Shooting Uncle Otto
In the 1960s, Uncle Otto (“Zee-Tat-to” in our barbarous Neapolitan slang) ran the candy store on President Street below Third Avenue. Candy was stale and cigarettes cheap, smuggled tax-free from North Carolina. I was fifteen, a Catholic school boy studying Latin and thinking about girls and college. My friends and I, useful dolts, played cards in Otto’s back room—usually briscola—while Otto took bets from the numbers runners and gamblers—my godfather, “Blubber Head” among them—who hurried in and out
Bookie joints were the fast food joints of the neighborhood. There were three in a four block radius—Otto’s, the Capri Club on Third and Carroll, run by “The Goose,” and another on Fifth Avenue and Carroll. On weekends, college football games and Aqueduct races blared on Otto’s TV. Desperate, soon-to-be fearful gamblers shouted and cursed in English and Italian. We were kids. We’d order oversized hero sandwiches stuffed with Genoa salami, provolone, tomatoes, olive oil and hot peppers on bread still warm from Gallo’s bakery. We avoided my cousin Mariuchella, who skimped, in favor of my Aunt Lucy Giovanucci. Lucy had an odd sense of humor: she called her grocery customers “whores, cocksuckers and fuck-faces” as she sliced their sandwiches. She drove a pink ’56 Cadillac. Everyone loved Lucy.
Uncle Otto dressed in a suit every day, well-cut, muted blue or brown. He wore glasses, a white shirt and tie, and never spoke above a whisper, on or off the phone. He might have been an insurance agent. One Saturday, half-a-dozen FBI agents came charging into the candy store. Otto wasn’t around and the feds, to their chagrin, found themselves rousting six teenage boys eating meatball sandwiches. They pushed us around. I felt like I was part of the civil rights movement.
A day came when a guy I didn’t recognize walked into the store, maybe from Court Street or faraway Bensonhurst. He and Uncle Otto talked. Otto looked at us for a moment and walked outside onto the sidewalk. The guy seemed nervous, apologetic; Otto phlegmatic. The conversation ended when he pulled out a revolver and shot Otto in the chest. Otto’s glasses flew across the pavement. I saw the red smear of blood slowly spreading across the front of his pure white shirt. There was no coup de grace. The guy fired once and walked away. He had an unpleasant job to do and had done it.
Another time, I was standing outside the club, when three or four of the worst neighborhood punks—my cousin “Popeye Anthony,” among them ran frantically up President Street. They’d been chased across the canal by at least 50 furious blacks—ranging in age from 15 to 50, who streamed out of the Gowanus House projects on Bond and Wyckoff Streets—the same buildings described a generation later by Jonathan Lethem.
One of the blacks, a teenager, was holding a rifle as he ran by. He stopped and saw me silhouetted against Otto’s picture window. He raised the gun and aimed. I was five feet away. It took forever. An older black man ran up and slapped the gun out of the kid’s hand. For the next hour, the mafia heard the grievances of the black men. It was like a powwow in a Western. I saw things that way.
Years later, when I was working as a reporter for Newsweek, I used to visit the “morgue,” where thousands of yellowing newspaper clips were stored—this was before everyone and everything was digitized. For fun, I’d read gangster clips to see whom I knew or recognized from the “old neighborhood.” One story caught my eye. The remains of four murder victims—suitably maimed and tortured—were being removed from the cellar of Uncle Otto’s candy store.
The feds had simply looked in the wrong place.
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Saturday, March 3, 2012
The Emperor of All Maladies
The Emperor of All Maladies. Rush Limbaugh for sure. I’ve been listening to and thinking about Limbaugh for years: beneath the racist, misogynist rant, the drug abuse, the divorces, the desperate yearning to be an athlete (his bombast is rife with football references), the bitter, fawning women callers he cultivates as groupies, the bottomless hatred of President Obama (who is everything Limbaugh is not) is self-loathing barely disguised. He's going to deconstruct. Of all people, the talk radio host, Michael Savage’s depiction of Rick Santorum, as a kid “no one would talk to in high school,” resonates with Limbaugh and many of these humorless talk radio “warriors,” who spew hate and divisiveness at both political parties and at anyone who’s achieved any distinction in the real world.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
A Garden of Unearthly Delights
Whole Foods, like Macbeth’s Birnham Wood has come to Gowanus! I read it in the New York Times. To the corner of Third Avenue and Third Street to be precise. I used to climb mountains there; stacks of Alpine blue barrels filled with toxic chemicals. I was thirteen. The crystals spilling out golden and emerald in my hands. Dumped there by one of the canal-side factories before they abandoned ship, or a wise guy named Honey, who, for a fee, would make medical wastes and other unwanted pollutants disappear into the glass green, shit-splattered Gowanus. Marty and Freddy, two black guys—actual brothers--from the Deep South, ran a gas station on the corner. Freddie was a great mechanic and a terrible gambler, so there was always a place for him among the bookies and loan sharks who hung out in the Capri Club on Carroll and Third Avenue. Freddie got shot one day. A credit default swap, I guess. He survived but the service station closed.
Across the street, the one historic structure in our neighborhood, a limestone mansion as architecturally dramatic as the brownstones above posh Sixth Avenue, until, of course, a local company took it for its headquarters and put linoleum on the steps of its stoop and fake orange brickwork on its exterior walls. Someone told me “George Washington slept there.” I believed it, though the history was off by at least 100 years. On Third Avenue toward Carroll Street stand the remaining walls of Washington Park, Brooklyn’s first pro-baseball stadium. I knew it as Con Edison truck depot.
Had they lived into their sixties, my mother, Gloria, and her three sisters, Mary, Marguerite, Dolly, and her two brothers, Sonny and Tony Giordano, sure would have been amazed to see Whole Foods arise on the canal’s fatal shore, though they could never shop there. They relied on “Farmer Jones” dim grocery on Carroll Street who allowed them to pay “on time.” There was Angioletti, a proto-Whole Foods, peddler who’d call out the names of fruits and vegetables in singsong Italian as he passed by on his horse-drawn wagon. They all died of cancer. The Giordanos lived on Nevins and Carroll, less than 50 yards from the Gowanus, now a Superfund site. When the tide was high, and the stench intolerable, their cellar would flood and my Uncle Tony, the family plumber, would wade into the toxic wastes. He developed brain cancer.
Across the street, the one historic structure in our neighborhood, a limestone mansion as architecturally dramatic as the brownstones above posh Sixth Avenue, until, of course, a local company took it for its headquarters and put linoleum on the steps of its stoop and fake orange brickwork on its exterior walls. Someone told me “George Washington slept there.” I believed it, though the history was off by at least 100 years. On Third Avenue toward Carroll Street stand the remaining walls of Washington Park, Brooklyn’s first pro-baseball stadium. I knew it as Con Edison truck depot.
Had they lived into their sixties, my mother, Gloria, and her three sisters, Mary, Marguerite, Dolly, and her two brothers, Sonny and Tony Giordano, sure would have been amazed to see Whole Foods arise on the canal’s fatal shore, though they could never shop there. They relied on “Farmer Jones” dim grocery on Carroll Street who allowed them to pay “on time.” There was Angioletti, a proto-Whole Foods, peddler who’d call out the names of fruits and vegetables in singsong Italian as he passed by on his horse-drawn wagon. They all died of cancer. The Giordanos lived on Nevins and Carroll, less than 50 yards from the Gowanus, now a Superfund site. When the tide was high, and the stench intolerable, their cellar would flood and my Uncle Tony, the family plumber, would wade into the toxic wastes. He developed brain cancer.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Sunday, January 8, 2012
In the year 2012
I've not posted on this blog since the fall of 2010, the time my son Thomas quit Hamilton College six weeks from graduation and on track to medical school. Quit and joined the infantry. He was immediately deployed to Iraq. I've held my breath for the last year-and-a-half. At the same time, my close friend, Bruno Rubeo, whom I knew from our poverty days in South Brooklyn and who went on to become an Academy Award-nominated designer in Hollywood, developed prostate cancer.
These two events and their outcomes have shaped my life in the last years. I plan to write about them in Gowanus Crossing.
These two events and their outcomes have shaped my life in the last years. I plan to write about them in Gowanus Crossing.
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Gowanus Crossing/A Life Along the Canal Chapter 5
On Monday, Americo shuffles into Malachy’s classroom, his mind whirling back to the lot and the dead ... He flashes on the filthy rubber dolls New York City sanitation men, for some stupid reason, tied to the radiators of their Mack trucks. No torsos, just the heads. He rubs the grease streaks on the corduroy pants he’d tried to clean. It was real, but already he couldn't picture it. An hour later, the nun orders him to stand in the dunce corner at the back of the classroom.
Punishment for behaving like a “vulgarian.”
At 11: 00 A.M. Malachy steps into the hall. Shouts and shrieks erupt all around him. Ernie fires a spitball, a strike that splats against his head. Another boy follows, then the rest. Americo stands there, Saint Stephen pierced by arrows, until the bombardment slows under the weight of his stillness.
Two rows away, Jenny Wilcox whispers.
"I take good notes. Can you read my writing?"
"I…I can't see that good."
Americo glances at the door and crosses quickly to Jenny's desk. He leans over, conscious of the perfume in her hair, the white satin brassiere strap visible under her blouse. He squints at the notebook. The letters, written in purple ink, are plump, elaborately curved, the lower case i's and j's dotted with circles and miniature hearts.
"I can read that easy. Thanks."
Conscious of his crooked front teeth, the worn-down heels on his shoes, the scrim of acne on his cheeks. Americo’s eyes flick to the door. Jenny scribbles in the margin of her book.
"Thanks for loaning me your records. Can you carry my record player for me this afternoon? It’s heavy!"
She’d lugged the boxy Victrola to class. Our Lady of Peace School had two portable record players and 18 classrooms. Malachy was preparing for the Christmas talent show. She wanted a dozen students waltzing gracefully around the stage while the rest hummed Rigoletto’s La Donna e Mobile in perfect harmony, and stalked the rehearsals in her black and brown habit. A Grim Reaper, slapping, punching and pulling hair.
"I...don't think..." Americo begins.
Jenny smiles, enjoying him squirm.
"PLEASE!!" she scribbles in big purple letters.
He wants to say yes.
Without knowing why, he blurts, "I can’t. I .... got to study.”
Hurt flashes in Jenny's blue eyes. Quickly overlaid with anger.
"I’ll get somebody else. You jerk!”
At 3:00 p.m., the dismissal bell clangs. Malachy waits until most of the students pass into the hall.
’Merico, Boy-Boy, ” she pronounces the names with repugnance. “Back to your desks."
Eboli, Naples, Sicily…Fiji, Mauritius, Borneo. What is the difference? The Archbishop needs missionaries not grammarians.
Boy-Boy—Shaky Manzo’s kid brother--slams down his books. A head shorter than Americo, Boy-Boy looks like Fabian with green eyes and long lashes. He wears mohair sweaters, pants with buckles in the back, leather jackets, featherweight shoes.
Malachy opens the storage closet, hands out brooms and dustpans.
"Preparation," she says, "for your futures."
Half-an-hour later, Boy-Boy throws down his broom andwalks out
“Fuck her!” he snarls.
Americo stands, cradling a broom, at the fifth-floor window. In the distance, the Gowanus is a sparkling green ribbon winding among the lofts and factories. He hears the squeals of the last departing students. Feels his distance from them. On the sidewalk, he picks out Jenny and Lorraine, their blonde pony tails trailing down the backs of green stadium coats. Jenny is lugging the record player. Lorraine carries her purse and school books.
He spots his cousin JuJu, black fedora squashed on his pumpkin head, sitting on a stoop across from the school. JuJu gets up, flicks his cigarette at a passing car, and hurries across the street. He turns and waves, crooked grin on his face. Boy-Boy hurries after him.
JuJu says something. Americo can see the fedora bobbing. Jenny shakes her head.
“No!”
JuJu flings out his arms in exasperation. Americo clenches his fists.
Now a third punk, a kid from President Street called “Catman” angles across the street cutting in front of the girls. JuJu struts alongside Jenny, hands in the pockets of his leather trench coat. Suddenly, he lunges for the record player's handle. Americo sees his fingers curl around Jenny's hand.
“Jerk!” Americo shouts
Lorraine begins pounding—not too hard, Americo notices—on JuJu’s broad back. He jerks the record player just as Jenny lets go. It crashes to the ground and pops open. 45 rpm records roll along the sidewalk. JuJu kneels to pick up the records. Catman follows a few disks as they rolled, like pitched pennies, down the sidewalk. He stomps a transparent yellow 45—Americo’s 1954 copy of "The Wind" by the Diablos.
“When the cool summer breeze sends a chill down my spine,
And I long for my love deep within...”
A white Grand Prix screeches to a halt. Shaky jumps out. He motions for Boy-Boy to get in the car. JuJu, hesitates then dodges, quick for his size. Shaky kicks at him, misses, then goes after Catman, who darts between two cars and escapes down the block. Shaky picks up Jenny’s record player—Americo can see him gesturing—and Boy-Boy and the two girls get into the car.
He pushes against his broom, moving up and down the narrow aisles, sweeping everything before him.
"Guzzi, are you deaf?"
Americo jerks around..
"No Sister."
“Just dumb. Clean the blackboards and out of my sight!"
Americo considers telling Malachy what he’d found. He'd felt the words hot in his throat all afternoon, afraid if he opened his mouth the secret would spill out. Yesterday, in church, Saint Luke’s parable of an infant "wrapped in swaddling clothes" had struck him like a blow. Only his was a shroud. He clamps his mouth shut, wipes the boards and runs out the door.
* * * * *
Five blocks away, Jenny Wilcox lies on her back in her rumpled bed staring at the photos taped to the cracked plaster ceiling. She places a stack of 45s on the record changer, then begins scribbling in her diary.
“Shaky’s car is so cool!! He’s really cute for an older guy!”
She can’t think of anything else to say and drops the book. Something is wrong with the record player. It’s broken, she thinks bleakly.
“‘Merico! You immature jerk!” He makes her so mad. She picks up the diary and scribbles, “You and your stupid books!”
She stretches and yawns. Five P.M.. Already dark. She switches on the radio.
"Murray the K” and his “swinging soiree,” was whispering about submarine race-watching. Spinning records, “red, hot and blue all the way.” A constellation of stars—Frankie Avalon, Fabian Forte, Paul Anka, Ricky Nelson, Tab Hunter, Frankie Valli—smile down at her. Jenny was sure the guys would dig her if they got to know her, but, like the song, they were.
“So near yet so far away.”
She imagines a hot date with Shaky. He did wear his hair just like Fabian. What would she wear? She’d order a lobster at the fancy place in Sheepshead Bay. How far would she go? Wouldn’t Lorraine be jealous!
The doorbell rings. She ignores it. Jehovah’s Witnesses. The lady upstairs complaining about her music. Boring. Jenny lived in a broken home, a world of frayed slips and graying underwear hidden beneath her brown Our Lady of Peace uniform. She hadn’t seen her father in ten years and kept seeing him in every older man walking along Fourth Avenue.
She’d thought about becoming a teacher, falling in love, building something together, but she was only sixteen (“The prettiest, loveliest girl I’ve ever seen.”), and was waiting for that special guy (“…The one with the wavy hair.…”) who would sweep her off her feet, take her from South Brooklyn to the city or Philadelphia, (“The kids in Bristol are sharp as a pistol.”) Even Memphis where Elvis was.
A key turns in the front door, ending her reverie. Dorothy Wilcox is working the afternoon shift at the Mrs. Wagner’s Pie Company and won’t be home until 8:00 P.M. This had to be Reynolds, her mom’s boyfriend, half-soused. Jenny jumps up, pushes the door to her room closed. Throws the latch.
“Jen you home?”
It’s Reynolds. Definitely.
“Shit.”
A moment later, she hears him piss loudly. The bathroom is next to her room. Doesn’t bother to flush., The door of the refrigerator opening; the clink of beer bottles, A cap skittering like a hockey puck into the sink. Reynolds smacking his lips.
Reynolds runs the coconut custard line at the pie factory. He’s kind of cute, with freckles and a shiny duck-tail haircut. Unfortunately, he front teeth that had come in sideways, almost perpendicular to the rest. He hissed when he spoke like a cartoon snake.
He stands outside her door.
“Your mother home?”
"You know she’s working late today.”
“I forgot.”
“Yeah right,” Jenny thinks.
“Want a beer?”
"No.”
A nonsense rhyme her father used to sing when he’d push her on the kiddie swings in Prospect Park flashes through her head.
“See-saw. Knock at the door.
Who’s there?
Grandpa.
What do you want?
A glass of beer.
Where’s your money?
In my pocket.
Where’s your pocket?
In my pants.
Where’s your pants?
I left ‘em home.
Get out of here. You dirty bum!”
Jenny feels like crying.
“Hey pussycat, brought you a present.”
He rattles the doorknob.
She jumps.
“I’m not dressed.”
Unconsciously, she smoothes the pink baby doll pajamas her mother had given her for Valentine’s Day. A moment later, Reynolds uses a butter knife to flip the latch open. He blinks, then grinned as his eyes adjusted to the light.
“Surprise!”
Reynolds is holding a blue jewelry box in his hand.
“I got this special for you at Mays’ on Fulton Street.”
“What about Mom?”
“Sheee’d want you to have it.” The snake hisses.
He sits on the edge of the bed a moment, then twists toward her, putting his hands under her shoulders, thumbs running over her breasts as he tries to lift and push her against the wall. His hands leave a slug’s trail of grime under her arms.
“ Move over! You’re hogging the bed.”
Jenny giggles, squirms away from him. Reynolds opens the box pulls out a silver chain. A jewel flashes in the lamplight.
Wow! Is that a diamond.
"Just like a diamond. Called a Marquisite.”
“It’s beautiful!. Thank you!”
She kisses him modestly on the cheek.
“Here let me put it on for you.”
Hot breath hissing like a radiator, Reynolds puts the necklace around Jenny’s neck. He reaches up and grabs a mirror from her dresser, holds it for her to see.
“Looks great!” .
She smiles, imagining it's Fabian's breath on her neck…Fabian’s hands in the mirror sliding under her pajama top
Reynolds drops the mirror, cups her breasts with his hands, buries his face in her hair, bites her neck with his sideways teeth. Jenny lay still, saying not a word as Reynolds plunges his blunt fingers into her pajama bottoms, rubs, then roughly strips her. Quickly, he’s out of his pants and boxer shorts, groaning as he spreads her long legs and mounts her.
Jenny clutches the necklace in her hand and stares at the ceiling. The stars smile down at her.
Punishment for behaving like a “vulgarian.”
At 11: 00 A.M. Malachy steps into the hall. Shouts and shrieks erupt all around him. Ernie fires a spitball, a strike that splats against his head. Another boy follows, then the rest. Americo stands there, Saint Stephen pierced by arrows, until the bombardment slows under the weight of his stillness.
Two rows away, Jenny Wilcox whispers.
"I take good notes. Can you read my writing?"
"I…I can't see that good."
Americo glances at the door and crosses quickly to Jenny's desk. He leans over, conscious of the perfume in her hair, the white satin brassiere strap visible under her blouse. He squints at the notebook. The letters, written in purple ink, are plump, elaborately curved, the lower case i's and j's dotted with circles and miniature hearts.
"I can read that easy. Thanks."
Conscious of his crooked front teeth, the worn-down heels on his shoes, the scrim of acne on his cheeks. Americo’s eyes flick to the door. Jenny scribbles in the margin of her book.
"Thanks for loaning me your records. Can you carry my record player for me this afternoon? It’s heavy!"
She’d lugged the boxy Victrola to class. Our Lady of Peace School had two portable record players and 18 classrooms. Malachy was preparing for the Christmas talent show. She wanted a dozen students waltzing gracefully around the stage while the rest hummed Rigoletto’s La Donna e Mobile in perfect harmony, and stalked the rehearsals in her black and brown habit. A Grim Reaper, slapping, punching and pulling hair.
"I...don't think..." Americo begins.
Jenny smiles, enjoying him squirm.
"PLEASE!!" she scribbles in big purple letters.
He wants to say yes.
Without knowing why, he blurts, "I can’t. I .... got to study.”
Hurt flashes in Jenny's blue eyes. Quickly overlaid with anger.
"I’ll get somebody else. You jerk!”
At 3:00 p.m., the dismissal bell clangs. Malachy waits until most of the students pass into the hall.
’Merico, Boy-Boy, ” she pronounces the names with repugnance. “Back to your desks."
Eboli, Naples, Sicily…Fiji, Mauritius, Borneo. What is the difference? The Archbishop needs missionaries not grammarians.
Boy-Boy—Shaky Manzo’s kid brother--slams down his books. A head shorter than Americo, Boy-Boy looks like Fabian with green eyes and long lashes. He wears mohair sweaters, pants with buckles in the back, leather jackets, featherweight shoes.
Malachy opens the storage closet, hands out brooms and dustpans.
"Preparation," she says, "for your futures."
Half-an-hour later, Boy-Boy throws down his broom andwalks out
“Fuck her!” he snarls.
Americo stands, cradling a broom, at the fifth-floor window. In the distance, the Gowanus is a sparkling green ribbon winding among the lofts and factories. He hears the squeals of the last departing students. Feels his distance from them. On the sidewalk, he picks out Jenny and Lorraine, their blonde pony tails trailing down the backs of green stadium coats. Jenny is lugging the record player. Lorraine carries her purse and school books.
He spots his cousin JuJu, black fedora squashed on his pumpkin head, sitting on a stoop across from the school. JuJu gets up, flicks his cigarette at a passing car, and hurries across the street. He turns and waves, crooked grin on his face. Boy-Boy hurries after him.
JuJu says something. Americo can see the fedora bobbing. Jenny shakes her head.
“No!”
JuJu flings out his arms in exasperation. Americo clenches his fists.
Now a third punk, a kid from President Street called “Catman” angles across the street cutting in front of the girls. JuJu struts alongside Jenny, hands in the pockets of his leather trench coat. Suddenly, he lunges for the record player's handle. Americo sees his fingers curl around Jenny's hand.
“Jerk!” Americo shouts
Lorraine begins pounding—not too hard, Americo notices—on JuJu’s broad back. He jerks the record player just as Jenny lets go. It crashes to the ground and pops open. 45 rpm records roll along the sidewalk. JuJu kneels to pick up the records. Catman follows a few disks as they rolled, like pitched pennies, down the sidewalk. He stomps a transparent yellow 45—Americo’s 1954 copy of "The Wind" by the Diablos.
“When the cool summer breeze sends a chill down my spine,
And I long for my love deep within...”
A white Grand Prix screeches to a halt. Shaky jumps out. He motions for Boy-Boy to get in the car. JuJu, hesitates then dodges, quick for his size. Shaky kicks at him, misses, then goes after Catman, who darts between two cars and escapes down the block. Shaky picks up Jenny’s record player—Americo can see him gesturing—and Boy-Boy and the two girls get into the car.
He pushes against his broom, moving up and down the narrow aisles, sweeping everything before him.
"Guzzi, are you deaf?"
Americo jerks around..
"No Sister."
“Just dumb. Clean the blackboards and out of my sight!"
Americo considers telling Malachy what he’d found. He'd felt the words hot in his throat all afternoon, afraid if he opened his mouth the secret would spill out. Yesterday, in church, Saint Luke’s parable of an infant "wrapped in swaddling clothes" had struck him like a blow. Only his was a shroud. He clamps his mouth shut, wipes the boards and runs out the door.
* * * * *
Five blocks away, Jenny Wilcox lies on her back in her rumpled bed staring at the photos taped to the cracked plaster ceiling. She places a stack of 45s on the record changer, then begins scribbling in her diary.
“Shaky’s car is so cool!! He’s really cute for an older guy!”
She can’t think of anything else to say and drops the book. Something is wrong with the record player. It’s broken, she thinks bleakly.
“‘Merico! You immature jerk!” He makes her so mad. She picks up the diary and scribbles, “You and your stupid books!”
She stretches and yawns. Five P.M.. Already dark. She switches on the radio.
"Murray the K” and his “swinging soiree,” was whispering about submarine race-watching. Spinning records, “red, hot and blue all the way.” A constellation of stars—Frankie Avalon, Fabian Forte, Paul Anka, Ricky Nelson, Tab Hunter, Frankie Valli—smile down at her. Jenny was sure the guys would dig her if they got to know her, but, like the song, they were.
“So near yet so far away.”
She imagines a hot date with Shaky. He did wear his hair just like Fabian. What would she wear? She’d order a lobster at the fancy place in Sheepshead Bay. How far would she go? Wouldn’t Lorraine be jealous!
The doorbell rings. She ignores it. Jehovah’s Witnesses. The lady upstairs complaining about her music. Boring. Jenny lived in a broken home, a world of frayed slips and graying underwear hidden beneath her brown Our Lady of Peace uniform. She hadn’t seen her father in ten years and kept seeing him in every older man walking along Fourth Avenue.
She’d thought about becoming a teacher, falling in love, building something together, but she was only sixteen (“The prettiest, loveliest girl I’ve ever seen.”), and was waiting for that special guy (“…The one with the wavy hair.…”) who would sweep her off her feet, take her from South Brooklyn to the city or Philadelphia, (“The kids in Bristol are sharp as a pistol.”) Even Memphis where Elvis was.
A key turns in the front door, ending her reverie. Dorothy Wilcox is working the afternoon shift at the Mrs. Wagner’s Pie Company and won’t be home until 8:00 P.M. This had to be Reynolds, her mom’s boyfriend, half-soused. Jenny jumps up, pushes the door to her room closed. Throws the latch.
“Jen you home?”
It’s Reynolds. Definitely.
“Shit.”
A moment later, she hears him piss loudly. The bathroom is next to her room. Doesn’t bother to flush., The door of the refrigerator opening; the clink of beer bottles, A cap skittering like a hockey puck into the sink. Reynolds smacking his lips.
Reynolds runs the coconut custard line at the pie factory. He’s kind of cute, with freckles and a shiny duck-tail haircut. Unfortunately, he front teeth that had come in sideways, almost perpendicular to the rest. He hissed when he spoke like a cartoon snake.
He stands outside her door.
“Your mother home?”
"You know she’s working late today.”
“I forgot.”
“Yeah right,” Jenny thinks.
“Want a beer?”
"No.”
A nonsense rhyme her father used to sing when he’d push her on the kiddie swings in Prospect Park flashes through her head.
“See-saw. Knock at the door.
Who’s there?
Grandpa.
What do you want?
A glass of beer.
Where’s your money?
In my pocket.
Where’s your pocket?
In my pants.
Where’s your pants?
I left ‘em home.
Get out of here. You dirty bum!”
Jenny feels like crying.
“Hey pussycat, brought you a present.”
He rattles the doorknob.
She jumps.
“I’m not dressed.”
Unconsciously, she smoothes the pink baby doll pajamas her mother had given her for Valentine’s Day. A moment later, Reynolds uses a butter knife to flip the latch open. He blinks, then grinned as his eyes adjusted to the light.
“Surprise!”
Reynolds is holding a blue jewelry box in his hand.
“I got this special for you at Mays’ on Fulton Street.”
“What about Mom?”
“Sheee’d want you to have it.” The snake hisses.
He sits on the edge of the bed a moment, then twists toward her, putting his hands under her shoulders, thumbs running over her breasts as he tries to lift and push her against the wall. His hands leave a slug’s trail of grime under her arms.
“ Move over! You’re hogging the bed.”
Jenny giggles, squirms away from him. Reynolds opens the box pulls out a silver chain. A jewel flashes in the lamplight.
Wow! Is that a diamond.
"Just like a diamond. Called a Marquisite.”
“It’s beautiful!. Thank you!”
She kisses him modestly on the cheek.
“Here let me put it on for you.”
Hot breath hissing like a radiator, Reynolds puts the necklace around Jenny’s neck. He reaches up and grabs a mirror from her dresser, holds it for her to see.
“Looks great!” .
She smiles, imagining it's Fabian's breath on her neck…Fabian’s hands in the mirror sliding under her pajama top
Reynolds drops the mirror, cups her breasts with his hands, buries his face in her hair, bites her neck with his sideways teeth. Jenny lay still, saying not a word as Reynolds plunges his blunt fingers into her pajama bottoms, rubs, then roughly strips her. Quickly, he’s out of his pants and boxer shorts, groaning as he spreads her long legs and mounts her.
Jenny clutches the necklace in her hand and stares at the ceiling. The stars smile down at her.
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