Before My Life Began (10 page)

I liked eating in restaurants, yet no matter where we ate I almost always ordered the same thing: a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich with french fries, a vanilla-Coke, and either lemon meringue pie or a hot fudge sundae for dessert. I loved the way the grilled cheese sandwich tasted from being pressed down hard on the grill, the odors of hamburgers and sausage and bacon and onions cooked into the bread, the cheese and tomato melted into one another, and I loved the way my father would always say, “He's some kid, my boy—you offer him the whole menu and he winds up choosing the same thing every time. He's one steady kid, my boy—a guy you can count on, right?”

After we were done eating, if he didn't have any errands we would stay on in the luncheonette for an hour or two and I would make sketches of some of the people—waitresses or cooks or owners or one of the regulars—and when everybody crowded around and patted my father on the back and told him how talented I was, he would glow.

One afternoon when we'd finished lunch early and were walking back home along Church Avenue—my mother and Abe had been gone for more than two weeks and she had written that they might not start back until mid-August, that Abe had to take care of some business for Mr. Rothenberg in Las Vegas—some of my friends called me from inside the Holy Cross schoolyard to come in and play with them. Tony Cremona was there, and for a second, knowing that part of the reason Abe was staying away was because there'd been some threats from Fasalino's organization, I wondered if it would seem disloyal to my uncle to play ball with Tony. But when Tony called to me, my father smiled.

“You go enjoy yourself,” he said.

I went in and started shooting with the guys—they were between games—and when we were lining up at the foul line to shoot for new sides, I noticed that my father had entered the schoolyard and was leaning against the fence. His jacket and tie were off, his shirt sleeves rolled up.

“Can an old man get a few shots?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said.

He bounced the ball on the concrete a few times, using both hands the way the girls did at school. I cringed. He stood to the side of the basket, about twenty feet away, his cigarette stuck in the corner of his, mouth, cocked his head to one side, took a step and a half, and shot the ball with two hands, using an old fashioned set-shot with a lot of backspin, but letting the ball go more from his waist than from his chest. The ball smashed off the backboard without even touching the rim.

“C'mon. C'mon,” he said, gesturing impatiently. “I gotta get the right angle.”

Tony tossed the ball to him and he lunged for it too soon, so that it hit him in the chin. He bounced it a few times, tilted his head, shot again. The ball zoomed toward the backboard in a straight line and this time it went right through the hoop. I was amazed. He smiled and took two steps backwards. “C'mon, c'mon,” he called. “Gimme.” I tossed the ball to him. He caught it, shot again, his right foot going up in the air backwards, almost as if he were skipping. The ball rattled the metal backboard and fell through the hoop again. I couldn't believe it.

He started going around in a circle, from the right side to the left, the way we did when we played Around-the-World, and he made eleven shots in a row before he missed, all line drives.

“Not bad for an old man, huh?” he said. “Can I shoot or can I shoot? You answer me that.”

Behind his glasses, enormous magnified droplets of sweat dripped down along either side of his nose. Under his armpits his shirt was soaked. He waited a few seconds, listening to my friends tell him how great he was and asking him what teams he'd played for when he was young, but instead of answering he just looked at me, smiled, and repeated what he'd said before. “Can I shoot or can I shoot?” He told me to have a good time but not to come home too late because he had a surprise for me.

When we were done playing, Tony asked me to go to his house with him. He said he had a surprise for me too and that there was still plenty of time until supper. We walked up Church Avenue and then along New York Avenue to the Italian section on the other side of Linden Boulevard, and I felt a little nervous, being in Mr. Fasalino's territory. But I told myself to act the way Abe acted—as if nothing were the matter and we were all at peace with one another. If you acted as if something were so, Abe said, sometimes everyone would believe it was so.

I liked being with Tony. He had straight, sandy-colored hair that fell over his forehead and into his eyes, and just before he asked a question he always gave a flick to his head that made the hair flap back on top of his head. He had small, sharp features and a smile that seemed to slant the same way his hair did, and sometimes he'd tease me about how, because of my dark curls, I looked more like a Wop than he did. While we walked and he asked me things I explained about how my father was blind in one eye since he was a kid and had almost no vision in the other and Tony agreed with me that if my father had had two normal eyes he would probably have been good enough to make it in the pros. Tony said that his priest explained to him how if you were a good person God made up for things—if you lost a leg, God might give you strong hands, or if you had rotten teeth, say, He might give you beautiful hair, or if you lost an eye He could give you good hearing, and when we came to Tony's street we talked about athletes who'd had diseases when they were young or who got wounded in the war, and of how they'd overcome their handicaps. We talked about guys like Monty Stratton, who pitched for the White Sox with a wooden leg, and Lou Brissie, the Athletics pitcher, who had a steel plate in his head from the time he got hit while chucking hand grenades into a Japanese bunker, and Three-Finger Mordecai Brown and his great fork ball, and Ed Head of the Dodgers, who was wounded on the beach at Okinawa and had switched from being a right-handed pitcher before the war to a lefty after the war, and Pete Gray, the one-armed outfielder who'd played for the St. Louis Browns.

When we were done discussing ball players and were at Tony's house—it was a small two-story private house with a porch and a green roof and a big garage and lots of pictures of Jesus and Mary on the walls—I repeated things my father said about President Roosevelt and how he was the greatest president our country ever had even though he'd had polio as a kid, and when I talked about how Roosevelt had worked like a maniac, swimming and exercising, and about how terrible it was that he hadn't lived to see the Japanese and Nazis surrender, I got tears in my eyes the way my father did when he talked about him.

Tony asked if I'd ever drawn a picture of Roosevelt and I said I hadn't. Then he took me to his basement, and from a box under his workbench—Tony was good with tools and could make benches and birdhouses and doorstops and things—he took out a big package and handed it to me. Inside were five packages of different kinds of drawing paper: nice thick creamy white paper made from rags—the kind I'd look at in the art store but couldn't afford to buy.

“I figured a guy who could draw like you should have quality merchandise to work with,” he said.

“How'd you get it?”

“I got my ways, you know what I mean?”

“No.”

“Ah. C'mon, Davey,” he said. “Things fall off trucks sometimes, right? Only you gotta be there at the right time, that's all.”

I said I had to get home to see what my father's surprise was and he said that the paper wasn't the real surprise. The real surprise was out in the garage.

“C'mon,” he said, and I followed him up from the cellar. The side door of his garage was locked with a combination lock, and when he had rolled the tumblers and opened it and turned the light on inside, he motioned me in.

“Take a gander, Davey. You take a good long gander.”

I stepped inside and gasped. The garage was filled with dozens of pinball machines, soda machines, candy machines, and juke boxes, all new and shining.

“Jesus!” I said.

“That ain't all.”

He led me past the machines to the back, to a corner where there were still a lot of oil-soaked rags and sawdust and nuts and bolts and pieces of metal. He pushed aside a few window screens, and came up with a little machine that looked something like my mother's meat grinder, except that where you would put the meat in, the opening was narrower, like a slot for letters.

“Watch this,” Tony said.

He reached up to one of the rafters, pulled down a sheet of thin metal, fed it into the machine, cranked the handle, and suddenly little round pieces of metal were dropping to the floor. Then he took a quarter out of his pocket, showed me that the slugs of metal were the same size as the quarter.

“Listen,” he said. “I ain't shown this to nobody else and if my old man knew he'd kill me, but I figure you're a guy I can trust, right?”

“Sure.”

“You got brains, Davey. Everybody knows that. You ain't gonna be like the rest of us. Me, I'll probably wind up like my brothers and my old man, running dirty trips for Fasalino and taking a rap once in a while, but you—I got the feeling, even though your old man works for your uncle—that you ain't gonna wind up as dumb as the rest of us.”

“You're not dumb,” I said.

“Well, I ain't smart like you.” He laughed. “You want proof?”

“Sure. Give me proof.”

“The proof is that you're here and I'm showing you all this stuff my old man got stored for Fasalino.” He grinned and I grinned with him. “I mean, how dumb can a guy be? See those big cartons over there?”

“Yes.”

“Got enough fags in there to keep your old man happy for the rest of his life. They fall out of trucks too, them cigarettes, only they ain't got their tax stickers on them yet. My brother Victor, that's his deal, peddling the cigarettes. Phil, he works the juke boxes and pinball machines. And my old man, what's his racket? He's the doorman, see? He opens and closes the door for his sons. What a drip!”

I moved back a step. “Why are you showing me this, Tony, if it can get you in trouble?”

“I don't know. When I saw your old man, and the way you looked down when he started shooting, I just kind of felt like it. Only he surprised you, didn't he?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah. Let's face it, Davey. You and me, we got drips for fathers mostly, only your old man might have been better with two eyes, so you can't blame him completely, and I got these fucking brothers too who like to beat up on me. They found me in here with you, they'd pound the shit out of me till you could hear me in Canarsie. Only what's the fun of having all this stuff, I say to myself, if you can't show it to somebody, you know what I mean? C'mon—you and me are gonna have some fun.”

Tony got a paper bag and filled it with the slugs. Then he put the machine back under the screens.

“You're lucky you ain't got brothers,” he said when we were walking again, away from his house. “The thing of it is, even if I wanted to be different from them—more like you—they'd fry my ass. They're bigger than me and when I try to say no to them, all the shit they want me to do, my father sticks up for them, and you know why?”

“No.”

“Glad you asked,” he said, laughing. “Because they pound the shit out of him too, see? They're bigger than he is and it's really something—I wish you could be there to watch, to see the way they slap him around sometimes, him whimpering and begging. Nobody would believe it, the way it is in my house sometimes.” He stopped. “Listen. You won't tell on me then, will you—to Abe or your father?”

“No.”

“Yeah. Good for you, Cremona.” He slapped me on the back. “I figured I could trust you, that you and me could be buddies, no matter what happens in the rest of our lives. I mean, when we're on the same team in the schoolyard, is there any two guys can beat us? It's like when I'm about to make a move toward the basket, you always know it ahead of time and get the ball to me. We're a good team, you and me.”

“Sure.”

“So that's why I figured I'd choose you to go in partners with me.” He jingled the bag of slugs. “What we do, see, is we go somewhere where they got candy and soda machines, and then we put a slug in, and that way we get ourselves a soda for a nickel and twenty cents change too. Got it?”

“But won't your father and brothers get mad when they open the machines and find all the slugs?”

“You think I'm some kind of idiot? I know which machines are theirs and which aren't, and I know which ones are your uncle's. What we do is we work different territories. C'mon.”

So Tony and I got on the subway at Church Avenue, rode to Atlantic, and went into the big station there, where people took the trains out to the racetracks and Long Island. Then we started in on the different machines, trying to act as nonchalant as we could. Tony let me put the first slug in. A cup dropped down and filled with Coke, and four nickels came spitting out of the change compartment. I drank the soda and put the nickels in my pocket. Tony put a slug in and the same thing happened for him, and then we did it again—I couldn't believe it—and when we got twenty nickels each we went to a change booth and asked the woman there to give us dollar bills for our nickels, and then we ran out of the station, laughing like crazy and pounding each other on the back and telling each other what a great team we made! We walked a few blocks, went down into another train station—Tony said it was best to use train stations because of the noise and how people were coming and going and not hanging around—and we filled our pockets with change and our mouths with soda and food: Clark bars and Oh Henry bars and Baby Ruths.

“Jesus,” I said, banging on my belly. “What if my father wants to take me to a restaurant?”

“Then you stick your finger down your throat first and barf.”

“Like the Romans, right?”

“Yeah. Only you come to my house and do it all over my brothers, okay?”