My old man and his old man tell us to get an apartment together now that Mikey was ready to pledge himself to the family again, maybe actually learn the business. It was a decent place on Mulberry, four floors up and a small view of the bridge. It had bedrooms at opposite ends of a living room and kitchen, like it was built for people who don’t like each other, the way I didn’t like Mikey. He was family, though. And I was stuck with him.
I had girls coming over from the hour we got the keys, but Mikey was workin’ hard to get into the pants of an old family friend, Regina Strogola; okay-looking, a tough chick who usually got what she wanted. You ask me, he was too good to her right from the start.
One night I’m done with this girl, third time for me and she’s still feeling it, so we have a talk, and I go out where Mikey’s watching TV in the living room. I leave the bedroom door open. He and I look back at the girl in my bed, and she’s got one of those inviting looks on her face. A blonde, of course, hair spread all over my black satin pillow.
“All yours, you want some,” I tell Mikey.
“Gina’s on her way.”
“So?”
“You know.”
“You don’t know nothin’. We got some work to do later tonight.”
“When?”
“When you’re done with Gina,” I say. “So, don’t take too long.”
I drove my Impala. We crossed the Williamsburg Bridge and went into Queens. It was a hot night, and my air conditioner was shot.
“What are we doing?” Mikey asked.
“Pest control,” I said. “My sister Julie bought a car from a guy out here, and now he won’t give her the money back.”
“What’s wrong with the car?”
“She don’t like it, Mikey. I talked to him on the phone, but he won’t listen to reason. Already got himself an Eldo. Don’t have the money now. A black. You know.”
“You made him an offer he could refuse.”
“Yeah, yeah, shut up about it.”
Me and Mikey had seen that movie at least a dozen times. Best movie they ever made ’til Scarface. The violence was right on, especially how Sonny takes care of Carlo. Mikey tried to tell me the flick was about honor and commitment and loyalty, and all that was fine with me, but when they got Sonny at the toll booth, it made me want to pick up a tommy gun and start blasting away myself.
Mikey didn’t like it that, in that movie, it always came down to the money. To business. Welcome to the real fuckin’ world, I told him. I also told him that business could be personal, that it didn’t have to be all one or the other, that the movie oversimplified that issue.
In Jamaica, I drove alongside the expressway. It was all Rasta this and that, every block. You could smell the ganja burning. It was hard to find the right street through my dirty windshield. Finally, I did, and I drove by the address, and sure enough, there’s a late-model Caddy Eldo, black and gleaming with white sidewalls, exactly like you’d figure for a black dude.
I drove past and parked along the curb and watched a minute. “We’re gonna detail his car for him.”
“How?” asked Mikey.
“Monkey see, monkey do.” I swung open the trunk and we put on the ski masks and got the bats. The new aluminum ones. “Come on. This’ll be fun.”
We crossed the street and came up on the car from behind. There were lights on in the house, but I didn’t care. I smashed the left brake light, then the turn signal. The aluminum made the plastic explode. The Caddy’s back windshield took more hits because the safety glass cracked in place but didn’t blow up like the plastic.
By then Mikey was on the other side. I only glanced at him, but he was slugging away like a pro. I was whacking the driver’s side door when the porch light came on and a big black dude in gym trunks and flip-flops came running down the stoop with a baseball bat of his own, the old-fashioned wooden kind. He stopped short and looked at me.
I said, “Give me the money you stole for that piece a shit Mercury, and we’ll stop.”
“That money helped buy the Cadillac you wreckin’.”
“Up to you, man.”
“You be sorry.”
He came at me in a funny-looking way, sideways kind of, with the bat cocked over his shoulder. I stepped back like I was confused, then ducked in and took out his kneecap. He yelped and caved in both at once, and I let him have it with the bat. Over and over. Then I thought I’d be like Sonny and kick him, so I did that, too. He was bleedin’ and yellin’, and I couldn’t believe the weird charge of adrenaline going through me. Felt like a river of electricity. Like something I could ride all the way to the moon and back.
“Finish the Eldo!” I screamed at Mikey.
“It’s finished! It’s done! Let’s go!”
I kicked the man once more in the face and told him, “Next time, you give the girl her money back.”
All he could say back was “Uck ou,” which made me laugh, so I kicked him again and headed for the car.
Mikey drove. I talked the whole way back to Little Italy, I was so high on the violence, the crack of the lights and the crack of his knee, and the whole glory of having power over a bigger man, the glory of having power itself.
“We gotta do this again sometime,” I said. My mouth was dry from panting so hard.
He gave me a funny look. “That was some ugly shit, Ray.”
“What do you mean, ugly?”
He looked pale and used up. “Forget about it.”
We did do it again. A lot. Stuff like that and stuff worse. Mikey, the deeper he got into the enforcement side of the business, the more serious he got. One night, drunk, he told me this life was worse than he had dreamed and feared when he was a boy. Much worse. He hated it.
The family business.
Marriage and children for both of us.
Twelve years went by.
During that time, Mikey’s father, my Uncle Jimmy, took a RICO fall, along with Matty Maglione. They got ten years for bribing, then trying to extort a Pennsylvania trucking company owner who turned out to be wearing a wire. Mikey’s mom, Christina, died of cancer. My pop, Dominick, became acting head of the family business. Paul Castellano got whacked just before Christmas of ’85, and the so-called Mafia Commission Trial dragged on. Junior Persico was running the old Colombo outfit, which of course affected us LiDeccas, not exactly fans of the late Joseph.
Personally, I thought the worst part of those years was all the Chinese swarming into Little Italy. Overnight, it seemed. Weird people. Glass tanks of live fuckin’ frogs and turtles to cook. All these signs you couldn’t even read. Not hardly any Italian left. Just Italian for tourists, which is different. I hate change.
Personally, I tried to bring some style to things, the same way Joey did. I blew lots of money on clothes and dinner parties. I got to know the tabloid photogs, and they liked me. I have good, straight teeth and a kinda round face, so when you put both of them over an eight-hundred-dollar suit, I looked kind of lovable and wicked at the same time. Which is exactly what I was. Girls on my arms, but never my wife, of course. And I’d pop off to the reporters, give ’em good copy. I’d tell ’em what sports teams and casinos I liked, and what movies, and what the good wines and restaurants were, and I’d bad-mouth the feds every chance I got, take pity on ’em for being so dumb. The cops were okay, but the feds hated me. They harassed my family and threw charges at me to prove it, but what they couldn’t prove was me being guilty. I left courtrooms with a trail of dropped charges and not-guilty verdicts behind me. I loved every minute of it.
Mikey went the other way. Hardly saw him. Regina dumped him outta nowhere, took off on tour with a Jersey bass player. That killed Mikey, having tried to be a musician once himself. Which was exactly her purpose, I pointed out. She left their children-Danny and Lizzy-with him, which was the only good thing Mikey seemed to get out of those twelve years.