It’s 1962. Uncle Sam has been threatening me with fines and imprisonment if I don’t report for my Army physical. Now he suddenly grants me a reprieve. I get a letter from the Selective Service Agency postponing my examination for sixty days.

“The System rules by caprice,” explains Morris Krieger, the Anarchist sage of Union Square Park. “It maintains power by keeping the people in a constant state of anxious uncertainty…”

Willie Mangelli, night manager at Riverside Memorial Chapel on Park Circle in Brooklyn, has a different take.

“You moved to Little Italy, right? All them big shots down there are bribin’ the Draft Board to keep their kids outta the Army. They gotta juggle the exams to make sure they got enough people comin’ in so it won’t look suspicious.”

Willie is a big shot himself. He has a “Hialeah tan,” wears a silver suit that almost glows in the dark and lights his cigars with a gold Dunhill. He’s not a licensed funeral director, but he’s the business agent of the limo driver’s local and the rumor is the owners gave him the job to avoid a strike.

“He’s gotta have some income to show the Government,” a driver tells me proudly. “He’ll be outta here as soon as his accountant tells him the coast is clear.”

Morris is a retired baker, whose union pension after thirty-seven years is $42 a month. He’s saving up from his Social Security to get his hernia fixed. “The Revolution is only a lifetime away,” he tells me and proudly quotes Emma Goldman:

“Anarchism stands for direct action, open defiance of and resistance to all laws and restrictions, economic, social and moral.”

Willie turns the chapel into his private criminal enterprise. In the morgue he buys “swag” watches and jewelry from furtive men in windbreakers. Out in the parking lot he sells the swag to men in Cadillacs who squint at his “goods” through jewelers glasses, pass him envelopes and drive away.

Willie runs a “Bankers and Brokers” card game in the garage. The “broker,” the player, has to beat the “banker’s” card–ties go to the banker. It’s quick and simple and fifty-one people can play. The deck is reshuffled and recut after every hand. Spiro, the “banker” crimps the deck so he can always cut himself a high card and raise Willie’s winning percentage.

Morris claims he takes his credo from “the great theorist Max Stirner” who wrote:

“Whoever knows how to take and defend the thing, to him belongs the property.“

He sells Anarchist books from a bridge table in Union Square. “Two dollars,” he says, but quickly adds, “or anything you can contribute.” And gives half his inventory free to people who plead poverty.

Morris and Mildred, mother of his two children lived for thirty years in “natural law,” he says. But they had to get married in order to make Mildred his beneficiary. “The state made sinners out of us,” Morris says and quotes “the great thinker” Prince Peter Kropotkin.

“Why should I follow the principles of this hypocritical morality?”

One night we are shorthanded and Willie has to come out on a “removal” with me. He throws me the keys–”you drive”–and grumbles “I can’t believe they got me workin’.”

We go to a tenement on Blake Avenue in Brownsville and walk up four steep flights of creaking steps. In a fetid bedroom an obese young woman is sprawled face down on the floor, her nightdress hiked up over huge, mottled thighs.

“She’s a fuckin’ whale,” Willie mutters.

“Why couldn’t it have been me?” her mother cries.

Willie puffs furiously on his cigar. “Stinks in here. Open a windah.”

He curses as we wrestle the corpse into a body bag.

“You take the head,” he tells me as we steer the gurney through the narrow doorway onto the landing.

“Drop your end, we’ll catch the express,” he says.

He kicks the gurney down the steps. It bounces and rattles and tips over. A swollen purplish, foot flops out of the body bag. A man pops out of his doorway.

“Have you no respect for the dead?”

“You wanna give us a hand, Rabbi?” Willie says.

The man steps back into his apartment.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Willie says.

Morris has scars where he was beaten by gangsters and cops. He quotes Max Stirner: “One goes further with a handful of might than with a bag full of right.”

It’s a busy week. A mysterious blight is killing the chickens in Connecticut and New Jersey. The chicken farmers are killing themselves in Brooklyn.

A fifteen year old boy is found hanging in his shower, girlie magazines strewn on the floor. It’s called a suicide, but the Medical Examiner says the kid was probably choking himself to enlarge his erection.

We can’t leave bodies laying in their homes so we hire other undertakers to move them for us and then we pick them up at their parlors. Willie pays fifteen dollars for a “pick up” and takes a three dollar kickback for himself.

I hear him on the phone.

“I get the three beans from you or I get it from somebody else.”

Willie likes to pay with exact change, but he only has a twenty. “Be sure you get eight bucks back,” he tells me. “Five bucks change and three commission.”

I go to the T……….a Funeral Parlor on Avenue U. Two men in the same shiny suits that Willie wears are sitting in the lobby.

“I’m here to pick up a body,” I say.

They take me to a tiny, windowless office where a large, man with horn-rimmed glasses perched on a jaundice-yellow scalp, gives me a baleful look.

“It’s been two hours. What took you?”

“We’re busy,” I say. “Seventeen funerals…”

“Seventeen? You givin’ away toasters down there?”

I hand him a twenty.

“You’re short,” he says.

“It’s fifteen dollars for a pick up,” I say and invoke the magic name. “Mr. Mangelli arranged it.”

“Mr. Mangelli gave the wrong price to my night man,” the large bald man says.

The two men in the silver suits push into the room behind me and close the door.

The large bald man shoves the phone at me. “Get Mr. Mangelli on the phone.”

They find Willie at the bar of the bowling alley across the street.

He answers gruffly: “Whaddya want?”

The bald man snaps the phone out of my hand. “Gimme that…” And growls: “Know who this is jerkoff? Think I don’t know what you’re doin’? You’re payin’ fifteen and puttin’ in a thirty-five dollars expense chit. You think you’re gonna make twenty bucks off me, you fuckin’ little chiseler?”

I am shocked to hear someone call Willie Mangelli a “fuckin’ little chiseler.”

There is a muffled tirade at the other end.

“I’m holdin’ your body, your wagon and your guy,” the large bald man says. “Send the fifteen bucks up here and I’ll let ‘em go.”

Another tirade.

“Call anybody you want,” the large bald man says. “Call the fuckin’ pope…”

I feel a hard hand on my arm.

“Take him downstairs,” the large bald man says.”Let Artie the fruitcake babysit him.”

NEXT: ARTIE’S AMAZING STORY

It’s 1961 and Brooklyn is a living, breathing Antiques Road Show. We’re sitting on trillions and don’t know it. Everything in my parents’ house–from the fiesta ware, the Heywood Wakefield furniture, oriental figurines, candy dishes, Nelson clocks, Danish lamps, silver serving spoons from the “old country”–will be a classic collectible in the future. My tipsy uncle careens around our cluttered living room. “Better not break anything, Sammy…” my mother warns. “Why don’t you get rid of this junk?” he yells back.

The streets are lined with cars that in thirty years will be bid up to a half a million by Saudi sheiks. Now they’re just “lemons” with lousy brakes that won’t start in cold weather.

I give an elderly neighbor $350 for his 1957 Chevy Bel Air, I hate its mint green color so I pay Earl Sheib $39.95 to paint it black. I hate driving its “three on the shaft,” and burn out the clutch. I park it with the doors and windows open on a dark street alongside Prospect Park, notorious haunt of thieves and muggers. In a year, a vandal– or anonymous ill-wisher– will flip a lit cigarette through the back window and turn the car into a fireball.

Today, a ’57 Bel Air is worth between $55,000 and 100,000.00

My grandfather leaves me a battered leather box full of silver dollar and half dollar pieces that he had been collecting since 1928. I use them to buy gas and cigarettes when I’m short of cash. In a year I’m down to one silver dollar, which I save for good luck.

Estimated value: $100K.

I have been an obsessive game player since childhood. At the age of eight I was flipping baseball cards with my friends. Closest to the wall won. “Topping” or landing on top of another card won two cards. A “leaner,” or leaning a card against the wall brought in three. Between flipping and trading I amassed a complete set of Topps cards. Plus I had the lineups of the 1952 Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Yankees and New York Giants right down to the coaches. I would lay them on my bed and replay the games for hours.

At the age of ten I took up marbles. We dug holes in the dirt called “pots.” You had to roll into the pot first and then roll out to hit and win the opponent’s marble. I wore bald spots into the knees of my corduroy pants, but won over two hundred “pee wees, immies and puries” –classic marbles which have avid collectors all over the world.

In 1963 when I move in with a woman eight years older than me my mother goes on a ritual rampage to erase my presence. She boils my sheets, gives my clothes, books and records away and chucks everything else she finds in my room, including a shoebox full of the Topps baseball cards, a bowling bag where I keep hundreds of marbles and my collection of 150 Classic Comics, which had been gathering dust under my bed.

Estimated value 75 to 100 grand.

My new obsession is chess. It entered me like a virus at the same time I got my draft card and realized I would have to stay in college forever to avoid the military. My every waking thought is devoted to openings and variations. I dream games in which the perfect move appears to me and the onlookers applaud. I study books on strategy, memorize the famous games and read about the great eccentric champions–Alekhine, Capobianco, Bobby Fisher, the Brooklyn wunderkind .The sight of a checker board tile floor sends me into a trance in which I stare at the squares visualizing moves.

My life is now about marking time until I can play chess. In the morning I doze through my classes at Brooklyn College. In the afternoon I move bodies and direct mourners at the Riverside Memorial Chapel. At ten in the evening my day begins. Still in my undertaker’s black suit I drive across the Brooklyn Bridge to Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. I pull into the first open spot, knowing I will return to find one or two parking tickets, flapping like trapped pigeons on my windshield. Under the street lamps in the southwestern part of the park, a crowd has gathered to watch the chess players. From early spring to late fall, the games are on, 24-7. There are about thirty stone tables, the boards etched into their tops, each manned by a “strong” player. By tacit consent the best ones have the tables closest to the street lights. The weaker players, derisively known as “patzers,” are consigned to tables in semi darkness on the outskirts.

The dominant players act with more privileged disdain than any movie star or billionaire I will ever meet. There is Duval, an elderly Haitian in dark suit, streetlight gleaming off his smooth brown pate, who sets up ornate ivory pieces and a chess clock and dispatches all comers at a dollar a twenty minute game. “Fish!” he cries, slapping down the pieces. “You lose!” Next to him is Jimmy, hunched and intense with prematurely gray Toscanini hair. Five dollars for unlimited time, but when the loser makes a bad move he mutters “blunder,” and forces him to resign. There is Joe “the Russian.” Bald with a drooping gray mustache, he puffs furiously on Parliament cigarettes as he bullies his opponents. “Stupid move, patzer .Don’t insult my intelligence…” And Fritz, a massive black dude with a full beard, who analyzes every move. “You think I’m gonna do this so you can do that, but I’m gonna do this and you can’t do nothin’ about it…”

Every other game has an element of the miraculous. You can throw up a buzzer beater that bounces off the rim and drops in. Hit a ball off the handle that just clears the infield to score the winning run. You can make a crazy shot and sink the nine ball. Or draw a Royal Flush and beat a lock poker player. But chess is unforgiving. There are no lucky moves. The better player wins every time. The hustlers in the park know this so they can afford to be arrogant. When a player sits down and says “I’ve been watching you. I know your weaknesses,” they can roar back “I have no weaknesses!” And trounce him in twenty moves.

I am determined to get better. For months I neglect my school work, stop seeing my friends and don’t open letters from Selective Service, probably scheduling my Army physical. I immerse myself in chess, studying during the day and playing all night. A girl I know comes and sits next to me, joining the girlfriends of some of the other players in what is at that point an all-male obsession. One night I realize she hasn’t been around for awhile. But I don’t care. I’ve made a breakthrough. Suddenly, I can see four, sometimes five moves ahead. I am beating players who used to beat me. It all amounts to a few dollars a night, enough for four gallons of gas (24 cents a gallon) and a hot roast beef sandwich at the Cube Steak Diner on Sixth Ave with a little profit left over. But the prestige is enormous. I still haven’t traveled the light years to the main tables, but I’ve moved up to one that had enough spill to illuminate half the board. I am greeted as I walk into the park. I see the weaker players talking about me.

Chapels are filling. Mourners are milling. Rabbis are chafing. Patience is waning. Thoughts turn to the lox and bagels, the chopped liver and pickled herring–the rugelach and Russian coffee cake that await the bereaved at the end of this long day. But the caskets stay in the service elevator. The lockstep march of funerals has abruptly halted. Every employee of Riverside Memorial Chapels is jammed in the back room watching my interrogation.

I’m downplaying the incident, but they’ll have none of it.

“Did she scratch your wrist with her nail?” Aiello/Shmattner asks.

“Maybe accidentally,” I say. “She didn’t want to fall on the ramp…”

DeSousa/Strauss grabs my hand. “Did she gently rub your palm with her fingertip, like this? That’s the universal fuck me signal.”

I hesitate…

“He don’t remember,” says Cesario, the mobbed up chauffeur, full of contempt. “You were scared, weren’t you kid?”

“Did she ask your name first or did you tell her?” someone asks.

“She asked me first, I think,” I say.

“You think?”

Albino pushes his way in, flushed and indignant. “You didn’t do what I tolya, didja?”

“I made conversation,” I say.

“Didja look in her eye and imagine her takin’ her clothes off like I tolya? Didja imagine her pullin’ that dress over head…?” He shakes his head, mourning my lost opportunity. “While you were makin’ small talk didja imagine that soft white skin, those boobs swayin’ to and fro. ‘Cause that’s part of it. You hafta send a signal. I told you that…” He addresses the crowd. “I tole him to do that…” He waves an accusing finger. “Didja leave an opening where you had a good excuse to call her? You didn’t, didja?”

My voice cracks. “It all happened so fast..”.

“Was she lookin’ at your crotch when she talked to you?” DeSousa/Strauss asks.

“I couldn’t see her eyes, she was wearing dark glasses.”

“When she bumped you in the elevator, did she rub against your pants ?” someone asks.

“I’m not sure. You know how that elevator kinda jerks when its starts…”

“Like you’re gonna be jerkin’ for the rest of your life,” Cesario says and turns on Sconzo. “See, that’s what you get for sendin’ a boy on a man’s job.”

“He won the lottery,” Sconzo says. “Besides, what makes you think she’d fall for you? She’s already had one guinea in her life–Joe Dimaggio– and kicked him out.”

I have been shunted to a corner of the back office, dismissed as the the least reliable witness to my own encounter.

Arguments break out all over the room.

First the coat:

“Dyed mink,” Albino says.

“Dyed mink is what a Jew dentist buys his wife when he’s caught cheatin’,” Rizzo says. “This is Marilyn Monroe. They give her the coat just to wear it around. It’s a ten thousand dollar sable.”

Every moment of the experience is deconstructed.

“She likes the kid,” Albino says. “I seen her lean over the balcony and take her coat off to show him her ass.”

“She was waving to the old man,” I correct timidly from exile.

“This is Marilyn fuckin’ Monroe,” Albino cries out on agony. “You think she don’t know what she’s doin’ with her ass?”

Rizzo snaps his fingers as he remembers. “Yeah! She took her coat off when she got into the car. And shook it right in his face…” He shoves me. “She likes you, whaddya arguin’?”

They grab the matchbook out of my hand.

“She dropped this for him,” Albino says.

“It fell out of her pocket,” I say.

“She dropped it on on purpose, you little putz!”

They examine it like archaeologists with a puzzling find.

“Danny’s Hideaway,” Cesario says. “That’s Dimaggio’s favorite hangout.”

“Maybe they’re gettin’ back together.”

Cesario offers more inside information. “Danny’s is a protected joint. Frank Costello said they didn’t hafta have the union…”

“Betcha she’s bangin’ Costello,” Rizzo says. “These movie stars love the tough guys. Bugsy Siegel banged Lana Turner…”

“Longie Zwillman banged Jean Harlow,” says Cesario.

“Look at this!” Rizzo says. And turns to me with a smile. “You’re in, you lucky bastard.”

It’s a phone number behind a row of unused matches. An “M” has been hastily scrawled over a number that is smudged and hard to read.

This is 1961 and all phone numbers start with letters which give an idea of the part of the city where the phone is located. This number begins with MU…

Rizzo snaps his finger again. “Murray Hill. Midtown, East Side. She lives there, right by the river…My brother-in-law dropped her off in his cab…”

Cesario grabs the matchbook. “The numbers are blurry. Like she wrote it at the bar and it dropped in a puddle or somethin’…”

Rizzo grabs it back. “If it fell in a bar puddle how come the matches are dry? She wrote it in a hurry with a ballpoint pen is what happened.” He squints hard at the number. “Can’t make out the last two digits…” He hands the book back to me. “You gotta dial every combination…You’ll get it.”

“Call her,” someone urges. It swells to a chorus.

“Call her!”

“Can’t do it cold.” Albino says. “Too obvious. It’ll put her off.”

Voices are raised in protest. “But she wants him to call,” Rizzo says.

Albino, raises a silencing hand. “I know how this is done, alright?” He’s a dwarf with a comb over and a hairy wart on his beak, but everyone accepts his authority. “You don’t wanna spook her by bein’ too anxious. You gotta have an excuse…” He leans back, eyes closed… “Go into the lost and found. Pick up somethin’ she mighta dropped like a glove. You call her. This is Heywood, from Riverside, Miss Monroe. Did you by any chance leave a glove?”

His voice gets breathy. “I think I did, she says. Then you say I can bring it over if you wish…She says, sure, why don’t you come by tomorrow afternoon?”

He’s lost in a reverie.

“Matinees are the best times,” he says. “Don’t worry about bein’ a superman. She’ll do everything…Then one day you say I need a suit for my cousin’s wedding. She slips you the cash…” He opens his eyes with a beatific smile…”You’re set…”

Rizzo pinches my cheek. “Look at the fatchim on this kid. Cheer up, you’re set.”

They were romantics with an unshakable faith in male power. But I was a timorous boy, convinced nothing momentous could ever happen to me. I never called.

When they asked I said a man kept answering.

“Some wise guy got there first, and he’s keepin’ her out of circulation,” Albino said.

I carried the matchbook around with me for a few years. I would take it out and say: “Marilyn Monroe gave this to me.”

She’s Marilyn Monroe. But she has to go.

We have twenty funerals today. The Miller mourners have departed, leaving wisps of smoke, gum wrappers and crushed dixie cups. Now the reposing room has to be turned over. Porters are poised in the doorway with dustpans, vacuum cleaners and air fresheners. Behind them Shmattner/Aiello and Plotzstein/Celiberti have wheeled out another casket containing another freshly embalmed, cosmetized and dressed decedent. In the lobby a new bereaved family is waiting to enter the room and receive visitors.

I take a baby step toward Marilyn.

“Uh…The service is about to begin…”

She has been standing under light in the casket alcove like an actress on stage. She blinks and stares at me in utter disbelief.

“Excuse me…?”

In a life to come I will realize how presumptuous I must have seemed. Nobody tells Marilyn Monroe what to do. She is famously late and everyone waits. Directors, movie stars, studio heads, columnists–she even showed up late to sing “Happy Birthday ” to JFK.

“The service is in the main chapel,” I say. Another non-sequitur, but Marilyn understands.

“Look…I don’t want to draw attention to myself. Is there a private room or something?”

There is a small two-seat opera box overlooking the chapel. No one ever sits there. It’s used as a make out spot with the girls picked up in the bowling alley across the street.

“We have a special reserved balcony area for private viewing,” I say. “Mr. Shmattner, would you tell Mr. Squires I’m taking Miss Monroe to the special balcony,” I say.

The room is on the other side of the building, which means another trip down the service elevator through the basement. We pass the tohora room where the watcher stands over the shrouded body chanting in fervent prayer.

“Does he do this all day long?” Marilyn asks.

“He’s supposed to,” I say.

In the embalming room Krieger/Carraciola and Strauss/De Sousa are eating huge hero sandwiches, tomato sauce dripping. Behind them two cadavers raised up on the tables, seem to be staring covetously at their lunch.

A small elevator takes us to a dark vestibule on the second floor. There’s the distinct odor of stale beer and drugstore perfume. I open the door. Heads turn in the chapel below; it’s amazing how Marilyn broadcasts her presence. Everybody looks up at her, but Arthur, who stares straight ahead. I open a folding chair. Marilyn slips her coat over her shoulders. The rabbi waits until she is settled before he begins.

“I’ll be outside,” I whisper.

She doesn’t seem to hear me.

In the vestibule, Albino’s cigarette is glowing.

“She likes you,” he whispers. “See how she put her hand on your wrist? Didja make small talk like I told you?”

“I told her I was working my way through college…”

“Keep it up. Give her an opening to make a date…”

“But what can I say?”

“Tell her you wanna be an actor and can she recommend a class,” he says. “She’ll say the Actors Studio where she goes and maybe she can put in a word. Get your foot in the door. Make your breaks…Don’t be a schmuck all your life.”

The rabbi is a pro, no long eulogies. Soon, I hear the announcement: “The funeral cortege will be leaving from the back parking lot.” Marilyn is leaning over the balcony, waving to Mr. Miller. He beckons. She shakes her head and blows him a kiss. In a moment the chapel is empty. The casket is moved behind a curtain to a covered driveway where it will be loaded into the hearse. Another casket is wheeled in from behind another curtain. Flower pieces are arrayed. Shmattner/Aiello steps back to make sure the arrangement is perfect. The chapel door is opened and a new group of mourners ushered in.

“It’s like a funeral factory in here,” Marilyn says.

Is she giving me an opening?

“Twenty funerals,” is all I can reply..

She shrugs back into her coat. Does she want me to help? What if I try and she brushes me off like she did to Albino?

“Can you take me back to my car?” she asks.

“Certainly…”

We go back down in the elevator. She bumps against me? Is she making a move? Could be the air. People get woozy in funeral parlors. We get a lot of fainters.

In the basement the porters are washing an old Packard hearse. Marilyn steps gingerly through the soapy puddles and takes my wrist between her thumb and forefinger, grazing me with her nail. A little electric chill shoots through me. Did she do it on purpose? I don’t know, but she just made it onto my fantasy team.

The cortege rides alongside of us as we walk to her car. Every face in every window is turned to Marilyn. She puts on her dark glasses and speeds up, her heels clacking on the sidewalk. The chauffeur jumps out to open the door.

Some guys ride by in an Impala convertible. “We love you Marilyn,” they shout. She waves, absently in their general direction. Then turns to me.

“You’ve been very patient with me, Mr…What’s your name, anyway?”

“Heywood,” I say.

“Heywood,” she says. “Is that your mother’s maiden name or something?”

“My father named me after a famous newspaper writer, Heywood Broun,” I say.

“Well, what do they call you for short?”

I can’t believe I’ve hit a bonanza of small talk over my name.

“Woody,” I say. “I get made fun of a lot. You know Woody the Woodpecker or Hey-is-for horses…Heystacks Calhoun–he’s a wrestler. Stuff like that…”

“You poor baby,” she says. “Well, at least, no one will ever forget your name…”

The chauffeur has been holding the door during this exchange. Big guy with a booze dark face, he’d just love to step between us and give me a shove. “Is this guy botherin’ you, Miss Monroe? Take a walk, pal…” Instead, we’re having a pleasant conversation. And now he gapes as she reaches up and strokes my face. “Goodbye Heywood…”

Her fingers are warm and moist. “Goodbye, ” I say.

She shrugs out of the coat and throws it in the back seat. Her butt bobbles as she climbs into the car. In another life I’ll become an expert at spotting panty lines, but for now I’m convinced she is naked under that dress.

Something has dropped out of her coat pocket. A matchbook. I retrieve it as the car pulls away. I can call out to her, stop the car and return it. Instead, I put it in my pocket and saunter back to the chapel where everybody is clustered at the door eager to hear my story.

NEXT: THE MYSTERY OF THE CRYPTIC MATCHBOOK

Hollywood has names for them. The “double-takers” –the ones who look familiar so you look again and still can’t remember their names. The “isn’t that,” or “wasn’t he in” celebrities. I’ll learn those categories in a life to come. Now it’s 1961 in the Riverside Memorial Chapel across from Prospect Park, and we get plenty of double-takers. Comedians, supporting actors, politicians–a slight thrill of recognition and they melt into the crowd.

But everybody in the world knows Marilyn. Every man has fantasized a lurid encounter with her. Every woman has wondered what it must be like to have every man in the room lusting after you. Gay men, too, I suppose, but they are still in very deep cover.

How much seed has been spilled over Marilyn’s calendar? How often has she substituted for a humdrum partner?

And now she’s coming to a funeral. She’ll walk through that door and one of us will be there to escort her.

Thirty guys are jammed into the tiny back office, each hoping to be the lucky one.

Sconzo, the day manager, originally appointed himself to the job. But he has been shouted down by the mob.

“Okay, we’ll make it democratic,” he says.

He takes out a handful of toe tags, the name tags, tied to the toes of the deceased to identify them.

“Everybody pays a five dollar entry fee and gets a tag,” he says.

There is a roar of protest, but Sconzo doesn’t waver.

“If you guys give me a hard time I’ll pull rank and you can all take a walk,” he says. “You buy a ticket for the Irish Sweepstakes, don’t ya? Well, this is the Marilyn Monroe Sweepstakes…”

“Yeah, but five bucks,” whines Aiello, a young apprentice.

“You give three bucks to that fat old hooer on Pitkin Avenue,” Sconzo says. “You won’t pony up a fin for Marilyn Monroe?”

Out come the fives.

“No owsies,” Sconzo decrees.

“But I only have three bucks on me,” says Rizzo, the grave robber.

“So go borrow a deuce from your wife,” says Sconzo.

The limo drivers in their dark coats and gray striped pants take a flyer. Earl, the handyman in his greasy work clothes, promises to rush home and put on a suit if he wins. The black porters, Marshall, Bill and Walter, right off the tobacco fields of South Carolina, watch from the doorway. Sconzo waves to them.

“You guys in?”

“Who you kiddin’?” Marshall says.” You just gonna palm our tags.”

“If you win, you win,” Sconzo says.

The porters caucus, still mistrustful, and decide to buy one ticket with all three names on it.

“If we win, we’ll pick the guy,” Marshall says.

We write our names on the tags. Sconzo puts them in a trash can and starts to draw.

“No, no,” says Rizzo, also a card cheat and a thief. “You could crimp your own tag that way.”

“Mix ‘em up,” we say.

Sconzo empties another can and pours the tags from one into the other, mixing before and after each pour. After the fourth pour he looks up.

“Okay?”

“Okay draw…”

“Draw already…”

He reaches into the can and comes out with a tag. “And the winner is…Gould…”

“GOULD???”

A chorus of groans, a shaking of disgusted heads.

“The kid?”

“Marone, what a waste.”

I am pushed, reviled.

“He wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

A shove from Albino, a semi-dwarf with a banana nose, who fancies himself a great lover.

“Tell the truth, kid. Didja ever get laid?”

I take a beat too long to answer.

“Sure I did…”

Albino reaches up and clocks me with the heel of his hand. “Fatchim! I’m not talkin’ about a handjob under the stairs.” His face screws up and he blinks back a tear. “I’m talkin’ about makin’ love to a real woman.” And turns away in despair. “This is a tragedy. A fuckin’ tragedy…”

Cesario, a hearse driver, shoves a handful of bills at me. “Cut the crap. Thirty bucks for your tag.”

The room gets quiet. Ceasario is rumored to have mob connections.

Still, I waver. I am stung by the sneers at my manhood, my inexperience. I know that if I surrender the ticket I will be seen as a coward.

Then, Sconzo comes to my rescue.

“He won it fair and square,” he says.

Cesario turns to him. “And I’m makin’ him a fair offer,” he says.

“No propositions,” Sconzo says. He checks his watch. “Funeral’s at one. They said she’d be here at twelve-forty five. Better get out there to meet her.”

Cesario is humbled, his power broken. He pockets his money and walks out. In a second the mood has changed. Everybody is grooming me for my big moment.

“Button your jacket…”

“Stand straight and look her in the eye.”

“If you get a chance to shake her hand, see if you can put her finger on her pulse. That gives broads chills…”

Albino takes me aside with an urgent look. “When you talk to her, keep a normal face, you know what I mean, but try to imagine her takin’ her clothes off. You know like pullin’ the skirt to unhook the stockings. Unbuttonin’ the blouse…Just keep thinkin’ it, y’see and that’ll give her the idea…” He breathes a blast of expresso and Lucky Strikes in my face. “Okay?”

“Okay…”

Mourners mill in the lobby. Nobody knows that Marilyn Monroe is coming today.

It’s a warm April day. The chapel is on a traffic circle that feeds to the park, the Parade Grounds baseball fields and Coney Island Avenue.

A charcoal Lincoln Continental Convertible, top down, comes around the circle. In the front seat, a chauffeur with a gray cap. In the back seat, a blonde wearing dark glasses. The Continental pulls up to the curb.

I’m frozen.

I hear Albino’s anguished whisper. “Shmuck! Go grab the door for her.”

Too late. The chauffeur opens the door, and offers a helping hand.

Marilyn Monroe steps out and looks around.

NEXT: MARILYN GETS THE GRAND TOUR

It’s 1961. I’m only 18, but my black deeds are mounting. I win an $800 scholarship for high scores on the State Board of Regents exams. I tell my parents I’ll use it for text books and a new typewriter, but my secret plan is to cash the check and run off to Europe where I intend to sport a beret, seduce French girls and write the Great American Novel. I see myself, standing alone on a windswept deck, while my sobbing mother reads my terse note of farewell.

I smoke marijuana and drink cheap wine every night, curing the morning malaise with a cherry Coke and an egg salad sandwich. My father tells me I look like a raccoon. To cover I make up symptoms–back pain, insomnia, nausea. My mother plies me with cod liver oil and chicken soup–I draw the line at an enema.

I am an erection in search of a home. Candidates can be of any age. Breasts are the main attraction. But I can be driven crazy by thighs swishing through a tight skirt.

I am an eclectic lecher. I nurse a frenzied fantasy for one of my buxom aunts. Somehow she senses it and won’t give me her usual wet kiss when she comes to visit. Occasionally, I am transfixed by the swinging buttocks of police horses.

NY State won’t send the scholarship check until the winner has completed at least one semester with a 3.0. Every morning I wrestle torpor and lose in freshman survey courses at Brooklyn College. In the afternoon I go to the Riverside Memorial Chapel across from Prospect Park where I defame the dead, the bereaved and the faith of my forebears.

NY State law requires all undertakers to serve an apprenticeship. My colleagues are young men whose families own small funeral homes. They are Italian and Irish and Riverside is a Jewish funeral parlor so the night manager, Tom Mammana, gives them Jewish aliases. Celiberti becomes “Krieger;” Aiello is “Altman;” McCadden answers to “Morris.”

But these names are too tame. The boys make up their own burlesque versions, calling to each other across a lobby crowded with mourners…”Mr. Shmatler, will you please take these people to the Gladstein room…” “Mr. Krapinsky, could you please direct these people…” “Be right there Mr. Plotzstein…” And then run into an alcove red-faced with suppressed laughter.

Still, there is some sacrilege not even these pranksters will commit. They’ll wear skull caps, but won’t say the short prayer for the dead. Because I am the only real Jew I’m elected. On Sundays funerals begin at nine-thirty and go non-stop in fifteen minute intervals until three-thirty. I stand in the family room off the chapel keeping an appropriately grave face as Shmatler, Plotzstein and Krapinsky try to crack me up. They lurk out of sight in the wings of the chapel, making faces, obscene gestures, even dropping their pants. I stare at them stony and unmoved. Before the ceremony I recite a short prayer, which the immediate family repeats after me. Then I rend their garments with a razor blade and lead them into the main chapel, requesting the mourners to “please rise,” and then “be seated.”

The families often misunderstand my simple instructions. “Please repeat after me,” I say to one man. “I’m going to cut your tie…”

“I’m going to cut your tie,” he blubbers.

“No, just the prayer,” I say.

“Just the prayer,” he repeats.

“No the Hebrew part…”

“Say the prayer already,” someone interrupts. “He’s only the brother-in-law.”

I begin the prayer…”Baruch atah adonai..”

Aiello/Plotzstein enters at the proper funereal pace. I know what he’s going to do and steel myself.

“Eloheinu melech haolam…”

As Aiello passes he turns to me and opens his mouth. Out pops a lit cigarette. He swallows it and walks on. I bite hard on my lip and finish the prayer.

“Dayan ha emet…”

Most funeral are models of decorum, but there are occasional outbursts, which test my impassivity.

A widow looks down at her husband.

“Harry, how many times did I tell you: Nobody buys pencils. Paper Mate ball points Harry…”

And is cut off by an anguished cry. “Let Daddy rest, Mama, you’ll sell the pencils…”

For weeks after that we greet each other with “Paper Mate ball points, Harry,” and answer in helpless mirth: “we’ll sell the pencils, Esther…”

One night I drink a bottle of Romilar Cough Syrup. An hour later I am whirling, aimless in the cosmos. Space winds howl in my ear. I try to open my eyes, but they have been locked shut. Then I realize:

I’M GOING TO HELL!

God is punishing me for my lies to my parents, my petty larcenies and perverted lusts– my disrespect for the dead. I cling to the slimy walls of my sanity, thinking: this isn’t real, this isn’t happening. But the deceased fly by me in their shrouds, their hospital gowns, their sad pajamas. The fat lady I threw onto the stretcher. The old man with the camp tattoos on his arm. Chalk white, blue veins protruding, crabbed fingers pointing.

Somehow I am on the cool tile of my parents’ bathroom. Then under a hot shower. The same God who is sending me to hell has also provided cherry Cokes and egg salad, heavy on the mayo. I am given another chance. Henceforth, I will be truthful, honest and respectful.

But mere days later I am in an Orthodox burial shroud stuffing myself with Italian sausage.

“MARILYN FUCKIN’ MONROE” is coming to the Miller funeral.

We grab the “first call sheet.” The deceased is Augusta…Next of kin, husband Isidore, daughter Joan, son Arthur…

That’s it.

“Arthur Miller, the playwright,” I say.

“Debts of a Salesman…”

” They’re separated,” Sconzo, the day manager says.

The office is now crowded. No one is out on the floor directing the mourners. It’s anarchy. People wandering into the wrong reposing rooms. Looking in the caskets: and running out:

“That’s not my Uncle Max.”

Sconzo has been on the phone with Marilyn’s secretary. “She says Marilyn is still very close to the family,” he says. “She wants to come and express her condolences, but she doesn’t want to cause a commotion.” He takes a dramatic pause. “She asked if it would be possible for someone to meet her at the door and take her to the family room? Then, escort her to a private place where she can watch the service without drawing attention…Then, back to her car…” Another pause. “I told her it could be arranged…”

The room explodes.

Who’s gonna meet her?

“Me, who else?” says Sconzo.

Suddenly, everybody’s a communist.

“Just ’cause you’re the boss?”

“You don’t have no special privileges…”

“We have just as much rights as you do…”

“What’d we fight the war for?”

“Okay, okay,” Sconzo says with a gleam, as if he had it planned all along. “We’ll do it the democratic way.”

NEXT: I BUY A TOE TAG FOR MARILYN

It’s 1961 and Brooklyn isn’t cool yet. It’s still a tributary, sending stenographers and piece workers across the bridge to mother Manhattan. Where colorful locals “tawk like dis” and mourn their departed Dodgers.

No war movie is complete without a “dese and dose” Flatbusher getting a salami from his mommy while he wisecracks in the Army. No B-musical can be filmed without a gum-popping Coney Island chorine who “knows the score.”

The Brooklyn Museum has a world renowned collection of hieroglyphs and papyri; the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens has the finest stand of Japanese cherry trees outside of Kyoto. But those joints (as we say in Brooklyn) are just for tourists and field trips.

Norman Mailer and Truman Capote are Brooklynites, not to mention poet Marianne Moore for whom the term “doyenne” was invented. But they live in Brooklyn Heights, a spit, which broke off from Manhattan Island after the Ice Age and has been trying to reattach ever since.

The real Brooklyn is a seething mass of sexual speculation. Three million people existing in uneasy intimacy with total strangers. Standing nose to nose and crotch to buttock on the subway. Adjoining each other in crowded apartment buildings where you can hear a sigh or smell a fart through thin walls. Looking at each other and wondering: “Does she want to?” “Is that a hint?” “Why is he staring at me like that?” “Should I say something?” ” What if Morty finds out?” “Jeeze, her boyfriend’s a fuckin’ giant…”

You want libidinal chaos? Try Coney Island on a summer weekend. The beach is a heaving mass of wriggling limbs, so jammed you can’t see the sand. Every age and variety of human anatomy is on display. You seesaw from repulsion to infatuation as you tiptoe between the blankets.

In my wanderings I see a clump of humanity, risen like a bush in the desert. That means there’s a hot bod on a blanket. I change course, trampling shrieking infants and dozing oldsters until I find myself on the fringe of a group of desperate men, all trying very hard not to look at what they came to see. A babe in a bikini pretends she doesn’t know she’s being watched and continues doing her nails, smoking a cigarette or, most excruciating of all, lying on her stomach while her friend spreads Bain de Soleil on the backs of her legs. She doesn’t have to be a beauty. A bit of boob peeking out of the bottom of a bra, a wisp of unshaven pube is enough to draw a frenzied mob.

Brooklyn is a place to be from, not to go to. This is proven by who dies and who buries them.

I’m working at Riverside Memorial Chapel, a funeral parlor on Park Circle across from Prospect Park. I’m a “removal man.” Every night I go to cluttered apartments in shabby neighborhoods where a very old person has quietly passed among his/her souvenirs. The deceased can lay undiscovered for days, even weeks, their death scent oozing out from under the door, obscured by cooking smells, gas leaks and general funk. Eventually, the uncashed Social Security checks in their mailboxes sound the alarm and cops arrive with crowbars. I show up soon thereafter, black suit and body bag my badge of office. I walk past stiffly posed photos of the old country, wedding pictures, Bar Mitzvah shots to a rumpled bed where a crumpled person in a cotton nightgown or striped pajamas settled in for a nap and never woke up.

I move bodies out of morgues in large hospitals. The attendant slides open a drawer on staring faces in the blue hospital gowns they died in.

I venture into Brooklyn’s vast, uncharted interior. To forgotten Jewish nursing homes in the encroaching black ghetto. The splintered steps creak. The warped screen door squeals. On the porch skeletons turn.

Is he here for me?

No Shmuel, you’re not dead yet.

The deceased is covered by a threadbare gray sheet. A friend sits by the window, nodding and licking cracked lips. They hand me a small valise and a shopping bag filled with used sundries. I belt it onto the stretcher on top of the body.

Two days later we bury them. The families show up all sleek and suburban in shiny sedans. The men are dressed for the office. The women wear dark suits, fur capes and walk in clouds of scent. The grandchildren bicker and fidget. Everyone has that extra layer of flesh that you get when you’re born in America.

A hired rabbi reads the prayers and gives a brief summary of the person’s life. It’s 1961 so we get a lot of “he/she survived the hell of Auschwitz;” or “came to this country at the age of nine with nothing but the clothes on his/her back; ” or “sent three children through college on a cutter’s salary…”

Occasionally, a cry of grief escapes like a hiccup.

“Momma, don’t leave me…”

Or:

“Forgive me Papa…”

It is answered by a brief of chorus of sobs and murmurs. The rabbi waits for silence, then concludes with the prayer for the dead. The chapel empties. We wheel the casket into the hearse. And wheel the next casket in for the next service.

Jews don’t bury on Saturday so Sunday is our busiest day. The manager is Italian, Anthony Sconzo, but he calls himself Yale Slutnick in deference to the clientele. On Sundays his wife cooks dinner for the staff, A big pot of veal pizzaiola with meatballs and chunks of sausage. Baked ziti with eggplant and mozzarella. Broccoli rabe. We eat in the back office, slipping on Orthodox burial shrouds so we won’t get sauce on our suits.

I don’t get this food in my mother’s kitchen so I am gorging myself when the phone rings. Sconzo listens for a while.

“Very funny, Angie” And covers the phone, shaking his head. “My stupid sister-in-law…” But then gets serious.

“Yes, okay, I understand…Sure…We’ll take care of it…”

And hangs up with a look of utter stupefaction.

We watch as he struggles to regain the power of speech.

“Why is this day different from all other days?” he finally gasps.

We pause, forks poised.

He rises and stretches his arms to the sputtering fluourescents, looking like Lazarus in his sauce-spattered shroud.

” Marilyn Monroe will be attending a funeral here,” he announces.

A scream issues from his limbic recesses.

“MARILYN FUCKIN’ MONROE!”

Next: THAT ARTHUR MILLER? WHO KNEW?

It’s 1961 and the CIA has decided to ruin my life. It wasn’t enough that they created Islamic fundamentalism to overthrow the Government of Iran, provoked, funded and then ignored insurrections in Eastern Europe, slipped LSD to unsuspecting dissidents, destroyed democracy in Guatemala to save United Fruit, masterminded a disastrous invasion of Cuba to prevent it from falling into the Soviet orbit half a planet away, etc. Now the alcoholic Yalies who run the agency have managed to convince new president John F. Kennedy that military intervention in Vietnam is an absolute necessity. Fighting International Communism is just an excuse. They really want to get me in their clutches.

I’m 18, a simple creature, one phylum above a paramecium. My moods travel between hunger, lust and dazed perplexity. During the day I snooze undisturbed in the overheated classrooms of Brooklyn College. At 5:30 I report to the Riverside Memorial Chapel across from Prospect Park. From 6 to 9 I direct visitors to reposing rooms. From 9 to midnight I load a Chevy panel truck with bodies collected from homes and hospitals and bound for the basement embalming room. Sometimes I am accompanied by Marshall, the night porter, a wiry black dude from the tobacco fields of South Carolina. Fastidious as an ancient Hebrew, Marshall refuses to touch a cadaver. He watches, arms folded, as I mummy-wrap two sheets around the deceased before gingerly helping me transfer it to a body bag.

My other partner is Rizzo, a limo driver working doubles to pay his shylock. By his own proud admission Rizzo is a gambler, adulterer and “cat boigler.” He is shaped like an eggplant, his hairline begins a wisp above his eyebrows, his oft-broken nose zig-zags across his face and he smacks his thick lips with glee when recounting a sexual conquest.

But Rizzo is frustrated. “Didja ever wonder why there’s no money on a stiff?” he asks me one night. “You go into a bedroom and there’s no loose change on the night table. Look in a dead lady’s purse. Nothin! A guy in a nice suit drops dead on the subway and his wallet’s empty? That’s not normal. Remember last year when the TWA plane crashed into the United over Staten Island? 100 bodies laying on the streets in Park Slope and not a dime on any one of ‘em. Everybody’s goes out with a little walkin’ around money in their pocket, don’t they? How comes stiffs are always clean?”

I confess I never thought of it.

“That guy who keeled over on the subway,” Rizzo says.” The passengers go through his pockets. Then the cops come and give him a toss. The ambulance guys have a look. And the vultures in the morgue pick the bones. By the time we show up there’s nothin’ left…”

Rizzo shakes his head at the perfidy of humankind. “You think they’d leave a coupla dollars for the sweepers…”

Rizzo brings little things to my attention. The indentation on a right ring finger where a heavy ring had undoubtedly lain for years before it was brutally yanked off. The faded circle on a left wrist where a watch had been. A broochless dress. “Didja ever see one of these old broads without a little pin or somethin’?”

He is especially incensed by Shultz, the morgue attendant at Jewish Chronic Diseases. Shultz is a scowling hunchback, who won’t trade pleasantries and never helps take bodies off the slabs. “He looks like Rumplefuckin’stiltskin, don’t he?” Rizzo says. “Betcha he’s got a nice taste stashed away. Somebody’s gonna hit his house one of these nights while he’s workin, mark my words.”

One night Shultz pulls open a drawer on a big, middle-aged man. Mound of fish white belly, crinkly gray hair on his chest. I’ve been told that people who die suddenly have their last living expression on their faces and this guy looks like he was really happy.

“Prick always puts the fat guys on the top row,” Rizzo says as we horse the body out of the drawer.

On the way out Schultz hands us a shopping bag with the man’s effects. In the truck, Rizzo looks at the crumpled suit, shoes, stained underwear with disgust. The jacket is empty, the trouser pockets have been turned inside out.

“No respect for the dead. They’d take the pennies off his eyes, but they’ll leave the shorts where the poor bastard crapped himself.”

He rips out the soles of the man’s shoes…”Nuttin!” Shakes one sock out. Then the other…

“Hey look at this…”

A ticket has fallen out of the sock.

“It’s from Belmont,” Rizzo says. “The guy played the daily double for Chrissake…”

“Maybe that’s why his pockets were empty,” I say. “He lost all his money.”

Rizzo snorts at my ignorance. “A guy don’t hide a losing ticket in his sock.” But then his eyes narrow and he puts the ticket in his pocket. “Ah, you’re probably right.”

An hour later I’ve smoked a reefer and am enjoying a meatball hero in the embalming room when Rizzo sneaks in. “Can I talk to ya for a second and drags me out to the garage. “Okay, you little prick, ” he says. “I’m tellin’ you because I don’t want you to blurt out the wrong thing at the wrong time…That was a winning ticket. The guy hit the double–Handsome Teddy and Sayonara Baby.”

“How much did it pay?” I ask.

He shoves me with the heel of his hand. “What are you, a big fuckin’ handicapper all of a sudden? It paid thirty-eight hundred, but you ain’t a full partner because I found it and you thought it was a loser. I’ll give you a hundred bucks to keep your mouth shut. And…” He gets a shrewd look. “Another hundred plus gas money if you go to the track and cash it in.”

As always my timidity trumps my greed. “I don’t wanna get in trouble…”

He pokes me again. “No trouble. I’m just busy tomorrow…Alright, you little chickenshit, if you don’t wanna make an extra C-note that’s your lookout…”

The meatballs soon combine with the marijuana aperitif and I repair to the one of the reposing rooms to sleep away the rest of my shift. But I am shaken awake. Two shadowy forms are standing over me. My mind screams. Cops!

“Did you remove the body of Sherman Flinker from Jewish Chronic?”

“I don’t remember the name…”

“What did you do with the ticket you found?”

I yawn and cover my fear with pretend drowsiness. “I didn’t find…”

“Your partner says you found a winning ticket from Belmont,” a cop says.

I calm down. Rizzo would never give me up because he knows I would implicate him. The cops have overplayed.

“I didn’t find nothin’,” I says.

“Mr. Flinker’s wife says he called her from the track all excited ’cause he hit the double,” a cop says. “But she couldn’t find the ticket in his effects…”

Years of lying to parents, teachers and lately to girls have taught me to stick to my story.

“I didn’t find nothin’,” I say.

A cop grabs me by the shirt with a hard hand “Sit up…” He shines the lamp in my face. “You better not try to cash that ticket you little wiseass!”

Next night Rizzo sits in the truck bemoaning his bad luck. “I had to catch a pussy whipped husband,” he says. “He’s probably one of these guys who calls his wife after he takes a shit…”

I feel I have to defend the deceased. “Hitting the double is a big deal after all,” I say.

“So you buy yourself somethin’ nice,” Rizzo says. “You spend the money on a broad. You never tell your wife nothin’ she don’t have to know.”

He stares at the ticket. “We can’t cash it at the track. No bookie’ll take it for us…We got six months before it expires…”

“Why don’t you just send it to the widow,” I say. “It belongs to her…”

Rizzo is outraged. “Why? Because she married the bastard? She didn’t pick the horses. What do you wanna bet she was humpin’ the plumber while he was thinkin’ about buyin’ her a fuckin’ fur coat to celebrate…” He shakes his head doggedly. “I got just as much right to it as she does. I found it, didn’t I?” He gets that shrewd look again. “I could go over there. Offer to split it with her. Didja see her at the services? Nice-lookin’ woman, takes care of herself…” But then he comes out of his reverie. “Who am I kiddin’? She’d want it all for herself, greedy hooer.” He repeats in despair: “Who am I kiddin’?”

Rizzo never cashed the ticket.

It probably fell out of his sock when they were taking him to the morgue.