My uncle Eddy was the eleventh child my grandma Pearl gave birth to, not long before my grandfather was the victim of a hit and run during a snowstorm in Cleveland. When Eddy was seven, Pearl took him to bed with her in their slum apartment—it was January, the heat was not working, and the apartment was cold as a frog’s belly. Shortly after midnight, my grandfather’s ghost appeared and swore at her, shouting, “Who is this you have taken to our bed?” Eddy always claimed he had seen the ghost too, but we all remember things we never witnessed but heard as stories so often told that we believe we were there.
Late in the Great Depression, Eddy moved in with us. He took the room that had been my brother Harry’s until my parents came home early from a party and caught him fucking his girlfriend Shirley on the scratchy old couch. My parents and hers forced them into marriage with the disaster you’d expect, but that’s another story. It set a pattern for Harry of marrying, again and again and again, never for long. Where some other guy would maybe give a girl he was seeing a nice birthday box of chocolates, Harry married her.
I slept in my parent’s room in our little wooden house near the Detroit Terminal Railroad. Harry and Eddy were only a year apart in age and became best friends. Eddy was of medium height, wiry and strong with curly black hair and green eyes that nobody else in the family shared. All the rest of us had dark brown almost black eyes. Harry was shorter and solidly built, more muscular.
“You’re pretty,” I’m told I said to Eddy. “You have green eyes like my pussycat.” The thoughtless coquettish flattery of a four-year-old who desperately wanted to be liked. Eddy had blue green eyes, changeable as the weather. My cat Whiskers had yellow green eyes. I thought Whiskers the most beautiful creature in the world.
Harry and Eddy bet on the horses together, bent over the racing form arguing records and jockeys, won and lost, mostly the latter, at poker, laid down their money on numbers, whored and generally behaved as if they were both single. I adored my brother because unlike my distant father, he was emotional, warm and funny. Eddy seemed to a four-year-old almost a hero, dashing, spontaneous, handsome. They seldom quarreled with each other but frequently got into arguments and fist fights with other men. Harry would come home with a black eye Mother would fuss over; Eddy usually got the worst of it but he always said, “You should see the other guy. He’ll think twice before he calls another working stiff a dirty kike.”
I do remember them arguing about the Purple Gang. Harry said, “They were just poor Jews like us. Now they live in big houses, they drive fancy cars and they hang out in nightclubs that would never let us in. They had the guts to go and get what they wanted. So big shots wouldn’t hire Jews for decent jobs. So they had to pay the Purple Gang just to get left alone.”
“They’re vicious fuckers. They were hired to bust unions. They killed anybody. They killed each other. That they ruled this city so long just proves how corrupt the system is.”
I imagined men who were the color of grape popsicles.
Both Harry and Eddy’d had Bar Mitzvahs of course, toned down thrown together affairs. Eddy wore a hamsa under his shirt that Pearl had given him for protection. Harry would tease him about that. But they were closer than brothers then. When the economy improved, Eddy moved back to Cleveland where Pearl pushed him to marry. She had a bride in mind, you might say, in tow. Eddy told my mother, “I don’t want to get married. But Mama’s insisting. She cries, she says I’m breaking her heart.”
Mother laughed. “Is she praying at the top of her lungs?”
“It’s not funny. Last week she wouldn’t eat for two days, calling out to Hashem to make me do the right thing. Couldn’t you talk to her? You know how Harry and Shirley are fighting all the time.”
“When Pearl got her mind set on something, dynamite can’t move her. You should have stayed here. So what’s the girl like? Is she ugly or bowlegged or stupid?”
“She’s sweet in her way. Not a bad looker. But I don’t love her. I guess she’d make a good wife, but I don’t want one!” But he gave in two months later and married what Pearl insisted was his bashert. We all went to Cleveland for the wedding, the whole family amounting to maybe fifty of us. Pearl’s rabbi married them and the men all danced, even my father, even Harry, although he made fun of it. The bride was very bashful and clung to Pearl. I learned her own mother was dead and Pearl had taken her in. Families did that a lot in the ghetto.
When I was twelve, I took the bus from Detroit to Cleveland to stay for a few weeks with my grandma. Pearl and Eddy lived on the same block of tenements, a neighborhood of poor Jews and Blacks, three story wooden buildings with rickety outside staircases. I got to know Eddy more as a person. He was an anarchist who was bright and read all kinds of literature, mostly political, and owned a jazz collection. He had recently walked out on his first wife and two kids and left everything including his music, but what money he had he spent on records and listening to live jazz. He was proudly and determinedly working class. At that time, he had a job in the steel mills.
“Jazz, that’s real music,” he told me, “Living music. It has soul. That shit on the radio, it’s empty. Full of lies.” He played Duke Ellington for me and talked about his genius.
There was not a lot he respected: the government lied, capitalists and bosses lied, the newspapers and news commentators lied. I felt heat from him, a fire that moved me without understanding its source. He was special and I wanted to be an adult like him with passions, excited and knowledgeable about things like a saxophone solo. He accepted my adoration, treating my comments with attention and respect I was not used to from any adult. He took me to the museum, to a ball game, to the fights. Our boxer lost.
I heard stories about him. He had been drafted but refused to salute or say “sir.” He was beaten, spent time in stockade, escaped the army by chopping off part of his foot. He would not bend to the government, but he joined the Merchant Marine, was torpedoed at least once. When the war ended, he’d had enough of life at sea. The stories I heard from my grandma or casually told by Eddy himself made him ever more romantic in my eyes. I thought of myself as a rebel like him.
Harry had married Betsy on impulse as he was about to be shipped overseas. She was an East Sider; we were all Westies. He returned from the Marines to divorce her. His marriage to Shirley had ended after three years when she sued him for adultery. She got the few wedding presents and he kept his guitar. He had never actually lived with his second wife, Betsy, so the divorce was simple. He then shook the chemical dust of Detroit from his shoes and moved to California.
He wrote Eddy that the living was good and there were lots of jobs, so Eddy moved to LA, where they shared a bachelor bungalow. Harry worked on the railroad. One of the few things he thought of sending me during those years was a fireman’s cap with a union button still attached. Mother wrote him regularly and occasionally he sent a postcard of palm trees or the Brown Derby. Eddy got a job dismantling hot cars in a chop shop. He sent a photo back to Pearl of the two of them standing shoulder to shoulder on a beach in skin-tight bathing suits—Harry in black and Eddy in red—darkened by the sun and grinning widely. Eddy was a few inches taller. Two women in one-piece bathing suits lay on a blanket just behind them in poses imitating pinups, arms crooked behind their heads and busts jutting forward and up like rockets about to launch. Pearl found the photo upsetting and mumbled about kurvehs (whores) in Yiddish. “And what was wrong with his wife, that I picked out for him myself? A good Jewish balabosteh. Mother of his darling girls.”
Even at sixteen I could easily figure out that a good housewife would not appeal to Eddy. If he was ever truly in love, I never knew about it. He had male friends, especially my brother, to whom he was far more loyal than he ever was to any woman. I think he always had something going, but it felt as if all women were interchangeable. Yet he was always good to me. I was in another category. He told me I had a good brain and I should use it. When we spoke, he was always warning me about men, how if I didn’t watch my step, they’d use and abandon me. Since one of my central goals in life was to be free and independent, I didn’t take his warnings too seriously.
“You don’t understand how it is with men. You make yourself cheap. If you can get the milk free, why buy the cow?”
“I am not some fucking cow!”
“If you talk like that, you’ll cheapen yourself. You’ll sound like a street kid or a whore.”
As if he didn’t say fuck every other sentence. I was furious with him. Like my mother, he couldn’t imagine a life for a woman who wasn’t a wife or a whore. We didn’t speak again (on the phone of course) for two months. All through high school we’d have these late night conversations—not only because of the three hour time difference but because the long distance rates were cheaper then. I had the room that had been Harry’s and then Eddy’s, so after my parents went to bed, I pulled the phone into my room in case he called.
I remember one postcard Harry sent Mother showing the Hollywood Park racetrack. He had scrawled on the back “This is one great place. Saw Gary Cooper betting twenty dollars on the fourth race. Won a trifecta!” A week later a gift arrived from him, a little round spiny cactus planted in a cart pulled by a gaudily painted burro. I don’t remember the ball of spines ever growing but it survived in the kitchen window for as long as I can remember.
In 1959 I followed the family migration to California. At that time, there were cheap lodgings in San Francisco; my neighborhood was a motley mix of musicians, writers, hairdressers, painters, of Japanese and Italians and Blacks and disaffected youth. It smelled of fish, canning tomatoes, and chocolate, and the train came down the middle of the street bringing produce for the canneries to deal with. I rented a studio so called that fronted on the tracks. I had a battered ’51 Hudson (my father hated the big three carmakers: Ford was an anti-Semite and supported Hitler; GM had crushed the workers’ strikes; I never got straight about Chrysler; but we always had off-brand cars) but I walked to work, tending bar at a local watering hole. I could never get off weekends but I got the other bartender Tim to cover for me Monday through Wednesday nights. I drove down to LA to see my favorite brother and my favorite uncle. And of course to see LA. My images of that city were formed by movies and I expected palm trees and glamour. I had heard about the smog but I figured, growing up in Detroit I’d be used to it, but this gray stuff burned my eyes and my lungs. It didn’t feel like air but some other medium. I couldn’t even see the mountains I knew were there surrounding us. There were miles and miles of little houses, of stores and small factories and car dealerships and eateries and then more and more miles of the same. There didn’t seem to be any end to it, as if it stretched all the way to Mexico.
My brother was a big surprise. On the hottest days he wore a long sleeved shirt to cover his tattoos. He was selling real estate in a development way out in the desert near the Salton Sea, that weird accidental salt lake. He had a little house with an oil well pumping two houses away, the rig dressed up with a chicken head on it. He had divorced another wife I never met and now he had a girlfriend who lived in a lavish house up in the hills with a kidney-shaped swimming pool surrounded by the palm trees I’d expected. She was a widow a few years older than Harry, with two half-grown kids. Obviously there was money. Harry insisted, “This one is different. This is the right woman for me. The fourth time is the charm. I know what I want and she’s all of it.”
It’s true, she was entirely different from his other wives or girlfriends. They had all come from backgrounds like ours and were what he now referred to as “common.” He’d somehow acquired a GDS, but he referred to his college days at some vague midwestern school. His time in the brig was abolished and he was proud to have served as a Marine, wearing a button and actively engaged in whatever ex-Marines did when they hung out in their club.
I asked him about Eddy and he looked at me blankly as if he had never heard of him. I kept pressing him, and he finally gave me an address—“If he’s still living there. He moves a lot. Can’t pay the rent.”
“He’s not working?”
“Got himself into a hole. Big debts to bookies.” Harry shrugged. “He’s a loser.”
“You used to be best buddies. For years and years.”
Harry slicked back his hair over his new balding spot on the crown of his head. “A wise man knows when to cut loose. Eddy would have brought me down to his level. Forget about him. He always said you were smart, so show some smarts. Forget you ever knew him.”
Of course I didn’t. I found the address, in the Mexican section over a taco joint, but Eddy was long gone. The woman at the cash register in the eatery was cagey at first but finally responded to my high school Spanish. “He got busted for trying to pass bad checks … But he never stung us.”
“Do you know where he is now?”
“Doing five at Chino.”
When I managed to go see him, it was my first time visiting somebody in prison, though by no means my last. The drill was new to me, dumping everything in one of those little receptacles before they buzz you in. The endless wait in a room filled with prisoners visiting with their families. He wasn’t a violent or high-risk prisoner, so there was none of that speaking through a glass wall like you see on TV. The children were running around screaming, the wives were clutching their hands in their laps, worrying, leaning on the little gray bolted down metal tables. Noisy, nervous laughter, occasionally a crying fit. I waited for close to an hour.
Eddy was gaunt and grayish coming toward me. He had a bruise on his cheek. His eyes were bright teal in his weathered face. He looked ten years older than Harry.
He was obviously surprised to see me. “You shouldn’t have come.”
“Why not? You’re still my favorite uncle.”
“You got no taste.” He laughed then and for a moment I saw his old spirit. I noticed two of the fingers on his left hand were crooked, as if they had been broken and never properly set. “So you come all the way out here to see me? How’s your mom?”
“Still cleaning houses at her age. I send her a little when I can.” I explained I was living in San Francisco, no, had never married and didn’t plan to in this life. He didn’t seem surprised.
He had never remarried, but he told me he had a kid with a Mexican woman, a four-year-old Pablo, Paul, answered to both names. He corrected himself. Five now. He fished out a photo and showed me. I was half shocked he actually kept the photo on his person, as he’d shown little interest in his ex-wife’s two daughters.
“When I get out, I’m gonna make it right for him. He’s a good kid.”
He didn’t like that I was tending bar. “That’s no way to meet decent guys.”
“It’s a good way to make money. I get great tips.” I didn’t tell him I was going to school part-time to get my degree in psych. I figured I’d heard so many hard luck stories I might as well get paid for counseling lost souls. He said he was coming up for a parole hearing in eighty-five days. He was counting them, of course. I said, “Let me know how it goes. I’ll come visit you if you get out.”
“Just give me a couple of weeks to get straight and settled.”
I felt closer to Eddy than to my brother, I don’t know exactly why. After all, I was striving and straining too, taking those courses aimed at hoisting me up into the middle class as Harry was remaking his past to suit the present and future he wanted. He felt fake to me—but hadn’t I worked on my accent? Maybe I thought Eddy was more genuine. More of who we all were under the faked education and pretenses. Whatever the reason, I stayed in closer touch with Eddy than with my brother.
I was kind of surprised he managed to finesse the parole board; it wasn’t like him. In the past he would have purposely shocked them, questioned their right to pass judgment on him, but obviously, he really wanted to get out of the can. He sent me his address on a postcard of the Hollywood sign. He was back in the Mexican ghetto, said he’d seen Pablo but Luisa had a new man living with them.
I arranged to drive down the next Tuesday, although I warned him he’d have to put me up and I could only stay the one night. It was hot on the drive down, even with all the windows open—the breeze that blew in could have toasted bread. Burned it more likely. Even with sunglasses, the glare gave me a headache, so I wasn’t in the best of moods when I crossed LA to his neighborhood, taking the wrong expressway, doubling back and then missing the exit.
With only average difficulty, I found his street and his block—little houses crammed together with a vacant lot where a house had burned down leaving charred earth in the middle of the block. I could see the address he’d given me—a little stucco house, a paved yard in front with a jacked-up Ford and a pickup parked—but there were three police cars out front with their lights flashing. Was he enough of a schlemiel to get busted again already? I had a brief impulse to turn around and go back.
I drove around the corner and parked on the next street. Then cautiously I walked back. A knot of local people had gathered across the street and I joined them. I asked in English and then in my high school Spanish, “¿Qué pasa?” “What’s up?”
Nobody answered me at first, then an old lady with dyed orange hair sticking out of a bandana asked, “You know him?”
I don’t know why I answered “Eddy?”
She nodded and a cold gurgle of apprehension started in my belly. “He’s my uncle.”
She sighed and nodded again. I started to ask what the police were doing when an ambulance came shrieking around the far corner. “Veinteocho minutos,” someone in the crowd said. “Tarde como siempre. Cochinos.”
When the medics brought down a stretcher I burst through the yellow tape. “That’s my uncle,” I said. I saw Eddy’s face, pale, distorted, unconscious. I could see blood soaking his chest.
After a brief argument with the medics, I found out where they were taking him. I wanted to climb in the ambulance, but the cops took hold of me for questioning. They held me for an hour asking me all about some burglary of a liquor store and Eddy’s associates, shoving their faces into mine, shaking me by the shoulder (it was sore for a couple of days), taking turns threatening me, shouting that I was lying. Finally I was able to persuade them I was down from San Francisco for the day. I put on a dumb and flighty act. After they let me go, a couple of the watchers were friendlier, having seen the cops roughing me up. They told me he had been stabbed and they told me where the hospital was.
I drove there as fast as I could. Eddy was in surgery. I sat in a plastic chair for three hours drinking coffee from a machine. At least they called it coffee. I’d call it ostrich piss. Anyhow, I waited. For what? A doctor finally came out and told me Eddy had passed. I called Harry to tell him. Didn’t get hold of him till I was back in San Francisco. He was silent for a bit and then grunted. “I couldn’t find out how it happened,” I said. “I can’t believe he’s gone. Just like that.”
“Better not to know.” Then quietly he hung up, leaving me with nothing but a dial tone. I got a postcard a month later inviting me to his wedding. Eddy’s murder was never solved. I wondered if anybody tried.