by John Addiego
He was adorable and bossy in the way that only the youngest can be, the baby that Mama protects and defends before the rest of the brood, and he was a shrimp and a know-it-all who was usually right. He hated his family’s poverty, which forced him to wear all the hand-me-downs, even his sisters’ shoes, to school, and determined to make piles of money when he grew up. When he got teased he lashed out with his fists, and he was a scrapper. He once broke a boy’s nose for saying the word ravioli.
Ranking next to poverty was shame for his family heritage. He watched the newsreels and movies in which Italians were happy idiots who played the concertina and drank wine like his pop, and he dreamed of being a famous inventor with a nose job and a penthouse in San Francisco. Joe thought of changing his last name, too, especially for business purposes. Joe Verb: Action Enterprises. But the business Joe eventually steered was a family affair, a group of hungry Italians building, first on the swamp his father had bought for next to nothing, and later anywhere Uncle Sam asked them to, during the war boom of the ’40s.
By the late ’50s, Joe and his brothers and sisters, whose husbands worked for the family business, were doing well, but they thought their father had lost his mind. He’d always been a drinker and wanderer, and had often spent months away from home at jobs with other Italians or just hanging out in the island culture of North Beach, but now his brain had stepped off a cliff, and at the bottom of that cliff was a teenaged hooker and her illegitimate baby.
No ugly stereotyping could have disgusted Joe more than these latest shenanigans, no joke about Italian soldiers or Italian funerals with only two pallbearers could have angered him further. He looked at himself in the barber’s mirror and asked for a flattop; he avoided Italian food, except on Sundays at his mother’s; he hid the Sinatra records under a stack of magazines until his daughter Penny found them and filled the house with Frankie Boy swinging with Nelson Riddle’s band.
It was Penny who talked him into going to see the old man. They were at a little Italian hole in the wall celebrating her twelfth birthday, just daddy and daughter, and she brought the subject up as if it had just occurred to her. Isn’t Grandpa’s place a few blocks from here? Shouldn’t we drop in on them?
Why? Joe glared at the menu.
You’ve got to see that baby, Dad. He is so beautiful! Your, um . . . brother, Jesús.
Maria, the young Mexican mother who pronounced Jesús like Hej-Zeus, fascinated Penny as much as the baby did. Giuseppe, the butt of a thousand jokes in Rosari’s repertoire, was a harmless geezer to his granddaughter, a funny old guy who would probably slip her a five-dollar bill as a birthday present.
They’d taken the L train from Berkeley over the Bay Bridge and a cable car to Chinatown, from which they’d walked to North Beach. A waiter spoke to Joe in Italian, and Joe reminded the guy that they were in America, if he didn’t notice. Joe checked his watch, tapped his fingers on the table, made notations on a napkin. He had a hell of a lot on his mind because his brothers were watching the shop and an important deal was imminent, but he wanted to give Penny her day. He left the table to call Ludovico, read him some numbers from the napkin, and told Lu to take them down, but his brother, whose moods were sudden and violent, told him to butt the hell out and enjoy his daughter and his ravioli, for Christ’s sake.
Try prime rib, Joe said. You sure you guys are all right? These bastards from New Jersey will have your peter in their pocket the minute you shake hands, Lu.
Hey, what are we, a bunch of rubes? You think we just got off the banana boat?
Giuseppe’s flat in Little Italy reminded Joe of the poverty he’d escaped and kept from his children: clothes on the lines between buildings, peppers and garlic hanging not far from them, loud voices yelling from one stoop to the next, broken glass and strong smells of urine and garbage in the alleyway. There was an old Mexican woman in the flat, and she said that la familia had gone to the beach. Joe laughed and thanked God. He fairly danced down the steps and the steep sidewalks to the streetcar stop with his daughter, calculating the time it would take to get her home and himself to the business. Penny reminded him that they were going to the Natural History Museum next. The what? The place with the alligators. He’d promised.
Christ. Joe hated it: waiting on the corner, squeezing in with all those people, rocking up and down the hills while the Jersey deal might be going down. They were stuck in a jam for fifteen minutes, and the siren of an ambulance announced the reason for the delay. Penny opened the bus window and stuck her head out as the attendants hustled with the stretcher, and Joe scolded her for snooping. Her eyes and mouth were open with wonder. Penny, you get back in your seat this minute, he hissed, and her face colored as she obeyed.
It was a mild summer afternoon in the city, fresh with strands of fog drifting among the buildings and the sunny eucalyptus and Monterey pines of the park. Joe and his daughter walked through the grove of pollarded sycamores to the museum and found the building closed. Penny suggested they walk to the beach and Playland.
Walk? Joe asked. On purpose?
It’s only a mile or so, I think.
Christ, Penny, only a goddamned idiot would walk clear from here to the beach. Excuse my French.
Then I must be a goddamned idiot, the girl said. She wore a summery dress and saddle shoes, and a new alpaca sweater was draped over her shoulders to ward off the pockets of fog and sea breeze. Joe figured that more loot had been spent on this one outfit than his entire wardrobe from age one to nineteen, and she kept growing out of things. Already her legs were nearly as long as his, her stride brisk and determined. They passed the lake with the pedal boats, crossed a polo field big as a goddamned aircraft carrier, muddied Joe’s best shoes near a creek. He saw a booth and told her to wait a minute while he got on the horn again. Narciso answered.
Ciso, what’s up? Did the guys from Jersey call?
They’re here, Joe. They’re real nice guys.
Oh, Christ. Joe’s stomach turned, and he asked to talk with his other brother, Ludovico. Penny was feeding French bread to a group of noisy ducks right next to the booth.
Joe, Narciso said after a bit, Lu says it’s all taken care of. It’s fine, Joe. These are great guys. How’s little Penny?
Jesus Christ, Ciso, of course they’re nice guys, they’re about to ask us to drop our pants and spread our legs. Get Lu.
There was a long pause. The ducks snapped at Penny’s legs, and she shrieked happily. Joe could hear voices, laughter, maybe a radio broadcast of a ballgame, a man saying the word southpaw. Then Sammy, the bookkeeper from the Philippines: Hello? Is somebody on the line?
Get me Lu, Sam, right now.
Oh, hey, Mr. Verbicaro! Hey, I’m sorry. He and Ciso just took off with these guys for lunch.
Son of a goddamned bitch. Joe slammed the receiver so hard the ducks bolted.
As they neared the shore the fog assaulted them. It rolled through the cypress and over the grass, tumbling against itself like an avalanche. The amusement park glowed and squawked somewhere in those snowy depths, its tacky music and Christmas lights beckoning like a buried city of sin which God had failed to destroy. Every foolish pleasure from the ’20s and the turn of the century, gartered legs, beer foaming the underside of handlebar mustaches, flapper dresses, wheels of fortune, and penny arcades, was depicted in garish colors which, though blasted by years of weather and generations of children, beamed at Joe through the fog as he approached.
Penny wanted to go to the Funhouse first, and they stood in line before the mechanical hag, the laughing, wild-haired, freckle-faced old woman in the booth. Joe fumed about his brothers, his father, and, to some degree, his willful daughter, who had dragged him to this spot, in bitter fog, before this ugly, guffawing woman. Her head rocked back when she let loose with the biggest laughs, and her arms in the wild striped sleeves jerked like a spastic’s. It made Joe wonder about laughter itself for the first time in his life; it made it suspect in his mind. What a miserable thing it was, rea
lly, a desperate and mindless noise. What an ugly animal sound, imbued with nothing nobler than retching or ejaculating.
Daddy, where are you? Penny shrieked and laughed, lost somewhere before him in the house of mirrors. Joe’s anger was like his father’s, slow-building, deadly, filled with resentment and purpose. His brother Lu would explode at the slightest provocation and laugh a moment later, and Narciso’s fuse was so long it might circle the earth twice before a wisp of smoke could be seen on the horizon, but Joe banked his logs in silence toward a coming forest fire. He stepped slowly through the house of mirrors while children squeezed past him, shrieking black and brown and yellow and white kids giggling and yelling, and felt the familiar blood of injustice beat in his throat. He came to the junctures in the maze of reflections and locked eyes with the man in front of him, this idiot with the crew cut and monkey suit, and wanted to punch his own lights out. Which way? He asked the many images of himself. I don’t have time to screw around. Kids were swirling past him in each direction.
Daddy, are you still in there? He could hear Penny’s voice above the din of laughter and yelling. I’ll meet you at the base of the slide, she yelled. Jesus Christ on a goddamned pogo stick, Joe muttered when he came to another dead end. A boy behind him laughed and said, You hear that guy?
He had no inkling what the hell people found amusing about getting lost. Penny was probably ten yards from him, and he had to navigate through a maze five times that length. If the monster in the myth, the guy with the bull’s head, were waiting for him around the next bend, Joe would be ready to break his nose.
Penny called to him again, and he was so mad he didn’t answer. By now Joe had his pen out and was making tabulations on the palm of his hand, five panels, left turn, three panels, right turn. Children zoomed past him. He was surrounded by facets of himself, the angry boy, the embarrassed boy, the lost boy; the little mathematician so poor he lacked a piece of paper, the little Italian kid in his sister’s saddle shoes. He stood in sight of the entrance, the fog, the laughing hag’s booth, back at the goddamned beginning, and swore. He turned and saw himself in a panel, mouth open in confusion, pen poised above his palm. Somebody yanked his coat.
You lost, mister? a boy with black, curly hair, younger than Penny, asked him in Italian. Follow me.
Joe followed the boy and was through the mirrors and in the center of the Funhouse in two minutes. He gave the kid four bits. The kid stuffed the quarters into his baggy dungarees and raced off.
The open center of the Funhouse smelled like an old gymnasium, like dirty socks and stinky shoes and the pine-scented wax and cleansers used on the hardwood floor. Penny was flying down the enormous wooden slide on a potato sack, her black hair and her petticoat sweeping back, her mouth open in a huge smile. When she got to the bottom she grabbed a girl by the wrist and dragged her over to Joe.
Dad, she yelled, her face flushed and damp, guess who this is!
The girl was nearly a young woman, and although Joe was a straight shooter and teetotaler compared to his brothers, he knew enough about the blue-light district to guess this girl had been around. She was beautiful and dark, to be sure, but there was something tawdry about her, something in her eyes, which had street corners in them, some odor of desperation, of drugs or booze. I don’t know who this is, Joe said. And I don’t want you to hang around somebody like this, he said to himself.
His daughter laughed. Dad, this is Maria!
Who?
Your stepmom!
The young woman shook his hand, then gestured for them to wait before she darted off. Penny ran once through an obstacle course of rolling barrels and tipping boards while Joe pictured his old man in the labyrinth of mirrors, a lusty, snorting, white-haired monster with booze on his breath and goat horns sprouting out of his skull. He imagined how he might scare the children, and how some boy like the little guy who’d just guided Joe through the mirrors might trip the old man into a glass panel or jump on his back and strangle him. Maria and Penny were talking, as much with hands as with words, near the giant barrel while Joe mused about Giuseppe. Penny ran to him.
Grandpa’s lost! She tugged on Joe’s arm.
So what else is new?
He took off with the baby!
Giuseppe had been getting lost on a routine basis. Penny told Joe about an afternoon spent with Aunt Francesca and Cousin Susan hunting all over Little Italy, down Columbus Street to Washington Square and the boccie courts, to the liquor stores in Chinatown, and finally finding him at the wharf staring at the water. Joe wanted to know why in the hell this young mother had left the baby with an old drunk whose brain had one foot on a banana peel, but he couldn’t navigate her Spanish. They jogged through the carnival crowd, under the Ferris wheel, which turned slowly and disappeared in fog, among the dart-throwing and ring-tossing booths, then into the huge arcade. Joe remembered putting a penny into one of the old machines many years ago, cranking the handle until he saw, in a jerky, magical dance of white flesh against a black background, his first glimpse of a naked woman.
They crossed the highway to the beach. The fog lifted, swept to the south like wind-tossed hair, and the sudden gleam of sunlight made Joe squint. Penny saw them first and pointed, across the slick plane of sand which disappeared in fog, at the tiny, smoky figures of a man in a fedora and a toddler holding his hand. The old goat was moving stiffly, and the child’s shiny black hair bounced in the wind. Penny and Maria stepped over the garbage and driftwood and kicked off their shoes while Joe sat on the seawall and looked at his watch. He yelled to Penny that he needed to make another phone call pretty soon, and she called back that they’d be on the beach with Grandpa.
Don’t get your clothes wet, he yelled. Something stank, a dead seal or some bum’s turd buried in the sand, and he stepped down to the beach and walked over to a log upwind. He imagined that his brothers were probably drunk and laughing while a bunch of sleazy bastards put their business in the shitcan. He imagined his father having sex with a teenaged whore, the woman dancing around in the surf with his daughter. The girls raised their skirts high above their knees while the water foamed around them.
He crushed a crab shell under his heel and hurled a stone at a log. He picked up a shell and observed it among the tabulations he’d made on his palm in the house of mirrors. Joe imagined some hermit crab had once lived in it, and wondered how the hell a crab could build a house like that, then realized that the crab had probably just found it and taken it the way his old man had snagged neglected land from lazy investors for next to nothing. But something built it, he said to himself, some little shellfish, and as he studied the perfect spiral he thought how somebody might explain its design with a series of triangles, a progression of right triangles, the hypotenuse of one becoming the base of the next. He held the shell, closed his eyes, and as he took in the scent of the briny air he returned in memory to the arcade from childhood, the secret peep-show world in the machine. That distant afternoon when he’d chased friends up and down this same beach and seen the woman in the box was linked somehow to looking into the heart of the shell today.
His daughter was still lifting her knees in the foam, her black hair tossed back and bouncing, and his father and the baby were trudging in the opposite direction now, along the water’s edge, their distant shapes silhouetted against the radiant mist. Joe turned and brushed the sand from his trousers.
The arcade was dark after the shore’s brilliance, and it took a moment for his eyes to read the signs. He got change from a cigar-smoking boy in a booth and scanned the dark recesses for a phone. Sammy answered and said that his brothers were still out with New Jersey. The carousel started up as he spoke, and it was hard to hear him. Joe watched the horses moving up and down. Could they do any damage without his signature? Sammy didn’t see how they could, and Joe agreed.
Several kids were at pinball, but none at the ancient penny arcade machines (which now demanded a nickel), and as Joe strolled among them he realized that the boy h
ad given him twenty nickels for his buck, and he had eighteen left, and his brothers probably couldn’t do anything without his signature, so what the hell. He glanced up and down the aisles of dusty machines, sighed, and dropped a nickel into one of them.
A little man with a bushy mustache was crank-starting a car. Joe could adjust the speed of the jerky black-and-white images with his arm, and he found it amusing that he and the man were cranking handles simultaneously, the ghost of an actor who died years ago and Joe moving their right arms in perfect sync. When the man hopped into the jalopy, the fenders fell off. Joe shook his head and peered up and down the aisles sheepishly. He wondered if he could find it or if it had long since been replaced.
He peeped into a few more machines. On some the metal visor above the eye sockets was worn smooth and shiny. The actors in the little films were obscure, the scenes taken from all manner of unsuccessful projects and experiments with the moving picture craft. Physical comedy, pratfalls, smoke and combustion were the main fare, but there were several very odd pieces: men rowing boats and lifting dumbbells, soldiers marching like wind-up toys. He had three nickels left when he found it.
The tiny figure in profile was running in place, the muscles of her hip moving to the rhythm of Joe’s arm, her small breasts bouncing with the sway of Joe’s shoulder. She was so small and naked, so white and vulnerable jogging before the pitch-black backdrop, her long hair pinned on top of her head. Her eyes looked frightened or startled, and Joe’s heart pounded as he cranked the handle. The screen went black.
He dropped another coin and moved more slowly this time, and still again more slowly with his last nickel. When he finished and started out of the semi-open, cavernous building he felt beads of sweat dribble down his dress shirt. He stood above the gleaming ocean feeling a bit foolish and ashamed.
Penny and Maria were in almost the precise place they’d been when Joe had left, silhouettes moving in the radiant mist, wading in the surf. Joe shuffled toward them and peered down the beach for the old man. A good fifty yards south of the girls the toddler crouched and bounced atop a log, but Giuseppe was nowhere in sight. Damn that old goat, Joe said to himself, leaving a child alone by the water. He started for Jesús. Obviously, the girls hadn’t seen the old man disappear. The toddler walked on the log and pulled something off one end of it. Then he ran west, across the smooth expanse of sand, clutching something round and floppy. Kelp? Jellyfish? No: the object left the boy’s hand and rode the wind a moment like a cartoon spacecraft before it landed on the wet sand. It was a fedora.
