“This is twice this has happened to me,” she’d said. So, Mama had had cats before, and they had died mysteriously, too.
I felt a new welling of sadness, of loss, bittersweet.
I set that picture aside. I saved it and, that evening, I took it with me to my new place. It got a special spot on my dresser top, right next to a picture of Dizzy and Gillespie, and a picture of Mama and me.
I miss you so much, I thought. But then I took a step back and looked around and it hit me once again. I did miss her, but I sure didn’t miss that old apartment.
I sat down and took it all in. My new place. My new place. My very own, new place. I said those words out loud, repeated them over and over. I had finally done it. I had moved into one of those townhouse apartments on Convent Avenue, and it was all I’d imagined it to be.
I gazed out my window and sighed.
It was good, so very good, to finally live “over there.”
PERSIA WALKER is a diplomat, former journalist, and the author of acclaimed crime fiction. Her three historical mystery novels, all set in 1920s New York, are Harlem Redux, Darkness and the Devil behind Me, and Black Orchid Blues. She is a native New Yorker, speaks several languages, and has lived in South America and Europe.
ME AND MIKEY
T. Jefferson Parker
The first thing my cousin Mikey does after high school is he takes his graduation money from the family and runs off to California. The money was for him to fly back and see the old country, maybe get in touch with his roots or some such thing. Those would be in Reggio, Calabria, but Mikey goes the other direction, all the way to Hollywood. This was in 1972. He was eighteen and skinny, with one of those hippie shag haircuts, and—you gotta love this—he thinks he’s got musical talent. He took his guitar.
I’m only two years older than Mikey, but I’m the one had to get him back to Little Italy. He was crashing in Hollywood with a guy he used to jam with in school. The guy’s family is tight with us LiDeccas. So it’s no secret where he was. Mikey never got basic stuff like that, like how to do a thing without the whole world knowing about it. It was like he was born with part of his brain missing.
“You made a mistake,” I explained to him in the terminal at LAX. “You have responsibilities, Mikey. Who do you think you are?” I couldn’t pay full attention to him with all those L.A. women around. Blondes. Miniskirts. I miss the seventies.
Mikey nodded and looked like some dog you’d kick just because he expected it. “I was looking for something to say.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“But I don’t know what it is yet.”
“Me, neither. So, you do what you have to do, Mikey—Jesus.”
In New York we got back to business, which was LiDecca Brothers Food. Just so you know, it was founded in 1921. It was fish and seafood at first, then we got into produce and dairy. And whatever else needed doing. Me and Mikey’s job was servicing the vending machines. We had them in five boroughs and parts of Jersey. Mostly they were candy, snacks, and sodas, but some were hot coffee and tea, which meant cups to reload and unsold product to dump and creamer going bad.
Mikey was a perfectionist, a time-waster. By the end of the day I wanted to kick one of those hot beverage machines to pieces. I had a woman friend out in the Bronx I’d see while Mikey fussed around, making sure everything was shiny and clean, and she made the job more than tolerable.
Some days after work we’d go to Mikey’s house on Grand. It was an older place, with a piano in the family room and always beer in the fridge. Mikey’s little sisters, they were the skinniest, loudest girls you could imagine, but they were kinda funny, too, and they’d bring us the beers. Christina, his mom, liked me, and I could never figure why. She played the piano. She made the best cannoli I ever ate. But she had her rules. One was, if you talked about the mob or made guys, she’d smack you hard on the cheek and send you out. June, the year before, I said something about Joseph Colombo getting what he deserved, and that’s exactly what she did to me. Kinda hurt, but it mostly made me feel small and mad.
One day Mikey closed the doors of the family room on all of them and pulled a big roll of cash out of his pocket. “I’m going to California for a year. I’m gonna play music and get famous.”
“Where’d you get the money?” I asked.
“Pop. We had a talk about me taking off with the graduation money for Italy. I’m gonna pay it all back. But then Pop surprised me. Told me he understands dreams because of the single-A ball he played for Philly. He only lasted a year because he couldn’t adjust to the off-speed stuff.”
“Yeah, yeah, we know all that.”
“But the point is he took a year to play the game and try to make it happen. He knows I have this dream to play music and be famous, so he’s giving me a year off to do it. At the end of that time, maybe I’ve made it big. And if I haven’t, I’ll be able to come back to LiDecca Brothers, work my way up. And this money is to get me started in music.”
I felt some anger, I’ll admit it. I always liked my Uncle Jimmy—Mikey’s dad. My own pop would never do that. Never. We don’t have dreams in our line of the family. We have responsibilities. “Well, lucky you, Mikey.”
“You come out and visit anytime you want.”
“I’ll stay here and do my job. And I’ll be moving up in the business while you’re out in California goofin’ off.”
Mikey looked at that wad of cash, then put it back in his pocket with a little smile on his face. I could see he was happy to be getting out of Little Italy. He was always a sensitive type. When we were young, he didn’t like the way the family was, the way you had to read between the lines. My dad, Dominic—Mikey’s uncle—he used to tell me the lines were bullshit and the truth was between them. When we were young, we didn’t ever get a direct answer to a direct question. Most questions we didn’t get an answer to at all. I got it back then that there were two worlds. One was where I lived every day, and it was okay. Women pretty much ran it. The other one was the real world, though—and I got that I might get to know it slowly, over years and years, and maybe not completely, ever. The men’s world. It wasn’t talked about directly when me and Mikey were young.
So, for example, Pop went up to Attica on a trumped-up rap, but we—his own kids—didn’t know what the rap was. Or one of the Maglione cousins went missing one day, and no one ever saw him or talked about him again. Or Nick, the playboy great-uncle that always had the custom suits and all those beautiful women hanging on him, well, one day we heard that someone had stuffed one of his suits with fish to make it look like Nick was inside, then arranged the suit on the sidewalk outside his favorite seafood restaurant, and no one ever saw him again, either. Shit like that would make Mikey bug-eyed and pale, send him into hiding in his room.
Me? It made me want to be a part of it.
With Mikey gone, I moved up. Found I could service the vending machines faster without him and his everything-had-to-be-perfect attitude. Which left me spare time for my girlfriends and for me and Pop’s side business, which was selling Italian wines to Manhattan restaurants. We had some people back home that could get us the cases for less than other importers, so we kept our prices down and delivered good product. There was also some creativity regarding the labels, but not so anybody would know, except for the occasional pain-in-the ass connoisseur, but those types were never any trouble. Also stuffed in the crates of wine, we got knock-off watches and purses still actually made in Italy back then, so perfect you couldn’t tell ’em from the real thing. We moved tons of that counterfeit stuff into New York, month after month. This wasn’t the crap you saw on the street; this was the crap you’d pay full retail for in a Midtown store.
Mikey called me almost every week. He wasn’t having any luck with the music. He had a waitress he was shacking up with, the singer in his band. He told me he overheard her and the other guitar player talking one night and realized they were just keeping him around for his money. Made me want to f
ly out right that second, choke those two punks for taking advantage of my little cousin, but you know, I was just as mad at Mikey for letting them do it. See? Another one of those things he just never got: don’t let anybody push you around. You push first. You push harder. This is not a playground, never was.
He tells me how he’s trying to write songs and learn his craft, but how you can go into any coffee shop or bar on Sunset and every waitress there can write and sing, and they know all the music producers by first name, and the guy slapping the burgers is a friend of Frank Zappa, and Zappa’s gonna produce his first album, and how amazing it was to be in a city where everybody had talent.
Then one night he calls late, I mean four in the morning late for me, and he’s drunk and talking about this party he went to and this songwriter who played piano and sang that night. Warren something. Mikey tells me how he realized he had no talent and nothing to say, so why is he doing this to himself? He sounded relieved. He sounded almost happy.
Two weeks later, he was back in Little Italy.
Of course, I pretty much ignore him, because you don’t leave your family, then come back and loaf around like you own the place. Sure, his mom and pop and sisters fall all over him. The neighborhood, they seem to think he’s a hero, back home from some big adventure. He’d cut the girly hair and gained some weight, so maybe he looked a little better, but to me he was still the same gutless pretty boy he always was.
My old man and his old man tell us to get an apartment together now that Mikey was ready to pledge himself to the family again, maybe actually learn the business. It was a decent place on Mulberry, four floors up and a small view of the bridge. It had bedrooms at opposite ends of a living room and kitchen, like it was built for people who don’t like each other, the way I didn’t like Mikey. He was family, though. And I was stuck with him.
I had girls coming over from the hour we got the keys, but Mikey was workin’ hard to get into the pants of an old family friend, Regina Strogola; okay-looking, a tough chick who usually got what she wanted. You ask me, he was too good to her right from the start.
One night I’m done with this girl, third time for me and she’s still feeling it, so we have a talk, and I go out where Mikey’s watching TV in the living room. I leave the bedroom door open. He and I look back at the girl in my bed, and she’s got one of those inviting looks on her face. A blonde, of course, hair spread all over my black satin pillow.
“All yours, you want some,” I tell Mikey.
“Gina’s on her way.”
“So?”
“You know.”
“You don’t know nothin’. We got some work to do later tonight.”
“When?”
“When you’re done with Gina,” I say. “So, don’t take too long.”
I drove my Impala. We crossed the Williamsburg Bridge and went into Queens. It was a hot night, and my air conditioner was shot.
“What are we doing?” Mikey asked.
“Pest control,” I said. “My sister Julie bought a car from a guy out here, and now he won’t give her the money back.”
“What’s wrong with the car?”
“She don’t like it, Mikey. I talked to him on the phone, but he won’t listen to reason. Already got himself an Eldo. Don’t have the money now. A black. You know.”
“You made him an offer he could refuse.”
“Yeah, yeah, shut up about it.”
Me and Mikey had seen that movie at least a dozen times. Best movie they ever made ’til Scarface. The violence was right on, especially how Sonny takes care of Carlo. Mikey tried to tell me the flick was about honor and commitment and loyalty, and all that was fine with me, but when they got Sonny at the toll booth, it made me want to pick up a tommy gun and start blasting away myself.
Mikey didn’t like it that, in that movie, it always came down to the money. To business. Welcome to the real fuckin’ world, I told him. I also told him that business could be personal, that it didn’t have to be all one or the other, that the movie oversimplified that issue.
In Jamaica, I drove alongside the expressway. It was all Rasta this and that, every block. You could smell the ganja burning. It was hard to find the right street through my dirty windshield. Finally, I did, and I drove by the address, and sure enough, there’s a late-model Caddy Eldo, black and gleaming with white sidewalls, exactly like you’d figure for a black dude.
I drove past and parked along the curb and watched a minute. “We’re gonna detail his car for him.”
“How?” asked Mikey.
“Monkey see, monkey do.” I swung open the trunk and we put on the ski masks and got the bats. The new aluminum ones. “Come on. This’ll be fun.”
We crossed the street and came up on the car from behind. There were lights on in the house, but I didn’t care. I smashed the left brake light, then the turn signal. The aluminum made the plastic explode. The Caddy’s back windshield took more hits because the safety glass cracked in place but didn’t blow up like the plastic.
By then Mikey was on the other side. I only glanced at him, but he was slugging away like a pro. I was whacking the driver’s side door when the porch light came on and a big black dude in gym trunks and flip-flops came running down the stoop with a baseball bat of his own, the old-fashioned wooden kind. He stopped short and looked at me.
I said, “Give me the money you stole for that piece a shit Mercury, and we’ll stop.”
“That money helped buy the Cadillac you wreckin’.”
“Up to you, man.”
“You be sorry.”
He came at me in a funny-looking way, sideways kind of, with the bat cocked over his shoulder. I stepped back like I was confused, then ducked in and took out his kneecap. He yelped and caved in both at once, and I let him have it with the bat. Over and over. Then I thought I’d be like Sonny and kick him, so I did that, too. He was bleedin’ and yellin’, and I couldn’t believe the weird charge of adrenaline going through me. Felt like a river of electricity. Like something I could ride all the way to the moon and back.
“Finish the Eldo!” I screamed at Mikey.
“It’s finished! It’s done! Let’s go!”
I kicked the man once more in the face and told him, “Next time, you give the girl her money back.”
All he could say back was “Uck ou,” which made me laugh, so I kicked him again and headed for the car.
Mikey drove. I talked the whole way back to Little Italy, I was so high on the violence, the crack of the lights and the crack of his knee, and the whole glory of having power over a bigger man, the glory of having power itself.
“We gotta do this again sometime,” I said. My mouth was dry from panting so hard.
He gave me a funny look. “That was some ugly shit, Ray.”
“What do you mean, ugly?”
He looked pale and used up. “Forget about it.”
We did do it again. A lot. Stuff like that and stuff worse. Mikey, the deeper he got into the enforcement side of the business, the more serious he got. One night, drunk, he told me this life was worse than he had dreamed and feared when he was a boy. Much worse. He hated it.
The family business.
Marriage and children for both of us.
Twelve years went by.
During that time, Mikey’s father, my Uncle Jimmy, took a RICO fall, along with Matty Maglione. They got ten years for bribing, then trying to extort a Pennsylvania trucking company owner who turned out to be wearing a wire. Mikey’s mom, Christina, died of cancer. My pop, Dominick, became acting head of the family business. Paul Castellano got whacked just before Christmas of ’85, and the so-called Mafia Commission Trial dragged on. Junior Persico was running the old Colombo outfit, which of course affected us LiDeccas, not exactly fans of the late Joseph.
Personally, I thought the worst part of those years was all the Chinese swarming into Little Italy. Overnight, it seemed. Weird people. Glass tanks of live fuckin’ frogs and turtles to cook. All these signs yo
u couldn’t even read. Not hardly any Italian left. Just Italian for tourists, which is different. I hate change.
Personally, I tried to bring some style to things, the same way Joey did. I blew lots of money on clothes and dinner parties. I got to know the tabloid photogs, and they liked me. I have good, straight teeth and a kinda round face, so when you put both of them over an eight-hundred-dollar suit, I looked kind of lovable and wicked at the same time. Which is exactly what I was. Girls on my arms, but never my wife, of course. And I’d pop off to the reporters, give ’em good copy. I’d tell ’em what sports teams and casinos I liked, and what movies, and what the good wines and restaurants were, and I’d bad-mouth the feds every chance I got, take pity on ’em for being so dumb. The cops were okay, but the feds hated me. They harassed my family and threw charges at me to prove it, but what they couldn’t prove was me being guilty. I left courtrooms with a trail of dropped charges and not-guilty verdicts behind me. I loved every minute of it.
Mikey went the other way. Hardly saw him. Regina dumped him outta nowhere, took off on tour with a Jersey bass player. That killed Mikey, having tried to be a musician once himself. Which was exactly her purpose, I pointed out. She left their children—Danny and Lizzy—with him, which was the only good thing Mikey seemed to get out of those twelve years.
He called me Christmas Day of 1986. He sounded happy and desperate at the same time. “We’re going to California to live,” he said. “Danny and Lizzy and me. I’m out, Ray. I’ve worked it out with Pop and Uncle Dom and—”
I hung up on him because I was furious.
Later that day, Christmas Day, Pop told me they’d arranged to let Mikey out of the family for as long as Jimmy was alive. So, Mikey didn’t exist no more. Obviously, this was out of respect for Jimmy, and not his coward of a son. All I could say on the phone to my own father was, “I’m sorry, Pop—I’m sorry I was the one brought Mikey along and couldn’t teach him one bit of sense or even the most basic rules.” Mikey was my failure.