by Ira Gold
So I must make my own way here. It shouldn’t be impossible. I feel confident I can cobble something together from a variety of genres. But before I do anything, I must deal with Ariel, who is kissing me all over my face.
She makes the most of her thin lips. They’re silky and Ariel pushes her tongue here and there so my penis hardens on cue. I won’t be able to stop now until some part of her swallows some part of me. For someone on the brink I’m pretty horny. Or maybe my impending doom excites my libido. Sex and death give everyone’s gonads a kvetch.
We roll on the bed now like ordinary lovers. Her breasts fall out of her nightie and flatten onto my chest like chubby babies. She hikes up my shirt and licks my nipples until I squirm away.
“Wait a second.” She pulls her magic barrel from under the bed and takes out a skinny, ridge-tipped black stick, about a foot in length, along with a fat jar of Vaseline.
“Nothing complicated. Nothing that will hurt.” She’s rubbing petroleum jelly on the stick, humming. Nothing unusual. Just an anal dildo. She pulls down her panties and lies with a pillow under her stomach. Her buttocks spread and she reveals her whole works without the least self-consciousness. “Have you done this before?” she asks.
“No.” I gulp the vodka and place the bottle out of harm’s way. This could get messy.
“The key is not to rush. Never be in a hurry.” Ariel instructs while pulling her cheeks apart. “I’ll tell you when to stop.”
I hesitate. She pushes herself up onto her knees. The bottom is luscious and downy pubic hair surrounds her vagina like a cloud. I gently screw the dildo into her waiting rectum. Ariel moans. “A little more. Slow. Remember. Slow.” She arches upward and nearly screams.
“Are you—”
“Fine,” she screeches. “Turn it on. Turn it on.”
“I am fucking turned on.”
“Not you, darling.” She’s now a schoolmarm encouraging a particularly idiotic child. “Turn on the probe. The switch at the bottom. There are twelve settings. Number six is good, better than average.”
Okay. I flick up the dial and the wand starts to vibrate.
I hold onto the quivering stick as if it’s a thermometer and I am worried about getting a poor reading.
“Let go. Let it go. It will stay.”
So I let go. Ariel breathes ah, ha, oh, oh, yes. She turns onto her side and parts her legs. I gaze on the glistening complexity of her genitals. “Come on.”
I have no choice. I quickly put on the condom. She raises herself a bit so I can squeeze in. It’s tight, but, oh, good.
“Yes, yes. Oh, you’re big. You’ll be okay. Just do what I tell you,” she moans in a stream-of-consciousness patter indicating she has created a world in which I am a hulking slave forced into doing my mistress’s bidding. I thrust inside Ariel with a savagery that stops her babbling.
Though Ariel convulses with bliss, the dildo sticking out of her ass does little for me. For one thing, I have to worry about shaking it out. Also I never knew a woman who demanded erotic satisfaction with such specificity. I go along because an attractive woman’s exposed private parts make me hard. But only when her vagina muscles tighten like a vice do I shudder with any sort of enchantment.
That twitch begins Ariel’s long orgasmic spasm and she exhales with the ecstasy of someone being strangled by delight. I come late, which causes her to explode one final time. When she’s finished, she falls onto her hip. But she’s right. The dildo stays inside her. Ariel removes it slowly and throws it on the floor by the bed. She then turns over, puts her arms around my neck and asks, “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”
I lay her back on the pillow and play with her heavy breasts.
“Are you new to the neighborhood?”
“Never left it. Never want to. That’s my problem.”
“You know, I must have held you prisoner around Easter four or five years ago.”
“What time is it?”
“What’s the difference? We just had something here. You can’t tell me that what just happened was nothing.”
“No. It was something. I need to know the time.”
Ariel sits up and stares at me. “Why? Stay here. The Russians will get to this Godfather character and that will be it for the Mafia in Sheepshead Bay. You’ll be able to start a new life, free of gangster obligations.”
I laugh at the idea of Vinnie Five-Five as a Godfather. He’s a down-the-totem-pole, on-the-shelf captain. He’s a bit slow-witted, lacks the self-assurance of the best mobsters. He’s a killer, but people are always on guard against him. A bigtime operator knows how to put people at ease before he slips in the knife.
Still. Ariel is onto something. Get rid of Vinnie and the war essentially ends. Maybe, in his grief for Julius, he’ll let his guard down, slip. Maybe he’ll be the next to get a family discount at DiPietro’s Funeral Home.
I say, “Vinnie will kill me if I’m not there.” The boss calls, you answer. That’s the deal. We have no more right to free will or a conscience than soldiers in any army.
Luckily, Ariel finally realizes that I can’t fulfill her fantasies twenty-four hours a day. She sidles into her panties. “It’s almost eight o’clock.”
So I get ready to say good-bye to my old friend Julius. He had turned into a Guido who threw his weight around, who beat on people for practice, who wrapped himself in a mantle of self-righteousness not seen outside the most incompetent fools of the second Bush Administration. But I knew him as a kid. Together we cut school to play ball and get high. At one time we talked about moving to Los Angeles to get in to the movies. These childish dreams ended when Vinnie’s sentiment to pass on his power engulfed Julius. We were taught how to keep book and make collections. He connected us to dope wholesalers and showed us how to run card games. The transformation from an intelligent, open child into a mean, stupid adult can only be accomplished by a good education. Anyway, he had been my friend. Even if Vinnie didn’t order my presence I would take a last look at Julius before the ground covers him forever.
Ariel watches me dress. I pull out my Glock from under the end of the mattress.
Ariel’s eyes widen. “Was that there the whole time we were making love?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you crazy?” she shouts. “On the bed while we’re rolling around. You could have blown our heads off.”
“No clip in it.”
Ariel pants in anger and demands, “Let me hold it for a second.”
That’s what happens in Brooklyn to middle-class girls. They really think guns are not central to the American experience but only for nutcases and lunatics. Thus, guns become the be-all and end-all of erotic objects.
I give her my piece.
It rests in her open palm. “I don’t know how you can bring this instrument of death into my basement.”
She turns the gun over and holds it by the barrel, and she slips her finger onto the trigger. Her arm lifts and points at the opposite wall.
“That’s enough.” I, slowly, take the gun from her and stick it in my waistband.
“Wouldn’t it be better if you had one of those shoulder holsters?”
“The cops will see the bulge.” I put on my leather jacket.
I don’t like carrying, but Bones said to come heavy. Vinnie is so angry that he wants everyone armed to the teeth and ready to kill at every step.
Ariel seems depressed. I have ruined her master/slave idyll by having to take off like this.
She orders, “Kiss me at least.” The torture devices not withstanding, she’s as sentimental as any of us. And this will hurt her more surely than any rope or gag. We smooch for a bit.
“Text me. Because I think I will go crazy if I don’t know.”
“If something happens, you’ll hear.”
“Just say ‘hi.’ That’s all. That will be our mercy word.”
“‘Hi.’ All right.”
“You could say more if . . .”
“I’ll say ‘hi.’ That
’s the perfect message.”
27
Hearts of Darkness
This time I pay less attention while on the street. The excess of caution had just made me more anxious.
The breeze coming off Sheepshead Bay brings a whiff of the sea with it, and for a minute I imagine myself in a tranquil New England village. Only the lack of charm and all distinction in the houses grounds me in reality. Still, it pleases me that I again feel slightly relaxed walking these streets, my streets.
The funeral home—in an anonymous one-story building on Coney Island Avenue near Avenue X—conveniently serves as the antechamber to hell. The funeral director, a man named Florian, is a dignified degenerate who had lost his business to Vinnie during the 2000 Subway Series, when the Yankees pounded the Mets. (He bet with his heart rather than his head.)
Vinnie Five-Five often holds meetings in an office grimy with ancient coal dust, a legacy of the building’s first furnace. Sometimes a ceremony progresses upstairs. Then I’d hear the funeral in my brain, the mourners treading to and fro. I had always hoped that one day sense would break through. Not for death, which is understandable, but for life, which isn’t.
Tonight, Julius will take his turn in the main room.
Coney Island Avenue, a treeless desert dotted with car repair shops and bathroom fixture outlets, stretches like a cement trail from the Atlantic to the Hudson. But it’s so ugly that few people, even in Brooklyn, walk it.
When I reach Avenue X, my stomach tightens. Would Vinnie Five-Five now throw what little caution he has into the wind? Would he demand his tribute in severed heads? His only limit: don’t get caught. His only concern: being implicated in the massacre.
Stupidly, I’m deep in thought. I do not hear the car creeping behind me like a stalking cheetah. Two pairs of iron arms grab me from behind. One is around my neck and one is around my legs. My head crashes against the car’s frame, not once but twice. Black spots come and go before my eyes. I pass out for a second, but I hear a door slam and taste the barrel of a high-caliber gun, maybe a .357, in my mouth. “No sound, motherfucker.” These all-American words are grumbled in a proud Russian accent. Then a man cackles.
The gun’s tangy metallic taste reminds me of flavored coffee, hazelnut, from Chock full o’ Nuts. The monster removes the gun from my mouth and crashes his elbow into my head. I tumble off the seat and onto the floor. The guy starts stomping on my back with his steel-toed boots. I just grunt with pain, though I don’t think he’s doing any real damage, yet.
Then I start quaking in terror.
The youngest gangsters are taught never to get in a car with people, friend or foe, who may have the least reason to kill you. You have more of a chance of surviving by taking off and risking a shot in the back. Most gangsters are terrible shots. Also, many will hesitate blasting in the street because of the possibility of attracting unwanted attention. Gunning down bystanders can bring scrutiny to other aspects of a gangster’s affairs. The original expression—forgetaboutit—was coined for the chances of survival when being bundled into a car.
So I am in trouble. I take courage from one insignificant fact. I am not dead yet.
I see the hoodlum in the backseat, the giggler, a little, narrow-shouldered guy with an absurdly stretched-out chin. I’m usually much more scared of these bantamweights, as they constantly need to prove how tough they are. When he notices my looking at him, he exposes his yellowed, crooked teeth in a nasty grin. He then whacks me across the head with his handgun.
The other guy in the backseat, a square-jawed goon with dead blue eyes, glances at me as if I’m dog shit rubbed onto the floor of the car. He puts his foot on my chest while the giggler pulls my hands behind my back and binds me with duct tape. He winds it around my wrists three or four times before he rips the roll with his teeth.
I can no longer hide my discouragement.
You reach a point in these proceedings where one transitions from fighting for your life with the blind fury of a US marine to an acceptance of fate with the equanimity of a Buddhist lama.
I can’t decide which state I’m in, but it doesn’t matter. The car stops and the driver, the kindest of the group, warns, “We kill you if you give trouble going from car to club.”
“You will kill me anyway,” I answer back idiotically.
The driver speaks in the same reasonable tone. “I wish to kill you. It will be good to make you dead. But the boss say not kill you.”
Ah, if he were only telling the truth, what a sweet fairy tale. Why would the Russians need me alive? To send a message? They could just as easily send one by e-mail or by placing my body in a dumpster as they did with Julius.
The car stops in front of The National. The backseat men force me to walk between them. If any of the million people rushing down Brighton Beach Avenue see me, or see my taped hands, no one dares glance twice. In fact, I catch one younger woman in a wide-eyed moment before she quickens her pace, fleeing from me as she would from death. Then I’m in the foyer of the darkened restaurant/club. To the right is the coat-check and to the left the stairs to the cellar.
In better days, during the détente negotiated by Vinnie’s brother and Vlad’s predecessor, my friend Ivan had shown me around. On weekends, the place rocks with drunken Slavs and gawking tourists eating seven-course meals accompanied by liters of vodka. There’s a floor show of Romanian strippers. Frenzied people gyrate to seventies disco and endless variations of the Hava Nagila. During the week, however, only quiet couples and hefty businessmen dine on the pelmeni and shashlick. There are no strippers.
The basement of The National has achieved a measure of fame equal to the old Gemini Lounge in Flatlands, when Roy DeMeo and his crew murdered and cut up dozens of marks. One cop described DeMeo’s merry butchers as the largest collection of serial killers ever assembled in one place. They disposed of the pieces of human at a dump on Fountain Avenue. Here, where his thugs drag me, Vlad has a similarly practical setup, with direct access to the sewers that wash body parts to a filtration plant and then deep into the ocean.
The basement is a dark maze lit only by tiny exposed bulbs. It smells of dank and rat shit. We pass half a dozen closed wooden doors until we reach one at the end of a corridor where my driver knocks. A voice growls from the other side and I’m pushed into a room. Vlad, a giant whose forearms are as big as a thigh, sits at the head of a table and is flanked by two lieutenants, one of whom I recognize as Dmitri, a mug whose hammer-and-sickle facial tattoo alludes to his menacing, if outdated, weltanschauung. All three of the seated Russians peer at me with the same disgusted look, as if I have some sickening deformity. This sort of contempt is especially disconcerting when harbored by people who will debone you as they sample the restaurant’s excellent tiramisu.
Dmitri finally spits out something in Russian and Vlad laughs. I think the comment has to do with my knees banging against each other.
After his grunted laugh, Vlad stands up. This, as Vlad is aware, is a frightening sight. Thick and broad as a bear, he’s also taller than me by a good four inches. Though as pale as a vampire with eyes as cold, blue, and empty as a winter sky, he has the chin and bone structure of a movie star and appears carved from granite. He’s the only one in his gang not covered in tattoos, I notice, just as he punches me in the face and knocks me off my feet. His fist has the consistency of a cement block. Blood pours from my nostrils and my left eye swells up so thoroughly that I lose vision.
I’m yanked off the floor. My head wobbles in all directions. The initial searing pain dissipates and a secondary, pulsing ache takes hold. I’m not completely conscious until someone pours a pitcher of water over my head.
This fixes things a little. With water dripping down from my hair, I can refocus on my torturers. Shit, doesn’t anyone use his basement for a rec room anymore? Is the administering of pain both the profession and hobby of all Americans—native born and immigrant?
“Listen to me, asshole,” Vlad says in clear English. “You tell
your boss. One word, even you can remember. I know you are one of the more stupid people who work for Vinnie.”
I make no objection. I certainly feel like the stupidest.
“Finished. Can you remember that, you fucking idiot?”
I nod.
The thug who has brought me hits me on the other side of my face, without quite the same propulsive force of Vlad, but enough to stagger me and swell my other eye closed.
Vlad says, “Say word.”
When my brain settles back into its case, I repeat, “Finish.”
My kidnapper punches the side of my head and I go down on one knee. The black spots reappear and gravity forces my head down. I barely succeed in holding onto consciousness. The reason for this last punch escapes me.
“Not finish. Finished. You fuck, can’t you speak the English. Past tense.”
Ah. Ideas come easy, but the rigid strictures of grammar always give me trouble. I get to my feet and mumble, “Finished.”
“We get to anybody. Next is his other son. Then him. We give Vinnie chance. We take over his houses, his corners, his gambling, his protection. He goes away. Tell him. Florida with other failures. You, motherfucker, go to hell. You like hell. Not so humid like Florida.”
He turns to his boys who break out in laughter.
“You sell one more gram of marijuana here, we cut your balls off then kill you.”
“Florida,” I repeat before they can knock me senseless again. “Hell.”
“We don’t want troublemakers in our neighborhood.”
With that, someone grabs my collar and pulls me out of the room. My feet churn to keep up. When we get to the steps the guy slows and it begins to sink in that I’m going to leave this place of execution alive.
I may be the first one ever.
Vlad doesn’t want a war, even one that he’d win. Why waste the blood and treasure? So he gives Vinnie a chance to surrender, a situation that in gang fights is almost unheard of once hostilities begin.
The car is in the same spot, double-parked in front of the restaurant. I’m thrown onto the seat as if I were a sack of potatoes.
