The Crazyladies of Pearl Street Read Online Free PDF

teddy bear with which he staged a comic wrestling match to my giggling delight, ending up on the floor with the teddy bear triumphantly astride his chest as he begged for mercy. I wonder what happened to that teddy bear? Mother never said so, but I suspect she threw it out in a rage when he disappointed her again. The only time she ever spoke of this one-night visit she shook her head fatalistically and said, “All that man had to do was unbutton his suspenders and I got pregnant.” The deal in Montreal fell through and my father disappeared from sight for a month or two. Then another letter came asking us to meet him in Schenectady, where he had reason to believe he could pick up a little action. His letter went on to say, “I know what anxiety and worry you've been through, Toots. All I ask is a chance to make it up to you. And remember... 'You Were Meant for Me'.” This song title had little notes written around it. The citing of 'their song' and the coyness of '...as an honored guest of the State of Florida...' are typical of the letters from him I found among my mother's things after her death. She had saved every one of them, a total of nineteen, all written in a blend of jocular Runyonesque style, sudden sincerity, unabashed sentimentalism, and kittenish duplicity. In short, a con man's letters.
    I should mention that my mother never told us that our father spent time in prison, presumably to protect us from the shame. I learned about this later, when reading over the letters she left behind.
    We joined my father in Schenectady in the winter of 1932-33, the nadir of the Depression, when dazed men stood on street corners, the collars of their suit jackets turned up, and begged passers-by for jobs or handouts, hopelessness muting their voices to mantra drones. We survived on a series of short-lived scams he ran, penny-ante hustles that didn't require much setup money. One of these was the Sure-Fire Employment Agency that disappeared from its storefront office within a month. (Mother had one of the business cards for this fraudulent enterprise in her photograph album, its corners held by stick-on tabs.) Another hustle was selling exclusive franchises to market Jiffy Fifteen-Way Mirakle Kleener (Fels Naphtha bar soap cooked down in water, bottled, and labeled in the kitchen of our basement apartment to flash as samples of the product). I remember standing in the front room looking up at the window to see the legs of people passing by, sometimes followed by little doggies that sniffed the window and sometimes cocked a leg at it, their leashes leading up from their collars to... nowhere. The room was full of the nose-stinging steam of yellow bar soap being cooked down to make Mirakle Kleener.
    The Sure-Fire Employment Agency scam provides an insight into the con-man mentality that reasons: If you can't find a job, then it must be possible to make money off other people trying to find jobs. And the jobs my father offered were opportunities to become franchised door-to-door salesmen of Jiffy Fifteen-Way Mirakle Kleener. This double-barreled scam shows how hustlers automatically think on the diagonal. Lots of men with no work and a family to support might have bottled and peddled Mirakle Kleener from door to door; but only cons like my father would have sold other out-of-work men franchises to sell it: offering them not only a chance to survive but an opportunity to 'Make a Killing in the Cleaning Industry!' because, let's face it, no matter how good or how bad things are, there'll always be dirt! My father had the con man's instinct for the jugular of human greed.
    These low-grade scams ultimately built up a body of victims eager for an opportunity to inflict retributive damage (if I may imitate my father's hokum/comic style, à la W. C. Fields), so it is not surprising that after seven months in Schenectady he accepted an offer from 'some friends' to go to South Dayton, New York, and supervise the transport of what his