Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud

by Joe Pepitone

  “It’s better than gettin’ killed by my mom—you and me!" Lemon slammed the window down.

  “Lemon, open this goddamn door right now!”

  Lemon raced to the door and unsnapped the bolt. His mother barged in, a large bag of groceries in her arms, and almost knocked over Lemon. She screamed at him for five minutes, then went into the kitchen. We looked out the window. One of Pat’s eyes was peering in around the frame, and water was streaming down her face. It was pouring outside—a cloudburst. She was out there for over forty-five minutes—Lemon and I sitting there whistling, talking about nothing—before his mother said she was going upstairs to a neighbor’s for a minute. “And don’t lock this door, you two!”

  We opened the window and Pat poured in, her hair plastered to her head, the water puddling off her on the floor. Lemon went for a towel, but Pat was half dressed when he got back. “Shove that!” she said, putting on the rest of her clothes and hurrying to the door. “Next time,” she yelled as she left, “you guys can go fuck yourselves!”

  There was a very pretty, very sexy woman in the neighborhood who used to turn us on all the time. She was married, and was a mature woman when I was thirteen. Lucy, I’ll call her, had huge breasts and she used to lean them out her windowsill and tease us. We would hang around outside the grocery store across the street, and when Lucy would come by she’d grab the thigh or tap the crotch of whoever was sitting on the box by the door. Lemon would go crazy, like spittle would slide out the corners of his mouth. We were all semi in love with Lucy, as I think half the men in the neighborhood were. She was very good-looking. I thought sure Willie had something going with her. Willie was a solid family man who couldn’t have fooled around much because he never went out. But he was a sexy-looking man, Sicilian sexy, tall and dark with his hair slicked back and a kind of impish smile. I know my mother always kept an eye on him when they were around Lucy.

  One day Lemon and I saw Lucy coming out of The Itch with a man who was not her husband. “Now’s our chance to get some from her!” Lemon said.

  “Yeah!” I said, realizing his plot.

  We went right to her apartment and knocked on the door. “What do you two want?”

  “We saw you comin’ out of the theater with a man who wasn’t your husband,” Lemon said.

  “We don’t think you’d want your husband to know,” I said.

  “Shhh! Come in here,” she said, tugging us into her apartment and closing the door. “What, are you two gonna start trouble?”

  “Not if you give us a kiss,” said Lemon.

  “I give you each a kiss, you’re not going to say anything?”

  “You give us each a kiss,” I said, “we’ll think about it.”

  She gave me a quick kiss and grabbed my cock, after she searched around to find it. Then she did the same to Lemon and laughed. She opened the door and pushed us out into the hall. “I’m gonna tell your father!” she said to me, laughing.

  “You do and I’ll tell your husband!”

  That night when I went up for dinner, my father grabbed me by the back of the neck and marched me into my room. He turned me around and there was a small smile on his face. “You little sonofabitch,” he said, “I don’t believe you! You tried to blackmail Lucy?”

  “No, Dad—uh—I just like her husband, and—”

  “You do that again and I’ll beat your ass,” he said, shaking his fist. But he couldn’t keep himself from smiling as he walked away.

  Two days later Lemon and I were hanging around the grocery store when someone grabbed us by the back of our shirts. It was the guy we’d seen with Lucy, and he said he was going to beat the shit out of us. He shook us and walked away, so I didn’t figure he was serious, that he had just tried to scare us. Lemon insisted we tell my father. He ran as fast as he could waddle to my house. “Lucy’s boyfriend says he’s gonna kick the shit out of me and Joe!” Lemon told my father.

  Willie clamped one hand on one of my shoulders and the other on Lemon’s and marched us off. “Let’s go see this guy.”

  My father knew who it was and where he lived. We reached the guy’s building and rang the outside bell. The guy stepped out in the corridor to see who was there before opening the hall door.

  “Open up,” Willie said. “I want to talk to you.” “Bullshit!” said the guy, who obviously knew Willie’s reputation.

  Willie kicked in the door, shattering one of the little rectangles of glass. He dragged me in to the guy and said to him, “All right, hit ’im!”

  “No, Willie, I—”

  “You said you were gonna kick the shit out of this kid, now hit ’im!” He was holding me by the neck in front of him and I was trying to bob and duck.

  “Willie, I’m not gonna hit your kid,” the guy said. “I was just trying to scare him because—”

  “You were trying to scare my son?” He pushed me aside and knocked the guy all the way to the staircase. He turned and was up three steps when my father’s left hand grabbed his belt, yanked him around. The right-hand punch dropped him to the tile floor, unconscious.

  Then my father took me home and dialed the telephone. “I just knocked your goddamn boyfriend on his ass for trying to intimidate my son, Lucy! Don’t ever try that shit again!” He slammed down the receiver.

  To this day when I go to my mother’s house in Brooklyn—she bought a two-family house in the Canarsie section after my grandfather sold his apartment buildings several years ago—I love to look through drawers to find old pictures, old things that bring back memories. I remember, when I was thirteen or so, sitting on my parents’ bed one day looking through a bureau drawer that was full of old albums. I was really getting a kick out of staring at pictures of my parents when they were kids, all neatly dressed and pressed for the photographer. My mother was so pretty—fine, smooth features, long dark hair, and large eyes.

  Then I got down to the bottom of the drawer and found a stack of about fifty pictures I’d never seen before—of people screwing. I had never imagined there were so many ways to do it, all those positions. I sat there studying them and holding my breath to listen for the sound of feet coming up the steps. I got all excited and picked out the ten pictures I liked best. I took them, after putting the rest back in their place, into the bathroom and did what I had to do. Just as I finished, I heard my mother come into the apartment. So I pulled the medicine chest away from the wall and stuck the pictures behind it.

  Every couple of days after that, I’d go in the bathroom, pull the medicine chest out, grab the pictures, and play with myself. What a turn-on! But after a while my mother began to wonder why I was spending so much time in the bathroom. She began hurrying me up, knocking on the door and saying, “Joe, come on out of there, somebody else wants to use the bathroom.”

  Then one day she really got angry. My little brother Billy, who was seven, had to go, and my mother started screaming and banging on the door. “He’s going to wet his pants, Joe! Now come out of there, damnit!”

  “Mom, I’ll be right out! Tell him to wait a second!” I smacked my cock to get rid of my hard-on and quickly shoved the pictures up behind the medicine cabinet. My brother Billy went in, and while he was going to the bathroom he noticed the corner of one of the pictures sticking out from behind the bottom of the medicine cabinet. He reached up, pulled it, and all ten dropped to the floor. He walked out with them in his hand.

  “Look what I found in the bathroom, Mom.”

  “Joe,” my mother yelled, snatching them away from Billy, “what were you doing in there with these?”

  “What?” I said. “Those aren’t mine, Mom. They must be Billy’s.”

  My face was absolutely scarlet, I mean burning up. My mother turned on her heel and took the pictures into her bedroom without another word. Obviously she didn’t say anything about this to Willie, because I didn’t hear from him. But it was the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to me, to be caught with those dirty pictures by my mother, who I was sure knew damn w
ell what I’d been doing in the bathroom. I couldn’t look her in the eyes for weeks, I just couldn’t.

  It was at about this time that all the guys in the gang started going to the Majestic Ballroom, a fifty-cents-a-dance hall near Times Square in Manhattan. I could never go with them because I had to be home at nine—ten o’clock at the latest—every night. All of us had phony draft cards that said we were eighteen, but mine didn’t do me any good. One Friday, though, I told my father there was this movie Lemon and I really wanted to see at Times Square that didn’t get out till almost eleven. I told him we’d come right home afterward if he’d let me go.

  “All right, just this once,” he said to me, then turned to Lemon. “But you don’t bring him right home, your ass is mine.”

  I was so excited on the subway ride there. All the guys were talking about Carmen, this Puerto Rican girl who rubbed up against them and talked dirty. “She made me come in my pants last time!” Lemon said, and several of the other guys claimed they’d gotten off dry-hump dancing with her.

  When we got there, we bought five dollars’ worth of tickets apiece. “There’s Carmen,” said Lemon, waving to her. “Go dance with her, Joe. See what we mean.”

  I walked over and asked her to dance and she said, “Lovely,” and took all of my tickets.

  “Hey, why are you taking all of them?”

  “You get ten dances,” she said, “and I know you’ll want to dance all of them with me.”

  We went out on the floor and I held her close. She held me closer, moving against me. Right away she started talking, her lips on my ear: “Oh, I want to take you home with me tonight. I’m going to teach you everything. I’m going to teach you how to make love to a woman. I can feel you already. You’re going to be so good. Very good.”

  Within thirty minutes my ten tickets were gone. “Thank you,” said Carmen, walking away from me toward a table. “Wait,” I said, “I want to dance some more.”

  “Get some more tickets, lover.”

  I ran to the table where the guys who weren’t dancing were sitting. “Lend me a few bucks, you guys. I gotta dance with Carmen some more. She’s gonna take me home tonight.” “Joe, she won’t take you home,” one of the guys said. “She just says that. All she does is show you a nice time on the dance floor. Nice, ain’t it?”

  “No, no. She wants to take me home. She said so. Lend me a few bucks.”

  I got some more tickets, but Carmen was then dancing with an older guy. I didn’t dance with anyone else. I just sat there watching Carmen rub against that old guy on the floor. They danced for almost an hour. I kept looking at the clock, waiting. Finally she went and sat at a table, but the guy sat with her. Shit! I thought, staring at them, waiting for him to leave. Then I just stood up and walked over to her.

  “Carmen, you wanna dance? I got more tickets.” I held them out to her, semipleading I guess.

  “Later,” she said.

  “I can’t stay too late,” I said.

  “I’ll see you later,” she said, not even looking up at me.

  “Where are you gonna take me? I gotta be home before twelve.”

  “Go on back to your table.”

  “Hey, what’s the matter? Don’t you like me any more?”

  “Go back to your table.”

  “You said you were gonna take me home . . . teach—”

  “Look, kid,” the man said, “get your ass away from here.”

  “But she said—”

  He stood up and pushed me. “I said get the hell outta here.” Two bouncers hustled over and one of them grabbed my arm. The next thing I knew my seven friends came running over and pushed the bouncers off me. What a fight! Chairs over, tables over, people yelling, girls screaming. They rapped us around a bit and we ran toward the stairs. When we got to the door—they didn’t even bother to chase us—I turned and yelled to Carmen, “You fucking cunt!”

  That was one of the biggest things you could do then, tell a girl she was a fucking cunt. All the way home on the subway I was bragging to my friends, “You hear me call her a fucking cunt? Right to her face.”

  “Yeah, Joe, you really told her off.”

  Growing up in Brooklyn was a lot like an East Side Comedy. All the guys were crazy, came on like big shots. I remember when the oldest guy in our gang got a car, all we did for weeks was drive around and yell at girls. When we’d see a girl walking along, the big thing was to pull up next to her and stop and say, “Hey. You. Get over here.” Then, if they paused and came toward you: “Can I get into your pants, or what?”

  Of course, 98.2 percent of the girls would just walk away, or say, “Get away from me, you fucking pigs!”

  But I’ll never forget this one chick. There were six of us in the car. “Can I get into your pants, or what?”

  The chick put her hand on her hip and said, “Okay. How many of you do I have to take on?”

  The guy who was driving threw the car in gear and shot away. “Jesus Christ!” he said. “There must be somethin’ wrong with her!”

  I was a terrible hypochondriac as a kid. For some reason, I’d worry about every cough, every sneeze, thinking I was coming down with a fatal disease. Along about the age of fifteen, I started having wet dreams, enormous noctural emissions. I didn’t know what the hell was going on. Was I jerking off too much? It was impossible to jerk off in your sleep. There had to be something wrong with me. Then I started having two, three, four in a night. There had to be something seriously wrong with me, I thought. Would I die in my sleep?

  My mother noticed how stiff the front of my pajamas and sheets were getting and called it to my attention without actually saying anything. I told her something was happening in my sleep, that I didn’t know why, that I was really worried. I was examining my face in the mirror every morning and swore I looked drawn, that I was dwindling away.

  “I’ll have your father talk to you about this,” my mother told me.

  That evening my father sat down with me in my room, closed the door, and said, “Look, Joe, you don’t have to worry about this thing that happens in your sleep, it’s natural. It happens to everybody. It won’t hurt you. But listen, now, don’t ever play with yourself and make that happen. That is unnatural, it’s bad for your body. When you play with yourself and that happens, what comes out is your essence . . . it’s a . . . it’s like white blood, and it’s very bad.”

  I didn’t jerk off for three months after that. I was really afraid it would kill me. But what my father told me, that was the way Italian families explained things to their sons in those days. I still can’t figure out why.

  IV

  “He’s not playing any more goddamn baseball!”

  My Uncle Red, Louie Caiazzo, was the person who got me started playing ball. He started catching with me when I was seven or eight. As I got older, nine or ten, he’d throw harder and get angry when I missed one. If I missed easy ones, he’d smack me. One day my father came around just as Louie smacked me, and Willie smacked him. But I played baseball, catching and picking up grounders, only with Louie.

  Stickball was my first love. We played every day on our street. I was the guy who cut the brooms off the handles for bats. If we had a game scheduled for ten in the morning, I’d be out in the street at eight-thirty. I’d call for guys, and they’d come to the door wiping sleep from their eyes. “What the hell you out so early for?” “C’mon, let’s practice.” I loved it. When I was ten I was a one-sewer hitter—I could drive a Spaldeen from one sewer to the next. When I was eleven I was a two-sewer hitter. When I was twelve I was a three-sewer hitter. When I was thirteen I could hit one of those little pink rubber balls with a broom handle and knock it past four sewers into the next block. I was a superstar.

  When my brother Jimmy was about twelve and a half he started playing baseball with a team in the neighborhood, and he came home after the first practice with a nice uniform. I’d never played baseball and asked Jimmy if I could try out. He said he’d see. The next day he told me th
e team could have only one fourteen-year-old player on it, and they’d have to vote me in, or out. A lot of them knew how I could hit a Spaldeen. I started the next game, at the Madison High School field, and there happened to be a bird dog for a Yankee scout in the stands, a guy called John King. A bird dog tips off a scout on a prospect, and John King was at the field to watch the second game that afternoon between sixteen-and seventeen-year-olds. But he got there early and saw me hit three home runs out of the ball park. After the game he came down to talk to the tall, skinny left-handed hitter who’d driven three balls over the fence. He started showing up at just about every game I played after that, a rumpled man in a cap, sitting there watching me.

  I got hooked on baseball. When we didn’t have a game or a practice, I’d go to Prospect Park by myself carrying my bat, ball, and glove. There would always be a few guys playing there. “Hey, can I join you?” We’d shag flies, hit grounders to one another, play one-a-cat where you batted until you made three outs. Gee, I loved it. Baseball was really my thing; something I could do well right from the start. I could run, I could throw, I had an unusual instinct for getting under fly balls—moving with the crack of the bat to be where they came down—and I had a quick bat. I couldn’t get enough of the game. I played from the moment I could get another guy out in the morning until balls were caroming off me in the dark.

  My father encouraged me, coming to every game he could make, even if he didn’t get there till the last inning. The following year, when I started playing for Manual Training High School, my father would quit work early to see me play. He never made me work like most of the other guys had to. Just play baseball.

  According to my mother, that’s what my father wanted most to do as a kid—be a baseball player. But my father’s father was from Sicily and he said baseball was a sissy’s game, that if Willie played he’d beat him good. I remember my grandfather Pepitone, even though he died young, at age forty-two. He was a silent, grim-faced man who, like my father, demanded instant obedience. My grandfather owned several trucks which he used to peddle vegetables around the neighborhood and, my mother says, my father had to start working for him almost as soon as he was big enough to walk. But my father always wanted to play baseball. And when he’d finish work, he would sneak off to play ball. Usually my grandfather caught him, and then he’d beat him with a razor strop. My father kept sneaking off to the ball field and kept getting beaten with that strop—until the welts became too much for him to take any more. He gave up baseball, but he never forgot how much he had cared for it as a kid, how much he’d wanted to become an outstanding player himself.