Paul Levine - Riptide

So close to paradise. Maybe it was time.

She wore her tightest jeans to the theater and wiggled her can like a bitch in heat. Still no rise from the old man.

She asked if he’d like his shoulders rubbed and he said no.

Like me to clean the office?

No again.

Anything you want?

Nothing, thank you, darling.

Shit, getting nowhere fast. She had a buzz in the back of her mind, worked it over, slept on it, finally was sure about it. Next morning, she told Harry.

He shook his head. “You want me to do a B and E?” he asked. “No friggin’ way. Never had a felony rap. Don’t think I could do hard time at my age.”

“Harry Marlin, what kinda man are you? You wanna play the stock market for real but you don’t have jackshit. You been a-fussin’ about them bonds ever since I let on about ‘em. Now let’s see if you got the hair on your balls to do somethin’ besides talk.”

Jake Lassiter parked his 1968 Olds 442 convertible in the alley behind the theater. Lincoln Road was empty of pedestrians. Wealthy matrons once shopped there, riding trams from store to store, wrapped in mink at the first breath of November. Then Saks closed, restaurants and art deco hotels were boarded, and the street was taken over by Marielitos — the tattooed Cuban prisoners — who urinated in empty door fronts and terrorized the neighborhood’s feeble retirees.

Five blocks away, Ocean Drive was rejuvenated with New York money and New York names. South Beach was now SoBe, where young couples of various genders sought out the newest cafes the way computer-guided missiles target tanks in the desert. Leggy models in Lycra shorts wove around traffic on rollerblades. Photographers and artists and Eurotrash dressed in trendy black walked the walk and talked the talk, but here, just half a mile inland, aged survivors of the Depression or the Holocaust shuffled along with canes and walkers, mumbling to themselves or long-lost relatives.

Violet Belfrey greeted Lassiter at the front door. “Show’s started,” she said. “You missed Mr. K.’s speech. Something about Lenin’s experiment and Roosevelt’s big deal.”

“New Deal.”

“Whatever.”

“How you been, Violet?”

“Busted, disgusted, and can’t be trusted.” With that, she grabbed his bottom, gave a firm squeeze, and guided him through the turnstile. “Nice toe-kiss,” she said.

“ Tuchis, Violet. Sam should teach you better Yiddish.”

“You’d be surprised how much learnin’ I been doin’ from old Mr. K.”

“And I’ll bet you could teach him a thing or two,” Lassiter said.

In his retirement Sam Kazdoy kept busy clipping bond coupons and showing Russian films at his movie theater. For the last six months, Violet Belfrey sold the tickets and changed the marquee. And hung around, Lassiter noticed. Rich old man and street-smart younger woman, a classic combination. Jake Lassiter saw cunning in Violet’s dark eyes and scavenger’s claws in her bony hands. Years ago, before age and wealth had dulled his senses, the old man would have seen it, too.

When Violet answered the employment ad, Lassiter wanted to do a background check. “Let’s find out if she’s ever been arrested, sued, divorced, done drugs,” he told Kazdoy.

The old man refused. “Don’t worry, boychik. Ey, she’s got some titskes,” Kazdoy chortled, cupping his hands two feet in front of his chest. Lassiter never brought it up again and Violet became a fixture at the old man’s side.

Jake Lassiter followed a trail of ancient stains on the threadbare carpeting to a seat in the third row. The chair sagged until the metal seat scraped the floor with the sound of fingernails across a blackboard. Once a showplace — home to ten thousand matinees — the theater now was a dank tomb, the air heavy with dust and humidity, ceiling fans struggling against the tropical night.

Lassiter was the youngest moviegoer by thirty years. Most were aged widows and widowers, born in czarist Russia. The crowd was an orchestra off-key, playing tunes simultaneously in English, Yiddish, and Russian,’the sounds of Babel rising to the empty balcony. Some chattered throughout the show, their whispers rattling like old mufflers, unaware that as their hearing diminished, their voices took up the slack.

Kazdoy showed double features, an old American film followed by a Russian classic. The Hollywood comedies and musicals were from his personal collection, bought on the gray market, so he paid no royalties to the movie studios, which he thought were still run by Louis B. Mayer.

“Tell the whoremongers Samuel Kazdoy don’t pay no blackmail,” he had said to Lassiter a half dozen years earlier. He had hired Lassiter to defend him when the studios sued for copyright violations. The old man settled, paying no royalties but agreeing to refrain from showing copyrighted films, a promise he regularly violated. There were no more lawsuits but Jake Lassiter and Samuel Kazdoy became friends, often having dinner together after a movie.

On this night, Lassiter dozed through The Battleship Potemkin, the classic Eisenstein film. After the show, a beaming Kazdoy moved quickly to the stage on steady legs and, using a microphone, began his weekly sociological essay.

“ Oy, what a mess we’ve got here in Goldeneh Medina, this golden country. They’re knocking down zaydes and bubbes for their Social Security checks. In Moscow, even with no government worth a damn anymore, it’s still safer than New York.

“Something else, too many lawyers. Everybody’s suing everybody else. I read in the paper, so I believe it even though it’s not the Daily Forward, that a woman got hurt in a bus accident, she’s suing the city saying the injury made her a whatchamacallit…”

“A nymphomaniac, Sam,” said a man in the front row, a dapper eighty-year-old in a lime-green polyester leisure suit.

“A nafka,” said a heavy woman next to him, her brown support stockings drooping around thick ankles.

“Feh!” sputtered the man in green. “No, no, no. A nafka charges money, a nymphomaniac does it for fun.”

“So who would do it for fun?” the woman asked.

“That’s right, a nymphomaniac,” Samuel Kazdoy said. “Now, maybe if I was on that bus, she’d have a case.” Kazdoy paused and the crowd roared. “But to get sued for too much shtupping? It’s meshugge. Yessir, too many lawyers we got.”

Kazdoy was squinting into the lights, trying to spot Lassiter. “Now take my lawyer. Please!”

The house erupted. They loved his corny jokes even more than the pickled herring at the old man’s delicatessen.

“Here he is, Sam,” a man with a silver toupee croaked. The man sat directly behind Lassiter and recognized him from previous evenings at the theater. Head bobbing, toupee sliding, the man jabbed a finger into Lassiter’s shoulder blade. “Here’s your mouthpiece, Sam.” Lassiter slumped in his chair as heads turned and arthritic necks craned.

“Ah,” Kazdoy said. “There’s Jacob Lassiter. He’s a good lawyer, and he got those gonifs in Hollywood off my back. If you need an estate plan, call him up, but he’ll charge you an arm and a leg, then you won’t have a ruble left for your kids, but so what when they’re in Scarsdale and don’t come see you anyway?”

“How much you charge?” said the man with the sliding toupee, his finger now rapping the back of Lassiter’s seat.

“I don’t do wills,” Lassiter said, hoping the old man would change the subject. He was in luck.

“In the Old Country,” Kazdoy said, his voice dropping to signify the importance of the next observation, “they told me that the streets in New York were paved with gold. When I got off that stinking boat in 1912, the first thing I see is a man following a horse with a broom and pail, but what he was sweeping wasn’t gold.”