And so, night after night, I would watch them, their faces a blurry haze from the glow of the television set, close my eyes and smile. I was on the eve of my thirteenth birthday and I couldn’t think of anything else I would much rather do than grow up and be one of them.
Be a gangster.
• • •
I GLANCED AT my watch and turned to Mary. “I was thinking of heading back to my apartment, grab a shower and change into some fresh clothes. Maybe even take time to catch a smile from my kids and a kiss from my wife. Will you be here when I get back?”
“Yes,” Mary said. “I may leave for a bit to do the same, but I won’t be gone long.”
“He’ll be okay,” I said, looking down at Angelo as he slept in his bed, the green monitors blinking and beeping around him. “The day nurses check on him every hour or so.”
“Can he hear anything at all?” Mary asked. “Is he even aware that we’re here, talking about him?”
“The doctors say no,” I said. “They said his brain and body are barely functioning and that he’s living moment to moment.”
“And what do you say?” Mary asked me with a sweet smile.
“I think he hears what he wants to hear and tunes out what doesn’t interest him,” I said. “And I think he’s happy that you and I are here together.”
“But you still don’t know where I fit in,” Mary said.
“It just comes down to a question of time. Eventually you’ll tell me everything you came here to tell me.”
“That sounds more like Angelo talking than you,” Mary said with a slight tilt of her head. “As much as you may want to try and fight it, a lot of who and what he is has rubbed off on you.”
“I’ll pick up some soup and sandwiches for us on the way back,” I said, ignoring her comment. “I shouldn’t be long. Two hours, three at the most.”
“Take as long as you need,” Mary said. “I wouldn’t mind having some time alone with him.”
I nodded and headed for the closed door. I turned to watch Mary walk over to Angelo’s bedside and pull a chair closer to him. She sat down, rested a hand on top of his and stroked the side of his face with a gentle motion.
15
* * *
Fall, 1968
I WAS FOURTEEN years old when I was sent out on my first official job for Angelo and Pudge. It was a cash pickup at an actor’s rented brownstone in the East Seventies. The actor was late on a cocaine payment to an uptown dealer who had given up on any chance he had of collecting his money, so he’d sold off the debt to Pudge, willing to take half as opposed to nothing.
“You heard of this guy before?” Pudge asked me. “I mean the name, it sound familiar to you?”
“I’ve seen him in a few things,” I said. “He’s in that big action movie that’s out now. I don’t like him all that much.”
“That’s good on all counts,” Pudge said. “You and Nico aren’t going to see him to do a breakdown on his acting. You’ll be there to pick up the cash he owes. Now, he’s Hollywood and used to getting most things for free. Angelo and me ain’t Hollywood and we’re used to getting what’s owed us. So, something’s gotta change and we’re way too old to start now. Nico will be there to make sure he doesn’t give you more than a little lip when you go to collect.”
“What do I do?” I asked.
“You be polite at all times and never get angry, no matter what he says to your face,” Pudge said. “Leave the heavy work to Nico, he’ll know what to do if it comes down to that. You’re there to take the cash, put it in your pocket and leave.”
“What if he doesn’t have it on him?” I asked. “Not many people have twenty-one hundred dollars lying around the house.”
“Then it’s gonna be a bad night all around,” Pudge said, standing to leave. “We’ll be outta cash and he’ll be outta luck. No winners anywhere in the circle.”
“I won’t let you down,” I said.
“It never crossed my mind you would. There’s a folder about this bum up on your bed. Look it over before you leave. The more you know about your target, the more it keeps you in control. Be ready to go when Nico comes to get you.”
“What should I wear?” My face turned beet red and I hoped the question didn’t come out sounding as stupid as it felt.
Pudge came walking over toward me. He put both his large hands on my two shoulders, leaned over and kissed me on the cheek, the smile on his face as wide as I’d ever seen it. “You don’t think the blue jean, T-shirt and sneaker look is gonna be enough to make him shit his pants?” he asked. And before I could answer, “There’s some new clothes for you, on your bed, next to the folder. Wear those. It won’t make him respect you any more than he’s going to, but at least you’ll look the part. This actor’s gonna be laughing when he sees you. You go in like a kid, then he’s got no reason to be scared. You go in like a man who wants his pockets filled with money that’s owed him, you’d be surprised how fast that sense of humor disappears. A good gangster, no matter how young, old, tall or short he might be, always runs the room. Always.”
Pudge’s smile was long gone and he held that look on me for several seconds. Then he turned and walked quietly out of the room. I sat down on the soft upholstered couch and closed my eyes, trying to drown out the muted sounds rafting up from the crowded bar below. Above me, the floorboards creaked as I heard Pudge walk across his room and turn on the record player. He slid a Benny Goodman album on the turntable, rested the needle on the third cut, “Sing, Sing, Sing,” and turned the volume on high, knowing I was downstairs and wanting me to hear it. I sat back on the couch and smiled, my eyes still closed as I listened to Gene Krupa’s ground-swelling drum solo mix in with Goodman’s magical clarinet. Almost every career criminal I’ve ever met has a song of choice they play before they go out on a job. It is an important part of their ritual. “Sing, Sing, Sing” was Pudge’s favorite song and it could always be heard blasting out of his stereo system whenever he and Angelo needed to attend to a crucial and often deadly piece of business. By playing it now, he was confirming the importance of my first job and his confidence that I would not fail in my task. It was also a way of handing his song down to me.
From now on, it would be what I would play whenever I prepared to head out to help quench a gangster’s insatiable thirst for blood and money.
• • •
THE ACTOR, THIN, pale and shirtless, sat forward on a leather chair, slapped his hands together and laughed just like Pudge said he would. He was facing a glass coffee table, its top covered with coke spoons and empty silver tins. He was wearing dirty jeans and white socks, a pair of Dingo boots tossed casually off in one corner of the well-decorated main room. Nico stood in a far corner, his hands folded across his waist, staring silently at the back of the actor’s head.
“Tell me again why you’re here.” the actor said.
I stared down at him, his blue eyes glazed and trying to focus in on me, his hands shaking as they reached for a half-filled bottle of red wine. “Like I told you, you’re twenty-one hundred down from the drugs you bought and you need to pay it off,” I said. “Tonight. To me.”
The actor put down the bottle, kicked his head back and let out a loud laugh. “That’s what the fuck I thought you said,” he shouted, nearly choking on the mouthful of red wine he had just swallowed. “You see, when I’m in New York, I get my coke from Charley Figueroa. I don’t get it from some midget dressed for a funeral. You hear what I’m saying, shithead?”
I shot a glance toward Nico and he shrugged his massive shoulders, eager to move forward and do some damage. I pulled a key from my black Perry Ellis jacket and showed it to the actor. “I didn’t ring the bell to get in here,” I said. “I used this key that I got from Charley Figueroa. But that’s not all he gave me. He also gave me your drug debt. That’s the twenty-one hundred I’ve been talking about. Now, just so you know the full story, I’m supposed to leave the key here and take the cash with me.”
“Would
you settle for an autograph and a kick in the ass?” the actor said, still laughing, turning around to glance at Nico, seeming to notice him for the first time.
“No, sir,” I said. “Just the money. Once I have that, there’s no need for you and me to ever see each other again.”
“I figure you to be about fourteen, maybe fifteen, tops,” he said. “Now, I’ve handed the kind of money you’re asking for to girls your age, but at least I got to fuck them first. So why don’t you get the fuck out of here, the both of you, before I stop finding this whole bit funny.”
The actor leaned over the coffee table, picked up a razor and pieced together a line of coke from the residue spread across its top. He placed his nose right on the glass and inhaled, a grunt and a cough mixed in with the final snort. He wiped the base of his nose with his hand and looked back up at me. “I know he don’t talk,” the actor said, jerking a thumb toward Nico. “But I know you both can hear.” The actor stood in the center of the room, his hands cupped around his mouth. “I’m gonna go take a short nap,” he screamed. “When I come back out and see your faces still here, I’m going to kick some fucking guinea ass!”
He turned and headed for the rear bedroom, walking with an unsteady gait. I looked at Nico and nodded. I glanced around me, past the clothes and empty food containers strewn throughout the expensive room and found an empty dining-table chair. I pulled it out, turned it toward Nico and the actor and sat down. I wasn’t at all nervous. Instead, I remember an incredible rush of excitement flowing through me, the power I had over the situation burying any fear. I knew that violence would be inevitable, the actor would allow no other resolution to occur, and I was oddly comfortable with all of it. Though such a feeling surprised me, it also pleased me. For now I knew that if the gangster life was the path my life would lead me down, I could live with its results.
“That fuckin’ Charley,” the actor mumbled to himself. “Selling me out to some little punk kid.”
“You can sleep all you want,” I said. “We’ll be here and we’ll stay here. Until we get what we came to get.”
The actor turned and came walking toward me, his temper lit beyond excess by the cocaine floating through his system. He stood over me, staring down, his blue eyes blazing with anger, his hands bunched into fists, his thin, hairless chest heaving up and down. “Who the fuck are you talking to that way?” he screamed at me. “Do you have any idea who the fuck I am?”
“You’re a bad actor with a bad habit,” I said, fighting to keep my voice calm, the back of my black button-down shirt soaked with sweat. “But that doesn’t mean anything to me. The money does.”
The actor took several deep breaths, his eyes bulged out so far they looked as if they would pop. He was blinking furiously and rubbing his hands against the sides of his dirty jeans. He bit down hard on his lower lip, cracking the skin and drawing blood as he leaned in closer, a foul mix of cocaine sweat and body odor causing me to flinch. He lifted his hand up and brought it down against my face, slapping me with the length of his fingers, the blow stinging and causing my left eye to tear. I looked up at him and saw a man long past the point of reason, running now on drug-fueled adrenaline. “I don’t let nobody talk to me that way!” he shouted. “Nobody! You hear that, you little motherfucker! You hear that?”
He lifted his hand again, ready to strike me with another blow. Nico caught the hand as it came down, inches from my face. The actor looked up at him and gritted his teeth. “Do I have to kick your ass now, too?” he said.
“Yes.” Nico spoke his first words of the day, still clutching the man’s hand. “Before you start, let me just get a few things out of the way.”
“Like what, asshole?” the actor said.
“Like your hands,” Nico said.
He lifted the actor’s wrist back and with the slightest of tugs, snapped the bone. The sound was like that of a shoe stepping down on a twig. The actor screamed out in pain and fell to his knees, his head bent down against his chest, tears rushing down his face. Nico lifted a foot and rested it against the actor’s neck for leverage and then took each finger in his hand and cracked it like a fortune cookie. He let go of the mangled hand, its fingers bent and broken, and watched it fall to the carpeted floor like a dead weight, the actor lying there, moaning out in pain.
It was the first time I had seen a gangster at work. It was the calm with which Nico attacked more than the brutality that struck me. It was one thing to be told stories about violence and quite another to bear witness to a man’s pain. I swallowed hard, felt warm bile rushing up to my throat and knew I needed to remain calm and not let what I had just seen affect the way I spoke or moved. I got up from the chair and squatted down next to the actor. “Get the money,” I said to him. “It’s all I want, and then I’ll go. But if you say no again, I have no choice but to leave you alone with him.”
“On the bureau in the bedroom,” the actor said in between sobs, his eyes fixated on his busted hand and wrist. “My wallet’s in there. There’s cash in it and next to it. I don’t know how much, but there should be enough to cover what you need.”
“I hope so,” I said, standing and nodding to Nico. He stepped over the actor’s body and walked off toward the bedroom. The actor crawled to the couch, lifted himself up and sat down, leaving his limp hand, now starting to swell, on his thigh. We stared at one another until Nico walked back into the room and handed me the cash.
“It’s all there,” he said.
I took the money, folded it over and stuffed it into my jacket pocket. “Then we’re finished here,” I said to the actor. “Your debt’s been paid.”
“I need to go to the hospital, have a doctor take care of my hand,” the actor whispered. “Put a cast on it, ice it down; something to make it better.”
“That’s a good idea,” I said, then I turned to follow Nico into the foyer and out of the brownstone.
“Help me get dressed and get me there,” he pleaded. “It’s the least you can do for me.”
I turned back, looked at him, and shook my head. “Get there on your own. Call one of your friends and have him come get you,” I said. “That’s not what we do.”
“You little fuck,” the actor said, the pain from his hand now reaching high up into his arm. “All you do is hassle people for their money and bust them up. That’s what you do.”
I didn’t respond. There was no need. But that’s not all I do, I wanted to tell him. I also go to high school.
• • •
NICO WAS DRIVING on the West Side Highway, heading downtown when I asked him to pull the car off to the side of the road.
“You okay?” he asked, turning on an overhead light to get a better look at my face.
“I will be,” I told him. “Soon as I throw up.”
He got off on the Seventy-ninth Street exit and parked the black Cadillac alongside a stone embankment overlooking the Hudson River. I eased out of the passenger seat, leaned forward and vomited, my body coated with sweat, my new clothes splattered with stains. I stared down at my hands, holding them under the glare of the lamps illuminating Riverside Park. They were trembling uncontrollably and were unable to grip even the door handle on the car. The calmness I felt in the actor’s apartment had long since abandoned me. I looked up and saw Nico standing over me, one hand resting gently on my back.
“I’ve never been this sick before,” I said, wiping my mouth against the sleeve of my new jacket.
“You never been out on a job before,” Nico explained. “This happens to everybody the first time. You’ll get used to it. It gets to the point where it comes as easy as taking a breath.”
Nico Bellardi leaned against the rear door of the Cadillac and lit a cigarette. He was tall, about six foot two, and carried a solid two hundred sixty pounds across his massive frame. He had a rich, thick head of dark hair, speckled by touches of white at the temples and along the sides. He was in his late thirties, always impeccably and stylishly dressed and spoke only when he felt the
need. He was Pudge’s top enforcer and the most trusted member of his crew.
“I wasn’t scared in there until the end,” I confessed. “That guy had enough drugs in him, he could have killed you and me and not figured it out for three days. And when he came over and slapped me, I should have come back at him. Instead, all I did was sit there and sweat. If you hadn’t bailed me out, I’d still be there catching a beating.”
“Your job was to leave with the money,” Nico said. “Mine was to help you do that. The way I see it, we both did what we went there to do.”
“If it was just you alone, having to go in there without me, what would have happened?”
“If the money was there, I would have come out with it,” Nico said, shrugging his shoulders and pulling on his cigarette. “But the actor might have had more than some broken bones in his hand to worry about. Without you in the room, I might have left him for dead. So what you did was make sure we got the cash and, better yet, that we left behind somebody who’s not going to tell anybody about it.”
“How long you been doing this?” I asked. “You know, going out on jobs for Pudge?”
“About ten years now,” Nico said. “He spotted me in a street gang I was running with and pulled me out. A guy like me, all he can do if he works in the rackets is be the muscle. Little chance to ever be a boss. But I make good money and they treat me right. If I was still kicking with that gang, I’d be on my second swing upstate by now, doing multiple years of straight time. Instead, I’m paying off a mortgage and I get a new car every two years.”