And I always tell them, “I am an elevator operator.” I say that I drive an elevator in downtown Manhattan.
The reaction to my announcement varies. Some people smile politely and then move on to more interesting people. Some ask questions about the art of piloting an elevator in a skyscraper, if I ever forget the route, if I ever get lost. Almost everyone quips, “I bet that job has its ups and downs.”

Generally, when that happens, I’m the one to smile politely. And then I respond with some variation of the retort I learned my first day on the job and have repeated many times over the years: “It sure does have its ups and downs, but it’s the jerks in the middle that cause the most trouble.”

Operating an elevator was not my career choice. I actually taught English for 33 years to reluctant high school kids who preferred drinking beer and getting laid to learning English grammar. Teaching I discovered, like the operation of elevators, is also a job where “the jerks in the middle” can be the most difficult.

The reason I tell strangers who ask that I operate elevators is because of first impressions. I figure that people won’t expect much of some “mobile doorman” who also drives them up and down before opening and closing the door. That way if I say or do anything stupid, their reaction will likely be: “Well what can you expect? He operates elevators for a living.” And conversely, if I am witty, charming and brilliant, their after-conversation will go something like this: “He’s so cultured for an elevator operator. He reads books. He appreciates fine wine and he is a great conversationalist!” For me it is a win/win situation.

I did, in fact, operate an elevator at The Equitable Building, a 38-story office in New York City, located at 120 Broadway across from Trinity Church in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan. The building is a landmark engineering achievement designed by Ernest R. Graham and completed in 1915. Originally it was supposed to be 40 stories high, but it was reduced on the advice of consulting engineer Charles Knox. He determined the lower height as being optimal for its elevators, the very ones I operated for one summer, the year I graduated college and before I started teaching. My friend John’s father worked in the Maintenance Department at the building and he got the job for me, and for Sal, a high school/college friend who was also going to teach in September. After our interview, Sal and I in civilian clothes took the elevators for a spin in the middle of the mid-day rush under the watchful eyes of veteran uniformed operators. We both passed our driver’s test, and reported for duty the following Monday.

The boss, a man named Andy Rattazzo that everyone called “The Rat,” but not to his face, had a glass eye that glittered under the overhead florescent lights and a jutting jaw. He looked like Benito Mussolini, and like Mussolini, The Rat prided himself on keeping his elevators running on time. He had risen from the ranks of elevator operator to become the “boss of all bosses,” the final boss of temporaries and hangers-on in a dying industry, at a time when all the elevators in the building were slowly being automated. Progress meant forced retirement or unemployment for the many who had spent their lives and logged millions of miles going up and down the insides of skyscrapers. It was summer employment for a select few.

That fact that he was on a sinking ship didn’t deter The Rat from running a taut ship. So every day, before every shift, he conducted mandatory inspections of the crews, checking the cleanliness of uniforms, the starch in the collared brown shirts, the shine on shoes and the condition of fingernails. If someone didn’t pass muster, he was banished, with instructions to stick his shoes under the electric polisher or put on a clean shirt, to the Break Room, a dingy sub-basement filled with discarded office furniture and a leaky toilet the operators shared with the rats. It was where we spent time between our shifts, where the old timers griped about their changing lives, complained about the bosses and played practical jokes on the temps.

Spencer Something-son was a particularly favorite target. A big, beefy kid from Utah, he looked like a gorilla with his blond hair and glasses in his brown starched shirt and uniform pants with the satin stripe. Although he had started weeks before Sal and me, Spencer was eager to please and still so naïve he believed all their war stories from the “glory elevator operating days.”

“We used to have these contests in the old days, to shoot up the fastest to the Penthouse without getting caught, or to see who could pack the most people into one elevator.”

“But isn’t that dangerous?” Spencer asked.

“Only if the cable breaks.” They all laughed. “And then there was that contest to see who could wait until the very last minute before putting on the brakes and stopping the levelest at the Main Floor without crashing into The Pit. I think Rattazzo won most of them contests, before he became The Rat, of course. He won a lot of money and he still holds the building record for getting twenty-six people into a car designed for twenty.”

The elevators at 120 Broadway were organized in banks. The Local cars patrolled the ground floor up, stopping at each of the 35 floors of the 38-story building. They were the most difficult to operate because they involved the most stops, the most people and had the highest margin for error. The Express banks left the ground floor and traveled through a dark, enclosed shaft like a vertical tunnel that opened at the floors they serviced. The three Express banks were floors 11 to 20, 21-30, 31-35. There was also a separate, private elevator that went directly to the top three floors where the exclusive Bankers Club was located. Only the most senior operators ever got to drive that one.

As a safety precaution, a large red #3 bull’s eye was painted on the walls of each Express shaft to alert the operator that he was approaching the ground floor. It served as a warning to apply the brakes, which meant returning the control handle to the center position, so the car would glide to a smooth stop that was also level if the operator timed it right. None of the cars had automatic leveling devices, and each elevator had different accelerating and stopping characteristics, so stopping level at any floor depended on the car, the weight inside the car, the speed of the elevator as it approached the floor and the experience of the operator. In the event of an uneven landing, which was not unusual when there were too many people on board, or the driver was new, “leveling off” required slowly taking the car well above the desired floor and letting the weight pull it down again. Sometimes the maneuver had to be done more than once. The hope was that it would eventually settle relatively level with the floor. Failing that, the customary warning to passengers was: “Please watch your step. Jump up! Jump down!”

Stopping level at the ground floor with a full elevator hurtling down the shaft from above required great skill and a greater amount of luck. Seeing that red #3 bull’s eye was crucial to brake the elevator in time and avoid disaster. Of course the people who designed elevators had taken into consideration the possibility that a distracted elevator operator might occasionally overshoot a landing, so they built catchers in each shaft, at the bottom, called The Pit, and top, The Claw, with heavy springs to cushion the impact and steel hooks to hold the car in place until Maintenance was able to free the car and its contents.

What happened to Spencer the day he was fired was the topic of discussion in the Break Room for weeks after the event. Some speculated that he was trying to earn elevator history glory and outdo The Rat by setting two new building records – for most people in an elevator. They later counted twenty-seven. And for waiting until the last instant, which he seriously miscalculated, before applying his breaks. Others said that Spencer likely missed the red #3 bull’s eye and crash landed in the basement at full speed. Whatever the truth, neither the twenty-seven people trying to get out of the building for lunch, nor Andy Rattazzo were amused. The instant my friend John’s father and the maintenance crew freed everyone from The Pit, a shaken and dazed Spencer was stripped of his uniform and sent walking.

The building operated twenty-four hour schedule, seven days a week, three hundred sixty-five days a year. Work shifts and elevator bank assignments were a matter of seniority or favoritism. The career guys, soon to be searching for new careers, mostly opted for Express elevators on weekdays from 9 to 5. The temps got what was left. Daytimes were busy and nighttimes were lonely. Some old timers preferred working the graveyard shift so they could nap, drink or pull pranks on the unsuspecting. A favorite was pressing the call button on every floor to get a new guy in motion, and then scaring him by jumping out of the shadows when he opened the elevator door.

If the Local elevators were the most difficult, the freight elevator was the most peaceful, but only after hours when there wasn’t much freight to move. Temps never got the assignment during the day because the freight operators often got tips. Whenever I got the opportunity in the middle of the night, I thoroughly enjoyed it. There was no roof on the freight elevator, so it afforded an unobstructed view of the entire shaft, all 38 floors, and piloting it was like taking a slow rocket ship into the dark heavens.

During my brief tenure at 120 Broadway, I tried to be a good elevator operator. I showed up for my shifts on time. I worked over-nights. I passed inspection. My shoes were shined and I smiled whenever I interacted with the public. I was even relatively consistent whenever I had to “level off,” accomplishing it with a minimal number of tries. But still there was a part of me that was curious, distracted, a part of me wanted to test the limits, to see just how far I might go up without getting hooked, how low without ending up in The Pit. Of course I didn’t want to kill anybody or myself in the process. Perhaps that was that wonder that caused the problem on my last day of work. Or maybe it was the image of a smiling Spencer climbing the maintenance ladder through the escape hatch in the elevator, wondering how it felt riding full tilt into the springs below. In any event, I missed the red #3 bull’s eye and kamikazed my elevator filled with Japanese office workers from Mitsubishi on the 28th floor into the The Pit. I don’t remember much, but I am sure it wasn’t me who shouted, “Remember Pearl Harbor!” as somebody reported hearing on the descent.
Of course I was fired in full view of everyone.

My friend Sal later told me The Rat gathered everyone in the Break Room and announced that my crash landing made a bigger impact on the building than the one he had witnessed in March 1942. That was when a seven-inch artillery shell fired by an anti-aircraft battery near the East River by mistake struck the 37th floor.
“It was one of eight,” The Rat told them. “The only one to hit. And I was right there when it happened. The other rounds all fell harmlessly into the river. That shell caused less damage, and no injuries.”
So my career came to an abrupt and crashing end. But I did make it into elevator operator lore, and in September I started on a new career path, teaching high school.

© 2011 Joseph E. Scalia

The construction worker eyed my father’s neatly pressed slacks and asked, “Who are you?”

“I’m his friend? He told me to meet him here for lunch,” my father said.

“Your name Reilly?”

“Yeah,” my father said.

“Richie’s waiting for you.”

“Where?”

The guy with the hard hat pointed ten stories up to the high steel. And then he said, “Take the cage up.”

At the top, the elevator operator opened the cage and motioned to a group of guys who were sitting on wooden planks, suspended over two horizontal steel beams. They were eating their lunch with their feet hanging over the edge, kicking at the clouds.

“What’re you doing?” my father asked. “Where’s Richie?”

“He’s out there. Just walk.You’ll find him.”

“Are you crazy? I’m not going out there. Take me back down.”

Richie Two-ax was my father’s best friend. He was a bolt man, an ironworker, a Mohawk Indian who rode gray iron girders through the high blue sky as they were maneuvered into place by a huge crane perched atop the skeleton frame of the growing Western Electric Building in late 1950s Manhattan. It was his job to fasten girders together with bolts from the bucket strapped to his waist. Like most Mohawk men, he hung out in the Wigwam Bar on Nevins off Atlantic in a part of Brooklyn known as Little Caughnawaga , a ten-square block area which became home to about 800 Mohawks, ironworkers and their families, during the height of the construction boom in New York.

Little Caughnawaga was like any other ethnic neighborhood in New York, transformed by the arrival of the latest other. Long-time residents complained about the decaying neighborhood, but shop owners saw an opportunity and adapted by stocking new foods. The pastor of the local house of worship, Cuyler Church on Pacific Street, had the same business sense as the neighborhood shopkeepers. He learned the Mohawk language, offered a Sunday service to families in the neighborhood, and increased his flock.

Most of the Irish and Italian residents who lived nearby passed through Little Caughnawaga as tourists. It was alien turf for them, but for my father, it was a familiar place because of his friendship with Richie. For the last forty years, he has been telling and retelling stories about Richie with the regularity of the seasons. I call these his Richie Two-ax stories and I recently tried to stitch them together to figure out what the Mohawk ironworker was like. What I discovered was that the anecdotes my father had shared with me over the years, tell me more about him than they do about Richie.

The story about the time he was supposed to have lunch with Richie at the Western Electric Building is the odd one out of the lot because this is the only story in which my father voluntarily leaves his side. In every other story, my father is the classic, loyal friend.

For example, after the Manual Training High School Prom in 1958, they were walking through Duffy Square as three guys passed them. Richie didn’t like the way the guys leered at the girls, and they may have said something, so he went after them. My father gets really animated when he tells this part of the story: “He didn’t say a word, didn’t wait for me. He just went shithouse. Two big guys squared off against him, and when Richie dropped one of them with that right hand of his, the other one lost heart. The guy opposite me was more interested in getting his friends away from Richie than in fighting, so I helped him break it up.”

But it was hard to stop Richie once he started fighting, so soon the cops got involved. According to my father, “Richie was still hot when the cops showed up and there was a lot of pushing and shoving. One of the cops pushed Richie and he pushed back. Richie always pushed back. Didn’t take shit from nobody. And neither did the cops, so out came the Billy Clubs. The cop started pounding Richie, but he refused to go down. Two other cops jumped in and they eventually cuffed him and pushed him into a patrol car.”

My father talked to the cops after they had calmed down and explained to them what had happened. “The guys insulted the girls,” he said. “What would you do if someone insulted your girlfriend in the street?”

“He pushed me, kid,” one of the cops said.

“He’s a hothead,” my father countered. “Give the guy a break. He’s an ironworker.”

“He’s Mohawk?” the cop asked.

“Yeah. C’mon, cut him some slack. He’s a good guy.”

“Where does he work?”

“At the Western Electric Building on Broadway and Fulton.”

“Go see if he knows our guys down there,” the cop told to his partner. And after a brief conversation, which my father couldn’t hear, they released Richie.

My father was by Richie’s side in 1957 when they walked into fraternity dance at Prospect Hall, on Prospect Avenue between 5th and 6th, in Brooklyn: “As soon as we got in, someone threw a bottle of Bushmills in Richie’s direction. It didn’t hit him, but he knew it was intended for him. He had had a beef with some Italians a few weeks earlier. So he went after an entire table of them. No words. No warning. Just steel violence. It took four of us to pull him away. Richie started swinging at us when we pulled him off of one of the Italians, but I managed to calm him down. Once we had a few drinks and everything was fine.”

The best example of my father’s loyalty to Richie takes place on the night of the riot at the Wigwam Bar. This is my favorite Richie Two-ax story. Each time my father told his seasonal story about the Wigwam riot, his blue eyes lit up and he became animated: “One night, after we dropped off our dates, Richie told me he had to go see his cousin who was the barmaid at the Wigwam, and he asked me to come along. We walked into the bar just in time to see her rip a stone tomahawk off the wall, almost knocking down the huge picture of Jim Thorpe that was right above it. She swung it at a guy who had grabbed her arm, and she hit him square on the head.”

Sometimes, during this part of the story, my father reached up to an imaginary tomahawk and swung it down into the air. When he did this, I could almost see the picture of Jim Thorpe swaying on the wall.

He used to get up during the next part of the story, but the arthritis in his feet make him less animated today: “Richie jumped on the guy who had grabbed his cousin, and before I knew it, the place had erupted into a riot! I remember yelling, ‘I gotcha ya back, Richie,’ but before I could take a swing, a huge ironworker I didn’t know picked me up and carried me outside. I yelled at him when he put me down: ‘My friend Richie’s in there!’ Before the guy ran back in, he said, ‘This is a Mohawk fight. No white men allowed.’”

“I tried to go back in, but something was blocking the door. I looked around and saw a black and white police car down the block on Nevins, near Dean Street. So I ran up to the car and told them about the fight. The cops were ambivalent, and when they didn’t do anything, I told them, ‘Hey, my friend’s in there.’ One of the cops said to me, ‘Don’t worry about it, kid. It happens all the time. We’ll take care of it.’ Just then, a guy came flying through the plate glass window and the cops called for backup.”

My father avoided moralizing at the end of his stories and left it to me to figure out what they meant. It took me a while, but one night, years later, as I was watching a National Geographic episode on the salmon's mating ritual with my young son and my father during a Sunday visit to Brooklyn, it hit me. My father had always been obsessed with the salmon’s difficult journey to return to its original spawning ground. He was particularly amazed at how a male salmon would sacrifice itself for its mate. If a female salmon had inadvertently landed on the shore as they leaped upriver, the male would join her and try to push her back in the water so she could continue her journey to lay her eggs where she herself had hatched. Or he would die trying.

As my father explained this ritual to my son, just as he had explained it to me, I realized that the salmon’s spawning ritual was the perfect explanation for my father’s persistent retelling of his seminal stories, which touched in his friendship with Richie, his membership in gangs, and his life on the streets of 1950s Brooklyn. Each of his seasonal retellings of these stories was his journey upriver, back to his spawning ground. And each time he brought me along, pushing me back into the river of his dreams.

Don Reilly received his MA in Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama from University College Dublin. He is an Associate Professor of English and Chair of the English Basic Skills Department at Bergen Community College in Paramus, New Jersey. Reilly is a reluctant suburbanite and lives in Wayne, New Jersey with his wife and children, but his heart remains in Brooklyn, the borough of his birth. He is currently working on his MFA in Creative Writing at the City College of New York.

By the 2nd Grade in New York, surrounded by Jews of every degree of enlightenment and gentiles with their kaleidoscope of religious beliefs, I became ever more resistant to what seemed to me to be the senseless sacrifices I was forced to endure to my mothers increasing piety.

We lived on the upper west side of Manhattan where there were few other Orthodox German Jewish refugees. Most of the indigenous Jews were Conservative (they wore Yarmulkes in Synagogue) or Reformed (Yarmulkes were optional). My mothers’ extended family, who began arriving a year or two after us, had all settled further north in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan, which became a major German Jewish Refugee enclave. There, the Jews were classified according to the Rabbis who led the Synagogues that they attended. There were (Rabbi) Breuers’, (Rabbi) Jungs’, and (Rabbi)Sterns’, the three most prominent Congregations all German and all Orthodox. My Mothers relatives belonged to Rabbi Breuers congregation. They were as clannish as Hatfields and McCoys. They too, grew more religious as the times grew more perilous, the headlines more horrific.

They sensed my apostasy and looked at me as a dangerously aberrant infidel even at the tender age of seven. For my part, I couldn’t accept their unquestioning fanaticism, the men’s black hats, the constant prayers, or the traditional sheidels (wigs) worn by the married women. Fortunately we were separated by the geography of Manhattan Island and the restriction against travel on the Sabbath. Thankfully, the two branches of my mothers family only got together on Holy days or for occasions like weddings and Bar Mitzvahs. I hated those events even more than Saturdays.

Removed from this intensely conformist culture I soon began to rebel at what I felt were the onerous Sabbath taboos. Riding in an elevators was proscribed although we lived on the fifth floor. Lights were left on from Friday night until sundown Saturday. The same for the stove. The light in the refrigerator was even removed because it went on when the door was opened. Carrying money was forbidden. You couldn’t even carry keys in your pocket although, arguable, it was permissible to pin them to your clothes. It was a sin to tear a piece of paper even by accident, so the Sabbath toilet paper supply was prepared in advance. The pay telephone that was downstairs in the hall was off limits. The usual reply to my impertinent questions about the paradoxes of these rules was that “these are the rules set down in the Bible and the Talmud and if you break these rules God will curse you.” I didn’t buy these less than factual answers, I couldn’t see the analogy between modern electricity and Biblical camp fires. Nor could I find where work was involved in dialing a telephone or pressing a button. Tearing papyrus was different from tearing toilet paper, and how could riding in a car or subway be forbidden ex post facto?

Most of every Saturday was spent inside a dimly lit apartment converted into a Synagogue, chanting prayers in Hebrew which I did not understand, and listening to interminable sermons in German that I didn’t understand either. To my mind the boredom was another level of torture. Here I was confined in an expatriate German Orthodox Synagogue. I stood and sat in unison with the congregation while inwardly I seethed with anger. My thoughts were with my neighborhood friends and non-refugee contemporaries who were playing stickball and baseball or street hockey on those warm summer Saturdays or ice skating and sledding in Riverside Park in the winter snows.

I wanted badly to be an American, to be like my American friends. Their parents spoke unaccented English and didn’t worship in two foreign languages. And, oh yes, when our histrionic Rabbi grew particularly intense during his sermons he sprayed spittle over me and the congregation.
In stark contrast to the Saturdays, our Sundays were often wonderful. We would go on outings. In the summer the whole family would go to Coney Island. We’d ride in the first car of the IRT with our noses pressed against the front door watching the endless ribbon of track streaming towards us out of the dark tunnel and disappearing under the train. Once there, at the crowded beach, we’d claim a blanket's worth of sand and have a picnic. After the obligatory one hour cramp wait, we’d swim in the murky salt water, jumping up and down in the weak surf.

My brother and I would often explore the cool, damp sand under the boardwalk, crisscrossed by thin lines of sunlight through the shadows, looking for dropped coins and other lost treasures. We’d press up against a fence to watch the rolling Steeplechase ponies carry their riders to the finish line. We watched as white captive silken parachutes slowly carried young couples up cables to the cupola at the top of the huge tower, where, with a snap, they would be released, the canopy filling and the passengers descending, screaming into earshot as they floated back to earth. My father would give us a few coins and we’d go to the penny arcade.  I loved the machine gun device there, fantasizing that I was a fighter pilot shooting at planes on the screen inside. I also liked the mechanical boxing ring, where I controlled one of the two robotic figures, flailing steel arms against my brother's boxer without the peril of a bloody nose and working off some of my accumulated anger.

Another favorite excursion was a subway ride to South Ferry. We’d take the Staten Island Ferry and a bus to Silver Lake Park. Before the bridge was built Staten Island was a completely rural enclave. The bus went past working farms before reaching the small lake that was as pure and clean as a beer commercial. My father would cut a woody stem from the shore of the lake with his penknife. Then he would loosen and remove the intact tube of bark. Part way down the core of wood he’d cut a half moon notch, and above this he flattened about an inch of the core to the end. When he put the bark back on it became a tunable whistle that we would blow on for hours until it finally dried out and split.

In winter, we would go to Central Park and ice skate on the lake underneath the Belvedere Castle. Sometimes we’d explore the still raw Hudson River shore where Robert Moses was building his Riverside Park and West Side Highway.

When the weather was bad we’d go to one of the City’s many Museums all of which were free. For us, the Museum of Natural History was a regular stop on rainy days as well as an after school hangout. Nearby, the Museum of the City of New York featured real antique fire engines, Currier and Ives prints and life-size dioramas of early New York and Nieuw Amsterdam.

However, what excited us more than any other museum was the Museum of Science and Industry, at Rockefeller Center. The industrial displays of this unique museum were like magic. I didn’t understand all that I was seeing, so the actions and effects seemed even more amazing. I would stand transfixed in front of an exhibit that featured ball bearings being tested. The shiny metal balls would pop out of a slot one after another, onto a flat steel plate, ball bearing after ball bearing, bouncing high and true in endless perfect arcs and out through a small exit hole. There were displays of things that belched smoke. There were working models of steam engines and gasoline engines. There were arc lights and wire recorders and radios and all kinds of operational displays that showed how a watch or a toaster worked.

Even though we were young kids, we were well aware that the world was heading down the greased path of crisis. The tension of the gathering omens war preoccupied our parents and teachers and filtered down to my brother and me with a sense of impending doom. We heard the names Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Franco, and Churchill; we knew who the good guys were and hated the villains. We sensed that the world was sliding headlong into an awfulness that could not be prevented.

One cold dreary Sunday early in December, when I was seven and a half, my father, my brother and I went to the Museum of the American Indian. It was in a building on the West Side near Columbia University, a long walk from our apartment. There is something about the American aborigine that is endlessly fascinating to anyone from Germany and there is no better market for the prototypical American Western Film. Having been born German, my brother and I were infected with this obsession, and we lost ourselves in the artifacts that had been stolen from the proud native tribes of North America and deposited in a huge incongruous Greek Temple. There were peace pipes, moccasins and wampum. Feathered headdresses, rugs and blankets. Tomahawks, papooses, buckskins and bows and arrows. Beautiful things that even someone as young as I was able to appreciate.

Stimulated by the beauty of the artifacts, we walked home along West End Avenue. As we passed the Tennis Courts that used to occupy the block between 95th and 94th a boy about 10 years old came running up to us breathlessly.

“The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor,” he shouted at us and then spread his news to some other people across the street. It meant nothing to us. We had never heard of Pearl Harbor. We shrugged and kidded about his excitement. A twin engine plane heading east flew overhead. “Maybe that’s the Japanese bombing New York,” we joked.

We lived on 93rd near an equestrian statue of Joan of Arc that sat on a land island park off Riverside Drive. We were home in a few minutes and my father turned on the radio. There were news bulletins on every station affirming the now-terrifying news. Did this mean that Hitler and the Nazis were on their way to invade New York? Frightened, I sat on my father’s lap as he tried to reassure us that the real danger was still thousands of miles away far across the wide Atlantic. We looked up Pearl Harbor in the Atlas and learned that it was in the middle of the Pacific and that Japan was many thousands of miles from the US. We weren’t reassured because, somehow, they had managed to attack it. We knew planes could cross the Atlantic in hours- hadn’t Lindbergh proved that? Was Hitler, the monster scourge, following us to America? Was there no place to hide, no escape? I remember the sheer, trembling terror.

Over the next weeks, months and years the world assumed a feverish pace. War was declared. We were issued small cream colored plastic ID tags that we wore on a chain around our necks. Rationing was imposed on almost everything. Gasoline was hard to get. Norman Rockwell painted the Four Freedoms. My male cousins began disappearing into the Army. We collected paper, tin foil, even donated our prized cast iron toys to the incessant scrap metal drives. We started collecting posters of Air Force planes. Because we were of German origin my father had to have the short wave section of his Grundig Console radio disconnected.  But every day, that AM radio brought us news of the Allied victories in Africa, the battle for Italy, the D-Day invasion, the shock of FDR's sudden death and at last, the ecstatic joy of victory over the Nazi scourge.

Fred Abrahams has had an interesting life. Fleeing Germany just before the Holocaust, he spent his childhood on the upper west side of Manhattan. He graduated from Stuyvesant High School and the University of Pennsylvania before serving a tour of duty with the US Army in Germany. A career in marketing grew into a stint as a writer/producer of TV Infomercials. A quad bypass started him writing about his experiences, including; travels in post-war Europe; partying with the abstract expressionist painters of the Chelsea school; his 270 minutes of fame as a champion on a TV Quiz show; visits to the original Studio 54; co-founding The Improv comedy club and the interesting people he's met along the way.An avid skier and amateur photographer he now lives in Brattleboro, Vermont.

When the company needed a production assistant, they hired one of my musician friends, a handsome Texan who went on to become so famous that years later, I learned about his death from an obituary on the front page of the New York Times. He’d played with everyone from Yoko Ono to Judy Collins, Bette Midler to the Talking Heads. But that was later. Back then, he needed a day job and we worked together in the studio, saw each other in the same West Village bars at night. It was a cash economy, before credit cards and ATMs, five and ten dollar bills passing from hand to hand.

One evening, as Don and I rode the elevator heading to the southbound 8th Avenue subway, I handed him the $5 I had borrowed the night before. He grinned and said, in his Texas drawl, “I may not be free, but I am extremely reasonable.”

And the elevator full of stone-faced New Yorkers laughed aloud.

Mindy? she asked, half turning her face from the TV set. I could hear Ed Norton calling out, Hellooooo, ball.

Yeah? I answered from the doorway.
You know about sex, right?
Yeah, Ann told me about it.
You don’t have any questions, do you?
I guess not.
Good.

For the record, Ann was my friend who was a year older and more worldly, and always smelled like a combination of Rive Gauche and Big Red gum. Her lesson on the birds and the bees had gone like this: The man sticks his pisher into the woman’s pisher, and something comes out of his pisher that makes the woman pregnant.

When we informed my brother Harry about this state of affairs, he ran straight to our father to ask him if he really stuck his pisher into our mother.

Who told you that? my father demanded.
Mindy and Ann.
They’re lying.

Mindy Greenstein is a clinical psychologist and writer. She is the author of The House on Crash Corner and Other Unavoidable Calamities (Greenpoint Press, 2011).

Sunday afternoon, hours before the play begins, Chola leaves church at the end of the Mass. She has received communion and now walks with her teacher, Sister Ramona, to the Dominican Sisters' convent which is to the left of the old grey-stone church built in 1886. In the role of the parish school principal she will dress in a set of garments, a costume that looks very similar to the holy habit worn by Dominican Sisters for hundreds of years.

Chola will be dressed by Sister Ramona and Sister Anthony in the common room in the convent. I wait for her in the school auditorium for over an hour before the play, eyes fixed, heart beating with great expectation. When Chola enters the auditorium she wears a black cotton tunic, the holy habit, that covers her body and falls to her ankles. A round shaped stiff white collar, a gimp, surrounds her neck and shoulders. It is heavily starched and extends outward and away from her body. A belt made of woven black wool tightens the habit around her waist. Wooden rosary beads, large and small, hang from her belt to help her count her prayers. A large silver cross hangs from a black cord around Chola 's waist. Jesus hangs from the cross. His head is down so I know he is dead.

Chola 's arms are fully covered. I can see both long and three-quarter sleeves, the one flaring out over the other. Chola neatly folds the longer sleeves up from her wrist. I curiously touch the sleeve as she folds it back noticing its smooth texture, but Chola taps my hand, like Sister Jean often does, and says, "You can't touch." That's when I notice a wedding ring on her finger: did she get married in the convent? I panic. Then I remember that Sister Jean also wears a wedding ring, and so does Sister Ramona, Sister Anthony and all the Sisters at Our Lady of Good Counsel. When I once asked Sister Jean who she was married to, she said she was the bride of Jesus. I start to think. When Jesus came back from the dead, did he marry all these Sisters? I asked my dad how many wives a man could have. He said only one and if you have more than one wife you can go to jail. Now I’m worried. I can't let Chola marry Jesus and raise her children as a single parent. I want to solve this mystery just like Trixie Belden in the Black Jacket Mystery.

Chola's dress is mysterious, just like Sister Jean's, my 5th grade teacher. I search for clues and ask Chola about her habit, and she tells me she can't talk about how Sister Ramona and Sister Anthony dressed her or what clothing she wears underneath. What happened to Chola has never happened before -- to be dressed as a Sister and told not to tell anyone how she was dressed or what she is wearing underneath. This is her secret. When Chola walks on to the stage I peek for a glimpse of her underskirts. Her holy habit is a sign she will live her life for Jesus. She will take a vow of poverty and share everything that she has. I wonder if, last week, when Chola gave me half of her package of Twinkies, she had already been practicing her vow. Later that same day Chola gave me a set of three baseball cards from her bubble gum package. One card was a big surprise: "Campy" Roy Campanella, the catcher on my favorite baseball team, the Brooklyn Dodgers. I hope that maybe next week she will give me the baseball cards packaged in her favorite potato chips.

I briefly imagine I would be happy for Chola 's vow of poverty if she joined the community of Dominicans. Maybe then she will have good luck. God will give her, and she will give me, the Mickey Mantle and Pee Wee Reese baseball cards that I've been searching for in every nickel package of Bubble Gum. I imagine the sun-filled day of her consecration. Chola gives me a special part in the ceremony that sets her apart to serve God. She asks me to recite the Lord's Prayer, a prayer I know by heart. I imagine the Dominican Sisters will serve my favorite foods from the school cafeteria for the celebration lunch: macaroni and cheese, slices of pepperoni pizza, and hamburgers with ketchup and sliced pickles.

Standing beside Chola after the play is over, I see her white coif, a headpiece that covers her neck and chin. A thin black veil is pinned over the coif and I remember how Sister Jean, sometimes at Mass, wore the veil down to cover her face. I don't like that I can’t see her soft brown hair beneath her cap. I am afraid that her face hurts, crunched in a moon circle, skin puffing out along the pressed edges of her starched coif. Chola doesn't want me to hug her now; she doesn't laugh when I try to be silly. I'm worried. If she is consecrated a Dominican Sister, she will change her name. She will no longer be Chola, and the tomato sauce stained apron that she now wears when she helps our Mom make delicious lasagna, cooked with sausage, ground beef and three types of cheese, will be replaced by a stiff white apron to protect the front and back of her habit when she works in the convent.

I walk out of the church and down the street. I know I am not allowed to cross Broadway alone. My Mom tells me all the time that she doesn’t want me to get hit by the Pesto Cheese Company truck, just like the one that hit Aunt Mary and broke both of her legs last year. But I’m sad and mad and feel like crossing the avenue on purpose. So I do. When I get home to my house on Madison Street, I go to Grandma’s apartment, turn on the television and watch Hector the Bulldog protect Tweety from Sylvester for the hundredth time.

Flo Gelo was born in Brooklyn, where she lived until her early teens. She's published numerous articles in professional literature about illness, death and dying. This story is one in a series about her life on Madison Street.

Though there was hardcore action, too, as I did raid a crack house in the Bronx with Curtis and a group of reporters from the Washington Times. After scaling a ten-foot wall and entering thru the back door, Curtis threw me a pillow and instructed me to wrap it around my right arm. “For the pitbull!” he yelled.

It was Joe Allen who invited us to Restaurant Row and housed us in an abandoned restaurant he owned next door – Broadway Pasta, now a swanky restaurant called Brazil Brazil. For every four-hour patrol of the street and neighboring parks, we were rewarded with a family meal from one of ten restaurants on the Row. I have been in every one of those kitchens.

If the meal was fish, Joe Allen would personally deliver a burger to me, as I am allergic to seafood. That’s the kind of guy he is! In those days he wore golf shirts and always appeared tan, like he just returned from Florida, or Palm Springs. He had a famous girlfriend, too -- Chita Rivera. Chita would call out to the patrol from across the street and yell, “Hola, Fellas!” One time she hiked up her skirt outside the restaurant and danced a minute or two of Jerome Robbins’ choreography from “West Side Story.” I used to think she was mocking us, but I now suspect she was merely reliving her life with a different gang from the West Side. Another story.

There's little need for Angels in post-Guiliani New York. Joe Allen now has restaurants all over the world. Lisa and Curtis are radio personalities. Chita Rivera went on to win yet another Tony Award. And me, well, sometimes I awake from a bad dream in the dark hours of the morning wrapping a pillow around my arm; but then, more often than not I'm sweetly comforted by the haunting echoes of a woman singing -- “I like to live in America!”

John Quilty is a writer who lives in New York City.

Except for development along the Brooklyn and Queens shores, things don’t change much on the river. It’s not unusual for a tug boat to pass the ferry pulling a barge upstream past the East River Generating Station and the United Nations Headquarters complex in Manhattan’s Turtle Bay neighborhood. My daughter—because the UN is in view, I will call her Olga Maximovna—waves at the boat. Who knows if anyone waves back. But I tell her that the skipper, no doubt bearded and well-seasoned by the salty air, has raised a tin mug of boiled coffee to her, in kind. And like clock work, as we’re just about at the 34th Street landing—and NYU’s Langone Medical Center—the ferry must give way to the good ship Red Hook, the Department of Environmental Protection’s newly commissioned sludge vessel, dedicated to transporting over two million gallons of river sludge per day—but to where? “To Who Knows Where, Olya,” I tell Olga Maximovna, addressing my daughter in the affectionate diminutive.

We take the ferry to Langone’s Rusk Institute for Rehabilitation Medicine, which is literally right across the river from where we live, for Olga Maximovna’s physical therapy sessions. But I tell her that one day, when all the therapy is finished and she can walk all by herself, we will take this same ferry to 34th Street and walk up, in the opposite direction, to the United Nations, and take the tour. After all, the ferry isn’t just for going to see the doctor. “And this time, Olya, Mommy will join us!” I always tell her how much her mother admires the design of the building—the so-called International style and it’s charmingly dated interior--even the tin ashtrays scattered throughout the facility from the cafeterias to the General Assembly Hall, where, in 1960, then Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev banged his shoe on his desk in response to a speech critical of the Soviet Union (not that it didn’t deserve it), and probably rattling more than a few ashtrays in the bargain. But I add that she’s got to hurry and finish with her therapy for good, because they’re renovating the whole complex, and I’m sure the ashtrays were already the first to go. Her mother is even wistful about the ashtrays. So am I. “But, ashtrays or not, you, Olga Maximovna, must bang your shoe, one you just walked through the door wearing, in the General Assembly room.” I address my daughter formally to underscore the significance I assign to this objective.

One day while crossing the river to the Manhattan side, I tell Olga Maximovna about the U.N.’s art collection, comprising gifts of goodwill from member countries. There are, among others, the tapestry of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, displayed at the entrance to the Security Council chamber; the Sword into Plowshares statue from Italy; the Japanese Peace Ball, rung but twice a year: on the first day of Spring and on every opening day in September of the annual sessions of the General Assembly; a magnificent stained glass window by Marc Chagall with its many symbols representing love and peace; a pair of Léger murals installed in the General Assembly Hall; and, of course, the Gun Tied in a Knot sculpture out in front of the complex. All these things and more, I tell Olga Maximovna, I want her to see, so she better hurry up with the therapy and learn to walk already.

Another day on the river, I tell Olga Maximovna about my own first trip to the United Nations when I was in junior high school. Then, in 1980, I had to take a bus from Newport, Rhode Island, with my classmates because I didn’t live in Brooklyn yet. I tell her about walking through the halls, seeing the art, and learning about the organization’s history and how, on the way back to Newport, the bus driver, who had been listening to Howard Cosell announce a football game, pulled over to the side of the road and made a serious announcement. Though we were children, he addressed us formally: “Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please. They killed John Lennon of The Beatles. John Lennon is dead.” I tell her how he had let the second sentence—“John Lennon is dead”—just hang there so that it would sink into our 12-year-old heads. And how it really didn’t sink in. Maybe we had heard of The Beatles, but we didn’t know John Lennon from Adam. The driver, clearly distraught, shook his head and slapped an overhead luggage compartment in disappointment as he went back to his seat to resume the trip home to Newport. I tell Olga Maximovna that while I was too young to understand the significance that the bus driver had assigned to the death of John Lennon, I did see how sad Madame C—, our French teacher, looked when she heard the news—and how her mouth opened slightly and just stayed that way as she turned to Mr. C—, her husband - but not Monsieur C—, who taught social studies.

Looking upriver on another ferry ride, I tell Olga Maximovna how one year, before I had even met her mother, I had marched up the streets just a few blocks from where she gets her therapy to protest the impending war in Iraq. Thousands and thousands of people were holding signs and shouting in protest against the war as they made their way uptown to the United Nations Headquarters, before being turned away by police. I told her about how cold it was, but how it sometimes felt warmer because of all the people marching side by side, and how, somewhere in the big crowd, her mother was there, too, even though we didn’t know each other then. Nothing so dramatic as Roger LaPorte, the young seminary student who, in 1965, had set himself on fire at the United Nations to protest the Vietnam War—but he didn’t stop the war either. Speaking to Olga Maximovna then, I used the term “self-immolation” rather than “set himself on fire,” figuring that there was less of a chance of the former haunting her young dreams than the latter.

To change the subject, I tell her that the United Nations is located in a neighborhood called Turtle Bay, but that there are no turtles there. It was named that in the 17th century because it was a safe place to land and to build ships. Maybe there were turtles there back then, but it is no longer a safe place for them to lay their eggs.

During the Civil War, I tell Olga Maximovna, after the first Conscription Act was passed, the Army set up an enrollment center there, and men had to sign up to go to fight their brothers. On July 13, 1863, an angry mob burned the office to the ground and rioted all through Turtle Bay, destroying entire blocks—maybe that’s when the turtles had left. The riots went on for three days before troops managed to put down the mob, which had burned and looted much of the city. I assure Olga Maximovna that her mother and father had only chanted slogans as we marched through Turtle Bay about 150 years later.

On still another ferry ride, I tell Olga Maximovna about how Muammar Gaddafi, who they had killed just the day before, once tried to pitch his tent on the grounds of the United Nations, just blocks from where she gets her therapy, but they wouldn’t let him. They wouldn’t let him put it up in Central Park either, or in New Jersey, even. So he had to rent property outside the city from Donald Trump. He always slept in that tent, except, apparently, one night in 1986 when Ronald Reagan bombed his compound in Tripoli. Despite plans by Oliver North to lure Ghaddafi into the compound on the night of the bombing, he wasn’t there. Someone had tipped him off. So they only ended up killing his daughter instead (I regretted telling Olga Maximovna this last detail. Just a year earlier, Nancy Reagan had given a mosaic to the United Nations to celebrate the organization's 40th anniversary. The Golden Rule mosaic was based on a painting by Norman Rockwell. Depicting people of all races, religion, and creeds, the mosaic tells everyone “to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

I go on to tell Olga Maximovna, the murky waters so gray and thick as to appear like the ferry is cutting through something solid, about how in another military operation, President Obama had killed Osama Bin Laden, though unlike Ronald Reagan, he didn’t bomb his compound, instead using specially trained men to sneak into his house and shoot him. That night, everyone in New York was out in the streets celebrating the killing of the man who had ordered that two airplanes be crashed into the World Trade Center (For context, I gestured downriver to the empty piece of the skyline where the Twin Towers once stood before the two planes had crashed into them.). That is, everyone except us. That night, I was struggling to feed Olga Maximovna while her mother was sleeping in the bedroom, herself exhausted from an earlier failed feeding. Still, had the circumstances been different, I’m sure we wouldn’t have joined in the party. “It’s a strange thing to cheer about, don’t you think, Olya?” I ask my skinny, red-haired daughter. It’s not like it made the river any safer for a little girl to go to physical therapy.

Even just a few weeks ago at 34th Street landing while waiting for the ferry to take us back across to the Brooklyn side, I saw that on our part of the East River there was a small Coast Guard boat with a mounted machine gun pointed in our direction, bobbing gently in the wake of the good sludge ship Red Hook. A machine gun pointed in the direction of little Olga Maximovna and the hospital she rides a ferry to twice a week for help learning to walk. Thankfully, she was napping, exhausted from a tough session.

This year’s General Assembly meeting started at the United Nations only this morning. They must have rung the Japanese Peace Bell just a few hours ago, I wonder aloud to the sleeping Olga Maximovna if the tug boat skipper had heard it sounding over the river as he made his way past Turtle Bay, pulling a barge full of who knows what to who knows where among the river folk.

Kevin Kinsella is a writer and critic. Most recently his work has appeared in/on The Believer magazine and Bomb magazine's Web site. He is the translator (from Russian) of Sasha Chernyi's "Poems from Children's Island" (Lightful Press) and Osip Mandelshtam's "Tristia" (Green Integer).

While the maitre d’ was escorting us to our table, Barbara gave my arm an annoying pinch while gasping wide-eyed that Jolie Gabor, mother to Magda, the infamous Zsa Zsa, and Eva was sitting at a table in the center. I had noticed the large jovial group and some of the women bejeweled.

 During the course of our dinner, Barbara began to complain how it was like pulling teeth to get any one of her males to volunteer to help wallpaper her kitchen. I think I saw tears well up in her mink-lashed cocker spaniel eyes when she switched her tone from being pissed off to heartbreakingly lonely. The topic of women’s lib and its pros and cons arose and suddenly, perhaps under the influence of her third glass of white wine, Amy, who believed and rightfully so that we were still too young to concern ourselves with men or kitchens, began to ululate like Tarzan.

I noticed a man seated across the room at the Jolie Gabor table cock an ear. Then without the slightest hesitation, he got up to make his way over to us.

“It’s Tarzan!”Amy shrieked.

It was Tarzan. But in my eyes he was Johnny Weissmuller, five time Olympic gold medalist swimmer and one time bronze.

“That’s not the way to do it,” he said annoyed, all 6 ft. 3 of him.

A waiter appeared like a miracle from out of nowhere to swiftly and graciously slide a chair under Mr. Weissmuller’s rear, I think preventing him from putting it into reverse and careening through the swinging kitchen door.

He was still handsome decked out in his well-tailored tuxedo. The cuffs of his starched white ruffled shirt revealed embroidered initials that repeated themselves as ornate gold and diamond links, and around his neck hung his medals.

The others sort of sat there with ridiculous grins on their faces but I, a swimmer for all my life, looked upon him in awe.

“I’m a swimmer,” I said, rather like an idiot.

After a few minutes of cordial chat, this absolute sweetheart of a man rose from our table, almost taking all of it with him. Later I read somewhere that he'd recently had hip surgery and a broken leg.

Denise Falcone is a writer who lives in New York City. Her New York stories have appeared in J Journal, Antique Children, Kerouac's Dog, and others.

I opened our apartment door and instantly smelled fire and tasted smoke. As I pushed the door in I saw my father on the floor, on his knees in front of his open closet in the foyer.

“Dad! Dad!” I screamed.

“It’s ok,” he said. “There was a fire, but I put it out.”

He was holding a half-full glass of water.

“Should I call the fire department?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I’ll call Jack Plotnick in a little while.”

*****

We lived in the West Bronx, on a typical Bronx block filled with six-story apartment buildings interspersed with a few two-family houses. It was a working-class neighborhood populated by mostly Jewish families. The fathers went to work as cab drivers, haberdashery salesmen, garment center workers, candy store owners, truck drivers, teachers, tailors, pharmacists, house painters, fruit vendors, accountants, musicians, upholsterers and printers.

The mothers mostly stayed home and took care of the kids, shopped, cooked and cleaned.

Among the families in our building and the immediate vicinity, we were in the lower half of the economic spectrum. My father was a factory worker in the fur trade, a fur operator skilled at sewing together individual mink pelts into a coat, a cape or a stole. He was from a long line of furriers going back many generations in Russia. It was my grandfather’s skill in the fur trade that allowed him to even dream of moving to America in the early 1890s. The czar’s approaching “army recruiters” enabled his dream to come true sooner rather than later.

The problem of being a worker in the fur trade in those days was that the work was seasonal. And that meant there often were long stretches of time when my father was out of work. And that meant out of money.

There were few luxuries in our household. The four of us, my parents, my 16-year-old sister and I all lived in a one bedroom apartment. We didn’t spend summers at the beach or up in the mountains, as many of my friends’ families did. We didn’t own a car as more and more of our neighbors did. My mother didn’t own much jewelry and, despite my father’s trade, didn’t dress in furs.

My father hardly drank and never spent time in bars. He never ran around with other women and was not a big gambler. He did occasionally play in a floating crap game he helped organize for men in the neighborhood, but the stakes were relatively small. When he won, it was no more than the cost of a good meal for the entire family at The House of Chan in Manhattan. That’s how he used his winnings.

When he lost, it never impacted the family’s standard of living. At worst, it meant he would have to forego a couple of lunches of cream cheese on date nut bread at Schrafft’s during the week.

But my father did have one vice: fine clothes.

He didn’t have an extensive wardrobe, but what he had was fit for royalty – literally. He had always told us that when it came to his clothes, if he didn’t have the money, he would rather do without for a while than buy an item that was not the finest.

Of his four suits, the two oldest were bespoke, purchased before my sister was born. No one, including my mother, knew what he paid for them. After my sister came along, he compromised and bought his suits from the Men’s Shop at Saks Fifth Avenue for about $175. Saks was also his source for socks (French lisle) at $15 a pair; handkerchiefs (hand-rolled Irish linen) at $10 each; shirts (custom-made) at $30 each; and underwear (silk or Egyptian cotton) with no elastic but rather custom-sewn buttons to his fit at $20 each. (These prices are all in 1950s dollars when our rent was $42 a month and a pack of cigarettes cost 15 cents.)

My father’s ties were, of course, silk and came only from Sulka at about $25 apiece. His overcoats, one for winter, one for spring, were from F.R. Tripler at about $100. His grey fedora hats were from Cavanaugh at $40 apiece. Each of these retailers was pretty much known as the finest shop in the city for the merchandise each sold.

Every day of his working life my father left home dressed in a suit, a freshly laundered and pressed shirt, with a tie around his neck, a handkerchief in his outer breast pocket and a fedora slightly tilted on his head. He may have been a factory worker but no Wall Street lawyer ever looked better dressed.

And he came home every day, regardless of how hot or nasty the weather, looking exactly the same.

He cut a unique figure in our Bronx neighborhood. While he stood about 5’9” tall, with his slim build and tailored clothing, he always appeared taller. He walked at a brisk pace and with such a distinctive bounce in his gait that my friends learned to spot him approaching our building from three blocks away.

But if there was one item that defined my father more than any other, it was his shoes. He would never compromise on shoes. They were connected to his soul.

Again, he didn’t own many pairs of shoes. I can recall no more than three or four pairs at any one time. But everyone in the family and all close friends knew his occasional declaration: “These shoes are custom-made by the same boot maker who makes shoes for the Duke of Windsor.”

It had been a good number of years in that spring of 1950 since my father bought himself a new pair of shoes. The year before, he had taken his black wingtips to the boot maker for repairs and was told that they no longer could be refurbished. He continued to wear them, sparingly, throughout the year but by the spring, they were on their last legs. His problem was that he didn’t have the cash to order a new pair.

Now, he could have gone to Thom McAnn and gotten a pair of wingtips for about $12. Or, he could have gone a little more upscale and visited Florsheim and spent about $15 - $18. He might even have been able to get a pair of Bali shoes for $35 or $40.

But he would never compromise on shoes.

And that is where the situation stood on that spring Saturday – until the hand of fate (or some other hand) intervened.

*****

The apartment was filled with smoke and an acrid stench. My father told me to open all the windows and I dutifully followed his instruction. When I got back to him, he was standing in front of his closet, looking down at the floor.

“My shoes are ruined,” he said mournfully. “My black wingtips are burned to a crisp.” Then he turned away and walked slowly into the kitchen. I followed and watched as he opened a cabinet and took out a bottle of Cherry Heering, his favorite alcoholic beverage. He took a small glass and filled it halfway and then sat at the table and sipped quietly.

After about 15 minutes he got up and went to the phone in the foyer.

“I’m going to call Jack Plotnick now,” he said. He put on his glasses, looked up the number in our address book and dialed.

“Hello, Jack. This is Luke Miller. I’m sorry to bother you, but we had a little accident down here, a little fire,” he told Plotnick. “Yeah, we’re all ok, everyone’s fine. But, could you come right down? OK. Good.”

Plotnick, one of our upstairs neighbors, was a very successful, self-employed insurance agent. His agency sold all forms of insurance – personal, business, life, burglary, fire. And he was as persistent as, well, an insurance salesman. I remember the many times he sat at our kitchen table with my mother and father trying to convince them to buy a small life insurance policy to “just take care of final expenses.” But each time he left without making the sale. My parents told him they couldn’t afford it, even when Plotnick said, “But it’s only a couple of dollars a month.” My parents never had life insurance.

Within three minutes of my father’s call, Plotnick was at our door. He was a short, pudgy man of about 50 with horn-rimmed glasses and curly grey, thinning hair. He always seemed out of breath.

“What happened? I smell it. Where was the fire?” he asked.

My father directed him to the closet.

Plotnick looked in. He stared at the floor and bent down and touched the ruined shoes. Then he stood and looked at the clothes – my father’s suits and ties and overcoats. He took out each piece of clothing on its hanger, examined it and put it back. Then he looked up at the closet ceiling, pushed the clothes aside and looked into the back of the closet and then all the way to the left and right.

“What happened here?” he asked my father.

“I smelled smoke and saw it coming from under the closet door. When I opened the door I saw flames so I got some water and put it out. It must have been electrical, a spark or something,” my father suggested.

“But there aren’t any wires in your closet,” Plotnick told him. “Could you have dropped a cigarette or an ash?”

My father shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. He didn’t know.

“It’s amazing,” Plotnick said. “Luckily, the only thing damaged by the fire is a pair of shoes.”

My father agreed it was lucky.

“Well, your fire insurance policy will pay for your shoes,” Plotnick announced with a smile. “All you have to do is get me a sales receipt and I’ll take care of the rest.”

“Wait here,” my father said. “I have it in the bedroom.”

He came back a minute later holding a yellow store receipt. “I save all my clothing receipts,” he told Plotnick as he handed him the bill.

Plotnick took the receipt and peered at it through his thick lenses. “Wait a minute,” he said. “There’s a problem here.”

“What’s wrong?” my father asked.

“The decimal point is in the wrong place,” Plotnick said. “The way this is written, it looks as if the shoes cost $125, not $12.50. You’ll have to get a new bill.”

“That’s not a mistake, Jack,” my father said. “The shoes cost $125.”

“Now, come on, Luke. Are you kidding? $125 for a pair of shoes? What are they made of, gold?”

And my father responded: “Jack, these shoes are custom-made by the same boot maker who makes shoes for the Duke of Windsor. That’s what they cost. I can show you the receipts for the others in the closet. Better yet, call the company and you ask them. And ask them if I’m a customer.”

Plotnick glanced at my father with his head slightly tilted to the side and a half smile on his face. “So, tell me, how much does this cost?” He was holding the sleeve of a navy overcoat.

“About $100,” my father said. Plotnick slapped his right palm against his jowly cheek and quietly moaned.

“And this,” Plotnick asked as he held out a tie from the rack on the door. “What, you’re going to tell me about $15?”

“No,” my father said. “It’s from Sulka and it costs $25.”

“Ok, you win. I’ll see what I can do.” And Plotnick left.

It wasn’t too long before my mother returned home from her job selling women’s hats at Lord & Taylor. My father filled her in on the details, including Plotnick’s visit.

“What was Plotnick doing here?” my mother asked.

“I’m putting in a claim under the fire insurance policy,” my father offered.

“Fire insurance!” my mother exclaimed in a tone two octaves above normal. “Since when do we have fire insurance?”

“Well, last year I was outside talking to Plotnick and I asked him how fire insurance worked. And before I knew it, he convinced me to buy a small policy,” my father explained.

My mother said: “But fire insurance? You said we couldn’t even afford life insurance. Why would you buy fire insurance?”

“Well, Plotnick says it’ll pay for my shoes.”

One evening about ten days later, Plotnick showed up with a check. He gave it to my father and said, “You know Luke, after you showed me the cost of everything in your closet, I got to thinking. You really need a larger policy.”

And my father said: “You know what, Jack. My wife says we can’t afford a policy anymore. I’ll have to cancel it now.”

*****

My father never talked about the fire after that. For a couple of weeks, both my mother and sister periodically pressed him about what happened. He told them time after time it was just an accident.

I couldn’t understand why they kept pestering him. He told what happened and that was it. What more did they want? I believed he was a hero; he put out the fire and maybe saved the apartment, the building.

It was a few years later, when I was about 15 or 16, that I thought about the incident and it dawned on me why they kept quizzing him.

What had happened on that long-ago Saturday? My father was always smoking. His Chesterfields left more than a couple of burn marks on the living room coffee table, his dresser, the linoleum in the foyer.

Maybe he dropped a book of matches on his closet floor. Maybe he went to his closet with a cigarette in his hand. Maybe a hot ash fell onto the matches and they burst into flame. And maybe he unknowingly fanned the flames when he closed the door, only to smell smoke and see it seeping from the closet a few minutes later.

On the other hand, a fire insurance policy?

Berton Miller is a retired ad agency owner, former Adjunct Professor of Communications at Iona College
and sporadic freelance writer. He grew up in the Bronx and now lives in Manhattan and Sag Harbor with
his wife (and muse), Ivy, and their yellow Lab, Bravo.