Jerome Charyn - Bronx Noir

We had the knock-down-drag-out.

“How can you bust up Katz & Katz?” I asked her, again in my impatient way. “We got a nice long-standing clientele of decent New York criminals.”

“It’s not like it’s fatal,” she said. “Partners split up all the time.” She was cool, like she had the questions and answers doped out ahead of time. Like I taught her.

“Right here in New York, kiddo, you got a big future.”

“As what? Daughter of the great Stanley Katz who doesn’t paint houses? The consigliere? I’m already Stanley Katz’s kid. It’s not a skill. I have to be my own person, find my own space.”

Oy vey.

“In Los Angeles? What’s out there for a lawyer?”

“Entertainment law. Like I told you a hundred times.”

“A hundred times I still don’t get it. What do they know from murder in Hollywood?”

This could have been the stupidest thing I ever said. So I tried to brighten up the moment with a blast from the past.

“Say, kiddo, what’s the best thing about a murder trial?”

Wendy didn’t give me the setup like years ago when she was a little girl all excited about the game of Papa’s punch line.

So I answered me: “One less witness.”

“That is so ancient, Daddy.”

“You’re breaking my heart. Don’t leave me. I’m lonely.”

“It’s a lonely world, Daddy.”

“Which makes it a shame to be lonely all alone. You look like your mother. I miss your mother.”

“Me too, Daddy. But she’s gone. You know.”

Then Wendy and the blue suitcases her mother and I bought her for college walked out of my life.

“California is not out of your life,” she tells me whenever I call these days and start up with the you-walked-out-of-my-life business. Wendy informs me, “They’ve got airplanes now.”

Okay, I should fly out and visit.

But right now, I need to talk.

“You hear me? Your boy found his way to the Palomino Club.”

“Oh — hi, Daddy.”

“This guy, Lewis, he’s for real?”

What am I saying?

“You can bank on Blake Lewis,” says Wendy. “He’s a legitimate television producer. He’s big-time.”

“For me, all he’ll produce is a visit from the feds.”

“Like they’ve never been to your office.” Wendy says this with a sigh, like when she was a teenager complaining how I embarrassed her in front of her friends. Then she laughs and says, “Don’t you want to be on TV, Daddy?”

Is my own kid in on this proposition I got last night?

“Why me?”

“Blake’s looking for consultants. It’s what he does for his kind of shows.”

“What’s he calling this one?”

“Unofficially, it’s called The Assassination Show. Keep it hush-hush, okay? Blake only told me because he had to ask about — well, technical advisors, let’s say.”

I’m thinking over a number of things I don’t want to say to Wendy until I think them over. This seems to make her nervous.

“Well, so, naturally, I sent Blake to you.” Naturally.

“Ideas get stolen in the television business, Daddy. So hush-hush.”

“Television’s for cabbage-heads.”

“Speaking of cabbage, did you talk money?”

“Money I don’t care about.”

“I do. I’m only just getting off the ground here. I did a couple of five-percent series contracts, but you know how that goes.”

“Yeah, you sent me copies of your work, kiddo.”

“It’s mostly boilerplate according to the unions and the producers’ association. About a hundred ifs in there between a lousy ten grand, which doesn’t even pay the rent, and the sky.”

“But when you get up there, it’s dizzy time. When are you coming home?”

“I kind of want to, Daddy, but what I need right now is a real show-runner client like Blake Lewis. A big fish who can pay me a big commission. I need you to help me reel him in.”

“You should have called me, Wendy.”

“Where would that have got me? You would have blown me off, right?”

“Not necessarily.”

As soon as I say this, I know she’s got her foot in the door. And I know she knows that I know.

“Listen, Daddy, this is a good piece of business. It gets me in solid with the biggest thing going out here.”

“What’s that?”

“Reality TV.”

“There’s an oxymoron for you.”

I have got many things on my mind this morning in the November drizzle that’s making my shoes squeak. Not only that, I accidentally step on a liverwurst sandwich somebody dropped on the sidewalk. So this is not a good omen.

I am on the way from my place on the Concourse over to the office on 161st Street around the corner from the marble glory of the Bronx State Supreme Court. This is where it’s my calling to help little people through the meat grinder of their lives and take from the big people what the market will bear.

When it looks to me like they can hack the payments, the working stiffs pay me with their little credit cards. Or else I take IOUs, which I almost never collect on. The big people — your old-fashioned wiseguys, your rap music moguls, your disgraced politicians — they pay cash, and lots of it.

In case you hadn’t noticed about the times we are living through, weirdness and rudeness is rampant. And it’s not just up there at the top, either, it’s now trickled down to the bottom of the food chain. Never mind, for me business is brisk.

So here I am running a healthy enterprise for which I could use the help of somebody I can trust, namely my kid. I wrongly thought she was happy being molded into the person who would take over everything her mother and I built up in the Bronx. Which is not a bad little empire.

For instance, I own the building on the Concourse where I have lived since pulling up to the curb in a yellow Cirker’s moving van back when Ike was the president. I’ll never forget that Saturday afternoon.

My old man was delirious with joy about leaving the Lower East Side behind us for a new life in the North End, which is what you called the South Bronx back then.

“Can you believe it, Stanny-boy, I got us a big apartment with sun in the windows where rich people used to live,” he said to me that Saturday. He’d gone to the library to read about the new neighborhood. “Right on the Grand Concourse, copied off the Champs-Élysées in France and built in 1909 in the Bronx — by an immigrant. Imagine that. An immigrant just like me. You know, I was in Paris after the war, Stanny, and I painted. And I don’t mean houses.”

Right across the hallway from our sunny apartment I met a chubby girl my age with blue eyes and red cheeks and frizzy black hair.

Her name was Miriam Smart, which was perfect for her. Some people get named like that. Like Billy Strayhorn just had to be a jazz musician, and Johnny Stompanato had to be a wiseguy.

Anyhow, I called her Mimi. We were married on her nineteenth birthday.

Mimi and I were the first ones in our families to go through all twelve grades. After Morris High School, we graduated City College together in the days before tuition. I went on to law school and wound with a job in the domestic violence bureau at the Bronx D.A.’s office, where mostly I sent up slobs who fell in love with a dimple but couldn’t handle the fact that a whole girl came with it.

Mimi, she was the brains of the Katz family operation. She went to work in the real estate business on account of being sadly inspired by her grandfather, who had a little farm stolen out from under him back in Romania.

“You should never leave your place,” Mimi would say, repeating her grandfather’s stern counsel, “no matter how they try to run you out, which they will try to do over and over in different ways.”