Tough Jews by Richard Cohen

Author:Richard Cohen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Is it any wonder some of the gangsters turned to drugs? Their lives were made of stress. Things used as metaphors in corporate America (bagman, hit man, hatchet job) were reality here. Living into middle age was itself a kind of victory. They worked under a pressure unknown even to deep-sea divers. They had built their world on a shifting landscape, a riot of feuds, wars, schemes. They learned to see their actions through strange eyes, to refract their lives through the eyes of enemies. Who will kill me next?

They were often awakened in the middle of the night. A pebble on the window. The stores below are shuttered, stoops empty. A man is standing under the streetlight. Hey, Kid, it’s me, Pep. We need you at the candy store. So they dress in a cold room, in the light of a naked bulb, not knowing if they are going out as killer or mark. If they were dumb, they were soon dead. If they were smart, they were afraid all the time. Afraid of enemies, more afraid of friends.

They joined the Mob when they were young, before they knew what it was about. Only later, after the first robbery, the first killing, did the picture come into focus. This is a world where no one is trusted, where no one walks away, a world without windows or doors. And by then it was too late.

Now and then, someone did try to get out. He would go all around the candy store, shaking hands. He had fallen in love or found God or whatever. He had forgotten something, too—that the last person who had fallen in love or found God or whatever had turned up in the weeds.

But when a man makes up his mind, what can you do? You just shake your head and watch him go. A shack in a forest, an apartment in a city, a house in a suburb. For a few weeks the reformed hood is left to live his new life, a routine just beginning to form, a glimpse of a future. But it’s an illusion, a dream that comes after the gunshot, before the bullet. Sooner or later there is a knock on the door.

For the boys, someone who quit was a threat. It was someone they had lost control of, like a plane that’s gone off radar, and who knows where it will turn up? It did not matter how many promises you made. Don’t worry ’bout me, boys! I’ll never tell a thing! Once you quit, you were carrying around the secrets of everyone in the gang. You couldn’t be allowed to walk off with that. That would be like stealing. Sooner or later the boys would track you down. When they did, they would take back what you stole. And the only way at it was through your head. They bled it out. The only person who ever got away was Gangy Cohen, and to do it he had to run to the movies.

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