The king is dead, long live the common man.
King and Rose went to King’s favorite steakhouse, RIVER STEAK AND CHOP-HOUSE. He always went there with Rose, exclusively. He did not want anybody to Inadvertently say anything about the bimbos he might be seen with at other places. He did not want to have to explain that Rose was his wife Instead of Introducing her as his friend.
RIVER STEAKHOUSE aspired to be appealing, warm and quaint and was convincingly decked out like an old English alehouse. It was located on the not too scenic river, near where the fireboats docked. It had a little window by the front door that looked into a refrigerated case. The case was filled with Prime graded cuts of beef, heavily marbled and thick barked with fat. They all had been rolled with the triple blueberry stamp of U.S. PRIME.
RIVER STEAKHOUSE aspired to be appealing, warm and quaint and was convincingly decked out like an old English alehouse. It was located on the not too scenic river, near where the fireboats docked. It had a little window by the front door that looked into a refrigerated case. The case was filled with Prime graded cuts of beef, heavily marbled and thick barked with fat. They all had been rolled with the triple blueberry stamp of U.S. PRIME. There also were lamb cuts and veal cuts, but they were not as dramatic as the massive cuts of beef.
River steakhouse boasted that all of their beef was aged at least two weeks. Indeed, they had a huge refrigerated cellar filled with aging beef where the fat, florid owner escorted Rose and King on an incredibly boring tour of the sawdust strewn cooler that smelled of sour blood.
“What a fucking dump. They kill the stuff here too? Jesus, I’m hungry”, thought King.
King hoisted Rose and put her on the tray of the massive dial scale. “Obviously I couldn’t charge by the pound unless you put on some weight.” He gave a leering wink to the red-faced restaurateur. He nearly burned her with his massive cigar; she was about to kick him in the balls but was kept busy avoiding the smoldering but red-hot tip of burning ash.
The restaurant had an outdoor dining deck; no one in their right mind would eat there because of the intense sulphurous smell of pollution from the steel mills and oil refineries on the river. Inside they had done a credible job of creating an opulent but understated ambience with white linen tablecloths, waiters in formal shirts and white aprons tied just below the arm pits. Original oil paintings of English pastoral scenes decorated the dining room. Photographs of some of the prize winning Angus Bulls with their massive nether parts grazing the ground that the restaurant had purchased hung on the walnut paneled hall leading to the restrooms. The lights were down and there was a soft glow from candles and brass lamps reflected in the windows from within and from the reflection of the strings of outdoor light decorations against the glossy dead black river without.
The Hostess seated King and Rose by a huge bay window overlooking the river, he tipped her lavishly with an exaggerated emphasis on his avuncular familiarity with her.
“What a babe, I’d like to get into her pants. Can’t pick her up here though, wouldn’t have anywhere to take Rose. She’d know in a second.” He was thinking. He was always thinking about the current situation, not just observing it. It was his nature to get the most out of any situation, despite the attached taboo.
The river had a glossy blackness by day as well as at night because of the seemingly permanent foot-thick oil slick on the river. The only difference was that at night the unending procession of flotsam was not visible. No toilet seats waltzing with railroad ties accompanied by store mannequins who seemed to be extravagantly pointing out the riches of the river, their wide eyes conveying wonder at what happened. Their mysterious smiles conveyed a determination to sail on no matter what, on the banana peel, coffee ground, paper bag full of garbage and empty beer bottle, railroad tie trash; no matter what. A waning gibbous moon barely illuminated the river through the cloudy sky and stench of pollution that blanketed the city on most days. A year from then, sparks from a railroad car would engulf the river in flames.
King ordered a porterhouse steak. “About that thick” he held his thumb and forefinger apart about an inch and a half to demonstrate how thick he wanted his steak.
“Christ, she’s going to order a fucking salad in a steakhouse”, he thought anticipating Rose’s next move. Rose ordered a salad and a Manhattan. King drank a double-bourbon on the rocks and was drunk by the time the food arrived. He ordered them to find the biggest baked potato that they could and it arrived on its own plate. He took delight in ceremoniously smothering it with salt, butter, chives and sour cream. His steak, a monstrosity of red flesh and blackened bone oozing barely cooked beef juices, arrived on wooden plank buried in a pewter plate.
The headwaiter assisted the waiter with placing the steaming raft before him. He rubbed his hands together, flashing his diamond cuff links, his wide smile, outlined with a pencil thin moustache, his hands displaying diamond pinky rings and manicured fingers. His voice was husky, low, a hint of the east coast but soft. He had the air of the lord of the manor, he loved himself and the wait-people were happy for him and relieved that he was pleased.
“Very nice, very nice.” He said, making a circular motion with his palms together, gloating over the feast.
“I live for this shit. Getting laid, too”, he thought.
He ordered the porterhouse because he said that it was the king of steaks. It had that description of the porterhouse steak in the menu. He pointed that out to Rose as a condescending gesture. She gave him a disgusted look, he treated that to mean that she was just a poor and ungrateful student of himself.
The waiter prepared Rose’s Caesar salad at the table. Rose began smoking; the waiter took her plate away. She never moved a muscle when he did; she just smoked and watched King with a smoldering hatred. “I can’t believe that I have to watch this pig eat”, she thought.
When King’s steak arrived with the superior flourishes of his servers, it was rare. “You can only do this with a prime piece of meat”, he instructed her. He seemed to disregard her emotional state entirely and spoke as if to one of his bimbos, on who he was bestowing the benevolent knowledge of his worldliness. Rose was seething with anger by then; she ordered another Manhattan, lit another cigarette and continued to watch his performance.
He started cutting up his steak at the tail end of the strip and methodically worked his way up. He would save the tenderloin portion for last, after offering it to Rose. He would chew his meat perfunctorily, maybe four times at the most and swallow his chunk of beef. He only put it in his mouth to get the flavor and then get rid of it as fast as possible by swallowing. Eating such a huge piece of meat presented a status opportunity for him and a burden as well, a responsibility even, that he assumed with a brave gluttony.
He was careful to excise any disconnected pin bone. On his next bite of meat, there was a small sliver of needle sharp bone attached to his piece of steak, so that when he began choking on it, the bone held the piece of meat in his throat, obstructing his trachea. He could not swallow the meat because he put too big of a piece in his mouth and it was still nearly whole. He could not cough it up because the lodged needle like end of the bone was keeping the meat from going retrograde.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, this is bad.” He thought frantically to himself, experiencing a strange, self-conscious, slow motion.
All five of the waiters jumped to his aid. They were used to this, it happened about twice a week and by now all of the waiters had experience with saving their customers from oversized chunks of meat that they swallowed. They pounded King on his back but he was starting to turn blue. The headwaiter had to take the drastic step of trying to remove the obstruction by pulling it out by hand. He got a few fibers of the steak between his thumb and forefinger but as he pulled the meat in a pincer grasp, the fibers gave way and he lost his grip, repeatedly. He tried this technique again, and again but the pin bone was embedded deeply enough that he could only remove the steak a few, rarely cooked, almost raw fibers at a time.
“What the fuck? Grab the bastard. Tell the horse, cunt, thanks…” his last thoughts, which, made perfect sense to him.
By the time the fire department arrived, he was dead. The freshness of his tailored silk suit made him look like Ronald Reagan playing dead except for his blue head.
Rose lit another cigarette and her waiter quietly brought her coffee. King was lying on the floor by the table where the firemen had worked on him. They covered him with a tablecloth. The patrons had left the restaurant.
Men in dark suits and dark coats from the funeral parlor came and took King’s body away. Rose paid the bill for dinner and over tipped the waiter from the roll of cash that the fireman fished out of King’s front pants pocket. Rose had the headwaiter bring her the biggest cigar they had in stock. King always finished his dinner with a cigar and coffee with a shot of cognac in it. The cigar was an El Presidente, Cuban. The headwaiter fiddled with the cigar using his little cigar tool and then lit it in his mouth for Rose. He got it fired up with a few furious priming puffs. She had to puff on it with greater vigor than she anticipated expending in order to make sure it stayed lit.
“Here’s a guy who makes a living lighting cigars for people, shmuckhead.”. she thought to herself. She tipped him ten dollars and skipped coffee, then she asked her waiter if someone would bring her car around.
This was King’s blue Cadillac sedan de-ville; she had a pink Cadillac convertible. Her car had wood blocks on all of the pedals; she needed them because she sat on an extra cushion in order to be high enough to see through the windshield. She also had a suicide knob on the steering wheel that gave her enough leverage in order to turn the steering wheel when maneuvering the big car. His car was not equipped to accommodate her. She positioned the seat as far forward as it would go, she rolled up her floor length mink coat and sat on it.
Rose pointed her toes at the pedals in order to just make contact with them. She could barely see over the steering wheel, the cigar competed for space with the wheel. She got lost a few times getting out of the industrial flats, most of the streets that she turned the big car onto very slowly, dead ended at the river or at lift bridges that were not down.
She kept the river on her left, sure that eventually she would discover where the dredged steel sided canal intercepted the lake. She wandered about the grounds of a steel mill then somehow, following the dark winding streets around mountains of stone, she rolled behind the illuminated grasshopper girders of the Hewlitts.
She had never seen them up close; always as a passenger riding over the high level bridge on the open steel grate road bed that screamed from protesting tires while cars appeared to be about to collide through the unmarked lanes. King would speed up at this point, knowing that it scared the hell out of Rose. She always associated the metal beasts clawing at the bellies of boats with a vision from hell.
Once she got up a paved embankment and out of the rail tracked ancient cobbled streets, out of the bottomland of the river area and to downtown, it was an easy, straight ride east to the suburbs. By the time she got home, the cigar was only half-smoked. She was exhausted from keeping it going and from what seemed like dancing on the pedals and turning the steering wheel. Both her wrists ached when she grabbed her purse or reached to take her keys.
Rose hated King because he took advantage of the fact that Rose was in love with him. She was sixteen when they met, he became the man in her life, that role had, up until then, been filled by her father. King quickly betrayed the expectations that she developed because of that sweet, considerate man. King did it repeatedly until the awful, unthinkable realization that a beast lurked in the disguise of a king who looked like her father.
Rose was sitting at the game table in her family room. Three times a week, the same four women had been playing mahjongg for thirty years; Rose, her sister-in-law Marge, Shirley Adelman and Sylvia Plotnik. They began in the old neighborhood, before the war, when everyone lived in the city. After the WWII, they all started moving to the Eastern suburbs, when King and Rose built this house, in what were the sticks at the time, they started playing there, three times a week at three o’clock in the afternoon. They referred to themselves as the mahj girls.
They were gum cracking, lipstick smeared, candy dish hungry, cigarette smoking, occasional martini drinking, tile clacking, gossip mongering, badgering affairs. Once in a while there was some shrieking over a stunning win and periods of feuds over what that year’s folded rulebook meant. Usually, the silent inactivity due to the feuds was too much to take and, for the sake of the game, one party of the feud would give in to the other, “Listen kid, we can’t go on like this”. The back biting over the feud continued for long periods however; mahjongg was a good game for people that could maintain love/hate relationships. The women had indifferent husbands, shallow unsatisfying lives and unmanageable children as well as mahjongg in common.
The first thing she did when she came into the house was to call her brother, Sid, She asked him to come over her house and gave him the news in the family room; he merely shrugged in reply. She told him that she had a suitcase full of money and asked him to hide it in his office, “keep it away from the house, the mob will search for it although they don’t really know that it exists. Do it tonight before anyone knows that he’s dead. Maybe they know already, maybe they have someone in the morgue. Take the adding machine too, give it to your accountant”, she said.
The game table was where she operated an adding machine to count money every night at nine for King. King would lie on the couch after separating the gambling cash from the business cash. She determined the balance of each and gave king a small slip of paper with numbers on it to read. He would read the figure and he would take it and all of the other adding machine waste paper and burn them on the patio in a metal wastebasket.
Rose would continue to band and stack money in a suitcase. She left out the small bills, which she took to randomly selected banks to buy hundred dollar bills. When she was done, King would put the adding machine and the suitcase back in the closet.
They had been doing some variation of this ritual since King began selling lingerie out of the trunk of his ’49 Ford Victoria. Lately, he had been skimming money from his retail stores and fixing horse races, this brought in large amounts of cash and Rose never thought twice about its provenance or legality, as far as she knew it was the way the world worked. King had to use much cash with which to pay people off in order to keep his nefarious enterprises going. He also kept large amounts of cash for himself and Rose, it made him feel secure, and it was the source of his seeming aplomb.
His accounts payable, owed mostly to his soft goods suppliers, were all beyond ninety days. He always claimed that he could barely make ends meet; his suppliers always extended his credit to ensure sales; as long as they were paid eventually, it was a small burden to carry him. He would even invite them to view his books or call his accountant. In the mean time he would use the floating money in his other business.
His other business was gambling. He was just a fair horse race handicapper, barely breaking even with Philly who was his bookmaker and who covered his bets for 24 hours. But, he bet a lot of money. That made his business important to the mob and also because King brought other gamblers to lay their bets off with Philly.
That was how Philly became a successful bookmaker and managed to build a bowling alley, which he made his headquarters, laundered mob money and skimmed from the profits. King also became very important to the gamblers when he began fixing an important race now and again. It took King a long twenty years of service to the causes of jockeys and trainers in order to gain their trust enough to approach them for payback favors.
His schemes were working fine until he got involved in boxing and he involved most of his gambler friends, who paid him kickbacks from their illicit winnings. He fell out with Philly because of the prize fighting scheme, Philly maintained that it was the New York mob who determined who won championship boxing matches. King insisted to a skeptical Philly that was whom he paid off. He mentioned the names of a few wise guys who he had not actually met. Then, their fighter lost and King choked to death eating a steak. The gamblers owed the bookies money that they didn’t have to bet in the first place because they spent it on bribe money. The local mob ran the bookmakers; the New York mob ran the local mob. The local mob was at the funeral to collect the gamblers’ debts.
When the IRS, whom was interested in King for years, opened his safe deposit box the Sunday morning after his death, the mob knew that there was nothing of any value there. They had no choice but to go after Philly, albeit carefully. They had to think it through, they could get all of the money back that the gamblers owed them by threatening their lives. However, if the gamblers stuck with Philly and continued to lay their bets off on the ponies and football with him, would it be worth it to immediately force King and the gamblers to pay back the money that they owed them? The local mob thought that they could make this decision on their own. What the mob was not sure of was whether Rose had the money to pay King’s debt to the mob and more.
“That’s the way it’s done in America Rose. Everyone who has a buck steals it; most people aren’t caught, even when they get greedy, because they don’t advertise the fact that they’re stealing. Only a poor man is honest; truth is, he’s not really honest because he should be stealing for his family”, that was King’s philosophy and he repeated it often with no encouragement.
Rose never disagreed; her father was known as a devout man and he was a kosher butcher in his community but he robbed his customers blind. For the brief time that Rose worked at the butcher shop, he taught her how high margins were maintained in a low margin business; thinking that she might run the business someday. It was not because he wanted her to be dishonest but because he was proud of being a good provider to his family. “You don’t have to learn how to cut meat; there are plenty of shlemiels to do that. You just need to learn how to run the business. Selling kosher meat is like having a license to print money”.
This seemed to be reinforced by the complicity of the old stone-faced European immigrant women in dilapidated wigs that worked for him. It was the first inkling that she had that the father that she adored had another side to him.
King would laugh with contemptuous, gleeful and artificial heh-heh-hehs. For Rose, his snide cackling was like digesting glass, she knew better than to say anything but asking him, “what’s so funny”, was the only way she knew how to use her tone of voice to express the contempt that she felt.
“Maybe we’ll make millions over time, if we’re lucky. The mob does a thousand times better than that, and the government does a thousand times better than the mob. There’s no conspiracy because everyone involved assumes that the next guy is going to do his job”, he answered. Then he said, "If the politicians ever hooked up to some big money doing the same stuff, our way of life is over."
The next morning, her sister Bernice called from LA to let her know that she would be out on the next flight.