by Albert Demeo
That night, when my father came to my room to tuck me in, I was still smiling about Uncle Mikey's story. As my father tucked the covers around me, I said, “Dad?”
“What, son?”
“Why does everyone call Uncle Mikey ‘Mikey Hammer'? Nobody calls his wife Mrs. Hammer.”
My father replied, “Well, you know, Uncle Mikey was kind of a tough guy when he was younger. He used to collect cash from people who owed me and some other guys money. Sometimes the people wouldn't pay what they owed. Now Uncle Mikey's a real gentle guy, but if someone won't pay up, what are you gonna do? So every now and then Uncle Mikey would break a couple of their knuckles with a hammer as a kind of reminder they'd better pay. After a while people started calling him Mikey Hammer.”
I felt my fingers flinch involuntarily. Uncle Mikey? Break people's knuckles? He was one of the nicest guys I knew. It didn't make sense. I shoved the image out of my mind and turned over to go to sleep. I drifted off dreaming of chocolate bunnies, hundred-dollar bills, and broken knuckles.
School was out at long last, and my sisters and I returned to the freedom of daily swims and evening barbecues. That summer Dad and I put laid concrete in the area behind the workshop, around the barbecue pit. That was also the summer my father rescued a small frog, left abandoned by its family in the backyard. My father was always rescuing wild creatures. My uncle Joe told me that when they were kids, he and my dad would go out in the backyard when the birds settled in the trees. He said my dad would stand very still, and the sparrows would come and land on his arms and hands. He'd never seen anything like it. My father dug a space for the tiny frog in the damp soil under the back porch, and every morning he would bring out a palm leaf filled with food and hand feed the small creature before he left for work. The frog wouldn't let the rest of us near him, but it had no fear of my father and would hop onto his hand to be stroked. Soon the frog would come hopping out from under the porch as soon as he heard my father's footsteps. My dad warned the man who mowed our lawn to be extra careful in the area around the porch, so that the frog would come to no harm.
One morning I woke up to hear my father screaming at someone outside. I ran downstairs and into the backyard to find my father yelling at the gardener. Dad's face was purple with rage. I had never seen him like that. I heard him shout, “You fucking idiot, what did I tell you? Now get out of here and don't come back! You're fired!” In Dad's hand was a small misshapen green thing. When I looked closer, I could see that it was his pet frog, the lower half cut off by the lawn mower. It was dead. Dad's hand was shaking, and there were tears in his eyes.
Dad said nothing to me. Instead he walked past me into the workshop and came out a few moments later carrying a small garden trowel. He walked over to the big tree near the swing set, then knelt down to dig a hole six inches wide and almost as deep. Ever so carefully, he bent over and placed the mangled remains of the small frog in the hole. Then he filled the hole with dirt, gently smoothing the mound with his hand and scattering grass over the top. When he went back in the house, I touched his hand as he passed by. He did his best to smile at me.
Freddy brought his kids over to swim in our pool that August, and the following weekend my dad asked me if I wanted to go with him to Freddy's house to ride the motorbikes. I was very excited. I loved going to Freddy's house. I sat in the kitchen drinking coffee with Mrs. DiNome while Freddy and my dad went down to the basement to talk. A few minutes later I heard my father's voice from the room below. He sounded angry. I went downstairs to the basement to see what was going on.
My dad was talking about the new wide-screen television and VCR that Freddy had set up in the living room. He was yelling at Freddy, “What do you think you're doing, you idiot? How many times do I got to tell you, you never keep the merchandise for yourself. The police come here, they see the ID tags, they're going to know it's stolen. It's bad enough you got all this stuff in the basement. You should keep it in a warehouse. You're going to get caught.” Freddy looked embarrassed, and a few minutes later we left without riding the bikes.
For the first time it dawned on me that the boxes Freddy always kept in his basement weren't his.
“Dad?” I said. “Where does Freddy get all that stuff?”
“Give-ups, mostly. The truck drivers park the trucks where Freddy can find them and then leave them there while he cleans them out. Sometimes the stores are in on it, too. The managers get greedy or the owner wants the insurance money. They get a double cut that way. Every now and then he hijacks them, but mostly they're give-ups.”
I felt a twist of anxiety. Freddy was stealing things, just like Uncle Vinny, but Freddy wasn't taking only fruit or janitors' uniforms. He was stealing big things, expensive things. That's what the men at the Ravenite meant when they said things had fallen off trucks. And the people who drove the trucks and ran the stores were helping him do it. It seemed like everyone was mixed up in stealing things. Did the police know what was going on? And how did my father fit into all of this?
That fall I started the fourth grade. For Halloween that year my mother made me a leopard costume that felt like real fur. She always made all of our costumes herself on the sewing machine downstairs. For trick-or-treat night she decorated the house inside and out with ghosts and skeletons and baked treats for the kids in the neighborhood. Dozens of homemade caramel apples dried on waxed paper on the kitchen counter, and she made taffy and fudge as well. Neither of my parents liked us to go out trick-or-treating, for fear we would get a razor blade or poison in one of the treats. Instead we had a big costume party and invited all the kids for blocks around. We ate piles of goodies and bobbed for apples and sat in the dark with flashlights while my father told ghost stories. They gave me delicious shivers. He looked scary telling creepy stories in the dark, not like my father at all.
Though I continued to do well in school, I felt more like an alien among my schoolmates with every month that went by. My world centered around my father; and bit by bit, I was becoming more comfortable in his environment than with other fourth-graders. Sometimes I felt like an adult surrounded by children at school, and though I didn't like it, I didn't know how to change it. Other boys my age were joining the Boy Scouts or Little League, but my free time was spent in the workshop with my father or visiting his friends in the city. My whole world was wrapped up in his.
Each morning before school, I sat in my parents' master bedroom and watched my father turn from a suburban dad into a wiseguy. It became a type of ritual between us. Freshly showered and shaved, my father would put on the expensive tailor-made suits and silk shirts that were the trademarks of his profession. He would slip on his Italian loafers, always impeccably shined, and then go to his dresser for his jewelry. He always wore the diamond on his left pinky finger, and on his left wrist a platinum watch with a smooth band and a circlet of diamonds around the crystal. Fastening his watch and checking his appearance one last time in the mirror, he would scoop me up in his arms for a hug. I always hated to let him go. I had the uneasy feeling he might not return.
I turned ten that January. I was learning more week by week about how my father made his living, but I still had no name to put to what he did. Dad was patient and gentle at home and always polite in his business dealings. In spite of the things I heard and saw on my outings with him, the line between legal and illegal was blurry for me. The social clubs I visited contained many legitimate business people, and I knew that Dad and Uncle Nino worked with the police all the time. I knew Freddy stole things, but he was a regular visitor on Sunday evenings, where he chatted happily with my father's best friend, the policeman. My father loaned people money in clubs in the city, but he also loaned money the usual way from a credit union in Brooklyn. Freddy put tags on stolen cars for my father, but my dad sold cars from a lot on the highway just like all the other car dealers in the neighborhood. It was hopelessly confusing.
I was halfway through the fourth grade when I finally put a name to what my father did f
or a living. The first two Godfather movies had been released while I was in kindergarten and first grade, and by the time I was ten, every kid in school had heard of the Mafia. One day during a visit to the joke store, I saw some fake ID cards that said, “Member of the Mafia,” with a place to sign your name. I thought it would be funny to buy one and carry it around to show the other kids.
I showed the card to my father that Saturday. I expected him to chuckle and say, “Pretty funny, son,” but instead he roared with laughter. My mother didn't seem to think it was so funny. Their reactions puzzled me. That afternoon, when we left for a trip to Mulberry Street, my father told me to take my ID card with me. When we found Uncle Nino at the Ravenite, Dad told me to show him my card. It was the first time I had heard Nino laugh really loud. Something strange was going on. I liked the card, but it wasn't that funny. Nino told me to go show it to my friends in the other room. Every time I showed it to someone, he started laughing like it was the funniest thing he had ever seen and handed the card to a friend. One of the men told another guy, “Hey, Tony, maybe we should get ourselves one of these. Whadda ya think?” An idea started to dawn on me. I had to find out if I was right.
I was reading at the eighth-grade level by then, and I had begun reading the morning newspaper along with my dad that summer. Usually I preferred the comics. Now, however, I started paying attention to what my father read. Each day he pored over the New York Post and the Daily News religiously. I noticed he always went to the obituaries first, then to the crime section. I began to read the same sections of the paper when I came home from school every afternoon, holed up in my room after I finished my homework. The papers were filled with detailed descriptions of murders and robberies, along with references to “reputed mobsters,” sometimes by name. The descriptions of the murders were often frightening. But what frightened me far more was the familiarity of some of the names they mentioned. Some of the men I knew from the social clubs had the same last names. Could they be the same guys? I didn't dare ask anyone, not even my father. Once the idea began to germinate, however, it started putting down roots, deep poison roots of terror. I had to know the truth. And no one could find it for me, but me.
My father was gone more than usual the next couple of days, and he seemed preoccupied. He didn't smile as much as usual, and when I talked to him, his mind seemed to be a million miles away. When he left the house late one afternoon, I saw that he was dressed in a black suit and tie. Every instinct told me that something had happened, and my suspicions were further heightened when my mother abruptly turned off the television in the den before the evening news came on. I was already in the habit of watching the news, but on this night, my mother told me to go to my room and leave the television off. I went through the motions of obeying, but the minute she went back upstairs, I crept down the hall to the den and turned the TV back on with the volume down low. The news broadcast showed a church with tall brass doors and a circular stained window, and the broadcaster's voiceover informed viewers that they were watching the funeral mass of Carlo Gambino, godfather of New York's most powerful Mafia family. While the cameras rolled, the doors opened and the mourners filed out of the church, ducking their heads to avoid the cameras. Suddenly time stopped. My heart rose up and choked me as the camera caught two men emerging from the church: Uncle Nino, wearing his sunglasses like always, and right behind him—my father. My entire body went numb. I hurriedly switched off the television and rushed back down the hall to my bedroom. Images from the newspapers swirled through my head, a kaleidoscope of brutality, of swift and brutal death. Somewhere in the blur of those images, everything I had heard and seen for the last five years came into focus. My father was a mobster. He was part of the Mafia. I was dizzy with fear.
I had always made a point to tell my father good-bye when he left the house. Each time I would put my arms around his neck to kiss him and say, “I love you, Daddy.”
And he would scoop me up in his arms and reply, “I love you too, Al.” Now, however, the ritual took on a new urgency. From the night I saw his face on the television set, I lived in constant terror of losing my father. My greatest fear was that I would never see him again, and he would die without knowing I loved him.
I lay alone in the darkness that night, watching the dial on my clock creep around until three in the morning. When my father's headlights finally hit the wall beneath my window, I cried with relief. I would lie awake the next night, and the night after that, always waiting to hear my father's car in the driveway.
I never slept through the night again.
four
GEMINI
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower.
—WORDSWORTH, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from
Recollections of Early Childhood”
From the moment I saw my father's face on the evening news, I began an agonizing process of gambling with eternity to keep my father alive. At night I lay awake, straining to hear the sound of my father's car in the driveway, bargaining with the Angel of Death. Sometimes I flipped a coin: If I got heads twice in a row, my father would come home alive. Other times I made small offerings to the Almighty, like a gambler offering up his best poker chips. I would get better grades, stop swearing, help my mother more, anything God wanted if He would only protect my father. And each time I heard the Cadillac's engine and ran to my bedroom window to look down at my father's figure in the half-light below, I would press my face against the glass and fervently thank whatever power had brought him home to me one more time.
As the only son, I was gradually being initiated into my father's rituals. My mother and sisters would never meet the people I met with my father, never enter the door of rooms reserved for men only. They did not even know that these rooms, these people, existed. My father went out of his way to protect them from that knowledge. Part of the task of keeping them safe in their ignorance now fell to me.
The horses were one small example of this. My older sister, Debra, loved to ride, a passion she shared with my father. On sunny days when Dad was free from business for a few hours, he would take Debra to a stable on the shore of Long Island. The two of them would gallop down the beach together, joined by the exhilaration of the moment. I, on the other hand, was taken to the trainers and the tracks to watch the betting and learn how to fix a horse race. My father explained that the most common method was for the trainer to put cotton up a horse's nose so it would get winded in the backstretch and fade at the end. The jockeys and even the owners were often involved in these scams, betting against their own horses if it meant making money. It was always about the money. My father had contempt for people who threw their money away gambling on the races. Much of his loan-sharking business came from gamblers. My father believed in a sure thing. He never bet on a horse unless the race was fixed for the horse to win.
Bringing me into the family business meant educating me. By the time I entered the fifth grade, my father was teaching me the specifics of the various operations he ran. Some of them were legitimate. But many were conducted on the wrong side of the law, and my father made no attempt to hide that fact from me. He began to educate me in the way the world he knew functioned, complete with the rationalizations that allowed him to move comfortably within its structure. As he saw it, business was business. Everyone knew the rules, and no one was there against his will. You did what you had to do to make a living.
His oldest operation was his loan-sharking business. Occasionally, he explained, force had to be used to make certain the customers made their payments on time. This was unfortunate, he told me, but sometimes unavoidable. Many of his customers were bad risks; and since my father had no legal means to enforce payment, his collectors sometimes had to use physical injury to get the client to pay up. My father was sorry it had to be that way, but the clients knew the risks when they borrowed the money. It was all part of doing business. I learned that my father, who never so much as
raised his fist to any of us, sometimes inflicted injuries in the course of business. Unable to process this contradiction, I tucked the information away in a separate compartment of my brain. I was rapidly developing an intricate network of such compartments. I had to keep the information separated, or I wouldn't be able to function.
I was away from home with my father nearly every Saturday and during school breaks, and I knew that my mother didn't much like it, but she had no real say in the matter. More and more, I was spending my spare time in the Flatbush area of Brooklyn, not far from the house where I'd visited Mrs. P when my grandmother still lived there. My father had bought a bar on Flatbush Avenue and gotten a retired fireman to run it for him. The bartender's name was Jackie. He was a hulking pink-cheeked man, a stereotype of the Irish bartender. The name of the bar was the Gemini Lounge. It was a nondescript building on the corner, faced with whitewashed brick. It was a workingman's bar, not so much a social club as an in-between place where my father could hang out during the day, a place where people could get in touch with him or drop off payments. If someone walked in off the street, it seemed like any other neighborhood hangout. It served drinks and snacks, and there was a jukebox and a small wooden dance floor where young couples did the Hustle on Saturday nights. There was a long wooden bar with a television set over it and tables where people could sit. I would sit on a barstool on Saturday afternoons, sipping Grenadine and soda and talking with Jackie while my father did business. Sometimes I'd go behind the bar and play with all the interesting gizmos I found there. A few feet to the rear of the bar was a little storage room where my father had a safe. He kept money for his loan-sharking business there and occasionally guns or other valuables.
