Everyone Has An Uncle Harry : A True Story

Harry Cohen was already old no matter how far back I reach. In the Depression he counterfeited stamps. And since? He and his wife Aunt Bertha never left their Bronx apartment on Jerome Avenue at the same time through the door. They’d always leave separately through the window and rattled down the fire escape — old habit, dodging gangsters and cops.

On a visit to their apartment in The Bronx, I — a young teen at the time — pulled the sheet off the equipment lining the floor in the foyer. “What’s this?” I asked as Harry came running. “Don’t touch that!” Dad said, staring at his elder brother more than at me. “Why do you still have this?”

Harry stopped into Bright’s appliance store on Cortlandt Street in downtown Manhattan periodically to see his kid brother, Sonny, the manager, who was 16 years his junior. Manhattan’s ﾑRadio Row’ was soon to be chewed up and 30,000 jobs spit out to make way for the construction of the World Trade Center, twin filing cabinets 110 stories high.

“Harry, where’ve you been?”

“Vic Tanny’s.”

“What for?” Sonny asks, despite knowing the answer.

“So I can kick the shit out of anyone who calls me a Jew bastard.”

Word-for-word that conversation repeats every couple of months, their way of greeting. Working out daily, Harry is very strong. And yet his kid brother, who never works out, is always able to arm wrestle him and come away victorious. As long as I knew them–and Sonny Cohen (aka Abraham) was my dad, so I knew them all of my 17 years at that point –Harry was never able to defeat Sonny at arm wrestling.

One unusually hot afternoon — you could tell something was in the air amid the New York smog — a large man, clearly a bit drunk, entered the store grumbling “Where’s my fuckin’ radio?” Sonny is sitting at a desk up 2 stairs in front, counting the day’s sales and recording them onto a spreadsheet for the boss before closing up.

Always courteous. Always confident. Dad was a Golden Gloves boxing champ, who’d been awarded the Navy-Marine Corps medal for heroism by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt for saving dozens of lives in a U.S. plane that crashed into the South Pacific island where he was stationed in World War II. Lore has it–and he told us this story a dozen times –Dad ran toward the plane carrying two 50-pound extinguishers on his back, sprayed down the gas tank. Upon hearing cries from inside, he tore the plane door off its hinges and carried people out, went back in before the plane exploded and got the rest.

Yes, Dad tried to save lives …. unless you crossed him.

“Where’s my fuckin’ radio?”

Dad asks for his receipt.

“I don’t have no stinkin’ receipt.”

“That’s fine, tell me what it looks like. I’ll see if it’s repaired.” Dad starts for the back to find the radio. He rises from his stool. The fellow springs up the two steps and swings at Dad’s head. Dad later brags, “you get one free swing at me. After that …” and his words tail off.

Sonny, aka Abe, is sometimes “Abraham” when mom is mad at him for locking himself in the bathroom with the Sunday Times crossword puzzle. “God, are you still in there?” (God lives in the bathroom, we joke.) She pounds on the door screaming: “Abraham, come out now. I know what you’re doing in there!” What is he doing in there? my brothers and I wonder. How does she know?

Dad ducks the punch and belts the guy in the jaw with a left cross, re-cocks for another before you can blink an eye. The guy – let’s call him Bruiser–falls backward down the two steps and rolls into a stereo console. On top of it sits a very heavy color Magnavox TV.

Dad–errr, Sonny–flashes down the steps to grab the TV before it crashes Bruiser’s skull. Bruiser, knocked out like a light, groggily “comes to” and reaches up. He grabs dad’s broad yellow tie with blue spots, choking him. Harry stands and watches, a spectator the entire time. He yells to his kid brother, “Get him, Sonny boy!”

Dad holds up the 200-pound TV console with one hand and again slams Bruiser with the other, knocking him out for the second time in 2 minutes. But somehow Bruiser still holds onto dad’s tie, choking him. With great effort, dad manages to push the TV back onto the console and picks up Bruiser (who is again swinging wildly), and throws him through the plate glass door, which shatters into a million pieces. “Attaway, Sonny Boy!” Harry cheers.

Bruiser rolls himself over the glass shards and limps up Cortlandt Street. Dad thinks he’s done with him, and has already called the repair service to fix the door. Picture Dad waitng for the new door. And now picture Bruiser — all of 6 foot 3 inches, bleeding from a hundred cuts, his nose broken– returning, with two of New York’s Finest.

“What’s going on here, Abe?” one asks. All the stores along Cortland Street regularly pay the cops “protection” money. That includes the brand new business next door, Syms, which was just starting out. Sy Syms and his daughter Marcy were still selling cheap “irregulars” and had not yet begun to advertise “An educated consumer is our best customer” — soon to become a famous tag-line on TV. Everyone paid off the cops. There was not a snowball’s chance in hell that Bruiser would be able to convince the cops to press charges against the store’s management or workers. That’s how it was in New York City in 1966.

“He won’t give me my radio,” Bruiser pleads. Dad, amazingly composed, describes for the two cops what had happened. Instead of arresting dad they handcuff Bruiser. Harry, in the meantime, says nothing.

Bruiser shouts: “Fuck you, Jew Bastard.”

Ummmm, really?

Harry–my uncle Harry, always an old man–suddenly springs into action. Looking at him, you wouldn’t know he had it in him, until you notice that “nothing-else-matters-at-this-moment” gleam in his eye. He pummels the handcuffed giant with everything he has. The cops finally peel Harry off Bruiser, whose ribs are now broken and whose face looks like …. well, you get the idea.

Bruiser again drops to the ground, bleeding. Harry’s face goes blank. The cops prepare to cuff him. Dad says: “Dat’s my bruddah, Harry.”

The cops, stunned, dust Harry off and put away their handcuffs. “Nice to meet you” they say, shaking his hand.

“Fucking Jew Bastards,” Bruiser groans from the floor. Harry yanks himself away from the how-do-you-do’s with the cops. He kicks Bruiser in the ribs, and again in the head, a demonic but satisfied look on Harry’s face. Bruiser moans.

The cops look at the ceiling. One says, “Well, I guess he had that coming.” They drag Bruiser face down through the broken glass and out of the store.

“You couldn’t help when I was keeping the TV from falling on his head?” Dad scolds his brother.

“Sonny, what’sa matta witt you,” Harry says, beaming proudly at his youngest brother. “Ya shoulda dropped it on his head and saved me the trouble.”

*   *   *

My brother Howie–he’s 6 years younger than me –offers this correction / updating.

No, Uncle Harry sold stamps the whole time and his visits [to that store on Cortland St.] were not only to check on his kid brother. Sure, he’d carry his attache-case regularly to the shop; looking as though it had survived all the wars, chained to his wrist (like a diamond-dealer). “Papa”, I once queried. “Why do we buy stamps from Uncle Harry and not from the post office?,” I wanted to know when I worked there when I was 13. They are cheaper he told me — which I just didn’t grok. Anticipating my next question dad informed me that Harry buys them en masse and was able to afford to sell them at a discount. It occurs to me, now, that Harry also most likely had an “arrangement” with the Post Office (perhaps skimming stamps from their production) AND with the Police so that he’d be left alone.