Last holiday season Richie Boy had hired me to help with sales and schlepping merchandise between dealers and jewelers. Hlove and I worked together to make sales, but business on 47th Street was murder. There was no foot traffic and my old customers hated the street and all the hawkers shilling to buy gold.
“Back in the 90s I used to make 150-200 thou in sales. Now I’ll be lucky to break $20,000,” I explained to Hlove who had been a jewelry manufacturer until five years ago.
“Back then I worked non-stop from September to December making rings, earrings, everything.” Hlove had coined cash for decades, but finally closed shop in 2008. “All my customers deserted me to buy from China.”
“Enough with the walk down Memory Lane.” Manny looked up from his paperwork. The octogenarian had survived the end of the Depression as a young boy in Brownsville. He hated idle talk. “The past is the past. What have you done for me lately?”
Manny had bills to pay.
“Nothing today.” I looked to the window. No one was standing before our display.
“I feel like I’m running a charity ward. You two are about as useful as a broom,” Manny stated in half-jest.
“Don’t worry, you’ll be rid of me soon enough.” I would be laid off after the New Year.
“You haven’t done a day of work since you came here.” The elderly diamond dealer was meaner than a flayed rattlesnake, but we had been friends over thirty years and I responded in kind, “The same could be said about you. All you do is shift papers from one side of your desk to the other and insult customers.”
“Customers? More like wastes of time.” Manny was on a roll. Only this morning he had called my main diamond broker a ‘gonnif’.
I regarded over to Hlove, who shook his head. Calming a barking dog wasn’t the guitarist’s forte.
“These papers run this company.” The Brownsville native slammed his palm on the bills, bank statements, and memos.
“Everything you’re doing could be done in a minute on a computer.”
“I ran this business before there was a computer and I will outlive the computer too.”
“I hope you’re right.” Manny and I went back to 1978. Our best years were ebbing on this side of the 21st Century.
“Right, only one thing is right and that’s one and one makes two.”
Hlove rolled his eyes.
Manny was on fire and his kvetching veered off the tracks.
“You’re useless. You’ve always been useless.”
“Like the time I sold a ruby for a million dollars and you stiffed me for the commish.”
Yiddish vindictives spewed from his mouth.
“I don’t need to listen to this.”
I went to the closet and got my cashmere coat. It was a cold winter.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“To get my lunch.” I waved to Eliza Randolph. The elegant brunette was Manny’s partner.
Years ago Richie Boy had hoped that the two of us became serious, so I could have been his partner. Eliza’s father was glad that nothing came of our flirtation and in many ways so were we.
“Eliza, you want some chowdah.”
“Chowdah from where?” Eliza could fake a wicked Boston accent. She had attended UMASS-Amherst.
“The Oyster Bar where else?”
The Grand Central Terminal institution sold the best clam chowder south of Boston’s Route 128.
“Get me a New England chowder.”
“What about you, Hlove?”
“No thanks.” The jazzman was on a special diet.
Manny made a face, as his mind calculated the distance between our store and the Oyster Bar.
“I pay you to work, not to gallivant around town.”
“You want to buy me lunch?” I already knew the answer.
“What for?”
“So I stay here to make a sale.”
“Stay, go, what’s the difference?”
“Then I’m out the door.” I decided to act nice and asked, “Manny, you want a chowder?”
“The chowder there tastes like old man’s underwear.” The old man liked putting in the ‘zug’ or dig to ruin anyone else’s good time. It was an old school Brooklyn thing.
“More like from a young girl, but you wouldn’t know anything about young girls anymore.” I had learned how to make someone feel bad from him and left the store in a foul mood.
Our daily tete-a-tetes were wearing on us, but as I crossed 5th Avenue I thought about my family’s teakwood farm bordering Thailand’s Western Forests. I indulged the delusion of being with them soon on the ten-minute walk to Grand Central. I bumped into several groups of slow-moving tourists. Without them the city would be as empty as the New York of the apocalyptical film I AM LEGEND.
I turned off Fifth onto 43rd Street.
The steel syringe spire of Chrysler Building gleamed in the winter sun. I was used to the sounds of the city, but not dogs’ barking.
There was more than one.
The MTA cops’ explosive- and drug-sniffing hounds were snapping at passengers entering the Metro-North terminal. They were looking for terrorists and the shepherd at the entrance eyed me with suspicion, but his master clocked me as harmless. I was white, in a suit, and over 50.
“Nice doggie.”
“He ain’t a doggie.”
“Doggies are cows, right?”
Same as all these cops.
All of them wanted to be a hero to stop someone from doing that something stupid.
I smiled and descended into the terminal.
Passengers hurried to catch their trains and I surveyed the crowds for anyone who might damage it or the people within the terminal. My inspection gave GCT an all-clear visa and I entered the Oyster Bar to sit at the counter.
I called Eliza from inside the restaurant.
“Anything other than Chowdah?”
“Chowdah be just fine.”
I ordered one chowder for here and three to go from a redheaded waitress. My counter mates were from the UK. His wife had a big diamond. I told them about working on 47th Street.
“We ain’t buying no diamonds.” The husband was adamant on this.
“He spent a fortune on this rock.” His wife brandished her stone. It glittered in the dim light of the Oyster Bar. She was happy with the now.
“Having a good time?”
“We love New York and love the Oyster Bar. In fact we feel safer here than in London.”
“I got robbed in Soho last time I was in the Smoke.” Somebody had picked my pocket.
“We come from Plymouth.”
“A nice town. I’ve stopped there a couple of times on the way to Cornwall.” I had friends out west.
I finished my chowder and signaled the waitress for a bill.
“If you change your mind about a diamonds, stop by our shop. It’s only five minutes from here.” I slipped the woman a card.
“Maybe.” His wife smiled touching her husband’s thigh.
“Cheers.” I paid for four chowders and hurried through the underground passages of Grand Central Terminal to Madison Avenue.
The dogs had left the exit onto 45th Street.
“Five minutes later I entered our exchange with three chowders.
“Chowdah, Bobby?” Eliza loved saying this. The words brought back her youth as a co-ed in Massachusetts.
“Chowdah and it’s piping hot.”
Eliza was so happy to receive her chowdah that she kissed both my cheeks.
I gave another to Hlove.
“I said I didn’t want.”
“It’s Christmas. Enjoy.”
“What about me?” asked Manny.
“Manny, you said no.”
“I didn’t say anything of the kind.”
“That’s not the way I heard it.”
“This is wicked chowdah.” Eliza liked to rub it in.
“Just the way you like it.”
Manny muttered under his breath and I said, “Just kidding, Manny.”
He smiled with triumph, as I put the extra chowder on his desk.”
“Watch the papers.”
“Not a chance.” I was his Sabbath goy.
“Incoming,” Hlove said, as the English couple entered the exchange.
“I met them at the Oyster Bar.” That meant they were my customers and the commish would be 25%. “They’re my privates.”
I motioned Hlove to sit and enjoy his chowder.
We split the sales 50/50 and sharing was always for the best in these hard times, especially if the chowder was from the Oyster Bar.