Jingle bells, shotgun shells: The stick-up on Christmas Eve

Just another snowy Christmas in New York City

It was 11 in the morning on the day before Christmas in 1968, and Johnny Machine, 6-2, skinny, ruddy, unshaven, nose like the prow of a tugboat, was sitting at the far end of the bar in the 55 on Christopher Street sipping a coffee with a splash of Jameson’s. Ice from a two-day-old snow was still brown and chunky in the gutters, the winter light coming through the window at the street end of the room barely making a dent in the gloom. The door opened, sending a gust of freezing wind down the bar. A squat figure waddled in.

“Fookin’ Mikey screwed us, Johnny. Said he had a .38, but it was bullshit. Fookin’ single shot .22 anybody’d laugh at soon as stick up their hands.”

They were meeting up to plan another robbery that very night, Christmas Eve, less than a block away. Neither the robbery nor the timing made much sense, but making sense wasn’t on the menu for either Johnny Machine or Beansie, his friend since they were kids on Avenue C on the Lower East Side. It seemed like a long time ago they were sprinting down Eighth Street in the West Village, snatching purses, coming up behind tourist couples as they came out of bars at night, sticking a wooden dowel in the back of the guy like it was a gun, warning them not to turn around or they’d shoot ‘em, croaking gimme your fookin’ wallet in as deep a voice as they could muster, then taking off in their stolen sneakers down McDougal into the dark corners of Washington Square.

They had each been in Sing-Sing up the river the year before, Johnny at the end of a three-year stretch for, what else, robbery, Beansie finishing up five years for pistol-whipping a bartender near to death on Avenue B in ’62. Cops caught him a few blocks away on St. Marks Place in a joint where his girlfriend, Roberta, worked tables flashing her boobs and getting her butt pinched for tips.

Beansie was short, round as a barrel, with a crew cut that looked like he barbered it himself, which he did standing at the sink in the kitchen of Roberta’s sixth floor walk-up on Avenue C, a block from where he grew up on 11^th Street. It was a railroad tenement, three rooms, you walked into the kitchen and you could see into the living room in one direction, a bedroom the size of a horizontal phone booth in the other, toilet down the hall, window in the kitchen stuck open six inches, you got slammed with blast furnace heat from the airshaft in the summer, snow swirling down off the roof in the winter, misery in every breath, every corner of the dump tenement, but with forty dollar rent, who was complaining.

Johnny slept on a daybed in the front room the nights he didn’t score a hippie chick hanging out in Thompkins Square Park or a waitress in one of the coffee shops on 14^th Street where you could get coffee and an egg and two slices of toast for fifty cents. Women’s knees folded like a lawn chair for Johnny, somebody once said, watching him do his act in a corner booth one-night, dark, hooded eyes he got from his father who beat him Saturday nights after losing at the track and a mother he had to scrape out of junkie crash pads when he was still in grade school. Chicks love the wounded ones, he told guys he played poker with when they marveled at his prowess with the women.

Beansie said poker had Johnny by the balls. Johnny was always short of money. He was into loan sharks in Hells Kitchen, on the Lower East Side, the Village, all over town when it came right down to it. Johnny and Beansie were what they called take-off artists. They had knocked over a bar in Chelsea two nights ago, but the owner had taken most of the cash out of the register when he went home an hour before closing and all they got was a couple hundred which didn’t cover the vig on even one of Johnny’s loans. So, a day later, they were in the 55 Bar gaming out how they were going to hit the Buffalo Roadhouse, half a block away down Seventh Avenue at the corner of Barrow. The Roadhouse was a hip bar with a younger crowd. Johnny had had a thing with one of the waitresses who told him that the take on Christmas Eve would be enough to retire on, crowded with dudes flashing cash to impress their dates and look big. Champagne assholes, she called them.

This is an excerpt from my Tuesday column in Salon. To read the rest of the column, go to:

Jingle bells, shotgun shells