Joseph Heller - Closing Time

I always felt that way as a kid. I was big and broad from the start and had a strong voice, and I felt bigger and broader than I was. In public school I could see with my eyes that there were older kids who were bigger than I was, and maybe they were stronger too, but I never felt it. And I was never in dread of the kids in those few Italian families we had in the neighborhood, all those Bartolinis and Palumbos, that all of the others were almost afraid to talk about unless they were home. They carried knives, those guineas, it was rumored in whispers. I never saw any. I left them alone and they didn't bother me. Or anyone else for that matter, as far as I could tell. Except one time one of them did. A skinny older one in the eighth grade came slouching past and stepped on my foot deliberately as I sat on the sidewalk at the front of the line outside the schoolyard after lunch, waiting for the doors to open and the afternoon session to begin. He wore sneakers. We were not supposed to wear sneakers to school except for gym, but all those Bartolinis and Palumbos did whenever they wanted to. "Haaay," I said to myself when I saw it happen. I'd watched him coming. I'd seen him turn in toward me with a mean and innocent look. I did not see my arm shoot out to grab him by the ankle and squeeze there only hard enough to hold him in place when he tried to pull free and continue past me without even moving his eyes, like he had a right, like I wasn't even there. He was surprised, all right, when he saw I wouldn't let him. He tried to look tough. We were under thirteen.

"Hey, what're you doing?" he said with a snarl.

My look was tougher. "You dropped something," I said with a cold smile.

"Yeah? What?"

"Your footsteps."

"Very funny. Let go of my leg."

"And one of them fell on me." With my other hand I tapped at the place he had stepped on.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

He pulled harder. I squeezed harder.

"If I did, I didn't mean it."

"I thought you did mean it," I said to him. "If you swear to God and tell me again you didn't mean it, I think I might believe you."

"You a tough guy? You think so?"

"Yeah."

Other kids watched, girls too. I felt good.

"Well, I didn't mean it," he said, and stopped pulling.

"Then I think I believe you."

After that we were friends for a while.

Sammy decided one day to teach me how to fight and to show me while doing it how much better he was at boxing.

"You can't just do it on brawn, Lew."

He had a book of instructions he had read and some boxing gloves he had borrowed. I had to keep smiling at him as we laced each other up. He showed me the stance, the lead, he taught me the jab, the hook, the "uppracut."

"Okay, tiger, you showed me. Now what do we do?"

"We'll go about three minutes, rest for one, and I'll show you what you did wrong, and then we'll go another round. Remember, keep moving. No hitting in the clinches, no wrestling there either. That's not allowed. Put your left hand up, higher, keep it up and stick it out more. Otherwise I'll come right in and bop you. That's good. Let's go."

He struck a pose and danced in and out. I moved straight toward him and with my left hand pushed both his arms down easily. With my right I grabbed his face in my open glove and twisted it playfully from side to side.

"That's a clinch," he yelled. "You're not allowed to hold a face. You have to punch or do nothing. Now we break and start again. Remember, you've got to try to hit me."

He danced around faster this time, popped the side of my head with one of his jabs, and flew right back. I moved right at him again, shoved his arms down easily with one paw, and began patting him on the face lightly with my other paw. I couldn't help laughing as I looked at him. I was grinning, he was panting.

"Let's do something else," he said miserably. "This just isn't working, is it?"

I used to worry sometimes about little Sammy because he couldn't do much and liked to needle people. But he was smart and it turned out he only needled people he could tell would not get angry at him. Like me.

"Hey, Lew, how's your girlfriend with the big tits?" he would say to me during the war when I had started dating Claire and had brought her around.

"You're a clever fellow," I would tell him with a forced smile through gritted teeth. I have a nerve at one side at the back of my jaw and the side of my neck that I used to feel twitch when I was starving to boil. I would feel it in pinochle too when I had bid too high and needed every trick.

"Hey, Lew, give my regards to your wife with the big tits," he used to say after Claire and I got married. Winkler started baiting me that way too, and I couldn't crush him if I didn't crush Sammy, and I couldn't crush Sammy. He would have been my best man, but my folks wanted my brothers, and in my family all of us did what the other ones wanted us to.

They named me Lewis and called me Louie as though my name was Louis, and I never saw that difference until Sammy pointed it out. And even then, I still don't see much difference.

Sammy read newspapers. He liked the colored people and said they should be allowed to vote in the South and be free to live wherever they wanted to. I didn't care where they lived as long as they didn't live near me. I never really liked anyone I didn't know personally. We liked Roosevelt awhile when he became President, but that was mainly because he wasn't Herbert Hoover or another one of those Republicans or one of those hayseed anti-Semites in the South or Midwest or that Father Coughlin in Detroit. But we didn't trust him and we didn't believe him. We didn't trust banks and we didn't trust bank records and we did as much of our business as we could in cash. Even before Adolf Hitler we did not like Germans. And among the Germans who did not stand a chance in our house were German Jews. And that was even after Hitler. I grew up hearing about them.

"I never wished harm on anyone," my mother would repeat. I heard her say that over and over again, and it wasn't true. Her terrific curses fell everywhere, even on all of us. "But if ever a people deserved to be punished it was them. When we came through from Poland to Hamburg they could not make themselves look at us. We were dirt in their eyes. We made them ashamed with our valises and our clothes, and we couldn't talk German. They were all of them ashamed of us and made us know it. Some stole money from us when they could. When there was an empty seat on a train or a bench on the street somewhere they would put down a hat there to make believe somebody was using it so we could not sit down near them. For hours they would make us stand there, even with our children. The people with money all did that. And they even all made believe they could not speak Yiddish."

When Sammy came up to the house for a visit with me not long ago he mentioned he thought that probably German Jews did not speak Yiddish. My mother would have pretended to be hard of hearing if she ever heard that one.

When the war came in Europe we were all of us still a couple of years too young to be drafted right away. I switched from Spanish to German in high school-I began getting ready-and began driving guys like Sammy crazy with my achtungs, wie gehts, hallos, and neins and jawohls. When they yelled at me to cut it out I threw them a danke schön or two. I kept up the German even into the army. By the time I enlisted I knew enough German to bully the POWs I found at Fort Dix and Fort Sill and Fort Riley and Fort Benning. As a POW outside Dresden I could talk to the guards a little and sometimes interpret for the other Americans. Because I could speak German, I was sent into Dresden in charge of a work detail, even though I was a sergeant and didn't have to go.

The junk business boomed while I was still a kid civilian. Sammy's mother saved old newspapers and donated aluminum pots and pans, my father sold them. There was a good living in waste, as the old man found out, and a few small fortunes for the dealers in scrap metal. We went racing for buildings slated for demolition. We followed fire engines. The big Coney Island fires were always a gold mine, for us a copper mine and lead mine, because of the pipes we salvaged. When Luna Park burned down soon after the war we had a bonanza of junk. They paid us to take it away and they paid us again when we sold it to scrap dealers. Everything hot was packed in asbestos and we took the asbestos and baled that too. We were pretty well off after that one and the old man had the ten thousand to lend me to buy the lumberyard, at stiff interest too, because he was always like that, and because he didn't like the idea. He didn't want me to leave the junk business and he didn't want us to move almost three hours away. Old schoolhouses and hospitals were especially good. We bought a second truck and hired neighborhood strongmen who could lift and who could scare other junkmen away. We even hired one big shvartza, a strong, quiet black man named Sonny who walked in one day and asked for work. We tore through plaster walls and asbestos insulation with metal claws and hammers to get at the copper and lead pipes with our baling hooks, crowbars, and hacksaws. My pop fired Smokey Rubin.