Pippy presumably met clients that evening at the Clinton Street Pool Room. He passed a little time with Frank Filia, my mom’s cousin, the one who got me into this project. By this time Frank had been working for the manager, Yank Croco, for nine years as a numbers runner and as counterman in the pool hall. Frank performed with the George Arcurio Orchestra on weekends and was building a name in town as a crooner. He was also an artist: in his spare time behind the betting counter he liked to make sketches of the regulars. When I asked, during a follow-up to our first Panera Bread session, what some of the people from his youth looked like, he picked up a stack of cocktail napkins and spontaneously re-created a few:
Frank told me he had been feeling a little uneasy around Pippy around this time. Everyone, it seemed, knew that Pippy was welching on the mob. Or maybe that’s all hindsight.
Night came on. Nowadays if you venture to downtown Johnstown on a February evening you’ll find yourself in a rustbelt ghost town, but in 1960 the streets got lively even in winter. People headed to Hilda’s Tavern, where on this night the Harmony Tones were playing. The Gautier Club, a strip joint right above the Clinton Street Pool Room, was hosting its All-Star Floor Show and Orchestra, plus comedian Allen Drew. Back at City Cigar, the place filled up with men and smoke. It got rowdy; floor men stood ready to break up fights (one told me he had kept a broken cue stick on hand, and used it frequently). Even in bad weather, the opposite corner of the street outside, called Wolves’ Corner, was alive. Guys hung out there and whistled at broads, hoping for something to happen.
Midnight came. The sleet stopped; the streets glistened. At two o’clock the bars emptied. Then it got quiet.
Two doors down from City Cigar, the top floor of a three-story building became an illegal after-hours joint on weekends called the Recreation Club. It wasn’t much: a jukebox, two sofas, a little bar with its lineup of offerings: Kessler Whiskey, Walker’s Gin, Mogen David wine. Tacked to the wall was a board listing football and basketball scores. You had to be known to get in. It was seedy, smelling of old carpet and cheap wine, but it could get packed.
Pippy showed up here sometime after two, with a woman nobody had seen before. He was a married man with a two-year-old son at home, but everyone—including his wife, Barbara—knew he had a weakness for ladies. He didn’t have much going for him in terms of natural attractions, which was a likely explanation for the otherwise unnecessarily large wad of cash. People noted it that night, the flash of the bankroll, and the grin. Making an impression. Eventually he left, with the mystery woman on his arm.
3
The Comeback
SO THERE I am, zeroing in on Russ and Little Joe, tracking Pippy diFalco’s last day on Earth, doing the work of a writer of historical narrative—archives, police records, the county courthouse; researching, compiling timelines, gathering events and newspaper headlines and the behavioral tics of people of the past, trying to corral it all into a story—when I get the call from my mother. The ambulance had just left. I arrived as the hospital as the symptoms and diagnoses and prognoses were cascading. My father had had a long history of health problems, with the ruinous combination of heart disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease foremost among them. He hadn’t been anything approaching hale and hearty in many years. We were apparently witnessing an “exacerbation,” a sudden, precipitous downward slide that COPD patients can suffer. He basically couldn’t breathe. The deterioration was very rapid.
I was surprised by the intensity of my reaction. We had a nice relationship, pretty much free of discord. I loved him. But I had told myself some years before that I would be ready for this.
Instead, I spent an entire night weeping—sobbing, really. I looked at myself and found I was overwhelmed by … regret.
About what? That I hadn’t spent more time with him? Gone fishing or something?
It dawned on me during the course of that night that for a long, long time I had been holding my father at arm’s length. Not just in the matter of my research into his father. Somewhere way back I had thrown up a wall between us. We communicated regularly, but I realized that our relationship had been a wee bit hollow. I didn’t know why. But I felt—the way you feel that a dream was threatening even though you can’t remember it—that the core of it lay back there. Which was maybe partly why I hadn’t wanted to go there in the first place, and why I’d been holding back on involving my father in my research. At the same time, I’d been aware of how ridiculous that was. My dad—Anthony Shorto; Tony—was Russ’s eldest son, and Little Joe’s nephew. Most of what I had known about Russ before I started on this book had come from Tony. He had lived through much of the period I was researching. He saw things. Those things became part of him. Indeed, a defining feature of my childhood was my dad’s anger toward his father. Even though my grandfather was never around our family, the very mention of him could set my dad off.
A memory surfaced, something I hadn’t thought about for a long time. I don’t know how I came to know it, but somewhere mid-childhood I became party to the news that shortly after my birth my grandfather had tried to take me from my parents. I have no recollection of how I absorbed this startling fact when it was disclosed to me, but it left a lasting impression: a fear of the man. That alone—fear, healthy and robust—could have been what caused me to balk when Frank Filia suggested I try to re-create my grandfather’s world. If it was my mother who offered up the information in my childhood, the look on my face would presumably have caused her to follow it with some explanatory cover: We were very young. My parents had eloped as nineteen-year-olds once my mother realized she was pregnant with me. “We ran off to Virginia Beach and got married,” she told me when I asked her to recount the tale of their elopement. “The next morning we went to the beach. Then we called home and told them what we’d done.” The startled reaction from their parents rattled them enough that the newlyweds reverted to children who had been disobedient. They drove straight back home—“We were still in our bathing suits,” my mom said, laughing at the memory of herself as that much of a crazy kid. Some months later she gave birth to me, and her father-in-law, having apparently decided that the two of them were too young for such responsibility, issued his decree concerning me: He would take it from there. I should note that this fit an established pattern. Like a medieval potentate, Russ had a history of moving small children around among those he had power over. Rearranging families to suit his sense of order.
But if this event was some kind of key to my relationship with my father, it surely wasn’t a source of regret. If anything, I was proud of him for his response. Tony had stood up to Russ—on my behalf. Like hell you will. The skinny kid, confronting one of the town’s biggest badasses, his father.
Tony stood up to Russ on another front too. Also somewhere in the depths of my childhood it was made known to me that when my dad had reached a certain age his father had decided it was time to bring him into the business—to groom him to run the town someday, I suppose—but he had refused. As an adult I tried, in the way you do, to pull these memories and stories apart and line them up in chronological order, to make sense of them. All of this was around the same time: Tony and Rita (my mother) run off and get married; have a son; the volatile father tries to take the grandson away from them and is rebuffed. And Tony has a decision to make: will he become his father’s right-hand man, an underworld figure? Fate gave him one of those fork-in-the-road moments—and, in the way I saw it when it made its way into my juvenile brain, he chose for Good. He rejected Russ and his world, said no to the boys. A primordial father-son struggle, ending with bitterness on both sides, and a severed relationship. Tony, I grew up feeling, had done this for us—my mom, me, and eventually my brother and two sisters.
Appearances reinforced the child’s gloss I put on the situation. Where Russ was a quiet, brooding, muttering, heavy, shadowy presence, my dad was open, bright, gregarious. Russ wore a somber suit, tie, and fedora, like a character in black-and-white TV reru
ns. Tony and his slim young pals laughed a lot, wore blazers, loafers, and “white on white” shirts with cufflinks, breezed through the ’60s listening to cool jazz. When I walked down the street with my father, everybody we passed said hi to him; it was indescribably thrilling to have your dad be such an easygoing public presence, to cruise along in the wake of his gregariousness. These two men who stood behind me in the biological chain—each of them, like me, the first son—were the white knight and the black knight.
The dark energy between the two of them extended throughout my childhood. It explained my grandfather’s absence from our life. As Tony’s family grew, and his father failed to play any part in it, never showed up for a grandchild’s birthday or a Sunday dinner, my dad’s feelings of hurt and rejection grew as well. Maybe Russ, too, felt hurt—that his son hadn’t followed in his footsteps, had rejected him, saw the work he did as dirty. To me, my dad was precisely the kind of person that he himself admired, what he called a go-getter. Having staved off the mob, and with no help from his father, he scraped and scrapped and carved out a career as a small-town entrepreneur. He moved from high-school dropout to salesman to owner of his own bar to local real-estate mogul. His path was certainly wobbly. He had a quietly spectacular collapse in mid-career, essentially lost everything—including our family house—and had to file for bankruptcy. But when it was all said and done he had provided for his family in more or less the traditional manner.
And all the while his father had existed in an alternate universe. Year after year, Russ and Tony, father and son, ran their separate enterprises in the same small city, weaving around each other’s lives, barely crossing paths, barely communicating. When someone mentioned his father, Tony, who had a pretty fierce temper, would seethe. Those moments—watching my dad’s eyes tighten, listening to him erupt into cursing, feeling that my world might explode—were punctuation marks in my childhood, occasions for me to ponder that fork in the road, the other life that might have played out—for him, for me, for all of us.
Morning came. I had wept and puzzled myself into a corner. I could find nothing in my memory bank to make me want to hold my father at a distance. And now it was too late for answers, too late for everything. What a fucking idiot. Regret. It tasted like acid in my throat.
And then, a week later, somehow he’s being released from the hospital. I go to visit—I had by this time moved from Europe to a town in Maryland an hour away from Johnstown, in part to work on this book—and find him shuffling around the house. Sitting there, looking shrunken, skin hanging in bags around his body and with a hoarse rasp, but conducting his old zesty dialogue with the lineup of MSNBC hosts. A couple of weeks after that and he’s wobbling out the front door, levering himself into the car, motoring slowly to the supermarket. Being a man about town again. Telling the same jokey stories over and over. Cruising the aisles of Giant Eagle in the motorized shopping cart, saying hi to everyone in the Depends section. He’s back in the world—at maybe 30 percent of what he once was, but he’s back.
And me blinking in amazement at this, this return from the dead. I can’t believe it, this opportunity I’ve been given.
So I initiated a little conversation, which went something like this:
ME: Dad, do you want to work on this book with me?
HIM: Work on it? I’m not a writer.
ME: You know what I mean.
(Pause.)
HIM: OK, yeah. I do.
ME: Do you think you knew him, really? Your father?
(Long pause.)
HIM: Maybe not. I know he loved us. But he couldn’t show it.
ME: He was shy, right? People tell me he had this hard, scary shell. Aloofness. But that in fact he was shy as hell.
HIM: I don’t know about that. He … he was filled with shame. And he did bad things. Most of all to us. To my mother and me, and my sister and brother. But I forgive him. I forgave him a long time ago.
ME: That’s nice. But I think that’s your years of AA talking. It’s how you feel now. If you’re going to do this with me, it would be good to unlearn the Twelve Step stuff. Can you do that?
(Long, long pause.)
It wasn’t going to be easy. It seemed to me that where it mattered most Tony had put up walls, surely out of self-defense. But he wanted to try. We would stumble forward together, two generations of Italian American firstborn sons, groping, in search of what came before. A father and son looking for a father.
RIGHT FROM THE start, I was amazed at how much Tony knew. He had been a kid during his father’s heyday, but he knew names, knew all the bigshots from Pittsburgh and beyond; he imitated their mannerisms and ways of speaking, how some of the guys played up the mobster thing. Somebody was “a real Damon Runyan kind of guy.” He had a sense of the scope of the operation. I couldn’t believe how much he had soaked up. It just came tumbling out: “They always called it the outfit …” “Frank Palumbo, the big guy in Philadelphia—they admired the hell out of him.” “They had the DA in their pocket.” “The time the governor came to the house for dinner …”
We started a routine of going off on local trips, driving around town, passing empty storefronts and soot-stained warehouses that bore silent testimony to what the place had once been, pulling up in front of old haunts. The building where City Cigar had been was being renovated, in the process of being turned into a Christian school, which seemed mildly amusing. “They took bets up there, on the second floor.” Sitting in the car looking at the facade fired up a memory in him, and we swung around the block and pulled up in front of a brick building on Market Street. It had a fresh coat of red paint but, like many others downtown, was empty. “People went in to bet on the horse races. It was packed in there! They had their own announcer on a microphone calling the races. Sometimes if they wanted to beat a guy they’d pull a con, give the result a minute later. Like The Sting.”
As Tony got into the job of being my researcher he looked up people he hadn’t talked to in decades, phoned them out of the blue. You around this afternoon? How about if we come by? Stories came tumbling out of unexpected places. The picture got more complicated. It wasn’t just “the mob,” whatever that even was. It was the town, a family, the intricate, mostly small, sometimes painful connections between people.
And yet, something was missing. We were filling in details, but I didn’t feel like we were getting very far on Russ. Example: Russ brought big-time pool players to town, trick shooters, to put on performances. They would have a competition the week before, to pick the city’s five best players, who would go up against the sharpshooter. It’s easy to imagine the club packed to the walls, people craning over each other, cigarettes bent, peering into the smoke hovering over the green baize. But where was Russ in this?
Example: Tony told me about the boxing gym Russ had on the third floor above the Melodee Lounge. He sponsored prizefights. “One time he brought in Billy Conn, the Pittsburgh Kid!” Conn had been the light heavyweight champ, famous for the time he had Joe Louis beat through twelve rounds then got cocky and ended up getting knocked out in the thirteenth. (“Why couldn’t you let me hold the title for a year or so?” he asked Louis after. “You had the title for twelve rounds and you couldn’t hold on to it,” Louis shot back.) Having the Pittsburgh Kid in town was a big event, and Russ was the precipitator, but where was he in this story?
More harrowing example: The alcoholic and the womanizer. Tony told me—and his sister, my aunt Sis, gave me her version of it—about the time their dad came home from an affair, one that my grandmother Mary knew about. And she was ready for him. The fight was epic: dishes thrown and smashing against walls, clothing torn, buttons flying, the kids cowering, My grandmother shrieking like a woman in a Greek tragedy. Then as the tempest quiets down, Mary, leaning into a familiar pattern, digs out a bottle of Seagram’s VO and a shot glass. Russ slumps onto the sofa and starts hitting it, filling one little glass after another. The fight picks up again, then subsides. Russ keeps going at the bottle, fini
shes it, pukes into a bucket. She gets him another bottle, brings him upstairs to bed. They’re both in there, the door closed, the kids listening from downstairs, and things fall quiet. Eventually she comes downstairs, her lips pursed, eyes surveying a distant landscape. Much later, in fear of what he might find, Tony sneaks upstairs and creaks open the door. The room is ghostly dark and ice cold. It’s wintertime, but the windows are wide open, snow drifting into the room. And there is his father, lying on the bed wearing only his underwear, arms folded over his chest. He’s dead drunk, snoring. His breath is visible. She has surrounded him with lit candles and houseplants, created his funeral. “His lips were blue,” my dad said. “I really thought he was dead. And when he woke up, he did too!” He laughed at the memory, the craziness; after seventy years there was nothing else to do with it.
Smalltime Page 3
