That Old Gang Of Mine Read online

  The rainbow woman half turned and waved a dismissive hand towards him. She shouted something that Bruce did not catch.

  'Mrs Blum, come on back right now. Please, Mrs Blum!' called the guard.

  Bruce turned and saw the numerous old folk now gathering by the parapet of the wall behind him, watching the developing scene with keen interest. 'This time she'll do it,' forecast a tiny bald man. 'You just see. This time she'll do it.'

  'Mrs BLUM!' echoed the despairing shout from the lookout

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  tower. 'YOU COME BACK HERE THIS MINUTE! MRS BLUM... !'

  She had now reached the fringe of the ocean and, after pausing, then stepping with fat daintiness over the first waves, she strode boldly into the rollers advancing on her. Bruce heard the lifeguard mutter, 'Shit, Mrs Blum,' as he slid down the ladder. Below the prematurely grey hair the rest of him was about thirty-five years of age. He was wearing a sun-faded track suit and he ran across the sand in athletic fashion. Bruce had slowly risen to his feet and now began to saunter, then run, after him. Mrs Blum had become like a multicoloured playball in the great green sea.

  The lifeguard plunged into the waves. A mutter of surprised approval came from the spectators on the parapet. 'There, Thelma, I told you he could swim. He wasn't kidding,' said the tiny man with the bald head.

  'The water ain't very deep there,' answered Thelma in a flat tone, pleasurably anticipating tragedy. 'You wait till that guy has to get into deep water. Or wait till there's a killer shark. He won't go, no sir, he won't go.'

  The bald man had a lifetime's experience of not arguing with Thelma beyond a sentence or so. They watched the lifeguard wrestling with slippery Mrs Blum. Her ringed colours spun in the waves. Twice she knocked the man backwards with powerful dorsal sweeps of her fat forearm. Bravely he struggled from the water and tried to get his arms fixed about her. He could not get a hold. He had salt in his eyes and brine in his throat. He was not, he repeated to himself, a very good lifeguard. He had a nasty vision of Mrs Blum eventually rescuing him. 'Please, Mrs Blum, cooperate,' he pleaded. Then Loose Bruce arrived and the lifeguard saw him gratefully.

  The two men closed on her, but Mrs Blum was not finished. She began to howl the name of her late husband whom, she bellowed defiantly, she intended to join. 'Arnie!' she cried above the rollers. 'Arnie, come and get me Arnie!'

  She turned and brilliantly knocked Bruce backwards into the waves. The lifeguard had to help him to his feet, letting go of Mrs Blum who made a final suicide bid, lying face down in the water, her multi-coloured backside rolling like some

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  Walt Disney whale in the swell. This time the two men managed to turn her over and tow her towards the beach. The final effort had exhausted the old lady and now she was a dead weight in their arms as they struggled for the sand. Her eyes were closed and her mouth hung open like a large cave. But she was breathing.

  T ain't doing no resuscitation,' said Bruce as he looked down at the mouth. 'It ain't my responsibility.'

  'Don't put ideas into Mrs Blum's head,' whispered the lifeguard urgently. He looked down at the large coloured expanse. 'Resuscitation could take six months.'

  Mrs Blum unhinged one eyelid to get a look at Bruce and closed it quickly again.

  'She does this often?' said Bruce.

  'Twice a week. At least twice,' nodded the lifeguard. 'It's her only contact with a man.' He looked expectantly up the beach and waved. Two men with a stretcher were coming towards them but with no urgency. They had obviously seen it all before. They even paused while one of them bent to pick up an unusual shell from the sand. 'That's the first time she's got that far out,' continued the lifeguard. 'Maybe she's been practising. One day I'm going to wake up on this sand with her blowing into my mouth.' He closed his eyes and shuddered briefly. Then he leaned gratefully across the coloured satin mountain that was Mrs Blum. 'My name's Oswald,' he said. I like to be called Ossie.'

  I don't blame you,' said Bruce reaching across. 'I'm Bruce. I just got here.'

  'Glad you arrived in time,' said Ossie. The two shook hands across the meridian of Mrs Blum. It was the beginning of a partnership.

  'What I gotta tell you,' said Ari the Greek loping along beside the wet Bruce, 'is that there's two hotels. The Sunny Gables and the Waving Palms, one right next to the other, if you get me. There's Mrs Nissenbaum, she runs Sunny Gables, and Miss Nissenbaum runs the Waving Palms. Like they're sisters-in-law. One is uglier than the other, but I don't know which.*

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  'She don't have to be Miss America,' shrugged Bruce. 'Just so I can get a room and get dry. Life-saving is very wet.'

  'It's no problem, not as I see it,' Ari assured him seriously. They had walked three blocks along Ocean Drive. Some people looked at Bruce with curiosity but not many. They were mostly elderly and they walked with their own enclosing thoughts, not taking much notice of anything else. Eventually the two men stopped short of a tired building that managed to reach eight floors. It looked as though it had hunched shoulders in the way of a tall, old man. Across the front were letters tipped at various angles with the words Sunny Gables Hotel and beneath that the inducement: come swing with us.

  Three old ladies nodded approvingly at Bruce from their seats on the narrow porch. They could have been operated by clockwork. Bruce nodded back and nervously tried to wipe some of the wet from his shirt.

  Immediately next door was a similarly weary building. One letter of its name had vanished so that it announced itself as Waving -alms Hotel. It boasted we swing more, apparently as a taunt to the hotel next door, and added pullmanettes and

  CONDOS.

  'Who are they?' asked Bruce.

  'You sleep in a pullmanette and you sleep in a condo, which is a condominium,' said Ari. 'There ain't a lot of room. It's good practice for when you're dead and in your grave.'

  Bruce saw the Greek's expression alter. He followed his eyes and saw an almost fearsome woman arrive on the top step of the Sunny Gables Hotel. Another lady of comparable aspect came out on to the porch of the adjoining hotel.

  'Mrs Nissenbaum of the Sunny Gables and Miss Nissen-baum of the Waving Palms,' whispered Ari. 'Get what I mean?'

  Bruce could. Dark, ugly and truculent, they stood on their separate doorsteps. The Sunny Gables Nissenbaum was the shorter of the two, so there was less of her to be ugly. But it was the only thing in her favour. He looked up like some boy slave put forward for auction.

  'Too late, Sadie, he's coming in here,' said the Sunny Gables Nissenbaum nastily to her sister-in-law. She pointed an enormous finger towards Bruce.

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  'And plenty you'll charge him,' said the Waving Palms Nissenbaum, 'And goddamn little he'll get for it.'

  Bruce stared up one to the other. Two grey men came out on to the porch of the Waving Palms and nodded in support of their landlady. The three women on the front of Sunny Gables had never stopped nodding.

  'You'll be happy here,' Sunny Gables Nissenbaum promised, waving Bruce towards the steps. 'We could do with a young face.'

  'You sure could,' said her sister-in-law coarsely. She put in a rival bid. 'Here, my boy, you pay two dollars less than you pay there. How much she charges, we charge two dollars less. You got a deal.'

  Bewildered, Bruce looked at Ari. The indecision brought Mrs Nissenbaum heavily down the steps of Sunny Gables and she caught him by the wet arm and hurried him into the house. 'He'll be sorry,' shouted the Waving Palms Nissenbaum after them.

  'That woman,' sneered her sister-in-law once they were in the lobby. 'Haggling. She's so Jewish.' She noticed Bruce's state apparently for the first time. 'Why is he all wet?' She looked at Bruce but asked the question of Ari, as if the responsibility must be his.

  'Since arriving in this area,' said Ari patiently, 'this boy has rescued a woman from the sea. Am I speaking the truth, son?'

  Bruce nodded modestly but Mrs Nissenbaum remained unimpressed. 'There's too many women here,' she said. 'Better to leave her. Conserve t
he men, okay. Let the ocean have the women, I say.' There was a brief pause, then she said, 'Thirty dollars a week for the room.'

  Bruce glanced gratefully at Ari who winked in return. 'That's very nice of you,' he said to Mrs Nissenbaum. He had time to study her now. She was a wooden woman with jowls and heavily reddened lips. Her hair was accidentally tinted several colours and her eyelashes laden with mascara. Detachable lashes projected like teeth.

  'Maybe if you feel at home I could give you a better deal still,' she said brazenly. She cocked her eye and the right eyelash broke partially free and curled upwards giving her the 17

  fierce questioning aspect of a war god in a Chinese opera.Bruce involuntarily shivered. 'I think thirty dollars is real generous, MrsNissenbaum,' he said. She knew the eyelash was adrift but it did not worry her. She reached up and pulled it back into position on her lid.

  'In advance,' she said firmly, holding out her hand. 'I got to take a week in advance.'

  'Sure,' said Bruce, reaching for his pocket. His seventy dollars came out like a wet wedge of tobacco. He looked at it doubtfully. 'I guess it needs drying out,' he suggested.

  'That'll teach you to run after women, even them that's drowning,' sniffed Mrs Nissenbaum. 'Okay, I'll take the thirty when it's aired. Ari will show you the room. No members of the opposite sex, that means women, allowed in the room after nine o'clock, no dogs and cats, no parties, noise, drunkenness or drugs. What I says, that goes. Okay?'

  'Okay,' nodded Bruce. 'I don't figure on getting a dog or a cat anyway.'

  'And there ain't no women around after nine o'clock anyway,' added Ari.

  Mrs Nissenbaum loosed off an enormous smile that completely wrecked her face. Her false teeth appeared to be floating in the cavern of her mouth. 'Welcome to Sunny Gables then,' she said. A hand like a spade came out and folded over his. Bruce winced. 'I'm sure we'll be friends,' she continued. 'This is a great little place to live. You just swing with us. Ari will tell you, won't you Ari?'

  Ari's nose bowed meekly. 'A great little place, Mrs Nissenbaum,' he agreed. 'Just a great place.'

  'Some of the beds are new,' she continued. 'And the water's clean. And in the evening we have a guy comes and plays the banjo.'

  In the early evening, as promised, the man who played the banjo arrived at Sunny Gables and set up a little dais upon which he sat to play to the guests. Loose Bruce walked into the lobby after the performance had begun and stood at the rear behind the rows of chairs, looking over the heads of the old folk as if they were children.

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  The banjoist was dressed, for some reason, in a kind of old-fashioned military uniform with which went a sombrero. Bruce wondered if he might have been in the Mexican army at some time. His voice, however, was mid-American. Once, long before, he had been able to sing as well as play the banjo, but although he tried gallantly now, the higher notes took off into silence with only a smile in the eyes and a moving of the mouth to show that they were being attempted. When he had real trouble with a few notes, or he slipped up on remembering the words, which he also did at times, the audience sportingly joined in to push him up the hill. With some it seemed that their voices were the strongest part of their bodies and they entered the spirit with almost raucous abandon.

  A great favourite seemed to be, They Tried To Tell Us We're Too Young - 'as sung by my own personal friend, the late, great, Nat King Cole.' Everybody joined in and Bruce stood awkwardly outside the company, too embarrassed to join it. He knew the words, however, and after being pushed and prodded by several eager old people in the back row of the seats, he began to mouth them silently. When the song had finished a long delicate hand reached up and took his encouraging him to take a chair. He sat down awkwardly.

  'I'm K-K-K-Katy,' said a beautiful, grey-haired lady. 'I'm not trying to st-st-steal you, young man. I already have somebody who loves me.'

  'That's nice,' was all Bruce could think of under the circumstances. 'That's very nice indeed.'

  'He is an ex-theatrical st-strong man,' she recited, keeping her voice well modulated, below the sound of the banjo man's tune. 'He was known as Lou the Barbender. He's J-J-Jewish, you know.'

  Bruce had never met anyone like this before. 'Jewish?' he echoed, as though she had said he was Gibraltese. 'That's very interesting.'

  Katy bent closer. She had a fine perfume about her hair. He wondered why girls did not smell like that now. 'He lives next door,' she whispered, 'in the other Niss-Niss-Nissenbaum place. Enemy territory. We have to meet in secret.'

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  That for the moment seemed to exhaust the information she was inclined to give about herself and her lover. The banjoist, with a unique blend of the slang of three generations, exclaimed: 'Bounce me, brother, we're going to rock, because this is where it all is!'

  An appreciative snort came from the audience and they began to sway about while he lurched himself into some barely recognizable tunes of the fifties. A lady came around with a tray of drinks and, impecunious though he was, Bruce felt like he ought to ask if Katy would like one. She seemed overwhelmed with pleasure.

  'Th-th-that's real kind of you, young fellow,' she told him. 'I'd like a Kosher Cola.'

  Bruce, trying to look as if he bought Kosher Colas every day, took the drink and paid his thirty cents. A pale, slim man in a faded but still shapely suit came in, his hair carefully combed, a boot-lace tie at his neck and a pair of fawn spats topping his polished black boots. He sat down with the casual-ness of a dude and turned on the television that stood in the corner. He took no notice of the banjo-player but turned the volume of the cowboy series he had selected until it was to his satisfaction. Then he sat back easily to watch.

  'That's Joe D-Danziger. They call him Sidewalk Joe,' whispered Katy seeing Bruce watching the man. 'He used to be a g-g-gangster, you know. In New York. Nobody crosses him.'

  'He looks dangerous,' agreed Bruce, looking at the man's frail hands against his cheek.

  T don't really think he is,' confided Katy.I guess he re-retired from that life a long time ago.' She looked around. 'Like all of us.'

  Bruce looked towards the other side of the room. 'Who's that?' he nodded. 'The lady tearing the pages out of the book?'

  'That's Molly Manders. Everybody calls her Molly Mandy. She looks for treasure on the South Beach. Her granddaughter's got a motor cycle. I've seen it.'

  Bruce was becoming accustomed to the inconsequential sentences. 'Why would she be doing that? Tearing pages from her book?' he inquired.

  'Once she's read a page she r-r-rips it out,' shrugged Katy as

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  if it were perfectly natural. 'No point in c-c-carrying around pages you've read, now is there? When you get older you learn to conserve your energy.'

  With a sudden rattle of his banjo, the player indicated that his evening's performance was almost through. Immediately everyone got to their feet and attempted to stand stiffly. Bruce was the last one up. 'It's the National Anthem of our country,' said Katy as if he had recently arrived from Mars. 'Do you know it?'

  'Yes ... sure,' mumbled Bruce. He tried to remember how long ago he had last sung the words.

  'It's a lovely song,' said Katy, skipping a couple of bars. 'We ought to be real pleased and proud to be Americans.'

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  Mornings begin early on South Miami Beach. As the" first sun pushes through the streets, so the people emerge from the shabby little hotels and hurry along Washington Avenue to the fruit and bread shops. At the fruit store they know there will be bruised and damaged produce being sold at half price and at the bakery the same bargains in day-old bread and cakes.

  Ari the Greek scorned such scavenging, as he called it. 'I got my pride still,' he said to Loose Bruce as they trotted along the beach in the warming morning. 'Sure I pick up my social security with the rest of the people, but me, I spend it in style. I buy fresh fruit and new goddamn bread. Maybe I give the apples a little push so they fall on the floor and then I get a discount on them being
damaged, but that ain't the same as lining up at dawn for the left-overs. There's no style in that, son. No style.'

  Bruce found himself puffing a little as they trotted the long beach. The early-waves fell nonchalantly on the sand almost at their feet.

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  In the distance behind them the cruise liners from the Caribbean were lined along the quays in the port, ahead the tall buildings of contemporary Miami Beach stood like topless palms along the shore. At that distance the sand diminished into early mist. Pelicans flew cheek to cheek and the municipal trash cart bearing its label 'Rubbish Gobbler' cruised Ocean Drive. There were a lot of cats and dogs mooching the streets and along the shore, because the old people liked pets. Mostly they were not allowed to keep animals in their rooms, but they adopted strays and fed them regularly in appointed places with scraps saved from their own tables.

  'See that,' said Ari pointing to four people feeding dogs and cats in a yard between two blocks. 'It don't matter what happens to humans as long as the animals get fed.'

  'Seems to me,' puffed Bruce, 'that all these people about here need something to do.'

  'Sure, sure,' agreed Ari. Bruce watched his clockwork legs with admiration. There was brown perspiration like rusty water on his face and his large nose wobbled as he ran, as though it were on a hinge, but he spoke without panting. 'They got things to do,' he added, nodding his nose towards a man sitting facing but not seeing the ocean, a transistor radio clamped to his ear. In the other ear was a deaf aid. 'But they ain't the right things. Feeding the birds and the cats, dancing, playing cards and dominoes, arguing, all that sort of stuff. But it ain't real, son. There ain't no ambition around these parts.'

  They came within shouting distance of the lifeguard's watch-tower. Bruce had done enough running. 'Ari,' he said, 'J. guess I'll have a word with my buddy up there.'

  'You're bushed,' grinned Ari. 'You ain't used to it.'

  'No, I'm in good shape. Just thought I'd see him. Keep running.'