The King of Kensington? (I know a man, Part 2)

I went to a Jewish High School in Calgary.  Actually, Henry Wise Wood wasn't technically Jewish, but many teens of Jewish extraction attended.  They were from Eagle Ridge, children of doctors and dentists, lawyers and accountants, and while they were definitely a minority in the school, they owned it in decisive ways.  They drove better cars than the teachers, and made the parking lot look high class.  They attended the Calgary Jewish Academy--most likely on weekends, and were therefore better educated than the rest of us non-Jewish boys, we Goyim.  Through their intervention on student council, there was a delivery of enormous honey glazed Texas Donuts on Friday at lunch.

We Goyim mimicked Yiddish expressions--calling each other schmuks and schmendricks, schlemiels and shiksas, without knowing anything at all about what those words means.  And they brought Hewlett-Packard programmable calculators to school for use in Chem and Physics and Math--when the rest of us had to settle for Texas Instruments.

Lies My Father Told Me

Once, during that time, while babysitting, I happened to watch Lies My Father Told Me, a classic Canadian film about growing up Jewish in Montreal in the 1920s.  In the movie, the maid catches Hell for making bacon in the frying pan--which was clearly not Kosher.  But then the family ate pork fried rice for Christmas dinner at a Chinese restaurant.  These lies were very human and utterly forgivable.

Romeo and Juliet

In English class at Henry Wise Wood, we very nearly got to go to the Chinook Theatre to watch Franco Zeffirelli's remake of Romeo and Juliet.  It was not a new film at that point--the Chinook Theatre did run vintage movies from time to time.  During the same time period they also showed The Sound of Music, for example.  At the eleventh hour, the local Baptist Moral Majority weighed in and put the Kabosh on our plan, which would have involved taking time out of the school day to go to the Chinook Theatre to see it--a weekday matinee.  We had to settle for a slide show, with still images from from the film and the soundtrack played on a record player--we didn't call them turntables at that point.  A turntable was something made by Pioneer that you bought when you had the money and wanted to look cool and pick up chicks and when you could appreciate better sound than what your parents' record player could deliver.  It also helped to have a graphic equalizer booster from RadioShack and a cassette player installed in your parents' car--also to impress the chicks, etc.

But the slide show and record play back simulcast was brought to an abrupt halt when a slide in the carousel popped up showing Olivia Hussey topless.  One student--a non-Jew--objected vehemently, characterizing the nude photo smut.  There was some rumbling--again, among the Goyim--about how the jerk that ended our fun was a Schmuk.  I later learned from my Jewish friend Sylvester that Schmuk meant the foreskin that was ceremonially cut from the penis (circumcision) during a Bris.

Other things were only revealed much later.

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz

In that same English class, we read The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and learned what an operator was.  It was also clear that we were all "on the make" somehow, and that's why the novel was interesting.  When I visited a friend's cottage in Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts in the 90s, I realized what I had been missing growing up on the bald headed prairie.  I mean, we had Sylvan Lake.  I think what was missing were the trees and shrubs--juniper and such, even if they were cemetery shrubs.

There was no question of seeing the film at the theatre.  The film had been made, but it never showed at Chinook.

King of Kensington

And that brings me to King of Kensington. Al Waxman played Larry King, who owned a convenience store in Toronto's Kensington Market.  The TV show went off the air just as I was finishing high school.  There were more clues as to what we Goyim were missing in the back and forth banter between King and his mother Gladys.  King conversed with his wife, too, but somehow the only dialogue that mattered was the one with his mother.  In Gladys I saw at last a Jewish mother, although I was none the wiser as to what a Jewish American Princess was.  For that I had to wait until I was a student at the University of Chicago, and a certain Carol said she couldn't make friends with me because she was Jewish.  Oh, but she was pretty.  And she was studying political philosophy like me.  But it was not to be.

Borax bombs

At Chicago I went with a postgraduate in Chemistry, the daughter of a reactor (I didn't know what that was then!), who took me to a buffet in downtown Chicago to have real Italian food.  It was one of those places with a modest street entrance in the Loop--the restaurant was downstairs in a carpeted, brightly lit banquet room with walls painted white.  The room was filled with members of the Chicago mob and their wives.

Over supper, she asked me about my apartment, and how I was coping with the cockroaches--she actually asked me that question.  There was no sense being shy about things like that.  She was a practical woman and proposed that she do for me what she had done at her own apartment and in the crash pads of all of her non-Chemistry friends, namely, cover up your furniture and light a boric acid bomb.  I was under the impression that it was impossible to get rid of cockroaches, but then I had never experienced the tactics of the daughter of a reactor before.  The chemical reaction of the borax bomb was only part of the reaction.  Behind that there were generations of practice in dealing with tense or otherwise vexing situations requiring ingenuity and the employment of fair means or foul, whatever the cost.  Let 'em howl!  Amen.

When I lived in Chicago, I went downtown for pizza with an old friend, whose father used to work there.  While walking back to the train station, I found myself behind Sean Connery, who, unbeknownst to me was in Chicago filming The Untouchables, in which he played an Irish copper in alliance with federal Prohibition agents to take down Al Capone.  In one memorable scene, Robert De Nero, who played Al Capone, whacks one of his capos on the head wit ha baseball bat during a team meeting.  In another remarkable scene, Connery tells Eliot Ness the only way to fight the mafia was to one up them at every point.  "If he pulls a knife, you pull a gun.  ... That's the Chicago way."  If he puts one of your guys in the hospital, you put two of his in the morgue."  I wonder what was beyond the borax bomb for getting rid of the cucharachas?  How does one up the ante on a bug that could probably survive a nuclear holocaust, especially one that was now laying eggs in the grooves of my razor and in the grout between the tiles in my shower stall?

When supper was ended (now where have I heard that line before?), she drove me back to Hyde Park.  We were going to go to a bar and drink orange juice--by the pint--as it was freshly squeezed and a much better value than beer.  When she was making a parallel park with her old man's Lincoln Continental--black, with whitewall tires (I told you she was the daughter of a reactor!), she eased up to the bumper of the car in front and then stepped on the gas to move it forward.  She did the same with the car behind us.  When I looked stunned, she said "What?"  When I asked her whether we should look at the condition of the bumpers of the cars in front and behind she said "No!  What are bumpers for?"  From that moment, I began to appreciate what a reactor was.

A different King of another Kensington?

It was a long time before I actually heard about reactors for real.  It was in conjunction with my friend George, who was kind of a reactor himself back in the day.  George grew up in Kensington, a now a no go neighbourhood in North Philadelphia.  To give you an idea of the 'hood, the cops don't patrol there.  Must be the same where it comes to ambulance and fire as well.  George was a different kind of King of Kensington.  He didn't own a convenience store, but did plan to roll a rival gang with fists hardened with rolls of pennies clenched in the palms of his hands.  George was a genius king--the professor of his pack of reactors.

Reactors

There is a safe injection site in Kensington now, but the supplies are left on a street corner in the Badlands, as it's too dangerous to make a proper delivery and have it signed for.  There's not much need for paperwork in North Philly.  For example, there are no bookies--the guys who make odds and take bets.  All that is done verbally using aliases, like Barrels.  The actual reactor used to hang out in the bar and dispatch his guy to press his nose against screen doors in the morning and ask people if they wanted to "buy a number".  Buy the Number of the Day, win, and get a 100 times payout.  Box your number in for a 10 fold return.  was a combination of the numbers of the horses who were the odds on favourites for the first three races.  Of course, such reactions as these depended upon many more reactions, in Atlantic City and elsewhere.

All reactors in North Philly knew Newton's 3rd law of motion: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.  And there were always many things in motion--more things sparking than in the dome of the Fels Planetarium.  Everybody knew the flame they were kindling, and some even knew a little bit about fires raging elsewhere.  Reactors were nothing if not craftsmen, hardening their swords in charcoal forges, wherever there was air.

Chain reactions

George and his crew used to wear High-Rize Pants with Pistol-Pockets bought from Mike The Tailors at K & A--Kensington and Allegheny.

Not that they were packing heat or carrying Smith & Wessons.  No, they stood in a circle on their street corner and with one hand held on of their own pistol pockets open, and with the other peed into one of their buddy's open pockets.  This was a form of chain reaction, eminently suited to aspiring reactors.  Ring a Ring o' Rosie, a pocket full of posies ...

Nuclear meltdowns

Occasionally, reactors got involved in chain reactions that spiraled out of control.  Like the time when Boatwright, a black dwarf from the 'hood, got squeezed into a urinal and his buddies tossed peanuts in his mouth.  That wasn't the meltdown, though.  Some time later during a football match, Boatwright was clutching the ball like any good halfback, but instead of getting over the goal line on his own steam, Boatwright got a little help from his friends.  He was thrown over the line by a couple of guys twice his size.  It is unclear what happened to Boatwright after that.  But the reactions in North Philly continued unabated.  In the case of Boatwright, one can only imagine that the earth moved in response to the contact of his head with the ground.  But that is pure speculation on my part.  In the world of nuclear reactions, much happens at the subatomic level, with string theory intervening.   I would imagine that Boatwright pulled more than his hamstring bouncing back from that score.  I doubt that he was aware of any subterranean shift that was the result of the contact of his head with the turf.  That kind of awareness is rarely part of a reactionary transaction.

The present post updated with files from the King of Kensington, who may still own the High-Rize Pants with Pistol-Pockets--we haven't finished clearing the garage yet!  The thing you have to remember about reactors is their absolute fidelity to the 'hood, with earlier--ever so slightly outgrown--selves remaining intact like matryoshka dolls waiting to be freed.  If it were not so there would be no story.  I once knew a family from the Glebeoisie in Ottawa who named their dog Zero, because, as they said, he had no soul and no history, a bit like the kamikazes in their Mitsubishi Zekes.

I know a man will be continued.