Bronx Noir

So here I am running a healthy enterprise for which I could use the help of somebody I can trust, namely my kid. I wrongly thought she was happy being molded into the person who would take over everything her mother and I built up in the Bronx. Which is not a bad little empire.

For instance, I own the building on the Concourse where I have lived since pulling up to the curb in a yellow Cirker’s moving van back when Ike was the president. I’ll never forget that Saturday afternoon.

My old man was delirious with joy about leaving the Lower East Side behind us for a new life in the North End, which is what you called the South Bronx back then.

“Can you believe it, Stanny-boy, I got us a big apartment with sun in the windows where rich people used to live,” he said to me that Saturday. He’d gone to the library to read about the new neighborhood. “Right on the Grand Concourse, copied off the Champs-Élysées in France and built in 1909 in the Bronx—by an immigrant. Imagine that. An immigrant just like me. You know, I was in Paris after the war, Stanny, and I painted. And I don’t mean houses.”

Right across the hallway from our sunny apartment I met a chubby girl my age with blue eyes and red cheeks and frizzy black hair.

Her name was Miriam Smart, which was perfect for her. Some people get named like that. Like Billy Strayhorn just had to be a jazz musician, and Johnny Stompanato had to be a wiseguy.

Anyhow, I called her Mimi. We were married on her nineteenth birthday.

Mimi and I were the first ones in our families to go through all twelve grades. After Morris High School, we graduated City College together in the days before tuition. I went on to law school and wound with a job in the domestic violence bureau at the Bronx D.A.’s office, where mostly I sent up slobs who fell in love with a dimple but couldn’t handle the fact that a whole girl came with it.

Mimi, she was the brains of the Katz family operation. She went to work in the real estate business on account of being sadly inspired by her grandfather, who had a little farm stolen out from under him back in Romania.

“You should never leave your place,” Mimi would say, repeating her grandfather’s stern counsel, “no matter how they try to run you out, which they will try to do over and over in different ways.”

Sometime in ’78 or ’79, when a Hollywood movie actor was running for president—such a gag, everybody thought—he brought a gang of reporters along with him to the South Bronx on a campaign tour. Which didn’t make sense to people in the neighborhood because we don’t vote for actors.

Up until then, I appreciated Hollywood for the movie memories I own, like the first time I held Mimi’s hand in the mezzanine of Loew’s Paradise up at 188th Street. But this mutt running for president, he said right in front of the cameras on the evening news that my own neighborhood was the worst place you could ever be in the United States of America.

Okay, we had problems. In those years, who didn’t? But scaring people so they’ll vote for you?

I was angry at this actor. Being the brains of the operation, Mimi figured something besides an insult was going on. “Aha! Now they send in the scary clowns to run us out,” she said. So we did not leave our place.

But just about everybody we knew did.

As the neighbors on our floor left, Mimi took over their leases one by one—at quite favorable terms, thanks to a landlord dumb enough to be scared by an actor who played second banana in a picture about a chimpanzee.

On our dime, Mimi kept our floor beautifully maintained and sublet to nice people who were just like the old neighbors except their skin was darker. She never worried how the dumb landlord let the other floors go to hell and generally ignored everything for years, including his unpaid property tax bill. By which time we could afford to buy him out at a distress sale.

Then Mimi put up the apartment house as collateral on a loan to acquire a few likewise distressed commercial spaces surrounding the courthouse, which we rented out to lawyers and bail bondsmen in order to pay our mortgage notes.

Plus, we had plenty left over for Wendy’s education, a proper storefront for Mimi’s real estate business, and a nice house on a few acres in the Catskills for summer weekends. Mimi loved the country place because of her grandfather’s stories about his farm in the old country. I thought about maybe buying a cream-colored horse but I never got around to it.

Also, we had money from not being scared so that I could switch teams and hang out a shingle as defense counsel. This was in one of Mimi’s buildings near the courthouse, so I have never had to pay rent. God bless America, as she used to say.

When you have somebody like Mimi Smart behind you, you don’t need to be too smart yourself. Or as she used to say, If law school is so hard, how come there are so many lawyers?