“I’d need witness protection.”
“You’d need an army.”
“Abortion! My flock! We cannot stand for this senseless murder!”
“Would we keep it?” I asked.
“I… yeah… I don’t know. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You wouldn’t leave for Arizona.”
“Don’t say that! You know I hate thinking about it.”
“Baby, I’m only kidding. You’re going to be a superstar out there. I’ll get shirts and hats and follow you on TV and everything. Go Sun Devils!”
Maria had accepted a softball scholarship to Arizona State last month—we had a framed newspaper cutout of her signing the “Letter of Intent” hanging in my basement over near the list of Prominent Italians.
’Zona State was a perennial softball powerhouse obsessed with Maria’s speed and arm. She was basically guaranteed the start at center field as a freshman. Her dad and uncle had played baseball and football for the Sun Devils, and her uncle’s house was covered in maroon–and-gold memorabilia with that pesky little trident-wielding mascot mocking my every move: “She’ll fall for a quarterback from California, you greasy wop.” I suppose the Devil is a bigot.
“Come on, babe. You don’t leave until the end of next summer, and who knows where I’ll go to school. Maybe those Trojans will come knocking.” Sometimes I had to lie.
She turned onto her side and started to cry.
“But don’t worry, my flock, for salvation is open for those who repent and avoid the fiery depths of Hell! Call the number at the bottom of the screen…” A number at the bottom of the screen twinkled to the same ethereal jingle I had heard as a kid. “And receive the blessed Survival Button in the mail this week.”
An infographic for the Survival Button appeared on the screen for the low, low price of $9.99 (plus S&H) to absolve those you love from their sins of fetal homicide.
The paisley bedsheets wrapped around Maria’s bottom half like a mermaid’s tail as her bare back convulsed lightly and her shoulder blades pinched together while she wept. I could have cried with her, I wanted to—I had to ask the proper authorities if I was allowed to cry since making the (figurative, not literal) plunge into manhood—but what good would that do? I loved her; I never knew a truer truth.
I pulled her in close and she tucked herself up underneath my arm in postcoital hibernation—a different sort of flesh-on-flesh contact that gave me the “warm and fuzzies.” I was transported back to Glenwood, sitting in that slowly forming circle to the sound of tennis balls gliding on linoleum as Ms. O’Donnell was using that term—“warm and fuzzies”—to describe how she did not feel when Pierce Stone had called Olena Lazarenko’s family “refugees.”
“I’m feeling the ‘cold and pricklies,’ Pierce, and so is Olena. I think she deserves an apology.”
Then I was transported back to the woods behind Glenwood on the day we had searched for Hell. And to the Geigers’ attic as Karl and I ascended to Hell, and on Clinton Road, as my car full of paisanos plunged through Hell, and there were cachinnating Sun Devils dancing in circles with naked California quarterbacks impaled on their tridents while bird-monsters and toad-monsters and snails devoured them whole and dragged their mangled bodies into the deepest depths of Hell like a Hieronymus Bosch painting. And when I came to, I was vigorously flipping through the channels, hitting those infomercials that dominated the 3:00 to 5:00 a.m. time block but always returning to the neon shine of Tom Jones Cleaver’s electric-white smile: “And that is the truth that follows the coming of the Lord!”
A pool of Maria’s tears was forming in my armpit. I pulled her in closer and her hand rested on my chest and I realized that Hell was everywhere without her.
“Maria.”
“Yeah, Victor?”
“I love you back.”
Tank and Carina had the house to themselves because their mom was out in the City or down the Shore or out in Canada or Cambodia with Roger and they wanted to have a party. Unfortunately, such soirees had evolved from ordering Dominos and trying to spot boobs on HBO to the occasional cigarette to blowjobs in the bathroom to the liberation from virginity to wanton revelry of Caligulaic proportions—its current threshold—where the DeVallo household became a stopover for kids from Bayonne to Bloomingdale to trade in every pill and powder known to man like a Garden State Samarkand. It was at such a soiree—an exchanging of indulgences—that André, zooted like a Lusitanian Tony Montana, convinced Joey to go see “Katie and them” in Westfield even though Joey hadn’t spoken to Katie in like a year—the things we do for lust.
When the cops arrived at the scene, the cream Audi was wrapped around a telephone pole on Route 22; they were both beyond recognition.
At Joey’s wake, being good Italian Catholics, his family had an open casket—a practice that, along with the prohibition of clerical sex, should be abolished. “If you have an open casket for me, I’ll come back to haunt you,” Mum Mum would always say.
Joey lay there in the pillow box looking like he was molded from clay. I imagined stealing the coffin with my remaining paisanos and sending it down the Rahway River followed by a flaming arrow: a warrior’s passage into the next life. I gave him two Our Fathers from my knees (I remembered them this time) and hurried to my feet so the growing line could get moving—Audis from as far south as Neptune were pulling into Galante’s Funeral Home parking lot on Springfield Avenue.
Carmine, Sonny, and Tank were standing in line with Ms. Lampedusa, receiving condolensces as if they were family; Joey didn’t have any siblings.
I had rarely seen my paisanos in the months leading up to Joey’s death. I wanted to balance my time with them and with Maria but quickly discovered it was an insoluble mixture. I even tried bringing Maria to a recent soiree at Tank’s, but the place had been a drug bust waiting to happen. I felt like I got a contact high doing that three-step handshake shoulder-hug with Pierre and Henri.
“Look at this real Slim Shady!” Pierre reached out to mess up my newly bleached blond hair.
Tank had burst out of his room with this girl, who looked way too young for him and was way too thin, tucked up under his arm and a little white ring lining his right nostril.
“Eyy ohh! Vito! I got plenty more of this!” he’d said, flinging the little bag of powder in his forefingers like it was a tea-time bell. “And this!” he gave his arm candy a wound-up smack on the ass—I thought Maria was going to faint.
Plus we couldn’t risk Maria getting tagged in a picture on Facebook with a beer or shot of vodka: “I won’t even be allowed to have Facebook in Arizona,” she would say. “I guess I’ll need access to yours so I can check up on you! Make sure you aren’t scumming on me.”
I envied the days before everyone had a camera phone, when a man could take his goomah (translation, literal: godmother; colloquial: mistress, side piece) out to a sit-down dinner without having to worry about a surprise Facebook tag waiting for him on his MacBook like served court papers. The president of the United States of America had an affair with the most famous woman in Hollywood and there was zero evidence of it happening—a freshman cheerleader gives me a box of brownies in the hallway and I’m being interrogated worse than a Jew in Spain!
And I wasn’t a cheater, either. I was so content with Maria that I viewed other girls with monk-like indifference, even the freshman Ukrainians with their tight asses and the perpetual beauties like Julie Fischer and Jenna Tisch. It was rumored that Julie had been blowing Aaron Podhoretz when he was home from college and he’d unloaded a glob right on her forehead—she didn’t seem so special after that.
“Victor, I want to leave,” Maria said, glaring into my soul. “One of those… African-American guys…”
“No, they’re Haitian.”
“One of those… Haitians kept talking about his gun and it’s vulgar.”
“Oh, Henri?
He doesn’t mean his penis; he’s talking about his nine-millimeter. Henri is always strapped.” My clarification didn’t change her mind.
But that was back before Joey died, when the DeVallo residence was serendipitous bedlam, not the bleak, backwater opium den it became when the techno music ceased and the Roman candles stopped firing.
Within a year of Joey’s death, Tank checked into rehab out in Colorado, Carmine got a girl pregnant, and Sonny disappeared, which was becoming an increasingly difficult thing to do.
Oh, and André? Ms. Lampedusa wouldn’t let André’s family put a candle anywhere near Joey’s on that godforsaken stretch of Route 22.
Castles were torn down overnight in the middle of my junior year. The economic crash didn’t hit everyone equally, but it hit everyone. “I think we’ll be okay,” my mother said. “You’re lucky your sister won’t be going to college.” Ahhh, the double-headed punch of a mother’s guilt. I knew it well. In one sentence I was reminded that my sister had a disability restricting her from graduating high school that was completely out of my control and that I would not be receiving a football scholarship for college.
The phone usually rang at dinner and my father would never permit anyone to answer it, but we had gotten rid of the one with the tan spiral cord that would follow my mother around the kitchen like a pet and upgraded to a cordless phone with caller ID.
“Don’t answer it, don’t answer it. We’re eating.”
“It’s Hermien Badenhorst, Silas’s mom. Why would she be calling now?”
“Oh, she’s so nice. Vito, you still hang out with Silas?”
“Should I get it?” she asked, agitated by her limbic role of the house phone answerer.
“Okay, okay. Just answer it. Did something happen between you and Silas?”
I hadn’t really spoken to Silas recently. We went to a bunch of the same parties and were definitely friendly, but he’d gravitated more toward the Jew Crew and I had drifted off with Maria.
So when my mother started with the “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” I had to really focus and think if I had done something with and/or to Silas that perhaps I had lodged somewhere deep in my subconscious in a fit of Mr. Hyde–like fury.
“What? What is it, hun?” my father asked, his mouth full of cheese ravioli. “Hey, Vic, you like the ravs? Good, huh? Tell Maria—tell her she won’t find ravs like these out in Tempe.”
“Oh my God.” She moved her hand around her face—fingers on eyes to forehead to cheek—stiff and calculated like a silent-film actor. “Okay, I’ll tell him. Thank you, Hermien. How is he? And Silas? Okay. Okay, take care now.” And she hung up.
“Victor…” It was my full name, but she had tears in her eyes. This was a curveball; I didn’t know what to expect.
“Hun, what is it?”
“Victor, Mr. Shaffer, Paxton’s father—he killed himself this morning.”
“Are you serious?” I asked like a seventeen-year-old. Like a total idiotic imbecile who lacked any shred of sympathetic depth and actually, possibly, considered that his mother had the comedic aptitude to pull off such a dry joke as Your friend’s father killed himself—psych! “How?” I asked.
“He… Britney, you can be excused, sweetheart.”
“Okay, Mom?”
“Yeah, it’s okay, you can go downstairs.”
“But… why are all of the fathers dying?”
“Just go downstairs, Brit!” I screamed.
“Don’t yell at her, Victor!” my mother shouted.
Britney rushed out of the kitchen and down the steps, Marlene in hand.
“He… uh… he jumped in front of the train on his way to work,” my mother said, as if the leap had been nothing more than an inconvenience on his commute.
“Oh my God, that’s just… that’s awful,” my father said between wet chomps of melt-in-your-mouth braciole.
“Are you going to be okay, sweetheart?” she asked, as if it had been Paxton himself mangled on the tracks. “You need to be excused? You can go.”
“Go ahead, my friend. Give Maria a call. Tell her we have plenty more ravs if she hasn’t eaten yet. She isn’t going to get ravs like this out in Tempe,” my father said, as if I hadn’t heard him the first time.
I accepted my father’s invitation to hang with my girlfriend on a school night and texted her in the hallway while I eavesdropped on my parents’ conversation.
Text to Maria <3 <3: Hey, Paxton’s dad killed himself. Want to come over?
“Hey, hun, which one was Shaffer again? Was he the one with the Porsche and the boat?”
“I think it was a Maserati, and no, they didn’t have a boat. Paxton, the one in Vic’s grade, would go around telling everyone they had a boat.”
“I’ll have my mother send them a lasagna.”
“Oh, this is just so awful. Tony, this is the third one in three months.”
“And there was one in Summit, too.”
“What a way to go out.”
Text from Maria <3 <3: OMG!! Baby, you poor thing. I’ll be right over. I’m just finishing up dinner now. Love you <3
I went down into the basement and opened the garage door and Maria jumped into my arms like I had returned from war, kissing my neck and cheek—I instinctively sunk my claws into her ass.
“Oh, I see you’re handling this well.”
“Let’s go in your car,” I said, biting her neck. “Britney is in the basement watching a movie.”
“Victor, you can talk to me about it. Stop repressing your feelings.”
“My feelings aren’t what’s being repressed…”
“What?”
“Come on, just follow me.” I grabbed her by the hand and led her to the SUV parked in the driveway.
“Victor, stop it. Your friend’s dad killed himself and you’re upset. Why won’t you talk to me about it?”
“Fine! Okay, fine. I’ll talk about it if you blow me while I do.”
She was like Suzanne Somers reacting to a misogynistic inquiry from her horny roommate: “Ohhh, Jack.”
I sat in the backseat, pants around my ankles, as Maria plateaued out from my waist, snug between the captain’s chairs.
“You know how upset I was when Mr. Geiger died, right?”
“Mhmm.”
“And how I used to cry about my Mum Mum and Nana dying?”
“Uhn uh.”
“No?”
Pop! “Nope.”
“Oh, yeah, I used to watch videos about, like, dinosaurs dying, and they’d be crying and then I’d start crying and my Mum Mum would tell me everything was alright while she had a Dewars with Bill Clinton.”
“Hhmm?”
“No, not that Bill Clinton. Could you imagine?”
“Mm ehm.”
“My mom wouldn’t let him in our house. You should hear her go on about Obama…”
Pop! “Victor, what does this have to do with Paxton’s dad jumping in front of a train?”
I knew my continued pleasuring was contingent on my ability to share my feelings on my friend’s dead father, so I ranted: “What doesn’t it have to do with our current political climate?” I pushed her head back down as I continued with Mussolinian ferocity. “The two-party system is broken. I don’t understand why everyone at school is going crazy over Obama. Well, what the shit is he going to do over there in Iraq? End the war? You know we used to think Kader was from Iraq? You don’t know Kader, do you? I haven’t seen him in years. I just friended him on Facebook, actually.”
“Viigtur.”
“I’m getting there. Okay, well, Paxton was—see, Paxton was the one who would spread that. And I listened to him even though I knew Paxton was always lyin’.”
Pop! “Okay, I’m going to stop because you clearly just invited me over so I’d suck your dick and you know I have a
double-header tomorrow in Belleville…”
“Okay! I’ll tell you the real reason I’m not that upset about Paxton.” She put my penis back in her mouth, but with a cock-eyed look that said I know what you’re up to, Ferraro.
“The other day, Paxton, who has really just turned into a liberal douche in the past couple of years, corrected me on my usage of ‘black’ over ‘African-American’ and then proceeded—get this—then he proceeded to call Matt Dershowtiz ‘so autistic’ when he dribbled the ball off his foot during gym.”
“Mmmm.”
“Right? I swear I wanted to knock him the fuck out right there. And they’re all saying it now. Pierce Stone says it with such vigor, it’s like he rediscovers it every time it pops into his brain! Fuck, I wish we brought Fight Club back.”
I imagined knocking Pierce Stone into the garage cement with a warhammer (the rules for Fight Club had changed) and bludgeoning him until he was a pulp, and I started to come.
“Mmm ehhmmm.” She smacked my thigh in frustration. “Hey! Where was my warning?”
Text from Dad: Hey, you guys coming in? Maria eat yet? No braciole in Tempe!
The photo spread through the hallways of Millburn High School like wildfire. My RAZR started to vibrate in my pocket during third period, and within a few minutes all the guys in the class were muffling laughs and gasps and mouthing “check your phone” to classmates across the room.
“Yo, pssttt, Ferraro,” said Mitch Farber over my shoulder. “Yo dude, check your phone.”
Mr. Peters, a tenured teacher who had been at Millburn since before my father arrived thirty years ago, was reading a book by Al Franken as Higher Learning played on a roll-cart television set and hadn’t noticed an iota of the buzzing hubbub. I checked my phone:
Text from El Dominicano (Jabie)
My jaw dropped and I, too, had to muffle a gasp. I wish I could say that I immediately looked away in disgust, but that simply didn’t happen. Before my eyes was a naked Michaela Silves with the handle of a hairbrush tucked snug up inside of her—the bristles bursting from her loins like a porcupine—as she stood in front of a filthy mirror and bathroom vanity.
Lunchmeat Page 19
