It didn’t matter, though. All those guys were slobs anyway. Faces as rough and scaly as tortoiseshells. They all wore polyester polo shirts with horizontal stripes and ropes of gold chains around their necks. Not a suit among them, besides Teddy’s. A bunch of no-account jerk-offs who couldn’t tell a quartz watch from one with a Swiss movement or understand why Jerry Vale wasn’t as good a singer as Frank Sinatra.
I noticed Richie Amato trying to stuff a three-inch-high hero into his mouth at the other end of the table. He was sitting next to a guy called Tommy Sick, who was always smiling and saying things like “That’s sick” or “I’m sick!”
“The youth,” said Teddy, running three sausage-like fingers through his oily dyed-black hair. “They’re always going around like they got some kind of stopwatch jammed up their ass. They don’t know how to stop and enjoy the finer things.”
Truthfully, Teddy’s life was about as interesting as scrap metal. Sitting around all day sipping espresso with Vin at a social club with torn-up green vinyl chairs and Italian flags on the wall. Maybe once a week, they’d hear about a hijacked truck full of toothpaste and drive for an hour to get someplace where the other guys wouldn’t show up. And by then it’d be dark and time to think about dinner.
“I got my own schedule, Ted,” I said diplomatically.
“I’m telling you you oughta learn to go with the flow.” Teddy speared a piece of prosciutto off my father’s plate. “Listen to your old man when he has a good idea. I seen you rolling your eyes just now when he was talking about you getting a marker off the casino.”
“Yeah, that’s all right, but I’ve got my days planned out already.”
I wasn’t going to mention anything about my talk with John B. I already had Teddy hanging over my shoulder looking to grab half of whatever I made.
“Look at it,” said my father, reaching into my pocket. “He’s got a little black book he carries around with him.”
I pushed his hand away from my Filofax as the rest of them started to crack up again. As the laughter started to die out after a couple of seconds, I heard a round of sniffling from the other end of the table. Maybe some of these guys still had their cocaine habits after all.
“Listen,” I said, fixing my cuffs and smoothing back my hair. “If I got a clean record, why would I wanna blow it for a nine-thousand-dollar marker?”
“The high roller,” said my father, grabbing my arm and punching it playfully.
I ignored him and went back to scratching the wax off the Chianti bottle. “All I’m saying is I don’t need the pressure. I got better things to do with my life.”
Teddy stopped chewing and just looked at me. It suddenly got very quiet. I could hear the busboy stacking dishes in the kitchen.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Teddy touched a spot just below his stomach.
No one was talking. Even the mural of Caesar on the wall looked tense.
“Nothing,” I said.
These were guys who’d just as soon blow the back of your head off as change a television channel. And since I’d seen what happened to Larry, I had a good idea of what that might feel like.
“No, go ahead,” Teddy said in a cold voice. “You were saying you’re better than us.”
“No, I wasn’t saying I was better, Ted. I was just saying I got other plans.”
Teddy sucked his teeth again and tugged his earlobe, the way Humphrey Bogart would. In his mind he was a dead ringer for Bogey, even though he weighed three hundred pounds.
“I give you all this money and get you started in your own business, and you’re making ‘other plans’?” he said.
I saw my father almost doubling over in his chair from discomfort. When he’d originally loaned me the money to go to college and start my own business, I had no idea how it would change my life. Now I had no way to pay it back. I’d tried everything. A couple of years before, I’d had a legit job managing some buildings on Atlantic Avenue. So Teddy muscled in on them, went partners with the owners, and burned them down for the insurance money. A few months later, I was running boat tours around the island Atlantic City is set on. What happened? Teddy got interested and all the boats sank. The same thing would happen with Elijah and the boxing match if I wasn’t careful.
“I’ll get it all back to you with interest,” I told Teddy. “Just be patient.”
“And what am I supposed to do in the meantime?” His eyes tightened. “Watch my favorite niece and her children starve because you can’t provide for them?”
“Hey, Teddy, I’m doing my best. I just haven’t gotten the right break yet.”
It was like trying to put out a fire with gasoline.
“The right break?!” His lip curled. “My own son, rest his soul, should’ve got the same breaks as you.”
His son Charlie hanged himself when we were in school together. He’d been a friend of mine. Skinny intense kid, who always listened to the rock group Kiss. Instead of saying “hello,” he’d say, “Love Gun!” I used to smoke pot with him under the Boardwalk. He couldn’t stand being part of his father’s life either. Every day he’d get teased by other kids at schooclass="underline" “Okay, Mr. Mafia’s son, let’s see how tough you really are.” And every day they’d kick the shit out of him. He didn’t have someone like Vin to protect him around the schoolyard. So he’d run home and have Ted ride him for being a weakling. As long as Charlie lived, his father’s enemies would be his enemies. He killed himself at the beginning of eleventh grade.
I took his suicide as an object lesson of what would happen to me if I didn’t get out one day. And judging from the look Teddy was giving me, I should’ve already been buried on the mainland.
“Charlie had problems,” I said, maybe a little too offhandedly. “He was, you know, like clinically depressed.”
Teddy looked at me like I’d just tried to bite his nose off. “Clin-ically de-pressed? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I’m just saying he had problems. He hanged himself.”
Teddy began stroking that spot below his stomach faster. “So what’re you saying, it’s my fault he’s dead?”
“No, Ted, I’m just saying he was depressed. You know, he was always talking about ‘Love Gun.’”
I heard Richie trying to say the word “clinical” in the background while Tommy Sick giggled and muttered, “That’s sick.”
“You little motherfucker, I’ll give you something to be depressed about.” Teddy stood up abruptly and reached into his pants.
You would’ve thought we were in the middle of a rodeo with the way all the other guys jumped up, trying to calm him down: “Whooa Ted! Down Ted! Chill Teddy!”
But Teddy was like the bull about to charge. “This little prick’s saying it’s my fault Charlie’s dead!”
He pushed them all away, snorting hard through his nose and staring me down with those beady red eyes. This was the way things started with them. You’d say you didn’t like the color of their car and wind up locked in the trunk.
My father reached up and put a hand on Teddy’s shoulder. “Hey, Ted, take it easy. Anthony didn’t mean nothing.”
But then Ted turned that same dead-eyed glare on my father. “You just watch it, Vin. You could die too.”
I started thinking maybe I’d try talking Vin into retiring to Florida if I managed to get out of this place alive.
“Hey, Ted,” my father repeated. “Sit down. We’re not done eating.”
“... trying to blame me for putting a rope around my boy’s neck,” mumbled Teddy, his lips turning white.
“Teddy?” My father cleared his throat. “Why don’t you just back off a little? Ha? Anthony did right by you the other night, didn’t he?”