Spinning Dixie (3 page)

I dreamt that my children asked me why I was covered in ashes. I told them, “Twenty-five years ago, there was a volcano.”

Spring 1980

Pajamas waited in gray shadows on Snyder Avenue, his shotgun cocked and his brain filled with cinematic visions of himself. His jaw fell slack as a meteor dashed across the Philadelphia heavens. Seeing the celestial development as an omen of his destiny, Pajamas curled his upper lip like Brando, or maybe Elvis, and imagined himself pinching the cheek of a neighbor's child who had come to his house to show respect. Pajamas, like others in his Philly crew, loved—and badly misused—the word “respect.” The mythical child would not visit out of respect, but out of his parents' raw fear.

Pajamas was no brute, he reasoned. He saw himself as a cultured man, sensitive to the pulse of the community, a pincher of children's cheeks. He wept at weddings, slipped a few bucks to the local homeless, and had been known to remember the names of the men who drove the trucks of his vending company.

What Pajamas was missing was an awe-inspiring trademark. He had earned the nickname “Pajamas” because, my grandfather once told me, “I know a man who puts people to sleep.”

I'm not being completely honest here. As Pajamas primed to kill the “Docile Don,” Angelo Bruno, I had no reason to know that it was he who waited. Whenever I heard anyone had died violently, I automatically assumed Pajamas had done it, an assumption I made when I heard about what had happened to Don Bruno.

Now there was a moniker: Don. It encompassed both the nobility and terror that Pajamas had been seeking his whole life. The prospects were linked to this title, and had drawn this would-be Don into the March penumbra.

 

The Docile Don stood in the doorway of Cous's restaurant in Philadelphia's Little Italy, the last of a breed that actually merited respect. Mr. Bruno deserved respect not because of his career choice, but because he actively practiced peace despite blistering pressure to demonstrate the muscle of his hidden fraternity. Years ago, when he caught wind of a plot on his life, Mr. Bruno forgave his would-be killer, who prospered as a bookmaker until his natural death. In a subculture that cherished
la vendetta,
this act of mercy was an aberration.

Pajamas held no admiration for Don Bruno, who was content to celebrate his children, who had made it in mainstream America. Pajamas regarded the success of the Bruno children as evidence of weakness. For Pajamas, being a mobster was what mattered. It had been only eight years since the release of
The Godfather,
and the Mafia was just beginning to get the recognition he felt that it richly deserved.

Angelo Bruno had no interest in recognition. He just wanted to keep his operations in Philadelphia and South Jersey flowing at a steady enough clip to allow him to die at home in bed at a ripe old age, with his shoes off. At sixty-nine he was close, but not close enough. Besides, he knew what business he was in. Public recognition meant only trouble.

Fifty miles to the east of Snyder Avenue, the winking lights of the new Atlantic City casinos were summoning Pajamas. Technically, the Shore “belonged” to Don Bruno. But the Shore and casino gambling were two different things. While the turf indeed belonged to Mr. Bruno, the gambling industry, long the cornerstone of the underworld, belonged to my grandfather, Mickey Price.

Mickey was precisely the same age as the century. An elfin Jew, born Moses Prinzcowicz in Romania, he had fled to America at the age of ten after a pogrom tore through his entire family over one winter weekend. After a youth on the streets of Camden and Atlantic City's Ducktown section, Mickey rose to become the preeminent bootlegger in New Jersey during the 1920s. It wasn't until Prohibition ended, setting off a gangland panic, however, that Mickey had found his calling: casino gambling.

Coast to coast, mobs of every ethnicity frantically tried to get into the gambling business, and it was Mickey who showed them how. Long after the Irish and Jewish gangs withered in the rise of the Italian Cosa Nostra, or Mafia, Mickey was cutting the Italians into his gambling action around the world. The Italians may not have loved Mickey, but he had survived at his base in Atlantic City because no sane Mafioso would recommend killing the man who had been reliably bringing in huge dividends for a half century.

“The old Yid's mooning us,” Pajamas told his big-shot patron. “He's cuttin' in everybody. The Shore is ours, and Bruno does nothin'. It's never gonna end,” he ranted.

On this nippy evening, as winter surrendered, Angelo Bruno was content. Sure, Atlantic City was “his,” but he was making so much money living peacefully with Mickey, the thought of going to war hadn't been seriously entertained. A war with Mickey Price, after all, could mean a war with every other happy Mob family in the country. Not worth it, Mr. Bruno thought as he waited for his driver beneath Cous's awning.

A teenage boy whipped by on his skateboard. Mr. Bruno wiggled his fingers mildly at the boy in a “slow down” gesture. A barrel-chested man standing behind Mr. Bruno stepped forward to reprimand the boy, who had swiftly kicked his skateboard up under his arm in a maneuver that impressed the Don.

“Fancy, fancy,” Mr. Bruno told the boy, who laughed nervously. “You should be careful going so fast.” His demeanor was calm and avuncular, which caused the barrel-chested man to withdraw his scolding posture.

“Sorry,” the boy said, shaken, slipping into the darkess.

“So fast, so fast,” Mr. Bruno said to the barrel-chested man who opened the passenger door of a tannish Chevy sedan that had pulled up next to the awning.

At some point during the two-minute drive to his townhouse from Cous's, Don Bruno's window had been cracked about two inches. It had been opened by his driver, a Sicilian immigrant, who had come to Philadelphia at the recommendation of Pajamas' patron. On any other night, the Don would have felt the cool air waltzing across the silver hair at the back of his neck. Tonight, he felt nothing.

While Mr. Bruno made small talk with his driver, Pajamas stepped from the shadows to consummate his metamorphosis into a boss. He pressed the barrel of his Browning twelve-gauge shotgun against the Don's skull behind his right ear. His skin melted within seconds as scores of steel pellets sliced through his brain.

The cliché is that the target “didn't feel a thing.” How does anyone know? Maybe Mr. Bruno felt it in a big way. Maybe the pierced brain actually processes the flight of the pellets and reverses the senses so that their penetration is acutely felt.

The concussion left him with his mouth wide open, seemingly in horror, at the cusp of spring and the end of the region's gangland tranquility.

On the night that Mr. Bruno's death shook the crust of the Delaware Valley, the rest of the planet was crumbling. I read the evening edition of the
Bulletin
before I went to my after-school job at the Atlantic City Racetrack (longitude-74.63883; latitude 39.45770). Snow was falling in Florida. A volcano in Washington State called Mount St. Helens had begun to hack lava. A preppy lady shot up her boyfriend, an old diet doctor up in Scarsdale. A jury in Chicago convicted a lunatic, John Wayne Gacy, of chopping up thirty-three boys—many my age—and burying them beneath his house. Ayatollah Khomeini had just toppled the shah of Iran and taken sixty Americans hostage. Khomeini's rise in the Middle East disrupted oil production, and gasoline prices skyrocketed. The
Bulletin
reported that a couple of guys at a Pennsauken Gulf station stabbed each other while they waited in line to fill up. The prime lending rate of about twenty percent couldn't have lightened their mood much. Meanwhile, the Russians had just invaded Afghanistan and were the length of New Jersey away from the Strait of Hormuz, the spigot through which most of the planet's oil flowed. And President Carter was about to sign a bill reinstating the draft, and at eighteen I was fair game.

The main thing I remember about that night in the spring of 1980 was how an orange moon appeared to blow rings around Claudine Polk's hair. When Claudine's tall boots planted themselves in the soft peat of the stables, I had been kneeling in the indoor center ring, tightening the girth of an edgy thoroughbred. Showing horses had been part of my job working nights at the track. Linda Ronstadt's carnivorous “How Do I Make You” was playing on the stables' eight-track stereo, and I took it very personally.

I had driven to the stables after school as usual. I was a senior at Ventnor High. Mickey had just bought me a used 1975 Ford LTD, which looked more like a refrigerator that had fallen on its side than it did a car. I was always thunderstruck when it actually moved. Buying an eighteen-year-old a car was a very un-Mickey-like thing to do. He was a big make-your-own-way-in-the-world kind of guy, but I think he made the purchase out of guilt. I had been forced to follow Mickey and my grandmother, Deedee, when he had to flee the country in 1975 to dodge an indictment. “No boyhood for you,” Mickey barked at me on the flight out of Philadelphia. We had returned to Atlantic City in 1978. Sounding tough was really Mickey's way of apologizing, and I never demanded tenderness from him. At some level, though, he knew that I wanted to kill him.

Mickey didn't help me get my job at the racetrack, although he was well connected there. I pursued it myself. I had learned to ride horses when I was young, something that Mickey had insisted upon. Carvin' Marvin, one of Mickey's top guys, had taught me.

“Your grandfather wants you to learn to ride,” Carvin' Marvin told me when I was ten. “He made us all learn. Me. Irv the Curve.” Irv the Curve Aronson was Mickey's chief of staff, mind reader, and public voice. “He figures us
shtarkers
are gonna need the skill someday.”

I never quite understood why we'd need the skill, but enjoyed the riding nonetheless. When I was accepted to Dartmouth earlier in the year, Mickey made it clear that he'd pay for my college, but not for “summer fun money.”

My boss, a former jockey named Swig, had ordered me to prepare a thoroughbred to show a woman from Tennessee who was driving up that evening. I had the dapple gray horse ready—I called her
Shpilkes
, pronounced
SHPILL-
kiss, after the Yiddish word for anxiety—but the woman didn't show up on time. She had called ahead from a pay phone saying she had been caught in a long gas line near a place she had to stop in Delaware. I rode Shpilkes around the ring to give her some exercise. I completed a series of minor jumps and one prolonged canter. As I bounced, I imagined God shaking the earth and moon like maracas, and we were all rattling around inside like petrified beans.

“She's here,” Swig eventually shouted from his pine office that overlooked the ring. I dismounted and crouched down to adjust Shpilkes's girth.

The first thing I saw was the black crop protruding from Claudine's tall boots. It took my pupils forever to scan from Claudine's toes to her waist, which was possessed by tan riding pants. A white logoless polo shirt was tucked in deep, miraculously revealing no line. Jet black hair with a few natural gold highlights fell around her heart-shaped face. Her eyes were a cruel green, not in the sense of deliberate meanness, but because of the havoc they provoked. They were ancient eyes, emeralds stolen from the tomb of an oriental princess. There was an Old Testament wickedness to beauty this extreme. It was as if God had made Claudine in the same spirit that he smote the Egyptians with plagues: to demonstrate that only He
could.

Linda Ronstadt's pulse beat down on us from above:

Deus ex machina
. I had just learned the phrase in Mr. Hicks's English Honors class. We had been reading Greek tragedies since the New Year. The phrase meant that a God entered the stage via machine. The implication was that this God could work both miracles and disasters. In class, I thought the concept was ridiculous because it had no real-world utility. Claudine's appearance forced me with the sting of a riding crop to recognize that I had been wrong.

Swig's little bowlegs soon wobbled up behind Claudine, offering up tragicomic dissonance.

“Jonah, this is Miss Claudine Polk from Tennessee,” Swig said.

I rose slowly from her boots to her forehead, fell backward slightly (or thought I did), and shook her hand. That's when I saw the moonlight framing her hair. It came from a giant opening in the tin roof of the stables.

“Jonah Eastman,” I said, only marginally sure. We circled each other. There was something predatory about it.

“Is she yours?” Claudine asked me. Her voice was musical, but antagonistic. She managed to extend the word “yours” into her own little symphony—
yoo
-ahhr-
zzz
—leading with a crescendo and ending with a nap on a hammock.

“No, I'm hers,” I said, familiar, as if I really owned the animal. “She sets the tone, and I do my best to control her.”

“You won't win,” Claudine said resolutely. “She'll do what she'll do.”

I had no response other than an adolescent chuckle that I immediately regretted. She made me feel combative. I wanted to insult her somehow.

“I'll let you two talk this out,” Swig said. “Jonah knows all about this girl.” He walked off with a smirk.

“Does she have a name?” Claudine asked.

“I call her Shpilkes.”

“Spilled Kiss?”
She strained at the alien word.

“Shpilkes. It's, uh, a foreign word meaning the jitters. She's high-strung.”

“Thoroughbreds,” she shrugged. “Shpilkes.” It still came out Spilled Kiss.
Speeled Kee-us
.

“What do you think of her?”

“Moody, strong. One speed—fast. What are you looking for?”

Claudine began pacing around Spilled Kiss, as I now thought of her, tracing her fingers along the animals nose and back across her side.

“I live on a family farm. We have plenty of horses, but they're getting old. I'm graduating from high school this year and my grandfather said I could bring home a new thoroughbred if I found one I liked. The description of her in a newsletter caught my eye. I'm looking at a few other horses in the area. Out in Devon, mostly.”

My chemical reaction to Claudine's answer was rage. Darwin had swung into action and converted everything into a sexual threat. I envisioned her over in Devon on Philadelphia's Main Line, having some rich, wheat-haired, tanned preppie named Chip, Biff, Hoot, or Dirk taking her on a dual test ride of an assortment of beasts with risky names. Of course, she said none of this. I felt it, though, like weather. I wanted a fight.

“A leg up?” Claudine asked me, ordered me.

I linked my fingers together. Claudine braced herself on my shoulder, pressed down with her heel into my palms, and swung her leg over the top of Spilled Kiss. As she reached with her foot for the stirrup, she accidentally kicked it away, causing it to sway against the horse's neck. Elusive stirrups are not unusual. No matter how good a rider you are, it can be awkward to find the stirrups of a new horse atop an unfamiliar saddle.

Claudine appeared to be embarrassed by her struggle and whispered, “I've only done this a million times.” I enjoyed her weakness. I validated my dominance by grabbing the stirrup on my side and bringing it to her, bracing her calf until she had balanced herself.

“Thank you.”
Thenk yeeew.
I liked the prolonging of the word
you,
as if she spoke this way just for me. “Would you take my crop?” she added.

“I don't take any crop from women,” I said, hands on my hips cowpoke style.

A lethal tilt of her head and a smirk bearing a dimple. “Will you take mine?”

“Yes, but this has to be our secret,” I said, taking the crop and holding it to my heart.

“Agreed,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Welcome,” I said, in an abbreviated form of stable talk that attempted to address the way Chip, Biff, Hoot, or Dirk might have spoken to her.

Claudine proceeded to ride around the ring, occasionally jumping the moderate posts that had been left out from an earlier ride. The milky blur of a white rabbit shot across the ring, and momentarily spooked the horse, but Claudine's recovery was slick. She moved with a retributive grace that I hoped was designed to impress me, given her earlier stirrup problem. She controlled Spilled Kiss entirely through leg pressure.

As she rode, I watched, trying to make it seem as if my presence were purely business. I nodded clinically the way Swig sometimes did when he saw people ride. Within minutes, I had translated the loose and natural flow of her limbs on Spilled Kiss into yet a new sexual threat: She was a better rider than I was. I was competent, but my riding skills were tied to my athleticism—pure hustle—not my social standing. I never kidded myself; there was a difference. Claudine's riding was a celebration of her caste.

When Claudine rode back to my side of the ring, I didn't know how to address her. I felt outclassed. When I get desperate, I get wise—as in wiseass.

“You didn't check the horse's mouth,” I said accusingly.

“Excuse me?”

“You didn't check his teeth. A serious horsewoman would, you know.”

Claudine glared down at me with her wide, steel-mounted eyes. “I like horses. Wanna know why?” she asked, dismounting.

“Sure.”

“They know they're stupid, not like some species.” Pleased with her parry, her dimple grew deeper. Claudine moved to the rear of the horse.

“Be careful back there,” I said. “You don't want to get kicked again.”

“Again?”

“That grotesque crater in your cheek.” I tapped her dimple and felt my finger slip inside it, which she allowed. “It must have been caused by a horrible accident.”

Claudine drilled into my own twin-dented cheeks with her pinkies. “Maybe, but I was only kicked once. It looks like you were kicked twice. Are you able to go to school with those deformities, or did your horse kick all the way through to your brains?”

“My brains are good, Miss Polk. I'm going to college next year.”

“Where.”

“Dartmouth.”

“Ooh, Ivy League. Some say it's the Vanderbilt of the North.”

“I take it you went to Vanderbilt before you got old and haggard.”

“I'm going in the fall. Unless I'm held hostage and tied up by some wretched Yankee.”

“What if you meet one you want to be tied to?”

“Never. I already told you, men are dumb. I'll have no part of them.”

“You'll find me different.”

“How so?”

“I'll admit that I'm dumb, Miss Polk.”

“You already said you were smart, Mr. Eastman.”

“I
was
smart. Until you came in here and started giving me crop.”

Claudine registered the pun, but in a faraway direction.

In the course of Claudine's inspection, I fumbled out a question about how long she would be in South Jersey.

“I'm going back tomorrow morning.”

“Are you staying with friends?” I asked.

“No, at a motel.”

“In Atlantic City?”

“Heavens, no. Pleasantville or something.”

“Have you ever been to Atlantic City?”

“Heavens, no.”

“Why all the heavens?”

“Well, I've heard things about Atlantic City.”

“I live there.”

“Figures, a cruel bully like you.”

“Tell me what you've heard and I'll tell you if it's true.”

Claudine smiled broadly. She had a crooked eyetooth, which I took to be an embossment of her divinity. She stepped close and whispered to me, “Gambling and gangsters.”

“No!”
I whispered.

“Really,” she whispered, arching her eyebrows.

“I can prove to you that there's no gambling and gangsters there.”

“How will you prove it?”

“I'll take you there.”

“When?”

“Now. I get off work soon.”

“I've never known a plain old cowboy to think so much of himself. I can't just up and go to Atlantic City with some strange, dimpled Yankee man. Besides, I have reservations.”

“No need to have reservations. You can trust me. You can follow me in your car. I happen to live in a hotel called the Golden Prospect. I know the owner and he'll comp you a room.”

“Comp?”

“Complimentary. You don't pay. And I'll wake you, I mean, take you for a walk on the Boardwalk and show you Atlantic City.”