The Squeeze

The Numbers Don't Lie

Never was a man more aptly named than Sidney Zion—and yes, that was his real name. Of the four characters in this little playlet, he is the only one I knew personally. Memories! Our relationship ended badly but I don’t hold it against him. I was young and dumb. Another story for another time. If I met him now, I’d have given him a very wide berth. For now….

---

Scene: Gallagher’s Bar, Third Night

The same amber light, the same haze of cigarette smoke, though the air feels sharper tonight. The door swings open, and in walks a character straight out of Damon Runyon: Sidney Zion. You almost expect the patrons to break into a Frank Loesser number.

Zion is bald, wears glasses, doesn’t look like much but pugnacity drips from every pore; not a witless pugnacity, a combination of wile, guile, and physical menace. You know he’s in a room before he’s in a room. He wears a decent but unremarkable suit with a newspaper rolled under one arm. His tie is grudgingly knotted because Gallagher’s requires it— you can just tell he’ll loosen it as soon as he walks out the door. He has argued every day of his life and won most of the arguments. He never loses; he only fights to a draw.

At the far end of the bar, Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin hold their usual posts — Hamill trim, fair, and thoughtful, nursing a whiskey; Breslin broad and rumpled, his gut leading the way, drink half gone. At the sight of Zion, they move to a small table. Zion slides onto the third seat, sits, and casually takes out a Montecristo No. 2, lights it, and exhales luxuriantly.¹

ZION
You micks may be dumb but you are clever. You did the old two-armed squeeze on the Jew. You get to do the old Gaelic shtick, that pretty Irish bubbe meise, the talking out of the tuchus, and I get to do the facts. OK, here it is.

He spreads open the newspaper and reads.

The Squeeze: A Racket by Any Other Name

By Sidney Zion

Leave it to the Jew to point out the financial facts.

Let’s start with the part where even the governor said it. “A racket,” Mrs. Hochul called it — the home-health-care aid system that’s eating Albany alive. When a Democrat governor uses that word, you know the jig is up.

Here’s how the squeeze works. Albany passes the “Fair Pay for Home Care” law — sounds great, looks great — but there’s a catch. Every hour the aide gets, the middlemen skim. Agencies, consultants, the nonprofit-industrial complex that long ago learned how to say “social justice” while billing the state double time.

Now along comes Zohran Mamdani, the socialist from Uganda by way of Queens who says Mrs. Hochul’s the villain because she won’t sign more checks. In my day, this was called compassion theater. A bunch of Jewish socialists — the old-fashioned kind, the one’s that left the party in ‘39 after the Hitler-Stalin pact but never stopped being socialists — would put on a play. Now it’s a billion-dollar industry.

The real story is this: New York built a health-care system that depends on imported poverty. You bring in women from the islands, from Africa, from Bangladesh — call them “essential” — pay them just enough to keep them in the job, then drown the rest in paperwork. The unions say they’re protecting workers, the progressives say they’re fighting capitalism, and everyone’s fighting for the same pool of state cash.

Mrs. Hochul, to her credit, said the quiet part out loud. But she’s boxed in — between the nonprofit racketeers who fund run the machine and the socialist purists who think money grows on trees. It’s a squeeze worthy of a B-movie: the racketeers on one side, the reformers on the other, and a state budget — that is, the taxpayers — screaming in the middle.

This is where Donnie Trump comes in. He’s from here. Don’t underestimate him. He grew up speaking New York legalese and learned to read with stipulations. He doesn’t have to pass a bill. He just has to send the auditors. Delay a Medicaid match here, question a waiver there, tighten the immigration screws on the aides who actually do the work. In six months you’ll have 200,000 home-care dependents panicking, checks bouncing, progressives marching, Mrs. Hochul begging and Mamdani’s boys in the streets. He won’t be smiling then.

Mamdani can chant “globalize the intifada” all he wants, but he better start globalizing the math. The numbers don’t care who’s oppressed; they care who signs the checks.

The people — the real ones, not the lobbyists — are left wondering why the cost of virtue keeps going up every year. Call it compassion, call it reform, call it whatever you want. But when everyone’s getting paid except the worker, you’ve got yourself a racket.

Zion sits back and takes a satisfied puff of the Cuban cigar. Pete and Jimmy say nothing. They know Zion has hit it out of the park and they just got base hits. But it’s alright; they sit in quiet, brotherly camaraderie for a few seconds.

Suddenly the atmosphere becomes supercharged with something indescribable: in a place where movie stars and heavyweight champs are humdrum daily fare, Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller are walking through the bar to the dining room. Monroe’s radiance illuminates the smoky darkness like a celestial halo.

The patrons watch her move noiselessly through the bar, stunned and silent. After a minute, the buzz starts up again and another night at Gallagher’s passes.

1. Cuban cigars were illegal to smoke in the US, thanks to the embargo Kennedy signed in 1962. Legend has it JFK ordered a thousand Petit Upmanns for himself the night before he signed it. Zion, of course, broke every rule he could and would certainly have smoked Cubans. I don’t know how he got them, but he would have.