Onion Street

CHAPTER ONE

FEBRUARY 1967, BROOKLYN

Bobby was smiling that night I bailed him out of the Brooklyn House of Detention, or as it was more affectionately known in the County of Kings, the Brooklyn Tombs. He was smiling, but things were different. He had changed. I’d known him since I was six years old and he’d always been blessed with a thick layer of woe-proof skin and slippery shoulders off which trouble would run like rain-water. Just recently, though, his skin didn’t seem quite so thick nor his shoulders as slippery. Maybe it wasn’t Bobby who had changed, but the world had changed around him, and even he’d been powerless to resist its momentum. Listen to me, sounding like I know what I’m talking about. What did I know about the world, anyway? I was just an unambitious schmuck from Coney Island, bumming around Brooklyn College looking for a lifeline. Everything I knew about the world, really knew about the world, I had learned on a stickball or basketball court or on the sand beneath the boardwalk.

Bobby Friedman was a happy son of a bitch — quick to smile, slow to anger. The thing about him I could never figure out was how he turned out that way. He certainly didn’t get his take-life-as-it-comes attitude from his parents. Hard-boiled, old-school communists, his folks were about as warm and cuddly as a box of steel wool. His mom was a cold fish who’d spent her childhood on a kibbutz in British-occupied Palestine, but she was Blanche Dubois compared to Bobby’s dad, a tough monkey who’d fought in the Spanish Civil War as an eighteen-year-old and had been a union organizer for the last three decades. Bobby used to joke that his mom’s favorite lullaby was “The Internationale” and that “Free the Rosenbergs” had been his first full sentence. Needless to say, the guys in the neighborhood didn’t hang out much at Chateau Friedman. My pal Eddie Lane used to call their stuffy, oppressive little apartment in Brighton Beach “the gulag.” It was kind of hard to cozy up to people who used words like liberal and progressive as faint damns, and who held nothing but contempt for our parents. As off-putting as their condescension toward our parents’ bourgeois aspirations might have been, it was nothing compared to the contempt they had for their own son’s cheery and entrepreneurial nature.

Don’t misunderstand: Bobby could recite the ABCs of communism, and even believed a lot of what had been drummed into his head since he popped out of the womb. He had joined Students for a Democratic Society before it became fashionable, and was a top-notch recruiter for the cause. He was a charming alchemist, a guy who could organize a protest rally out of thin air. Bobby Friedman was also the poster boy for cognitive dissonance — even if he could tell you what kind of cigars Castro preferred or explain the minutiae of the Kremlin’s latest Five-Year Plan, Bobby would always be more Lenny Bruce than Lenin, more Groucho than Karl Marx. And there was something else: Bobby Friedman liked money. He liked it a lot. He liked to spend it. More than that, he liked making it.

He was a hustler. He always had an angle, even when we were kids. For instance, he was great at flipping baseball cards. Instead of hoarding them all, he’d sell the duplicates of the prized cards, like the Mickey Mantle rookie card, to the highest bidder. He understood long- and short-term investment before the rest of us understood that we didn’t come from the cabbage patch. Bobby seemed to know where he was going and what the world held in store for him. The future that stretched out before me like a vast desert was, to Bobby, an oasis. He was a man with a plan. I admired that about him.

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised at Bobby’s smile that night at the Tombs. I was, though, maybe for the first time since we’d sat next to each other in Mrs. Goldberg’s kindergarten class. I was surprised because not only had he chained himself to a police paddy wagon and been dragged along Bedford Avenue for a hundred yards, but because the demonstration was about, among other things, the vicious lies the press and police had spread about Samantha Hope. Bobby’d been dating Samantha Hope for almost a year before the explosion. He had seemed totally smitten by her from the moment they met. I’d been more than a little smitten myself. I suppose all of us guys were. Who wouldn’t have been? She was a Brooklyn Jewish boy’s wet dream: a golden blonde shiksa goddess with crystal blue eyes, creamy skin, chiseled cheekbones, and legs up to here. Forget that she was an older woman — by two years — worldly, at least compared to us, and savvy about all sorts of things, but especially politics, drugs, even sports.

For two months now, our goddess had lain in charred bits and pieces in a lonely grave somewhere in her hometown in Pennsylvania. So yeah, I was surprised Bobby was smiling, and maybe more than a little bit disappointed in him. I didn’t say a word. It wasn’t my place to judge other people’s grief. Besides, Bobby looked in bad shape. Although his face was bruised and scratched up from getting bounced along the pavement at twenty miles per hour, most of the damage was below his neckline. His clothes were filthy; the elbows of his sweatshirt and the knees of his jeans in tatters. The skin beneath his shredded clothes hadn’t yet scabbed over, and some of the cuts were still angry, red, and raw.

“You look like shit, man,” I said.

He tousled my hair. “Hey, I got dragged behind a police paddy wagon. What’s your excuse?” Joking, deflecting, that was quintessential Bobby.

“C’mon, I’ll get you home so you can get those cuts washed up and bandaged. Maybe with your fresh battle scars, your mom and dad will finally welcome you into their club.”

“Nah. I could shove a Molotov cocktail up McNamara’s ass and they would still be ashamed of me. I smell of money, don’t ya know? How did the rest of the demonstration go?”

“It didn’t,” I said. “After the arrests and tear gas, it kinda broke up.”

He grabbed my arm and turned me to face him. Finally, that perpetual smile ran away from his face. When it vanished, my disappointment in him went with it. “You know the pigs are full of shit, right? They’re lying about Sam and Marty. Samantha believed in fighting for the cause, but she wasn’t a bomb thrower. That wasn’t her style.”

“I know, Bobby. I know. And Marty Lavitz … come on! He was about as radical as my Uncle Lenny’s Edsel.”

“Even if nobody else believes that, it’s important that you believe, Moe. Sam wouldn’t have done it. You gotta believe me.”

“I do, man. You know I do.”

Bobby’s smile returned and somehow the world felt all right again. When we stepped outside the Tombs, I swear I could feel the heat of the sun on my face, although it was twenty-five degrees and night had fallen over Brooklyn.