Jay Fox - THE WALLS

“Holy shit,” says Tomas.

“Now, I'm cutting this a little short because I want to finish these (holding up one of the beers, shaking it, and then placing it back down), I guess this (as he raises the other beer) drink, and get out of here.” He pauses. “I forgot I picked this song (“Sunshine”). Anyway, the long and the short of it is that the Balaguez family was able to pay off Beatrice without batting an eye before the police or the press discovered what had taken place. This is nineteen eleven or twelve. Dick was born in twelve, though I couldn't tell you the date. Anyway, Beatrice didn't do too much with the money at first. She moved into a place in Brooklyn Heights. She ate better. All in all, however, most of it she just gave to her mother, who kept it in a safe place. I don't know the whole story behind it; I just know that it never went into a bank. Regardless, Beatrice, like her mother before her, continued to raise hell, as they used to say back then, and even managed to stay out of jail in order to avoid losing custody of Dick.

“When the depression hit, she took that money and started buying up properties all along the Brooklyn waterfront. From Greenpoint to Bay Ridge, there wasn't a neighborhood in which she didn't have at least one or two buildings. She kept rents low so as to give working people a break, and she managed to make enough on the properties so that she never lost any money due to repairs or taxes or anything like that. As for profit margins…well, they weren't all that important to her. The point is that she wasn't trying to be a martyr, and she sure as hell wasn't about to be consumed by avarice.

“As for Richard, Dick, he was provided with the best education that money could buy. The Balaguez family made sure of that, even after a lot of the money simply disappeared once the Bolsheviks took power in Russia. He went to a private school in Manhattan, got sent to Columbia, and then went to Harvard Law even with the Depression on. Graduated in thirty-eight, I believe. The family cut him off at that point, but he was armed with enough knowledge to help his mother with the property management business. Not to go too far off topic here, but the Balaguez Empire Jose had constructed had completely collapsed by then. Raphael committed suicide after driving all of the papers into the ground. The eldest daughter married into some political family based in New England — not the Kennedy family, but one like them — and the youngest son went out to California. I don't really know what happened with him, but I'm fairly certain that he got involved in the pictures. As for the three other sisters…well, let's just say that they were as virtuous as the daughters of Charlemagne.”

“What?”

This is ignored. “Some people claim that Beatrice began to sell out before the war started. I don't really buy into that. I will admit that she did begin to make more money off of her properties, but I think it had more to do with getting more buildings to help more people as opposed to simply making more money for the sake of a greater profit. She certainly did begin to get frustrated by the amount of work that was demanded of her company in order to comply with building codes and the well-being of her tenants,” he admits. “So maybe they are right to a certain degree; maybe she did cross over that line, and maybe she stopped seeing life through the eyes of those who are struggling to make it. Maybe she found herself incapable of abandoning the vantage wealth provides. But that's only speculation.

“When the war broke out, Dick told his mother that he was going to enlist in the navy should the country enter the war on the side of the Allies. She was pretty steamed about it, or pissed as you fellows say here, but she changed her tune after Operation Barbarossa — you know, when the Nazis launched their assault on the Soviets. After Pearl Harbor, Dick joined up, set out to war, and came back from the Pacific about three years later without these two fingers,” he says as he grips the middle and index fingers of his right hand. “Sad story really, but at least he didn't lose an arm or anything like that.

“Once he got back stateside, he found that things had changed. Beatrice had apparently gone to the other side, as he used to say, and she was scooping up every property she could get her hands on. In order to pay for these myriad acquisitions, she began increasing rents, kicking out tenants who were behind, and charging exorbitant late-fees. When she married Yaniv Abram in the spring of forty-five — something not unlike a political marriage — things took a further turn for the worse.

“While I'll be the first to tell you that most Jewish people are decent and industrious people, there are those elements in any population that make everyone else look bad. It's like the drunks for the Irish,” he says as he takes down another swig. “Now, where I'm from, Americans, as a rule, tend to be considered the exception: it's not looked down upon to think all of you guys arrogant fucks. Of course, as I've found out from my time here, this is just because we don't see working class people from the States all that often. We see the wealthy and the nouveau riche , who come into our country expecting to be treated like fucking royalty just because their last name begins with an ‘O’.

“But that's immaterial. The point is that Abram was the Anti-Semites paragon of the Jew, a shrewd, horrible little man who looked like the lovechild of Cato and a gargoyle. He had acquired a lot of properties, particularly in the Bedford-Stuyvesant, Williamsburg, and Greenpoint regions, and he was notorious for the most downright exploitative practices in which a landlord can partake. Someone once told me that Amiri Baraka, back when he was LeRoi Jones, actually spit on him, but I don't know how true that is. Anyway, my point is that the man was good at one thing — and that was business. Suffice to say, the couple, once together, became one of the most dominating forces in Brooklyn real estate.

“Two days after the marriage, the newlyweds founded Abram-Keens. I guess that was the honeymoon — a trip to the court to file the certificate of incorporation. The company did well; it expanded and became more profitable than either Yaniv's company or Beatrice's company had been prior to the union. The two eventually relocated from Brooklyn Heights to the Upper East Side, the Clivus Victoriae of Manhattan. They hobnobbed with celebrities, aristocrats, and all of the other scum attracted to scenes where status and popularity are determined by the make of your car.”

“Get to the fucking point, man,” Tomas says.

Patrick looks to Tomas with a bit of ire. Tomas sips his coffee begrudgingly. “So, they died — car accident sometime in fifty-four or fifty-five. For whatever reason, Dick inherited the company. Problem was, he couldn't change the direction that it, the company, had taken. He wanted to cut rents, but, by that point in time, most of the people who rented from Abram-Keens were not the type of people who needed their rents decreased. The couple had sold off most of the properties in working class neighborhoods in order to buy properties in the nicer parts of the city — Manhattan in particular. He fought with the shareholders for a few years, but they ended up winning every time. The feats of Hercules and David are still well known for a reason, after all.

“He recognized that his hands were tied, so he did what seemed to be the most rational thing: he sold his shares in the company and resigned. This was fifty-nine.” He pauses. “You have to love this song,” he says as the Cornelius Brothers & Sister Rose serenade the bar. “Anyway, some say he was bought out for fifty million dollars, but I don't think that's quite right. Maybe it would have been something like fifty million dollars by today's standards, but I don't think that's right, either. Regardless, the amount isn't all that important; the point is that he came out of the deal with more money than he knew what do with.