Wednesday, March 06, 2002 7:30 PM
One from column A, a little schmaltz and more starch in that collar please.

It was 1969-1970 and I was working at a Cleaners and Tailors Supply Place on the corner of 12th and Franklin in Oakland Ca. One block off Broadway. The place was run by a brisk seventy-five year old man named Ben Rosenberg and I swear he was way healthier and younger than my twenty-four years. He was also a tough guy with a heart of gold. The place was populated by Jews who had been kept, in one case by the British in concentration camps and in the other by the Japanese in Singapore in concentration camps. They were not called concentration camps, but the effect was the much same. Later a kid without proper papers worked with us for a few months until the INS sent him back to Hungary. The two older women in accounting did not have so exotic a story as the others but they were upstanding members of the Oakland Jewish Community and Ben’s synagogue in particular.

So what the hell was a Larimer Avenue Dago doing there? Well, I loved everyone who worked there and fit in a very comfortable way. I am a pretty good worker and it was a plus that my wife Andrea was Jewish. We were Abbie’s Irish Rose in reverse. A negative Bridget Loves Bernie.

Trudy, a survivor of the hell camps in Singapore, she lost her family somewhere in Nazi Germany, taught me Yiddish. “What,” I asked one day after she disparaged a customer, “the hell, Trudy, is a schlimachel. “ She explained, “Just like a schlimazel only worse.”

Emil had graduated, at a later time, from the same high school in Linz, Austria that Adolf Hitler attended. Both Trudy and Emil had seen Hitler speak at rallies. Andre had been in Hungary when his countrymen were tossing Molotov Cocktails at Russian Tanks. It was an odd way to be touched by history, but it affected me.

Each morning I would have coffee and Danish at the Chicago Delicatessen. Then I would load up my VW bus with hangers, diatomaceous earth, bolts of cloth, and skeins of thread, make the drive across the Bay Bridge into San Fran and most definitely China Town. I knew my way around in those days. Would travel from the near orient of Rosenberg Bros. to the far orient above North Beach. It turns out, and should have been no surprise, that Chinese families involved in the laundry business in San Francisco/Oakland are all related. For some reason that must have to do with genes and chemical triggers, I was immediately liked and accepted by the families.

I would walk into a narrow store front perched in the middle of an impossibly steep street. The emergency brake on my dull green VW bus tightened to a frightening maximum. There was invariably an old man in a white shirt and black slacks, who looked like he had many of the kung-fu secrets to the world. He would point to a door that led to the back room.

Once I left that laundry façade, I entered a new world.

In the first of the many back rooms, there were always one or two women who were cooking some concoction that looked indistinguishable from the liquid that was in the swirling in the washing machines. The brew was always fragrant and often as not would smell enticing. I would smile at them as the old man pointed to another doorway. This one always led to a narrow passage guarded by a dog, who would growl and let me know just how happy I should be that he was tethered just a few inches short of me as I hurried passed. Then into another room that was full of oriental folk eating and chatting in Chinese. The corridors were endless. The building that looked so tiny from the street was as huge as the Cow Palace inside. And populated with more people than must exist on mainland China. Every place that I would deliver to, in Oakland, out in the Sunset District, in Chinatown, in Pittsburg, in Richmond, even in Contra Costa County would be the same.

I also to felt comfortable, at home with the “laundry” people. I didn’t understand all that they said, they didn’t understand much of what I said, but we did try and that was enough.

One day, in search of adventure, I asked one of the white shirted cloned keepers of the laundry, where I could find authentic Chinese Food. He told me that the best restaurant in the Bay Area was located on Broadway in Oakland at about 8th Street.

Andrea and I went along with Phil and Kay. Authentic it was. The name of the place is lost in the shards and fog of my memory, but it was a very understated place with booths on both side of the washed out lime walls. A couple thousand year eggs graced the front window, along with heavy Chinese cups and dishes full of food that looked a lot like my grandmother’s vegetable garden on Lenora Street in East Liberty.

I am probably imagining this, but as we walked up to the front of the restaurant to one of the few empty booths, I swore I saw an eyeball gaze up at me from a bowl of shark’s fin soup. I wish I could say that the food was great or horrible but I don’t remember. But I am sure it was “authentic”.

Next day at the Chicago Deli, I had a chopped liver with brown mustard on dark rye for lunch. I love schmalz!