Paradise City

by Lorenzo Carcaterra

  “We’re very close to Eastchester,” Lo Manto said. “That means we are very close to a wonderful meal. An antipasto misto, a bowl of pasta, and a glass of vino will put you in a much better mood. It might even make you smile.”

  “Taking you to the airport and shoving you on a plane back to Italy would make me smile,” Jennifer said. “And let’s not forget, we’re on city time in this car, which means it’s taxpayer money we’re wasting while we’re driving around looking for the latest Zagat five-star. They may not give two shits about stuff like that back in Naples, but it’s pretty much a huge deal in New York.”

  “I will pay,” Lo Manto said. “Both for the meal and for the gas. With my own money. It is what’s fair.”

  “It’s going to be your nightmare if I find out you’re playing me,” Jennifer said. “You’ll regret it till the day you’re on your deathbed.”

  “You are not married, correct?” Lo Manto said. “And no boyfriend as well. True?”

  “What’s that have to do with the price of tomatoes?” Jennifer asked, calming down, more agitated than angry. “I could have a GQ husband, six model kids, and Rin Tin Tin waiting for me on the front porch, I’d still be in the pissed-off mood I’m in.”

  “You spend all your free time alone,” Lo Manto said. “It is why you are always so fast to get angry. You have, come si dice, a short fuse. Like a volcano, you wait to explode.”

  “I suppose you got a nice, hefty Italian bride waiting for you back home,” Jennifer said. “The kind that cooks all your meals, irons all your clothes, and serves all your needs. And maybe, seeing as how you’re both a cop and an Italian, you also have yourself something even better on the side. That’s the Kodak moment that flashes before my eyes.”

  “No,” Lo Manto said, shaking his head. “I have no wife or girlfriend. I too spend all my free time alone. And like you, I get angry very fast. I am the one with the short fuse.”

  “It fits easier on a man,” Jennifer said. “You don’t get ragged on as much by your friends, your family, the others on the job. Everybody you know trying to pair you up with someone they wouldn’t be caught in a grave with. All this massive effort just so, at the end of the day, you can end up as miserable as everyone else around you.”

  “Now I know you have never been to Italy,” Lo Manto said. “To be a single man, as I am, in his late thirties, is un grande problema. There is always talk behind your back that maybe you are not right. Mi capisci?”

  “The words gay and cop hardly ever make a Scrabble match,” Jennifer said. “No matter what side of the ocean you walk your beat.”

  “And then there are all the female cousins in faraway places who have never married,” Lo Manto said. “And there are reasons found for us to meet.”

  “You would marry a cousin?”

  “I would not, no,” Lo Manto said with a shrug of indifference. “But many in Naples have. And in New York, too. I have an Aunt Claudia and an Uncle Franco, they are first cousins and have been married for close to forty years. And they are more in love now than when they were children. It is una bella cosa to see them together, holding hands, teasing one to the other. Some customs are much slower to break than others and some last so long for a reason.”

  “That would never work for me,” Jennifer said. “I can’t stand being in the same room with my relatives, never mind being married to one.”

  “Some are made for marriage and others are not,” Lo Manto said. “And I think you are a better police officer, here and in Italy, if you have no family.”

  “Seeing how there’s no sign of my Bachelor anywhere on the horizon, I’ll have to agree with you,” Jennifer said. “Not unless we throw Milo in the mix. He’s been crazy about me for a lot of years.”

  “But you said you had no fidanzato?” Lo Manto said.

  “If that means boyfriend,” Jennifer said, “you’re right. Milo’s my cat and my friend and the one who listens to me bitch about my problems late at night when nobody else cares. He cleans up after himself, never leaves a mess outside his box, and even likes to drink beer. He’s as close to the perfect man as I’ll ever get.”

  “Does he know about me?”

  “There isn’t anything that goes on in my life that he doesn’t know,” Jennifer said. “We keep no secrets between us, me and Milo. We’re partners clean down the middle. Total trust.”

  “Even the gatto wants me back in Italy,” Lo Manto said. “Well, soon he gets his wish and you both will be happy again.”

  “How soon?” Jennifer asked, hitting the brakes hard at a red light, ignoring the angry glances of the crossing pedestrians.

  “I can’t talk when my stomach is empty,” Lo Manto said, dismissing her question with a wave of his hand. “I can’t even think. We must eat now. That’s a request even a great gatto like Milo would honor.”

  Jennifer stared at Lo Manto, shook her head, and hit the gas, running through the light, barely missing an oncoming Ford Taurus, the driver’s right fist furiously slamming down on his horn. “Maybe I’ll get lucky,” she muttered. “Maybe I’ll get food poisoning and be out a few days.”

  “Have the raw clams,” Lo Manto said. “That usually works in Naples.”

  12

  FELIPE LOPEZ STOOD and watched as the man in the red sauce–splattered shirt slid a plain slice onto a paper plate and rested it on the counter. “You want a drink with that?” he asked.

  “What I want and what I can buy ain’t the same,” Felipe said, reaching for the red pepper. “I got enough to cover the slice, so I’ll just stick with that.”

  “Where you been sleeping these days?” the man asked, watching Felipe fold the slice and take a big bite.

  “This a pizzeria or a police station, Joey?” Felipe asked. “You should be asking me how I like the pie, not where I get my mail sent.”

  “You’re still on the street,” Joey said. “That’s why you give off with the smart answers instead of laying out the truth.”

  “I deal with it,” Felipe said. “That’s as much as I can do right now.”

  “The brothers at that school of yours came up with six months’ worth of rent money a few weeks back,” Joey said. “At least that’s what I heard. Handed it off to your father and told him to go find a place for the both of you. What happened there?”

  “Six months of rent money can buy you four weeks of booze,” Felipe said. “That’s what happened. And that picture ain’t never gonna change. Not while he’s alive, anyway.”

  Felipe Lopez was fifteen and homeless. His father, Enrique, was an abusive alcoholic, out of work and in debt, living and sleeping in a string of downtown flophouses. He had managed to get it together enough to figure a way to scam Social Security out of a small disability check the first of each month, which he used to help fund his bottle habit. Felipe avoided him as much as possible as he moved from shelter to shelter in search of warm food, a cool drink and a clean cot. On some nights, usually during the school year, he would take advantage of a friend’s offer and sleep on a fold-away in the boy’s tight one-bedroom apartment. And some other nights he would crouch in the rear of a steamy tenement hallway, waiting out the hours until the sun came up. Either way, on the street or off, Felipe managed to stay in school. He scrounged together enough pocket cash to keep the mandatory uniform he had to wear clean and hold up to the demanding academic schedule devised by the Catholic order of brothers who ran the place.

  Felipe was twelve the last time he saw his mother. She was just out of her teens when she met Enrique, and soon she was pregnant with his son. The marriage was always shaky at best, both husband and wife chasing demons of their own, trying to hold down low-paying jobs, with little time left over to care for an infant son. “She was laying flat out,” Felipe once told a friend about that last day with his mother, “her eyes rolling like marbles in the back of her head, white foam bubbling up on her lips. She was holding the crack pipe in her right hand, held it tight like it was a winning lottery ticket. It looked like
she was floating away. I said good-bye to her right then and there, in the middle of a crack den, in a room filled with junkies and pipe rats.”

  “She dead?” his friend asked.

  “To me she is,” Felipe said, shrugging his shoulders, his voice still navigating the border between adolescent and adult. “Probably to everybody else that knew her back in the day. Except maybe for her dealer. That lowlife will be the last set of eyes my moms will ever see before the drop-off into the OD.”

  The counterman filled a small plastic cup with crushed ice and Coke and rested it next to Felipe. “Use this to wash down the slice,” he said to the boy. “My pizza’s the best. With a drink, it’s even better.”

  “I ain’t one of Jerry’s kids,” Felipe said, ignoring the cold soda. “You looking to give something away, dial him up.”

  “I don’t move nothin’ for free,” Joey said. “I don’t care who it’s for. You’re gonna pay me for that soda, you just won’t be paying me for it today.”

  “All right then,” Felipe said, reaching a hand out for the drink. “Next time I walk in here, you and me be square.”

  “You keeping up with the schoolwork?” Joey asked. “Those brothers don’t give a shit you live in a mansion or on the steps of a sewer, they expect all their boys to be pulling down straights.”

  “I get my A’s no sweat,” Felipe said. “And I don’t mind the work, either. Gives me an excuse to hang in the library late as I want.”

  “You catch any buzz with that lady from social?” he asked. “I seen her around here the other night. She any help to you or just talking it to cash a weekly?”

  “I don’t let her anywhere near me,” Felipe said, munching on the thin crust end of the pizza. “She’s starting to catch wise I don’t sleep anyplace steady. She nails it, I head straight for a foster home and I want no piece of that end.”

  “Where she think you’re living?” Joey asked. “The Plaza?”

  “There’s a house up around Baychester,” Felipe said. “Remember Jerry Botten? Old man lost a leg down the piers?”

  “Extra mushrooms, heavy on the cheese,” Joey said, wiping down the Formica top with a damp cloth. “I never forget a regular. He died about six, maybe eight weeks ago. Am I right?”

  “That’s him,” Felipe said. “Now his two kids are butting heads over the house. Who gets it, who don’t. Until all that gets cleaned up, the place stays the way it was the day Jerry kicked. So that’s the address I give the lady from social. She’s been up there four, five times I heard looking for me. Walked away like a Jehovah’s Witness, her hands and pockets empty.”

  “She go up to the school?” Joey asked. “Scope you out there?”

  “It ain’t like she’s on me 24/7, Joey,” Felipe said. “Came up there twice, figuring to nab me in the halls between classes. The brothers put some Jason Kidd moves on her and made sure she left same way she came in.”

  “Which leaves you where?” Joey asked.

  “Here,” Felipe said. “With you. Eatin’ your pizza and drinkin’ your soda.”

  “And you get the money for that how?” Joey asked, leaning forward, one arm bent across the countertop.

  “I take off pizza places,” Felipe said, flashing a wide smile. “That way I can score on cash and cheese.”

  “I’m talking to you serious,” Joey said, genuine concern behind his words. “You’re on the street, which is no place for anybody to be, let alone a kid still in high school. Shit happens out there and none of it is even close to being good. You can joke about it you want, maybe that helps you deal with it, but the real deal is short of laughs.”

  “I’m too old to cry, Joey,” Felipe said. The boy stepped away from the counter. The smile was gone now. He was a wiry young man, thin and fast, a natural athlete with a handsome face and charcoal eyes set off by a head of hair as thick and dark as tar. “And I’m too young not to be scared. But this is my hand and this is what I gotta play. You can only do your best and hope for it, too.”

  Felipe excelled at playground basketball and was a solid enough player to work his way into the five-on-five rotation games that offered cash payouts to the winners. His six-dollar cut was usually enough to carry him for three days, sometimes four. He also competed with the homeless, the winos, and the rummies for the empty cans and bottles that filled the corner garbage bins or were left on the sides of curbs and in unlit hallways. But a full-day tour of that work never amounted to more than pocket change.

  The boy never begged and he never accepted handouts, neither from the brothers at school nor from his extended street family. Not even from the do-gooders down at the Salvation Army. “I’ll make my way out of this,” he once told Brother Joseph, the school’s American history teacher. He was the prime force behind convincing school administrators to ignore the boy’s rising tuition bills and focus on his grades, making him eligible for one of the four yearly scholarships that were offered. “Maybe not in a way you’d like or want to see, but I’ll do it. I’m not gonna be on the streets the rest of my life and I don’t count on being found dead there either.”

  “So you steal,” Brother Joseph said. They were in the school gym that day, a large, warehouse-size space, with a regulation basketball court, running track, and indoor bleachers. “You take what belongs to someone else and make it your own.”

  “It’s what I need to do now, Brother,” he said. “I’m as happy about it as you are, but it’s keeping me alive. And I never take from those that have less than me.”

  “No one has less than you, Felipe,” Brother Joseph said. “Even I have more in my pocket than you do.”

  “That was a choice you made,” Felipe said. “I never wanted to be poor.”

  “One crime always leads to another,” Brother Joseph said. “It’s easy to move from stealing food to eat to robbing a bank or a restaurant at gunpoint. I’ve seen it happen too many times to too many kids the same age as you. I’m forty-two years old and sick of going to funerals, watching them bury people twice as young as me.”

  “Let’s not make a U-turn here and put me on a wanted poster,” Felipe said. “I steal candy bars, snack foods, a bottle of 7-Up maybe, take a bag out of the Chinese delivery guy’s basket. Nobody’s gonna die off of anything like that.”

  “Speaking of which,” Brother Joseph said, his voice echoing off the thick walls of the empty court, “Denise in the cafeteria tells me we’re missing one of the roasted turkeys that were delivered the other night. You wouldn’t know anything about that?”

  “No,” Felipe said, shaking his head. “But you want, I’ll look into it for you.”

  “I’d appreciate it,” Brother Joseph said.

  Felipe walked out of the pizzeria and into the thick and humid East Bronx air. This was the hottest city summer he could remember, and he was giving some thought to spending the night up on Ely Avenue, where he could always count on the fire hydrants being open full blast. A couple of hours under the spray of the ice cold water there would be more than enough to cool him down. Then, he could jump the brick wall at the dead end of Ely, sneak into one of the subway cars that were parked there, and spend the night on the number two line, moving between Manhattan and the Bronx. With luck, he might even catch an air-conditioned car. Either way, it had to beat the large cardboard box he had been using as cover the last two nights, his back and neck still sore from the cement floor that took the place of a mattress.

  He was crossing against the light on East 235th Street, walking under the shade of the elevated subway, when he saw Charlie Sunshine coming out of Ben Murphy’s Bar and Grill, his right arm pressed against his side, the sleeve of his loose-fitting blue bowling shirt tinged with blood. Felipe ducked behind a rusty iron pillar, the subway rumbling loud overhead, and watched as Sunshine lurched from the side of a parked car to that of a waiting one. Sunshine opened the rear door of a black Oldsmobile Cutlass and dove in. Within seconds, the driver had the car out in the traffic lane, moving fast toward the entrance to the Major D
eegan Expressway.

  Felipe checked the oncoming cars, then ran across to Murphy’s B&G. He opened the front door, his eyes forced to adjust to the near-darkness. Thin lines of smoke filtered through the air, the smell of cooking grease hanging heavy. The booths that lined the right-hand side of the B&G were empty, table settings in place, ready for the start of business. He walked slowly toward the bar, careful not to step on the broken glass that littered the center of the floor, the whiskey seeping out of the bottle forming a puddle near one of the stools. The television above the bar was tuned to the Yankee game on YES, Jim Kaat breaking down a Jorge Posada at bat. “Ben?” Felipe called out. “Are you in here?”

  Felipe stopped when he heard a low moan coming from behind the bar. He made his way around the wood and looked down at the row of cracked slats that covered the dark blue linoleum. Ben was sitting in the center of the floor, just under the open cash register, his back resting against the cold steel door of a small fridge. He turned to look at Felipe, his chubby face bruised and bleeding, his bald head shining under the lights from the beer dispenser, part of his skull cracked and raw. The front of his white shirt was sopped with blood and a puddle of it was forming at the base of his spine. His legs were splayed out, the right one trembling slightly.

  Felipe rushed to his side, got down on one knee and reached for his hand, holding it to his chest. “I’ll call for an ambulance,” he told him. “Get you to a hospital in about five minutes. They’ll fix you up good once you’re there.”

  Ben yanked at the boy. “You stay put,” he said. “I want no ambulance. No hospital and no cops, either. There’s no time or need for any of that.”

  “I can’t just let you stay here like this,” Felipe said. “We don’t do something quick you’re going to bleed to death. And I can’t even think of what else to do. I gotta call for help, Ben. It’s your only shot.”

  “Listen to me,” Ben said to the boy. “Forget all that other shit and just shut the hell up and listen.”