Joey Levitch was sweating bullets. He was a loose goose and half-a-spastic on his best days, and tonight his usual anxieties were dialed up into the megahertz range. He tried to play it cool, spinning the six-shooter on his finger like he’d seen the gunslingers do on the big screen, but the gun spun free and landed on the floor of the Mercury Coupe.
“Easy,” Leonard admonished him from the front passenger seat.
“If that’s the best he can do with a pistol I feel bad for whoever he’s shtupping,” Julius quipped from the back seat next to Joey. He tapped his cigar ash out his half-open window.
Adolph, behind the wheel, honked at a kid on his bike getting too close to the front bumper but otherwise kept quiet.
“Couldn’t we just, you know, maim the guy a little?” Joey wondered aloud. “I mean, killing seems so awful…permanent…”
Leonard didn’t even turn around, just stared out the window watching the traffic and the people on Hudson. “You know what they did to our little brothers. What they did to Milton and Herbert. We told you all about it, didn’t we?”
“Sure, sure, I know the tune,” Joey stammered. “And I’m not made of stone, or clay. I’m not saying they should not be avenged. But is this really the answer? Is this what they would’ve wanted?”
“Trust me,” Julius said, teeth clenched around his stogie. “This is exactly what they would’ve wanted. Gift-wrapped, with a bow.”
Joey gulped, gave the gun another half-hearted spin. Adolph honked his horn.
***
It hadn’t always been like this. The early days of Vaudeville were rough and tumble, sure, but for the first however many years, the killing was strictly metaphorical. You slayed the audience, knocked ‘em dead in the aisles, left no man standing, etc. Or you died, bombed, pushed up stage daisies, whatever. Things didn’t get really wild until around ‘34, when Moses Horwitz decided he’d had enough of being some other guy’s stooge and bumped off Ted Healy to become head of his own comedy outfit. That changed the game. For the next few years it was Moe and his brothers, Sam and Jerome, with their pal Louie Feinberg, and they were a tight bunch that could go toe to toe with the roughest and toughest of the Vaudeville acts. They were as hilarious as they were ruthless, and some of their best stage bits were straight from the things they’d had to do coming up in the biz the hard way: the eye-gouges, the nose-and-ear–pulling, the heads in vises, the hammers to the cranium, the mousetraps on the fingers, all of it.
***
Minnie Marx’s boys, though, they were something different. Oh sure, they could do the slapstick and be as brutal as any troupe of professional stage clowns, and Julius played a Tommy gun smooth as Adolph strummed that harp. But there was something more to ‘em, a kind of rat-a-tat wit that was as deadly as any machine gun, a fierce velocity to the wordplay that not only razzle-dazzled the crowds but really spun the heads of regular jakes like Moses and the rest of the Horwitz crew. They were a threat, the scary kind, the sort that ate up ticket sales and stole butts from seats.
The whole mess started small enough, as these things do, with Moses and his stooges perhaps “borrowing” a bit of stage business, a gag or two, pilfered not-so-indirectly from the Marxes’s act. Flagrant, really, and impossible to hide or get away with in those days when there were more than a few someones– theater critics, comedy fanatics, entertainment addicts–who went to everything, not to mention performers and stagehands and ushers and the like who were in and out of this and that revue at every theater row in every borough that had one. So word got around. Maybe Moses was a little too Julius-like in some way, shape or form on a Tuesday night or at a Saturday matinee, or perhaps it was Jerome apishly pantomiming something that Adolph had perfected over a lifetime of wordless genius. Whatever. It was decidedly not a two-way street, in which case it probably wouldn’t have been such a situation as it became, tit-for-tat gag theft being kind of expected and excused almost as homage in those days in certain theatrical arenas. But this wasn’t that. This was a kind of mutual disrespect, with the Horwitzes nakedly thieving and the Marxes pointedly not reciprocating, almost as if to say the other work was beneath them and what would they even need of it?
And so it came to pass that Leonard and Adolph caught Sam Horwitz out and alone one dreary evening down near the Bowery, and some unkind words were exchanged, and some even less kind actions followed, and it being two on one and Sam already a bit in his cups, he did not fare so well on that particular occasion. Roughed up, in the parlance of the time, and sent back that much the worse for wear with a taste of his own slapstick medicine.
Naturally there was retaliation, and when Sam, Jerome and Moe cornered young Milton Marx–whose sobriquet on both stage and street was the unfortunate “Gummo”-in the garment district early one Sunday morning, things went a bit too far with an industrial sewing machine and a dressmaker’s dummy and the feud was then in full swing.
***
Julius being Julius, he fought back in the way that had always been most familiar, from the stage, calling out the stooges with a lacerating monologue ad-libbed at a packed Friday night at the Palace Theatre.
“I’ve never seen four men with three less brains between them! They give actual stooges a bad name. In fact, to truly earn the title of stooge would be an advancement in stature for these imbeciles, and I think I speak for all of us when I say that some of us speak for the rest of us. In conclusion, I have to say all four of the Three Stooges need to learn to count, and if the Horwitzes want a battle of wits with the Marxes, well, it’s pretty clear they’ve got more ‘whore’ than ‘wits.’”
After that, it was open season, and no one was safe onstage, backstage or on the streets.
***
“I think I see him,” Leonard said, pointing at a rotund man in a suit jacket and pork pie hat who’d just exited a Horn & Hardart’s and was still shoveling the last of a slab of lemon meringue into his maw.
“You sure that’s him?” Joey asked, clearly hoping it wasn’t.
“Personally, I can’t tell a Joe Palma from a Joe Besser from a Joe DeRita,” Julius said, exhaling a plume of blue Cuban smoke. “Nor do I particularly care. You’ve seen one Joe, you’ve seen ‘em all.”
“Hey!” Joey protested.
Julius scowled. “You’re no more a Joe than I am. I’m telling you, you want to stand out in this business, do not keep that name.”
Julius had hand-picked Levitch for this gig. He didn’t like getting blood on his or his brothers’ hands if he could help it. The idea was to keep appearances clean, and imply everything else; innuendo was his stock-in-trade. He hadn’t even used any of the criminal buzzwords that one would normally employ to manipulate a man like Joey L. into this particular circumstance. There was no talk of killing or offing or doing murder. As far as Julius and Joey were concerned, this was all strictly a bit.
***
It was what the stooges did to Herbert that pushed Julius to the edge. At a romantic dinner with his paramour at the Stork Club, good old Zeppo, the baby of the family and the apple of Mom’s eye, the one they’d tried to keep out of the funny business. Jerome Horwitz, one table away, performed the old “choking” gag, letting a chunk of lamb gristle lodge just above his tonsils, then horking it up when Moses slapped him on the back, the half-chewed projectile rocketing across the room right to where poor Herbert sat, mouth gaping at the scene. The meat-plug lodged for real, sending Herb to the carpet, turning purple and gasping for a breath of life.
***
In the car, Julius removed his specs and wiped the lenses, fogged with the unpleasant memory. Adolph angled the Mercury over to the curb, cutting off a guy driving an ice truck, who made a bunch of those gestures Italian fellas learn from their mothers.
“You can do this, kid,” Julius said by way of encouragement. “I believe in you. Which is saying something, because I generally don’t believe in anything. Ask him.” He pointed his cigar at his brother behind the wheel, who honked the horn once more and still said nothing.
Joey closed his eyes and took a deep breath before opening the door.
“What are you waiting for?” Leonard asked.
“I just want to get my bearings and make sure I don’t do something stupid like accidentally shoot some nice LADY,” laying a goofy emphasis and expression on the final word, popping his eyes and bucking his teeth, which cracked all the brothers up even though they weren’t quite sure why.
Joey stepped out onto the sidewalk, adjusted his tie, smoothed his hair, dropped the gun one more time for good measure, retrieving it in a seizure-like display of flailing limbs that attracted the attention of everyone on the street, and then stumbled like a disabled kid towards his target. Julius watched from the back seat half-flabbergasted, half-mesmerized, in awe of the audacity, the all-in sense of fervor. Realizing in that moment that he was witnessing a well-calculated ploy, this appearance of total chaos and loss of control when actually Joey owned the moment, had rehearsed this hit within an inch of its life. Utterly prepared to announce himself to the comedy underworld in the most offbeat and unforgettable manner possible.
“Oh, a wiseguy,” said Jerome, turning to see what was coming for him, running one foot against the cement like a bull about to charge. “Nyuck nyuck nyuck.”
Joey cut loose with the six-gun. Blood from Jerome’s heart sprayed like a squirting lapel flower, and his bald head came apart like a melon hit with a hammer. Ladies screamed, kids dove for cover, hard men and soft alike turned tail and fled the crazy scene. Joey dropped the gun and kicked it sideways into the open sewer grate, like it had all been planned that way. He was back in the car and Adolph had them rolling before anyone who counted even knew what really happened.
Catching his breath, the kid wasn’t quite down off his slack-jawed, eye-rolling, loony-goony performance high. “Didja see that?! That wasn’t no Curly Joe! That was the real thing! Unless they can convince Shemp to make a comeback, they’re gonna be calling themselves the Two Stooges from here on out!” Joey delighted in his own punchlines in a way that made Julius feel a little sour.
“You did good, kid,” Leonard said, eyes straight ahead, his deep confident gravel making it sound almost true.
“You didn’t lose your head anyway,” Julius said, drawing a fresh cigar across his mustache and inhaling the aroma. “Can’t say as much for the other fella…”
Adolph honked at that.
-- Stephen T. Brophy has known he was a writer since the 2nd grade, when he started writing his own version of a novel called Jaws (with illustrations!) in a purple spiral notebook. He's been attempting to damage other people's IP ever since, while also writing his own original short stories, novels, novellas, film and TV scripts, internet cartoons and just about anything else that can be typed by hand. He started getting paid for it around the turn of the millennium and has eked out a living mainly as a writer/producer in the entertainment-adjacent field of reality TV. Recently he's turned his attention to trying to write for videogames while rediscovering his love of long-form prose. He lives in Los Angeles, where he went to sell out but only partially succeeded.