I.4 Wednesday 1 April
On his way over to Lem Filbert’s garage to hunt down some wheels after a fortuitous cheeseburger and beer at Mickey DeMar’s Bar & Grill, Georgie Lucci stops in at Doc Foley’s corner drugstore to check out the centerfolds in the magazine rack. It is a glorious April day, first of its kind, the sun’s popped at last, he has money in his pocket, the birds and flowers are doing their hot-ass spring thing — it is a day in short for draining the old coglioni, for having one’s ashes hauled, as they say in the Land of Oz, and Georgie is many moons overdue. His last fuck wasn’t even one, just a tired blowjob in the front seat of his city taxi by an aging whore—una troia turpe, as his long-gone old man used to call his mamma while belting her about — which he had to pay for. He’d even make a play for the scrawny snatch behind the soda fountain, but he’d probably have to order something and he hates anything with cow milk in it and has a philosophical objection to spending money for coffee. He loosens the staples and slips the centerfold out of the magazine (if he wins a pot some day, he’ll buy a camera and take up photography), tucks it under his jacket, and with a wink at the big-eyed jugless kid who has been watching him, strolls out into the sunshine.
It has been shitsville since his vomitous predawn return on Sunday, un merdaio di merda as his dear babbo liked to put it when speaking of his beloved family, but things have at last turned around. For the past two days he has been mostly slopping around in the cold wet weather looking for a job, getting nothing better from it than a sore throat. The post office, the lumberyard and iron works, the strip mines, the bowling alley, the flour mill, the power stations, the bars, the gravel pits. Niente. Main Street is like Death Valley. That scarred-up war vet who runs the bowling alley and talks out of a hole at the side of his mouth could be elected its beauty queen. Shops boarded up, jobless guys hanging about in the pool hall and barber shop trying to stay dry, the streets potholed and littered with garbage. No trains, few buses, newspaper now just a print shop, the old hotel looking like a war casualty. Even the bus station pinball machines have been permanently tilted. His old mine manager Dave Osborne apparently got suckered into buying the shoe store from the new mayor when he got elected, and Dave, gone gray, looked twenty years older. Georgie figured there were worse things to do than tickle young girls’ feet and peer up their thigh-high skirts, but Dave just shrugged when he asked and gazed off into the wet gloom beyond the shop window. He looked in on his late cousin Mario Juliano’s widow Gina at the mayor’s office in city hall, and she snorted when she saw him and said he must be crazy, no one who leaves this town is ever stupid enough to come back. At the Piccolotti Italian Grocery Store, the kid now running the shop laughed in his face. “Fucking highway supermarket’s killing us,” he said. “Go try them.” He did. Offered himself up as a stockboy, bagger, delivery boy, whatever. The manager wouldn’t even talk to him. He stole some razor blades and a candy bar and left, wondering what the fuck had dragged him back here. He should have got back on the overnight bus the same day he arrived. Nothing has happened here since he left, nothing good anyway, and nothing ever will.