KOSHER PIG - BET ON CRAZY - 2013

In 2013 business in the Diamond District was spotty during the high holidays of Rosh Shananah and Yom Kippur. The Hassidim disappeared to the various shetls scattered around New York and tourists entered our diamond exchange to gawk at the diamonds and jewelry. At least twice a day out-of-towners asked in complete seriousness, "Are they real?"

"Everything is real," I answered the visitors before launching into a short spiel about the value of diamonds and gold. "Years ago we told the customers that diamonds were a good investment. It was sort of true then, but now diamonds appreciate in value better than houses plus they're easier to convert into cash at times of need."

The tourists nodded with understanding. Their homes had lost value three years in a row. My boss Richie Boy doesn't have the patience for these rubes. Only occasionally they were buyers.

Later that day I sold an Italian diamond bracelet to a Vermont couple celebrating their 60th anniversary. They lived a short distance from Richie Boy's ski shack and he warmed up to them. Selling turned him on like a drag racer on nitro and the Thursday after Yom Kippur he delivered a 31-inch diamond necklace set with GIA-certified .40 ct. diamonds to a hedge fund investor.

The piece was a magnificent blaze of reflected light set in platinum. His customer coined millions every day. He could have shopped at Harry Winston, but Richie Boy and he went back to the 80s. Discos. Both were loyal to each other. Richie Boy returned to the store after closing and said, "That's it. I’ve had enough of Rushahoma. I'm headed out to my surf shack."

“What about tomorrow?” his father asked from his desk. Manny would have remained open 24/7, if the exchange didn’t close at 6.

“Fridays are dead and nothing is deader than a Jewish holiday Friday.” Richie Boy needed his rest. He had rescued the firm through a series of near-miraculous sales. I had helped with a few deals out of the blue and neither of us were broke.

“What about trying to run this store like a business?” Manny was frustrated by his son’s laissez-faire attitude.

“There’s more to life than work.”

“Like what?” Manny lived for his work. His father, Jake, had been the same. Somehow that relentless devotion to the grindstone had skipped a generation with Richie Boy.

“Surfing.” Richie Boy had a place on the beach out in Montauk. Ditch Plains was a five-minute wak from his front door.

"What are you doing this weekend?" asked Marvin, the newly-married diamond dealer across the aisle.

"I'm having a kosher pig BBQ."

"How can pig be kosher?" The balding fifty year-old didn't follow the dictates of glatt kosher, but Marvin wasn't a bacon Jew.

“How?”

“Yes, how?” Marvin was a shrewd diamond buyer. He figured everything for a third of its value. He had been the president of the glee club of a summer camp in the Jewish Alps and was as gullible as a cheerleader on quaaludes.

Richie Boy wickedly went for the complete wind-up.

"A special rabbi consecrates the pig before killing it according to an ancient Hebrew tradition. It predates the Torah." Richie Boy is a great salesman and Marvin admired his chutzpah as well as his ability to thrive amongst the goyim.

"Really?" Marvin was swallowing the possibility of kosher bacon with a kvelling smile.

"100%. Come out to my BBQ and I'll introduce to the delight of kosher pork."

Marvin promised to show up at the beach BBQ. We laughed at his schmielism and Richie Boy prepared for his early departure from New York. His father continued to kvetch like an old yenta. At 83 the only choice were work or death. Manny and I fought every day. Our arguments flushed the blood through his body. I hoped that he lived to 103.

At 59 I had more in common with him than most of the people on the planet.

"You know the reason why pork is tref?"

"It caused people to have worms in the old days." Richie Boy checked the exchange. The religious don’t have a funny bone over pig’s feet. "And don't tell me that it's because Yahweh ordered the Jews give up pork as the ultimate sacrifice."

"Little tastes better than bacon." Richie Boy and I knew each other over 30 years. We had heard enough of our stories enough to give them numbers. I was still capable of catching him off-guard. "Pork is tref no matter what. Leviticus condemned pig for its cloven food, but there is such a thing as kosher pork chops. Not for the Hassidim, but it's cooked with pickle juice and kosher salt."

"Sounds as dry as an old shoe." Richie Boy possessed a better than average epicurean palate.

"Not something I'd eat, but maybe scientists can genetically modify a pig to have feet instead of hooves." I had eaten pigs' foot in Berlin. Schweinefüße was considered the city's signature dish. "Pigs with little toes."

"Stop. That's sacrilege." Manny hadn’t been to the temple in years, but once a Jew always a Jew.

"Sacrilege and heresy are my specialties." I set the alarm and wished Richie Boy a good weekend.

"You can come out on Saturday."

"Thanks, but I got to get ready for my trip." I was heading out to Thailand for a month. It would be the longest that I had spend with since 2008. "If there really was kosher pig I might change my mind."

"You never know."

"I know." Richie Boy and I had spent too much time together over the past years. It was time for a break.

Kosher pig or not.

KOSHER CHINESE FOOD

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 stood 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 got 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 lays in a church tomb, 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. 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. He also leaned forward.

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 Richie got home from his next destination.

“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 your holy nuns." Manny had dropped out of high school at the age of 15 to 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 had run him over on Canal Street. Jake had 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 shvets schmatah or ’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.

Glatt Chateau Bacchus / BET ON CRAZY by Peter Nolan Smith

These days most people in America have no money and the middle-class survive from paycheck to paycheck, dreaming of their lost wealth. Even the lower upper class are struggling to make ends meet and New York's Diamond District has been feeling the pinch. My bosses Richie Boy and his father Manny couldn't offer me a place behind the counter upon my return from the Orient.

"It's brutal out there." Manny always kvetched about business, but his business had been bled dry by salaries and rent. "I'm totally farblondzhet."

"It's that bad?" Manny was never at a loss for a solution, but I knew the answer from the long face of the other dealers in the exchange.

"I would be lucky, if it was bad." The Brownsville native had seen everything over his eighty years. "Vel ist mir, This is a nightmare, but we'll get through somehow."

His son was less optimistic. Richie Boy had newly born twins. We went out for a drink after they closed the exchange.

"I can't pay my rent."

"Something will happen."

"Call up your old customers. Make me a sale. I'll give you half the profit."

"I'll believe that when I see it." His father was a notorious chisel.

"Help me and I'll help you."

He went home to his wife and I wandered across 47th Street to catch my train to Brooklyn at Grand Central. Halfway down the block I ran into Rondell, a young Hassidic diamond broker with five kids. We hadn't seen each other for months and the overweight dealer asked if I knew of a red diamond.

"Red red." Red diamonds are actually rare. They cost a fortune, but I had seen one earlier in the day at a colored diamond dealer's office. "You want red red, I know of one, but it's less than a carat."

"How much?" Rondell clasped his hands in hopes of hearing the right number.

"Less than a million."

"How much less?"

"I'll have to make a call." I stepped into a foyer out of Rondell's earshot and called the holder of the red diamond and then contacted Richie Boy, because I needed his name to make this deal. I explained everything and he said, "If this comes through, then you get a good bone."

"You said half before."

"Half it was a private. This is a wholesale deal. No one is getting rich from it."

My friend was right about that and I didn't argue, since something was better than nothing.

The bargaining between the holder of the stone, Richie Boy, Rondell, his partner, the next person down the line, and the final buyer was murder, but after a week everyone said mazol and the deal was done. I made a few thousand, but Rondell kicked in another G, so it wasn't bad money for making two phone calls to the right places. The money was shared out in the exchange. Everyone was happy, but Manny.

"I have to get you and Richie Boy a good bottle of wine." Rondell was grateful to us both. He had a lot of mouths to feed "A bottle of kosher wine."

"Kosher wine, feh." Manny didn't like anyone who made more money than him and I expected nothing less from the Brownsville native. They grew them tough in that part of Brooklyn.

"There's good kosher wine," Rondell protested, while sticking his check inside his coat.

"No, there isn't." I tasted enough 'yayin kashér' to know that good kosher wine was a trifecta oxymoron. "It's all tref to my palate."

"No, there is good kosher wine." Rondell leaned on the counter. He weighed more than an NFL linemen and was only 5-11. Hassidic cooking was thick with schmaltz.

"Not a chance." Talmudic law banned the drinking of wine which might be used to honor an idol such as the Golden Bull underneath Mount Sinai or Jesus or Bacchus, the Greek God of epiphany. "Wine is drunk for enlightenment. I can't even finish a glass of glatt yayin and that makes schitkahness impossible."

"I will bring you a bottle of drinkable kosher wine and you'll sing praise to Chateau Zeitgeist."

"I'll believe it when I taste it." Yayin mevushal has to be boiled to purify it from the touch of an idolater and I explained to Rondell, "Back in 1995 we opened a nightclub in Beverly Hills. The previous bar had been Dean Martin's hang-out. The owner said that we could have the wine stock. I looked at the list. It was very impressive and I asked where was the cave. The owner said, "There's no cellar here, we kept it upstairs." The top floor was suffocatingly hot. I opened a few bottles. It had been boiled by the California sun to swill. The same goes for kosher wine."

"You're wrong and I'll bet you $100 that you'll tell me you're wrong." Rondell waddled from the exchange. Manny shook his head. I could read what he was thinking in his eyes. I had wasted too much time on 'bullshit'. It was his second favorite expression. # 1 was calling diamond brokers like Rondell 'piece of shit'. I left the exchange and went over to the public library to write. I was good for the month.

The following day I went up to 47th Street to pay off a debt. Rondell arrived in the exchange with a bottle of Chateau Beaucul. Richie Boy and I thanked him for the offering and we uncorked the bottle. I spit the first sip into the trash can and yelled Rondell.

"Are you trying to kill a goy?"

"Is it bad?"

"Nearly poisonous." I was more a sheygutz than a goy.

"Sorry, it cost almost $50."

"I appreciate the gesture, but it's dreck. I lived in France for ten years and this is worst that vin-trois-hommes?" Sheygutz was considered a 'wise guy' by some Yiddish speakers. To others it was an insult.

"What is that?"

"When wine is so bad that two men have to hold you down and pour it into your mouth."

"Give me another chance."

"It's not necessary." Drinking that wine was like having sex with an ugly woman. Something you would never forget and I didn't need to fuck a 'messkait' twice.

"No, I'll make good."

"Rondell, you might think of me as the shabbos goy, but I'm more the shabbath starker. Du versehts?" I spoke the last two words with a Bavarian accent. My high school teacher had hailed from that region. He might have given me an F, but I had the tone down right. "Worse than this I don't need. Not as a favor."

"Es tut mir leid." Most Hassidem only spoke Hebrew these days.

"Klein problem." I'm an old school goy. Hebrew is only for schul and Yiddish is daily life .

Rondell didn't show up for three days. Manny mocked my trusting him.

"He's a piece of shit."

"In the twenty years I've been working for you, you've never bought me a bottle of wine." Plenty of martinis and vodka, but never wine.

"If you're so in love with that fat fuck, why don't you marry him?" Manny had a way with words and so did I.

"Because he's not my type."

Richie Boy his son was staying out of this argument. He had enough trouble with his father. Anytime I took the brunt of the old man's attack was free time for Richie Boy to make money.

"Don't you have a home?" Manny was tired of seeing me.

"Yeah, but I like seeing you ready to plotz."

"Get out of here." Manny meant it, but only for the moment. We were old friends and I was trying to selling a diamond to a basketball player in Miami.

On Friday Rondell showed up before the rush home for Shabbos with a new bottle in his hand.

"This is the best of the best."

Richie Boy and I thanked him and took the bottle without any comment. I gout out the bottle opener and two glasses.

One for me and one for Richie Boy. Manny wasn't getting a drop.

He examined the bottle and nodded his approval. None of its ingredients were non-glatt.

Chateau Dionysos. It was a pricy bottle of wine.

"Let it breathe." I was patient and opened the bottle.

It had been a long day. The sale of an eternity band to my NBA client had fallen through the ice. His Miami jeweler was saying that I was no good. I poured Richie Boy and myself a glass.

Halfway to the top.

We dipped our noses over the rim. Our eyebrows peaked with anticipation. A single sip sent us into ecstasy. It was better than good, then again Chateau Lafitt 96 wasn't glatt kosher.

I tried calling Rondell. He wasn't picking up his phone. Shabbos started early in the summer. I raised a glass to the air and toasted my fat friend.

"Here's to Bacchus. Pagan not kosher."

Richie Boy clinked his glass with mine.

Manny glowered at his desk and we smacked out lips in appreciation, because sometimes the best things in life many times aren't kosher and that's a mitzvah for a goy and a blessing for a sheygutz. There was a difference between the two.