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.

KOSHER PORK - BET ON CRAZY

Business in the Diamond District is spotty after the 4th of July. Most New Yorkers are preparing for summer vacations. Tourists enter our diamond exchange to gawk at the diamonds and jewelry. At least twice a day out-of-towners ask in complete seriousness, "Are they real?"

"Everything is real." I answer the visitors and launch 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 have lost value three years in a row. My boss Richie Boy doesn't have the patience for these rubes, but occasionally they are buyers.

This Wednesday 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 turns him on like a drag racer on nitro.

Thursday he delivered a 31-inch diamond necklace set with certified .40 ct diamonds. The piece was a magnificent blaze of reflected light set in platinum. His customer makes millions every day. He could shop at Harry Winston, but Richie Boy and he go back to the 80s. Both are loyal to each other. Richie Boy returned to the store after closing and said, "That's it I'm headed out to my surf shack."

Fridays were dead on 47th Street. 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. None of us were broke. A rarity for many men in 2011.

"What are you doing this weekend?" A newly-married diamond dealer asked him.

"I'm having a kosher pig BBQ."

"How can pig be kosher?" Marvin had eaten pork a few times in his life. The balding 50 year-old wasn't glatt kosher, but neither was he a bacon Jew. One thing he was was gullible. Marvin had been the president of the glee club of a summer camp in the Jewish Alps. He was a good boy.

"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 pork."

Marvin departed, promising 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 would have kvetched like an old yenta. Manny was addicted to work. 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?" I had a slew of contradictory theories.

"It caused people to have worms in the old days." Richie Boy checked the store. Nothing valuable was on the desks. He nodded for me to shut the safe. "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 each other's stories enough to give them numbers. I was still capable of catching him off-guard. "Pork is tref no matter what. Leviticus condemns 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."

"It sounds as dry as an old shoe." Richie Boy possessed a better than average epicurean palate. he hated common food other than pizza, pastrami sandwiches, hamburger, and chicken Parmesan.

"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. It was considered the city's signature dish. "Pigs with little toes."

"Stop. That's sacrilege."

"Sacrilege and heresy are my specialties." I set the alarm. Friday was my last day on the job. Two and a half years ago I had returned to New York with $100 in my pocket. Things were better now. I 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.

BAD MAN by Peter Nolan Smith

In February of 2013 the president of a private jet charter service invited me to dinner at the Oyster Bar. I accepted without hesitation, because I was a born and bred New Englander and nowhere else in the city served a wider variety of oysters.

“You don’t mind if I my girlfriend and her daughter join us?” Enos liked to compartmentalize his world into separate entities.

“Why would it bother me?” I had met his lover once. Cheryll seemed a very nice woman.

“No reason. Just that I don’t want to hear anything about a diamond ring.” The portly fifty-year old executive was a devout bachelor

“Diamonds make women happy.”

Sandy had killed business in the Diamond District, so I wasn’t working for my old firm, but any profit went straight into my pocket. With four kids I could use the money from a sale to Enos.

“They’re a girl’s best friend.”

“And a dog is man’s best friend.”

“That’s true.” My puppy Champoo had loved me more than fried liver.

“So no talk about diamonds. Especially in front of Cheryll. She’s dying to make me an honest man.”

“Not a chance of that.” The Oyster Bar was about oyster and lobster.” I won’t say a word about diamonds.”

I hung up and later in the day traveled by subway from Fort Greene to Grand Central Terminal. I spotted Enos at the entrance to the subterranean restaurant. My friend had gained weight and more than a few pounds, but his curly hair had lost none of its spring.

“Good to see you.” The big man wore a tailored suit. Leasing jets was good business as long as you dealt with the rich. “I like the tan. How’s the family?”

“Everyone’s good.” I had just returned from a month-long visit to my kids in Thailand. “How’s your dad?”

“Holding on?” Enos and his elderly parents had weathered hurricane Sandy on Rockaway. “I thought we were goners, but the surge ended with the high-tide. The house is a wreck.”

“Any disaster from which you can walk away from is a good thing.”

“My pilots always say that about crashes.”

“True is true.”

We walked inside the restaurant. The Oyster Bar’s vaulted tile ceiling was a bastion of timelessness. Waiters in white apron shucked Malpecs, Blue Points, Belons, and Hog Islands. Diners were happy with their meals. It was a good place to be.

“My father loved oysters. He used to eat fried clams from Wollaston Beach and wash them down with a chocolate milk shake without a belch afterwards.”

“I wish I had that stomach.” Enos tapped his bass drum girth and signaled the counterman for oysters.

“Shouldn’t we wait for your girls?”
Enos and I sat at the counter. The dining rooms were for out-of-towners and couples.

“Cheryll’s daughter is a vegan. She doesn’t eat fish.”

“No oysters either?”

“None.”

The waitress handed us menus, but Enos waved them away. While he came from a good Jewish family, nothing was too tref or unclean for his palate. “Mind if I order for us?”

“Not at all.”

“Clams casino to start and a glass of Riesling for my friend. I’ll have water.” Enos had stopped drinking and drugs three years ago. It was either cold turkey or a cold grave. He looked better above ground. “Then an assortment of oysters and two lobster stews.” I ordered a glass of Chardonnay. Enos had stopped drinking three years ago. He was fine with tap water.

“I have a question.”

The waitress brought an Austrian Riesling blessed by the sun shining on the Danube’s northern slopes.

“What?” Enos asked, as if I needed a loan.

“This is a dietary question of religion.”

“Meaning a Jewish question.” The waitress placed the clams casino between us.

“Yes.” I had been a diamond firm's Sabbath goy for two decades and considered myself a scholar of Judaica. “It’s a simple query. Bacon is tref and clams are tref, right?”

“Right.” Enos lipped the delicacy with pleasure.

“So in physics and mathematics two negatives make a positive, right?” I popped a clam casino in my mouth. The combined taste of pig and shellfish was a sin of delight.

“Right.” A plate of oysters crowded the counter. They smelled of the ocean.

“So if bacon and shellfish are both tref and you eat them together, does that make them non-tref?”

“According to my calculations, yes, although my father would say no.”

Enos popped two oysters into his mouth. He might have stopped blow, but he was eating a little too fast for a man approaching 280.

“They’re fine as long as we eat them before my girlfriend’s daughter arrives. She’s a vegan Nazi.”

“Vegans hate us.” We were omnivores and devoted the next twenty minutes to devouring the clams casino and a dozen Malpecs, and two lobster stews.

As the waitress replaced our empty plate with lobster stew, Enos’ girlfriend arrived at the counter. She kissed my host with love and her twelve year-old daughter gave him a hug.

“This is Naomi.” Cheryll introduced her precious offspring. “She’s an actress in training.”

“Hello.” Her skinny daughter exuded a toughness hewed from a thousand refusals. She pointed a finger at my plate “You eat dead food?”

“We had a bi-valval feast.”

“You’re a bad man.” Her neo-ingénue eyes were trained to seduce casting directors. Her scrawny beauty might blossom into stardom with the right training and her succubus eyes disregarded my age. I was simply another old geezer to wrap around her accusing finger.

“You couldn’t believe how bad.”
Enos and Cheryll were deep in conversation, happy that I was diverting the little monster.

“How bad?” Naomi wanted to know.

“I was brought up along the coast of Maine. Every summer a whale would get confused in the shoals and end up beached on the sands as the sea retreated on the tide. The fishermen fought off the sharks and cut off the best pieces of whale meat for their families.”

“You ate whale?” Her eyes widened in horror.

"Not then."

"Another time?"

"Yes, there was a fish store in Boston's Haymarket that sold whale meat sandwiches. I went there with a college friend." Fred was a hippie. We all were in 1973. "I have to say it was the best thing I’ve eaten in my life.” Once was enough for a lifetime and I didn’t tell that to the little precious actress.

“You’re worst than bad.”

“What's worse than Evil?”

“Fucking evil,” Naomi whispered those two words with a biting accuracy.

"What was that?" asked Cheryll. Like all mothers she had good ears.

"Nothing," we answered with smiles. My evilness was our secret.

Cheryll resumed his conversation with Enos and I turned to He was good around other people’s children.

“I like how you sold those two words. You want me to give your headshot to a casting director?”

"Don't smoke smoke up my ass." Naomi was older than her years.

"I'm serious."

“You know someone?”

“Not just someone.”

I dropped the name of the biggest casting director in the city.

“You can get my headshot to her?" The skinny waif flip-flopped from disapproval to delight.

“Yes.” Nina was a longtime friend.

"You're not joking?" asked her mother, who had heard the name.

"No, I can send her the information." I had never asked my friend for a favor and this wasn't one. I thought that Naomi had something. "I can't promise anything."

“I know that, but thank you.” Cheryll understood that I was doing a mitzvah.

“Thank me, if something happens.”

Enos winked at me. He thought that I was lying to help him with Cheryll and Naomi caught the wink.

“You really know her?” The daughter was used to men using her mother.

“Yes.” Enos wasn’t a bad man and tonight he would be happy with Naomi asleep in the next room while he was on top of her mother. I leaned over to the young girl and asked, "So am I still 'fucking evil'?"

"As evil as Satan, but even the Devil has his good points."

“Thanks." I really meant and signaled for the waitress. "A half-dozen Wellfleets."

Naomi's eyes condemned my badness.

I smiled at her without saying another world

The Wellfleets reminded me of summers on Cape Cod and I felt like a million dollar, because it wasn’t every day a twelve year-old girl called a man my age ‘evil’ and Naomi knew bad, because like all girls she was made of sugar and spice and certainly not from oysters or whale.

A TRAIN STATION WITHOUT TRAINS by Peter Nolan Smith

A TRAIN STATION WITHOUT TRAINS is a collection of four stories set in New York's Grand Central Terminal. Millions of tourists come to view one of the largest open air interiors in the world and while I've traveled north from the station, I've also spent time eating and drinking at the fabled Oyster Bar and traversed the great floor of Tennessee pink marble countless times. My path is never the same and neither are these tales, because leaving the station is almost as pleasurable as staying there.

I love oysters.

EXCERPT

BAD MAN by Peter Nolan Smith

In February of 2013 the president of a private jet charter service invited me to dinner at the Oyster Bar.

I accepted without hesitation, because I was a native New Englander and nowhere else in the city served a wider variety of oysters.

“You don’t mind if I my girlfriend and her daughter join us?” Enos liked to compartmentalize his world into separate entities.

“Why would it bother me?” I had met his lover once. Cheryll seemed a very nice woman.

“No reason. Just that I don’t want to hear anything about a diamond ring.” The portly fifty-year old executive was a devout bachelor

“Diamonds make women not so much happy as happier.”

Hurricane Sandy had killed business in the Diamond District, so I wasn’t working for my old firm, but any profit went straight into my pocket. With four kids I could use the money from a sale to Enos.

“They’re a girl’s best friend.”

“And a dog is man’s best friend.”

“That’s true.” My puppy Champoo had loved me more than fried liver.

“So no talk about diamonds. Especially in front of Cheryll. She’s dying to make me an honest man.”

“Not a chance of that.” The Oyster Bar is about oyster and lobster.” I won’t say a word about diamonds.”

I hung up and later in the day traveled by subway from Fort Greene to Grand Central Terminal. I spotted Enos at the entrance to the subterranean restaurant. My friend had gained weight and more than a few pounds, but his curly hair had lost none of its spring.

“Good to see you.” The big man was wearing a tailored suit. Business these days was good as long as you dealt with the rich. “I like the tan. How’s the family?”

Everyone’s good.” I had just returned from a month-long visit to my kids in Thailand. “How’s your dad?”

“Holding on?” Enos and his elderly parents had weathered the hurricane on Rockaway. “I thought we were goners, but the surge ended with the high-tide. The house is a wreck.”

“Any disaster from which you can walk away from is a good thing.”

“My pilots always say that about crashes.”

“True is true.”

We walked inside the restaurant. The Oyster Bar’s vaulted tile ceiling was a bastion of timelessness. Waiters in white apron were shucking Malpecs, Blue Points, Belons, and Hog Islands. Diners were happy with their meals. It was a good place to be.

“My father loved oysters. He used to eat fried clams from Wollaston Beach and wash them down with a chocolate milk shake without a belch afterwards.”

“I wish I had that stomach.” Enos tapped his bass drum girth.

“Shouldn’t we wait for your girls?”
Enos and I sat at the counter. The dining rooms were for out-of-towners and couples.

“Cheryll’s daughter is a vegan. She doesn’t eat fish.”

“No oysters either?”

“None.”

The waitress handed us menus, but Enos waved them away. While he came from a good Jewish family, nothing was too tref or unclean for his palate. “Mind if I order for us?”

“Not at all.”

“Clams casino to start and a glass of Riesling for my friend. I’ll have water.” Enos had stopped drinking and drugs three years ago. It was either cold turkey or a cold grave. He looked better above ground.

“Then an assortment of oysters and two lobster stews.” I ordered a glass of Chardonnay. Enos had stopped drinking three years ago. He was fine with tap water.

“I have a question.”

The waitress brought an Austrian Riesling blessed by the sun shining on the Danube’s northern slopes.

“What?” Enos asked, as if I needed a loan.

“This is a dietary question of religion.”

“Meaning a Jewish question.” The waitress placed the clams’ casino between us.

“Yes.” I had been the Sabbath goy for two decades and considered myself a scholar of Judaica. “It’s a simple query. Bacon is tref and clams are tref, right?”

“Right.” Enos lipped the delicacy with pleasure.

“So in physics and mathematics two negatives make a positive, right?”

I popped a clam casino in my mouth. The combined taste of pig and shellfish was a sin of delight.

“Right.” The plate of oysters crowded the counter. They smelled of the ocean.

“So if bacon and shellfish are both tref and you eat them together, does that make them non-tref?”

“According to my calculations, yes, although my father would say no.”
Enos popped two oysters into his mouth. He might have stopped blow, but he was eating a little too fast for a man approaching 280.

“They’re a Fargenign or delight as long as we eat them before my girlfriend’s daughter arrives. She’s a vegan Nazi.” Enos loved interspersing his sentences with Yiddish.

“Vegans hate us.” We were omnivores and devoted the next twenty minutes to devouring the clams’ casino and a dozen Malpecs, and two lobster stews.

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It's a mitzvah for you and me both.