Bitter Bronx by Jerome Charyn Read Free Book Online Page A

Mrs. Messenger, “leave the kid alone. He’s interested in your daughter, not J. D. Salinger.”
    Salinger reigned over the Upper West Side; half the kids at M&A knew his stuff by heart. But it took me an entire month to grasp that “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” and “The Laughing Man” were short stories rather than pickle merchants at the Jennings Street Market.
    I walked hand in hand with Merle through an endless maze of dark rooms—West End Avenue had all the light of a sepulchre. And finally we came to her room, which was almost as large as our apartment in the Bronx. It had two beds, a sofa, and a desk near the window. Merle didn’t believe in preludes or preambles. She undid her robe and let me glimpse at her partial nakedness in pajamas that almost served as a second skin.
    She meant to play Manhattan’s own alley cat and seduce a cockroach from the Bronx, but I was as much of a trickster as Merle. I moonlighted after class. I was a male model for a Seventh Avenue clothing cataloguer, Rosenzweig & Co. Girls were always running around the showroom in their panties and peekaboo bras. Romances would flare up behind a photographer’s curtain. The whole place was a tinderbox.
    It took me a while to understand the mechanics of Merle’s household. Her mom and dad didn’t like her running around to parties with college boys and coming home after midnight, smothered in mascara. They weren’t snobs. I went to Music and Art and looked like J. D. Salinger. That was enough of a résumé.
    I saw Merle once or twice a week, stayed over, and had breakfast with her mom and dad. But I was on a tightrope, since I had no time to read the books they talked about at the kitchen table—Kafka and his castle, Cervantes and his crackpot of a knight, James Joyce and the river that rattled through his bones.
    Merle was the snob, not her mother. Whatever delight we took in the wonderful warp of our bodies didn’t carry over to M&A. I wasn’t included in that web of friends she had. She mocked me in our English class when I fumbled for the right word.
    â€œWhat Jerome is trying to say, Dr. McCloud, is that Hamlet is dangerous to all mankind—he kills on the advice of a ghost. He’d marry his own mother if he had half the chance.”
    No one could argue with Merle. Literature was her own private tablet and proving ground. She could talk about a text as if she were in the middle of making love. Her sentences were a kind of intelligent delirium.
    My hair began to fall out. Rosenzweig, the catalogue king, gave me a special shampoo. He sniffed the air with his huge nostrils, looking like Count Dracula with a whitewashed face. But he was gentle with me. I was his most successful protégé.
    â€œI’m in love,” I said.
    Rosenzweig had a quick solution. I should overwhelm my sweetheart with his largesse. It sounded like a military operation. But I was desperate and listened to Dracula. I announced to Merle that we were going on a real date—beyond her bedroom. She wasn’t very pleased, but she must have been curious. I showed up on West End Avenue in a maroon sport coat from Rosenzweig’s racks. Merle was waiting for me in high heels and a miraculous silver gown. Her lavender eyes weakened whatever will I had. I was her Archy, the cockroach who couldn’t type capital letters. And she was my myopic Mehitabel.
    â€œToujours gai, kid,” she said as we approached the elevator. But she was suspicious of Rosenzweig’s chauffeur and limousine.
    â€œAm I your gun moll? And is this an armored car?”
    She couldn’t have realized how prescient she was. The limo and its driver had once belonged to Frank Costello, who was the cataloguer’s silent partner.
    Rosenzweig had picked the restaurant, a Florentine dive on Ninth Avenue that didn’t have to troll for customers. Costello himself dined there whenever he wasn’t in the