Chapter 18 The Chins
THE CHINS
Next came those who knew the darkness best. He was in the living room when they arrived.
They pooled over the furniture, folded themselves into the window curtains, and leered from the void of the dead TV.
He sat in his lounge chair, smoothing out the Help Wanted section of the New York Daily News, struggling to make sense of it, a shivering candle on the table beside him.
His children and his wife were asleep, but the rest of the city was awake and restless, taut with desperate desires, and he was part of that restlessness, that desperateness. He was in trouble.
The ancestors knew.
Why are you wasting time?
They took turns whispering.
That shark will take the roof over your family’s head.
Don’t you know in America there are rules? How come you thought you could be a landlord and you didn’t know any of the rules?
You brought a wife from China and now you’re going to put her on the street?
How come you still can’t read English? Can’t read English! Can’t read Chinese!
How come you don’t go to Chinatown to find a job?
He tried to ignore them, but the room filled up with a strange odor: the smell of wet soil and rotting apples. It made him dwell on his bad decisions.
Buying 78 and 80 Livonia Avenue from Arnold Cohen—that had been a stupid idea; he could see so now.
Because the bank had refused to approve a mortgage for the tenements, he’d borrowed ten thousand from a scumbag who was charging him nearly 100 percent annual interest. He’d thought the rent from the building would allow him to pay the guy back, but then the tenants had gone on strike.
He’d been fired from the Wall Street lounge after nine years of loyalty.
Mr. Connelly had called him to the office, he thought for a raise.
Instead, he was sacked, and Mr. Connelly promoted the Jamaican man with the name Richard couldn’t pronounce.
Richard was beside himself. He felt he deserved the higher wage—needed it.
He was behind on his payments to the lender, and the collateral on the loan was the East Flatbush house.
Forgetting that the fridge had been off for hours, the food rotten and the beer lukewarm, he grabbed a Budweiser from the door.
You drink while your baba suffers. What kind of son is that?
Ancestors drip-dropped from the kitchen sink faucet, oozed from the rice cooker, bubbled up from the bamboo vase.
Your baba needs a knee replacement. That’s what the doctor says. But you never do anything for him.
You should wonder what happened to your mother.
You don’t know what happened to your own mother?
When she stopped writing the letters, what did you do? You drank a beer.
Richard slumped into a chair at the kitchen table and held his head in his hands.
What kind of father are you? Your son doesn’t respect you.
“I tried!” Richard cried into the dark. “I tried to teach him things. The kid’s too sensitive.”
The boy is smarter than you. He knows you’re stupid.
“I know! I know! I know!” He had known this for a long time. “Don’t tell me what I already know!”
Richard knew he was running out of time.
He hadn’t told Foon Wah about losing the Wall Street job.
For two weeks he’d pretended to drive to work, when really he was bound for a pay phone booth on a deserted street in Red Hook.
So far, he’d called forty-five realties.
The phone always grew greasy with his sweat, and not a single agency took interest in buying the Livonia tenements.
A few days after the power returned, he found the humility to take the train to Chinatown.
Telling himself it would only be a temporary arrangement, he folded back his sleeves and walked to Columbus Park, where his second cousins played handball.
Delighted to see him, the cousins invited him into the game.
He played, intending to ask them where he might find a job.
These cousins, who worked as cooks and lived their lives within the radius of Mott Street, treated him like the peasants in China had; they thought he was a big man because his father was a donor to the association and because he lived across the bridge.
He found it difficult to disillusion them.
Before he knew what he was doing, he proposed a feast. They walked to Wo Hop, ordered enough dishes for a banquet, and got drunk.
When he slapped their shoulders and assured them he could take the subway home in his sleep, they probably thought he was a happy and wealthy man.
Instead, he walked to the Brooklyn Bridge.
He glanced up at Manhattan’s skyscrapers, but their flashy jewelry no longer interested him.
Instead, he peered at the darker Brooklyn side: the abandoned factories, the Brooklyn Navy Yard devoid of workers, the swellings of trees below a starless sky.
Back in the day, Richard remembered, a man with a willingness to sweat could find work along those piers, or in any number of factories.
But he’d been too late for all that.
Richard climbed up onto the parapet. With a grunt, he pulled himself up so that he stood on the edge of a beam, the traffic roaring below.
He dared himself to jump.
A braver man might have done it. Wasn’t that what bridges were for?
Sightseeing, and jumping. In the ’30s, one of the Brownsville boys’ fathers had thrown himself off the Brooklyn Bridge so his wife could collect aid from the state.
But he was too much of a coward.
Richard walked all the way to Flatbush Avenue with his soles aching, his graying hair in disarray.
He continued past the flashing neon lights of Junior’s and the Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower, all the way to Grand Army Plaza with its mold-green Civil War heroes splattered with pigeon shit.
Brooklyn belonged to the underworld: squeegee men waiting to ambush cars with mops, muggers sticking up pedestrians in broad daylight, perverts, pedophiles, flashers.
His head throbbed. He sat on the steps of the library, dreading his return home.
And then he remembered. A number he had memorized long ago. He hadn’t talked to Steeplechase in years, though sometimes he heard rumors about his shady deals. Jack, however, knew everyone in real estate across the five boroughs. He would surely have the answer.
Richard hurried over to a pay phone on Eastern Parkway. He began to shake so badly he nearly dropped the receiver. Then he heard laughter—a woman’s and a man’s, and a television set.
“Hello? Who’s this?”
“Richard—Richard from the Brownsville Boys Club,” he stuttered. “Jack?”
“Richie Wong? Wow, is this really Richie Wong?”
“It’s been a long time.” Richard swallowed, trying to remain calm. “How’s the family?”
“Well, Richie, it sure has been a while. The wife and I split. She took the kid. I got a girlfriend, Marla, she’s with me right now. Say, where you calling from? I live in Woodhaven, you should come over and have a beer.”
“I’m on a pay phone. Can I ask you a favor?”
“Sure, Richie. What can I help you with?”
“It’s a sale. A property sale.”
“You and Foo Foo moving out of East Flatbush?”
“No… I’m talking about the properties on Livonia I bought from Arnie.”
“Ooh, that’s bad, Rich,” Jack sighed. “You’re not gonna find a buyer for those. Just skip your property taxes and the city will take them from you.”
“I…” Richard closed his eyes. “I need to sell. I need the money, Jack, or I’m going to lose my house.”
“Oh boy, oh boy.” Jack cleared his throat. “Let me think.”
Richard sucked his teeth, waited, aware he had no backup plan.
“Actually, I know one… one firm. They might help you out. I’m going to give you a number, you got something to write with?”
He didn’t. He’d have to scratch it somewhere, like a vandal. He took his keys and etched the number on the metal of the phone booth door.
“Don’t ask them too many questions, all right?”
“What’s that mean?”
“Nothing. Just sign the papers. They won’t screw you, I give you my word.”
Swiftly, Richard called the new number, hoping against reason that they, too, would answer at nine o’clock at night.
His luck was in the house.
“I’m calling to sell a property—I got this number from Jack Schmidt,” Richard said.
“I need you to call another number,” said a woman’s voice. “Are you ready?”
He scratched down the second number, dialed it—the same lady picked up.
“And your name?”
“Richard Ch—” He stopped himself mid-speech. “Richard Wong.”
“Please hold.”
It must have been five minutes before he heard another voice. An old man’s voice—sagacious, almost aristocratic.
“Thank you, Mr. Wong, and what kind of properties do you speak of?”
“Two buildings in Brooklyn. Fourteen apartments total.” He gave the addresses and his home phone number. It was the first time any agency had taken down his information, and he was giddy with relief.
“We shall deliberate and then return your call, Mr. Wong.”
“That’s swell—and what’s the company name?”
The old man laughed softly, as if this was funny. Richard heard a trickling in the background, perhaps the sound of a fish tank.
“Just call us the Leviathans.”
“The Leviathans?”
“That’s right, the Leviathans.”
Foon Wah knew Richard had lost his job. She went to the lounge to meet Mr. Connelly and have her hunches confirmed. Yet even after this, she decided to say nothing. She’d already learned it was a useless exercise to confront her husband.
Whenever she’d asked him about the buildings on Livonia Avenue—why the loan man called, why the tenants left long messages—he would launch into a series of rebukes. She didn’t know anything about the real estate business, he’d bark.
“You’re wasteful,” he’d often shout at her in Toisanese. “Always spending my money. Like a spoiled child.”
Now that he’d lost his job, she hoped that if she kept quiet, he might resolve the issue on his own, maybe come home with his eyes wide, exclaiming about a fantastic new opportunity.
For three weeks, she kept her mouth shut.