Whacked By a Loquat

A friend of mine recently moved into a house in California which had an unusual tree in the back yard. The tree was loaded with yellow fruits that weren’t quite mangoes and weren’t quite plums. She did research on the Internet and found she had a loquat tree. She sent me a picture of the preternaturally laden growth that seemed almost as if it might have been planted by space aliens in her garden - to flourish from mere floral effulgences into paunchy human simulacra.

Ah, loquats! That brought back memories of what had been one of my own more outlandish experiences - memories of a colorful, roaring twenties-style episode in my life.

Back then, I was dating a man from Sicily. Without meaning to play into any ethnic stereotypes, this man in fact bragged that he had friends who were “connected.” That is, he had friends in the mob. He brought one of these pals along on one of our dinner dates. The two had grown up together, getting into minor smuggling mischief along the coasts of Cefalú and Taormina. They had come to the U.S. around the same time. Spencer Tracy/Humphrey Bogart fashion, they had taken different paths here – the good and the bad.

This pal turned out to be a perfect embodiment of the Joe Pesci character in Goodfellas, except he was taller. But he was fore-square and burst forward with a burly sense of always having the right-of-way. Again in embarrassing stereotype, he wore a tailored dark suit (even on that hot summer night) and drove a black Cadillac.

He said we should go to Chinatown. He was ripe for a meal at one of his favorite hangouts there. So we loaded into his Cady, all three of us crammed onto the front bench seat, with me in the middle. I soon learned that Jimmy not only looked like Joe Pesci, but he was filled with the same erratic, dangerous kind of presumption.

He soon apparently lost his way, but of course it was impossible for him to admit as much. He said he was taking “a short-cut.” After a long course of twists and turns along unfamiliar streets, we found ourselves at the entrance to an abandoned railroad siding on Chicago’s south side. “No Trespassing” signs were posted along the periphery of this desolate acreage. We were further meant to be warded off by a heavy anchoring chain that had once been stretched across a side road leading onto the property. But the chain had rusted and fallen onto the pavement. Jimmy took this as a come-on. He gunned his engine and shot over the heavy chain and over some other twisted metal as if he were Evil Knievel ramping up and over the hurdles in an obstacle course.

My date meekly observed, “I no think we suppose to go this way. The signs say about Tres…, Traipsing…”

“Those signs no apply to us!” Jimmy asserted with supreme bravado, as he shot over a spool of cabling.

As we jounced along, I was slung against him and became aware that he was “packing.” When I told this story to a friend of mine, she suggested the alternative that he might just have been glad to see me. But no, he actually was wearing a shoulder holster. This was well before the days when carrying concealed weapons had been made legal in Chicago. So no wonder the reason for the heavy suit jacket even in the heat of summer.

Miraculously, we finally made our way out of that terminus of abandoned railroad cars and railroad detritus, without either us or the car having suffered any damage. We actually found ourselves in a neighborhood within striking distance of Chinatown. Jimmy felt vindicated, although what should have been a twenty-minute drive had taken us over an hour. “I knew it a short-cut,” he pronounced. He parked the car and we walked.

On the way, we passed a thin, elderly black man who was weaving towards us down the street. The black man was obviously very inebriated and was having trouble steering a straight course. To my shock and horror, Jimmy grabbed the black man by the T-shirt as we passed him. He shook the man and yelled into his face, "Hey you! This Chinky town! You a Chink? I no think so! No you ain't! You no belong! Get off of da street!" With that, he flung the man aside toward the curb as if he was a sack of garbage. I guess Jimmy wanted his Chinatown to be like a DisneyWorld experience, peopled only by authentic Chinese actors.

I couldn’t believe it! Neither could the black man. The reality of this virulent rebuff clearly didn't register on him. He rolled his eyes as if trying to bring reality back into better focus, as if he believed he must be suffering from D.T.’s and just had some hallucination more exotic than the usually cited pink elephants. He staggered on without making any reply to what he’d obviously taken as some figment of his imagination.

Of course Jimmy had no sense of the irony of his objecting to a black man walking down the streets of Chinatown, while he himself, distinctly NOT Chinese, was walking there. But again, his conviction that none of the rules applied to him carried him forth, undeterred. With him leading the way, we finally got to his hangout, the King Wah Restaurant on Wentworth, the main street of Chicago's Chinatown.

There was more harrowing, illogical rough-talk from him during our meal. Jimmy’s politics were staunchly Republican – Republican to the death.  He vehemently took the side of the latest Republican Senator to be embroiled in a scandal. He said all the man’s opponents should be lined up against a wall and shot! Jimmy illustrated his point by pantomiming a St. Valentine’s Day-style massacre right there on the spot as he pointed his arms toward a wall of the restaurant.  He was filled with such violent partisanship. There were no gray areas for Jimmy. He was either all for or all against.

The mobster stereotypes kept coming hot and heavy. He said he was “in construction,” with the quotation marks floating almost palpably around his statement. He said he poured a lot of concrete. When my date rather disingenuously asked him what job he was currently working on, Jimmy said he had something he had to do out of town the following day. He said he was leaving for Detroit, to “straighten something out.”

Was Jimmy’s whole life a pantomime of mob affiliation? Was he just a wannabe? I’m not sure, but I have it from reliable sources that he did in fact leave for Detroit the following day, and my date was convinced his boyhood pal had become the real thing. He recommended him as someone you could always go to if you ever wanted a problem fixed. As we sat there, I felt no doubt that Jimmy would in fact straighten out whatever – or whoever – was fated to meet with him in Detroit.

But then it came time for dessert. This is where loquats played such a memorable role.

Jimmy imperiously snapped his fingers, and our elderly Chinese waiter eventually came over to our table, none too compliantly though. The waiter had a sour, disinclined look on his face. Jimmy had some trouble describing what he wanted for desert. “You know, that fruit, lo…lo…somethin’ like that,” he groped after the word.

The waiter said "Loquat? We no have that. Just what on menu." The waiter pointed testily to the absence of any mention of loquats on the menu. (This became a case of dueling dropped articles of speech.)

"No," the mobster tried again, although with clearly flagging spirit. "No, I think I have here before. Lo, lo - yeah loquat."

Then I remembered. It was true, I used to see lychee nuts, but occasionally loquats too, offered as desserts in Chinese restaurants. They would bring the fruit on dishes of chipped ice – cool succulences to end a spicy meal. But maybe now only the most expensive Chinese restaurants offered such delicacies. I hadn’t seen them in mainstream Chinese restaurants for a long time.

In any case, our waiter at this restaurant was definitely not willing to make common cause with Jimmy’s hankering for loquats. Like a teacher reprimanding an unruly child, the waiter sternly repeated, "No, we have no loquat. We have what on menu. You no see on menu - we no have!"

Amazingly, the mobster, the hit man - melted in meekness into the cushion of his booth before this onslaught of refusal. He backed down, all sheepishness, "Oh, OK. I thought... It OK. I wrong. Just... I guess we'll just have the fortune cookies. That OK. Yeah, we want fortune cookies," he said with face-saving assurance, as if that’s what he’d really wanted all along.

After all his rough talk, the mobster had been cowed by a waiter. Well, I guess NO ONE can intimidate a senior Chinese waiter.

The next day, my boyfriend passed along a message to me. He said Jimmy had liked me and had asked if I’d be interested in becoming his mistress.

I have to admit - despite the man's vicious racism and absurdist approach to life - I was tempted. I thought how nice it would be to be ushered through this world on the arm of a man who could “straighten out” all my adversaries. I thought of a popular tune sung by country/western star Joe Sun back then – “Shotgun Rider.” In the lyrics, Joe Sun asks his girlfriend to “Let me be your shotgun rider.” He says, “I will protect you from the rain and the cold.” I guess the term originally referred to armed men who’d ride on the sides of stagecoaches and shoot away all would-be stagecoach robbers. Then later the term was applied to the roaring 20’s mobsters who’d stand on the running boards that cars had then. They’d stand outside flanking their boss who rode in more secure luxury inside. These latter-day shotgun riders carried machine guns and Tommy guns, ready to blast away any impediment or enemy who crossed their path.

Yes, it would be nice to have a person like that running interference for me, in a metaphorical sense of course. I wouldn’t want anyone to actually get shot – I guess. But more generally, I longed to be in the company of a man who could umbrella me under his conviction that the rules – “They no apply to us!” For a moment there, I felt that with someone like him, I could break through the chains that warded mere mortals off sacred property. With such audacity by my side, all the “No Trespassing” signs, all the chains, and even death itself - would not apply.

But even then, I was wise enough to know that men who spout violence like that rarely can be counted on to aim their violence in the right direction. They usually end up wreaking their violence on their mates, while they coweringly cave-in when the real world presents a challenge. They’re too afraid of appearing foolish to ever ask for directions. They’re nowhere to be found when a repairman presents a grossly padded bill. And they back down when a sullen waiter refuses to bestir himself to produce loquats.

I sensed Jimmy would fail me in all those more vital everyday categories. I could picture him furtively siding with the plumber who charged me $250 to change a faucet washer – slipping him the money against my protests while he rolled his eyes to indicate that I could be a little moodily difficult, at certain times of the months. And he had shown himself to be incapable of standing his ground to get us those loquats that would have been so cool a refreshment on that hot summer night. All he could do was bully elderly black men on the street – men who weren’t in a position to fight back.

So I politely sent back a message declining Jimmy’s offer. I used the excuse of my loyalty to my current boyfriend – although we both knew that was a crock. Ours was just a casual summer liaison.

So to this day, I’ve never had a loquat. I don’t see them in the grocery stores where I shop, and I’ve never again seen or heard mention of them in any Chinese restaurant. My friend in California said she would send me some from her tree – except she found hers got mushy the day after being picked. They’d never make the trip. So all I have of loquats is the picture she emailed to me – and the memory of a hit man years ago who didn’t have the ammunition to get a loquat on our table.