Longing to see some people with clothes on, Amrhein Sharkey tugged the brim of his salt-stained Braves cap, grabbed his lunchpail and hit the reeking public beach. To him the cap was as functional as it was for Johnny Sain, or any Braves star. He wore it as work clothing, not a smarmy souvenir, to shield his eyes from the August harbor glare. He also wore it to put an added layer of something besides his scalp and hair over his brain, just as a matter of safe-keeping. Not that he was a bookish twerp or anything smacking of mixed gender. Amrhein came from Southie in the days of Joe Palooka, and you couldn’t survive Southie in those times being less than a power puncher. And he worked at City Point Beach – at the famous L Street bathhouse – in the days of Charles Atlas; and it was a fact that nobody kicked sand at Amrhein Sharkey, not unless they wanted to chance losing a nut or an eye. But he had tested his brain in wondrous ways and was of the opinion his cranial organ was at least as big as either bicep, because of the things he could do with it.
Why, he had a mum who couldn’t cook her way out of a paper bag, even after cooking for seven children - one now a big priest - of which he was the seventh. Such are the failings of a woman who works nerves and fingers to the raw crux in the warrens of City Hall, dawn to dusk, for the glory of the Mayor and his Knockos and Jockos. She boiled everything until it was the exact same shade of gray, corpse gray or dead stinking-fish gray. Amrhein had this trick he’d do with just his brain and one of his mother’s cookbooks, those volumes of browned pages from which she’d learned utterly nothing. He would sit with a plate of her corpse-gray waterlogged cabbage and laundered, desiccated, leather-sole beef – inedibles, his runaway pa had called them – he would sit alone with this gray heap and a fork and knife and the cookbook open to some mouthwatering section such as the lobster thermidor page. And using just his brain and the description of the ingredients of the succulent claw-fish, Amrhein would transform the nauseating mouthfuls of cabbage and beef into sensational swallows of lobster thermidor. It was too real to be fantasy; what fantasy could ever rile a taste bud so? He could feel the crustacean tang and sherry infusion penetrating his glands and releasing torrents of hunger juice. Sometimes it was so delectable he would shake. He told no one of this alchemy; he kept it under his Braves hat. But he knew he had a brain of power and torque to go with his Palooka muscles – for how else was he, a summertime shithouse sweeper, able to flip a switch in his head and turn inedibles into incredibles?
When Max Baer left the prize ring for the movies, a thread of history came to the end of its spool. The species known as the fist-fighting Jew became so rare as to be considered extinct in America. But one still flourished far under the radar, the Mattapan teenager Keppy Zass, king of Cutler’s Pool Room at the Little Israel intersection of Morton and Blue Hill. For how many times could a strapping boy who was a kosher butcher’s son hear, “I kicked Keppy Zass from Franklin Field to Savin Hill” without stepping up to the bag and honing his uppercut into a lethal weapon?
To escape the suffocating steam of landlocked Mattapan, Keppy’s girlfriend Marsha Winkler, dragged by her sunworshipping mother Doris, boarded a Blue Hill Avenue streetcar bound for M Street Beach, which was in Little Ireland but legally open to all creeds from all sections of town. Their fingers grabbed for the straps on the screeching rattletrap at about the same time as Amrhein - whose three-decker was just a walk from the sea - pushbroomed his first load of pissed-on morning sand out from under the twenty-foot urinal, the marbled cascade where the L Street men in droves unburdened themselves of the previous night’s Gansetts and Guinesses. He had put up a handwritten sign – “those with short horns stand close” – but a bareassed off-duty cop had confiscated it as indecent for so municipal a space in so Catholic a district.
Leaning on the staff of his pushbroom, Amrhein stood back in a corner of the lav and counted nine sets of lined-up buttocks, ranging from scrawny to gargantuan, not a one of them near worthy of appearing in public unclad. For the ten thousandth time, he shook his head over one of the great paradoxes of his era, the era of banned in Boston. In Amrhein’s Boston, the Papal duchy of Southie, books were banned, shows were banned, nations were banned. But nudity raged – it was blessed by church and state. On any given summer day, hundreds of Southie males wearing only a St. Christopher’s medal sprawled elbow to elbow behind the high creosote fences of the Men’s Side, their hairy jewels browning in the sun. (Hence the term L Street Brownies, or so Amrhein had thought as a little boy brought in to bake by his pa). The only exceptions were the dungareed operatives, he and his mates of the shovel and broom. On the Women’s Side there was an even vaster sea of skin, a huge Coppertoned harem basking like seals in a zoo of maximum-security cedar, where the DPW night crews, under pain of clerical-secular excommunication, made sure not a single knot-hole went unplugged.
Although joined at the middle by a double-thick fence, the two stockades of sunbathers could have been on opposite continents, for all the interaction that took place. A labyrinth of tiled firewalls, patrolled by fierce matrons with direct phones to the stationhouse, prevented all hope of male entry into the distaff side, even entry by a probing, binoculared eye. “You’d have to fly over in a plane, Rhino,” was the brogued comment of Timmy, the pipe-puffing head janitor. “And many of them do, which is why I suspect they put the airport right across in East Boston. From June through September they fly in mighty low.”
When Amrhein wasn’t swabbing the crapper under the sagging behinds of naked, sun-stinking men, he was out loitering by the partition that divided the sexes – pawing the hot sand and brooding hormonally over what lay behind it, so near and yet so far. He pressed his nose to the sticky fence-planks and trolled for aromas he knew could not be washed-up kelp. They were as tantalizing as the urinal was depressing. They seeped through the wood and hinted at moist thighs and exposed rills and ravines a mere arm’s-length away, tickling the cilia of his nostrils but detectable in no other way; and when the clock struck noon he was a pressure cooker whose needle was rising beyond the red zone.
“I’m out of here,” he told Timmy, seizing the lunchpail and a rolled-up copy of the Boston Daily Traveler – for its reader-submitted recipes, to mentally ingest them and alchemize the fishy pork sandwich from his mum into something palatable. He pushed through the big double door on the Men’s Side, hit the traffic din and the public beach, and headed up the boulevard alphabet, from L to M Street.
An hour and a half earlier, Doris Winkler was peering out the open streetcar window and caught the hot glint off the sea. “It’s a scorcher, Marsha. We’re gonna get black today.” The two of them clambered off the running board and Doris drew a bead on an open patch in the choice middle of the M Street beach. Hauling the pouty Marsha and three shopping bags of food and paraphernalia would have worn Doris out had she been aided by a second Doris every inch her size, a size that was considerable. But she persevered without complaint, knowing the good to be gained outweighed the pain.
After all, it was approaching lunch, and what a lunch she had in those bags. Kreplach, fisselach, taigelach, rugelach – she could have been catering a small Bar Mitzvah. But Doris loved to do it. To do it and then to eat it; and to watch as others ate it, and they’d better eat every last crumb. This was a mother whose idea of Mother’s Day was to cook all the harder, to cook for a solid week – so her grown daughters, mothers themselves, wouldn’t have to lift a finger on their day. “That’s what a mother does,” she would cluck, glorifying herself as the others nodded and chewed and sipped in homage. Marsha, her youngest and still at home, couldn’t chill Jell-O. “A queen shouldn’t have to do that,” Doris said.
“I’m not hungry in this heat, Ma. And why do I have to get blacker? I’m black enough.”
Doris sat on the cluttered blanket, slathering goo the color of chicken fat across her youngest daughter’s bony shoulders. She played dumb, not even acknowledging the heretical question that had just been asked, as though it had come from the lips of someone too insane to talk with normally. For in Doris’s world view, everyone should want to wear frying oil and get as black as they could. Except the blacks, of course, of whom there were so few in Boston at this point in time as to be near invisible. The waves would soon come, however, unleashed from the Mississippis and Alabamas like squadrons of weevils. In that sense, Doris and her yentas were prescient, as were the colleens-sans-swimsuits behind the L Street stockade. Were they psychically blackening themselves for the forthcoming African-American invasion? Was it an act of symptomatic sympathy or camouflage? Whatever it was, getting merely tan was not enough. The idea was to blister and burn and char. To get black was to get beautiful. It was the Boston woman’s goal of every moment of spare daytime, June through September.
“Have a fisselach, Marsha. It’s good for you.” She held up a slow-braised chicken’s foot. It looked like a little hand with pointy digits, beckoning to Marsha.
“No, Ma, I’m still full from breakfast. I’m going in the water.”
“You’re thinking about something. I can tell. Something’s on your mind.”
Marsha denied it and went off in a huff. But something was on her mind, the thought that never exactly shook her to pieces, but never went away either.
Love-wise, she was on an alright path. Except for what she saw at the end of the path.
Marsha Winkler didn’t want to be called Marsha Zass. She could hear the whispers and snickers, a lifetime of them, and peals of outright razzing. Why was fate pulling her towards a name that would spoof her anatomy like a personal bumper sticker? Through sheer willpower – closing her mouth every time her mother tried to put food in it – Marsha had cultivated a willowy figure for herself, the proof of which was evident as she swiveled towards the jellyfish-strewn dregs of Massachusetts Bay in her Filene’s Basement one-piece. All the way from the tide line to the boulevard, the eyeballs of rummies and beachbums turned so fast the socket-grinding was audible. And if that wasn’t the entire cause of the screeching roar Marsha heard, the source became evident soon enough – in a gust thrown up by a sudden squall churning the sea off Castle Island. The blast of wind stopped Marsha in her tracks and she covered her eyes against the whipping sand. As she pulled her palms back to peek out, something blue and fast came rolling over a chunk of flotsam and was halted by an MDC refuse barrel just to her left. She squinted and became curious enough to reach down and pick it up. It was a Braves cap.
Right behind it came a huffing young man with a lunchpail and a rolled-up newspaper. Even with his city worker shirt and dungarees he projected more muscle than nine out of ten of the males dozing in their shorts on ratty towels or parting the sluggish waves with their sun-pinked beer bellies. Those lumberjack wrists and hands of his were all the bare parts she needed to see for that special shiver to prance across her skin.
“Amrhein?” Marsha had never heard that word as a first name before.
“You can call me Rhino.”
She liked it. It left no doubt.
“Hey, Rhino. What are you doing with a Braves cap? Does anyone go to Braves games anymore?”
“Last night in the fifth inning the announcer gave the official count in the stands. It was 248 paid, 62 unpaid. That’s why I have a Braves hat. Everyone and his brother has a Red Sox hat.”
“So you’re not like everyone, huh?”
“Never was, never will be.” He firmed his Southie chin as he said this and squinted eye-beams of pheromones right at Marsha. These were the rays she far preferred over the skin-blackening August sun her mother had forced her to boil under. Like some atomic burst from a Buck Rogers comic strip, they zapped the name Zass and its owner Keppy, who suddenly vanished from her mind.
“This must be your lunch hour.” Marsha took a step forward and playfully made contact, first touching the lunchpail, then the hand that held it. “Do you have something good to eat?”
“Don’t I wish it.” Amrhein was in no mood to mince words about the sad sandwich his mother had made him. When he said the word pork, Marsha frowned and looked furtively back up the beach. Her eyes and Doris’s met like the crossfire of two machine guns.
“I think I may be able to help you in the food department,” said Marsha. “Come on.”
Feeding taigelach to an obvious Gentile was not Doris’ idea of a fun lunch. But what could she do? Southie was their territory, not hers. Besides, she was incapable of resisting flattery, and the voracious Amrhein, chowing down as though making up for seventeen years of food deprivation at one shot, was beyond lavish in his gratitude.
“Eat mine too – I’m just not hungry in this heat,” said Marsha, pushing a juicy chicken foot at him; and while he nibbled that she rummaged and found him a helzel, a stuffed chicken neck. But her remark - and even more than that her stubborn abstaining from anything but a thermos cup of grape soda - caused Doris to make a fist and strike her own breast in an age-old ritual of maternal grief.
When the clock finally yanked Amrhein away from the savory shopping bags and back to his bathhouse pushbroom, a romantic exchange had taken place. First item: Marsha had been responsible for Amrhein getting the best meal of his life. Second item: Without him even asking she handed him her phone number, wrote it right on a piece of wax paper torn from the kreplach bundle. In return, Amrhein felt moved to give something of himself that wasn’t claptrap, something that held true meaning for him. He took off his Braves hat and set it on her head. Although her skull was way smaller than his, the hair-do more than made up the difference. She wore it the rest of the broiling day, except when she was in the water.
And she was still wearing it three nights later when she emerged from the Little Brown Jug, which was right next to Cutler’s Pool Room, having eaten Chinese – but only a few forkfuls of vegetable chow mein - with her girlfriends, Minna and Bunny. As she sashayed down Morton Street the pool room door flew open with unusual velocity, as though the shoulder propelling it belonged to a claustrophobic Brahma bull. Out burst Keppy Zass, and he had more on his mind than shooting a few racks of eight-ball.
“Since when are you a Braves fan?”
“Everybody in the world wears a Red Sox hat. Don’t you want your girlfriend to be different?”
“Don’t shit me. Some potato-nose with a city janitor job gave you that cap on the M Street beach. You think I was born with a finger?”
They were standing right under a street lamp, and Marsha felt her face turn hot as a frying pan. She was sure it was beet red, exposing her crime. In actual fact, her tan was so deep and coppery, well on its way to black, that the blood rush hardly showed. But Keppy kept up the barrage, no less aggressive in love than in the ring at the Young Men’s Hebrew Association.
“You don’t talk but your mother does. She was in my old man’s buying a roast and she told him everything. You think I’m Mickey the Dunce?”
“I think I want to go for a ride,” she said, going chest to chest and tongue to tongue with him right under the street lamp. When their mouths finally pulled apart, emitting the sound of a plunger disengaging from a drain, she asked him if he happened to have the yellow Studebaker tonight. “We could drive to Wollaston,” she said, “right across from Howard Johnson’s near the old pier. We’ll go way out. I can show you what to do with that finger…”
Keppy smiled, and Marsha took the Braves hat off her head and put it right on his; and they locked lips again.
Meanwhile, Amrhein had dialed the numbers scribbled on the wax paper and was asking Doris if he could speak with Marsha. Back clacking the Mah Jong tiles in her native turf, Doris was feeling little need to play politics with the Hibernians of L Street. “She’s out, with her boyfriend,” she replied, and slammed the phone as heartily as if she were pulverizing coconut for Passover macaroons.
Although the Jews of Mattapan trolleyed all the way to M Street to catch the rays, they stopped short of the nude encampments of the L Street Bath-house. Among the men it was said you had to be wagging a full foreskin to be welcome in the stockade. Conversely, Southie-ites ventured to Morton Street but steered clear of Cutler’s Pool Room. There the skinny was you could get brained with a cue stick if the shiny thing around your neck wasn’t a mezuzah.
Those were the rules of peace, however, and as the Marsha-less days and nights went on and on, Amrhein was brewing for war.
Jocko Dugan, who had gotten him the L Street job, had his feelers deep into the trenches of Ward 14. It was he who had read the chatter and told City Hall of the three- thousand-vote swing riding on how promptly His Honor found a new hippo, replacing the one that had died face-down in his tub at the Franklin Park Zoo. This bit of sleuthing was widely credited with saving the Mayor’s ass, and Amrhein knew it, so he paid heed when the naked Jocko shook off after a long leak and motioned him over to the showers for a private word.
“There’s a hooknose wearing your Braves hat. He can run a whole rack of solids and stripes and he drives a yellow Studebaker.”
Jocko was no more a fighter than Marsha, but he had a spy’s mind and two hands, and that was all Amrhein required.
“Find out how he drives home at night,” Amrhein said. “Where and when. Exactly.”
Two in the morning on a secluded stretch of River Street, Mattapan. Streetlamps face each other from either side of the road. So do Amrhein and Jocko, spotlit in the electric glow.
“It’s all in the mind,” says Amrhein, calling out across the street. “Just like Blackstone the Magician. We’re creating an illusion.”
As the yellow Studebaker zoomed into view they clenched their fists as though tugging on a cable stretched between them. They arched backwards, straining to make that which was nothing more than air appear knotted and tight. Even though the illusion was all about hands and posture, Amrhein went full throttle on his most powerful weapon, the noggin. He concentrated, visualizing rope, rope and more rope. He concentrated and conjured, until he saw the same braid, taut as a tugboat line, Keppy Zass saw as he slammed the brake and spun into a screeching, tire-eating pirouette; which ceased only when the Studebaker nose buried itself in a huge breast of earth left by Boston Sand and Gravel for a future sewer control station.
Street lore has it that Keppy came wading out in the Braves hat, shooting hooks like Jake LaMotta. There was copious blood shed that night, but it was only the first of three slugfests between Keppy and Amrhein, all over the hat and Marsha. By the time they’d punched to a gory draw in the third, both battlers concluded that at least one of the two prizes, the one that was tan as coffee, probably wasn’t worth it, and they shook hands and went to a Braves game together.
And bought a second hat.
Both men went on to enroll in the work-study program at Northeastern, high on practical experience and low on Ivy League frippery. They considered applying to Suffolk Law and starting a practice together, but a firm that would be called Sharkey Zass seemed to carry the seeds of its own demise, right in its proposed shingle.
So, parlaying their natural strengths, they settled on opening a deli called the S & Z. It meant Rhino giving up his track to City Hall – maybe even the White House, for history and Tip O’Neill show that what starts at L Street ends at Beacon Street and even Pennsylvania Avenue ; and in true Boston fashion the place wasn’t exactly kosher, but “kosher-style.” Hot corned beef with mayo on a white roll. Egg trilby with bacon on a bagel. It was pragmatics, pure and simple, since Boston was no New York and the Jewish wards paled in size before the vast Irish district.
Marsha, meanwhile, got tight with a budding hotel entrepreneur who had also attended Northeastern. She avoided the Zass trap, and she acquired a rock that stood out like the Custom House tower at high noon; but her last name, sadly, became Lipschitz.
The S & Z Deli was a smash hit because Northeastern had taught Amrhein and Keppy to play their born advantages. Amrhein had the taste buds; and Keppy’s father, the kosher butcher, had old, arcane ties to smoked-meat vendors that got them credit terms and extensions to die for.
But the coup de grâce was the cook they were able to hire. With Marsha off in Chestnut Hill and Palm Beach being Mrs. Lipschitz, Doris needed something to do.