“No,” I said.
“An informal little group down in D.C., the Rich and Powerful Queens. I’ve been an honored guest. You’d be amazed who drops in to fuck with us. We’re talking cabinet-level cock. The Thirteen Richest Fairies. They’re against everything they are. Many of our leading fag-baiters are fags. From a former chairman of the National Conservative Political Action Committee to one of the louder television evangelists. I think of them as Turks. Turks despise homosexuals. But they define it differently. A Turk will fuck a man in the ass and then boast to his friends, ‘I fucked a fairy today.’
“I loathed myself. I was certain that I had brought about my own death through my own despicable sin.”
“How could you know … ?” I said.
“Oh, I knew. I knew that it was sin. Degeneracy. That’s what attracted me to you. You look so straight. Which of course you are.”
“Sorry about that,” I said, insincerely.
“A curious thing happened. I have a very good doctor. While I was wallowing in my misery, he ordered a second set of tests. There’s a twenty percent or better margin of error in the blood tests. The second test, and the third, came up negative. This body is clean. This body is going to wait to be run over by a car, or have a heart attack. But I am not going to die of AIDS.” Syd laughed. Then he said, “I was livid. I let myself get angry at the straight world for the first time in my life. Instead of at myself. For making me despise myself. For turning a virus, a microbe, into Sin. Let me tell you something: In Africa, this is a heterosexual disease. It’s the plague. None of this picking and choosing the underclasses, the dope users, and cocksuckers.
“Which,” he said, “is why I sent you the special prosecutor’s report. To tear up the past. So that I couldn’t go back. I’m some kind of radical now, I think,” he added shyly. “I quit my job. I do largely volunteer work. The estates of the soon to be departed. If they’re substantial enough, I take a fee. Fighting landlords to let the stricken keep their homes. I told that bitch I married that she could have half of whatever I make. However little that is. There’s work that needs doing, and I am not going to waste my life protecting the fortunes of Fortune 500 corporations so that she can have two houses and a Mercedes.
“Her lawyer sent a threatening letter. I sent back a copy of the first blood test.” He laughed. “That shut her up. Of course, a few years from now, when she discovers I’m still alive, she’ll be furious and sue again. But I’ll worry about that when I come to it.”
“I need your help again, Syd,” I said.
“Sure, Why not?” he said. “Since I don’t owe you anything but a kick in the ass. You know, I could announce that you’re a fag-basher. And let the whole gang jump on you. … ”
“Cute,” I said.
“But”—he sighed—“I’m not that flipped out yet. Let me watch a couple more people die of opportunistic infections, sores oozing all over their bodies, and maybe I will be.”
“I need the report again,” I said. Someone passing by patted my butt. It took all the control I had not to turn around swinging. Or shriek.
“Why?” he asked.
“I’m going after Gunderson. To get him indicted.”
“Interesting. But I can’t give it to you.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t have it. Nobody has it, as far as I know. After your friend did his broadcasts, the FBI showed up. They not only questioned me, they confiscated my copy of the report. They confiscated everyone’s, I think. Except, maybe, Fenderman’s.”
“Is that legal?”
“I don’t know. It didn’t occur to anyone to argue about it at the time. Certainly not to me. That would have been pointing the finger at myself. Which I was not about to do. It was not exactly a pleasant interview. They knew I was … homosexual. They felt obligated to act super-butch.”
“We go along in America and mostly it feels like politics is bullshit,” I said. “Ford or Carter. Hart or Mondale or Reagan or Bush. I mean, what the hell difference? And most of the time, what you think you’re voting for, it’s the inverse of what you get. Vote for Reagan you get bigger deficits; Nixon made friends with the Red Chinese; Johnson and the war. But sometimes you see a line, and that line, you really gotta say, Which side are you on, boys, which side are you on?” I was speaking to motivate Syd, but as I talked I couldn’t help hearing myself. “There are people running the country who are not part of the solution. They are the problem. These guys owe their election to the Falwells, the Pat Robinsons, the haters, the fag-baiters. They’re your enemy. This federal government is not going into court to support the civil rights of people who sleep with people of the same sex. They’re not going to fund a crash program in AIDS research.”
[We are] facing the future with the Bible. [Within it] are all the answers to all the problems we face today—if we only read and believe.
RONALD REAGAN
“ … You watch,” I said. “What they’re going to say we should do about AIDS is stop fucking. And pray. Which side are you on, boy?”
“I think the FBI is watching me,” he said.
“Me too,” I said. “But please, Syd, let’s find another way to evade them than meet in The Badlands. Please.”
23.
A Proposition
WHEN I LEFT THE Badlands, I was kidnapped.
It was simple, classic, and Cadillac. I didn’t notice the Caddy creep up behind me. One guy got out. He slammed the door. I glanced over my shoulder and saw him. By then the Caddy was shooting forward. When it was beside me, the driver cut right, up, over the curb, onto the sidewalk. The hood behind me had his gun out.
As instructed, I got in the backseat. The wise guys rode up front. We went north.
“Hey, what’s happening?” I said.
“They didn’t tell us you was a faggot,” the driver said.
That hurt. Maybe they were going to kill me, but I wanted to go with my masculine image intact. I started trying to explain that I wasn’t one of them. I had only gone to The Badlands on a case.
“Get a case, you mean,” the gunman said, and laughed at his own wit. “Haw haw, uh uh.”
“Hey, whaddaya do? Suck ’em or fuck ’em?” the driver said.
“I don’t do either,” I said, sounding like an inane twelve-year-old. Feeling like one.
“You one of them leather types, or do you do it in thoth little lathy numbers?” the driver said in a heavy-handed imitation lisp. “Haw haw, uh uh, haw.”
“Just shut up, you guys,” I said. I hadn’t been that embarrassed since that first time with Maria D’Aquisto, when I melted in her hand instead of her mouth. And she laughed at me.
They laughed some more. Then they started talking about the horses, Atlantic City, and lying about their winnings. I asked where we were going. They ignored me.
We went over the George Washington Bridge, to Englewood, New Jersey. Lush elms and maple shaded the winding suburban streets, larger and larger homes set back from the street. When we turned in, I recognized where we were. The fellas had brought me to see my uncle.
There is an area of ambiguity here. Or willful blindness.
What I do know is that Vincent is worth a lot of money and that the money comes from construction. This may only be what Ray Donovan, Reagan’s secretary of labor, called the “New Jersey Syndrome,” when he was being investigated by a special prosecutor. That is, “If you are in the contracting business, it seems in this country you are suspect. If you are in the contracting business in New Jersey, you are indictable. If you are in the contracting business in New Jersey and you are Italian, you are convicted.” Ray meant to imply that this was a public myth that obscures the reality. Rhythmic and pithy, it may instead be a poetic statement that captures the truth.
Presume that the contractor is as honest in his heart as Abe Lincoln. But he is surrounded by corruption. The government sits on his left, the unions on his right.
There are only two reasons to be labor leader.
/> One is because you believe that workingmen have a right, a priority, to the profits of their labor. All the intellectual structures that support such a belief come from the left. Communism, Anarchism, Socialism, Whathaveyouism. Certainly not from investment bankers.
The other is to make more money than you can make actually working. If you’re in it for the money, then you’ll do other things for money. Like sell out the people you represent.
Even a working stiff can tell the difference.
In order to stay in power, the guys who are in it for the money have to rely on force. The people who deal in force, they like the unions. A union is a cow with two udders. You milk the members. You milk the employers.
When the gangsters are attacked by the idealists, what do they do? They call the government and say, “We got commies to get rid of.” When the businessman comes up against a union he can’t buy, he calls the government and says, “We’re dealing with a bunch of communists.” So the government comes and kicks the commies out—or anybody they can call a commie, or have to call one because he has the integrity to stand up to the bosses and the guts to stand up to the gangsters.
Who’s left? … The government, the businessman, and the gangster.
MICHAEL CASSELLA
One of the people who got cleaned out was my father. Afterward he turned away from the union and went into business for himself. A small construction business. His older brother, who had taken a very different path and was already a big shot, came along and they went into partnership.
They quarreled, bitterly, and never spoke again.
About what? “Vincent and I had very different ways of doing business,” my father said. In what way? “He would have called it business as usual. Living in the real world. I think you have to make a choice: doing things right or not doing them at all.” I accepted that answer. Only later, looking back, did I see how explicit it wasn’t.
It is easy to see how a businessman who will not do business under the table—payoffs for “labor peace,” bid rigging, bribing inspectors as well as mayors—can’t survive against one who will. That doesn’t make it right. Another question remains. Whether a particular businessman, such as my uncle, simply does business with them or is one of them.
And now the trail from Gunderson seemed to lead back home. How? Through Scorcese? The Teamsters? Frank Felacco? Michael Pollazzio, aka Mikey Fix? I didn’t know. I figured I was about to find out.
We went to Uncle’s favorite room. Mine too. It faced the long, sloping backyard. High arched windows from floor to ceiling made the outdoors part of the in. The garden was illuminated. Spotlights glowed on the early blooms—tulips, daffodils, lilacs: red and white, yellow, purple. A red Japanese maple was lit from beneath. There was one major change in the room since the last time I’d been there. A bed had been installed. A hospital bed, with cranks and adjustments, and a call button beside it. A soft, warm breeze came from one opened window. But the floral aromas that drifted in were overwhelmed by another smell: hospital.
Vince sat in a chair beside the bed, a blanket across his lap; he was pale, shrunken, and small. A uniformed nurse sat in an easy chair by the window, knitting.
“Zelda, outa here,” my uncle said. The nurse rose, wool and needles clutched in her hands, and left us alone.
“Why you no ahave akids,” he said, his beady eyes glaring at me, cheeks twitching or wobbling. “Infamia. You one a those people. Alla time I wonder. Now I know.”
I laughed.
“Whata for you laugh? You got no shame? I shoulda spit on you, my blood or no, I shoulda spit on you.”
“Is that what those assholes told you?”
“Theya tell me where they find you,” he said with a sneer.
Why I cared what he thought, I didn’t know. Maybe it’s the one defamation I compulsively felt I had to refute. And I did. “I’m on a case. And the guy I need to get information from, that’s where I had to go to find him. If I had to go to Jerusalem, it wouldn’t make me a Jew. You able to follow that, Vincent, or is it too complicated for you?”
“Thena how come you gotta no children?”
“I don’t know that that’s any of your business.”
“It’sa my business. I hadda no son. Your father had only one son. That leaves you. You’re a bum. But you’re all there is to carry on the family. I wanta you to carry on the family.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Why you got no children? Why I got no grandnephews from you? Tell me something—how mucha money you make last year?”
“None of your business.”
“The year before that?”
“Look it up in Dun and Bradstreet.”
“If you had a kid, you couldn’t afford a kid.”
“I got a kid,” I said, “and I support him.” What he said hit me in places that I kept hidden. Money was a lot of why all of it had happened. The relationship with Glenda, not having a child with her. Or leaving to have one with someone else. If that was what I wanted instead. Not that that was an option anymore. Wayne was too much my son.
“If I made it so you could afford a kid, would you have a kid?”
“I got this case,” I said, “and I got some questions to ask you.”
“Raising a kid, it costs a lotta money these days.”
“How deep in the mob are you, Uncle Vincent?”
He waved that away with his hand. “Thirty, forty grand a year? Is that enough?”
“Is Mikey Fix your boss? Or are you his? You in the Gonzoni family? Do you know Santino Scorcese?”
“You tell me what it costs,” he said. “We’re runnin’ outa time here.”
“What costs?”
“You having a kid. You’re still capable, aren’t you? You still gotta the stuff, huh?”
“It’s time you told me something. What happened between you and my father?”
“I tell you that long ago. Long time ago.”
“You told me bullshit, Vince. You told me nothing. You told me he didn’t know if he was a commie or a saint. But you didn’t tell me what the quarrel was about.”
“You go to church anymore?”
“I never went,” I said.
“I’m thinking I’m a gonna leave alla my money, the house, everything, to the Church. The priests, they’re leeches. But giving to the Church, that’s a good thing. Charity.”
“It’s your money. You do what you want.”
“Where you think I’m going?” His head twisted as he looked around the room. “You think I’m gonna go to hell? Lookit me. Whaddaya see? I tell you what you see. You see a dead man. I gotta get things settled.”
“What was it about? What did you do to my father?”
“Do? I didn’t do nothing. I tried to make him some money. Your father, he had problems. He thought money was immoral. Money got no morality.”
“This is getting nowhere.”
“You tell me, now. Your gun still shoot? You can still do the deed?”
“Yeah, old man. My gun still shoot.”
“I got a proposition for you.”
“What?”
“You getta the girl. The girl you got, different girl. Don’t matter.” He stopped to breathe and to wipe the dry spittle from his mouth. “I pay for the kid!” he announced, proudly.
“I’ll give it some thought.”
“You lissen a me, Antonio. You lissen. We do this right. You getta your lawyer. He meets with my lawyer. Draw up the agreement. You getta the girl pregnant, you get plenty of money.”
“Right, Vince.”
“I got conditions. You gotta marry her. I don’ wanna no bastards. You find the girl. Both of you got to get tests of fertility. I don’t want no misfires. I come to the wedding. To see that it’s legit. As soon as she gets pregnant, you get the money. Forty grand, fifty grand a year. For eacha one. That’s a lotta money.”
“I promise you I’ll think about it. I’m gonna go now,” I said.
“You lissen to me. This
offer, it’s only good for ninety days.”
24.
June
_______________________
People been watching. I can feel it.
get a box? stash the money?
where am i going to go? heaven or hell. Is it like they told us? This world certainly ain’t. Does T believe in anything at all? How can he live if he doesn’t? Do I? The Priests/Nuns, they lied about everything. How can I believe them? Was Father Cappiello doing it with “young Father O’Connor”? We didn’t think those things back then, but looking back … does being a cop twist everything? me, coming down to the wire, seeing everything and everybody as perps and perverts.
what do I care about? who do I care about? My brother is shit. He beats up on his own kids, his wife, or he did. I don’t think he got the strength anymore. I think he’s gonna beat me out of here, cirrhosis or DWI. Two sons and both bums. My sister. She started good. Too good. I think. Looking back. Married a bum. If I’d known. If I’d known, I would have fixed him. I would have straightened him out. Hurt him. the way he was hurting her. But she kept her mouth shut. Good Italian girl. Good Catholic girl. Let her husband use her as a toilet bowl and never say a word. Or would I? She come to me, maybe I would have said, “That’s your husband, he’s the king of your house.” That’s what I thought.
King of the house. Not in my house. All I learned from that is doing good don’t pay back good. Being right don’t buy nothing. Scratch one more, two more, three more people to care about. Ex-wife. Ex-son. Ex-daughter. One did me wrong. Two left me before they knew me so well that it mattered.
Who do I care about? Mario & T. Now that’s what I call a wasted life!
________________________
From the Notebooks of Joseph D’Angelo
“Some men came to the house yesterday,” my mother said. “They wanted to talk to me about you.”
“Who were they?”
“They said they were FBI.”
You Get What You Pay For (The Tony Cassella Mysteries) Page 20
