After I made a sandwich at my desk, Richie Boy grabbed a slice of salami. Our sharing more than food throughout our twenty-year friendship didn’t deter my protests against his poaching. “I see you have no shame in being a schnorrer!”
“Only cause I learn from the best.” Richie Boy popped the peppery slice in his mouth and returned to fielding the onslaught of phone calls from friends and customers.
“What’s a ‘snorer’?” said Anna, the tall student who had been hired for the Christmas rush. She was beautiful and sweet, but her Brazilian accent couldn’t get around the guttural ‘schn’., so I explained, “A schnorrer is someone who mooches off you.”
“Mooch?” This term stumped Anna’s English.
A passing Hassidic pearl dealer interjected his two cents, “A mooch or schnorrer is a beggar.”
“Yes, but not always,” I explained. “A schnorrer is more someone who eats off your plate, because he likes what you have.”
“You mean like how someone else’s potato chips taste better than those you buy.”
Satisfied Anna understood my analogy, I turned to the Hassid. “Can you think of another word for beggar?”
“Not that I know.” The Hassid pulled on his long curly sidelock.
“Marty,” I yelled to the retired principal, who schlepped merchandise part-time for Manny’s partner. “What’s the Yiddish word for beggar?”
While Marty was a scholar of Judaica, he replied perplexed. “Have to admit I really don’t know.”
“So a ‘snorer’ is like those ladies with the canes begging on the sidewalk?”
“No, those ladies are Palestinian Gypsies,” Marty frowned disapprovingly.
“So there’s nothing wrong with them?” Anna’s eyes widened like she had witnessed a miracle.
“They have a school where they learn to walk like ballerinas with broken feet.”
“I thought they were cripple.”
“They’re thieves running a scam.”
“So beggars are more honest.” Anna was puzzled.
“Beggars are just as bad.”
“Not Lenny!” I protested.
Manny, my boss, lifted his head. “Lenny was the worst of them all. He pretended to be mad, but he had more money than all of us put together.”
Manny also accused me of having a hidden fortune and I said, “That’s not true. How much money did you think Lenny made in one day?”
“Fifty dollars easy,” Marty ventured and even Lee got into the discussion. “He didn’t need the money. His family was rich.”
“Lenny was too crazy to make any money.”
“Too drunk more like it!” Manny muttered, then added, “Don’t you have anything better to do than talk about that bum!”
“Yeah, the world’s a better place without him!” Lee returned to his end of the booth.
Lenny certainly wasn’t cantonizable to sainthood, so I dropped the subject and called several customers about picking up their merchandise. Once I was hung up, Anna sat down and asked, “Who was Lenny and why did everyone get so angry about him?”
“Lenny?” I looked over my shoulder and whispered, because I didn’t want to ignite another debate. “There’s a mad rabbi who always is shouting ‘Shalom!’ and another Hassid pretending to be asking for alms for the new temple in Jerusalem. Lenny was the only Hassidic bum on the street who wasn’t running a religious scam.”
“So this Lenny was a good person?” Anna whispered, as Manny went into the window for a diamond brooch.
“No, Lenny wasn’t such a nice person, but I like him.” Maybe because he resembled an overweight puppy gone.
“Anna, I want you to go up to the setter and have him check these stones.” Manny handed her a set of earrings. “Why are you bothering to tell stories about that gonif!”
“Because Lenny was special and certainly didn’t steal like Tie-coon.” Tie-coon was a well-dressed gentleman from Harlem providing ties and belt from famous stores at a fraction of the price.
“Tie-coon provided a service.” Manny gave him $20 any time the shoplifter asked. He had a weak spot for him and I had mine. “Lenny might have been worthless, but he wasn’t a thief and always had a nice word for me.”
“Cause you gave him a buck!”
“Yeah, well, it was my dollar.” Noticing Anna waiting with her coat over her arm, I motioned for her to leave. Once she was gone, Manny said, “And now you don’t have to give it to him, because Lenny’s gone.”
“Don’t tell me that makes you happy?” I actually missed seeing him on the street.
“No, just glad I don’t hear his whining voice anymore.”
Manny resumed juggling his bills and I went to the front window to rearrange the rings. In front of 34 West 47th Street an older man in a suit sat on the sidewalk with his trouser rolled up his wooden leg and by the garbage can a seventeen-year old Gypsy with a baby in her arms was begging to passers-by. Sometimes it seemed like there were more beggars on 47th Street than customers, but none of them were as good as Lenny.
He made me laugh many times and there aren’t many people who can do that.
The first day I started working at 45 West 47th Street was cold.
By the afternoon the snow was coming down hard and the operation across the aisle was packing up for an early departure home. Manny was desperately hoping for a final sale and said we were staying till closing time. The guards weren’t happy to hear this news, but no customers entered the exchange. Not one and at 5pm a bovine-faced fat man with broken glasses and a yarmulke drunkenly perched across a prematurely balding skull opened the door. He wasn’t wearing a coat, only a tee-shirt and paper-thin pants, though he showed no effects from the blizzard other than show on his shoulders. He blew on his hands and asked, “Anyone have anything to give today.”
Manny shouted, “Get out! This is a place of business.”
“What you have against Jews?” His voice was high-pitched and sounded easily excitable.
“We have nothing against Jews, only bums!” Lee angrily shouted, “You heard the man, get out of here!”
“You’re both Nazis!” He faced me. “What about you? You’re a gentile, right? You got a dollar. I don’t do drugs. All I do is get a little stitch. That’s Yiddish for drunk.”
I dug into my pocket for a dollar. When he eagerly stepped closer, the smell of rancid potato wrinkled my nose. He took off his threadbare yarmulke. “Sorry, but I don’t wash in the shelter. It’s not kosher.”
I laughed, “You are a little ripe.”
“In the summer it’s worst, but it keeps away anyone who wants to hurt me and in the shelter there’s plenty of people that don’t like Jews.”
I handed him the dollar and the bum shrugged to Lee. “See how gentiles treat Jews.”
As soon as he left, Manny said, “I don’t want you giving that bum any money. Not in my place of business.”
“Okay,” I answered, but my money was my money.
The next day I was returning from Berger’s Deli with my lunch and spotted the bum was speaking with Manny’s first employee, Norman Greenhut. It was below freezing, yet his skin steamed from the fever of his mania.
I stopped and listened to his articulate treatise on Microsoft stock. He almost sounded intelligent, though I wasn’t banking anything on someone who smelled like a dead man’s shoe. As I began to walk away, the bum said, “There’s the goy who gave me a dollar yesterday. The good goy, Damien.”
“His name isn’t Damien___”Norman started, but I interrupted, “I like the name Damien fine.”
“My name’s Lenny.” The bum nervously shuffled from one foot to another.
“You want my lunch?” I couldn’t resist the charm of his utter helplessness.
“From Berger? That’s not kosher.”
“Just what the world has been waiting for, a finicky bum,” Norman laughed, but Lenny cringed with hurt and shambled off with a mutter. “I’m not finicky, just don’t eat tref. See you, Damien.”
Berger’s was definitely kosher, though not dairy, and I said, “Lenny doesn’t seem to be playing with all the cards in the deck.”
“Believe it or not, Lenny used to be a big stockbroker on Wall Street.”
“What happened?”
“He went nuts after the 1987 Crash. Lost his fortune and his mind.” Norman never had a nice word to say about many people, but admitted, “He really does know what he’s talking about.”
“So you would use his stock tip.”
“About Microsoft? No way they’ll beat out IBM.”
Of course no one listened to Lenny, because he would start the day on 47th Street at noon as a meek moocher and work the street getting a dollar here and there. Richie Boy and I gave as did another twenty soft touches. He would always joke about Richie Boy having schitzah or gentile girlfriends and thank me for any contribution by saying, “You’re a good man, Damien. God bless you.”
We all made fun of him, but no one picked on the schemiell more than himself and he worked self-deprecation to a fine art. People would ask him to come home in hopes of salvation, but Lenny was beyond redemption and apparently happy where he was, though he did suffer.
Once I caught him limping up the sidewalk and asked him what was wrong.
“You know I sleep outside, because the crackheads in the shelter will steal everything I have.”
“Lenny, what could they want from you?” Lenny possessed nothing even a crackhead would want, but desperation is the evil step-father of need.
“They think I’m rich, just like everyone here. The Nazis!” He unbuckled his belt and dropped his pants. “I was sleeping on a bench and a cop hit me.”
The bruises across his thighs were not self-induced and I told him, “Pull up your pants, Lenny. There are women present.”
None of them were looking, but Lenny chuckled, “Sorry, I forgot where I was.”
I held out five dollars and Lenny said, “You don’t have to, Damien. I know you don’t make a lot of money.”
“You do?”
“Yeah, I know everything about the street.” He smiled wisely and his eyes were clear. “Maybe one day I’ll tell you everything I know like how three years ago there was a drought in Angola. You know where it is, right above South Africa.”
The country had been suffering from a savage civil war since the Portuguese abandoned their old colony in 1975. I nodded and Lenny continued, “Well, there was a UN truce and things were getting back to normal, but because the water was so low, people were able to go into the rivers and pick millions of diamonds from the riverbeds. Billions and diamonds were getting about as rare as light bulbs, so deBeers got tired of paying out this money and paid Savimbi from Unita to start up the war again. Don’t worry, you won’t find it in the papers. Thanks for the money, Damien.”
And he was right, I never was able to verify this tale, except there is still a war in Angola.
Being right didn’t help Lenny, but he always retained his humor. His best schtick, occurred in 1996, when he ran for president. “Vote for me for President. A Jew for America. I have a plan for peace in the Middle East. We normalize relations with Cuba, bet them to declare Havana to be Miami. All the Cubans will move to Cuba thinking it’s Miami, then we get all the Israelis to move to Florida, where Disneyworld will build them a new Jerusalem to await the messiah.”
Of course no one voted for Lenny, but they would give him enough to buy a pint bottle of whiskey. Despite his size it didn’t take much to get him drunk and by 5pm he was a disgrace. His glasses at an angle, he would insult the pedestrians, ignorant of anyone’s generosity, and the police hustled him off the block for good.
The winter of 2000 I left to live in Thailand, thinking I could retire from the diamond trade.
Life was good out there and I returned to New York for the holidays. The city was prosperous and filled with shoppers. I hadn’t been looking for Lenny, but found him on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. His schtick didn’t work on the bussed-in tourists and he appeared sad, almost sick. I went up to him and said, “Lenny, are you okay?”
He squinted behind his smeared glasses and whined, “Oh, it’s you Damien! You still working on the street?”
“No, I’m living in Bangkok. Working for an Internet company.” At least hat was my cover.
“Oh, Bangkok, you have to be careful there. They’ll steal all your money, you don’t look out.” It was a prediction to which I should have listened. I reached into my pocket and held out a dollar bill. “Damien, you don’t have to.”
“Hey, it’s the holidays.”
“For the goyim, but not a poor Jew like me.”
“Poor, everyone on the street thinks you’re rich.”
“A lot they know.” He emptied his pockets. They held nothing, but lint. “I haven’t made any money, since they threw me off the street. All because I started saying that Israel should give back some land to the Arabs.”
I had heard it was for exposing himself in an exchange, but he had done that plenty of times without getting in trouble. “What about your family?’
“I have no family. My mother and father, you think they want anything to do with me. And my brother and sister. Them too, but what can you expect? I’m a bum. You want to know where I live. I’ll tell you. You know I can’t sleep in the shelter, because it’s not kosher, so I sleep on the grate near the Fifth Avenue Synagogue. I think the rabbi doesn’t like me doing that, but you know why I do this. Because I make the gentiles think there’s such a thing as a poor Jew.”
“But everyone on 47th Street thinks you’re rich.”
“That’s what they want to think, because they don’t want to know anyone poor. That’s why I haunted 47th Street. Just to show them how close being poor was. That was my mission, but they took that away from me.”
“Lenny, that’s not true.”
“Damien, that nice of you to think that, but I know better. You look at all those diamonds. All so beautiful and do they make the people who sell them happy. Not that I can see, but then I’m nearly blind.”
He took my dollar and lurched off the steps like a giant Panda trying to find a new zoo.
When Anna returned to the store, she asked, “What happened to Lenny?”
“He died of an infected hernia.”
“That’s so sad.”
“Yeah, and he was a good dancer.” It was a lie, but I wanted Anna to think good of him.
I miss him. Miss him beaming an idiotic grin at the window. Miss him pissing off Lee. Miss his stupid shamble up the sidewalk, because on a street where wealth is exulted, Lenny believed in just being a human being. That might be wrong, but like him I don’t really believe in the value of diamonds, only their beauty. Just like people.
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