Debasements of Brooklyn

by Ira Gold

  I’ve had better nights.

  28

  Maternal Love

  Soon enough I’m tossed onto a curb. I hit my elbow on the cement and the pain radiates in all directions so that I don’t even know what hurts.

  After a minute or an hour I’m lifted, none too gently, and brought into the funeral home.

  Someone cuts the tape and frees my hands.

  I’m in a back room, away from the visitors and the casket. Through dim eyes, I see Pauli Bones trying to get me to hold an ice pack.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  Pauli backs away and I switch the ice from the left side of my face to the right.

  My eyes focus. I take in Frankie Hog, IRA, Gus, Bones, Moron, and the Jew.

  Vinnie Five-Five then walks into the room. Wearing a black suit with pinstripes, his slickly shaved face shows no trace of grief for his son. “What happened to you?” he asks in the violent tone he adopts for all occasions.

  “Vlad. Met him in the basement of The National.”

  Vinnie barks, “And you’re still alive? What did you give him?”

  “Nothing. Vinnie, what could I give him. What do I have?” Even in my addled state, I need to make this clear.

  “You’re lucky you’re nobody. What did the cocksucker say?”

  Vinnie is not going to like this. “That he doesn’t want war.”

  “Fuck him. And fuck you.”

  Vinnie’s tone reminds me that he has killed messengers before, particularly ones like me. Still, he waits for me to finish, so I add, “He says he can hit us at will. He wants us out of here. He’ll give us some time.”

  Vinnie stalks out of the room.

  His crew sits around. In one corner Frankie Hog’s ass is taking up nearly an entire bench. IRA leans against Vinnie’s desk. Bones and Moron sit in folding chairs. We are waiting around like an audience in a theater or soldiers in a trench for the show to begin.

  IRA can bottle up his psychopathic energy no more. He leaps off the desk and points at me. “You’re the luckiest piece of shit who ever lived. You saw the setup at The National.” He leans down. “Listen, you prick, can we get to him?”

  I lean back and grit my teeth. “Get out of my face, asshole.” I want so much to go to bed. Ariel’s cozy dungeon comes to mind. There I could be beaten by a loving, beautiful woman who only has pleasure on her mind.

  “What’s the security like?”

  I laugh but immediately regret this. “You’re going to hit Vlad at The National?”

  “Why not?” IRA demands. “We hit him or he hits us. We’d have surprise on our side, that’s for fucking sure.”

  “To find his office you have to go through a maze in this cellar.”

  “How many people are down there?”

  I don’t feel like discussing this. “I don’t know.”

  IRA paces slowly toward me, yanks up my chin with his fist. “How many?”

  I bring my foot up into his groin but I’m too slow. His fist cracks against my knee. Oh shit. I’m left breathless again.

  The others are looking on with bored expressions, as if this desire for a suicide mission has nothing to do with them.

  “How many?”

  Every inch of me throbs. “Two lieutenants were sitting with him. Two other punks in the room. But there are a lot of rooms. There could be an army behind all those closed doors.”

  “How many in front? Before you get to the stairs?”

  “I didn’t see anybody.” My lucidity shocks. I can hold a conversation as if not concussed. “But I don’t know for sure. Too much blood dripping down my face—”

  “Douche bag,” IRA interrupts. “You got down to Vlad’s place and you don’t look for a way back in. No wonder Vlad let you go. Why not let an idiot go?”

  Here I had been thinking that I acquitted myself rather well under trying conditions. I never cried or begged for my life. I didn’t give out any information of value. Yet IRA screams that everyone, friend and foe, knows I’m a fuckup.

  If true, my clownish reputation has saved my life.

  Vinnie Five-Five walks back into the room. IRA’s voice takes on a wheedling tone. “Vinnie, we can hit Vlad right in his fucking National.”

  “Get your ass off my desk.”

  IRA, eager to murder in nearly any encounter, obeys. “Sorry. It’s just, I have an idea.”

  “Yeah? What?” Vinnie sounds as if he can’t despise IRA more deeply than he already does, yet he wants to hear this plan.

  “Vlad thinks no one can hit him in his crib. So we charge in, take down whoever’s in the front, run down the steps, blazing. Blow everything away—doors, people.”

  Vinnie pulls out a cigar as if celebrating a victory. But he says sourly, “You’re full of brilliant schemes. But somehow nothing except shit comes out of them.”

  Vinnie blames IRA for the failed attacks on Vlad’s whorehouse. Unfortunately, IRA is his chief strategist, so Vinnie must be feeling isolated, surrounded by enemies and dolts.

  “This is for Julius,” IRA intones somberly.

  Yes, I conclude again, IRA is a category-five madman. No one would risk his life for Julius when he was alive, certainly not IRA, insanely jealous of Gus and Julius. IRA’s own father, a mean drunk, smacked the living crap out of him without connecting him to anyone important. Vinnie Five-Five is a captain who takes care of business and put his children in positions of power, at least until they get whacked. He is IRA’s ideal dad.

  Maybe IRA believes that there is now an opening in the Five-Five family for someone over six feet tall. The poor, love-starved killer would do anything to win Vinnie’s affection.

  Vinnie, with surprising sanity, dismisses IRA’s idea. “It sounds like suicide.”

  “No.” IRA inches closer to Vinnie. “I got a secret weapon. A great idea.”

  Vinnie sinks into his chair and exhibits a moment of total exhaustion. His face turns grey as a cafeteria hamburger and he closes his eyes as if he wishes they never have to open again. But he does open them and stares at IRA. “Stop talking in fucking riddles.”

  “Night vision goggles. We get into the basement, blow out the lights. But we can see and they can’t. Even if they know the terrain better, we’ll still have the advantage.”

  Vinnie buttons his suit jacket. Then he unbuttons it. “Upstairs, all of youze. Show some fucking respect to my son.”

  Even through swollen eyes I see Vinnie’s jutting chest fall in on itself and his shoulders slump as his crew leaves the room. I and Frankie Hog, who has trouble raising his bulk out of a seated position, are the last.

  As soon as I get to the main room, I go over to the casket and examine the waxy remains. Julius had a type of dark handsomeness. Now an unnaturally rosy tint feminizes the heavy masculine features. Ghoulish. I back away, almost into the lap of Julius’s mother, Rose, Mrs. Five-Five. A tense woman in a black dress and heavy bags under her eyes, she sits on the bench closest to the casket.

  “I’m sorry about Julius. He was . . . great.”

  She wipes her nose with a tattered white tissue. “What happened to your face?”

  “You know. An accident.”

  Tears leak down the channels created by wrinkles and irrigate her pallid cheeks. But she maintains a stony expression. “A lot of accidents around here.”

  I say nothing.

  Rose Five-Five grabs my arm and pulls me down onto the bench. The tears end up at the tip of her nose and drip off. “Howie, how much more? Am I going to see my whole family dead? Is everyone I know going to be murdered?” She loses the Rushmore cragginess and her face crumples into the balled, ineffectual tissue she holds.

  Her body shakes as she speaks. “My life ended up in the dumpster with Julius. I have nothing left.” All the tough sons of bitches sitting on the benches stop their low conversation. Mrs. Five-Five might or might not know that the floor is hers. “Julius never wanted to hurt anybody. He did business, but he told me, Ma, I never harm nobody if nobody harms me.”r />
  “He was a good man,” I lie.

  “He was a boy! He lived at home.”

  True, as far as it goes. But he was, like his brother, Gus, in his thirties and a killer.

  She hiccups now with grief. “I should have stopped it, Howie. I gave the boys my soul, but I didn’t protect them.” She talks so loudly that everyone hears.

  Someone tells Vinnie, who comes upstairs.

  Without him having to ask, I get off the bench. Before I walk away I hear Vinnie saying, “Rose, please. We can’t blame Julius’s work. His goals . . . He took on responsibilities.”

  From a couple of benches back, I see that Rose neither touches nor looks at Vinnie. And he doesn’t dare touch her. They’ve been married a long time. She hates him.

  Besides our crew, there are a dozen soldiers and associates from the family. This death, it seems, has taken Vinnie Five-Five off the shelf, at least momentarily. But Rose’s bitterness would get back to the bosses. Maybe they’d worry that the wife would turn on the husband in revenge for getting their child into the life. This could hardly help Vinnie get the backup he needs to hold on to his territory.

  Rose calms down. I’ve known her, Mrs. Spoleto, my whole life. She always struck me as background, silent and indispensable. A mother. When very young she loomed large. Afterward, we ignored everything but her veal Parmesan.

  Vinnie waves to IRA and the others to come back into his office. I go too, but Rose calls me back.

  She grabs my hand. In a tone low with urgency she tells me, “I didn’t see . . . this is not forty years ago . . . the life today . . . the Pistones didn’t let their boys near the business. Michael Pistone is a podiatrist. Michael. Could you imagine what Julius could have been?”

  I knew Michael Pistone. As a teenager he gangbanged, a punk like any of us. But after he beat a heroin rap he got his GED. From there it was only a small step to podiatry. In my imagination, even in a topsy-turvy alternate universe, Julius could never have reached the heights of a foot doctor. I think of him maybe as an EMT, someone who enjoyed using his vehicle to scare pedestrians.

  I lean over and whisper to the grieving woman, “Julius could have been a surgeon.”

  This snaps Rose into a dreamy reverie. “A surgeon. Yes. A heart man. That’s what he told me when his grandpa died of a myocardial infarction.”

  I agree, though I have only mentioned surgeon because Julius liked to cut people. I remember him telling me that a man with a knife can close twenty feet and slit a man’s throat in 1.4 seconds. Being good with a blade, Julius had contended, made you far deadlier than someone with a crappy handgun.

  “I gave my life for Julius and Gus.” Rose Five-Five speaks in a monotone drained of all anger, all energy. “Vinnie took it all away. I fought him, but not hard enough. Gus is next.”

  “Nothing will happen to Gus,” I assure Rose. “Vinnie will make sure of that.”

  “How? By starting a war? That’s some funny way to keep your son safe.” Her grip tightens on my hand. “You think we will turn back the clock by killing a few Russians? Howie, your mother was my friend. Everyone with Vinnie is going to end up in the garbage. He’s going to take his people with him. That means you too. I’m talking now for your mother’s sake. Get out. In one piece.” She speaks with the same nihilistic fury that now animates Vinnie Five-Five. Both react to their son’s murder as if they have nothing more to lose.

  Too bad neither could do anything constructive, like leaving this killer neighborhood. I don’t even see Rose Five-Five leaving Vinnie, though she wishes him dead.

  Still, Mrs. Five-Five flabbergasts me. I have always known Rose as the quartermaster for Vinnie Five-Five’s army. She did the food, the cleaning, the laundry. Neither Gus nor Julius mentioned her much. When we ran wild as teenagers, we turned to Vinnie to bail us out. That Rose saw her whole life in her kids, that she battled her husband for control of their destiny, shocks me just as much as Rose’s warning to get out, to betray Vinnie during this war.

  But maybe Rose’s reaction should not have surprised me. In grade school, both Gus and Julius were good students, far better than I. They did homework I never dreamed of touching. I saw their mother hover, urge them to study, to get control of their tempers. Rose fought to keep her kids out of the business with her only weapons, love and nagging. By erasing herself for them she hoped to win them to a safer, saner life. All this comes to me suddenly and I grieve for Rose. She lost to powers far stronger than maternal love.

  What happened? High school. Vinnie sometimes used his twins, who had morphed into wide-shouldered, contemptuous kids, as bagmen. He never objected if I tagged along. He tipped well. Then he hooked us up. Soon we went to school solely to sell drugs to the other kids.

  Rose’s total defeat occurred when her sons started meeting girls who knew Vinnie Five-Five’s position in the community. Suddenly, they were not short, lunkheaded punks. Once, a girl named Brenda needed a favor. This guy was hassling her as she walked home from school. He waited on his mother’s porch on Ocean Avenue and Z, and followed her all the way to Avenue T, feeling her up no matter what she said. She asked the boys, as a team, to talk to him.

  I, a tall, strong kid, the perfect build to debate with this man, went with them.

  That Monday afternoon, we trailed thirty feet behind Brenda. I recognized the guy. He used to be part of a gang called the Stompers. He was badass, but two of his crew went down for manslaughter, while two others went down by getting manslaughtered. This cat, when not hassling high school girls, spent his time lifting weights and taking steroids. He cobbled together a living by stealing cars, moving a little junk, and keeping on the lookout for the odd score. But he was with no one now—no gang, no girl.

  When Brenda passed his house, he strode down the steps. “Hello, beautiful.”

  “I’m in a rush, Ray.”

  “Come on. You have a minute for Ray.” He put his arm around her shoulder.

  He was running his hand through her hair when Julius crushed him with a metal garbage can lid. The rest took about a minute. We talked good. A punch in the face meant a broken nose, a couple of kicks translated into a cracked rib. And something that was said early on, maybe by a few links of a chain, led Ray to conclude with a concussion. Overall, we explained that a sack of shit pasted to the sidewalk should leave a girl alone when she requests this.

  Brenda had not stuck around until the end of the conversation, but later, giddy and on fire, she thanked both Gus and Julius by cleaning their pipes. Her gratitude extended even to me. I was beginning to discover that the initial stages of relationships with women would not be a problem for me, whether I was in the life or not. For Julius and Gus, this was less the case. Lovely Brenda, in fact, was their first. But as soon as they realized that girls would do anything if they beat someone up, Rose lost. Cash and pussy combo knocks out maternal love every time.

  Rose only managed to save her daughter, Tanya, by getting her to go to rehab in California and by warning her never to come back.

  Mrs. Five-Five, meanwhile, holds both my hands and stares into my messed-up face. “I liked your mother. Did I ever tell you that?”

  “No.”

  “She wanted for you what I wanted for my kids. But your father . . .”

  “He was addicted to the action. But he never pushed me into the life.”

  “He was a good accountant.”

  “With someone like Vinnie, honesty pays.”

  Pauli Bones is standing over us. “Mrs. Spoleto,” he begins. “I’m so sorry about what happened to Julius. He was my best friend. I loved him like a brother.”

  Rose nods. While hardly true, Pauli delivers this little speech with impressive earnestness.

  Rose finally takes her flaming eyes off me. “For your mother. Find a way out of this.”

  I stand with some pain. My lungs hurt and my head aches worse than ever. Being a gangster is as painful and dangerous as being a professional football player. And our pension plan consists of dyin
g young.

  IRA demands, “What was the old lady telling you?”

  “Nothing. That she wasted her life.”

  “Bitch. Gives Vinnie more trouble than the Russians and Chinese put together. Come on. Let’s see Vinnie.”

  The back room is now crowded with soldiers and associates who have come to Julius’s viewing. All the chairs are taken and I lean against the wall. A guy who I only know as Charlie Ear, an ex-boxer, looks up. “You okay? You look like shit.”

  My head hangs and I rub my forehead. “I’m fine.”

  “You look like shit,” he repeats with satisfaction. With his spread legs he takes up the whole couch as he sinks into its soft cushions.

  The pain kneads into my tissues. If I had a home I would go to it.

  Vinnie clears his throat and orders, “Turn on the music.”

  Gus moves to the stereo and cranks up on an old Snoop Dog album.

  “This was Julius’s favorite song,” Gus yells.

  The noise will interfere with the listening devices that the Feds enjoy planting like so many spinster gardeners. Everything will be mentioned in code, but Snoop Dog will add another layer of static.

  “Thank you for coming,” Vinnie mumbles. “It’s a sad occasion, fucking tragic, but we have a problem. We need it solved and we have the people now to do it.”

  These new guys, most of whom I don’t know, are trouble in tailored jackets. But when I reexamine our crew (not as well-dressed, I notice) an insight, which had been staring me in the face for years, finally hits me. We have survived this long because, like the old DeMeo crew, our gang is made up of a half-dozen serial killers. All crews are violent, but IRA, Bones, Gus, and Vinnie form a nucleus of sociopaths who lack not only remorse but also all fear of punishment. This species of bravery, a type of madness, has kept us in business despite the competition. Even Vlad the Impaler, until now, has trod carefully. Maybe that’s why he offered us terms of surrender. It’s only the Chinese backup that gives Vlad the courage to make any move at all.

  Vinnie continues, “Here’s the proposition. We’ll eat at The National tomorrow. It will be dark, but we’ll have glasses. An early dinner. Meet back here at six and we’ll go together.”