Boogaloo On 2nd Avenue Read Free Page A

a landsman. Well, that was an exaggeration, but he looked like someone who could have been from the neighborhood. George Bush looked like one of those people who were increasingly venturing down for a quick "Friday night in the East Village," whose children might buy apartments in the neighborhood, the smarts.
    When the votes were counted, it always showed that a few people in the neighborhood had voted Republican. They had voted for Reagan, and now, no doubt, they would vote for Bush. It was a frightening thought that somewhere in these dark-colored brick tenement buildings a few Republicans lived in silence. Though Nathan had spent his entire life in the neighborhood, he had never met any of them.
    The closest Nathan had ever come to meeting a Republican was Mrs. Kleinman, who lived in his building. Mrs. Kleinman had voted for Ronald Reagan because she believed Jimmy Carter had mismanaged the postal service. But it was no better under Reagan, and this year she was back to Dukakis.
    Mrs. Kleinman had met a man, a Yiddish-speaking man, at the social agency on Second Street where she worked. He left New York, moved to Boston, and when she received no letters from him, she was convinced that something was wrong with her mail. She would complain regularly to the landlord, who was Nathan's father. "Oh, Mr. Seltzer, have you seen anyone tampering with the mailboxes?"
    "No, everything looks normal," Harry Seltzer would say.
    "I can't understand it. Something must be wrong."
    "Are you missing all of your mail?"
    "Yes, I have not received one piece of mail in weeks. Something is wrong."
    "I'll look into it," Harry would say, and walk away knowing he would receive no rent from Kleinman again this month. Harry owned a lot of property It had belonged to his wife's family and it made very little money.
    "Harry," Ruth would say, "I don't want to knock Socialism, but it would be helpful if we collected rent from the tenants from time to time."
    "We're doing all right," Harry argued.
    "Oboyoboy," Ruth muttered with a sigh.
    "Anyone who heard or saw anything last night on Fifth Street announced the police bullhorn. At the corner was Arnie, at home on his wooden pallet, cuddled up with old blankets he was storing for next winter. He wore a woolen beret, which may have been an homage to either Che Guevara or the international brigades of the Spanish Civil War. But the way he wore it combined with his gaunt appearance made it look more like an homage to Field Marshal Montgomery, except that on it he wore a black-and-white pin that said, VIVA LA HUELGA! from a farmworkers' strike twenty years before on the other side of the continent that he had supported by refusing to eat grapes. Technically, Arnie had been boycotting grapes for two decades, though in recent times he would have had few opportunities to eat grapes unless someone threw some in the garbage. Arnie was in a total boycott these days. He bought nothing. Viva la huelga, the meaning lost in time, had become his greeting.
    "Viva la huelga, friends," Arnie greeted.
    "Viva la huelga to you, Arnie. What are you reading?" Nathan asked with Sarah above him, leaning forward to view the steep drop down to Arnie.
    Arnie turned the thick, curled old paperback to reveal the cover, Dostoyevsky's The idiot. Sitting up on one arm, he explained to Nathan, "I found it on Avenue B," as though Dostoyevsky had a special, different meaning when it came from Avenue B. "Do you think there is such a thing as a purely good man?"
    "Partially good would be a find, wouldn't it? Here's a question for you, Arnie: Why do we kill mice?"
    Arnie looked up with the smile of a man who had just won a contest. "Because we think it is a threat to our property It is all about owning property." He gestured sweepingly around his small wooden pallet stacked with blankets, books, yellowed and wilted copies of the Times, the News, the Post, a few magazines, and a few cans. "I own no property, I have no home to protect, and I kill