I am sorry, but old men stories are simply the best.
The reason is that you never know exactly what you are going to get.
The reason, of course, is that as time goes by, the rate of embellishment tends to rise.
- How many bad guys were there?
- How big was that fish?
- How many points did you score?
- How beautiful was that girl?
Memory is a funny thing. And so is growing old.
Reles’s treachery now seems inevitable to me, an indispensable part of the story. He is the Judas of the Jewish underworld, the man whose treachery makes the legend possible. Without Reles, the Brownsville Boys would have grown fat and bloated, tired crooks in tired cells, or else petered out in Miami Beach, old men with bullshit old men stories. They will instead live forever, always young, angry, tough. What else can such men do but flame out, bitter and betrayed, a storm washing the sky clean, leaving nothing but blue vistas behind?
-Rich Cohen, Tough Jews
