Ted Getzel Works

Louie #2

(From Casablanca, a movie, made in 1942)

Major Strasser: Are you one of those people who cannot imagine the Germans in their beloved Paris?
Rick: It's not particularly my beloved Paris.
Heinz: Can you imagine us in London?
Rick: When you get there, ask me!
Captain Renault: Hmmh! Diplomatist!
Major Strasser: How about New York?
Rick: Well there are certain sections of New York, Major, that I wouldn't advise you to try to invade.

“Many were deaf.
Many were dumb.
Some saw what was going to come.
He taught me that I should always fight,
against the vermin of the night.”

Louie: We heard the German American Bund was going to have this parade down in Yorkville – on 86th Street.

Me: German American Bund?

Louie: They were these guys that loved Hitler, thought he was the best things since sliced bread. They got dressed up in fagelah uniforms and marched around waving Nazi flags and screaming about killing all the Jews. There were a lot of ‘em down in Yorkville and 86th Street was the big shopping street.
So word went out in the neighborhoods about it and a lot of the boys got together. We had baseball bats, blackjacks, rolls of pennies
Rolls of pennies, why’d you have them?
Grab a roll of pennies and make a fist around it then when you punch someone if you’re a middleweight he’ll feel like he just got hit by a heavyweight.

Me: Wow!

Louie: Word came down from the big guys no guns, no knives no killing no one. Just bust them up good so they’d think about all the crap they were saying about Jews. Us with the bats were told not to go for the head –go for the shoulders. If you hit someone in the head with a bat you’re liable to kill them- hit ‘em on the shoulders you break their shoulder blades and they go down twitching and stay down. Remember that.
Sure.
So Meyer Lansky , he was a big time gangster donated a few trucks that picked up the boys and drove down to Yorkville. We showed them Nazi bastards , we showed them how far a signpost could go up their asses and which way it was to the hospital. They must have assigned Jewish cops to that parade, because they just watched us break that party up real good. Remember you’re a Jew and don’t let no-one push you around.

Me: I'll never forget, I promise.

Later that night I stood before the bathroom mirror, my left fist tightly wrapped around a roll of pennies, and threw left hooks and jabs at an imaginary opponent, who over and over again fell to the ground twitching.

On my birthday Louie gave me a baseball bat.