Chapter 29 The Chins
THE CHINS
Richard had not heard back from the Leviathans. He’d waited for months, dialing the number repeatedly, always getting a busy signal. He needed to sell the buildings—to get out of the loan. The loan shark was calling every day, threatening to take the East Flatbush house.
Richard looked up the Leviathans’ number in the white pages.
He got it into his head that if he met the Leviathans, man-to-man, he might be able to convince them.
Sometimes people heard the Chinese surname and misjudged him, but Richard could always win them over in person.
The phone number matched an office in Sheepshead Bay.
He drove down to Avenue Y one morning and scanned the streets until he located the right building, a small yellow townhouse with an office on the downstairs floor.
DR. EDWARD LIPSCHUTZ, PEDIATRIC DENTISTRY, the sign said.
Undeterred, thinking perhaps this Edward Lipschutz shared the space with the Leviathans, he parked and rang the bell.
Someone came to the door—a knockout of a girl, maybe in her twenties, in a miniskirt and heels.
She let him into a small room with teddy bear wallpaper and a bunch of toys on the floor.
“Are you making an appointment for your child?” she asked, returning behind her desk, and immediately, he recognized her voice; it was the woman who’d answered his initial call to the Leviathans. She had a Russian or Polish accent.
“I’m here for the Leviathans,” he said. “About my properties.”
She looked at him sharply.
“Wait.”
He followed her swaying hips until they disappeared behind a door.
A few minutes later she reemerged and led him to a small office at the back.
Richard sat in a chair and looked around.
On the left wall hung a 1943 air force medal with a plunging eagle engraved in the bronze.
A tropical fish tank gurgled by the right wall, and above it hung a framed letter of gratitude from the local police precinct.
He thought about what he should say to ingratiate himself.
Maybe Mr. Leviathan had served in the air force.
Through the wall, he heard two male voices—he recognized the older, baritone voice.
“That guy who keeps calling?” said a younger man. “He showed up. Mila put him in the office.”
“That’s fine. I’ll speak with him.”
From the voice alone, Richard had decided that the old man was compassionate and would be sympathetic.
“Did we hear from Tuchman?” the older voice inquired.
“He called yesterday.”
“And?”
“Second-rate. They’re small, worth pennies. And too much attention.”
“What kind of attention?”
“The tenants had a rally, called in the press. They still have a case going in court.”
Richard’s chest tightened.
The old man chuckled. “I thought Tuchman liked Brownsville.”
Another pause.
“What about Abe?”
“Abe will sign if you want him to.”
“And that kid. That kid who did Southern Boulevard?”
“No sign of him.”
Richard struggled to decipher the meaning of these last exchanges, but then the doorknob turned. Richard grabbed the newspaper on the adjacent chair and held it to his face.
The two men stood in the doorway—a younger man wearing shades, with thin lips and a chin smooth as marble, and an older one, short and rotund, with small, kindly eyes swallowed in the wrinkles of his forehead.
Richard got to his feet to shake their hands, but the young man sidestepped him, slipping into a chair in the corner of the office.
Richard eagerly seized the older man’s hand.
“Sir, it’s a pleasure.”
“Call me Rich, Mr. Wong.”
“Rich? Well, look at that—I’m Rich too! Richard Wong!”
“Oh?”
They both sat down, Richard in front of the mahogany desk and the old man behind it, while the younger man looked on from the corner, his arms folded in front of him.
“And your ribbon,” Richard continued, pointing to the air force accolade on the wall. “I was a man of the navy myself. Trained down at Key West.”
“Thank you for your service.”
“And yours, sir. The air force—that’s swell. You might know a few of the fellows I grew up with. I was a member of the Brownsville Boys Club.”
“Richard.” Mr. Leviathan cleared his throat. “My apologies, but let me save you some time. I don’t think we’re interested in your properties…”
“Really, I’ll take any price!” Richard interrupted, raising his voice, ready to beg now.
He leaned his elbow on the old man’s desk.
“Honestly, sir, I got myself in a bad situation. I lost my job. I’m looking to keep a roof over my wife’s head.
I took a bad loan, and my house is on the line.
I just need to pay back this guy—I’m not looking to benefit. ”
Mr. Leviathan sat with his hands in his lap and something like pity in his face. Richard could still see the young man out of the corner of his eye, but he tried his best to ignore him. Something about that youngster in his black shades made Richard’s neck itch.
“Sounds like a difficult situation, Mr. Wong,” said Mr. Leviathan.
“Any price, any conditions,” Richard repeated, and then, embarrassed, he leaned back and tried to make a joke out of it. “Tough times, this economy, right? We’re all down on our luck—even the Mets. I don’t know if you’re a fan?”
“You really are quite the Brooklyn boy, Mr. Wong.”
Richard laughed, wiping the perspiration off his forehead. He had never fallen so low. His pants were too short, he realized now; he could see the dry skin above his ankle socks.
“And I regret that I can’t help you,” Mr. Leviathan continued. “But there really is nothing I can do.”
“I see,” Richard muttered, crumpling into the chair. What could he say? All was lost.
He heard the young man stand up, and then Mr. Leviathan rose, the flesh of his white throat jiggling, so that to Richard’s eye, the old man resembled a giant toad.
“I am sorry we cannot help you,” he said. “I’ll have to ask my son to escort you out now.”
“Is that right.”
Realizing that they were waiting for him, Richard rose to his feet.
The young man opened the door to the lobby and waited for him to pass through it, and for a moment, Richard felt a wave of déjà vu, like he’d seen the young man before.
Taking in his tight lips, his hairless chin, Richard tried to recall if they’d run into each other someplace else.
Perhaps the man frequented the diner on Wall Street.
Or perhaps he’d gone to school with Jennifer or Julie.
“Have we…?” Richard began.
But the truth was that Richard Chin had never met this young man before, and there was no reason for déjà vu other than the fact that throughout his life, Richard had met many such men—men from whom Richard had found he always needed to get something, who always possessed in plenty what he lacked, and who could give him, or withhold from him, whatever he desired the most. And in truth, though Richard hated the coloreds and the spics, as he still called them, he hated the young man even more.
This kid was the reason he was on the killing floor to begin with—chinks and coons, thrown together like chickens in cages in a Chinatown slaughterhouse, tearing at each other’s feathers for a glimmer of sunlight, a taste of corn.
“Mr. Wong!” the old man called from behind. “In fact, please wait a moment—I’ve changed my mind.”
Richard turned around, and the old man sighed, as if sympathy had suddenly overwhelmed him. “I can’t help but feel your story touches me. I really can’t see much use for these properties but perhaps we can work something out.”
Richard jumped back, grabbed the old man’s hand, and shook it with vigor.
“Thank you. Thank you!”
“Of course, we’ll be evicting the tenants. There will need to be some serious renovations.”
“The buildings are rent stabilized, sir.”
“That is not a problem. We have our workarounds.”
“That’s very good, sir.”
“I just need you to understand one thing, Richard.”
“Yes, sir?”
Richard straightened into military posture.
“Once the deed is signed, it’s signed. You have nothing to do with those properties anymore.”
Richard nodded, but the elation dripped off his face, and he felt a hole growing in his stomach. He knew, though he couldn’t admit it to himself, that something was wrong.
But, he told himself, he had no other option.
“Mr. Leviathan,” he muttered, again reaching out his hand.
“Excuse me?” Mr. Leviathan stood up slowly, frowning.
“Mr. Leviathan?”
“Oh, right, right,” the old man chuckled, giving his hand. “Yes, yes, Mr. Wong. Thank you for your business.”
“Thank you, Mr. Leviathan.”
He departed, willing himself not to think about it. He didn’t want to know what type of “workarounds” they had to remove rent stabilized tenants, or what kind of designs they had for crappy buildings like his.
Yet there was one image he couldn’t get out of his mind: that of the meat factories in Chinatown, where the air reeked of blood, bone, and musty feathers.
He saw the butchers swinging their cleavers, the chickens clucking frantically within their cages.
His whole life he’d been a chicken in that factory, he thought, and now he’d be the one to escape.
It happened only a couple of weeks later. He saw the piece in the Daily News.
He did not know who he could tell—not his father or Foon Wah, not his daughters, and least of all his son. He sat in the lounge chair, flipping channels so quickly that the actors could not finish their first syllables.
He decided to start waiting tables at Wo Hop, on Mott Street in Chinatown.
All those years, whenever his father had suggested the idea, he’d wanted to grab a sizzling pot of chicken broth and dump it on his baba’s head, but now he recognized his senselessness.
Even with the properties off his hands, he needed the money.
For several weeks, he went nowhere except Mott Street.
And then one day, he knew he had to go to Brownsville. He needed confirmation that he hadn’t dreamed the whole thing.
He drove on Pitkin past the shuttered glory of the Pitkin Loew’s, then past what used to be Kishke King.
Everything he’d known was gone. The knish sellers, the Belmont fruit venders, the Fortunoff furniture store.
He drove by Nanny Goat Park, but where were all the baseball players?
Where were all the goats? He remembered the young, bushy-headed Alan Friedman leaning down to be eye level with him.
We’re a democracy, we make our own decisions, just like the American forefathers wrote in the Constitution. A Brownsville democracy. You want to be a member?
He drove past the projects, too many of them, the neighborhood just teeming with them, like it was turning into a graveyard, gray, cold tombs.
The projects had killed Brownsville, he decided.
If it weren’t for the projects, the Jews would still be around.
Canton Kitchen would be open. He wondered what life would have been like if they’d kept the restaurant.
As a young man, he’d been so sick and tired of Canton Kitchen, and now it seemed to be the only place where he’d felt secure.
He circled closer, still unwilling, still bracing himself.
Someone was living in their old house on Amboy Street and had hung up a blue, yellow, and black flag in the yard.
This habit of the new immigrants was strange to him; never in his life could he imagine hoisting a Chinese flag in his American yard.
He was not ready, but there was nowhere left to go. Livonia Avenue waited for him—a ghost town, an abandoned village, burned and stripped to its foundations, sneakers swinging from the telephone wires, incomprehensible phrases spray-painted on the handball court walls.
This was it.
There they were.
The charred husks of what was. One tenement missing its rooftop.
The other, its top two floors. Rafters exposed.
Windows blown out. The CHOW MEIN HERE! sign gone.
The sidewalk littered with scorched bricks.
It smelled like the moratoriums on Mulberry Street, like incinerated bones, or like the musty bedroom upstairs on the day he’d found his wife on the floor and his father dangling from the ceiling.
A vandal had tagged, in orange: Murderer!
Richard felt sick. He clutched his stomach, held a hand over his mouth, and opened the car door to retch.
Lumps of half-digested beef lo mein fell in clumps to the concrete.
Wiping his mouth with his shirt, Richard got back in the car, closed the door, pressed the accelerator, and continued down the avenue.
He found himself driving up Hopkinson to get a glimpse of the Betsy Head Park pool.
The water looked like it had been sitting there for days, more a swamp than a pool.
Leaves, twigs, and strips of bark floated on its surface, and soda bottles, plastic bags, and other trash littered the pool’s side.
In one corner, someone had clipped open the wire fence.
Richard parked the car, opened the door, and put his feet on the sidewalk.
He smelled marijuana. Then human piss. He walked to the hole in the fence, lowered his head, and ducked inside, scraping his arm on the wire.
No more or less dangerous than jumping off a bridge.
Richard sat by the edge of the pool, his knees to his chest, and cried.