October 1, 2005--Saturday Story: "The Untimely Execution of Myron Portnoy"
Here's another one-
The Untimely Execution of Myron Portnoy
It should come as no surprise to anyone that a boy growing up in Brooklyn during the 1950s, would look forward to periodic executions. Especially because they took place in legendary Sing Sing, just up the river, and were via electrocution. When it was time for someone to walk his Last Mile, we hoped that would occur well before dawn, while still dark, so the lights would blink 75 miles south in Brooklyn. And the lights did flicker since all the juice needed to fry someone put a tax on even Con Edison’s resources.
It’s not just that we were perversely morbid or anything that simple. We of course were that too, but since so many of our neighborhood heroes were underlings and gofers for big time Brownsville gangsters (read boys from Murder Incorporated), we clung to stories of their every final deed, including the details of their last meal (duly reported course by course and ice cream pint by pint in the News and the Mirror), their last mile (walked or dragged), their being strapped in (casually plopping down or struggling), their last request (preferably not to receive any religious unction), last words (hopefully defiant and wise-cracky), and how many jolts it took to finish them off (as many as possible of course—the final test of toughness).
Why should this be “no surprise” to you—our interest in such gruesome events? The quick answer is that you had to be there in, say, June of 1953 (the 19th to be exact) when the Rosenbergs (Julius and Ethel) were sequentially executed after being convicted of spying for Russia—for giving them the “secret” to the atomic bomb—to understand how sweet yet boring life was. When they pulled the switch on them, the lights flickered through the night and all the Fellow Travelers keened. That was excitement. That was life!
Otherwise, there wasn’t that much going on. The Dodgers hadn’t yet won a World Series and were soon to depart for Los Angeles. And so the debates that raged on porch stoops across the borough—who was the best center fielder, Mantle, Mays or Snyder--were soon to be just about Mantle and Mays, emotionally to be reduced by much more than a third. Uncle Milty took care of Tuesday nights, but that was about it.
More profoundly, we were getting to the age (10 or so) when our parents’ expectations for us began fully to reveal themselves. Up to that point they had been primarily hinted at, had not become fully overt. Now we were beginning to hear about “My son the doctor” and “My son the lawyer” (I can’t begin to imagine what the girls were hearing). And those among us of a transgressive sort (count me among them) were getting restive, attempting to figure out for ourselves a different future, what during the next decade would be called “alternative careers.”
Closest then to an alternative “career” was, yes, crime in its many forms. If Crime with a capital “C” was too transgressive, minimally we could consider misbehavior, audaciousness, rule breaking, or out and out “getting into trouble.” For us, getting into trouble meant doing something bad enough (misdemeanor like) so that one could acquire (we preferred to think about it as “earning”) a JD Card. With the “J” standing for “Juvenile” and the “D,” ah the “D,” for “Delinquent.”
If you couldn’t earn such a card, at least you could get yourself a Garrison Belt and imagine using it (in my case lots of imagining was going on), with the leather part wrapped around your wrist so the buckle (Garrison) part could be used as a version of a weapon in the periodic school yard fights where the guys from East 56th Street would rumble (West Side Story style) with their equivalents from the hated East 54th Street.
This is where Myron Portnoy enters the picture.
He was our landlord’s son, just nine, but already showing signs of the very same unattractiveness that characterized his father—Willie Portnoy, “The Lumber King,” who made his fortune during World War II. Willie had a contact with the Brooklyn Navy Yard to supply them with two-by-fours and such and was quite adept at two things that made him “comfortable” (his word for rich)—one, he would overcharge for every order and, two, more famously, when the Navy trucks pulled out of his yard with a full load Willie’s men would run behind, pulling lumber off the back so that by the time the trucks turned the corner onto Avenue U, Coney Island Avenue would be strewn with what they had repossessed. Willie in turn would sell the Navy’s lumber back to the Navy. Within three years he had "made” enough money to buy a two family house on East 56th Street (we rented the second floor) and to send his family to the Concord in the Catskills for the summer (Buddy Hackett appearing nightly).
I was not quite a Pink Diaper Baby or in truth that much of a patriot, but I had enough class consciousness not to like either businessmen such as The Lumber King or, worse, landlords, which Willie was as well--ours. Very stingy with the heat. Thus Son Myron was not hard to hate. So much was he hated, for all his comfort and social posturing, that shortly after the excitement surrounding the Rosenbergs’ electrocution died down, we immediately began to plan Myron’s. (I hadn’t thought about it at the time but maybe retrospectively I was also thinking about “executioner” as an alternative career choice and that executing him would be a form of internship.)
Unfortunately, we didn’t have the means to construct a proper electric chair. The information-suffused Internet hadn’t yet been invented [though Heshy Pearlmutter reportedly was working on it—or something like it (he ultimately became an ophthalmologist)], so all we had at hand was the occasional picture of the Sing Sing Chair from the front page of the Daily News. But of most concern--we didn’t have enough juice to get the job done. We knew this because we had completed the necessary neighborhood research by rummaging around among various local fuse boxes. The most powerful circuit we discovered was around the corner in an apartment house—just 25 Amps, only 110 Volts. From his study of Thomas Edison’s life, the Chair’s perfecter—an underreported story in American history--Heshy concluded that we needed at least 2,000 volts for a Chair to be effective. Less than that and it would take up to 15 minutes for it to “work.” Since this would clearly not be humane, we needed to find another method.
Since this is intended be amusing rather than gory, please use your own imagination to figure out which other methods we considered. Suffice it to say that, of all that were available to us, hanging seemed to offer the promise that it would do the trick and be humane.
Faced with the clear next challenge—where to set up the gallows—we remembered that in our hunt among the fuse boxes there was a room in the basement of the Portnoy house that had a light fixture just over the entrance door that we felt could handle a noose, and a body. Additionally, setting it up there would offer the further opportunity for poetic justice—to do the deed in the bowels of the oppressor’s very own house!
The rope was set and now all we needed to do was lure Myron to the cellar, slip it around his neck, and . . . .
Knowing Myron’s psychology as we did so well, we came up with a fail safe plan: Always eager to be a part of the group, Myron was endlessly and desperately willing to perform a variety of servile and humbling tasks: Serving as The Pillow in the never ending Johnny On the Pony Wars (this meant leaning his lumpy body against a wall to cushion the assault of the real player-warriors who leaped and piled on top of each other, kicking and gouging with increasing ferocity); serving (again serving) as the Chicky or lookout at the corner of Church Avenue and East 56th Street to alert the rest of us of any impending attack by the 54th Street Gang; and serving as the extra, superfluous outfielder in the neighborhood soft ball games (his real job here was to dart through traffic to chase after any ball that got loose). Knowing this about Myron, his overwhelming need to be included, to be accepted, even to be humiliated, we set up a trap for him in that fateful basement.
We let him know that we would be having an important meeting in the fuse-box room cum execution chamber, a meeting that explicitly excluded him, being certain that he would, as a result, be eager to push his way in. [Pushing (and pulling) was a genetic Portnoy characteristic.] The plan was to hold the door shut as he pushed and pushed and then at the last instant let go of it, allowing him to burst through. And in the bursting through he would entangle himself in the noose. The rest would be inscribed in East Flatbush history forever.
It worked.… Yet then again it didn’t. The door part of the plan went off as planned; and after we let him burst through, he did somehow, in spite of his terminal clumsiness, manage to tangle himself in the noose. But as we hadn’t done an adequate job calculating his weight, pudgy would not quite capture it (Heshy failed us here too), he momentum and heft tore the light fixture out of the wall and in the process short circuited all the electrical systems in the house. And neighborhood.
Thus, Myron lived to see another day (and so thankfully did we—the Chair might have been waiting for us if we had succeeded). But at least, as it was widely reported to us that day, the lights did blink all up and down East 56th Street, if not in all of Brooklyn. That counted for something.
So, I was not only a failed center fielder and not only a failed JD, but now I was also an unsuccessful executioner (time and the Supreme Court and DNA would have put an end to that career in any case).
What to do? Like Heshy, I went to college, became a premed, got into medical school (but turned them down), and then went off to become a (1) sheetmetal worker, (2) professional horseplayer, (3) writer, and after failing at all of these, (4) became a teacher and educator where I’ve been more or less thriving ever since.
From the world from which I emerged, for a man (a real man if you know what I mean) becoming a teacher is at least a little transgressive. So maybe I’m not such a failure after all.
The Untimely Execution of Myron Portnoy
It should come as no surprise to anyone that a boy growing up in Brooklyn during the 1950s, would look forward to periodic executions. Especially because they took place in legendary Sing Sing, just up the river, and were via electrocution. When it was time for someone to walk his Last Mile, we hoped that would occur well before dawn, while still dark, so the lights would blink 75 miles south in Brooklyn. And the lights did flicker since all the juice needed to fry someone put a tax on even Con Edison’s resources.
It’s not just that we were perversely morbid or anything that simple. We of course were that too, but since so many of our neighborhood heroes were underlings and gofers for big time Brownsville gangsters (read boys from Murder Incorporated), we clung to stories of their every final deed, including the details of their last meal (duly reported course by course and ice cream pint by pint in the News and the Mirror), their last mile (walked or dragged), their being strapped in (casually plopping down or struggling), their last request (preferably not to receive any religious unction), last words (hopefully defiant and wise-cracky), and how many jolts it took to finish them off (as many as possible of course—the final test of toughness).
Why should this be “no surprise” to you—our interest in such gruesome events? The quick answer is that you had to be there in, say, June of 1953 (the 19th to be exact) when the Rosenbergs (Julius and Ethel) were sequentially executed after being convicted of spying for Russia—for giving them the “secret” to the atomic bomb—to understand how sweet yet boring life was. When they pulled the switch on them, the lights flickered through the night and all the Fellow Travelers keened. That was excitement. That was life!
Otherwise, there wasn’t that much going on. The Dodgers hadn’t yet won a World Series and were soon to depart for Los Angeles. And so the debates that raged on porch stoops across the borough—who was the best center fielder, Mantle, Mays or Snyder--were soon to be just about Mantle and Mays, emotionally to be reduced by much more than a third. Uncle Milty took care of Tuesday nights, but that was about it.
More profoundly, we were getting to the age (10 or so) when our parents’ expectations for us began fully to reveal themselves. Up to that point they had been primarily hinted at, had not become fully overt. Now we were beginning to hear about “My son the doctor” and “My son the lawyer” (I can’t begin to imagine what the girls were hearing). And those among us of a transgressive sort (count me among them) were getting restive, attempting to figure out for ourselves a different future, what during the next decade would be called “alternative careers.”
Closest then to an alternative “career” was, yes, crime in its many forms. If Crime with a capital “C” was too transgressive, minimally we could consider misbehavior, audaciousness, rule breaking, or out and out “getting into trouble.” For us, getting into trouble meant doing something bad enough (misdemeanor like) so that one could acquire (we preferred to think about it as “earning”) a JD Card. With the “J” standing for “Juvenile” and the “D,” ah the “D,” for “Delinquent.”
If you couldn’t earn such a card, at least you could get yourself a Garrison Belt and imagine using it (in my case lots of imagining was going on), with the leather part wrapped around your wrist so the buckle (Garrison) part could be used as a version of a weapon in the periodic school yard fights where the guys from East 56th Street would rumble (West Side Story style) with their equivalents from the hated East 54th Street.
This is where Myron Portnoy enters the picture.
He was our landlord’s son, just nine, but already showing signs of the very same unattractiveness that characterized his father—Willie Portnoy, “The Lumber King,” who made his fortune during World War II. Willie had a contact with the Brooklyn Navy Yard to supply them with two-by-fours and such and was quite adept at two things that made him “comfortable” (his word for rich)—one, he would overcharge for every order and, two, more famously, when the Navy trucks pulled out of his yard with a full load Willie’s men would run behind, pulling lumber off the back so that by the time the trucks turned the corner onto Avenue U, Coney Island Avenue would be strewn with what they had repossessed. Willie in turn would sell the Navy’s lumber back to the Navy. Within three years he had "made” enough money to buy a two family house on East 56th Street (we rented the second floor) and to send his family to the Concord in the Catskills for the summer (Buddy Hackett appearing nightly).
I was not quite a Pink Diaper Baby or in truth that much of a patriot, but I had enough class consciousness not to like either businessmen such as The Lumber King or, worse, landlords, which Willie was as well--ours. Very stingy with the heat. Thus Son Myron was not hard to hate. So much was he hated, for all his comfort and social posturing, that shortly after the excitement surrounding the Rosenbergs’ electrocution died down, we immediately began to plan Myron’s. (I hadn’t thought about it at the time but maybe retrospectively I was also thinking about “executioner” as an alternative career choice and that executing him would be a form of internship.)
Unfortunately, we didn’t have the means to construct a proper electric chair. The information-suffused Internet hadn’t yet been invented [though Heshy Pearlmutter reportedly was working on it—or something like it (he ultimately became an ophthalmologist)], so all we had at hand was the occasional picture of the Sing Sing Chair from the front page of the Daily News. But of most concern--we didn’t have enough juice to get the job done. We knew this because we had completed the necessary neighborhood research by rummaging around among various local fuse boxes. The most powerful circuit we discovered was around the corner in an apartment house—just 25 Amps, only 110 Volts. From his study of Thomas Edison’s life, the Chair’s perfecter—an underreported story in American history--Heshy concluded that we needed at least 2,000 volts for a Chair to be effective. Less than that and it would take up to 15 minutes for it to “work.” Since this would clearly not be humane, we needed to find another method.
Since this is intended be amusing rather than gory, please use your own imagination to figure out which other methods we considered. Suffice it to say that, of all that were available to us, hanging seemed to offer the promise that it would do the trick and be humane.
Faced with the clear next challenge—where to set up the gallows—we remembered that in our hunt among the fuse boxes there was a room in the basement of the Portnoy house that had a light fixture just over the entrance door that we felt could handle a noose, and a body. Additionally, setting it up there would offer the further opportunity for poetic justice—to do the deed in the bowels of the oppressor’s very own house!
The rope was set and now all we needed to do was lure Myron to the cellar, slip it around his neck, and . . . .
Knowing Myron’s psychology as we did so well, we came up with a fail safe plan: Always eager to be a part of the group, Myron was endlessly and desperately willing to perform a variety of servile and humbling tasks: Serving as The Pillow in the never ending Johnny On the Pony Wars (this meant leaning his lumpy body against a wall to cushion the assault of the real player-warriors who leaped and piled on top of each other, kicking and gouging with increasing ferocity); serving (again serving) as the Chicky or lookout at the corner of Church Avenue and East 56th Street to alert the rest of us of any impending attack by the 54th Street Gang; and serving as the extra, superfluous outfielder in the neighborhood soft ball games (his real job here was to dart through traffic to chase after any ball that got loose). Knowing this about Myron, his overwhelming need to be included, to be accepted, even to be humiliated, we set up a trap for him in that fateful basement.
We let him know that we would be having an important meeting in the fuse-box room cum execution chamber, a meeting that explicitly excluded him, being certain that he would, as a result, be eager to push his way in. [Pushing (and pulling) was a genetic Portnoy characteristic.] The plan was to hold the door shut as he pushed and pushed and then at the last instant let go of it, allowing him to burst through. And in the bursting through he would entangle himself in the noose. The rest would be inscribed in East Flatbush history forever.
It worked.… Yet then again it didn’t. The door part of the plan went off as planned; and after we let him burst through, he did somehow, in spite of his terminal clumsiness, manage to tangle himself in the noose. But as we hadn’t done an adequate job calculating his weight, pudgy would not quite capture it (Heshy failed us here too), he momentum and heft tore the light fixture out of the wall and in the process short circuited all the electrical systems in the house. And neighborhood.
Thus, Myron lived to see another day (and so thankfully did we—the Chair might have been waiting for us if we had succeeded). But at least, as it was widely reported to us that day, the lights did blink all up and down East 56th Street, if not in all of Brooklyn. That counted for something.
So, I was not only a failed center fielder and not only a failed JD, but now I was also an unsuccessful executioner (time and the Supreme Court and DNA would have put an end to that career in any case).
What to do? Like Heshy, I went to college, became a premed, got into medical school (but turned them down), and then went off to become a (1) sheetmetal worker, (2) professional horseplayer, (3) writer, and after failing at all of these, (4) became a teacher and educator where I’ve been more or less thriving ever since.
From the world from which I emerged, for a man (a real man if you know what I mean) becoming a teacher is at least a little transgressive. So maybe I’m not such a failure after all.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
9:30 AM
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