After Valentine’s Day business on 47th Street slowed to a halt. The rich were vacationing in St. Barts and Palm Beach. Oil bills taxed normal New Yorkers to the bone and purchasing a diamond was the last thing on most people’s mind in a bad economy during the harshest winter in modern memory.
Hlove the store manager had succumbed to a cold and called in sick. Richie Boy phoned me to come in to open the safe. I was grateful for the day's work.
After setting up the counters and front window, the standard procedure was to plod through the repairs and pick-ups from the setters and polishers.
No one entered the diamond exchange.
At least no one with an honest intention of buying jewelry.
By noon Richie Boy and I were standing around the space heater discussing our lunch plans. We decided Chinese.
"You want anything, Manny?"
"Chinese?"
"Yeah."
"Not for me. I'm on a diet."
"Suit yourself." Manny, my boss and Richie Boy’s father, was unhappy with our obvious idleness.
“I might as well hired two brooms than you heroes.”
“What else should we do? Get down on our knees and pray for customers?” Richie Boy’s clientele came from his going out at night. None of them were getting out of bed before noon or out of work until after lunch.
“Maybe that would do us some good.” Manny pointed to me. “I got one goy. You must know some prayers for getting money. Who’s the patron saint for money?”
“St. Matthew is the patron saint of money managers. He doesn’t really count.” I had been an altar boy in my youth. “Saint Agatha is the patron saint of jewelers. She was martyred for refusing the sexual advances of a Roman. Her body is supposedly incorruptible.”
“Enough already.” The thought of a 2000 year-old virgin corpse disgusted Manny. “But say a little prayer to this Saint Agatha. It can't hurt.
“I’ve forgotten my prayers.” Some stuck with me. The nuns taught religion with the help of a ruler. My hands twitched in memory of the flat wood measuring stick striking my knuckles.
"Sa but my atheism wasn’t something I mentioned at work.
“Pray already. We need money.”
"I'll do my best." I rejected my atheism for ten seconds and begged the intercession of St. Agatha, but stopped before saying how much cash I wanted, because lunch had arrived from the Chinese take-out.
“Great, first I have a religious bullshitter and now I have loafers.”
“A man has to eat.” Richie Boy handed me my order of General Tso’s chicken. He was having the same thing.
“I loved the succulent meat covered with crunchy batter and the sweet tang of the sauce. Neither of us ever questioned the source of the meat until after whoever ordered the General Tso’s chicken had finished their meal. It was just good manners.
“What about me?” Manny asked from his desk, whose surface was cluttering with bills, invoices, and folded packets of loose diamonds.
“What did you order?” Richie Boy pulled out a plate of dim sum.
“Nothing.”
“Then you get nothing, fat boy.” Richie poked his father’s belly. A good three inches of fat hung over his belt. The eighty year-old liked his food.
“Great.” Manny threw down his pen. “I pay everyone to do nothing and I get to starve.”
“You’re not going to starve. We ordered you Moo Sho Pork.” Richie put Manny’s food on the counter.
“Eat here.”
“I’ll eat at my desk.” Manny started pushing his papers aside.
“No you won’t. Last time you did that you ate a diamond with a dumpling.”
“It was only a twenty-pointer.” Manny remembered everything that he had ever done with diamonds.
“And I found it two days later.”
“Don’t tell us where. We’re eating.” Richie Boy had a delicate stomach.
Manny put a paper towel under his collar. His tie was Armani.
I ate at my desk with a real fork and spoon. I hated plastic utensils.
Richie spoke on the phone with his wife, mumbling out apologies. He had had a late night last evening.
“Were you with my son last night?” Manny constructed a small crepe from the pancake accompanying the Moo Shu Pork.
“Only until midnight, then we both went home.” I had no idea what time he got home.
“You’re a good friend, but a bad liar.” Manny crammed the Moo Shu Pork into his mouth. The sauce dripped on the counter. Pork was tref to most Jews, but Manny, Richie Boy, and everyone from our partners’ firm were bacon Jews. They loved the taste of pork more than Yahweh.
“Manny, when you were a kid, did your mother let you eat pork?”
“I’m from Brownsville. We couldn’t afford pork. My mother covered everything in a gravy. I had no idea what we ate. It could have been cat same as that General Tso’s Chicken.”
“What makes you think a Chinaman is going to serve you cat?” I put down my fork.
“There are no cats in Chinatown,” Richie Boy shouted from his desk. “We had a store on Canal Street for twenty years and I never saw a single cat and the Italians in Little Italy never let their cats out of the house. Cat makes a very good General Tso’s Chicken.”
I examined a piece of fried chicken without figuring out what part of a chicken it came from.
""I have a question for you."
"What?" Manny asked daubing at a post of gravy on his shirt.
“Why do Jews like Chinese food so much?”
“Because it’s cheap.”
“It has nothing to do with the money. Chinese culture and Jewish culture go back thousands of years.”
I popped the crispy morsel in my mouth. It tasted like chicken.
Manny expounded on this theory.
“They know each other since Adam. Marco Polo found Jews in China. They weren’t there for their health. They probably came from one of the lost tribes.”
"Lost tribes? That's almost a good a legend as General Tsao Chicken being cat."
"My father told me ten tribes were deported from Israel by the Assyrians. They were scattered across the earth."
"Jake taught you that?" Richie Boy put down his phone.
"Whatever my father taught me stayed taught same as the nuns." Manny had dropped out of high school at the age of 15 and had started working on Canal Street at the age of 16. “My father said our family was a lost tribe in America."
"But then you were found?"
"No, but we discovered China in Brooklyn, because when I was a kid, there were Chinese restaurants on every corner and every Sunday the Chinese restaurants were crowded with Jewish families and the real reason Jews like Chinese is that they never mixed dairy with meat."
"I thought you said that jake didn't take you out to eat." Richie Boy remembered his family history from its one source.
Manny.
"We never ate at the restaurant. Jake hated giving tips." Manny's father had been a common laborer. He had worked into his nineties as a diamond schlepper for his son. A truck ran him over on Canal Street. Jake survived that and lived another three years with a slight limp. "Like I said we were poor, but sometimes my father would treat us to take-out. We ate on paper plates, which my mother would hide in the trash, so the neighbors wouldn’t know that we were so poor. Like she was fooling anyone.”
“So you went, because it was cheap.” Richie Boy wasn’t letting go of this bone, because Manny liked to save money. He wore the same shirt twice and to prevent his collars from getting dirty he placed a paper towel between his neck and his collar. We called it his ’sweat rag’.
“Sure, it was cheap and good, plus my brothers and I ate pork, because eating forbidden foods showed we were Americans. At the Chinese restaurant Jake wouldn’t even look at the menu. He’d order #3. Pork Chow Mein. The waiter would say, “#3." and never mention pork. They were respectful that way. The number two reason that jews eat Chinese is that they weren’t goys. At an Italian restaurant there was always a cross on the wall. How can a Jew eat at a restaurant with a Jew nailed to the wall? Feh. But Buddha, he always had a smile and we rubbed his stomach for good luck.”
“You said you didn’t eat at restaurants.” I thought I had caught Manny on this, but he shook his head.
“What you think we had telephones back then. Take-out meant you went to the restaurant, ordered, and brought the food home and another good thing about the Chinese was that we weren’t Jews to them. They thought all white people looked the same, so we were the same as everyone, because they couldn’t care less about anyone as long as you had money.”
“So you never ate in a Chinese restaurant as a kid?” Richie finished off his dumplings.
“I never said never. We went on Christmas, because they’d be no one there and afterwards we’d go to the movies. There was no one there too. My old man didn’t like waiting for nothing.” Manny made himself another crepe. “Stop looking at my food. If there’s anything I hate, it’s a schnorrer.”
“Your son is the worst in here.”
“Only because he studied with the best. You.” Manny bit into the pancake loaded with pork and pointed to the door. A man and woman were coming out of the cold.
My prayer to St. Agatha had hit its mark.
“Enough talk. Work.”
“You got it.” I put away my food before Richie Boy could get out of his chair,
I was hungry for money and ‘nimmt geld’ or take money was the first rule of 47th Street. My lunch could wait till later and Chinese food always tastes better with a little money in your pocket.
Even cold.
