bow at the waist. Her hair’s jet black against her wrinkled face and she has on dark blue mascara. One smart old broad. After six cards at gin Flo knows seven of the cards in your hand. Good thing they never play for more than a penny a point. Sammy’s against gambling among his boys. If he hears you bet twenty bucks on a ball game, he says, “That’s a piece of change.” He could have thirty thousand on the table in front of him and he’d say it. A connoisseur of the meaning of a dollar, like millionaires who take out reading glasses to scrutinize a breakfast check of $8.95. Flo’s back is stooped now but she has the outline of a slinky kid, and teeth, she says with a nasty smile, “like the stars that come out at night.”
“Every morning I do the Jane Fonda workout for my bum,” she says, “and then I walk with hand weights around Central Park Reservoir. If you don’t watch your figure no one else will. Mario, darling, save that plastic fork for me, okay?”
“Look what just swooped in,” Mario says. “Hawk’s here, the streets are safe.”
Hawk tells the button gang that, drunk, he stepped on a broken bottle in his house and practically cut his toe off so he needed twenty stitches. The last is almost the truth. He’d like to tell the whole truth. Only Sammy says if they associate with criminals he won’t do business with them.
Hawk loves the old man, owes him so much of the life that he has—the loft, years of paydays, friendships with the b-gang, afternoons of baseball at Yankee Stadium with hot dogs and Cokes when they were kids. But it sickens Hawk when Sammy gets on his high horse about criminals with this sour expression and spits the words “felon,” “convict,” “drug user.” Since they were fifteen he told them, “Don’t enter into business with criminals or junkies.”
Hawk thought this might be good advice for kids, but for adults it rules out too many people. Of course Sammy and Norman get flexible about crime when it comes to their little Kosher Nostra. Bringing twenty-dollar bottles of Arpège in from Manila at two dollars a pop, that’s business. Sammy’s distinctions match his interests and are supposed to become yours. Criminals give bribes, Sammy gives performance incentives or shows appreciation. Even if you play by his rules he acts disappointed. You could play like he’d taught you but you never played quite right. If you ever mastered his system he’d change the rules. And the guy’s so oily if he touched himself he’d leave a smudge.
Men from all walks of life work for him. Accountants, fire marshals, doormen. They check with Sammy when they need quick cash.
“Try and get a loan out of the cheap bastard,” Flo cackles.
Sammy’s the last person Hawk could ask for help.
“I’ll give you work but not money,” Sammy says. “Boys, do I look to you like a bank? The day you can’t work a good day you might as well lie in the ground.”
When Sammy suggests a play on the street it’s what the smart money would do. He’s either right or more right than you.
If only Hawk had listened about the balloons.
When Hawk goes to the bathroom, the blood, disinfectants, and ooze have soaked his top sock red-orange-yellow. He lays the sock on the sink, rinses the slipper sock, thinking he better give the Doc’s latest wrap a day at least at the show before he changes it.
“You take one of these pills if you’re hurting bad,” the Doc said. “You take two and you can’t work. I could be decertified.”
“I promise not to tell,” Hawk said.
Looped, he’s trying to remember if he took one of Doc’s pills or any of the Darvocets Witold gave him when Mario pushes in, almost knocking Hawk off the toilet, and sees the bloody sock on the sink.
“Jeez, Hawk,” he says. “That must be one hell of a cut.”
“I didn’t think it was so bad at first,” Hawk says.
The button gang, half of whom Sammy recruited when they were kids that Watergate summer, sits around a heap of fifty-count bags pinning tight rows of Jesse Jackson and Michael Dukakis buttons to foam core boards. One wall of Sammy’s apartment is lined with cork boards pinned with buttons from a dozen campaigns; the antimacassars on the sofa are fastened with little stickpins. Whatever’s left from a show, Sammy sells to collectors through a catalog put out with Norman, who runs a button factory. Some of the buttons date from fifty years. They’re from all countries, endorse or mock any cause. White/Black, Democrats/Republicans, Gay/Straight, Sammy doesn’t side.
Tomorrow the gang will make the night van ride down to Atlanta, where Sammy’s all-around-man Harold has rented a condo and arranged licenses. Gazing around at the familiar faces, buttons splattered across the carpet like blood drops, uncut boards, duct tape, crumpled fast-food bags, pistachio shells, and soda cans, smells of socks and Aqua Velva, Hawk feels back in his boyhood.
Even a day late and a dollar short, on the eve of the convention there’s much to be hopeful about. So much of the world is coming apart, people shooting up, shooting others, dropping out, at credit’s end shrieking about what’s been done to them. Hawk’s not sleeping over hot-air grates or in box cities like guys he’s nodded at for years. These guys stay alive by wiping tables in old-men’s bars and collecting glasses for the bartender and sucking off anyone who’ll pay. Old Mac the other day, a good man, looked like death in a Hefty bag. It had been raining and he must have forgotten to take it off.
His hair was filthy cornrows, forehead all scabs.
“Hey Mac,” Hawk said. “Where you been at?”
“Hospital, man.”
“What seems to be the problem?”
“You stay cool,” Mac said, arm around Hawk.
Hawk returned the man’s hug and slipped him a fiver. He started in with a wiseass remark but it stuck in his throat because the odds were that he would never see the scabby bastard again. And after Mac was gone Hawk’s hand and shoulder itched and he rubbed himself like he was cold.