SHABBAS STARKER - BET ON CRAZY by Peter Nolan Smith

New York in the 70s was a tough place. Tough guys were a dime a dozen. Killers cost a lot more.

Nowadays some guys think they are tough.

Few of them are.

Four years ago Richie Boy, his father Manny and I went to Sofia's on West 48th Street for an after-work drink.

Sitting at the bar was Lil Joe; 6-3 and 300 pounds plus. He had left several jade pieces on consignment at our store. No one had looked at them yet.

We waved for him to join us for a beer. He plodded over with his cashmere coat over his muscular arm. I could have used it as a tent.

"He's good for a laugh." Richie Boy liked a good story and Lil' Joe told of his diving venture on the East River.

"I have access to a shipwreck in the East River."

"The General Slocum?" That excursion liner exploded in 1904 with 1300 souls on board. 1100 perished in the accident, which had been New York's greatest disaster until 9/11.

"No." Lil Joe shook his elephantine head. "It's a British ship from the Revolutionary War."

"What you got off it so far?" Richie Boy was hoping for gold coins. Doubloons were popular with his hedge funder clientele.

"Just some broken plates. It's not easy diving the site."

"Why not?" Manny had swum in the East River as a kid. He came from Brownsville.

"Because the wreck is located in Hell's Gate and they called it that, because the East River and Harlem River meet the Long Island Sound and unlike many confluences which have smooth bottoms, Hell's Gate has jagged rocks on the bottom. Hundreds" Big Joe sounded like an expers. "Visibility is sometimes less than zero and the current runs at 13 knots. We're lucky to get twenty minutes of diving at slack tide."

"Treacherous waters." I had seen the rip tides tear through those straits.

We drank a few beers and Lil Joe told a few more war stories about diamond purchases in Tanzania. Each entailed more danger than most people liked to experience other than at the movies.

"Is Lil Joe bullshit?" asked Richie Boy, when the big man went to the washroom.

"All stories are true, if interesting."

A few more beers were consumed and it was time to head home, because happy hour is my new midnight.

I got Manny his coat. The old man has lost some freedom of movement. Lil Joe slid off his stool.

"I'll help you."

"Piss off," snarled Manny. He didn't need any help from a stranger.

"I could be your bodyguard," Lil Joe offered with a smile.

"The day I need a bodyguard is the day you can throw dirt on my grave." Manny pointed to me. "Besides I have the shabbas starker with me."

"Shabbas starker?" Lil Joe wasn't fluent in Yiddish.

"Shabbas means 'the holy day' and 'starker' means tough guy," I explained Manny's reworking of 'shabbas goy'.

"You tough?" scoffed Lil Joe. He was twenty years younger and had me by a good 120 pounds.

"He was known as Maddog on his good days." Richie Boy had witnessed my performance at various after-hour nightclubs.

"I'm quiet now, but manny is a true starker straight out of Brownsville."

"Never ran never will." Manny had lived the motto most every day of his life.

"And Manny doesn't need a bodyguard. He could take you right now by himself and wipe that smirk off your face. Two years ago Manny was playing tennis with a friend. After the game they stopped at a bar. He looked down the bar and sees this guy who took 50K from him on a memo. Manny excuses himself from his friend and took out his racket. The gonif sees Manny and tries to run, but Manny swacks him the kopf with the tennis racket."

"My best serve of the year," Manny added with a smile.

"Manny swats him a few more times for a good measure> Everyone in the bar is horrified, except his friend, who drinks like this is nothing new, and manny lifts the gonif to his feet, saying, "Everyone remain calm. I'm making a citizen's arrest. Call 911."

"A stupid move, because we go back to the gonif's apartment and he has all my jewelry. The police confiscate it all as evidence." It took me two years to get it back from the thieves."

"So Manny doesn't need me or you." I poked Big Joe in the chest.

At 61 I was a shadow of that Maddog, although the last year at the steel mill had tightened my muscles.

"Well, my family is from the Bronx," Lil Joe mentioned a Mafia gang.

"But they're not here and Maddog is." Manny let me help him on with his coat.

"Sorry, Lil Joe, but a starker is a starker and you go to the grave with that rep," I had to tell him the truth, for amongst starkers no one tells their own tales.

Richie Boy paid the bill and we got his father a taxi.

"You might think you're tough, but I was tough when tough meant something." Manny wasn't leaving without a barb.

"And that's true." There's nothing wrong with letting an old starker having the last word.

After watching the old man disappear into traffic, his son asked, "You think you could take Lil Joe?"

"He's veakling. You know I don't fight fair. Same as your old man."

"Some things never change."

"What about another beer?"

"Downtown."

"Where else?"

He caught a cab to Balthazar.

No one cared about tough guys there.

Starkers neither.

ps we don't turn off lights on Shabbas and we are peaceful as long as everyone else is.

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.