Boogaloo On 2nd Avenue Read Online Free PDF Page A

thought Nathan, who had never tried to give him a massage. Nathan was having these thoughts now as he walked down his street, hoping Sarah was not hearing the discussions of Eli Rabbinowitz's remains. One dealer insisted that "the fucking cops spent all fucking mañana fitting pieces together so they could put together his face to see who the fucking pen-dejo was." Fortunately, the one who insisted that the body was headless and that the police were still searching the neighborhood for the missing part was imparting this news in Spanish.

    Should he be like the new smarts? Nathan wondered. Like Maya's parents? Did he need to start earning money for types of schools he had never heard of? What did he have to do to make life safe for her?
    When Sarah was riding on his shoulders, he felt an unreasonable hostility stir at the sight of the pushers. He didn't want Ruben's sweet-faced, friendly nod when Sarah was up on his shoulders, waving and laughing at the funny world. But there it was. Sarah looked down from Nathan's shoulders at the sweet-faced man and drew his portrait in her notebook, which she balanced on her father's head—two zigzags across the page.

CHAPTER THREE
Talmudic Shortcomings
    N ATHAN WOKE UP on a Friday morning with the unshakable sense that during this day he would commit a catastrophic error in judgment. Something had been written by the gods, and as he walked to the Meshugaloo Copy Center, Nathan Seltzer knew this was one Friday that he would regret.
    He pulled open the gate of his store, rolling up a dozen indecipherable spray-painted names. "Seltzer!" shouted out Carmela, a name that means "Candy" Carmela was already living above the shop when he first opened it, one of his father's old tenants who paid a few dollars rent. She spent the entire summer sitting half out her window on the fire escape. There used to be many more on the other fire escapes, and they all shouted to one another. But in recent summers almost everyone had bought air conditioners, which hummed and dripped, and they had all gone inside and closed their windows, leaving Carmela with no one to shout at but Nathan and his customers. She planted her spacious denim-covered posterior—a nice posterior, though a bit overstated for white people, as she herself once observed—on the window ledge and twisted to see the street traffic below. "What's the probkma? Slow down. Quiere me to take you to Cristofina to read tu fortuna?"
    Nathan had never seen a reason to believe that Cristofina could read fortunes. But Carmela, on the other hand, had uncanny abilities.
    People often sense that they are about to encounter fate, but usually once they do, they don't recognize it. That is why they go to fortune-tellers. At first Nathan thought his fateful moment would be the meeting. It was a slow summer Friday, and as Nathan decided to close his shop a few minutes early to get to his meeting, turning off a Beethoven quartet before its urgency had quite mounted and putting out water and dried food for the always hungry Pepe Le Moko—wasn't he finding enough mice to eat?—he had a sense of some misfortune beshirt —fated. It was even possible that the entire reason for this doomed feeling he had awakened with was that he knew he had this meeting. He had been contacted by a growing chain of photocopy stores called Copy Katz. Nathan thought it was a clever name. The man's name was Ira Katz.
    Nathan took a subway, the F train from Houston, to their offices west of Fifth Avenue in the Fifties. Immediately he could see that Ira was not the owner of Copy Katz in the way that he, Nathan, was the owner of Meshugaloo Copy Center. It was more complicated for this fast-growing company that already had fifteen copy stores in Manhattan alone.
    Their office was in a building so perfectly air-conditioned that it was climateless, odorless, temperatureless—an experiment in total sensory deprivation. Nathan tried to remember from his childhood if this was one of the