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Penny arcade cigarette lighter that nobody ever filled.
Buddy was a pain in the ass but he didn’t have to die because of that. In Jersey City it was always grey and rainy.
The funny white stone pipes in the drawer with green ribbons tied to them.
Gramp’s fat guitar. Was that the kind of thing Tito Guizar played?
Uncle Joe talked funny and always gave him cold chicken to eat: “Boys gotta to eat.”
For his birthday when he was little Margie gave him a rector set. She had a green dress on and smelled sweet. “Like the five-and-ten.”
Daddy came in with one kind of suit on and went out with another one on right away.
Mrs. Herrick next door gave him and Dougie vanilla cookies and hot chocolate when the old hunkie’s police dog scared them.
Daddy took the tail off the zeppelin when he cut his heinie. “God damn mockie bastards at Shiffman’s!”
You could eat potatoes with big rats on your shoulder? How? They liked potatoes too? People could be anything!
“I’m sure you have to work tomorrow, don’t you, Tony?”
Once Gramp saw men pull a dead man out of his coffin and try to make him drink whiskey. Granma said the ice would melt under the coffin sometimes and the dead person would roll over.
Snow halfway up the door and Daddy dug a path like a big tunnel.
Everybody would die, even him.
A bunch of things like blotters attached together with a leather cover that said lake hopatcong, n.j., and had an Indian in a canoe on a river.
“Matches her shanty-Irish teeth.”
Buddy fell off a rope or something. He had a little backache and then he died.
The orange stuff on the salad was called French dressing Daddy wouldn’t eat: “That’s what makes the Americans all crazy.”
His other gramp was blind and he couldn’t understand what he said to him, they’d sit together in the backyard while the old man smoked licorice twists Uncle Angelo said were cigars. “Pop talks that damn Chinese to him all day long.”
The tin pig had a sailor suit on and a sailor hat and a drum and when you wound him up he beat the drum and walked funny across the floor until he stopped and then he fell over. He always smiled in a kind of scary way.
Once an old witch talked to him from behind the door in the kitchen that went down to the cellar. “Your mother told me to tell you to stop untying your shoes.” He ran around the house screaming and banging into the walls, the witch ate Mom!
“And I’m sure Miss Little Helper has to work tomorrow too?” Daddy pushed the salad away, “Give it to the pigs, O.K.?”
The dirty kid who smelled like coo-coo handed him a can of worms to eat. Cousin Katie told him to stay away from the filthy little dago.
A whole bunch of tiny little canes made out of blue glass tied together with a rubber band. Granma saw him looking in the drawer and hit him with her — skinny belt: “Like your father! Just like your father! Oh, Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” Daddy maybe looked in the drawer and they made him leave home when they found out.
Mom worked at a steam table and got tired. It must have been hot, whatever you did there.
He told Mom the fat man on the corner outside the saloon smiled and tipped his hat, and she pinched his arm. “Sh! He’s a bookmaker. I had enough of Italians to last me a lifetime.”
Some kid who was a cousin or something, Frankie Caffrey, ate bananas all the time with sugar all over them. “My mother says that gives you pimples.” “Shut your fuckin mouth, you greaseball!” He asked Mom about these funny words that pleased him and she told him that Frankie was nothing but a thick ignorant Mick.
Uncle Tom always took him to a park to have a catch with a hardball and once showed him the guy who said “Call for Philip Morris!” playing Softball. When they went back to Uncle Tom’s house he’d make pizza in a stone oven in the backyard and talk to Aunt Marie like his other gramp did.
“You don’t even have a father and that’s why you can’t go to Cathlick school. You’re a Protestant.” He spit in Pat’s face and ran. “You’re as Irish as that Mick!” Mom was really mad.
In the dark church with all the statues wrapped up in purple cloth they had to walk in line down the center aisle and then there was Jesus on the floor on a crucifix and they had to kneel down when the nun slapped her wooden clappers together and kiss Him on the mouth. His stomach turned over and he gagged.
Peggy Copan sat on the railing of the porch with her legs up and he saw her pink underpants.
Mrs. O’Neill asked Mom if she bought her fish from the guinea street peddler because he had the best. So guineas were dagos and wops and also greaseballs? He was a greaseball like Daddy and his other gramp! But he was also Irish like a thick Mick. A greaseball Mick?
“Is Margie a thick Mick?” Gramp laughed, shelling peas for Sunday dinner. “Between you me and the lamppost, not one of them that’s not, if truth be told, Billy — save your mother.”
When Helen Walsh kneeled down to kiss Jesus he saw her white underpants and so did Guido Pucci who made a hole with his left hand and moved his right finger in and out of it fast. Sister Francis de Sales saw him smiling and yanked him out of the line by his ear: “You committed a terrible sin laughing on Good Friday in Church!”
What Guido did meant fucking, because girls had a hole in their stomachs and you stuck your thing in it. Guido wore rubbers to school because his shoes had such big holes in them. He was a real greaseball because he was born in Italy. In the Christmas play Guido wore a black cardboard moustache and a gold earring and a shiny yellow shirt. His name was Happy Tony and he waved a little Italian flag: “I am Happy Tony, the fruitstand man. I love to sing and dance and my favorite dinner is spaghetti and meatballs! I come from sunny Italy’s pleasant land where grapes and olives grow!”
Granma’s corset stiff and monstrous on the chair, he smelled its flowery perfume. Did that mean that Margie wore one of these things? But her smell was different.
On 68th Street when they moved back from Jersey City he had a fistfight with Angie Salvati his first day on the block. “Cockeyes!” Then they were friends and then he was friends with everybody.
He couldn’t judge a thrown or batted ball and so was admitted into games out of pity. But nobody could run faster.
Mom at the kitchen sink in pink underpants and stockings with her chest bare, drinking a glass of water. “Billy, go back to bed!” her arms crossed over her breasts.
Granma hid the corset when Dr. Drescher came with his medicine bag. He would listen to his chest with his ear thing, just like he did with Granma. Bottles of dark-red and black medicine and sticky spoons. “Port wine to build up the blood, ja.”
He thought the Swedish Hospital would be all white and was astounded to find it drab and ordinary. “Swedish ships are the cleanest.” “The Palmolive company buys all the filthy oil and grease in the tanks after a voyage, that’s what they make that soap from, why do you think they color it green?”