In 1928, Jakow Krol became Jacob King and began his publishing business, Family Enterprises.
                    "Are you going downtown?"
                    Jakow looked up from his eggs, and stared at his wife's legs as she scrubbed the frying pan. He issued a sub-verbal grunt intoning a question, and thought about picking her up and carrying her back to the bedroom.
                    "I have something for my sister."
                    Yetta turned around and smiled at Jakow. He stared into her blue, blue eyes and grunted an affirmation to her request. Her brother, Moeshe, would be running the shop, Krol's tailor business. Krol was a lousy tailor, but a pretty good businessman, and quickly hired a number of destitute, yet skilled immigrants to work for him. And he hired Moeshe, in part for his wife, but in part because he figured Jews were good at business, and Moeshe was good, good enough that Jakow was already planning to move out of the Lower East Side. Jakow was Polish Catholic, and if his parents were still alive, they'd die if they found out he hired Jews over his own kind. He couldn't even think what they would have done if he'd married Yetta when they were alive. But at that moment, he thought again about having sex, and then took a few more bites of egg.
                    "Little Sammy, the boy who works for you," said Yetta, "Mrs. Greenblatt said he's won some sort of scholarship, you know, to the high school of the arts."
                    Jakow hired Sammy Greenblatt, a kid from the neighborhood, to draw signs. At a quarter a sign, the kid managed to produce professional looking work. Krol had seen the teenager around, drawing on the sidewalk, and the grocer, Feinbaum, had even put one of the boy's drawings up in his window, as it had one some sort of contest, and Feinbaum was proud that someone from the neighborhood was getting recognition.
                    "You'll drop this off with Chaim, eh?" Yetta said as she put a small package in front of Jakow. He thought about reaching up and grabbing her left breast, nibbling her ear. She turned and picked up her hat. "I need to pick up some groceries."
                    Jakow growled an answer as she pecked his cheek goodbye.
                    Chaim was Yetta's sister's husband and he had a little newsstand uptown. Jakow had noticed that it was in a good location, but as far as he could see, Chaim just around arguing politics with other communist Jews, bickering over why they followed Lenin or Trotsky. For all Jakow cared, Marx could be one of the Jew brothers in that show on Broadway, but he did want to know how Chaim made enough money to move his own family out of the slum.
                    After checking in on Moeshe, who had managed to talk that skinflint on the corner into buying a new suit and two (Hell of a salesman, Moeshe), Jakow walked to the subway. Chaim's stand was located right near a subway exit downtown.
                    When Jakow arrived, he saw Chaim gabbing with Yetta's deadbeat cousin Izzy. Izzy tried to make a go at publishing a communist newspaper, actually more of an infrequently produced leaflet. A few weeks back, he had had been beaten up by Irish goons under the pay of a local factory. Jakow hoped it had done him some good.
                    As soon as he said hi to both of his relations by marriage, a couple of kids came up, one with red hair and buck teeth, the other with a needle nose and a beanie.
                    "Um," said Buck Teeth to Chaim, "we heard, you had some, er, special publications."
                    Both of the teenagers averted their eyes, pretending to look at some of the glossy magazines on display. Chaim stared at the redhead until the young man finally made eye contact.
                    "Now," he said, "what is it that you want?"
                    The younger man looked flustered. His friend, who still wouldn't look up, nudged him.
                    "They're like, y'know, the funnies in the paper. Only different, y'know."
                    The young man had a desperate smile on his face, and perspiration beaded on his forehead.
                    "How many you want?" asked Chaim.
                    The young man gulped.
                    "How much are they?"
                    "For you, my friend, 75 cents each."
                    The young man turned around to confer with his friend. They pulled a pair of bills and a pile of change from their pockets, and the redhead counted it out.
                    "We have $3.47."
                    "That would pay for 4," said Chaim. "But for you, I'll throw in a fifth."
                    "Gee, that's swell," said the redhead as he handed over the lump of money, and five small items, which Jakow couldn't make out, were pulled from under the counter and quickly handed to the teenager. The young pair left.
                    "You selling dope, now, Chaim?" asked Jakow.
                    "You want I should get arrested?" Chaim gave his brother-in-law a dirty look and gestured for him to come behind the counter. In a box, were a pile of small booklets. Jakow took one out to look at while Izzy returned to telling Chaim about some Russian film that sounded boring as Hell to Krol. The booklets that the teenagers had purchased were made up of two small pieces of paper stapled together and filled with what Jakow could see were a bunch of crudely draw pictures of people fucking. Even with how horny he had been that morning, Krol didn't find the images particularly stimulating.
                    "You sell many of these?" he asked Chaim, interrupting Izzy's speech, something about the symbolism of maggots in meat or something. Krol never could make any sense of their Red talk.
                    "Sammy, my boy," said Jakow, taking the young artist by the arm. The teenager was almost a head taller than Krol, gangly, with a shock of curly black hair frizzing out in every direction. Clumsy, bad at sports, and useless in a fight, Sammy had found something to impress his peers, the slum toughs of the neighborhood. Drawing gave Sammy a special place in the hierarchy of the street, had won him respect in certain influential strata of the ghetto youth. Sammy would draw pictures of anything on anything with anything he could find that made a mark. Some might think he suffered from a form of hypergraphia. He drew from life and copied paintings and illustrations from magazines, but what he loved to draw best was the comic strips, and unknown to the subjects, the girls in his classes. Sammy would daydream about presenting the likeness to one of his crushes, and maybe she would meet him after school for a soda. Or maybe she would laugh at him and make fun of his drawing. So he never showed those drawings to anyone.
                    "Sammy, I have a business proposition to make. How would you like to earn five dollars?"
                    Sammy had never had two dollars at once in his life, but he stiffened up. Something, maybe Mr. Krol holding his arm, made his stomach turn icy.
                    "I need some drawings," said Mr. Krol, "some very special drawings."
                    He looked Sammy straight in the face, and the young man nervously averted his eyes, nodded and coughed out some sort of assent. Krol reached into his suit jacket and pulled out a small pile of 8-pagers he had appropriated from Chaim's newsstand and handed them to Sammy.
                    "Here," he said, "this is what I need. I'll give you five bucks for each one you finish."
                    He stared solemnly into the boy's face; what Krol hoped was a paternal smile crawled up his cheeks. Jakow held out his hands in a gesture of friendly openness.
                    "You draw good. You draw for me, and we both make money. You're a good kid, Sammy."
                    Jakow began to nod slowly, smiling and gesturing to Sammy until the young man, expressionless, nodded back, as if it were the only way he could stop the man from looking at him.
                    "Alright," said Krol, patting Sammy on the shoulder "we're working together. I need the first one by Friday, OK? Go talk to my wife's cousin Isaiah, Izzy, from down the block, about the details, size of the pictures and stuff. OK?"
                    Sammy gave him a somnambular nod. Mr. Krol nodded back aggressively, then turned and started to walk out of the room. The he stopped.
                    "And, Sammy," he said, "if you tell anybody what you're drawing or who gave you these, I'll break your fucking neck."
                    Mr. Krol gave him a look that melded together aspects of a grin and a glower, then left.
                    Standing in the hallway of the tailor's shop, Sammy stared at the tiny books for a moment, not sure what to make of them. It wasn't until he opened up the one on the top of the pile, titled "Clara Blow in 'Footballing,'" that he realized something was strange. He stared at the two facing panels on the opened pages for a moment, drinking in the crude caricature of the famous film star, totally naked. On the left page, she was holding the enormous penis of a football player wearing no pants. "You know," he word balloon said, "I've never fumbled a ball." On the right panel, the same player was shoving the large organ into her crotch, which was shown at an angle that raised questions to Sammy about drawing perspective and anatomy. She also had the member of another player in her mouth. "Gee, yer swell," said the first player. "What a pippin!" exclaimed the second. As he felt the blood rushing to his own loins, Sammy quickly looked around and shoved the pile of books into his pants.
                    Before that moment, Sammy's own concept of sex had been vague to say the least. The only females he had ever seen naked, and only very briefly, were his mother and his older sister, and he had never realized that there was anything down there besides hair. Having no really close friends, he had never learned anything on the streets, except that a man was supposed to put his penis between a woman's legs. That it actually went inside her body, stirring up what in the picture was a veritable wave of liquid, was news to him. And that a woman would put it in her mouth also came as a surprise.
                    And he was also intimidated to see that the men in the comic had penises the size of their own forearms.
                    He kept thinking about Clara Bow in the movies. And thinking about her naked. And what it would be like to stick his penis in her. And how difficult it is to walk home with a hard-on. And where could he draw the pictures without being caught? And how could he keep himself from aching after looking at these pictures?
                    He learned what to do to lessen the tension in his crotch in a booklet featuring Jiggs from "Bringing Up Father", called "Father Brings it Up". Jiggs is on his way to Dinty Moore's for some corned beef and cabbage when he meets up with a woman in a see through shirt, who asks him, "Is you is, or is you ain't my baby?" By the third panel she's undressed, and he has his penis out. Over the course of the next three panels, they explore a series of positions, only to be interrupted by a rolling pin-armed Maggie in the penultimate panel. In the last picture, Jiggs, who is sporting a black eye, is sitting in a bathroom, holding his penis, his arms surrounded by lines indicating movement. "Well, might as well finish the job myself," he said.
                    After a while, Sammy realized what the cartoon Irishman was doing. Unfortunately, this prevented him from doing any drawings over the next two days, as he studied the 8-pagers in private.