Jerome Charyn - Bronx Noir

So who am I, sitting next to this Jack Armstrong type and doing my bit to be one-half of an odd couple? And what’s this bar about?

The Palomino Club is neutral territory for a bunch of us who depend on one another to keep the criminal justice system of the Bronx a going concern. Meaning the cops and the crooks and guys like me, since all roads lead to lawyers.

Over the bar right where I’m sitting, there’s a creased photograph of a curly-haired squirt with his ears folded under a cowboy hat and he’s sitting up on a big cream-colored horse with a flowing white mane. At the bottom of the picture it says, Camp Hiawatha 1953.

That’s me in the saddle, by the way. I always sit near the picture of my youth.

I am now a grown-up man of five-foot-six, if you can call that grown. I am sort of round and practically bald-headed. I have lived on the Concourse since my days in short pants. The fact I now get my suits made by a tailor with liver spots over on Grant Avenue who claims he sewed for Tony Curtis after he stopped being Bernie Schwartz from Hunts Point doesn’t fool anybody. So says my kid.

My kid says I’m so Bronx haimish there’s no way my name could be anything besides Stanley, which it is.

So imagine how curious I am about this tall, sun-kissed, golden-haired guy — goy — who took stool next to me when he could have sat down in a lot of other spots.

The guy orders a cosmopolitan. Nate the bartender cuts me a look that says, Nu?

Naturally, I am wondering myself. So I start chatting up Jack Armstrong.

“Look at these,” I tell him, holding up both hands so he can see my pink palms. “Soft, hey? Nice?”

“For crying out loud, Stanley—”

This is from Nate, who is rolling his eyeballs like Jerry Colonna used to do on The Ed Sullivan Show . I am not currently speaking to Nate on account of he encouraged my kid to break up the firm of Katz & Katz.

Yeah, I get your point , he says to my kid. You got to be your own person , he says to her. You have to find your own space . Feh! Since when is Nathan Blum talking hippie?

“—Not with the schtick already, Stanley.”

I think about telling Nate, Life is schtick, numb nuts . But instead I keep him on my list of people to ice, which I hope irritates him like a nail in the neck. He picks up another Hamilton from the little pile of cash on the wet mahogany in front of me and pads off, knowing to bring back another Grey Goose marty, the hump.

I get back to business.

“No kidding, Jack,” I tell the golden boy. “Look at these hands.”

“It’s Blake, actually.” He smiles, which blinds me. “Blake Lewis. I’m in from the coast.”

Who says this?

Well, what did I tell my kid about Hollywood guys with the teeth she thinks are so freaking fabulous? Phony-baloneys, all of them. No parents in the history of the world ever gave the name of Blake to their innocent little boy, not even to Jack Armstrong here.

“So, Blake, feel the hands.”

He touches one palm, then the other one.

“Soft,” he says. “Nice.”

“Smooth like a baby’s pilkes.”

“You must be terribly proud of those hands,” says Blake Lewis with the suede and cashmere. He sounds terribly like somebody who doesn’t want you to know he grew up in a splitlevel eating casserole and Jell-O. “You didn’t have to work hard — like your father did.”

This golden boy, he knows?

“My old man painted houses,” I tell him, playing it casual, like maybe Lewis here hit on a lucky guess. “He had hands rough as shingles. Me, I don’t paint.”

“I heard that. I heard you’re an attorney.”

“Not an attorney. I’m a lawyer.”

Lewis smiles and swivels on his barstool to scope out the place again. The usual suspects I mentioned are here.

Three fat capos by the names of Peter “the Pipe” Guastafaro and Charlie the Pencil Man and Nutsy Nunzio are eating bloody steaks in a corner booth. The steaks are so big they’re going to have meat breath for the next couple of days.

Down the middle of back dining room is a long table full of potato-faced Irish detectives in shiny suits. They’re drinking champagne to celebrate a take-down that’s going to earn everybody commendations, and making eyes at the bling-bling brown-skinned girls the latest gold-toothed hip-hop prince on his way to bankruptcy court brought along with him.

The local Chamber of Commerce boys are here, with long-legged women they’re not married to. One of them decides to showboat. He hands over an intriguing wad of cash to a crewcut desk sergeant from the 44 thPrecinct and says, “Take care of the other guys too.” He has not yet learned that sending money by cop is like sending lettuce by rabbit.

Hanging around the bar to either side of me are solid-built guys keeping a quiet eye on one another, along with some tabloid guys, including Slattery from the Post .

Slattery came with the detectives from his tribe, but now feels the need to drink something that’s not bubbly. He’s got buck teeth and a mustache from the ’70s he ought to get rid of.

The solid-built guys are nursing seltzer. Their fingers on the glasses are as thick as rolled quarters. They’ve got enough firepower concealed under polyester suit jackets to hold off an invasion.

Down at the end of the bar, the D.A. himself is getting a bang out of showing a gaggle of Wall Street attorneys the other side of the tracks. And working the room, of course, are my comrades of the Bronx criminal defense bar. They’re handing out business cards.

Lewis turns back to me and says, “I hear you’re a lawyer who knows how to motivate certain types of people.”

He says this with no sense of irony or amusement. I notice I’m still sitting here with my pink palms up in the air, like I’m about to get mugged by a guy who’s prettier than anything I ever saw walk out of a Jerome Avenue beauty salon.

This good-looking mugger, he glances up at the memento from Camp Hiawatha a long time ago and says, “You’re Stanley Katz, aren’t you?”

Then he sticks out a hand that’s smoother than mine and I shake it because what else am I supposed to do.

It takes me a long minute, but I am now recovered. Because now I figure what’s with the golden boy.

“You know my kid out in Los Angeles.” I don’t say this like it’s a question.

“I do indeed. Wendy said I’d find you here. She says your office is nearby.” Lewis nods his expensive haircut in the right direction while he’s saying this. Then he says, “According to Wendy, they call you Consigliere .”

“Nobody named Stanley was ever a consigliere. Except for me,” I tell him. “But that’s mostly for laughs.”

“But not strictly.”

He’s got me there.

“Counselor, I could use your help,” says Lewis.

“For what?”

He tells me.

“You want I should whack Monkey Boy?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

Later, when I’m home after listening to this disturbing proposition, which I admit has got a certain appeal, I get Wendy on the horn. It’s around midnight in the Bronx, which I know is only 9 o’clock in California.

“Your boy Lewis, he clocked me at the Palomino.”

I inform her of this right in the middle of when she’s answering “Hello” into the phone.

Even though Wendy is my flesh and blood, I can’t help being impatient with her since she’s out there with the phonybaloneys now. Which I know all about from reading the unpleasant memoir of a New York writer who went to Hollywood once. The title of this memoir, it’s Hello, He Lied .

Six months ago — before she started up with her my-own-person business — I gave Wendy the loan of this book, figuring it would disgust her enough to keep her home where she belongs, namely in the Bronx with me. I figured wrong.