'74 & Sunny (14 page)

“Yeah, Joe. The guy just fell down in his hallway.”

“I could've sworn I saw him swing at you first, if I'm not mistaken,” Joe said.

“Could be. It all happened so fast,” my father said. “I got some clams for you in the icebox.”

“Beautiful,” Joe said. “Some cherrystones would be great.”

“Yep. No problem.”

Before we even got home, the three Coogan boys were already scrubbing the ugly words off the sidewalk with a big brush and a big bucket of car wash. And as the sentence disappeared, my father was already offering the boys some barbecue and a dip in the pool.

“When you boys are done, why don't you take a dip?”

“Yeah, no . . . it's okay, Mr. Benza. We gotta go,” Danny said.

“Well, take a frankfurter with you for chrissakes. They're good, like Nedick's,” my father said, imitating the famous Giants and Knicks broadcaster Marty Glickman.

Needless to say, the Coogan boys didn't have much of an appetite. My father had Gino and me stay out on the lawn until the ugly words disappeared and washed away into the street and down into the sewer. When the sidewalk was just about clean and the phrase was gone, the Coogan boys walked away knowing they could never, ever mess with us again. But I'll tell you this: Danny Coogan and I remained friends for years and our families never had a problem again. No cops were called on that ugly day. It was pure and simple street justice. Gino and I watched them turn the corner.

“That's that,” I said. “You know my father did that for you, right?”

“I think I know,” Gino said, looking down at the sidewalk.

“Gino, I want you to know something,” my father began, while uncoiling the garden hose. “Sometimes a person can hurt you without putting their hands on you. And sometimes that hurts even worse than a black eye. You understand what I'm saying?”

“You mean like name-calling and stuff,” Gino said.

“Name-calling is bad enough,” he said. “But it's even worse when the names they call you aren't even true.”

“Yeah, like queer,” I said.

“But those kids are your friends,” Gino said.

“Not anymore,” I said.

When I said that, Gino's spirits seemed to lift. He looked toward my father, who was hosing off the last remnants of what had been written on the sidewalk. “Real friends don't do things like that,” my father said. “And I'm here to make sure they never do anything like that again.”

“Yeah,” I told him. “Blood is thicker than water.”

“And it sure as hell doesn't wash away as easy as chalk.”

“So,” I said. “You still feel like throwing up?”

Gino thought about it for a second. “Actually, no. I feel . . . better.”

That was the moment I think we turned a bigger corner than the Coogan boys did.

10

SUNDOWN

T
he July Fourth weekend was upon us. We always had a full house, especially on that holiday, since my father's birthday fell on the fifth. So it was always like a double party—with friends and relatives coming from all parts of Long Island, Jersey, and the five boroughs. My mother, sisters, and Frankie cranked out food like crazy. Forget about chicken wings and six-foot heroes. We made deep trays of lasagna
and
manicotti
and
linguini with fresh pesto sauce. Our kitchen was as busy as a crime scene, with Frankie preparing veal marsala and some shrimp francese. Rosalie was prepping a huge fisherman's platter, with clams that I, and after some practice Gino, had plucked from the bay with our own hands and feet. At the same time, I had my father frying the cardoon—a rhubarb-
type stalk—that he would find growing wild on the off-ramps of the highway. My mother would cook for an hour or so at a time before she gave in and stood knee-deep on the third step of the pool to cool off. Then she would head right back into the kitchen. Some of my crazy relatives, like Anthony Coniglione and Phil Mattera, brought in trunkloads of fireworks that we shot off all day long, while escaping the occasional drive-by from Suffolk County cops. We always had a ton of stuff to blow off. We had mats of Black Cat firecrackers that we shot off in a big aluminum garbage can. We had M-80s, Ash Cans, whistling rockets we inexplicably called “niggah chasers,” and tons of bottle rockets that we shot out of a steel pipe hammered into the lawn. And, maybe funniest of all, we had Roman candles that we would light and aim at each other's asses. I remember Gino laughed like crazy as we aimed our rockets at his ass while he tried to successfully get out of the way. We usually spent the whole day using flimsy punks to light the explosives, but for the big show at nighttime—the one that brought out the relatives and neighbors—we used lengths of slow-burning rope that lasted all night. For years on end, we were always able to finish the night with a beautiful firework called a Silver Jet that would mysteriously knock out the streetlight in front of our house, rendering our part of the block completely black.

My father would applaud the show the wildest, whistling with both pinkies in his mouth. And then he would beckon several people up to our second-floor outdoor sundeck for the
night's dangerous finale. Most people would peel away, but there were always half a dozen of us or so who would climb the stairs and watch him ceremoniously stand on our sundeck, outside the master bedroom, as he fired off live ammunition up to a mile away into the purple night of the Great South Bay. First he'd use his .22 rifle, and then he'd finish off with the carbine with the cool World War II scope. Didn't it occur to him that someone might be sitting on their boat somewhere out there, enjoying a beer, and suddenly get picked off by a stray bullet? Didn't it matter what my mother said or my relatives urged? No. It was ceremony, and it reminded him of the five years he'd served in the European theater. There was no stopping him. So people just sort of held their breath for the twenty-one shots to end.

Gino and I plugged our ears for the first several shots or so. He spoke up as my father was changing rifles. There was the slightest bit of his being a wiseass when he started uncontrollably laughing and said, “He's probably killed some people tonight. If tomorrow's newspaper has a story of a person dying on their boat by a bullet to the head, Uncle Al is the murderer!”

As the night wore down and the fireworks faded in the black sky, there were always a couple of stragglers who'd show up at our house just to be a part of
any
part of it. My father had a wonderful habit of collecting people, and Sundays and holidays were the days they usually wandered in. I can remember all sorts of characters dropping by, like my
father's buddy, Danny DiSalvo, a down-on-his luck lounge singer, who always had a $5 bill for me whenever he popped in, smelling of whiskey and trouble.

A few years earlier, my father had taken my mother, my sister Lorraine, and me to see Danny sing old standards at a dive bar in the Bronx called the Wagon Wheel. There was decidedly nothing
Western
about it, except for the fact that the Bronx was considered the “Wild West” in the seventies, on account of its high crime rate. I remember the place basically being a two-story gin mill—with nothing going on (far as I could tell) on the second floor. The tables were all shaped and fastened like wagon wheels, but the entire joint had indoor/outdoor, wall-to-wall
carpeting,
and even at my young age, I could tell that didn't look right, feel good, or smell nice. The fact that my father took me there—on a school night, no less—was something else. And to make matters worse—Danny didn't start singing until some guy “in charge” of lighting found him with a giant, five-foot spotlight the second he walked out of the kitchen door singing the first bars of “The Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” with all the sad swagger of a washed-up Tony Bennett.

“Watch, A.J., watch,” my father told me. “Listen to the words. Listen to what the lyricist wrote. It all begins with a writer. No words, no song.”

And I listened. And that night stayed stuck in my head. A man I barely knew, belting out the first bars of the song by a foggy window beside the swinging door of the kitchen next to a bar.

I walk along the street of sorrow!

The boulevard of broken dreams.

Where Gigolo and Gigolette

can take a kiss without regret,

and so forget their broken dreams.

I was hung up on two things. Where was the “boulevard of broken dreams” and who were Gigolo and Gigolette? But I kept it to myself for a bit. Then, after what seemed like a ten-song set, Danny kissed and hugged us good-bye and we got in the car and headed home. It had to be close to midnight, because my mother kept telling me, “Close your eyes, A.J. Go to sleep. You got school.”

But I had to speak up.

“Dad,” I said. “Remember that song about Gigolo and Gigolette?”

“Of course,” he said, lighting up, peering at me in the rearview. “That's a classic.”

“Is the boulevard of broken dreams real?”

“You bet your ass.”

“Where is it?”

My father told me, “Look out the back window. You see those tall buildings?”

“Yeah,” I said, seeing parts of the Manhattan skyline through the cracked plastic back window of his convertible.

“That's the place,” he said.

Danny wasn't the only lost soul we let in after dark.

There was also a very sexy, raven-haired, sad sack of a woman named Maureen, who our door was always open to after we had witnessed a married man throw her out of his slow-moving car right in front of our house one night. “Don't you understand?” he hollered. “It's over, you bitch! You come by my
home
? Where I live with my
wife
and
kids
? I'll make sure you disappear!” Before my father could get the guy's license plate, Maureen ran up our driveway, crying her eyes out and screaming suicide. I remember her mascara running down her face and under her chin. We took her in. Gino was astonished while my mother poured her coffee, lent her an ear and comfort, and insisted she sleep in our guest room for that night until she had a clearer head in the morning. She was screwing a married man, and he was trying to break it off. Even I could figure that out. But, at one point, when she was sobbing and looking like she'd been through hell and back, Gino went to the bathroom and came back with a hairbrush.

“I'm going to brush her hair for her,” he told me softly.

“Yeah?”

He walked over to Maureen as she was relaying her story of love, lies, and deceit and held up the brush to her.

“Can I . . . do you want me to . . . should I brush your hair for you?”

“Oh my
Gawd
.”
Maureen sobbed in her Long Island accent. “How sweet of you. Good luck, doll. I'm a fuckin' mess.”

“This is my nephew Gino,” my mother said.

“Oh, he's so goddamned
precious
. Please stay this sweet,” she said. “Don't become a prick like all the rest.” She had a way of stretching syllables.

Gino looked mesmerized as he brushed her crazy hair straight while she laid out her story for all of us around the table that night.

And then there was my father's “connected” friend “Big” Freddy Muserella—who had worked as a bone breaker for the Anastasia brothers' crime syndicate. He loved coming by, all three hundred pounds of him, because my father was the only guy he let bust his balls. Freddy would stammer through a horrifying story of street justice, and my father would get a kick out of interrupting him.

“And
when
 . . . Storio Longo,” my father said over espresso and anisette. “You tell me stories about snuffing out gangsters for the Anastasias, but you're scared shitless of a little duck in Rosalie's backyard. What kind of a hit man are you?”

This ruffled Freddy's feathers.

“That's no ordinary duck! The thing flies three inches off the ground and comes right at me, nipping at my shoes,” Freddy said. “I'm gonna put a contract on that fuckin' duck.”

On nights when Freddy felt like confessing, he'd tell Gino and me about how bad guys had to be “handled.” He'd pull us in real close and explain his signature move—one which Gino listened to, though it definitely made him queasy. “So . . . for the guys who couldn't keep their traps shut,” Freddy said, “I'd lay the guy on the street, with his
mout
open and his front
teeth biting the curb. And then, you know, I'd just step on his head. Boom. No more teeth.”

“That's so badass,” I said.

“Oh my God,” Gino said. “That poor man.”

“Well,” Freddy would reason, “you can't do too much talking with no more teeth in your head.”

But one of my father's friends who was a bit calmer was a younger man named Nolan. At first, I didn't exactly know what he did for a living, but I remember my father initially having a hard time telling me what Nolan's occupation was.

“Dad, what does Nolan do for money?”

“Sales.”

“What kind of sales?”

“He sells stuff that falls off the truck,” he'd say.

“What stuff is that?”

“You know . . .
hot
stuff.”

“I still don't get it, Dad.”

“All right . . . then no more questions, A.J.”

It didn't take too many visits to figure it out, especially when he dropped by on my father's birthday very late at night with a dozen or so five-gallon cans of Gino's Italian Ices sitting in his backseat, covered with a bedsheet. He had them in every flavor, even in blue—whatever flavor that was—and all the kids at the party came running to the driveway.

“Only the best for the Benzas,” Nolan shouted up the driveway to my approving father. “Gino's!”

“Now I've seen everything, you crazy bastard—
hot
cold ices.” My father laughed.

“Who, me?” Nolan said. “Nah, I got a guy who knows a guy. . . .”

We were all happy to see Nolan, though there was always some sort of calm to him. Whatever it was, it made the women, as well as the men, love to laugh with him. His stories were a bit on the softer side, and he knew to always stay even with my father in terms of his place at the table, but never to pull ahead.

Nolan was always good to me, but that summer he was especially sweet and understanding to Gino.

“I can't stay long,” he said to my father. “But I'll see you Thursday night. Let's get in the boat and catch some crabs. The gas is on me.”

Nolan was like that. He came and went.

“He seems nice,” Gino told me as he left.

“Yeah . . . he's cool.”

“Do you think he'll really come back Thursday?” Gino asked.

“Yeah, if he says so.”

Sure enough, on Thursday night—about two hours before we could even catch crabs at nightfall, Nolan showed up to get ready for our excursion.

“You're early,” my father said. “Have some wine while we get the boat ready.”

I was standing with Gino at the edge of the shallow end of the pool, trying to teach him to not be afraid of diving into the pool. Gino stood there shaking in his shorts, while I stood behind him and held on to the waistband of his shorts and begged him to lean over and dive.

“Just put your toes on the edge, Gino. It's four feet; you know you can't drown,” I said. “What the hell are you so scared of?”

Gino stood there on the edge and gently pushed his toes to the end of the coping. “I can't do it. I just can't,” he said. “Let's try tomorrow. I swear I'll do it tomorrow.”

“You've been saying that for a month,” I yelled.

Nolan laughed to himself as he walked over and stood on the other side of the pool.