by Patrick Mann
He turned the corner and surveyed a long row of single-family bungalow-type houses, stretching into the dusk as far as he could see. The sky was still bright in the west, but the street lights were on already, in case any cruising gangs of blacks decided to invade this tight Italian enclave.
Once, his grandmother had told him, these houses had been heaven, these shacks tightly crowded next to each other with only a narrow passageway between them, chunks of pepperoni sliced and left standing in a line. Heaven. Their little screened porches had caught the summer breezes. The moment a family could work its way out of the Mulberry Street slums, it made a down payment on a house of its own in Corona. Ignorant Sicilian farmers! As if this corner of hell, with its cramped, squeezed-out-turd houses, was a better place than Mulberry Bend.
Joe felt as he always did walking down this street past houses no amount of ingenuity or work could any longer disguise. They tried. They spent money on cheap tarpaper shingling, on curiously shoddy siding that was painted to resemble mortared stones. They glassed in the screened porches to make living rooms, while the original living rooms were chopped up into bedrooms. They planted flowers, saw them die, planted trees, watched the sulfuric air of Corona kill each one.
He shivered, even in the thick heat of August. Corona had this effect on him, not because it was where he had grown up—what the hell, everybody grew up in some side-chamber of hell, didn’t they, some back shithouse like this?—but because this Corona street was so much like the street on which he and Tina and the kids lived. Instead of one-story houses, it had six-story apartment buildings in dark red brick. Thick with soot. But the feeling was the same.
It was incredible, in a way, that no matter how you clawed your way out of it, you ended up in the same place. It wasn’t called Corona. It was a few miles farther away from Manhattan and it was called Forest Hills. Yes, where the rich-bitch assholes played tennis. Although Joe always told people it was Forest Hills, the real name was Rego Park, which a lot of the neighborhood people called Corona East, smiling bitterly. One thing you could say for Rego Park, it had Jews. When the wops and the kikes got together, they had enough political clout to keep the niggers out. For a while.
Joe had already walked past his mother’s home and was two houses down the street when he heard Tina’s honeyed voice, filtered through pads of fat, the voice you might expect to hear if a plate of gnocchi could talk.
“Littlejoe, honey!”
He whirled, eyes blazing. Where the hell had she picked up his nickname? It wasn’t the one he’d grown up with. It was his Village name, the one the class people downtown called him. “Y’bring the kids?” he grunted, walking back to his mother’s home and up the cracked concrete walk to the front door.
“Huh, honey?”
He examined her face through the screen door between them. She was his height, even in the slop-slop slippers she was wearing now. She announced herself a mile away, in the house, on the street, in supermarkets, all that meat slipping and slapping and sliding and slopping from one fat foot to the other in heelless slippers.
Her face was round, like one of those idiot smiley-faces people used to wear as buttons or sewn-on patches. Her mouth was big, with big lips, and her cheeks were smaller mounds of their own, equally circular. Tina’s nose was tiny but perfectly formed, like Elizabeth Taylor’s, classy, with a slight arch, thin nostrils. Her brown eyes looked like two ripe Greek olives swimming in fat that was only starting to melt, still white as suet, but liquefying around the edges. She had no forehead, or, rather, her unplucked eyebrows, arching over the pools of suet, left only a half-inch gap of pale skin before her teased-down bangs, curly as pubic hair, took over.
Tina let him shove the screen door hard against her immense breasts as he came in. She turned up her face as if Joe were a head taller than he really was, and pouted her big soft lips into a kiss. He bit them and, as often happened, felt as if he were biting ass instead. They tasted of garlic and cigarettes, and for some wild reason he could feel an erection coming on.
She was chewing something that still tasted faintly of clove. “Wa’ my Dentine, honey?” She propelled the chewing gum toward him with the pulpy tip of her tongue. He took the gum and chewed it for a moment, then spit it out.
“Big deal,” he said. “You chewed the flavor out.”
“I got another stick.” She was fumbling in the shapeless apron tied around her belly. She found the gum, stripped the wrapping, and popped it in his mouth.
He removed the stick and put it between her lips. “Warm it up for me,” he said. Then, watching her chew: “Y’bring the kids?”
She shook her head from side to side, chewing strenuously. “Stella’s house f’ the evening. Honey . . .” Her voice dropped to a low, snarling whine. “How soon kin we blow this place? They got that French Connection movie in Sunnyside.”
He put his finger between her lips and extracted the wad of gum, then chewed it. “When’s the last show?”
“Ten.”
“Good. We split this joint right after dinner.” He gave her a tight smile. She knew the movie was a weakness of his. He’d already seen it fourteen times in the last year, and he was ready to see it fourteen times more. That wasn’t true of every movie. Some he only saw five, maybe ten times. But this one was different, special. “You sure the kids’re okay at Stella’s?”
“Sure.” Like most of the people Joe knew, Tina pronounced this word “shew-uh.” Joe made it a point not to talk as goddamned Queens-Brooklyn as all that. He turned and and went inside the house.
His father, reading the Daily News in his narrow rocking chair by the side window, looked up as Joe passed, but said nothing. Joe thought of nodding to him, coolly, but decided not to. The miserable bastard deserved nothing, not even that. It was enough that Joe sat down once a week or so at the same table with the rotten piece of shit. Between the enveloping smother of his old lady and the sadistic beatings of his old man, a guy was smart to volunteer for Nam ahead of the draft. Nothing Viet Cong Charlie could do to him would ever be half as bad as what his own flesh and blood had tried over the years.
He stuck his head in the kitchen and inhaled the smell of garlic, oregano, and stewing tomatoes. “Hi, Flo.”
His mother looked up from the old gas range. Actually, Joe told himself, she wasn’t fat. Her face was sort of long and thin, actually, and so was her torso, like Lana’s body. But Flo had fat hips and thighs, of course—what ginzo broad didn’t? On the first look she didn’t produce the impression Tina did, a mound of Jello that moved, or the sleek look Lana had. More just a solid feeling.
“Hi, baby. You wanna taste something great?”
“Four pounds of shit in a two-pound paper bag?” he snapped.
Her face, with its big, narrow nose, darkened. “Is that a mouth to bring your mother?”
“Can’t help ribbing you, Flo.”
Her head shook up and down fast, as if this was only what she’d expected. “That the kind of talk your faggot friends use with their mothers?”
He glowered at her. “I don’t like that word.”
“Your queer friends. Christ, you’re getting just like them. Sensitive.”
“Don’t use that word, okay?” He glanced around the steaming kitchen as if trapped. How the hell could she stand the heat in here on a night like this? It was a garlic-flavored Turkish bath.
Flo held up both hands, palms turned toward her son as if begging forgiveness. “Your gay friends,” she amended. “How are they, your gay buddies?”
Joe felt his face set in a permanent frown. He had to watch the way she did this to him. If he wasn’t careful, by the time he was thirty he’d have those deep lines between his eyebrows, the way his father did, permanent frown lines that told the world how bitter and eaten-up inside you were.
“I wouldn’t know,” he said slowly. “What’re you cooking?”
“A little Progresso minestrone, a little cheese canneloni from Fusco’s deli, with my own sauce on it. Som
e cutlets parmigian’, and those French-fried onion rings you like from the Chicken Delight place.”
He could feel his gut rise up like a trapped tiger, lurching to claw its way to freedom. On a night like this, when the class people down in the Village were drinking cold white wine and eating a little Caesar salad, this tub of shit was mixing up a furnace of food.
He turned away from her because he knew what he was thinking showed on his face. She had always been able to read his face. His father had never even bothered to look at Joe’s face, and to Tina his face was only a kind of mirror in which she could see her own fat moon reflected. But Flo was different. She looked. She saw. She dug. Therefore, she was dangerous.
“Where you goin’?” she called as he left the room.
“Outside for some air.”
“Dinner’s in fifteen minutes.”
“Right.”
He walked past the immobile form of his father, hidden behind the News. “Where you goin’?” he heard the old man rasp.
“Air. Air.”
He shoved past Tina, still rooted to the front porch near the screen door. “Air,” he told her as he threw open the door and clattered down the wooden steps two at a time, his four-inch clog heels making a volley of sound like a gunfight. “Fresh fucking air,” he yelled back at her over his shoulder. He fled down the cracked concrete to the sidewalk, turned right, and strode blindly toward the subway station on Queens Boulevard.
No dinner. No family scene. They could all rot in their own pus. Corona had never been the place for him. Nor Rego Park. At the boulevard he glanced both ways, anxiously, as if he were as trapped here in the hot open air as he had been in that steamy kitchen. A cabdriver, seeing him paused irresolutely just off the curb, slewed toward him. Joe jumped in.
“Sunnyside,” he gasped at the driver. “The theater where they’re showing that French Connection flick.”
It wasn’t even eight o’clock. He could see the movie and be out of the theater long before Tina’s lard-head brain put two and two together and she went looking for him. He fingered the change in his pockets. A dollar for the cab. A couple of bucks for the movie. That left him flat. Maybe enough change to get the subway back to Rego Park. But why go back?
4
He left the movie house after that part of the movie he liked best, where Popeye blasted the rat on the steps of the El station and shot the big cop as they searched the abandoned warehouse, but before the part he hated to watch, where the French crook escaped for good.
He strolled for a while in the somewhat cooler night of Sunnyside, the elevated tracks over his own head as they had been over Popeye’s during the big car chase. Christ, that was really it, wasn’t it? The chase, the tires squealing, the rammed fenders and dented doors, the people diving out of the way.
He stood for a while in the shadow of a red brick building, a branch of the Chase bank, and watched a train rattle through Sunnyside on the tracks overhead. Joe jingled the coins in his pocket, then, on a sudden impulse, pulled them out and counted them in the red neon glare of a bar across the street.
A dime, a quarter, a nickel.
Not enough for anything. Standing next to a bank, but he didn’t have enough to fucking live and breathe and get through this hot night. He saw his father-in-law’s light blue Mustang pull up in front of the theater. After struggling with her immense flabby bulk, Tina managed to pull herself out from behind the wheel and slosh up to the box-office window. Trust her, cheap little gash, to con the theater out of a freebie instead of paying admission. Maybe, while she was inside . . .
Joe watched the woman’s head behind the glass of the box office nod up and down once. She called an usher, who took Tina inside. Joe walked slowly across the street and along the sidewalk until he was directly opposite the box office and the bank. His father-in-law’s car hid him from the ticket seller’s gaze—not that she knew him, but maybe Tina had given her a description.
He knew Tina. He knew she was too lazy to take the keys out of the car. He loped across the street and got in behind the wheel. Not only were the keys in the ignition, but the engine was still running. He waited until the ticket seller was lighting a cigarette, threw the transmission into “D,” and roared off down Queens Boulevard toward Manhattan. He revved the car up to fifty miles an hour.
The gauge showed an almost full gas tank—no help from Tina, just that her old man was good about such things. Joe gunned through as the green changed to red and raced up a slight incline onto the lower level of the 59th Street Bridge. Funny, her rescuing him. Funny her not even knowing she was giving him a way out. She’d come to recapture him, and instead she’d handed him his escape.
In Manhattan he turned left on Second Avenue and moved easily downtown with the progressive lighting, darting in and out between trucks moving in the same direction. He wondered if she’d report the car to the cops, or if she’d guess he’d taken it. Better phone her old man. Yeah, smart.
He braked at a lighted corner telephone booth, listened to the dial tone, dropped a dime—thirty fucking cents left for the night—and phoned Tina’s father.
“Yeah, it’s Joe. Listen, I got your Mustang, Gino. Okay?”
“Wha’? You ga’ wha’?”
“It’s me, Joe, Tina’s husband. I got your Mustang. Okay?”
“Whadya mean you goddit?”
“Just tell Tina I got it.”
“Don’ she know you goddit?”
“Christ!” Joe slammed the telephone back on its hook, jumped into the car, and continued downtown on Second until he reached Fourteenth Street. You couldn’t waste your life trying to make these old goombars understand. Gino didn’t know anything about his daughter except that she was happily married, had two gorgeous kids, left them with Gino and his wife almost as often as she left them with her sister, Stella, and had a good job in Chase Bank. Not that Tina had worked at Chase for the past three years. Just that Gino still thought she did.
He turned south on Seventh Avenue and slowed the Mustang slightly as he cruised through Greenwich Village. It had been through Chase that he’d met Tina.
They’d both worked for the goddamned bank, him in a branch in Manhattan, her in a Brooklyn office. They’d met on a bank picnic up in Westchester, a whole day’s outing with barbecue lunch, barrels of beer, baseball, even boating and swimming at a little lake. He’d enticed her out on a boat in the middle of the water. It had been almost time to leave, the sky getting dark, half an hour before the buses showed up and everybody went back to town.
He’d been her first, pulling her down into the bottom of the boat, yanking up her dress, ripping her little bikini panties because he pulled them too hard. Her muff had been as neat and stiff as brunette Brillo. She had had no idea what to do, how to help him. It didn’t matter. He didn’t need any help. In a way it was a real kick making a virgin, because there were no smart cracks about his size. Christ, what did these whores know, anyway? As if size meant anything. It was whether you knew what to do with it or not. Miss Panetta was going to get two of them, the bitch.
In the end, even after they were married, he felt something special for Tina, even after she bloated up like a slab of rotten pork. Whatever he did to her, she loved it. No matter how fast he came, she adored it. Nothing he could do to her was anything but beautiful. She said as much, over and over again, maybe not in words but in the way she let him abuse her.
No other broad would stand for the way he treated her. It was almost like not being married, the way he almost never showed up except to play with the kids a little. And this thing tonight, walking out on her and leaving her with his mother, then stealing her father’s car. She ate it up. She loved it. To her it was marriage.
He grinned as he steered right onto Bleecker and started looking for a parking place. The good thing about breaking a broad in from the start, especially a religious guinea like Tina, was that she didn’t know what any other man was like. You were it. You were everything. She took it and liked it.
He parked the Mustang on Bedford, not far from Christopher, and carefully locked it up. The first thing Tina would do when she found the car stolen was call her old man, and he’d tell her the news. So there wouldn’t be any cops staking out the car when he came back to it again. Now the trick for tonight was to find himself a sponsor. He didn’t dare show his face at the bar where Lana hung out until he had a few bucks to spend.
He walked quickly along Christopher, nodding to this passerby and that. He was well known in the Village. Littlejoe was a name people had heard of. Even these leather freaks knew him, because he could outleather any of them. They’d all heard of him. It wasn’t like Rego Park or Corona. This was Ground Zero for excitement. And where classy, exciting people put it together, Littlejoe was a well-known person.
Maybe Mick would stake him to a night. Mick wasn’t a bad guy. He was even some sort of distant cousin, although Flo claimed never to have heard of him. Being Italian, naturally Mick was Flo’s cousin, but she refused to recognize him because people said Mick was Maf.
Labels. Until they had a label slapped on them, nobody was a person to people like Flo or Tina. Everybody had to have a label, and if they could label a guy “faggot,” oh, man, that tickled their insides. Sure, Mick ran a few leather bars at the river end of Christopher, dark, hot places where you could find yourself somebody who liked getting whipped. Sure the cops had to be paid off steady, right up to the lieutenants, in order to keep the places open and running. Did that mean Mick was Maf? It was a business expense, just like the monthly rent.
Littlejoe checked the front bar at the first leather joint. Since the time was just ten o’clock, the place was still not filled to capacity. He signaled the bartender.
“Yah?”
Joe was glad he’d left his jacket in Gino’s car. Even now, in sweaty shirt and loose tie, he looked too square to get within five city blocks of a place like this. “Mickey around?”
