BET ON CRAZY - COLOR by Peter Nolan Smith

The last week of January I was hurrying down the sidewalk on West 47th Street. I had been on the job since my friend Richie Boy had busted both his knees skiing at Jackson Hole. My watch read 9:35. I was late for the third time this week and it was only Wednesday. Lenny the bum was standing in front of Berger’s Deli. His lightly-clothed body was steaming in the sub-zero temperature. Fat people generate a lot of heat.

“Can you give a little?” Lenny said to a passing Hassidim diamond dealer and then pointed a quivering finger. “There’s the goy who gave me a dollar yesterday. The good goy, Damien.”

“His name isn’t Damien___” The dealer recognized me from Manny’s store.

“I like the name Damien fine.” I couldn’t resist Lenny’s utter helplessness. “You want a bagel?”

“From Berger’s? That’s not kosher.” The Deli had been operating on 47th Street for decades.

“Just what the world has been waiting for, a finicky bum,” The Hassidim laughed, but Lenny cringed with hurt and shambled off with a mutter.

“I’m not finicky, I just don’t eat tref. See you, Damien.”

Berger’s was definitely kosher, though not dairy glatt, and I crossed the street. It was 9:38. Manny was in the front window, tapping his watch.

I entered the exchange and Manny said, “Every day you’re late. Two minutes, five minutes, fifteen minutes. Why can’t you get here on time?”

“I try.” I got up at 8. Somehow 90 minutes weren’t enough time to shower, dress, and get from East 10th Street to Midtown. “I’ve taken the N train, the L, the 4. None of them are faster.”

“So leave a little earlier.”

“Okay.” I took off my leather coat and hung it over my chair. Richie Boy and Domingo were running late too. Nothing really happened on the street until lunch.

“Okay what? Okay you’ll be on time?” Manny handed me a tray from the safe. The metal box contained the heavy goods for the front window. Diamond necklaces and engagement rings.

“Manny, when you going to teach me about diamonds?” If I was going to sell diamonds, I needed some basic knowledge.

“What’s there to teach?” Manny had little time for on-the-job training. “You do what I tell you and you can’t go wrong.”

“Yeah, but here are two 3-carat diamonds.” I held up two engagement rings in 14k gold; a marquise and round stone. “Both the same size, color, and clarity, but they don’t cost the same.”

“I told you about the 4Cs.” Manny sighed with exasperation. He hated wasting any time from his beloved paperwork.

“Carat, color, clarity, and cut.” These 4Cs determined the price of a diamond. “Your lesson lasted three minutes.”

“What you expect to know everything in a week? A month? A year?” Manny motioned to speed up setting out the goods in the window.

“No, I listen to what you tell customers and you inevitably tell them every stone is a G VS, unless it has a certificate from the GIA.”

“I hate the GIA.” Manny had no confidence in the Gemological Institute of America, having sent several stones for certification only to have them come back a lesser grade than his original estimation. “Upstarts.”

“They’ve been around since 1931.”

“And I’ve been around since 1925.” Manny was a little younger than my father. “So I beat them. They think that they’re the be all and end all of diamonds. We never sold those stones on the Bowery. Only when my hero and your friend, Richie Boy, moved me up here did I have to deal with GIA stones and that 4Cs crap.”

“It’s not crap.” Richie Boy entered the store on crutches and lifted the counter top. The braces had come off his legs, so he was able to wear his suits again. Armani, Zegna, Calvin Klein. I had inherited several hand-me-downs. They were little small on me, but better than a 20 year-old suit from Jaeger.

“It’s crap. The G comes into the store for a 1-carat stone. He doesn’t know a D color from a J, but he knows how much he has in his pocket. He has $3000. You tell him the stone is G VS. He has $4000. You tell him G VS. He has $2000. You tell him G VS, because what he wants is a white clean stone for the right price. Nice and easy.”

“Except if he has $10,000 in his pocket and he wants a 2-carat F SI stone. Then your formula gets shit-canned.” Richie folded his cashmere coat and hung it behind the safe. “Manny, the GIA helps the customers and it helps us. Get used to it.”

The telephones ringing ended this discussion. Richie Boy and Manny answered them, while I filled the window with rings, necklaces, tennis bracelets, pins, pearls, chokers, and antiques.

“Manny’s nervous enough to make a statue twitch.” Richie Boy hobbled to my side. “Do us a favor and don’t wind him up.”

“All I asked was about the difference in diamond prices.”

“It took Manny 50 years to know what he knows and doesn’t know. Leave him alone. If you want to learn about diamonds, just keep your ears open. In the meanwhile, run this setting up to Eenon to pick out 20 stones. G SI. Five pointers. Got it.”

“And afterwards the stones will be G VS?” 100 points made up a carat, so five pointers were 1/20th of a carat. “It’s what the ‘G’s want.”

All customers were ‘G’s, not because they were goyim like myself, but they always asked for a G color stone like Manny said. I left the store and headed down the street to the front of a 9-story building.

Lenny was by the entrance front mumbling about deBeers.

His audience consisted of errant snowflakes, as everyone rushed about on their chores. He was too drunk to notice my entering the building and I got in a packed elevator, pressing the button for the 8th floor.

A skinny Hassidic setter hadn’t bathed since the Deluge of Noah. I breathed through my mouth until the 8th floor.

Eenon’s office was at the end of a bleak corridor. The walls were a weak lime green and the overhead neon lights fluttered at the end of a long life. Room 805 was magnetically locked and I rang the buzzer, then lifted my face to the CCTV. The door clicked open and I stepped in the waiting room. An old man face popped into the tiny window.

Eenon’s father resembled a featherless chicken and I heard him say, “The goy is here.” Goy and Damien were my two new names on 47th Street.

His father opened the door and indicated that I should sit on a metal folding chair. The small room was decorated with battered desks on which weighing scales were lit by brilliant lamps. Eenon looked up from a parcel of small diamonds with a smile.

“Ach, it is the goy.” Eenon was my age. He liked calling me ‘the goy’, because there were so few gentiles working on 47th Street. “What does Manny want now?”

“20 five-pointers. G SI.”

“He’s willing to pay $550 per carat?” Eenon asked like he hadn’t heard me right.

“I think so. What’s the difference between $500 and $550?”

“A good question.” Eenon usually had a little time to speak with me, probably because I was his only contact with the goyim. He reached over to the pile of loose stones with long-nosed tweezers and placed two small stones on a folded piece of white paper.

“The price is determined by the usual factors. Color, clarity, cut, and carat size. No matter what the size. Look at these two stones. Each one is a 20-pointer. Same cut and clarity and both are the same color. Different costs.”

“And you can tell the difference?” They appeared to both be white to me.

“My father taught me the difference, although when he was learning they called the stones different colors. D was Jager. E and F were River. G and H were Wesselton. I-J were Top Silver, K-L were Top Cape and the rest to Z were designated as Cape to Yellow.”

“Why you wasting your time telling ‘the goy’ this?” His father was seated at his desk, sorting tiny diamonds, each one a glitter under the electric light of his lamp.

“Because he asked a question.”

“You know why they called Wesselton ‘Wesselton’ or Jager ‘Jager’?” The old man pushed back his sleeve. A tattoo was burnt into his wrist, a concentration camp souvenir.

“No.” Eenon answered with a grin.

“What’s so funny? You think you’re tricking an alte kakher into being the goy’s teacher.”

“No one said you were an old man.” Eenon was fluent in English, Hebrew, and Yiddish. “I want him to know the right thing and not lies.”

“Being honest is easier than lying.” His father tsked with the cluck of his tongue. “Zo, Wesselton was the name of a South African mine. The stones out of it were G-H in color. People called E and F River, but no one uses those terms anymore.”

“Same with Jager?” Eenon was not through digging.

“Any more questions are $1 dollar.”

“What is Jager?” I put a dollar on the desk.”

The old man plucked a diamond from an envelope. Maybe a 90-pointer. Almost a carat. There was no mistaking the gin-clear color was a D.

“Jager is the finest diamond color. Why they call it “Jager’?”

He motioned with his hand and I put down another dollar.

“It came from the Jagerfontein Mine.”

“The word means hunter in German and fontein probably means fountain.” I had taken the language in high school.

“Jaeger.” The old man’s eyes narrowed. “Maybe you aren’t such a stupid goy after all.”

"I try." It was the first syllable in ‘triumph’ and I learned that from a proverb on a Salada tea bag.

“One more thing and this is a free answer, because you didn’t ask it. Color is determined by the lack of nitrogen in a stone. The more nitrogen, the yellower the stone.”

“Thanks.” I liked freebies.

“Here are your stones?” Eenon gave me a paper parcel. He had written 20 stones = 1.04 and I signed a memo for the goods.

“When is your boss going to pay for these?”

“Wer wisst.” Manny was a notorious slow payer.

“Who knows?” Eenon’s father shook his head. “I like this goy more and more. Sie gesund.”

“Thanks for the lesson.” Eenon had never explained the difference between 500 per carat and 550 per carat diamonds.

I left the office and went to the elevator. and took it to the ground floor.

Out on the street Lenny was leaning against the wall.

Across the street Manny was in the window.

He would have never told me about Wesselton and I doubted if he knew about Jager. If he did, he wasn’t saying, because the best secrets are the ones you never tell.

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BET ON CRAZY / CARAT WEIGHT by Peter Nolan Smith

The day after Christmas Manny’s longtime partner, Lee, was showing a 7.04 Cushion Cut Round Diamond to a retired couple from West Palm Beach. The sixtyish woman wore a fashionable Dior outfit, though her nasal accent betrayed Brooklyn roots with an envious coo, “I don’t know, it’s so bigggg!"

Her husband’s skin color of an old leather couch from the decades of sun on Long Island and Florida.

"It is big.”

For once he agreed with his wife. He wanted to get back to Boca Raton ASAP, preferably without buying this rock.

“Big? This isn’t big.” Lee, silver-haired and handsome in his early seventies, slipped the platinum ring onto the woman’s finger. “You remember Liz Taylor and Richard Burton? Well, back when we were all young, my good friend, Buzzy Yugler, had a 55-Carat D Flawless Diamond, which sparkled like snow under moonlight. Liz also thought it was a little too big. Buzzy said they get smaller after time and put the ring on her finger. Liz changed her mind and said, “I think I can get used to it.

Acting as if he had been in the room with Liz, Lee guffawed with practiced elegance and slipped his diamond ring on the lady's finger.

"Maybe you're right." She admired the stone with a smile.

"Maybe there's a little Liz in you." The venerable diamond dealer hailed from Brooklyn too. His posh mannerism were inherited from his wife. Her family was French and he patted the woman's hand. "You got used to your husband. You'll get used to this ring too."

The couple laughed with embarrassment and the man sighed, "We'll have to think about it."

"Take your time. We'll be here when you make up your mind." Lee waved good-bye to the couple. Once the door shut, he handed me the ring, “Put this back in the front window."

As I waked past my boss' desk, Manny muttered about Lee’s unabashed schmoozing, “Buzzy Yugler had nothing to do with that sale.”

Whereas Lee had inherited his father’s diamond business on 47th Street, Manny had spent his youth on the streets of Brownsville and learned the jewelry trade on the Bowery from the bottom up. The Italian suits and imported ties pinpointed his rough background, not that he cared a rat’s ass what anyone thought, because he didn’t have to pretend that he appreciate the division of classes in Jewish society.

“What do you mean?” I asked, bringing the 7.04 to the front window.

Carat weight was one of the diamond trades 'Four Cs', because the cost of a stone was determined by the carat weight, cut, and clarity.

“I don’t have time to tell stories.” Manny looked at the wall clock at the back of the exchange. It was past noon and his customer hadn’t arrived with a promised check. He frowned like Jackie Mason not getting a laugh and turned to me. “And neither do you."

I surveyed the sidewalk for prospective customers, however most of the pedestrians were intent on wide-eyed browsing.

"Not much business out there today.”

“Now you hexed the entire day.” Manny tightened his tie and joined me in the window. He was ready for action, but one glance at the street broke his heart and he said, “Buzzy Yugler bid a million dollars for the stone, which wasn’t 55-carat.”

I was old enough to remember Liz Taylor leaving the singer, Eddie Fisher, for Richard Burton during the filming of CLEOPATRA. “

"A million dollars back in 1964 must have been a lot of money.”

“But not enough to buy a 66-carat Pear Shape, because someone beat Buzzy’s bid by three hundred thou, though that failure didn’t prevent his claiming to hail sold Liz the stone.”

“I thought Harry Winston sold Richard Burton the stone.”

“Maybe he did.” Manny shrugged like he heard different. “Abe Padrush offered Elizabeth Taylor two-million three for the stone. She would have sold it to him, except he wanted her to hand it to him personally and be photographed doing so. Publicity like that would have been priceless, but Richard Burton refused. Thought it was too low-class. Goyim, go figure.”

Richard Burton’s rejecting the prime Yiddish tenet of ‘nimmt geld’ or take the money confounded Manny, as did many aspects of gentile behavior. His son, Richie Boy, had been speaking on the telephone, but overheard his father and decided to his father a zug or needle. “You just don’t understand them, because you were brought up on the Bowery.”

“We had plenty of Gs downtown.”

“Yeah, but not like here and you don’t know how to deal with these uptown people.”

Being Yankee Irish I had a lot of better things to do than intermediate the eternal psychological struggle between father and son, but Richie Boy turned to me and said, “You remember than million dollar ruby?”

“How can I forget?”

The deal was ten years ago.

The fingernail-sized stone possessed an awe-inspiring blood red radiance, but I hadn’t seen one million dollars in it and when I had told Richie Boy the same at our old exchange, he had said, “I don’t either, but believe me that’s what it’s worth."

“Your guy isn’t going to buy it!” Manny had insisted, as we examined the stone.

“Why do you always have to be so negative?” Richie Boy had shaken his head.

Richie Boy had lost his looks, but retained a winning affability. His uptown clientele consisted of wealthy millionaires, though none as rich as the president of a West Coast airline who had been looking to buy his married girlfriend, a blonde heiress, something special for her birthday.

The call had been for a very rare natural Burmese ruby over five carats the color of the blood bleeding from a pigeon’s nose.

The vein, not the artery. The customer had been very specific about the details, which meant he had done his research.

Richie Boy called several dealers and within a day found a stone fitting the client's prerequisites.

It wasn’t cheap and the dealer flatly told him, “It's 875,000 dollars and I don’t want to hear any kvetching about the price."

Banned from chiseling the price angered Manny, especially since his son was reaching for stars he couldn’t see.

“I’m not being negative, but no one, and I don’t care how rich they are is going to spend a million dollars for someone else’s wife.”

“Yeah, but he’s going to marry her as soon as she’s free.” Richie Boy protested, though Manny merely laughed, “Think what you like. You’re young. You’ll find out.”

His father stormed away and Richie Boy asked me, “What do you think?”

“It doesn’t look like a big house in the Hamptons, but what do I know about rubies?” I had grown up as a goy on the South Shore of Boston. A house on Jerusalem Road was much less than a cottage in Amagansett, but rich was rich and there was no way that I could ever afford a ruby for a million dollars, unless I took it with a gun.

"Nothing." Richie Boy picked two diamond necklaces as back-up. Both cost over a quarter million. “The G has to buy something.”

An hour later the client phoned to request a meeting at the Regis Hotel

In his room on the tenth floor.

Upon hearing the plan Richie Boy’s father warned that we were being set up.

Neither of us disagreed with his prediction.

"Get the G to come here." G was the street's label for a goy.

"He isn't coming here." Richie Boy had tried that, however the rich didn't like 47th Street's seedy atmosphere.

Manny wanted to kibosh the entire deal.

"Everything is insured to the max." Richie had spent $1000 on a twelve hour addendum to his insurance policy.

“And what if you get robbed on the street?” His father played every negative angle in the search for the right path.

“That’s not going to happen!” Richie was licensed to carry and stuck his 9mm in the shoulder holster.

“You’re not really going to shoot someone, if they try and rob us?” I was no gunman.

“No, nothing is worth dying over, but it will look better on the insurance form, if I was carrying.”

To Richie Boy getting robbed was almost like making a sale, since the insurance companies would have to cover the loss, though both of us could do without the psychological scarring of someone sticking a gun in our face.

As Richie Boy hid the jewelry inside his suit coat and I picked up the front section of the newspaper. His father swore, “What you need a newspaper for?”

I was about to tell him, I wanted something to read, however Richie Boy said, “He broke Doom Darazzio’s nose with a newspaper. One blow.”

Manny’s brother. Seymour the Cop, could attest to my toughness, but that beating was a long time ago and I was only taking the newspaper was to have something to read, while Richie Boy conducted his sale.

Leaving the exchange everyone wished us luck and his father swore, "My fucking heroes."

He was right to be worried, but we arrived at the St. Regis Hotel without incident.

Two guests tried to get on the elevator with us.

Richie Boy and I glared a warning for them to take the next car. Reaching tenth-floor corridor, we smiled nervously. So far everything had gone accordingly to plan.

Richie Boy padded his jacket, as if he thought he might have been pickpocketed by the Invisible Man. He nodded to indicate the jewelry was still on his person and then he pressed the buzzer for suite 1121.

Inside a woman laughed and several second later the door was opened by a naked blonde in high heels. She was in her early forties, but her skin tone was a testament to a strict gym regime.

When Richie Boy and I exchanged a glance, she smiled and drawled straight out of Texas, “C’mon in, boys, we’ve been waitin’ for y’all.”

She sashayed into the main suite, where her older boyfriend rose from the satin couch. He was tall, athletic, and wearing only a bathrobe. He greeted Richie Boy with a handshake and looked at me and asked, “Who’s your friend?”

“He’s the protection for these.”

Richie played it right and withdrew the two diamond necklaces from his jacket.

"Come here," he ordered the woman and draped the diamonds around her neck.

"And let's not forget why you came here?"

He slipped the ruby ring on her finger.

She looked several million dollars richer and her head turned to the airline executive.

"How do I look?"

"Come into the bedroom and I'll tell you."

The bedroom door shut and Richie Boy motioned for me to go into the corridor.

"What if they leave by the window?"

"I'll shoot them off it." He went to the window and I stepped outside.

Then minutes later Richie Boy opened the door.

"He likes the bigger necklace."

"What about the ruby?"

"Back in my pocket." He showed me a check.

"It was for $330,000, which was more than we would earn in several years.

Back at the store everyone congratulated Richie boy on the sale. His father shrugged and said, “I told you that he wouldn’t go for the ruby.”

“Yeah, you’re always right.” Richie Boy retold the story. Lee came over and turned up his hearing aid, since he liked to hear about the schitzah’s being naked as much as the blonde buying his piece.

“You would,” Manny commented, since Lee’s admiration of blonde gentile woman was endemic to the most Jewish men. “But I’ll tell you another story.”

“Not about your girlfriend!” Richie Boy groaned.

“No, I’ll tell you a story about schitzahs that will curl your hair.” Manny smoothed down his Caesaresque coif for effect and then continued, “I was working down on the Bowery before you came to work for me, Richie.”

“Back in the Stone Age before the car and telephones!” Lee joked, but Manny was two years younger and said, “You remember those days just as good as me, if not better, but this was also when the blondes were really blondes and not out of a blonde out of a bottle. Well, maybe half of them were real.”

Manny had everyone's attention, including the two Hassidic diamond brokers at the counter.

“It was summertime, maybe 1971. Hilda and I were doing good. She was a lot like Richie in that she could sell rain at a picnic. Anyway this day she’s not working and I’m in the store with Norman.”

“Norman!” Everyone remembered Manny’s first employee and some not fondly, especially Richie Boy, who announced, “Best thing I did two years ago was fire that kuchleffle!”

As far as I could recall, Norman retired once he inherited his mother’s money, but Manny raised his hands, “Norman was a shit-stirrer, but back then he was a real lady’s man back then. He won the Lido Beach Club Body-building contest all through the sixties.”

“And you call that a talent?” Lee asked and Manny answered with a smile, “It worked for me. Anyway this one afternoon I see Norman outside talking with this beautiful blonde. I mean, she’s like a Vegas showgirl. He comes in with her and I expected him to go down to the vault, but instead he tells me she’s looking for a diamond ring. A big one. Five carat. I know not as big as Liz Taylor’s or and certainly not more money than you got for that diamond necklace.”

This story sounded very familiar, because I had heard it from Norman. Manny noticed my dismissive gaze and said, “Norman likes to tell it that he sold her the diamond and got screwed later, but she said to me, “I have this boyfriend. He’ll buy me anything I want. He won’t chisel you for the price, but I want you to give me half the profit.”

“I couldn’t believe my ears and thought she was pulling a scam, but the guy came in, didn’t squawk about the price, and she left with him. Ring, box, go.”

“And so then what happened?” one of the Hassidic brokers asked, stroking his salt-and-pepper beard.

“Well, she came back just like she said she would and I paid her what I owed her."

“Half?” Lee demanded incredulously.

“Fifty-fifty above my cost.” This split could have meant anything, but Manny stilled all other questions by saying, “She was happy, but gave me back the ring.”

“She wanted you to buy it back?”

Manny shook his head.

“No, she said she wanted me to sell it back to her.”

“What?” Everyone asked in unison.

“She tells me she has another boyfriend, who wants to buy her a ring, but she can’t have two, otherwise she won’t remember which is which could lead to complications, so she says, “Sell me this ring again and we’ll split the money fifty-fifty.”

Manny eyed everyone.

Nobody attacked the morality of what the woman proposed and Manny said, “I did what I thought was best.”

“Which means?“ Lee demanded in suspect curiosity.

“That nobody got hurt.” Manny’s last word coincided with the arrival of a young couple looking for an engagement ring. I heard Richie Boy start to say, “You're up."

I turned to the young couple, “When are you getting married?”

“September,” the twenty-two year-old brunette announced as if the vision of her wedding was playing inside her mind.

“2002?”

“No, 2003.” The man put his arm around his future bride.

Manny and Richie Boy chuckled and said, “A WOT.”

They were probably right about the couple being a 'waste of time', but you never knew where missionary work would lead, so I said, “Congratulations.”

"How big you looking for?"

"A little less than a carat?"

"Nice size."

And I wasn’t lying, because in diamonds the best stone is the one you sell and in December 2002 2003 was just around the corner.

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SOME CHOWDAH, BOBBY by Peter Nolan Smith

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.

A Xmas Tale/ BET ON CRAZY

Three years ago Christmas sales were few and far between on 47th Street. The depression has robbed the middle-class of their imagined wealth. Diamonds and jewelry purchases have been sacrificed to pay mortgages and credit card bills. America as a nation continued to suffer from the banking debacle, the collapse of the car industry, and the two wars in Asia. Thankfully Richie Boy has rich clients who are taking advantage of the downturn to buy high-grade diamonds and luxury jewelry with ruthless bargaining.

"We squeaked out another year." Richie Boy toasted our few successes at the Oyster Bar three days before Xmas. The wine was Austrian and the oysters had been harvested in New England. His wife was happy with both.

"A million-dollar ruby sale, a couple of rich guys buying big items, and a few lucky sales off the street." I had sold an Italian suite of pearls and sapphires to a Swiss couple and the ruby to a woman from Boca Raton. Richie Boy's client was the richest man in New York. I'm sworn to secrecy about his purchases and his name. "We were lucky."

"And we showed up to work every day. 90% of success is showing up on time."

"Or not too late." I arrived at the diamond exchange fifteen minutes after the opening time of 9:30 every day without exception. It was my one perp after working there for twenty years. "Here's to 2010."

As happy as we were with the season, Richie Boy's father shared none of our positivity. The bills came in faster than the money. His son's spending was profligate, but Richie Boy deserved every c-note. Without him the firm would be another dark window on 47th street.

The next morning Manny brandished the bill from the Oyster Bar.

"$4 for an oyster. They sell them at Doc's for $1 at Happy Hour." Doc's was his local bar on 34th Street.

"Happy hour ends at 7 and we worked until 7:30." I had worked 7 days a week since my return from Thailand the week after Thanksgiving.

"And only two of them were $4. Willapas as big as your palm." Richie Boy had been disgusted by the size. "The goy loved them."

"Almost as much as the clams casino. Oysters wrapped in bacon." I turned to Benzy, my Hassidic diamond broker. He's a big Yankee fan. We're friends anyway. "If oyster are tref and bacon is tref, do two tref make something kosher like two negatives make a positive in math."

"That's a good question." Benzy laughed with the joy of a man with six healthy children, which was a small family for the Hassidim in Williamsburg. "I'll ask my rabbi. He has a good sense of humor."

Not Manny.

He hated Richie Boy and me for spending money on oysters.

"Why are you so miserable?" Richie Boy wasn't allowing his father to ruin his holiday. He was heading up to Vermont on Christmas Eve and then off to St. Bart's with his wife for the New Year's. Richie Boy had a good life and his father ruined every success with a bucket of Grinch. Manny reviewed our sales, as if each was a dead loss.

"You should have got more profit for the jewelry suite."

"I'll take $20,000 on a $50,000 sale any day." The commission paid the flight to Thailand.

"Big hero." He thought that I should have hit them for 70K. "I would have let them walk."

No one was exempt from his holiday gloom. He schlepped every dealer to the last minute. He chided my co-workers for every supposed fault. I told Richie to give us our bonuses before his departure to Vermont, otherwise his father would divine some way to make us miserable.

"I'm out of my here at 2:30." Richie Boy distributed our pay and Xmas bonus. He had wanted to give me a G. Manny cut it down to $800. I thanked them both. Manny had stiffed me with a nothing bonus the previous year.

"Manny, let them out early. They're goys and have family." Richie Boy cared about us, although not enough to stick around to insure an early Christmas Eve closing. He had a long drive in front of him and was eager to leave behind the grumblings of his old man.

"I'll let them go at 7." The exchange closed at that hour from Thanksgiving to Christmas Eve.

"Funny."

Only Manny wasn't joking about his remake of Dicken's classic Xmas tale. Manny was Scrooge and I was Bob Crachtit. Everyone wanted to go home, but Manny wanted to show he was still boss.

"Manny, could you at least let Deisy go home early? She has a baby and needs to go to church." I pleaded between muttered curses.

"She's go home at the normal hour."

And we sat there for another two hours without a single customer entering the store, so I went out and bought some beers to drink. I didn't offer Manny a sip. He kept his head down and crunched numbers on his ancient accounting machine.

"Fucking mean old shit."

At ten to 5 I started pulling the back showcases.

"It's not five yet." Manny lifted his head and tapped his watch.

"Then buy a new watch. The computer says 5. My watch says 5. My phone says 5. The clock in the back says 5 and you had the landlord retime it five minutes slow to get another few minutes of shopping time. We're closing."

"Since when have you become my boss."

"I'm not the boss. I'm a goy and we celebrate Christmas."

"You're a non-believer." Manny remembered my many rants against the Church.

"Not today. Deisy start pulling."

"Deisy, don't do anything."

"Manny, give it up. We're going home."

"Why don't you go home and don't come back?"

"I can't, because Richie Boy asked me to look after you."

"I don't need anyone looking after me."

Manny was seething with anger. The octagenarian's friends have died or retired to Florida. His girlfriend lived in Miami. He doesn't want to join them and rightfully so because most of them sit in their rooms watching the wall. By coming to work Manny got to pretend that he was actually doing something useful and truthfully the only reason I could show up fifteen minutes late was that Manny arrived at 9:30 every day without fail. Richie Boy's 'extravagant' life style was managed by his father's careful balancing of the checkbook.

Manny might have been Scrooge, but he was my Scrooge and after closing the safe I wished my longtime boss a good holiday.

Deisy was gone. It was just him and me.

"You feel like a drink?" Manny got up from his papers and I handed him his coat. It was cold outside.

"Down the street?" I had nowhere to go this Christmas Eve.

"Anywhere as long as they had wine and maybe some oysters." He knew me well.

"Sounds good to me." I was still pissed at the old git, but Manny wasn't that different from me and neither is everyone else.

We all have a little bit of the Grinch in us this time of year, for as Manny likes to say, "There is no season for giving."

And ain't that the truth, especially if you like oysters and they tasted might good on Manny's tab.