It was to have been a productive workday. He would grind out six more pages. In the television industry swamp, in that summer of 1985, “pages” meant scripted scenes that a producer deemed worth a camera’s time and trouble. This was how the Burbank geniuses measured their employee’s worth: How many shootable pages could the hack du jour grind out?
According to Larry Sloan, né Scharfsky, you could substitute the word pounds for pages. That’s what they wanted. Pounds of shootable crap for a low-budget series set in Brooklyn. They wanted to film “real people” and let them act out the stories, a terrible idea in which a bunch of nobodies carried on like somebodies. It was also wonderfully cheap to produce.
Manufacturing the six pages of this proposed disaster in his eight-by-ten rental office in the Artists and Writers Building on Little Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills was no easy feat. The director Billy Wilder rented the office across the hall. The aging and iconic Kirk Douglas, carrying a container of English Breakfast tea, sometimes shuffled through one of the smoked-glass doors three down. Larry’s fellow tenants, highly worshiped avatars of the craft, were a stinging reminder of how low he had sunk in the scheme of things.
Larry Sloan was taking the buck and running. A shameful crime, he felt, but he was getting away with it. After all, nobody got hurt but Larry.
The walls of his office were painted in a particularly tired-out shade of gray. The cool of the Mexican stone floors seeped through his thin-soled Rockports. A dusty window looked out upon an alley, offering a glimpse of bougainvillea and the back wall of a garage. The stunning California sun, as reliable as it was relentless day after day, redeemed an otherwise grim view. As it is said in L.A., another goddamn beautiful day.
The pages were not coming today because Larry Sloan was somewhere else in his head, lost in his own Brooklyn, a long time ago, where his crime wave began.
The Creamflake Bakery, on Utica Avenue between Carroll and President, was a popular establishment in Crown Heights, catering not only to the Jews, but the Irish too, as well as some Italians—and, lately, newly arrived Caribbeans, whatever they were.
You could get challah at the Creamflake and Irish soda breads. Green cookies were sold on St. Patrick’s Day, of course, and elaborate confections were available for Christmas, Hanukkah, Easter, and other religious events, such as when the Brooklyn Dodgers won the National League pennant the year before, which was 1952.
They called him Loo-Loo. The nickname had stuck since his baby days. He was ten now, and Al and Dotty still called him that. This was before being sensitive to your kid’s feelings was called “good parenting.” At P.S. 189 on East New York Avenue, the kids ragged on him about the girly-sounding moniker.
“It’s not Lulu,” he would snarl, spelling it out. “It’s Loo-Loo, you stupid moron.” This was the big put-down of 1953, the gilded age of “moron” jokes on the tube.
Anyhow, Loo-Loo’s skin was thick. He had tons of friends. He was a first-class punch-ball player. He could fire a pink Spalding—duly pronounced spaldeen—the whole length between a pair of sewer covers in a neat trajectory. Automatic homer. On President Street, this was status.
The other thing about Loo-Loo’s popularity was that Al Scharfsky owned the Creamflake. When your father sells chocolate cookies, jelly doughnuts, and charlotte russe, there is no shortage of kids who will gladly accompany you to the bakery for the sweet possibility of a handout.
Jack Horn was Al’s partner. Jack was in charge of cakes. Al himself took care of the breads and rolls. Everything was baked in old stone ovens with piles of coal that glowed eternally in the corners.
Loo-Loo hung around sometimes. Jack and his father would let him squeeze jelly into the doughnuts, using a metal contraption with a lever and a long spout. Sometimes, the Russian help baked alligator-shaped bread with raisin eyes, especially for Loo-Loo. Ten o’clock at night or so, the cops drove by to collect bags of “stale,” leftover breads and rolls which they took back to the 71st Precinct station house on Empire Boulevard.
Along Loo-Loo’s stretch of Utica was the usual constellation of neighborhood shops—fruits and vegetables, butcher, freshly slaughtered chickens, fish, dresses, radio repair, barbers, and a candy store with a soda fountain. Two blocks further up, the retail pattern repeated, including a bakery just like the Creamflake, only it was called the Union because it was near Union Street.
Although people preferred shopping as few steps as possible from where they lived, they would sometimes cross the continent into the next block. Which is why Al Scharfsky considered the Union Bakery his arch competitor, especially in the summer of ’53 with the place under mysterious new management.
Trolley cars once clanged their way up and down Utica, their motormen wearing neckties. Kids put pennies on the tracks and they got flattened out when the cars rattled past. Now there were buses, though the old tracks remained on the cobblestones as parallel reminders of the past, beyond Eastern Parkway into the unknown and ominous infinity of Bedford-Stuyvesant.
This was Loo-Loo’s universe. President Street terminated at the enormous Lincoln Terrace Park, which separated the Andy Hardy tranquility of Crown Heights from the mean and dangerous Brownsville, birthplace of Murder Incorporated. While the park had plenty of green spaces for a game, the kids preferred the “gutter,” a.k.a. the street. Two grand maple trees on either side were markers for first and third. The sewer cover in the middle was second.
Crown Heights was not at all like the fabled and dangerous Brooklyn of Cagney movies. It was more like some small town in middle America, at least the small-town America image perpetrated by Hollywood’s immigrant studio heads.
Very innocent. Very tranquil. There were rows of one-and two-family houses, some of them in the Renaissance Revival, Georgian, and Romanesque styles, sometimes bookended by five-story apartment houses on each corner. Looming shade trees, elms and sycamores, lined the sidewalks like protective uncles.
But for some, danger seemed near at all times. Something in the air, obviously lurking yet inexplicable; a conventional notion that someone was coming to get you if you didn’t watch your ass. One minute, everything seemed safe in the neighborhood. Then a cop car would come tearing down Utica on the way to a murder or a holdup someplace, its siren splitting the June air like heat lightning.
At the supper table, to make matters even more unsettling, Loo-Loo would sit staring into the dry chicken on his plate— chicken cooked to within an inch of its taste—exchanging looks with Rita, his little sister, while Al Scharfsky sang disturbing arias.
“It’s changing, you know. The whole neighborhood. They’re coming in.”
“Who’s coming, Pop?” Loo-Loo asked.
“People. The Immigrants. Coloreds. Spanish. People from Aruba.”
“Where’s Aruba, Pop?”
“It’s down there. The rich people go there for gambling and ha-cha-cha and the criminals from there come to Crown Heights.”
“What’s wrong if they want to come here, Pop? Maybe you’ll sell more rye bread.”
“They don’t eat rye bread, Loo-Loo. They eat their own food. Things with fish in it.”
“Maybe they’ll like your rye bread.”
“Maybe,” Al said, then changed the subject. “No sooner we got rid of Murder Incorporated, we got to deal with this element.”
“What’s an element?” Rita asked.
“A criminal element. Criminals are attracted to this neighborhood, honey.”
“Uh-huh,” said Rita, nodding her head, dimly satisfied.
Loo-Loo’s mother raised her hand to say, “They’re just poor people, Al. Besides, Murder Inc. around here, that was ten, twenty years ago.”
“Oh, they’re still around,” said Al. “Believe me, Dotty. And nearby—just over into Brownsville.” He lowered his voice, so as not to scare the kids, which scared the kids. “You saw on the Senator Kefauver hearings a couple years ago—those mobsters. Albert Anastasia. Frank Erickson. Frank Costello. They’re still around assassinating each other left and right. Some of them live right around here, probably.”
“I never saw Frank Costello on President Street,” said Dotty.
Al leaned closer to his wife.
“You know those people who just bought the Union Bakery?” Al paused. “They could be connected to the mob.”
Dotty snickered, which did nothing to soothe the frightened kids. “You’re crazy, Al. What would the mob want with a bakery? And why are you whispering?”
“I’m just saying, the criminal element’s all around and we have to be careful. Furthermore, look what happened to that shoe salesman last year—what’s-his-name, Arnold Schuster. A Brooklyn guy. One of us. An innocent citizen.”
Loo-Loo, an inveterate reader of the tabloids his father brought home every day and likewise an ardent viewer of the Kefauver hearings, enlightened his mother: “Anastasia had him bumped off. Schuster snitched to the cops about Willie Sutton the bank robber.”
“Where’d you get that?” Al asked his boy.
“From Kefauver. Remember, Pop?”
Al, grumpily attempting to keep control of the conversation, replied quickly. “Arnold Schuster had nothing to do with Murder Inc., which was before you were born, Loo-Loo. What you say we change the subject?”
“Murder Incorporated were the ones who threw Abe Reles out the window,” Loo-Loo now informed his goggle-eyed sister.
“Where’d you hear that?” Al barked.
“I dunno,” said Loo-Loo. Not wishing to be forbidden access to tabs, he lied, “The schoolyard.”
“Ah-hah! Schoolyard University,” Al said with disgust.
“They said this guy Abe Reles gave names of gangsters to the G-men,” continued Loo-Loo in a rush, “and the detectives were supposed to be guarding him, but then he fell out of the window at the Half Moon Hotel on Coney Island and it’s a big mystery because they don’t know if he was pushed out of the window of room 623 or if he was trying to escape.”
Al eyed his son despairingly. “You know the room number, I see?”
The boy was on a roll. “They called Abe Reles ‘the canary who sang but couldn’t fly.’”
Al pushed away his plate. “Who’s feeding you this trash?”
“I’m interested in crime. Just like you, Pop.”
I’d prefer you to be interested in long division,” Al said, after which he grumped into the living room where he could read the Post and maybe the Brooklyn Eagle—and certainly the Journal-American and the World and the Daily Mirror, these three being the reading mainstays of the bathroom—after which he would probably doze off, having begun his day at the bakery at the usual starting time of 5 o’clock in the a.m.
Gangsters were just the half of it. Spies also fascinated Loo-Loo, especially the Rosenbergs.
Convicted of being in league with the Reds a couple of years back, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sent up the river. Loo-Loo hadn’t thought much about it at the time; he was only eight, after all. But he knew Mr. and Mrs. Rosenberg were parents, like his own, and that they had two sons about Loo-Loo’s own age. This made the case seem closer to home than the business about the racket guys Senator Kefauver talked about, guys like Joe Adonis and Frank Erickson.
But the thing that kept the spy case hot for Loo-Loo was Al Scharfsky’s supper-table lament that it was an awful shame that Mr. and Mrs. Rosenberg were Jewish.
Weren’t they guilty?
Al summarized the case. “Guilty? They’re Jewish. We got enough troubles.”
One warm night in that June of ’53, Loo-Loo went out to Utica Avenue after supper for an ice-cream cone. Then he strolled to Chudow’s radio repair store, across the street from the Creamflake, to watch television. Very few people owned TV sets, and a small crowd had gathered, as usual, to watch a flickering black-and-white DuMont screen in the store window. This was evening recreation in Crown Heights.
The news was on. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing at sundown.
Loo-Loo worked his way through the onlookers, his cone dripping. There was no sound from the TV set, just the ghostly screen, with mugshots of the recently departed spies. A man in an Adam Hat and a business suit stood watching.
“What’s goin’ on?” Loo-Loo asked the man.
“They stole atomic bomb secrets, Sonny. Gave ’em to the Russians.”
Loo-Loo was silent. He already knew that.
“Yep. Espionage. They fried ’em both for espionage.”
“Jeez,” was all Loo-Loo could say, wondering what espionage was.
“Yeah, and they said that Julius went just like that after the juice was turned on,” said the man, snapping his fingers. “But they had trouble with the missus. Electrodes weren’t working right. A witness said he saw smoke coming out of her head.”
“Thanks, mister,” Loo-Loo said to the man in the Adam Hat.
Then his knees went soft, and Loo-Loo felt as if he’d be reviewing his supper in about a minute. Still, he managed to finish the cone. When he got home, he consulted his dictionary:
es•pi•o•nage /n [F espionage.] the act of obtaining information clandestinely. Applies to act of collecting military and industrial data about one nation or business for the benefit of another.
Loo-Loo also looked up clandestinely. Which made his heart thump even faster.
The phone rang. Stunned out of Crown Heights, Larry Sloan picked up. It was the producer demanding to know: “How many pages?”
“I haven’t counted. Leave me alone, Roger. I’m trying to work.”
“Well, work fast. We’ve got another project coming up. You could be right for it, Larry. No promises.”
“Want to tell me now?” Larry asked.
“We’ll talk about it,” Roger said, dangling the invisible carrot with which Larry was so familiar.
“Goodbye,” Larry said.
“Don’t go anywhere. Pages, okay? Later.”
* * *
Even before school let out for the summer, some June days of 1953 could be stifling at P.S. 189, this being the era before everything in the city was routinely air-conditioned.
On such blazing days, school ended early, releasing to the damp heat Loo-Loo and a couple of his inner-circle pals, Teddy Newman and Lester Dank. They hightailed it across Lincoln Terrace Park to the Creamflake, in the cause of a guaranteed gratis charlotte russe for each.
The coveted charlotte russe consisted of a slab of sponge cake set in a little white cardboard cup, topped with whipped cream and a ceremonious glazed cherry—a particular favorite of the chunkier Lester. As the boys entered, Al Scharfsky sized up the troop and ordered Manya, the Czech refugee beauty with the visible gold tooth who worked behind the counter, to give the boys what they wanted. Manya did.
Manya always wore a tight sweater, making it hard for Loo-Loo and his friends to keep their eyes off the cushiony outlines. Whenever Manya saw the boys staring, she smiled, and her gold incisor would catch the light in Slavic appreciation.
As instructed, she now gave Loo-Loo and Lester and Teddy a charlotte russe. Then Al asked his son’s two pals to take a hike because he needed to talk to Loo-Loo privately. This was unusual, but the boys left, their faces smeared with whipped cream as they stole a last look at Manya’s majestic sweater.
“What’d I do, Pop?”
“Nothing. Come in the back, we got a job for you.”
“We” meant Pop and Mr. Horn, who never talked much. The two men moved to the end of a long butcher-block worktable, motioning for Loo-Loo to come close. Back by the ovens, the Russians turned to watch.
Al Scharfsky lit up a Chesterfield and took a deep drag. He spoke in a muted tone, with exhaled smoke punctuating his words. “You know the Union Bakery?”
“Yeah.”
Al reached into the secret petty cash drawer under the butcher block and extracted a five-dollar bill. Loo-Loo knew about the drawer because it was where his father and Mr. Horn kept a gun in case of a robbery.
“Take this and go to the Union Bakery,” said Al, handing over the fiver to Loo-Loo. “Buy a chocolate layer cake. Don’t tell them who you are or where you’re from. Just give them the money and bring back a chocolate layer cake.”
“The Union is our competitor, right? Can I go in there?”
“Sure you can. Just don’t say nothing.”
“But why, Pop?”
Mr. Horn—in charge of cakes, after all—chimed in. “Because we need to know what they’re putting into the layer cakes,” said the man who didn’t say much. “Understand? It’s business.”
“But what if they find out that you sent me?”
Al placed a fatherly hand on his boy’s shoulder. “They’re not gonna find out, bright boy, because you’re not gonna say nothing. Just buy the cake. Is that so hard?”
“No,” said Loo-Loo. He liked being called bright boy. “I thought you said the Union is owned by the mob.”
“I didn’t say. I only heard.”
“They’re gonna know where I’m from.”
“No. They don’t know who the hell you are,” said Al. “You’re some kid buying a layer cake. Now hurry, before they sell out.”
All eyes were on Loo-Loo. Al, Mr. Horn, and the Russians were studying him, assessing his bravery. Especially the Russians, immigrants being naturally curious about matters of risk.
Al said, “You can keep the change, Loo-Loo. After you do it, that is.”
Mr. Horn inquired, “You ain’t a sissy, are you?”
With the fiver deep in his pants pocket, Loo-Loo proceeded up Utica toward Eastern Parkway—past Chudow’s radio repair shop, past the chicken store, past the fruit market.
At Union Street, a hotness crawled across his chest. It felt like the prickly heat rash he sometimes got in August, but this was only June.
Espionage! They were asking him to commit espionage. Loo-Loo, a bright boy, was about to procure secrets from the competitor and deliver said intelligence to the Creamflake.
Wasn’t this kind of thing against the law? Wasn’t it punishable by J. Edgar Hoover and his federal authorities, who had sent Mr. and Mrs. Rosenberg to the electric chair? And what about that higher court in the sky that Al and Dotty had talked about when Loo-Loo was little?
At that moment, he caught sight of McEntee, the huge cop of the neighborhood. He was ambling down Utica with a bunch of grapes in one hand and a peach in the other. He was always eating something he got from the storekeepers for free. Loo-Loo jaywalked to the other side, trying not to look suspicious.
What if McEntee asked him where he was going? Would Loo-Loo confess? Kids could go to jail. The city was getting tough on juvenile delinquents. Loo-Loo had seen plenty of reform schools in the movies. Full of delinquents, mostly Irish kids who would beat the crap out of you if you looked at them funny. Especially if your name was something like Loo-Loo.
Loo-Loo passed Union Street now, and found himself in the repeat line of little shops. Then the big sign over the street like a movie marquee: Union Bakery. Loo-Loo dragged his heels over the pavement, shuffling forward. He didn’t want to move, but he was somehow moving anyhow.
What if it was true that gangsters had taken over the Union? Gangsters would know the minute Loo-Loo walked in that he was up to no good, that he was a spy for the Creamflake.
They’d grab him right there, take him in the back of the bakery, and tie him up, make him talk. So you won’t talk, huh? Hey, Tony, get a hot coal out of the oven and let’s burn a hole in his freakin’ head. Or else they’d stick the spout of the doughnut machine in his ear and press the lever, filling his skull with strawberry jelly. They did things like that, these gangsters. Loo-Loo had heard the stories, he’d watched the Kefauver hearings. And didn’t he faithfully study the crime blotter in the Daily Mirror, just the same as Al himself did during his long stays in the can?
But even if the Union guys weren’t gangsters, Loo-Loo reasoned, he was still doing something really wrong in buying their cake—clandestinely!
So when J. Edgar Hoover sat Loo-Loo Scharfsky down on Old Sparky, would the electrodes function properly? Or would smoke come billowing out of his head? Say—how about if Loo-Loo managed to escape to Coney Island and hide out in room 623 at the Half Moon Hotel? Would somebody toss him out the window, making it look like he did the old brain-dive?
Funny how the Union Bakery smelled just like the Creamflake. This was comforting for about five seconds. Things even looked alike.
Tall glass showcases displayed cakes and cookies, breads and rolls. Loo-Loo had never gone into this shop, of course—ever. It was off limits. Yet the merchandise looked so familiar, and the girls behind the counter looked so much like Manya.
A few customers were ahead of him, so Loo-Loo lingered at the counter, waiting his turn. What’s that? You say you can hear my heart beating, mister? That’s not my heart, it’s coming from the subway tracks. Get outta my way. I got business.
“What would you like, dear?” asked a cushiony Manya look-alike.
“A chocolate layer cake, please.”
“What size, honey?”
“Size?”
“Seven-inch or nine-inch?” The woman gave a nod of her head toward the showcase with the fancy cakes.
This was a monkey-wrench question, thought Loo-Loo, who felt as if he was suddenly coming down with a fever. If he hesitated, the woman would suspect. She’d send some kind of signal, and a couple of thugs would come bursting out from the back of the shop.
Loo-Loo studied the cakes. Don’t try anything, sister. My father owns a gun.
“Well, dear?”
“The nine-inch,” said Loo-Loo, figuring Mr. Horn would want as much as he could get.
Sister took the chocolate cake out from the showcase, slid it into a half-opened cake box, closed the sides, and deftly tied and bowed it with a curly red-and-white string that spooled down from the ceiling—just like the spool at the Creamflake.
“Two dollars,” she said. Loo-Loo dug in for the bill, passed it up to her, took the change, and ran like hell.
He shouldn’t have bolted out of the Union like that. He should have left slowly. But he couldn’t take it. They could probably hear his heart pounding in Brownsville, clear across the park.
Obviously, the woman suspected something fishy was going on. She’d be in the back by now, telling the hard guys. And then they’d come tearing out of the store after him.
If not the hard guys, then somebody. Cops maybe, or the FBI. Or even the dreaded “element.” It could be anybody, but one thing was for sure: Somebody was going to get Loo-Loo today.
It didn’t matter who. Loo-Loo was in too deep. He’d crossed the mob. He’d committed a federal crime. He was tangled in a clandestine web of lies. At least that’s how they talked when he listened to The Shadow on the radio. A web of lies.
But this was the real thing, not some stupid mystery show. Loo-Loo ran for his life, and the faster he ran, the faster the tears washed down his face. You big sissy! What are you crying about, you moron? The tears burned, and blurred.
The big hand seemed to come out from the sky.
It gripped his arm. It seized him powerfully and held fast, bringing the bawling Loo-Loo to a dead halt.
It was all over. The end of the line, and inspiration for the big block letters in tomorrow’s Daily Mirror: BLOODY DEAD KID SPLATTERED ALL OVER UTICA AVENUE.
Not quite.
McEntee’s shiny badge was slowly becoming visible through the big puddle of Loo-Loo’s eyeballs.
“Now where’s the fire, boyo? You looking for trouble?”
“No.”
“You know you almost ran into that bus? You trying to wreck a bus or something?” McEntee laughed. “You want to be more careful. You could hurt people, feller.”
“Sorry.”
“Watcha got in the box? Looks like a cake.”
Loo-Loo now sized up McEntee, noting with disgust how the big cop was smacking his lips. “Yeah,” he said, “it’s a cake.”
“How’s about donating a big piece to the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association?”
“It’s for my father,” said Loo-Loo, prepared to run like hell again. “Gotta go!”
McEntee laughed.
They were waiting for him at the Creamflake. Al and Mr. Horn and the Russians and Manya in her sweater.
Wordlessly, Loo-Loo’s father took the Union box and had the boy follow him to the back, where he plunked the parcel down on the baking table.
Mr. Horn picked up a huge knife. He cut the string and opened the box and slid the chocolate layer cake onto the surface, positioning it under a glaring overhead light, and there it sat: pristine, a work of the baker’s art and toil, a prize.
Then—whack!—in a sudden motion, Mr. Horn brought down the knife, like it was a six-pound meat cleaver, slashing the chocolate cake in two. Everybody watched as Mr. Horn surgically slit the layers.
There were three layers of dark chocolate, with viscous spaces defining them: one space filled with raspberry jam, chocolate buttercream in the other. Again like the careful surgeon, Mr. Horn scraped at the fillings, determining their thickness, their richness. He handed a layer to Al, who tasted it.
Then the Russian bakers closed in for a taste. All the men made knowledgeable comments as they probed and dissected and sampled the enemy booty. Mr. Horn took notes, writing on a brown paper bag, which he would later hang over the worktable.
“You did a good job,” Al said to Loo-Loo. “Just don’t mention it to your friends.”
“Why not?”
“On account of it’s nobody’s business. Understand?”
“Yeah.”
“How much change did you keep, Loo-Loo?”
“Three dollars.”
Al reached into the petty cash drawer.
“Here’s two dollars extra,” he said. “Go buy yourself a present at the Woolworth’s. Good job, kiddo.”
Loo-Loo heard the bleating siren of a cop car as it sped past the Creamflake, heading for Brownsville, no doubt, where somebody was holding up a liquor store or maybe a Plymouth exploded with somebody inside of it.
Loo-Loo studied the dollar bills, saying nothing. Five bucks in all. Pretty good. He stared at the engraving on the bills, particularly the triangle atop the pyramid with the one eye on it—staring back at Loo-Loo Scharfsky, as if it knew all about him.
“When we finish this project—remember, we got something more for you, Larry”
“What? A game show?”
“No. It’s a movie script we picked up. White Heat meets Diff’rent Strokes. A gritty urban story, only there’s no grit yet. We need you to—you know—Brooklyn it up.”
“Brooklyn it up?”
“Yeah. Think you can handle it?”
“Piece of cake.”
“Money’s good too.”
“I’m all over it.”
EDITORS’ NOTE: The author of this report, Jess Korman, is a shy person. He is of the same quirky generation of television writers as Neil “Doc” Simon, with whom he shares two impulses: recounting life experience comedically, as a means of relieving pain through laughter; and hiding behind alter egos. In writing his memoir, Jess Korman employs assorted aliases. In the case of “The Creamflake Kid,” a true tale (though some names have been changed), the character Larry Sloan, né Scharfsky, a.k.a. Loo-Loo, is indeed the alter ego of a shy person.