Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight

by Jimmy Breslin

  Angela always went home from school wordlessly, head down, books held up to her face. When she came across the avenue and turned onto Marshall Street, the books would come down and the chin would go up and life would flood back into her eyes and mouth. At home she was kept away from everything, and she knew everything.

  In poor neighborhoods everywhere, there were signs hanging out to welcome kids back from the Korean war. On Marshall Street one night, everybody hung out signs saying, WELCOME HOME SALLY and flags hung from windows and there was a big block party for Kid Sally Palumbo, who was home from the battle of Sing Sing. The kids Angela played with ran around getting sips of red wine from the adults drinking on the stoops. Then they all went up to the corner and told strangers passing by, “Her brother come home today.” And the strangers would say, “Oh, isn’t that wonderful.” And Angela and all the kids would shriek, “He was a prisoner!” Laughing, they’d run down the block again. If Big Mama had heard this, she would have erupted into hand-swinging anger.

  As Sally and the five cousins on the block grew older and were involved in continuous trouble, Angela thickened the screen around herself, and her life became the books on the table in her room. In school she became the moody little girl who made the honor roll. In high school, at the Dominican Girls’ Academy, she outgrew her head-hanging walk. She began to notice that girls either were overfriendly to her, which she knew was an expression of superiority, or went out of their way to ignore her. Boys, who understand power, always treated her with deference. In her third year of high school her class of thirty-eight girls sat and talked before class started, and it was February 15 and they were talking about Valentine cards they had gotten. A redheaded girl in the front of the room called out, “How come Angela got Valentine Day cards with a picture of a garage?”

  Laughter fell around Angela. For a small instant she was nervous and confused. Then the embarrassment ran out of her face and her eyes narrowed. When the laughter stopped, she called out, saying each word by itself, “You … rat … stool … pigeon … son … of … a …bitch.”

  Nobody was overfriendly and nobody made a show of trying to ignore her after that. Everything became correct, and Angela spoke to girls only when she felt like it.

  In her neighborhood most of the girls went to vocational or commercial high schools and spent their afternoons smoking cigarettes in DiLorenzo’s candy store with boys who had dropped out of school and were waiting to get into jobs or trouble. The girls went to filing-clerk jobs in insurance offices in Manhattan, or, mainly, into knitting mills. They rode in cars with boys, and sex and marriage came quickly. Angela found she had nothing in common with the girls. And the boys were overly careful of her because Kid Sally Palumbo had promised to cut the fingers off anybody touching his sister. For a few years Angela was close to Carmine Pollino, who lived at Number 25 Marshall Street and attended Brooklyn Automotive High. Then one afternoon she was coming home from school and she stopped to talk to Carmine, who was sitting on the stoop doing homework.

  “A composition, I don’t know why I got to do a composition,” he said. “You don’t have to write no compositions to fix up cars.”

  She came up and sat next to him on the stoop and looked at his composition.

  My friend Jonny Lombardo isn’t nervouse of anything. The other day he sent away for a brochure on a fuel injector. Then the mailman came in the morning and what did Jonny receive but the brochure. It was outasight and he come right over to the house to show it to me so I could see what a outasight thing he had received in the mail.

  Carmine’s budding masculinity crumbled away in Angela’s eyes as she read the painful scrawl.

  “Is that how you spell Johnny?” she said.

  “Yeah, Johnny,” he said. “J-o-n-n-y. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  “An H,” she said.

  “H?”

  “Oh, you know that,” she said.

  Carmine shrugged and crossed out the name the first time and wrote it out correctly and then he skipped over the second misspelling and resumed his scrawling. After this, Angela found she had very little to say to him.

  At school she went to basketball games on Friday nights at Bishop McCarthy Boys’ High School. After the games she danced with Irish boys who were breathing heavily even before the music started. She did not see the boys at any other time. When one of them asked for her phone number, she told him she had no phone. One of the things Angela knew without being told was never to use a telephone. At home, Angela was always given a running lecture by Big Mama on the evils of Irish boys. Big Mama kept saying that Irishers take the bread out of their children’s mouths to buy whisky. Big Mama said this in a high-pitched voice, with her hands waving. Among the most overlooked racial problems in the country is the division between Irish and Italians. “Go with nice Italian boys,” Big Mama said.

  The trouble was, Big Mama’s idea of a nice Italian boy was a strangler’s son. For the big event of Angela’s four years in high school, Big Mama went to the South Brooklyn version of the Social Register. Just as any decent Protestant would enter the hospital if his daughter tried to make her debut on the arm of somebody with an unknown family name, so do the old-breed Mafia try to match their offspring with children of other Mafia families. Royal blood can be preserved only with the strictest of breeding. Big Mama insisted Angela invite to her prom a nice Italian boy named Henry Gallante. He was the nineteen-year-old son of Sammy (the Timber Wolf) Gallante, the Canarsie section of Brooklyn’s answer to John Dillinger. On the night of the dance, Henry Gallante arrived with three huge orchids. He gave them to Angela reluctantly because he really wanted to wear the orchids himself. One strangulation too many in the yard behind his house had turned Henry Gallante very far from violence.

  Outside of trying to steer her toward Italian boys of shaky antecedents, Big Mama went to great lengths to shield Angela from what was going on around her. Kid Sally Palumbo never spoke of what he did for a living, in front of his sister. And by her own instincts Angela never went into the vending-machine office. She developed the habit of never walking past it, either. She did not want to see or know what was going on in the office. At the same time, she knew everything. There was an organization of Good People and it was an old Italian thing and her brother and his cousins were in it some place, and Big Mama knew all about it, and so did Angela. But the Kid Sally Palumbo in the newspapers was not her brother. Her brother was the person in the house with her who could make her laugh.

  One day, in the spring of her last year in high school, she came into the vestibule to go upstairs and the sound of loud voices came through the wall from the vending-machine office.

  “Do the right thing,” her brother’s voice shouted.

  “I’m trying to do the right thing,” another voice said.

  “Then where’s the freakin’ money?” Big Jelly’s voice said.

  A chair scraped and there was the sound of flesh being slapped. Then another sound. And then a loud shriek. “You Jew mocky son-of-a-bitch!” her brother shouted. “Oh, you dirty bastard.”

  “Are you all right, Sally Kid?” Big Jelly’s voice yelled.

  “My hand, the dirty bastard. Kick his head in.”

  There was a commotion, and through the door Angela saw a man in a neat gray suit running onto the sidewalk. Big Jelly ran after him and threw a kick at him that missed. The man got into a car at the curb and pulled away.

  Angela went up to her room and dropped her schoolbooks on the bed and sat there for an hour. When it was out of her, she left the room as if nothing had happened. Her brother came home that night with his hand in a cast. Kid Sally Palumbo had a willing, but inaccurate right hand. In the afternoon melee he had bounced a punch against the edge of the desk and broken two knuckles.

  When she graduated from high school, Angela had the marks and units to enter several colleges. But the Palumbos were not yet in the stratum of gangsters who sent their daughters in fur coats to exclusive schools. Angela entere
d NYU. She liked the idea of being swallowed in its size. Only people directly familiar with her from months of sitting in the same class knew that she was the sister of New York’s reputedly roughest young racketeer. She kept an uninterested attitude about everything but the classwork. One boy, Robert Dineen, who was in her late-afternoon classes, always spoke to her. One day at the end of class he asked her if she felt like a cup of coffee. He took her to a bar that was three steps down from the sidewalk of Sheridan Square. Angela drank Coke. Dineen drank beer with a motion that caused the rim of the glass to strike the bridge of his nose so hard Angela was afraid he would wound himself. After that she met him one time at the Brooklyn Public Library on a Saturday night. They walked to a place on Flatbush Avenue called Flynn’s. Dineen drank beer and talked sports with the young guys in the neighborhood who hung out in the place. He had his back turned to Angela much of the time. She noticed the bar was filled with young girls whose companions treated them the same way. But when she walked to the jukebox Angela could feel Dineen watching her very carefully. She went home alone by cab that night. She met Dineen there a couple more times. She liked his openness and the way everybody else in the bar was open and spoke out. Nobody was withdrawn and there was no whispering.

  One day after school, when they were going out that night, Angela said she had to go and change and Dineen insisted on coming with her. Angela said yes. She was empty while she rode the subway with Dineen and then walked him down the street to the house.

  Big Mama got Dineen in the front room. She sat directly across from him.

  “You want a pear?”

  “No, thank you,” he said.

  “Where you go tonight?”

  “To a movie, I guess.”

  “Then you be home by eleven o’clock?”

  “Well—uh—I guess around then.”

  “You name Dineen. What’s-a you mother’s name?”

  “Collins.”

  “Uh. You go to mass?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Our family goes to church.” Big Mama turned and looked at a picture of the Sacred Heart. “You want a sandwich?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “What’s-a you father do?”

  “Oh, he’s dead.”

  “Oh, that’s-a bad. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “What did this-a father do?”

  “Policeman.”

  Big Mama said it very slowly. “You … father … cop?”

  “He was a sergeant. I have two uncles on the job in Long Island.”

  Big Mama blessed herself and looked up at the ceiling. “Gesù Cristo,” she muttered.

  When Angela came out, dressed, and started to leave with Dineen, Big Mama snarled at them, “You be home eleven-fifteen the latest.”

  Angela looked at her, puzzled. “All right,” she said.

  They were halfway down the stairs when Big Mama leaned over the banisters.

  “No fagia mal!”

  “Pardon me?” Dineen said.

  “Never mind. She know.”

  Later, when Dineen brought her home, they stood inside the vestibule talking to each other quietly. Through the wall came the well-enunciated words of her cousin, Larry (Kid Blast) Palumbo.

  “I still think we should go and shoot his whole freakin’ head off. Then set the son-of-a-bitch on fire. That’s what I say we should do.”

  Dineen grabbed the doorknob for support. He stuttered through a good-by. As Angela started up the staircase, a light flicked on and Big Mama looked down the stairs at them.

  “You kiss-a her?”

  “I’m afraid to close my eyes here,” Dineen said.

  Dineen kept going to school in the summer so he could finish quickly and go on to law school. Angela stayed in school for the summer too. On Friday nights Dineen drove her to Sheepshead Bay for clams and beer. Afterward they sat in the car, looking at the lights on the dark water which ran up to the fishing-boat piers. On the first night there Dineen leaned over and kissed Angela and she brought up her face to his and he ran a hand over her body for the first time.

  On the July Fourth weekend Dineen took her to a beach party at Breezy Point. His cousin had a house three doors from the beach. There was a big crowd of people Angela knew from Flynn’s. Dineen started the night off by drinking beer from a keg and talking to the other boys. He came and sat on a blanket with Angela for a while. Then at 11:30 he said he wanted to go up to his cousin’s house for cigarettes. He took Angela by the hand and they walked away from the wood fire and across the dark sand to the street. Dineen said nothing. He was breathing too hard to talk. The house was a one-story white wooden bungalow with a screened-in porch. A lamp on the porch was the only light in the house.

  “I’ll wait outside,” Angela said. She said it automatically. Dineen held her hand and took her up the walk and held the screen door for her. On the porch he took her hand again and started into the darkened living room. Inside, he headed for a door. “Where are we going?” Angela said automatically. And he opened the door and led her in by the hand and he was kissing her and she went down onto the bed on her back with him still kissing her, and she wriggled her legs onto the bed. He was surprised when she did not stop him. His hands were at the top of her blouse and he was pulling at it so hard it was lifting her shoulderblades off the bed. The button went in his hands.

  “Stop it,” she said. He was tugging at the next button. “Stop it!” she said sharply. Her tone brought Kid Blast’s voice back into his ears. She’ll have my head cut off. Dineen tumbled from her and stood next to the bed.

  “Don’t get mad,” he said.

  “I’m not mad, I just want to have clothes to wear,” she said. She unbuttoned the blouse and reached down and unzipped the side of her Capri pants.

  “Don’t tell your brother,” he said.

  The day Angela was supposed to have her period, the phone rang at eight a.m. Big Mama looked at the phone suspiciously. Kid Sally was inside, asleep. The few people who called never called before noon. Big Mama picked it up. It was Robert Dineen, calling the house for the first time.

  “Well, how do you feel?” he asked Angela.

  “Fine,” she said.

  “Everything’s all right?”

  “Oh, that? Oh, I don’t know. No, not yet. Don’t worry about it.”

  “I do worry.”

  “Oh, stop.”

  “Stop? I don’t want to get strangled.”

  For three days Robert Dineen called in the morning and saw Angela during the afternoon at school, and each time the answer was no. He began to look like a defendant. On the fourth day Angela told him everything was all right. Dineen went to the bar on Sheridan Square and drank whisky. By seven p.m. he was looking at himself in the mirror behind the bar. “I play with death!” he said.

  Chapter 8

  A FEW MONTHS AFTER this, a man named Theodore Kaplowitz, who owned four bars in Brooklyn, walked into the office of the District Attorney. He said that Kid Sally Palumbo and three others had come into his best place, the Esquire, and walked behind the bar and opened the cash register and taken half the money. Kid Sally Palumbo announced he was a partner in the place from now on. Kaplowitz began to argue. Kid Sally Palumbo took Kaplowitz’s arm and tried to break it over the edge of the bar.

  The assistant district attorney handling the complaint had bodyguards placed on Kaplowitz. He also had him wired for recording in case Kid Sally Palumbo returned. Kid Sally had intended to return and get some more money and give Kaplowitz another beating, but he never got around to it. The police thought Kid Sally was smelling the trap. The assistant district attorney, Frank Rogin, twenty-nine, decided to bring in Kid Sally for questioning. Assistant Chief Inspector Cornelius J. Gallagher, fifty-nine, commanding officer, Brooklyn South detectives, had Kid Sally picked up. Kid Sally came into Rogin’s office at eight p.m. Gallagher and two detectives stood in the doorway. Kid Sally was chewing gum. The 100-watt bulbs in the cracked plaster
ceiling made Kid Sally’s black hair glisten.

  “What could I tell you, Mr. Rogin?” Kid Sally said. “What could I tell you?” He held his hands out and sat in silence while Rogin kept asking questions.

  Gallagher lit a cigarette. His pouchy eyes became slits as the smoke ran over his face.

  “You’re just a guinea,” he said to Kid Sally.

  “All right on that stuff,” Rogin said.

  “Why not?” Gallagher said. “Why be nice to a guinea like this?”

  “I said forget it,” Rogin said sharply.

  Gallagher glared through the slits of his pouchy eyes. Gallagher went into another office and sat with his two detectives. Gallagher leafed through the file on Kid Sally Palumbo. “What’s this with his sister?” he said.

  “She goes to school,” one of the detectives said.

  “She must do the bookkeeping for them,” Gallagher said. “You know these other guinea bastards can’t read or write.”

  “I just know she goes to school,” the detective said.

  “Uhuh,” Gallagher said. He went back to the doorway of Rogin’s office.

  “Sally?”

  Kid Sally Palumbo didn’t turn his head. “Yeah?”

  “Does the sister handle the money for you, or does she just keep the records?”