The Crack in the Sun E-Book

Monte Jaffe

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

"The Crack in the Sun" is a story about God, love and gangsters. Max and Chrystal live in a world of chaos and violence Max is an opera director and Chrystal is an opera singer. They meet and try to fulfil a life together. In New York in the 1960s they come into contact with the shadow world of criminals and the world of opera. "The Crack in the Sun" is a story about love and courage in a world fraught with fear and tragedy.

Leseprobe

About the author

Monte Jaffe began writing in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he was born, composing songs and writing short stories and TV scripts.

He supported the civil rights movement, working and living with the Highlander Folk Group, followers of Martin Luther King.

He later moved to New York, going underground to avoid being drafted into the Vietnam War. He did roofing and construction work and worked as a social worker in the notorious Hell’s Kitchen. Echoes of these challenges reverberate through the pages of his novels.

In 1982 he moved to Europe, pursuing a successful career singing opera. Presently he lives with his wife in northern Germany.

Visit him on www.montejaffe.com and www.montejaffe.de

Contents

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 1

This guy’s running as fast as he can. His name is Max Fagan. Organized crime is after him. Three muscular fat guys with iron pipes and handguns are running after him and laughing. They’re having fun because their adrenaline is up. In a way the whole chase is doing Max good too. It’s taking his mind off his problems. Max is a carrier. In a certain world, you can’t write checks. Money is transferred in light brown paper bags by ex-boxers, like Lewis Brown, who have been knocked into eternal innocence and are therefore totally trustworthy; or actor types, like Max, looking to make a little extra cash by doing non-judgmental errands. These guys are called carriers.

Max ducks into a bar where the rules don’t allow the fat guys to go, territorial sensitivity (they were just having fun anyway), and he looks for the recipient of the light brown bag. The owners of this bar didn’t waste money on décor, which is a kind of décor. Atmosphere is a result rather than a planned goal, and there is plenty of atmosphere, naked ladies dancing on the bar top, not gorgeous dropdead beauties, just normal, mildly interesting young women, mostly students, walking around naked on the bar and letting themselves be stared at. The recipient of the brown bag is actually a Jewish guy, white hair, thin, around sixty and if his grandchildren could see him now, all dressed in black leather, well, we all have our needs. Max gives the bag to Zorro Finkelstein, who puts it in a safe. The young actor says good night and leaves. Back out on Tenth Ave., Max looks around to make sure he is alone, along with the other millions of residents of midtown Manhattan, and he is.

The question now is, where will Max sleep tonight? Maybe Marylyn’s. He met her while walking down the street mumbling lines from a play he was memorizing. The words were, “She was untouched, oh Lord. She was untouched before her young body was defiled by my hands, defiled by my lust.” These mumbled words caused a look in Marylyn’s eyes that promised a future for the mumbler and the young woman. While explaining the reason for his utterances, Max became involved in an evening of dinner at her place (he didn’t have one), rump steak with lots of Worcestershire sauce and Rioja wine, social worker talk (that was her profession) and interesting sex, because, among other things, she peed when she came, which was warm.

Max could also stay at Marco’s, which was uptown at 148th St. in Spanish Harlem. Always a corner place there; or down at Ellen’s in the Village. It’s not that he doesn’t have money. He has lots of jobs, under the table money jobs. It is simply that this is his time of running. People have running times. Wars cause running times, private and world wars, but also running can be the result of the inner furnace, the burning off of the carbon in search of the diamond. It will be Marco’s tonight. It’s late. So it’s up to Harlem. He hops a subway and heads uptown.

Sitting in the uptown local at twelve at night can cause thoughts to gather in the mind. Most normal people have organized themselves to sleep or at least to a resting-place. People who are not so organized, the populations of the restless, often find themselves in subways at this late hour, moving on to their next stop before they reach nowhere in particular.

Max decided to stop off at the Oasis first. It’s just a few doors down from Marco’s apartment. He’ll stop in first for a quick check-in drink, before going to Marco’s. Maybe Jose will be there. Jose is a short man of color. Max is white, so normally the Oasis is off limits. It’s not a bar for everybody. Max had met Jose one morning outside Marco’s place. Jose had seemed just to be standing around. People do that in Harlem. They have their place on the street, and they just hang around there. It’s like their office. Certain times of the day you can always find them there, talking with friends, whatever. Max saw Jose just standing around, so Max just let the vibes happen. Harlem functions on vibes. They seemed good. Max and Jose started up a conversation. It turned out that Jose hadn’t been just standing around. In his pocket he had a buzzer. There was some gambling going on in the basement of Marco’s building, gambling and numbers. Every few minutes a guy would go down the stairs to the basement entrance, and Jose would buzz him in. All this was going on while Max was chatting with Jose, and Max didn’t even notice it. Max didn’t have street eyes. Jose just told Max what he was doing, by way of educating him to street ways. It was an act of friendship and trust. Max felt honored. Another time, Max was walking up Broadway on his way to Marco’s, and Jose bumped into him and lifted his wallet. Max didn’t feel a thing. Jose handed the wallet back to Max and showed him how he had done it. Max would learn a lot from Jose. Out of gratitude, Max invited Jose to dinner. Jose was surprised.

“No one has ever taken me to dinner before.”

It was a strange thing for Max to hear. Everyone has been invited to a meal sometime or another. They went to a soul food restaurant around the corner and had a great Southern feast. After the meal they walked by the Oasis.

Max joked, “If I were to go in that bar, I’d never come out alive.”

“You want to go into that bar? Let’s go in. I’ll buy you a drink.”

“You know they won’t let me in that bar.”

“You’re with me, man. Let’s go.” That’s how Max got into the Oasis.

Getting out of the subway at 145th, Max goes up Broadway toward the Oasis. He loves this part of town, Spanish and Cuban music coming from portable radios, people walking down the street laughing, having a good time. The night air is alive.

He enters the Oasis wearing a shirt of many flowers, which makes him just a little bit more welcome than otherwise and is not greeted but is not thrown out. They don’t bother with mixed drinks at the Oasis, so he orders Jack Daniel’s straight. Jose is not there. Against the back wall, some sitting on stools, some standing, is the gallery of drug-addicted young beauties. Out of respect (and that is the secret word) you don’t smile at them, that would mean business, and you don’t look judgmental, that would mean trouble. The big, very well-dressed guys next to them look at you to see if there is any action, and if there is not, then what the hell are you doing here; but that’s your business. One custom-made suit guy comes over and asks if Max has change for a ten, which means something else other than if you have change for a ten, and Max says no, and the suit man goes away. Max is beginning to feel very white. A man comes over to him and starts speaking Spanish. Max smiles.

“Sorry, I don’t speak Spanish.”

The man is very drunk. He has pissed in his pants, but could care less.

He mumbles, “What you speak?”

“French. Je parle français.”

As luck would have it, so did the drunk, Caribbean French.

“Je vais te tuer. I will kill you.”

Max smiled and asked, “Comment tu feras cela? How are you going to do

it?” trying to keep his verbs straight.

“Avec a. With this.”

The drunk pulls a pistol out of his pocket. Within seconds six men grab the drunk Caribbean. It had seemed that no one had been paying any attention to their conversation, but in the Oasis everybody pays attention to everything. They disarm him, push him outside and come back in as if nothing has happened. Max stands alone at the bar.

“What’s happenin’, man?”

It was Jose. Max was very glad to see him.

“I was just about shot. That’s what’s happenin’. How you doin’?”

“Ain’t nobody gonna shoot you here, man.”

Jose is not a big man. He’s not into any drug action. Nothing about him seems dangerous. He certainly isn’t rich, but he is highly respected in the neighborhood. He has a room somewhere, but he doesn’t have a phone as far as Max knows. He has an ex-wife who is a prison guard in some Women’s Detention Institute. He told Max he had laid a man flat once.

“What’s that?”

Jose explained.

“I killed him.”

He didn’t say it with pride or guilt or anything. He said it by way of educating Max, translating street language. Jose knew the street. It was his world. In his world he was just a normal guy. He said if Max ever needed anything, he would get it for him. Max didn’t need anything Jose could get. Not yet, anyway.

Max leaves the Oasis and heads up to Marco’s. He looks at his watch and notices that it is almost three, a little late to wake Marco up, so where? If you’re gonna wake somebody up, then maybe Marylyn. She’s warm and has a woman’s understanding about these things. He’ll call first.

“Hello, Marylyn. Max. You sleeping? Dumb question. You want a drink?”

“Max? What time is it? You want to come over? I’ll buzz you in, but I got to sleep. Come on over.”

Max sleeps at Marylyn’s that night.

Well, that’s one day in Max’s life, actually half a day. You multiply this times three hundred and whatever it is, and you have a year, and Max has lots of years ahead of him with no idea what the hell will happen next.

Max wakes up the next morning. The bed’s not wet. Marylyn doesn’t always pee. She has gone to work. He remembers kissing her good morning as she took off and then rolling over for a few more hours of sleep. So, morning in this bed, Marylyn’s bed, Marylyn’s place. He gets up and makes himself a cup of coffee. Women have nice homes, little decorations around, flowers, interesting art pictures hanging on the walls and a bookcase full of books. He’s in her private domain, a sexy feeling, alone in Marylyn’s apartment. He could look through her drawers, panties and things. That would be an invasion somehow. He takes a long, slow bath. That’s not an invasion. He cleans up his traces like a good Indian and goes out, back on the street, cold October street.

Max walks toward the City Library. He really didn’t have to hurry like the people around him were hurrying. He enjoyed his aimlessness and was also a little frightened by it. People all around him were on their way somewhere. They had that look on their face that everything will be OK when they get to where they are going. Max looked at a reflection of himself in a store window and put on a serious face, full of purpose. Then he laughed because he looked like an idiot. He did have a place to go—the library. He just had a lifetime to get there.

Max thought about his parents wandering around in New York many years ago, before they finally settled in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He thought about them getting off the boat from Europe and wandering around with no place to go, looking at themselves in the store window reflections. They were probably still thin. Their winter coats were probably like tents around them. They were camp survivors, Dachau. Max’s grandparents had left Europe before it had been too late to leave, and they had settled in Chattanooga, Tennessee, so that’s where Max’s parents eventually settled, but first Max’s parents had wandered the streets of New York, like Max was doing. They had probably been frightened too, but really frightened, not just philosophically frightened like Max. They had probably wondered if they would survive; even though they had survived, they probably wondered if they would survive at least until the next day. They are probably still wondering if they will survive until tomorrow, down there in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Max thought about his parents wandering around on the sidewalks he was now wandering around on.

What’s up today? He’s got to make a run for Lew later. Lew is the ex-boxer who usually does the brown bag runs for Abe, the porno man, but Lew is having his eyes lifted. He’s in his early fifties and is still very strong. He’s seeing a ‘younger woman’ and is concerned about his beat up face. Actually it’s a great face, but even ex-boxers can be insecure. His eyes do have a squinty look. One would think that would be advantageous in bedroom matters, but what do I know? Anyway, Lew is recovering from his eyelift, so Max is taking over his run for a while. The money is going from Abe to Zorro for services rendered. Don’t ask.

Max will go over to Abe’s love nest suite later and get the bag. But it’s around eleven now, plenty of time. He’s got to go somewhere now, where he can study the scene he’s working on for acting class. He’s working on a scene from ‘Darkness at Noon’ with his scene partner, Shurbe.

It would be nice to have a place of his own.

He had shared an apartment with Diane for a while, but they broke up. She wanted someone with more money. Who could blame her? Also, in all honesty, he had a wandering eye. He moved out. First he went to Marco’s, took a few things with him, then spent some time at Ellen’s. Ellen is an older actress, more of a mother-friend who had survived the McCarthy era. He has a few things there too. Anyway, he sort of drifted into drifting, but soon he should get a room somewhere.

‘Darkness at Noon’ and Shurbe. Shurbe is thin, blond and very courageous. She had been in a mental institution, haven’t we all. They were giving her cool out pills, and one day she threw them in the toilet and walked out the door. She had gone in voluntarily and gone out voluntarily, only to discover that she was not an elephant in a porcelain store, she was porcelain in an elephant world. She and Max worked well together. They did several scenes for the class and several scenes for themselves. Max spent some time with her, but she said that living with him was like playing tennis uphill. She eventually moved far away and then again, not so far.

There is a special bookstore for theatre books on 50th, just off Broadway. Max goes there to get the ‘Darkness At Noon’ script, then he heads up to the Lincoln Center library to read the play. He meets Shurbe at five, they rehearse a while, then he goes to pick up the bag.

One of the clowns in God’s tent of characters is Abe, the porno man. Abe is not in the porno business per se. Actually he has a house on Long Island and a wife and two kids. He just owns the buildings where the porn occurs. On the other hand, Abe is a perfect porn person. He is slob fat, but that is just the beginning. He has a physical condition, maybe caused by a nerve disorder, whereby his tongue always hangs out over his lower lip. He also usually has a cigar stuck in the remaining mouth space. All this affects his speech. So when Max goes over to make the pick up, the occasion usually turns into a study of human triumph over obstacles such as reality and acceptable good taste. Max rings the penthouse doorbell. By the way, Abe also owns the building where the penthouse is. First Max hears Abe waddling to the door, then security noises, looking through the hole in the door which makes everyone look funny, unlocking many locks, heavy breathing, then the inevitable,

“Whoth there?”

Eventually Abe opens the door, and Max is let into an oxygen-free apartment. The smell of stale cigar smoke and some other smell alert the visitor’s brain that we’re dealing with some other kind of human being. Max is then led through several rooms that were never used for anything other than a passageway to the bedroom. The bedroom has a water-bed, with mirrors over the bed, green, drawn curtains and a green bedspread. The breathing factor in this room is inhibited by a stench coming from colognes and sexual labor, all several hours or several months old. Abe reports,

“Lath night I had two cunth in thith bed. Futh them both in the ath.”

Abe gives Max the bag and gives new dimension to vulgarity.

The city condemned some buildings on East 93rd, the old Rupert Brewery tenement houses. The plan was to tear down the buildings and build apartment houses, but it would be about a year, maybe two, before the tenement houses would be torn down. In the meantime, you could rent apartments called railroad flats for very little money. Max heard about the apartments through some actor friends and found himself a home. He painted the ceiling sky blue, with some sand in the paint to give it a cloudy look. His apartment was on the top floor, which was great, because it was near the rooftop of the building. The rooftop of a tenement house was special. You could spend time up there thinking and drinking a beer like it was a penthouse terrace. He lived there for about two years.

Max brought Mimi there and tried to live with her. It was a blissful catastrophe. Mimi couldn’t speak English. She only spoke French, which was OK because Max spoke French, but Mimi couldn’t speak to anyone other than Max except for very few other people. That was also OK, because Mimi wasn’t very gregarious. She just liked to lay around and read and eat delicious food She was a specialist in love making, like a courtesan, except she didn’t do it for money. She just loved to make love. Max met her when he went to Canada for a few weeks that summer. They imploded into each other, and when the pieces settled, she left a relationship in Quebec and came with Max to New York. Luckily he had this apartment in the condemned tenement building he could offer as a home for them. They spent a lot of time making love. Max being temporarily unemployed, time was in abundance. Eventually a train speeding toward a wall will hit the wall unless common sense is brought to bear, and of course, common sense was a language neither one of them spoke. Oh, that was a painful train crash. Her former Quebecian friend drove down and picked her up and drove away with her. Max’s whirlwind life whirled on.

Max was out of work, so he called up the Dressers Union. Maybe there was some extra work on Broadway or at the Met. He was supposed to call a certain Mary Jones. She knew about job openings. Mary wasn’t there, so somebody took Max’s name and phone number down and left them on Mary’s desk. That’s why his name and phone number was there on her desk when a famous actor called and said that his dresser had dropped dead and he needed a new dresser. Mary looked down and saw Max’s name and phone number and sent Max over to meet the famous actor to see if the chemistry worked. It did, and Max was employed.

What a dresser did was not really clear to Max. He had been helped by a dresser when he performed. A dresser held the jacket or pants as Max slipped out of one costume and into another. But more than that Max didn’t know. So he would learn.

Aside from caring for the costumes, hanging them up after the show, seeing that they were cleaned etc., Max’s other main job was to make sure the bar was always well stocked. Cutty Sark and Guinness stout were the main staples. The famous actor drank a roaring lot. So did his famous colleague. With her it was champagne or ‘champs’, as she called it, but that was her dresser’s problem.

Her dresser was a gloriously heavy, black woman named Besulda. Besulda had a voice that came out of a huge heart filled with centuries of explosive living. She also had a hollow wooden leg and could outdrink even these heavy weights. Max was a young robin in this area, drinking booze from a booze puddle while admiring the great ocean guzzlers. There was a third somewhat famous actor in the play, ‘Country Girl’. He was a quieter type. So Max swam among the whales. It was lively.

The show opened in Washington, and all the Washington people tried to outdo each other giving parties for the famous. Max and Besulda were more or less a necessary evil for these party hosts. They weren’t famous, and they ate and drank a lot, but the famous actor and the famous actress wouldn’t dream of Max and Besulda not being a part of the festivities. And the one thing you didn’t want to do was to offend this particular actor. He could get pretty angry.

There was one short but memorable rage that occurred at the closing night party of the Washington run. It was about three in the morning, and the house was filled with theatre people unloading the last buckets of energy before moving on to the next project or period of uncertainty. The actor had called a friend in Ireland. The friend didn’t want to come to the phone. This enraged the actor who began to curse his ex-friend; ex-until morning, when reality exchanged places with booze. The actor poured waves of violent raging into the living room, causing one innocent lovely to cry. Max quickly came to her aid. Everyone mumbled good night and left—one guy through a window, which was open anyway. Max and the actor were alone in the living room. Max, somewhat amused with the drama, his own perspective heavily ingratiated with sprits, stood next to the actor and watched the show. Then he offered the actor a drink. Timing is everything. They sat down and finished off a bottle of Cutty Sark and discussed a new project the actor was considering, where Max could play an important role. The project was a play called ‘The Dresser’. The dresser would be played by Max. Oh booze, how splendid is thy lie. Around 8:00 Max remembered he had a train to catch back to New York. So he said goodbye to the actor, “Thanks for the party,” and got a taxi to his hotel where he threw anything that looked like it might be his into a suitcase and checked out of the hotel.

He took another taxi to an alabaster train station where Besulda was desperately looking for him because she had his ticket, and the train was about to leave. Max stood swaying among hundreds of people. He knew he had very little time, so he took a short cut. He went to the middle of the alabaster station, where the acoustics were the best and called in a somewhat scotchy voice,

“Besulda!”

From some far corner, he heard the unmistakable voice of Besulda’s reply,

“There you is! Honey, we gots to hurry”.

She grabbed him, and put him on the train, and that is how he got back to New York.

When he arrived at Grand Central, he hailed a cab up to 200th Street where he lived with Bunny at that time. Bunny was a beautiful woman with creamy black skin, warm brown eyes and an exquisite body. The only endearing imperfection she had was one of her fingers. Her mother had had a fondness for chalk during pregnancy, and one of Bunny’s fingers was a little crooked because of too much calcium. Bunny would have made a great life partner for Max, but Max was burning carbon. She eventually went to Switzerland and married some rich doctor. But when Max poured into their apartment on 200th, they were glad to see each other, in fact, so glad that after some champagne and tenderness, they went to Marco’s, who was giving a little party. Max (who, by this time, had been up for two whole days, and had consumed a considerable mixture of alcoholic fluids), came in, greeted his friend and noticed a bottle of vodka. He opened it, poured himself a drink, drank it down and fell on his face.

Max woke up the next day in his room in the corner. This time his collision with the erratic circus of chaotic people hurt. He had a severe pain in his solar plexus. He never drank that much again in his life. It was the end of his journey through the boozy lives of the stars. It was great, but it was over. It wasn’t the pain in his solar plexus that turned him off to that life. It was simply the feeling that they were all going on a journey that ended somewhere far away from where Max wanted to go. They were voyagers too, like Max, and Max loved the feeling of the ride, oh yes, the riding was thrilling, and it’s not that Max knew where the hell he was headed, but the demons in Max’s ass were just different demons. The famous actor and actress had theirs and Max had his. Max saw the actor a few years later in a play on Broadway. He went backstage and said hello. The actor had had a serious auto accident and had given up drink, but there was a champagne glass filled with light tan liquid sitting on his makeup table. Max didn’t know if he later drank it—a one-glass reward for work well done—or if it was just a reminder of a journey he used to be on. Max and the actor parted and Max never saw him again except occasionally on a late night movie on TV.