Grief Street

the United States were the only actually newsworthy things that occurred during George Bush’s historic visit to Covenant House. But not a word was said about an y of it in the next day’s papers, nor on TV or radio. So after all these years, you are reading it here first.
    I now approached the corner of West Forty-third and tenth Avenue, which is personally landmarked to the northeast by a guy called Eddie the Ear. As usual, he was sitting in his folding lawn chair, puffing a cigar stub, fingers laced across his little pot belly, chair tilted back against the painted brick wall of the bar across the street from my place.
    The bar is called Dinny’s Lounge, incidentally. It is famous in particular circles for being the site of another Hell’s Kitchen event that never made the news. Here again, the scoop:
    Back on the seventeenth of November, 1972, a legendary group of Irish-American gents who are now mostly guests of the federal witness protection program tossed a birthday party for the late Arnold “Rosie” Rosenbaum. In his day,! Rosie was the biggest loan shark on the West Side—big in every way except brains. The boyos who sported him to birthday cake and so forth were members of the bygone Westies gang, which mainly capitalized itself by hiring out to perform acts of permanent violence on behalf of Mulberry Street mafiosi.
    In kind moments, however, the Westies could be altruistic, as they considered themselves guardian angels of Hell’s j Kitchen. Good and bad angels were heard in equal measure j that time when the Westies convinced dim-witted Rosie Ro-v senbaum that he, a loan shark, was a beloved figure in the! Kitchen. And further, that Rosie’s many debtors would bet delighted to fête him at Dinny’s Lounge on his natal day. 1
    So, Rosie showed up and ate a lot of good food that| November seventeenth. Big portions. Also he drank many! big drinks. And much to his surprise and teary gratitude, he opened many nicely wrapped presents. Everybody wore party hats and felt pretty good and fuzzy when the big cake was wheeled in. Rosie blew out a half-century’s worth of candles, after which he did the honors by cutting off the first : slice—a slab roughly twice the size of his bowling hand.
    Then came the second slice. This being in the person of; a quick-stepping boyo who sidled up behind Rosie, pulled a ' machete out from under his coat, and whacked off Rosie’s plump head with the party hat on top of it. The head mushed into the birthday cake and bloodied it up so badly it could only be half-eaten by the celebrants.
    After cake and coffee, Rosie’s hosts transported the remains of his body down to what used to be a kosher abattoir on Eleventh Avenue and West Thirty-eighth. The late Arnold Rosenbaum was dumped into the sausage mash along with a lot of cow and lamb carcasses, and eventually became breakfast in homes from coast to coast.
    A young flunky of Rosie’s in those years and therefore a party guest (although he says he was among the first to scram out of Dinny’s Lounge when the birthday boy was whacked), Eddie the Ear told me all this at the time. I was a cop then as now and therefore required to snoop around a little bit. But since the private death of a shylock is a departmental low priority in the first place, and since there was no trace of the shylock’s corpus delicti in the second place, the matter was informally written off as a public service homicide.
    He is not much to look at, Eddie the Ear: pink faced and maybe forty, but older looking because of his bald head, sturdy but growing a little rubbery around the middle. He is soft-spoken and wears spectacles that slip down over a bumpy snout. He dresses practically year-round in checked polyester pants, ripple-soled shoes, and a nylon bomber jacket with the breast patch of his union, Theatrical Stage Employees Local One.
    Edward Michael Mallow’s peculiarity appears only at close range. This is when a person can see how the left side of Eddie’s head is a stretch of flat skin, including where a second ear should have grown but never did. There is not so much as a pucker to mark the spot.
    When I was growing up, the nuns used to whisper how Eddie’s peculiar head was the result of something unholy about the Mallow family—here in New York, and over on the other side, too. We boys at Holy Cross suspected the whispering had something to do with sex, a topic sure to set nuns to low and secret talking. Even the bravest among us