I felt the cold steel of a gun against my head three times. Twenty-six years we have been here. A tailor fourteen years before that here. Fifty-one years. And he's an Orthodox Jew, and his father said (when he was managing: when first we settled on a price; and, you know, we negotiated . . . but when we were done he told me): “I will never throw you out.” The boy, he said, “Before I do a thing we'll talk.” Today I get his letter in the mail. And I go there. I say, “You said that we were going to talk.” He said, “I thought instead of talking I'd send you a letter.” So what am I going to do? Where am I going to go? My customers are going to follow me? Can I ask them to walk for twenty blocks? If even he gave me a ten-year lease, at least then I could sell the business. So I said double the rent. Triple the rent, I told him. He has got a guy is going to pay two thousand a month, he says. And he's going to put in fifty-thousand dollars restoration. I told him, “How is he going to make the rent?" He said, “He'll break his back.
