American Desperado (23 page)

After they told their capo, he took it up to my uncle Joe.

Even Andy couldn’t help me out of this one. I met my uncle Joe at a coffee shop by his house on Staten Island. By then my uncle was so old, his bodyguards had to practically carry him to the table. When he ate, it was a disgusting mess the way he drooled. Because he was half deaf, you had to lean in to his ear and shout. But when he spoke, he was as sharp as ever. When we sat at the table, he said, “Tell me the fucking truth. Did you rob those guys?”

“Yeah, I did. I pretended like I had bearer bonds to sell them.”

There was no way I would tell my uncle I had set these guys up in a drug deal.

My uncle looked at me for a couple of seconds like he forgot who I was. His eyes got very dull. But then the lights flashed back on. He said, “You got to pay their money back and give me an extra ten percent for the trouble you made.”

“Okay,” I said.

My uncle still looked at me. He had cream cheese all over his face from the bagel he was trying to eat. But his mind was as evil as ever. He said, “Jon, something ain’t right. I don’t believe none of this trash about bearer bonds. Don’t bullshit my ass here.”

Andy and I thought we were the smart, new Italians. But the old mustache Italians, like my uncle Joe, even with his brain half gone, could not be fooled.

What could I do? I told him these guys wanted drugs, and I robbed them.

My uncle Joe actually smiled. “You’re a little motherfucker. You’re a cocksucking prick. You do this all time, I’m sure. And you don’t give me a cut?”

I told him the truth, that anything I did I paid a cut to Andy, and he always pushed this up to the family. I did not pay the IRS, but I paid Gambino.

My uncle did not want to hear how loyal I was. He said, “Jon,
next time you rip somebody off, I don’t give a fuck if it’s drugs, or if you take teeth out of their mouth, you bring me my fucking end, you little prick.”

Then he asked, “How much money have you made in the last year robbing people like this?”

I told him I’d made $100,000 in robberies.

“That means you’ve made at least three hundred thousand,” he said. “I’m going to teach you a lesson. From now on, you steal any money in the street, I’m your partner. I want twenty-five percent off the top.”

That old prick. My uncle Joe was shaking me down. The man had no heart.

Just like the Mafia guys I ripped off couldn’t tell their bosses they were into drugs, I also couldn’t say nothing about my uncle shaking me down for my drug rip-offs. Drugs is what really fucked up the Mafia. They made all these idiotic rules against them, and then everybody went crazy scheming against each other. The Mafia should have known better. All the old guys got their start when the American government tried to enforce Prohibition. They saw how idiotic that was. Then they went and made a Prohibition of their own against drugs.

I’ve never liked rules. I am a criminal because I hate rules. But there I was sitting across from this old fucker, my uncle, telling him I’d follow his rules. I saw no choice at the time. I was a part of the family.

To live in New York, I had to be in the family. I could not imagine being in any other city. I had no concept of any other place. Within a year of my uncle shaking me down, it would become obvious to me, and to everyone, that I couldn’t be in New York anymore. It would take a girl breaking my heart—if I can use that term—as well as a few more murders to make me leave the city and the family for good.

But first I would have to get shot in the ass.

24

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.:
What I was thinking by getting involved with the wife of an older wiseguy is beyond me. I wasn’t thinking with my brain, obviously.

The woman’s name was Marie. Her husband had a guinea name like hers: Luigi. Luigi worked with Phyllis’s father. That’s how I met him and his wife. He was an older man in his fifties and she was in her forties.

I can’t account for why I started fucking Marie. She was the oldest lady I’d ever been with, but I could not get enough of her. She did things I’d never imagined could be done. While we were fucking, Marie could wrap her feet behind my head and give me a toe massage. This old broad could fuck for hours—fucking me, massaging me. Marie taught me this: Some women have a great pussy, no matter how old they are.

Marie and Luigi had a little rathole apartment off of Mulberry Street. Luigi had never been a big earner. He was just a big dumb greaseball who did whatever his
boss told him. I hated going to that place. It was depressing. But Marie had to stay home so she could answer the phone whenever Luigi called. I swear to you this old lady could fuck, give me a massage, talk to her husband on the phone, and smoke half a pack of Pall Malls at once. I knew in the back of my mind I should not go there. But I’d fall into that pussy of hers for hours. It felt like she had golden wheels inside her pulling me in.

Just like I knew would happen, one night I was at her place screwing my brains out when we heard the front door open. It had to be Luigi.

I wasn’t afraid of Luigi. But he was a typical macho Italian guy, and if I confronted him, he would lose face and be forced by his pride to try to kill me. No matter what happened, it would be a losing situation. If he killed me, my uncles would want payback. If I killed him, he had people that would want payback. Two people like us should never try to kill each other. The best thing was for me to try to run out of there.

Luigi’s footsteps came toward the bedroom door. The only way out was the window to the fire escape. But when I grabbed the window, it had burglar bars on it and was locked with a padlock. I asked Marie, “Where’s the goddamn key?”

She was lying back, with her legs open showing her bush like she didn’t have a care in the world. She said, “How do I know where the key is?”

When Luigi came in the room, I had nothing on but my wop T-shirt. His wife was there with her tits out like it’s a normal night at the opera. Luigi pulled out his gun.

This wasn’t like when the guy shot me outside Hippopotamus. I had no plan in my head. I jumped off the bed and fucking ran. Luigi started shooting.

I made it past Luigi into the living room, and a shot hit my back. The force of it knocked me down. He had shot me at the coccyx—my tailbone. Everybody has a tailbone. It’s like if you’re a monkey, it’s the bone that you have so when you walk on all fours, your tail
sticks up. It’s one of the more useless things a person has on his body. I’d never thought about mine until it was shot.

This hurt so bad, I thought he’d hit my spine and paralyzed me. Normally, I could take a lot of pain, but my mind checked out. I felt like a bug stuck to the floor with a pin. I could not move. Later I found out that when Luigi hit my coccyx, the bone shattered and the splinters exploded into my intestines. The bullet tore my pancreas and part of my stomach. I had blood coming out of my asshole and my mouth. I was puking blood and bile. I nearly passed out, and if I had passed out, Luigi would have shot me again.

Luckily when I saw him coming toward me, I got enough control of my brain to try to reason with him. I said, “You know who I am. If you shoot me again, you better put a bullet in your own head, bro. Because you will pay. Everybody will talk about you.”

That was one positive of dealing with a macho Italian guy. If he killed me, he would have to justify it to my family. To justify it, he would have to tell everybody I was screwing his wife. Luigi knew that, and the last thing he wanted was everybody laughing at him because of what his wife did to him with me. I saw in his eyes he had some reason in his head.

He walked closer to me and spat. He began kicking me. His natural man reaction took over. He kicked and kicked. I couldn’t fight back. I put my hands over my balls and jammed my head under the couch, so it was harder for him to kick my face in.

It takes a lot of energy to beat somebody. Luigi’s kicks slowed. He started to wheeze. He stopped kicking and went silent. Then he said, “Well, what do we do now?”

I looked up at him and said, “Are you a scumbag? Put me on the street and call an ambulance.”

“I’m not calling you an ambulance.”

I said, “You got your satisfaction. If you don’t want trouble, you got to fix this.”

“Okay,” he said.

This asshole dragged me down I don’t know how many flights of
stairs. I’ve seen corpses rolled up in carpets that were treated more gently than me. After he dumped me on the sidewalk, the motherfucker did not keep his word. He never called the ambulance.

It was the dead of winter. I got nothing on but my T-shirt. I was on the sidewalk bleeding out my asshole, throwing up chunks of shit I’d never seen before. It took a stranger who saw me there to finally call an ambulance.

I
WOKE
in the hospital a day or a week later. I don’t know. I felt worse pain in the hospital than when I was shot. I started to scream, it was so bad. Then I heard somebody laughing. I looked over and saw two cops.

Here’s why I hate cops. I’m screaming bloody murder, pissing in a tube, and they start their typical jerk-ass shit, wanting to know who shot me. They know I’m not going to say a word, but they got to play the game.

Finally, my uncle Sam showed up with some of his goons to watch over me. With them in the room, I passed back out and slept very peacefully. When I finally woke up, my uncle Sam was leaning over me, laughing. He said, “You little motherfucker.”

I saw Andy in the room with my uncle. Andy must have told him about me and Luigi’s wife. My uncle said, “I’ll take care of everything with the family, but you’ve got to think of a story for the police.”

After my uncle left, one of his goons said, “Why do you want to be fucking a lady forty years old?”

“Don’t knock it until you try it,” I said.

“You’re out of your fucking mind,” Andy said.

Andy was laughing, but I could see in his eyes he was tired. People were getting worn down by the trouble I made. When a wiseguy got shot, the police made special reports for the FBI. The heat believed that if one of us was shot, it was the start of a new war, and so they would question everybody for weeks.

In the family, everybody looked down on screwing another guy’s wife. When I got a little better, my uncle Sam, who normally would
laugh with amusement at the things I did, came to me with a black look in his eyes. He said, “You ever screw someone’s wife again, I’ll cut your cock off myself.”

Phyllis was another one not happy with me. As open-minded as she was, my getting shot for screwing the wife of her father’s business partner was rubbing her nose in it. Phyllis had her natural woman reaction, just like Luigi had his natural man reaction. She sent her sister Fran to tell me not to come home until my wounds had healed. Phyllis did not think it was right she should nurse me back to health for the trouble I got into from screwing another woman.

I understood why Phyllis put me out, but it caused something to happen that I hadn’t expected. I fell hard for another girl.

25

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Andy and I kept an apartment on the Upper East Side as a party place. We sublet it from a friend of Bradley Pierce’s who had decorated it very weirdly. It looked like a spaceship inside, with plastic chairs shaped like eggs and blinking chrome lights. The walls had paintings of Chinese ladies in dresses. When we first took the place, Andy and me cut holes in the mouths of the ladies in the pictures and stuck cigarettes in them. I went there to recuperate.

For many years I’d carried a pimp cane—an oak stick with a handle shaped like a dog’s head with diamonds for eyes. Now I had to use the cane for real. Every step I took hurt. Going to the toilet was agony.

One day I’m lying on the couch snarfing up some Chinese takeout when there’s a knock on the door. I limp over, open the door, and see a beautiful girl standing there, Vera Lucille.
^*
I had met Vera at Hippopotamus a few weeks before I was shot. I met her through Patsy Parks, who was in the group of party girls that followed Bradley Pierce to his different clubs. Patsy Parks was a half-assed model I never thought much of. She only stood out because she wore a cross on her neck like a Catholic schoolgirl. When I saw that cross, I’d usually walk in the opposite direction because she was never my cup of tea. But one night I saw her with a sensational girl, Vera. She was a French girl who was petite and dark haired like Phyllis, but with a personality that was the opposite. There was something warm about her, not hard and scheming like Phyllis. I felt it the first time I met her. But I met many cute girls, and this one fell out of my mind until the day she stood in my doorway with some crescent rolls she’d picked up at the Brasserie.
^*

“I heard you were hurt,” she said.

It floored me that this girl had been thinking about me. When I invited her in, there was nothing I could do but lie around. Vera came every day and sat with me for hours. I was in too much pain to sleep with her. She would sit, and we would talk. She was a smart girl. She had come to New York to study at Barnard College. But she wasn’t from a rich family. Her father sold fish from a cart by the road in a small town in France. She carried a picture of this man at his stand selling fish. Can you believe that? God, she was unbelievable. Vera had an innocent mind. She truly believed I was a good guy.

Even before I touched Vera’s body, I started to think about how I could get away from Phyllis. Even though Phyllis had thrown me out, in her mind this was temporary. To her, we were still married.

When I got my legs back, Vera and I kept a low profile going out. We spent a lot of time in the Village at little places like El
Faro
^*
—my favorite Spanish restaurant in New York—and out at a house in the Hamptons.