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The skid marks are enough to frighten youThey killed a woman right out in front of our place, same week my car was stolenI was leaving for the dayIt made my blood run coldJust driving her own car out of 2nd Street, and this woman, young black woman, gets itTwo days later it’s one of my own employeesBut they don’t care, black, white doesn’t matter to themFellow named Clark Tyler, my shipping guy–all he’s doing is pulling out of our lot to go homeTwelve hours of surgery, four months in a hospitalHead injuries, internal injuries, broken pelvis, broken shoulder, fractured spineA high-speed chase, crazy kid in a stolen car and the cops are chasing him, and the kid plows right into him, crushes the driver’s-side door, and that’s it for ClarkEighty miles an hour down Central AvenueThe car thief is twelve years oldTo see over the wheel he has to roll up the floor mats to sit onSix months in Jamesburg and he’s back behind the wheel of another stolen carNo, that was it for me, tooMy car’s robbed at gunpoint, they cripple Clark, the woman gets killed–that week did itewark Maid manufactured now exclusively in Puerto RicoFor a while, after fake birkin leaving Newark, he’d contracted with the Communist government in Czechoslovakia and divided the work between his own factory in Ponce, Puerto Rico, and a Czech glove factory in BrnoHowever, when a plant that suited him went up for sale in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, over near Mayagiiez, he’d bailed out on the Czechs, whose bureaucracy had been irritating from the start, and unified his manufacturing operation by purchasing a second Puerto Rico facility, another good-sized factory, moved in the machinery, started a training program, and hired an additional three hundred peopleBy the eighties, though, even Puerto Rico began to grow expensive and about everybody but Newark Maid fled to wherever in the Far East the labor force was abundant and cheap, to the Philippines first, then Korea and Taiwan, and now to China
Even baseball gloves, the most American glove of all, which used to be made by friends of his father’s, the Denkerts up in Johnstown, New York, for a long time now had been manufactured in KoreaWhen the first guy left Gloversville, New York, in ’52 or ’53 and went to the Philippines to make gloves, they laughed at him, as though he tiffany and co jewelry were going to the moonBut when he died, around 1978, he had a factory there with four thousand workers and the whole industry had gone essentially from Gloversville to the PhilippinesUp in Gloversville, when the Second World War began, there must have been ninety glove factories, big and smallToday there isn’t a one–all of them out of business or importers from abroad, “people who don’t know a fourchette from a thumb,” the Swede said”They’re business people, they know if they need a hundred thousand pair of this and two hundred thousand pair of that in so many colors and so many sizes, but they don’t know the details on how to get it done
“What’s a fourchette?” I asked”The part of the glove between the fingersThose small oblong pieces between the fingers, they’re die-cut along with the thumbs–those are the fourchettesToday you’ve got a lot of underqualified people, probably don’t know half what I knew when I was five, and they’re making some pretty big decisionsA guy buying deerskin, which can run up to maybe three dollars and fifty cents a foot for a garment grade, he’s buying this fine garment-grade deerskin to cut a little palm 18k omega watch patch to go on a pair of ski glovesI talked to him just the other dayA novelty part, runs about five inches by one inch, and he pays three fifty a foot where he could have paid a dollar fifty a foot and come out a long, long ways aheadYou multiply this over a large order, you’re talking a hundred-thousand-dollar mistake, and he never knew itHe could have put a hundred grand in his pocket
The Swede found himself hanging on in P he explained, the way he had hung on in Newark, in large part because he had trained a lot of good people to do the intricate work of making a glove carefully and meticulously, people who could give him what Newark Maid had demanded in quality going back to his father’s days; but also, he had to admit, staying on because his family so much enjoyed the vacation home he’d built some fifteen years ago on the Caribbean coast, not very far from the Ponce plantThe life the kids lived there they just lovedand off he went again, Kent, Chris, Steve, water-skiing, sailing, scuba diving, catamaraningand though it was clear from all he had just been telling me that this guy could be engaging if he wanted to be, he didn’t classic chanel handbag appear to have any judgment at all as to what was and wasn’t interesting about his worldOr, for reasons I couldn’t understand, he didn’t want his world to be interestingI would have given anything to get him back to Kiler, Fortgang, Lasky, Robbins, and Honig, back to the fourchettes and the details of how to get a good glove done, even back to the guy who’d paid three fifty a foot for the wrong grade of deerskin for a novelty part, but once he was off and running there was no civil way I could find to shift his focus for a second time from the achievements of his boys on land and sea
While we waited for dessert, the Swede let pass that he was indulging himself in a fattening zabaglione on top of the ziti only because, after having had his prostate removed a couple of months back, he was still some ten pounds underweight
“The operation went okay?”
“Just fine,” he replied
“A couple friends of mine,” I said, “didn’t emerge from that surgery as they’d hoped toThat operation can be a real catastrophe for a man, even if they get the cancer out
“Yes, that happens, I know
“One wound up impotent,” I said”The other’s impotent and cartier pasha watch inconti