Find Big Fat Fanny Fast (13 page)

Big Fat Fanny sashayed into Tony B's apartment, chewing Bazooka Joe bubble gum, like a lion chomping on a cheetah's carcass. She blew a huge bubble, then snapped it with a flick of her tongue. “Hi Boss. What's the deal on the guy who has to go?”

“His name is Mock Duck, but we'll discuss the details later,” Tony B said. “But first, let's have a few drinks.”

They sat on the couch and in about two hours, they had finished an entire quart of Cutty Sark, promoting Big Fat Fanny to open another bottle. Big Fat Fanny had her enormous weight to absorb the alcohol, so she consumed about twice as much Cutty as Tony B did. After pouring two more drinks from the new bottle, Big Fat Fanny figured it was time to get down to business.

“Hey boss, how about a nice blowjob?”

“Not a bad idea,” Tony B said. “But I have other things in mind too. For later.”

Big Fat Fanny blew a huge bubble, then popped it with her
tongue.
“Whatever
you say. You're the boss, Boss.”

*****

After taking the Red-Eye flight from Sarasota, Junior exited Laguardia Airport and stepped on the bus headed to the long-term parking lot, where he had parked his brand new Ford Mustang convertible five days earlier.

His searching expedition to Sarasota, Florida had been a huge success. He had completed his mission in five days instead of seven. And since Sarasota was in the midst a severe cold spell, temperatures topping out at only 50 degrees in the daytime, Junior decided he's rather spend the extra two days in the confines of New York City, even though it was now below freezing in the Big Apple. Junior had a slight case of the flu and all he wanted to do was lie down and fall asleep in his own warm bed, rather than in some strange motel, that had roaches as big as Yorkshire Terriers.

Soon, Junior was on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway headed towards lower Manhattan. Twenty minutes later, he pulled into the outdoor parking lot of Chatham Green. He parked his car and headed through the front door of his building and into the elevator. He pushed the button for the 12
th
floor.

In less than a minute, he exited the elevator. He strode to his apartment door, put the key in the lock and turned the key. He pushed the door open, but its progress was impeded by the inside chain.

“Hey Dad!” Junior yelled. “It's me! Open the freaking door!”

Junior heard mumbling and rustling inside the apartment. Junior figured his father had fallen asleep in the living room, with the door chain in place and was just awakening from a deep sleep.

Junior waited a full minute for his father to unchain the door. When Junior entered, he noticed that his father was wearing only his undershorts and a tee shirt. Now this was not unusual, since two bachelors living in the same apartment together usually dressed his in this leisurely manner, unless they were two fags, then it was a different ballgame altogether.

But what Junior saw next would remain indelibly etched in his mind for the rest of his natural life.

Sitting on the living room couch was a girl, a few years older than him, Junior knew only as Big Fat Fanny. She was the neighborhood monstrosity, who lived with her parents in an apartment at 75 Baxter Street, a six-story building on corner of Bayard, across from the city prison called The Tombs. 75 Baxter Street was the only tenement in Little Italy that had it's own elevator. But this elevator was so tiny, that when Big Fat Fanny entered it, nothing else in the entire world could fit inside the elevator, except maybe a small fly.

But the worst was yet to come.

When Big Fat Fanny spotted Junior, she stood tall to greet him. Junior stood frozen, as Big Fat Fanny staggered towards him. She was slowed by the fact she was obviously drunk and also because her huge panties, which seemed to be made of gray tenting material, were flopping down by her ankles, impeding her progress.

Big Fat Fanny took a couple of choppy steps, then pitched face forward onto the wooden floor. It was like King Kong falling off the Empire State Building.

The impact of Big Fat Fanny's chin banging against the floor, caused the building to shake to its foundation. Her eyes rolled, and blood and teeth spilled from her mouth. She made a slight groaning sound, then lay there unconscious, her fat legs spread upward at the knee behind her, her mammoth panties flapping in the wind.

Tony B went nuts. “Jesus Junior, she's hurt bad! Help me pick her up and put her on the couch!”

Junior stood transfixed at the front door. “Pick her up? No ten guys can pick her up!”

Tony B started crying. “Please help me pick her up.”

Junior's face started burning and his fever seemed to explode higher. He yelled at his father, “Call 911! Make them send a freaking tow truck! Maybe the truck can pick her up. And I'm not even sure about that.”

That said, Junior spun around and exited the apartment.

He left the building, put up the collar of his cashmere coat to thwart off the howling winter wind and trudged down Madison Street to Castillas Bar and Grill, located conveniently next to Vanella's Funeral Parlor, the final resting stop for most the 4
th
Ward's residents.

It was now 2 am, but the bar was open and packed with customers. At Castillas, if the bar was open, the kitchen was open, and people were there munching on hamburgers and skirt steak sandwiches, stuffed with steaming peppers and onions. Junior was not hungry, but he sure needed a drink.

“Give me a double Remy, with a water backer,” he told the bartender, a short, stocky bleached blond woman in her fifties named Louise, who if she ever smiled, her face would crack.

“Whats-a-matter, Junior?” Louise said. “You don't look too good. Got the flu, or something?”

“Yeah, I got the flu
and
something,” Junior said.

Louise took Junior's drink around the bar to a table behind him. She placed the drink on the table, along with the bottle of Remy.

“You sit here,” she told Junior. “The owners are out of town and I've got to work straight through the next seven days. I can't afford to get the flu.”

Junior sat at the table. “Fine with me.”

“Want something to eat?” Louise said. “I made some nice chicken soup. It does wonders for the flu.”

“No thanks. Just the bottle's fine.”

After downing double Remy after double Remy, Junior's fever seemed to be breaking. Or he was getting so drunk, he couldn't feel anything anyway.

It was now nearly 4 am and Louise told the remaining customers it was time for “last call.” In minutes, the last few stragglers staggered out the front door and Louie locked the door behind them.

She handed Junior a key. “Here's the key to the front door. I have an extra one. I'm sleeping on a cot in the back by the kitchen, 'cause I gotta open up at nine in the morning. Freaking daytime bartender's got the flu too. Lock up when you leave. And there's more Remy behind the bar if you need it.”

“What about the alarm?” Junior said. “How do I set it?”

Louie made a fist. “I'm sleeping in the back with a baseball bat. I don't need an alarm.”

“Be careful where you use that bat.”

“Don't be a wiseguy,” Louise said. “Make yourself comfy. I'm conking out.”

“Thanks, Louise. I owe you one.”

Louise forced a weak smile. “Too bad I'm a dyke. If I weren't, I'd take you into the back with me, so you could give me that one you just said you owed me.”

Louise disappeared into the kitchen

Junior drank until dawn. Then he cleaned up after himself and let himself out of Castillas, locking the door behind him.

He staggered the two hundred yards or so to Chatham Green, and in minutes, he unlocked the door to his apartment. Thankfully, he had no chain to contend with.

There was nary a sound inside and the apartment seemed empty. He checked his father's bedroom just to make sure. No one was there. Then he went into the living room to view the scene of the crime.

He bent down, and sure enough, there was a crack in the wooden floor where Big Fat Fanny had done her header. It looked as if someone had dropped an anvil from the ceiling.

The blood had been wiped clean, but from that moment on, whenever Junior saw Big Fat Fanny, and he would see her often, all he could think about was that bloodied, beached whale, out cold on his living room floor, her plastic, puffed-out panties waving in the wind.

How freaking embarrassing.

CHAPTER 13

The Mayor of Chinatown

Hung Far Low, all three hundred pounds of him, sat alone at a two-seat table, in a coffee shop on Pell Street. Wearing his omnipresent three-piece white suit, he looked like a Chinese version of Sydney Greenstreet's Senior Ferrari in Casablanca. He chomped on a pork bun and washed it down with greasy Chinese coffee, swill so vile no non-Oriental would ever dare swallow it.

Hung Far Low had a decision to make and it was not going to be an easy one. Junior Bentimova, the son of Tony B, who was still holding on tightly to his chintzy Italian Boss of Bosses crown, had done something of great disrespect. Despite what the police report had said, Norman Chung did not slit his own throat, stab himself three times in the back and throw himself off a Knickerbocker Village rooftop. As witnesses reported back to him, the killer was one of Junior's henchman, a cretin named Billy the Blade. Hung Far Low knew for sure the official police report on Norman's death was pure garbage, written by crooked cops on Tony B's payroll.

Hung Far Low intended to get even. If he didn't get even, the Dagos might think they had a even slight chance of regaining power in Chinatown. The neighborhood had gone from Lasagna to Chicken Chow Mein and Hung Far Low was going to make sure it would stay that way forever.

The Italians had ruled Chinatown since the early 1900's. In 1923, an Italian ex-boxer and boxing promoter named Johnny Keyes, real name Canonico, had somehow been elected Mayor of Chinatown. The story on the Chinatown streets was that Keyes and a few hundred of his greaseball buddies, cracked some Chinaman heads in order to win the vote, even though at that time the Chinese outnumbered the Italians 3-1 in the neighborhood.

As the years went by, the Italians began treating the Chinese people like crap. Up until the late 1960's, if the Chinese even dared try to play football, soccer, or basketball in Columbus Park, the Italians would beat them up and stab the heck out of their ball, telling the Chinese to, “Stay the fuck out of our park.”

All this began to change in the late 1960's, when Chinese businessmen finally started to get smart. They combined their money and approached the Italian tenement landlords in Little Italy, one at a time.

“How much do you want for your building?” they'd politely ask.

“I ain't selling to no Chinks,” invariably would be the Italian owner's first response.

“But sir, if you
were
selling, how much do you think your building would be worth?”

Now here's where the Dago's greed got the best of them.

“Hey, I bet my building's worth half a million bucks.”

Now the Chinese already did their real estate comps and they knew the building was worth three hundred grand, tops. Now was the time for them to drop their hook.

“Really, sir. How about if we offered you one million dollars for your building, would you sell it to us then?”

Dollar signs rolled in the Dago's eyes.

“Yeah, but I'd want the contract signed for half a million dollars and I want the other half a million under the table, in cash.”

“No problem, sir.”

And this is how the Chinese began throwing the Italians out of Chinatown and Little Italy, one building at a time.

The Chinese started buying dozens of tenements, paying two, and sometimes three times what they were worth. The Italian landlords lived in fancy places in Brooklyn and Staten Island, so they really didn't care what happened to the old neighborhood anyway. In a few years, the Chinese owned more than half the buildings in Chinatown and in Little Italy. That's when the purge began.

All of a sudden, Italians who were paying sixty bucks a month, for a two-bedroom cold-water flat, got notice that their rents were being raised to three hundred dollars a month. Most Italians could not pay that much rent, and the ones that could, thought it was dumb to live in a rat-infested tenement, when for less money they could move into new digs in nearby Chatham Green, Chatham Towers, Knickerbocker Village, South Bridge Towers, or in the newly built Independence Plaza on the lower west side of Manhattan.

The apartments the Italians vacated in Little Italy solved another problem for the Chinese businessmen. Most of them were involved in an illegal human smuggling racket, headed by men and woman called Snakeheads. These Snakeheads sneaked illegals into America from China, at a whopping thirty grand per head. Thousands of the illegals were coming into Chinatown every year, but they had no place to live. So the former two-bedroom apartments, now rented for at least three hundred dollars a month, split by hordes of illegal Chinese immigrants, sometimes as many twenty people living in a two-bedroom apartment.

Floors of entire apartments were filled with mattresses for people to sleep on. But illegal immigrants were rarely inside the apartments, except to sleep, because they had to work 18 hours a day, in one of the hundreds of Chinese restaurants in New York City, at less than minimum wage, for many years, just to pay the Snakeheads the rest of the thirty grand they owned them. Either that, or get their hands chopped off and they wouldn't be able to work anyway.