by Tara Clancy
TARA ARRIVES TO CUT GRANDMA’S TOENAILS.
Grandma
Minchia! Look who decides to finally come over here! I just said, if this kid don’t show up soon, the nails are gonna come through my socks!
Tara
I been nuts. School, work—you know. Sorry—
Grandma
Okay, enough! You ready?
Tara
Yeah, gimme your foot…
Grandma
Good. Cos we gotta talk about something…
Tara
What?
Grandma
X-mas balls.
Tara, now looking up from Grandma’s feet
What??
Grandma
In the garage…in a box.
Tara
It’s July—whattaya want with Christmas balls?
Grandma
You’re not listening! See? Just like when you were a kid! X-MAS BALLS. X-MAS BALLS! There’s no Christmas balls in the box.
Tara
I really don’t know what the hell you’re talkin’ about now.
Grandma
Madonna! Then listen! In the box what says X-M-A-S-B-A-L-L-S is all my good jewelry.
Tara
Why? Other foot.
Grandma
Whattaya mean, why? So the crooks don’t get it, that’s why! When I moved here, from Queens, I put it there. I figured your fancy aunt with all her fancy stuff in her fancy house would make the robbers come! I put it there so they wouldn’t get it. I figured what would a bunch of crooks want with Christmas balls anyway? Nothing! They don’t care about no Christmas!
—
Anyhow, now you know.
It’s a beautiful spring day, blue skies, sunshine, ten o’clock in the morning, and I am in a bar—the kind of bar that, well, opens at ten o’clock in the morning. All right, so it’s not the Ritz, but it’s mine. It’s my family’s bar in the West Village, the one owned by Uncle Sal, where my mother worked when she was younger, and now that I’m twenty-one, I work here, too. I am a bartender and a senior in college.
On this particular morning, there are only two people in the bar: myself and a regular named Joe Bird. Now, Joe was from South Boston (Good Will Hunting–type South Boston, Mark Wahlberg South Boston). He always wears jeans and a flannel shirt and work boots, and I’ve known him for years, but I don’t know what he does for a living. I’ve kind of presumed he’s in construction, but he never offers, and I never ask. He comes in and drinks Budweiser, nothing but Budweiser, and never short of a case, with or without the help of his younger brother, Danny (worse drunk, better teeth). But on this day Danny isn’t here; today it’s just Joe and me.
The bar has its ups and downs; on the upside, business is really good, because we have a lot of regulars. And on the downside, business is really good, because we have a lot of regulars. In fact, we have so many that, just like back at Gregory’s, we give them nicknames to set them apart: We’ve got Big Joe, because he’s big, and Black Joe, because he’s black, and One-Arm Joe, because he actually only has one arm. Then there are a few guys who got their nicknames based on the kind of work they did: Jimmy Ice Cream sold ice cream, and Vinnie the Fish sold fish. And, we have so many guys named Eddie that one of them is called Goiter Eddie. The giant goiter under his chin isn’t his only accessory; he also has an oxygen tank that he drags into the bar behind him, day after day—I’m not sure who decided we should call him Goiter Eddie over Oxygen Tank Eddie.
Now, obviously, there was a lot more to these guys than their jobs or their goiters, but because they didn’t go around spouting their life stories, even though people didn’t know the first thing about them, they judged. And when I say “people,” I mean me.
At this point, I’m still kind of this little shit—I got the college walk, the college talk, and I’m not yet past overusing the word polemic. And here I am, sitting across from Joe, and he’s reading the Post, I’m reading the Times (schmuck), and he looks up from his paper and says, “You see this, kid? Looks like they really are going to ban smoking in bars.” And I say, “I guess that’s what you call cultural hegemony.” And he says, “I guess that’s what you call—WHAT THE HELL are you talking about??”
Come noon, Joe’s still drinking Buds, and I’ve ordered myself some Chinese food for lunch. The delivery guy hands me the bill, and right away I see that I’ve been overcharged, and so I say as much, pretty nicely. But he doesn’t understand—he’s not a native English speaker, and, between how fast I talk and my accent, in some ways, neither am I—but I’ve been charged for two orders of dumplings instead of one, so I try to pay what I actually owe, and he gets pissed and points to the amount on the bill, and I try to open the bag to see if there’s actually two orders in there to show him, and he grabs the bag away and gives me the pay-up hand, and I get pissed, and words aren’t working, and now we’re just yelling, and the bag is going back and forth, and before you know it, we’re playing tug-of-war with a carton of pork fried rice…and that’s when Joe stands up.
Joe being Joe, when he slides in between us, I figure he’s just gonna coldcock this dude, and without thinking, I shut my eyes. But what I hear next shoots them right back open—Joe Bird is speaking slowly and calmly…and completely in Chinese.
This guy, who just an hour ago was drinking a bottle of Bud and eating a bag of Fritos for breakfast, this guy, whom I have known for years and years, his only notable change being a little more or a little less pee on his pants, THIS GUY is rattling on and on in fluent Chinese! What’s more, it seems that he and the delivery guy are patching things up; they’re patting each other on the back, and they’re doing that “Everything’s cool, bro” IN CHINESE, and then the guy trots on out, and Joe sits back at the bar and takes a sip of his beer as if nothing ever happened.
I’m now in a state of shock. All I can do is stare at him. I can’t speak. But finally, thankfully, Joe does. He says, just as nonchalantly as if he were asking for another Bud, “I sell pigeons.”
My mouth says nothing; my eyebrows say, What the fuck???
He goes on. “A couple of years back I expanded the business to Hong Kong, and you know, my brother, he doesn’t speak Cantonese, and it really holds him back!”
Nope. I still got nothing.
“Listen, I know it’s weird, but my father started the business years ago, and it was all just an accident.”
That does it. “Joe!” I say. “How the hell do you accidentally sell a pigeon?!”
And with that, we both shut our newspapers and slide them to the side, knowing there’s nothing in there that’s gonna be better than this.
“So maybe forty, fifty years ago my father was driving through Boston in a pickup loaded with cages of his racing pigeons. He stops at a light in Chinatown, and a woman approaches and asks him the price. He’s caught off guard. He explains that he trains his pigeons himself, and no one has ever asked to buy one before, but she cuts him off and explains that she doesn’t want to race them, she wants to eat them.”
(And, hey, to all of you who just made that face: people eat pigeon all over the world! Even here in New York City, at white-tablecloth joints, they call it “squab” and charge you thirty dollars.)
Joe continues. “So my dad goes home that night, and he really thinks about it, and a little lightbulb goes off—street pigeons!”
“Street pigeons?”
“Yup, street pigeons. They are talentless, but they are edible! And, more important, they’re free—no overhead, tons of supply, BINGO! The family business was born! All I did was take it to the next level. Started exporting, you know—”
I interrupt. “Take it to the next level? Joe, man, you’re a mogul! It’s like, like, what McDonald’s did for the hamburger, you’ve done for the street pigeon!”
Now, of course, all of this is completely illegal, which is why Joe and his brother had kept it a secret. And so, what’s the point? The point is that I was an idiot, and for two reasons. One, up until this very
moment I had thought that Bird was his real last name. And, two, here I was working in my family business but thinking I was ambitious, acting as if I was better than all these “bar people” I had grown up with just because I was in college, only to find out that these “bar people” had actually taught themselves Cantonese to be secret, international, criminal pigeon dealers! How’s that for ambition?
Afterward, since his secret was out of the bag, I got to know Joe a bit better. He invited me to his apartment one day, and it was incredible—there were a half dozen jade Buddhas and tons of beautiful, antique, bamboo furniture. And one night, when I ran into him on the street, he showed me how to catch a street pigeon. You have to do this one fluid motion in a split second: you walk up to a pigeon, maybe a foot away or so, and you stomp, they fly, you clap—bam! Pigeon. Sounds easy…but it ain’t.
It’s been over ten years since I last ran into Joe Bird. There’s as much of a chance that he’s OD’ed as there is that he’s now heading a department for Google.
It has also been over a decade since that night in Bridgehampton when I first caught wind of Mark’s business’s fatal collapse. The cause of which really just boiled down to two things: hard luck and the fact that anyone born to booze and grease simply isn’t given a safety net and rarely learns to build one.
Mark’s resulting depression never fully let up, and it would one day claim the life of his relationship with my mother. Afterward, due in large part to Mom’s strong encouragement, me and other Riccobonos kept in touch with our beloved Mastagotz. We stayed in contact until his death, when he was in his eighties, just a few weeks after I started writing this book—for which he gave his proud blessing.
—
As for me, though it was certainly Mark and our moon and stars talks that first stretched the horizons of my thinking, it took Joe Bird, and the lessons of time, to forever alter the way I look at people, including myself.
A year after I learned Joe’s story, I was bartending again, at 10:00 a.m., and again there was only one guy in the bar; a different regular, sitting on the last stool by the window. Outside the window there’s a guy walking to work. He’s got a briefcase, and he’s wearing a suit, and he’s staring in as he passes. My regular is staring right back. I’m looking at them looking at each other…and for the first time I realize that they’re both thinking the exact same thing: poor guy.
Domenica Alioto. DO-MEN-I-CA AL-I-O-TO. Despite having such an ungodly number of syllables in her name that someone might think she was one of my great many Italian relatives, she is not—she is the editor of this book. And yet, our lack of shared DNA notwithstanding, she has become family to me.
Turning the grammatically incorrect ramblings of a headstrong Queens girl into a legible book takes more than editorial skill; it takes planting yourself on a barstool and listening to her stories, sitting shotgun in her old Honda driving around the ass-end of Queens, and spending hour after hour on the phone with a person who was somehow, simultaneously, both super-insecure about her ability to write a book at all and yet so defensive, she wasn’t easy to talk into making changes. It takes earning said asshole’s trust. It takes a gift that I’m pretty damn sure is only possessed by one supremely dedicated and intelligent woman with an eight-syllable name. In other words, if you liked this book, then know that the credit is as much Domenica’s as mine. And if you didn’t, well, what can I say…she gave it her best.
Anna Stein, Robert Strent, Howie Sanders, and Peter Gethers are my alternate universe version of a Queens handball court crew—thank you all!
By pure luck I crossed paths several years ago with Lauren Cerand, and her support was what ultimately got this whole writing thing started for me. I’m forever grateful, lady.
Huge—or should I say, ’uge—thanks to everyone at the Moth for letting me tell my stories on your stage and radio show, and for being such lovely and supportive people. Thanks also to John McElwee, Alex Hoyt, Michael Ferrante, and Honor Jones, for editing several of my previously published stories. And I’m enormously grateful to Michael Howard for reading the very first draft of this book and making one helluva call!
Without Kel O’Neill this book might never have been started; and without Robert Voris it most certainly wouldn’t have been finished. And much love to Suzanne and Blake Ashman-Kipervaser, Whitney Estrin, David Goodman, Tiffany Brightman, Holly Ivey, Kate Glass, Rich Neuwirth, Gail Thomas, Sal “Papa” Schifilliti, Jackie and Colby Clancy, and Christine Ponton.
I’m also very grateful to my whole Crown crew: Claire Potter, Terry Deal, Dyana Messina, Liz Esman, Danielle Crabtree, Chris Brand, Songhee Kim, Matt Inman, Donna Passannante, Annsley Rosner, and Molly Stern.
There are no composite characters or pseudonyms in this book. And that all of the following people allowed me to use their real names and tell their stories is an honor second only to my being able to call them my best friends:
Esther and Lynette, our friendship is one of the greatest gifts of my life. You are my sisters. L.E.T. crew, forever.
Al, I love you, girl. Did I just put that in print? Hell yeah, I did! So maybe you can wait five minutes after reading this before texting me some chop-busting shit about how I’ve gone soft, and just take it in.
Birdie, where would I be without your crazy brilliant ass? You’re my favorite roller-skating, Snooki-looking, soccer-whiz, arty hooker/chicken in the world!
Kristy—thanks for accompanying me on the long and arduous journey from Queens to Manhattan. You’re amazing.
Antonetta, Jen, Johanna, and John Solina, Phyllis Silverman, and Rob Hauer are family…period.
And special thanks to the O’Reillys, Rosemary Gallagher, all of my teammates on the St. Gregory the Great softball team, all of the regulars and staff of Gregory’s Bar and Restaurant and Barrow’s Pub (most especially, Joe Bird), and each and every one of my not-so-small army of blood relations, the Clancys and the Riccobonos.
My wife, Shauna Lewis, is the world’s sexiest saint, and without her this book couldn’t have been written. And, our sons, Ray and Harry, fill me with more joy than hitting all the buttons on all the Overhead Control Panels in all the world. Thank you a million times, my dears.
Dad, thanks for being the greatest storyteller I know, for the unwavering love, and for always letting me eat the dessert first on a TV dinner. I love you so very much, and I’m proud to be your daughter.
And to my mom, my best friend, I can’t think of any other way to put it than to say: you are the most beautiful human being I’ve ever met. I’m the luckiest schmuck in the world to have you for a mother. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
In Loving Memory:
Tina and Lenny Curranci, Anna and Joe Paradise, Alice, Gilbert Sr., Gilbert, Arthur, Thomas, and Dennis Clancy, Margaret Merkle, Guilio Portobello, and Mary Zacchio.
Josh Miller, I miss you so much, my friend. You were the linchpin.
Bruno Riccobono, what I wouldn’t give to steal one more used tennis ball with you…
Mark Ponton, you changed my life. I’ll love you always, Mastagotz.
And to the boss-lady herself, my hero, Rosalie “Che cazzo!” Riccobono, here’s hoping you’re in heaven, telling everyone to fuck off.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
See previous 250 or so pages…add one incredible wife and two amazing sons.
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