The Real Thing

by J. J. Murray

  Yes, indeed you did, Mr. Lattanza. I will never forget that hardness as long as I live. It’s making me a bit damp just thinking about it.

  Now, do I mention the clippings, the crucifix, and the wedding picture? Well…two out of three will just have to do.

  On the walls of his closetlike bedroom, he has clippings of his losses to Tank Washington and Felix Cordoza to motivate him. A crucifix reminds him of “the greatest sacrifice ever.”

  Recently named one of the “Sexiest Men Alive” by Personality, Lattanza has kept a low profile for the past ten years, “fishing, traveling, and staying in shape.” Other than a bit part in Heavy Leather, he’s been virtually invisible.

  “It was easier than you think,” he says. “Not many recognize me wearing clothes and without my gloves. It was okay to be anonymous.”

  If Lattanza should beat Washington in their long-awaited rematch on December 7 at Madison Square Garden, he won’t ever have a chance to be anonymous again.

  I am so frustrated. There’s so much more to this man than this! But this is what we give the public. It’s never enough. As vain as he appears to be, he’s about the most humble athlete—or man—I’ve ever met. Sure, he’s misguided, gullible, and naive, but so are most people.

  Me most of all. I can’t believe that I was naive enough to think I could muscle in on Dante and steal him away from the mother of his child. Two days cannot undo almost seventeen years of a “relationship”—and I use that term loosely.

  I think the tone of the article portrays Dante’s humble nature without me saying it. I want to tell the world how gentle he is, how much of a gentleman he is, how much he isn’t the stereotypical conceited “warrior,” how generous he is, how tender he can be, how his “Blood and Guts” nickname fits him and doesn’t fit him. I want readers to know he’s something more than a wicked left hook and a smile. I want them to know how crazy he is about his son.

  I still don’t have a first paragraph. “Dante Lattanza is not your average fighter” just doesn’t cut it. “Dante Lattanza is a man” is a bit too grandiose, even though it’s true. If I tell the world he’s fighting for love, I’ll break my promise to him.

  But I’ll have the ultimate opening. I’ll have a paragraph that will yank the reader into the rest of my story.

  I’m going to let this percolate for a few days over the weekend while I get properly drunk and cry a lot. I know I will. I’m already going through withdrawal.

  There’s my flight.

  I wonder if I can start my pity party early with a glass of wine on the plane.

  Chapter 23

  They don’t have any alcohol on the ninety-minute flight to LaGuardia, so I begin my pity party with some stale peanuts, sour orange juice, and a weak cup of coffee.

  I catch a cab from the airport (on Personality’s tab, of course) and reread the serious article. I barely broke seven hundred words. The Evelyn/Dante’s father info would double it easily. I just can’t get past how much I gushed when I wrote it!

  It’s obvious I’m in love with him.

  Shit.

  I’m in love.

  I spent, what, almost three days with this man and I’m in love? I have never believed in love at first sight. “Is there any other?” he said. Maybe he’s right. But I’ve never let myself get this involved with anyone, even the boyfriends who put up with me more off than on. Love to me has always been just another word in musicals, in date movies, in soap operas, and on the radio.

  I look up. We’re just now hitting the Grand Central Parkway? Geez. Why don’t you all move to Canada? There’s plenty of space up there.

  I need to talk to Dante. I need to apologize. I just need to hear his voice. It’s a little after ten. If he went fishing, he’d probably be back by now. I find the cottage number in my cell phone’s directory and make the call.

  “Hello?”

  Why is Evelyn answering the phone? “Um, hi, Evelyn. It’s Christiana Artis. I, uh, I need to check a few things for my story with Dante.”

  Silence.

  “So, um, I need to speak to Dante.”

  “He’s sleeping,” she says.

  She’s lying. The man never sleeps. “Well, please wake him up. My editor has to have my story by noon today.” She lies, and I lie. It’s a vicious cycle.

  “I don’t want to interrupt his dreams,” she says.

  “Che?”

  “What?”

  “That’s what I said. Che means ‘what.’ Weren’t you married to this guy once? Didn’t you learn any Italian?”

  “He only spoke English around me,” she says.

  Because you took away his ability to be Italian. “How do you know he’s dreaming, Evelyn?”

  “Because I’m looking at him.”

  Where is he? He can’t be…But the only phone I saw was in the guestroom. Did he sleep there last night? No! She has to be lying, but how can I know for sure? “Please wake him. It’ll only take a minute.”

  “He needs his rest,” she says. “He was very busy last night.”

  You…What’s worse than a bitch? An itch. Evelyn is an itch from now on. Wait. She’s talking in a normal voice. If she’s in the guestroom, and he’s in the guestroom…“Why aren’t you whispering?”

  “Dante can sleep through a hurricane,” she says.

  Itch! Witch! “Look, I really need to speak to him now.”

  “I’d really rather not wake him. I can take a message for him if you like.”

  No, I would not like. “I’ll…I’ll just call back later.”

  I slam shut my phone.

  This is bullshit. She’s lying. He wasn’t “busy” last night, not with her. And she is nowhere near Dante now. He probably went fishing this morning to get away from her, and now he’s down at the dock cleaning fish. Yeah. She’s up in her little palace of a guesthouse while he cleans the fish she couldn’t possibly eat. That phone was the only phone there. He wouldn’t dare—

  She has to be lying.

  Oh, God, I hope she’s lying.

  Maybe if I call back, he’ll answer this time. Not likely, but…

  I hit the redial button.

  No answer.

  Why doesn’t Dante have an answering machine, voice mail, something? Why won’t he join the rest of us in the twenty-first century? I know he’s old school, but there are things you have to have in the modern age.

  I press all the numbers this time, hoping the phone misdialed the first time.

  No answer.

  She has obviously left the guesthouse. I’ll bet that’s it. She’s left her little palace to go find Dante. He’s not there with her. If she were there, she’d answer because she couldn’t resist talking to me again, lying to me again, getting me all worked up.

  But if Dante were getting busy with me, I wouldn’t answer the phone for anything, even a hurricane.

  Shit!

  Okay. Get a grip. You can’t go to pieces over this. You’re from Red Hook, Brooklyn. We don’t fall apart over things like this. Oh sure, we fume about something every second of every day, but there have been worse things that have happened to us, like 9/11, the Mets “el foldo” of 2007, the Knicks since Walt Frazier, the Dodgers leaving for LA, the Jets since Broadway Joe Namath….

  I fish in my pocket for Red’s cell phone number. I know he’s in Montreal, but maybe he can get through for me or at least give Dante a message.

  Red doesn’t answer either, but at least he has voice mail.

  “Red, it’s me, Christiana. Things didn’t go too well, and I left last night. No one is answering the phone at Dante’s cottage. Please have him call me as soon as you and Lelani get back from Montreal, okay? It’s urgent. Bye.”

  I sigh. There really isn’t much more I can do. Red will give him the message, and then Dante will call me.

  I hope.

  The cab stops. I pay him. I get out. I’m home in Red Hook, where everyone has to hang tough.

  The Dutch, who obviously couldn’t spell, originally named Re
d Hook (population eleven thousand) Roode Hoek. Red Hook is the former home of tough Brooklyn dockworkers and was once the stomping grounds of NBA star Carmelo Anthony, who lived here until he was in the third grade. The Knicks could certainly use him. Creepy horror writer H. P. Lovecraft grew up here. That should tell you something about Red Hook. Rocky Marciano’s trainer Charley Goodman, Wiseguy actor Ray Sharkey, and real wise guy “Crazy Joe” Gallo were all Red Hookers, too. Gallo was shot up in Little Italy at Umberto’s Clam House on his forty-third birthday while eating scungilli. Red Hook is also the site where that knucklehead floated his homemade wooden submarine, which looked like a floating brown egg, too close to the QE2 and got arrested, a tallboy beer in his hand.

  A sign on a Red Hook door says it all:

  NO MENUS

  NO CIRCULARS

  NO ANYTHING

  NO EVERYTHING

  Or, as I overheard one night at Sunny’s Bar, “Red Hook is like a hot chick in coveralls.”

  I’m no hot chick, and though I live in a pre-WWII warehouse near the intersection of Van Brunt and Reed, I own no coveralls. I open my black steel door and see twelve hundred square feet of “space” in my studio apartment, for which I pay only sixteen hundred a month plus utilities—a legal steal these days. I share this building with artists, designers, writers, and other bohemians like me, none of whom seem to have regular working hours. I know. Some of them work long into the night, hammering, banging, and generally being industrious. I have a beamed ceiling, a full East River view through an arched window, shiny hardwood floors, a tiny kitchen, a bathroom about the size of Dante’s room, and lots of open space. Carnival Cruise ships appear, blast their horns, and disappear from my window, all of them sailing away and leaving me behind, and on a clear evening, I can catch Lady Liberty’s glowing head.

  Not tonight. New Jersey must be on fire again. Are those white caps on the water? New Jersey blows, too.

  I hit my bed without undressing. It’s not as stiff as the floor in Dante’s room, but it sure is comfortable. I prop myself up on two pillows, listening to the ding dang dong of the buoys and checking out my “space.”

  I have turned my space into an eclectic mix of whatever strikes my fancy. I have a long green sofa from the sixties, above which hangs Brown Skin, an acrylic by Darlene F; Twins, a black and green painting by Olivia Rose Jackson; and Red Hook, a series of color photographs by Scott A. Ettin. All are framed, and none of them matches each other, the couch, or anything else for that matter. Splashed through my space are old movie posters, framed and unframed photographs of old Brooklyn, menus from defunct Brooklyn restaurants, ancient magazine covers from Collier’s, playbills of plays I’ve never seen, and a postcard collage of places I’ve never been. I have not spent much for any of it, shopping so often at Main Street Ephemera (on Columbia Street—don’t ask) they know me by name. A neon clock that rarely keeps the right time hangs over the window and my Indo Nouveau sun lounger and side table, the only truly expensive pieces I’ve bought. Whenever I hold my laptop on my lap—where a laptop is supposed to go—the sun lounger becomes my office. Scattered here and there are TwigCraft lamps made from New York City street trees and bamboo candleholders holding white waxen nubs. Loads of shelving crammed with books, most of them dusty hardbacks and other unique finds from Freebird Books & Goods, surrounds my space. A framed page from The Book of Changes hangs opposite my “dining room” table, an old library table surrounded by mismatched chairs and stools, all gathered on an L-shaped rug remnant I bought from a neighbor for five dollars.

  My favorite places within my space are shrines to boxing and the Brooklyn Dodgers. Granddaddy had collected a few boxing items over the years, and when he died, I inherited his collection. A glove signed by Joe Frazier dangles from a nail in between a black-and-white autographed photo of Ali training at Gleason’s and an ancient autographed photo of Kid Gavilán. A 16 x 20 photograph signed by both Joe Louis and Jake LaMotta hangs above a green Everlast robe on a hook. I sometimes wear the robe, which Frazier wore in the fight against Jerry Quarry after Ali beat him in the Garden, whenever I feel the need for a comeback.

  I ought to put it on now. Maybe later.

  I get up and hook Dante the Moose’s tag to the nail. Wow. I’ve added to my boxing wall. I should have had Dante autograph the moose’s nose.

  My Brooklyn Dodgers wall is just to the left of my bed. All those heroes have gone away. I have Duke Snider climbing the Bulova watch sign, Maury Wills’s number-thirty jersey, a lithograph of Ebbets Field with a real piece of brick attached at the bottom, and team photographs from the fifties. Jackie Robinson keeps stealing home, Pee Wee Reese keeps fielding the ball and throwing it to Gil Hodges, and Don Newcombe is forever winding up on the mound. I even have a globe containing a miniature Ebbets Field that plays “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” I want to buy an actual Ebbets Field chair, but I don’t have the seven thousand dollars (!) it would take to add it to my dining room chair collection. I never saw the Brooklyn Dodgers play, but Granddaddy brought them to life for me, and he talked about them as if they were friends of his. “When Campy had a good day, there was no stoppin’ ’em,” he’d say. Now we’ve sent a Yankee manager out to LA to coach the “other” Dodgers. Serves ’em right.

  Some people think my space is an indoor yard sale.

  I just call it home.

  I used to have friends who called Red Hook home, but they’ve all gone away. LaKeisha, Kimberly, and Kayla were the girls I used to jump rope with a long time ago on “the Back.” I haven’t seen LaKeisha since graduation. She was the one who wanted to be a dancer so badly. She was always teaching me different moves and dances that I could never quite master. She also had the ugliest toes I have ever seen, all gnarled and callused. I hope she’s made it somewhere. Kimberly got pregnant during high school and dropped out. She supposedly lives over in Queens with a few more kids. I doubt I’d recognize her. Kayla is the only one I’ve talked to in the last ten years, and that was just in passing as we waited for the F Train at Rockefeller Center. She’s a senior analyst for some Wall Street firm making “crazy money” doing arbitrage or something extremely dull like that. She looked so corporate, dressed in a blue pinstriped power jacket and skirt and carrying a dazzling attaché. And this was the girl who wore baggy clothes and skateboarded everywhere she went in ninth grade. She seemed happy, though, and she promised to keep in touch.

  I haven’t heard from her in at least five years. Once folks leave Red Hook, I guess they never come back.

  I’m hardly home anyway, and leaving Red Hook daily is a hassle and a half. The Mass Transit Authority (MTA) says I have several choices, and each choice stinks. I can take the 61B bus to Smith Street and take the F Train to Rockefeller Center roughly ten miles away. Sounds reasonable, right? Well, the Massive Trauma Assholes are planning to close the F and G lines any day now for up to a year, not that I’ll miss the Smith/Ninth Street station. “Derelict” is a compliment for that station. The paint doesn’t peel—it reaches out, grabs you, follows you home, and asks to spend the night. The escalator might have worked in 1965, and it rains inside the station, too. This bus/subway method costs me about an hour a day each way and roughly a hundred dollars a month. Some folks are skipping the Smith/Ninth Street Station entirely and going on to the Borough Hall Station. If they close the F and G lines, I’m looking at a ninety-minute bus ride to work.

  That would suck big time.

  I can also take the New York Water Taxi to Pier 11 on Wall Street and ride the Seventh Avenue Local to Times Square at about, oh, two hundred fifty a month. It’d be cheaper to take the M6 bus from the pier, but I don’t like buses. If I had my own boat like Dante’s, I could cruise past the Statue of Liberty to work every day on the way to—I have no idea. Somewhere over near Thirty-fourth Street, probably, where I’d have to pay extortion rates to dock my boat, and I’d still need another mode of transportation from the dock to Rockefeller Center. I suppose I could buy a car.

  Sorr
y. I lost my mind for a moment. I’m from Brooklyn. I don’t drive. Someone or something drives me.

  After all that good exercise with Dante, I guess I could bike it. I get out my trusty Lonely Planet New York City map that has been unfolded and folded so often that streets have vanished from most of the creases. I trace a relatively direct route with my finger. If I ride by Red Hill Park and pick up Clinton Street, I can cross the Brooklyn Bridge.

  Hmm.

  Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge at night? In the rain or snow? It does give one pause. Once in Manhattan, I could zip by City Hall Park and eventually go up Sixth Avenue. Yikes. That gives one several pauses. But even if I dog it or walk my bike through traffic, I’ll get to work in half an hour and save up to three thousand dollars a year. I’ll also be in better shape…and arrive at work sweaty. Yeah, I’ll be sweaty, and if it snows, I’ll be in trouble. Unless they sell snow tires for bikes.

  Maybe I can combine the water taxi with a bike—the water taxis have bike racks. It’s only about five miles from Pier 11 to Rockefeller Center, and I could be at work within forty minutes.

  I need a damn helicopter.

  I get out of bed and stand at my open window looking out into the daylight. I have never quite gotten used to Red Hook’s smell. It’s nothing like the fresh, clean air in Canada. I also miss the silence, the lapping waves, the crackling fireplace, the pine breezes, even the icy cold water, the sunsets, Dante’s sweat….

  Sigh.

  I need a few days off to recover, so I call in “sick,” buy a bottle of Cavit Pinot Noir (2002), put on my new red, white, and green flannel shirt, drink two glasses of wine, and pass out.