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On Saturdays father often
took my sister and me to visit Great Aunt Ice Pick and Great Uncle X at
their three room sixteen door apartment in Shutterville section of the
Dronx. Mother wouldn't have anything to do with Ice Pick and X. She
thought them disgusting. And they were disgusting. But as a kid you love
that extreme, brutal stuff. And those two weren't run-of-the-mill crude,
they were brilliant crude.
It's true Uncle X could not read English and subscribed to a
newspaper that was blank and good only for picking up dog crap. But in a
way he was more literate than many people who can read and write because
he had invented a language of Xs, hundreds of different Xs, some with long
tails, others big on bottom and small on top or consisting of whirling
layers of lines in the manner of a Hindu tapestry, and each X represented
a word or phrase so that, had he wanted, he could have written a novel
just with that one letter.
And though he did not write a novel, he was a free lance fuse
changer and wrote his own service contracts, some of them five or six
napkins long.
I inherited those baroque agreements when he died, along with
other napkin contracts he'd collected over the years, being a connoisseur
of unusual paperwork.
Every Friday X would visit the Easy Come Easy Go pub in the
Dronx financial district and a bartender friend would hand over all the
contracts left on the bar during the previous week. In the end, 328 cigar
boxes full. Some illegible. Many unexecuted. But not all. The archive
contains signatures that built bridges, highways, skyscrapers. Mayors
Wagner, LaGuardia, Lindsey, Beame, Koch and St. George are represented.
Senators Kennedy, Javits, Moynihan. Developers Moses, Trump, Helmsley.
Picking through the yellowed mother lode, one gets a feel for the way a
city is improvised, no less the impetuous product of human emotion than a
jazz solo, a stone and glass riff that is by turns slovenly and brilliant,
dreamy and dreamless.
Then there are pathetic prenuptial contracts between drunken
couples: You don't get my fishing pole no matter what happens.
Blackmail agreements: IOU $25,000 for photographs of me and that dancer.
Mafia scribbles stipulating so and so is to be maimed or dunked like a
donut into the Dronx Canal.
The oldest napkin, a milk delivery agreement, is dated March
3, 1935. The most recent, a truce between two brothers: We will no
longer hate what we cannot change..., is dated February 18, 1983, the
year Ice Pick and X died in the car accident.
When I die or move out of the New York area, the Dronx
Dysfunction Archive will get the entire collection, along with a photo of
X and these paragraphs, explaining that while he was an uneducated man, he
was far from an idiot.
And the same is true of Ice Pick. She always referred to
herself as a "dumb old broad" and corrected us kids when we made the
mistake of being polite and calling her Auntie. But that was part of her
act, just like the snorting and cigar smoking and wearing of red vamp
dresses. All these ploys disguising the lusty intellect that allowed her
to turn what should have been a life ending injury into a lifelong asset.
At 15 she walked past an ice truck at the wrong moment. In the
back of the truck stood a very hung over man with very bad aim. Not only
did he miss the block of ice, he missed the truck. The eight inch pick
swung over the rail and plunged into the head of the passing school girl.
There was, she always said, surprisingly little blood and only
one choice: to live with it. Because all the doctors in Ohio agreed that
removal would likely trigger the formation of a deadly blood clot.
And live she did! To the hilt!
The handle repainted a zesty yellow and bearing bright red or
green ribbons tied by her mother who never really accepted the pick,
always referring to it as "a pig tail stuck in the up position."
Straw hats with holes in them. Another hole cut in the roof of
the Ford by her father, who then customized the house for her comfort. A
headboard with a hole in it. Towels with holes in them to aid the drying
of hair. A notch in each door frame, so she could pass from room to room
without ducking.
Though she often did duck on the way to school and charge a
boy like a bull.One she sent to the hospital.
Another the insane asylum.
And when she'd chased all the boys off, she went after the
men.
To be more specific, the gangsters at a nearby racetrack
called Alamonda.
In the private box of gang leader Knees Ruby she executed one
trick after another with the ice pick.
Rolled cigarettes without using her hands. Juggled empty
whiskey bottles. Snuffed out candles. Rang bells and shuffled cards.
Flipped off Ruby's toupee and caught the hair in her mouth. Folded a horse
blanket while tapping the rhythm of "How Great Thou Art" with her right
foot and dicing garlic.
For these efforts she was showered with mink furs, jelly
beans, gold rings, lollipops, valuable betting tips. But no kisses. When a
guy got romantic he got his larynx crushed with that yellow battering ram.
Sixteen mobsters were rendered mute before Knees placed the
call he hated to make but never regretted.
Ice Pick's father picked up the phone, heard the machine gun
cough, began trembling. Ever since she'd been going to Alamonda he'd
feared the consequences but been too afraid to intervene. (Knees was
called knees because of what he did to the lower portion of those who
stood in his way.)
The mobster ordered him to fetch "the damn girl."
This was easier said than done. Upon arriving at the track, he
found Knees in a stable, hiding behind bales of hay, and Ice Pick
charging, head down, with the intent to impale. Only after a vet fired a
tranquilizer into her back was removal possible.
When she woke 10 hours later, locked in the bedroom with the
collected writings of Bret Harte, there was no one at home to hear the
cries of agony.
First her parents went to institutions for the blind looking
for a husband. But all the blind men quickly backed off after feeling the
pick handle. Next they mail ordered a succession of grooms but only one of
those oddly quaffed men offered to hang around and not as a husband to
Zelda but as "bachelor-in-residence." Finally, not knowing what else to
do, they drove to New York and stood on the dock at Ellis Island, gripping
a huge sign bearing a doctored photograph of Ice Pick and the same message
in 28 languages: Wanted: Upstanding man with open heart to marry our
beautiful but unfortunate daughter.
On the fifth day up walked X, alternately crossing himself and
pointing at his crotch. The parents asked no questions, hog tied the
stranger and drove back to Ohio.
Preparations for the wedding took all of a half an hour. And
while the Justice of the Peace was being bribed, X was locked in the
bedroom with his bride, the two of them getting to know each other.
How many times Ice Pick snorted forth the unromantic story of
her betrothal! And never enough.
As I said, kids really go for that viscous stuff.
My father didn't laugh as loudly as my sister and I but he
didn't scowl either because Ice Pick was his oldest living relative and
that excused everything.
He let her play unicorn with us. Ring toss. Matador. Stab the
cheese. All the old gangster games.
And neither did X give a hoot what his wife said or did
because he was never in the same room with her.
Not since their wedding day had they seen each other, as
specified in the prenuptial agreement Ice Pick concocted minutes before
the vows were exchanged.
That napkin contract was framed and hanging on their living
room wall next to a crossed out copy of the 10 commandments.
I used to stand on a chair and read the stipulations while
nursing my unicorn wounds: We both solemnly agree that after the
exchange of front porch vows, there will be no face-to-face meetings
between us, no matter how pressing the circumstance, because we cannot
stand each other and are only getting married because fate has forced us
to.
Whether the document would have held up in court I don't know.
A determined lawyer might well have been able to convince a
jury that a man who could not read could not have understood the agreement
he was signing.
But somehow, probably via body language, Ice Pick had fully
communicated the contents of the contract to X, for it was the mechanism
that allowed them to live happily until the day they perished on the Dronx
River Drive in a brand new double-decker car--he in the top compartment,
she in the bottom, both at the wheel and going their own way, as they
always had.
How deeply each respected the intense feelings of the other!
A month ago I even went so far as to have their home movies
transferred to video tape which I then sent to the Secretary of State
because the peaceful way Ice Pick and X lived with their undying hostility
might just be the key to solving many of the world's seemingly intractable
problems. The Middle East Conflict. The Irish Question. The Colombian
Civil War.
Remember, their apartment was only three rooms. And not big
rooms either. Many couples with much less of a bone to pick would not have
lasted a year. But X was 76 at the time of the crash. Ice Pick 77. I was
nearly 30 by then but still in the habit of visiting once a week to take
in the spectacle of their domestic arrangement, which can only be
described as a continual changing of the guard.
As soon as X entered through one door, Ice Pick disappeared
through another--leaving a hunk of impaled cheese or a dozen rings
scattered across the brown carpet. How she knew he was coming I never
understood until I transferred those movies to video and slowed the
footage way down and noticed the slight quivering of the pick, the metal
acting as antenna, picking up the approach of what even my mother had to
admit was Uncle's magnetic personality.
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