Return to Shepherd Avenue

by Charlie Carillo

  Vic was eighteen years old, five foot ten, a hundred and ninety pounds. His hair was thick as a cluster of wire brush filaments—when he ran his hands through it, it leapt back into place. His hairline ran straight across his forehead and down the sides of his head, with no scallops at the temples. His eyes were brown, like the eyes of everyone else in the house, including me. Only my father had picked up blue eyes, through some errant gene.

  Every pair of Vic’s pants looked tight on him but he insisted they were comfortable and kept wearing them, despite my grandmother’s warning that “They’ll make you sterile.” His hard belly bulged slightly, like an overinflated tire. His rump bulged in the same way. From time to time he patted his buttocks, rat-a-tat-tat, as if they were bongos.

  Vic’s room was sparsely furnished: a horsehair mattress on a platform bed, an army foldout cot (for me), a crucifix on the wall, a photo of the Journal-American’s 1960 all-star baseball team (“I’m third from the left—that guy’s hat hides my face”), a Frank Sinatra record jacket tacked to the wall, and a Victrola.

  “Put that down,” he said. I’d picked up his athletic cup and put it against my nose, thinking that was where it was worn. He took it from me and gestured with it.

  “Listen. If we’re gonna get along we can’t be messing around with each other’s stuff, okay?”

  I nodded. “What is that thing?”

  He blushed. “You wear it here,” he said, holding it in front of his pants. “In case you get hit with a baseball. You like Sinatra?”

  “I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  “I don’t listen to music much.”

  Shaking his head, Vic put on a record. “If you hang around here, you gotta like Sinatra.” Music filled the room. Vic lay on his back, his stiff mattress crunching as he rolled with the music.

  “Look,” he announced when the first song ended, “I think you and me can get along real good. See, I’m a ballplayer, I need lots of sleep. Most nights I’ll probably go to bed earlier than you.”

  “What position do you play?” I asked politely.

  Vic’s eyebrows arched. “You know baseball?”

  “A little.”

  “I’m the shortstop. I play in between the second baseman and the third baseman.”

  “Oh.”

  “Hey, don’t go thinkin’ I can’t hit, just because I’m an infielder. I hit better than all the outfielders on the team. If you can call ’em outfielders. Now listen to this part, how he does this,” Vic said, leaping off the bed and cranking up the volume on the Victrola.

  Down the street the elevated train rode past, partially drowning out the music. Vic muttered “Damn” and lifted the needle off the disc to play the same part again, scratching the record.

  “Here it is,” he said solemnly.

  I forget the song but at a certain point my uncle was jumping up and down on the bed, singing along. When the song ended he stepped to the floor, pink-faced.

  “Like, I get carried away,” he said.

  Connie appeared at the doorway. “I heard you jump, all the way downstairs! You’re gonna come right through the floor.”

  “Sorry, Ma.”

  “Come on,” Connie said. “We’ll eat.”

  When she left, Vic grinned at me. He clasped the back of my neck and led me into the hallway, giving me a slight Indian burn.

  On the way in I’d noticed a beautiful dining room where I figured dinner would be served, but Vic surprised me by leading the way to a dark, rickety staircase. Our footsteps echoed as we walked down to the cellar. There were no banisters. I put my palms against the walls for balance, feeling the scrape of rough stucco.

  The basement floor was red and yellow tiles. There were windows along one wall, facing the driveway—you got a view of any approaching visitor’s ankles. A long table with built-in benches stood under fluorescent lights. My grandfather’s oak chair stood at the end of the table.

  This was the hub of the home. During Depression years the main floor of the Ambrosio house had been rented out to boarders, so the family had gotten into the habit of using the basement. It was roomy, and always cool in the summertime.

  Upstairs, the dining room might as well have been a museum—the mahogany table with its fitted glass top, a buffet table on wheels, heavy long-armed chairs. On the backs of those chairs there were doilies that stayed white year-round, and if you opened a cabinet door in the dining room there was a clicking sound, as if the long-untouched varnished surfaces had welded together. Trapped inside the cabinets were gold-rimmed teacups and saucers with paper tags still glued to their undersides.

  But that room couldn’t hold a candle to the character of the basement.

  For one thing, the floor wasn’t level, which Vic demonstrated by placing a baseball on it. The ball was still for an instant, then rolled to the opposite wall.

  “Enough with that trick, already,” Connie said.

  The ceiling was a network of pipes and cables, painted white. There were upright poles at strategic locations, supporting the house above us.

  A bowl of spaghetti sat in the middle of the table, steam rising off it and disappearing into the fluorescents. Connie worked it with a pair of forks.

  A cameo portrait of her would have displayed a slender woman. Most of her two hundred and twenty pounds hung way below her breastbone. She was fifty-five years old but her hair was black, save for a pair of white-gray stripes at either side of her part, like catfish whiskers.

  Those fleshy arms rose again and again over the spaghetti, curtains of fat dangling and dancing from her upper arms. I was reminded of the flying squirrel pictures I’d seen in my science book.

  Her guard was all the way up that night. “You hungry?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You didn’t eat so good when you and your father lived alone.” A statement.

  “Sometimes we ate out,” I said.

  “Mmmm.” She was confirming her own thoughts. She put a bowl of spaghetti before me. “You remember the last time you ate here?”

  I hesitated. “I never ate here before.”

  “Ah! You don’t remember!”

  Vic bared his teeth tightly. “God, Ma, he was a baby. Why do you bring that up?”

  Connie ignored Vic as she loaded his dish. “That was some fight,” she said. “I still get knots right here when I think about it.” She made a tight fist and held it near her stomach.

  “Forget the knots, let’s eat,” Vic said, winking and squeezing my knee.

  Eating noises. Connie pointed at my side dish. “He don’t like it.”

  I was poking my fork into something I later came to love: bread, raisins, capers, and cheese, mixed together and baked into half a red pepper. It reminded me of a little coffin and was too sharp a taste for my first day.

  “You don’t like it, don’t eat it,” Connie said, as if she didn’t mind.

  “This food’s gotta grow on you,” Vic said. “Eat a mouthful tonight, next time eat two. Before you know it you’ll love it.”

  I held my breath and swallowed a mouthful without chewing. It went down like a giant slippery aspirin.

  “I promise it won’t taste so bad next time,” Vic said. Already I was chasing it with a forkful of spaghetti.

  “You talk like my food’s poison,” Connie said.

  “Ah, quit acting hurt, Ma.”

  Connie pointed at him with a fork. “You. Don’t eat so fast.”

  She had a point. Vic ate with the speed of an animal fleeing predators. He held his fork in his right hand and a piece of Italian bread in his left, which he used to shove food onto the fork. When the bread got mushy with sauce he took a bite off it, then resumed work with the dry bread.

  “You’ll bite a finger off,” she warned him. “Gonna get fat.”

  “Ah, I burn it off fast,” Vic said, a crumb flying from his mouth. He elbowed me, and I found myself smiling and nearly echoing, “Yeah, he burns it up fast,” but I stopped myself. Why make an
enemy of Connie when I barely knew Vic?

  The rest of the meal was quiet, save for low, muffled belches out of Vic. Connie picked up a bit of food that had flown from Vic’s mouth and crushed it in a paper napkin.

  “Now don’t go thinkin’ your father don’t love you,” she said.

  A direct hit; my eyes welled with tears. Vic stopped chewing and shot a searing look at her. Then he softened and looked my way, prodding me with an elbow.

  “What team do you like, the Yankees or the Dodgers?”

  I’d never even heard of the Dodgers. “Yankees.”

  “Me, too. My father likes the Dodgers, he’s ready to kill O’Malley for sendin’ ’em out west. Listen, if I make the majors, I’m gonna play for the Yanks.”

  “Big shot,” Connie said, getting up to clear the table. The meal had lasted barely ten minutes.

  Vic ignored her. “Only thing is, they got so many good players that hardly anybody gets to play every day, except for guys like Mantle and Maris.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “See, I don’t wanna warm some bench when I get there.”

  It never occurred to my uncle that he might not make the major leagues, but only that he might get cheated out of valuable playing time once he arrived.

  He folded his big hands behind his head. “The big dough’s in New York. You set yourself up nice, and then you can get into, like, broadcastin’. That’s how come I’m takin’ a speech class in school. They remember who you are when you play in New York.”

  “They forget,” Connie said above the thumping of hot water into the sink. “You’d be surprised how fast people forget.”

  Again he ignored her. His eyes narrowed suddenly. “Who hit more homers last year, Hank Aaron or Mickey Mantle?”

  “Mickey Mantle,” I guessed.

  “Wrong!” Vic roared joyfully. “They both hit forty! See? Here’s a guy hittin’ homers all over the place and nobody knows about it, ’cause he doesn’t play in New York. Poor guy’s stuck in Milwaukee.”

  “Shut up already,” Connie said. “Every night we hear this.”

  She finished washing the dishes. We climbed the stairs to the front parlor and watched TV for a while. Not once had my grandfather’s absence been mentioned.

  * * *

  They set my cot up next to the bedroom window, which was open all the way. Warm air puffed through the screen, but you’d be exaggerating if you called it a breeze.

  The sheets were stiff, having been hung to dry in the dead air of the basement because it had rained earlier in the week. Getting into bed was like climbing into an envelope.

  It wasn’t dark and it wasn’t quiet. Light filtered in from the street lamp. Two or three radios played somewhere. There were bouts of distant laughter and the screech of brakes on Atlantic Avenue.

  “Vic?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Is there a party going on somewhere?”

  “Whatsamatter, can’t you sleep?”

  “Too much noise,” I complained. “Is it always so bright in here?”

  “Are you crazy?” He hated being awakened. “Here, sleep on this side,” he said, rising.

  “It’ll be the same over there,” I whined.

  “The same,” he mimicked. “Roll over and close your eyes.”

  “I already did.”

  “Well, just shut up.”

  I heard his irregular breathing across the room and imagined him hating my guts. Now and then he sucked in his breath and socked the pillow with his fist.

  I had to break the silence. “My father cried when he left.”

  “I saw him cry once before,” Vic said, startling me with his friendliness. He sat up, propping his head up with his hand.

  “The time Dixie died, a long time ago. You never knew Dixie. Swell pooch. Well, anyway, he made him a coffin out of an old desk drawer and stuck him in a pillow case. Buried him right out in the backyard.”

  Vic flipped onto his belly. “Didn’t make any noise when he cried, though. Cried and cried until his eyes got red, but . . . funny.” He looked at me. “Didn’t he cry when? ”

  “When my mother died,” I said, completing his sentence. “No. Not around me, anyway.”

  Vic let it sink in. “Weird guy.” He reached around under his mattress. “Want a Milky Way?”

  “We just brushed our teeth.”

  “Ah, it’s all right, you just rub the chocolate off with your tongue. Here.”

  He tossed one at me. It landed in the sheets, near my knees.

  “Dixie,” Vic said through a mouthful of candy. “Once in a while my mother still chucks a bone out in the yard for her, where your father buried her. You can’t touch the bone, either. It has to sit on the grave till it rots.”

  His voice grew serious. “So if you see a bone in the yard, don’t touch it, ’cause it’s for Dixie.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Especially if my mother’s lookin’.”

  “I won’t. What would I want with a dumb bone, anyhow?”

  He flipped onto his back. “I’ll tell you this—your father’s all right. He was good to me when I was a shrimp.”

  I let his remark go without comment.

  “But he was always a little crazy,” Vic continued. “Remember when he got married, and everybody told him . . . jeez, do you believe this? I’m expectin’ you to remember your father’s wedding!”

  “What did everybody tell him?”

  Vic sighed. “All right. When he got married nobody was marryin’ Irish girls. That’s the truth. I mean it’s no big deal now, but to my mother . . .”

  “What?” I said. “Say it.”

  Vic licked his lips. “My mother thought she wasn’t good enough for Sal,” he said. “She apologized a million times since then,” he added quickly.

  The news hit my heart like dull daggers.

  “God, I shouldn’t have told you that,” Vic said, pummeling his bedding. “Why the hell couldn’t you fall asleep?”

  Vic rolled away from me. I saw the black back of his head, suspected he was nowhere near sleep. I was right. When he rolled to face me again his eyes were wide open.

  “Nobody could ever tell your father what to do,” he said with fierce pride. “If he had his hand on a hot stove and you told him to take it off he wouldn’t. A rock head. Now it’s the same thing. He wants to drive away, he drives away. Understand this? Joseph?”

  “Joey,” I corrected. “No, I don’t.”

  “Want another Milky Way?”

  “Yeah.”

  This one landed on my navel. “They got married real young, they had you right away. He’s makin’ up for lost time, I figure. Few weeks and he’ll be back, guaranteed.”

  The bedroom door opened. Connie’s form filled the doorway.

  “Talk soft.”

  “Sorry,” Vic said, wincing.

  She looked at me. “He keeping you awake?”

  “No,” I said, “I’m keeping him awake.”

  “Lie down and shut up,” she instructed, pulling the door closed. It was shut nearly all the way when it opened again, suddenly.

  “You ain’t foolin’ me,” she said to both of us. “I find the candy wrappers in the morning.”

  The door closed for good. Vic’s breathing became rhythmic with sleep. I ran my tongue over my teeth to get rid of the last traces of chocolate and caramel.

  The night that had given Connie “knots” was still a mystery, but that was all right. I could wait. I certainly wasn’t going anywhere.

  “Nowhere to go.”

  I hadn’t meant to say it out loud. Vic rolled over.

  “What’d you say?”

  “Nothing.”

  He pushed a thick knuckle against one eye. “Aw, c’mon, kid, get used to this place and sleep, already.”

  Queens-born Charlie Carillo was a reporter and a columnist for the New York Post before becoming a producer for the TV show “Inside Edition.” His first novel, Shepherd Avenue, was named a Notable Book of the Year by
the American Library Association in 1986. He is also the author of My Ride with Gus, Raising Jake, One Hit Wonder, Found Money, God Plays Favorites and The Man Who Killed Santa Claus: A Love Story.

  Charlie now divides his time between New York City and London, England, where he works as an independent television producer. He is a frequent contributor to the Huffington Post. Visit his website at www.charliecarillo.co.