More shit with my family, of course, because it never ever ends.
“Somebody whacked Carmine G.,” Anthony says like he’s in overdrive, “and the heat’s on so Ma wants your ass home now.”
I can’t do this again. I can’t. I don’t want to be part of this.
“I don’t care, Anthony. I’m with Clive and I’m better off staying here than running home and parading past the cameras and being on the six o’clock news.”
“Talk to her,” he says, handing my mom the phone.
“Gia,” she says in crazed mode. “Frankie’s in Jersey somewhere, and I can’t think without the two of you around, and God knows what will happen now because you know how they love to come after us to get your father mad.”
But for the first time I’m not giving in. I don’t care what my mom needs. I don’t care what Frankie says. I don’t care what Vinnie says. I don’t even care how it looks or doesn’t look for my dad and what he thinks because why is everything in the whole world about him?
Why doesn’t someone think about me for a change and what I need and what I want and how it affects who I am and what happens to me? I am so tired of everything I have to put up with in school every day because of them.
And right now the last thing I need is a gang of so-called reporters shoving microphones in my face and asking me if I think my dad had anything to do with it like I would know what it is. Like I would ever know anything or actually tell them if I did.
All I do know is that the world is a better place without that pig of a gangster because Carmine G. was known for putting coke up his nose and concrete shoes on people he didn’t like and torturing gays because he probably was one and couldn’t deal and setting up middle-of-the-night meetings with my dad so that our whole house went crazy because my dad walked around furious that he had to get dressed and go out at three a.m. And then he’d come home exhausted, in a rage because he had to come to agreements with someone he’d like to throw into a pit of alligators.
“No one knows I’m here, Mom, and there are a thousand locks on the door and the pope couldn’t breach this security if he wanted to.”
“Gia…” she says.
I don’t answer. We both wait for what seems like an hour.
“Mom, I’m not…”
“Okay, okay,” she says finally. “Stay there, stay there. But don’t go out. Stay inside.”
“Okay.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
We hang up and then I’m back in default mode and feeling guilty about not caring what she wants, but am I going to spend my entire life running home when there’s trouble or running away until it dies down? And I feel even guiltier because I think about running away from this life and then I stop that because how can you run away from something that you are? And even if you could, it’s not like the world has amnesia.
Then I have nightmarish thoughts again about my dad and not seeing him and not being with him ever again. It could happen, it could, I know. But I just can’t deal with that and try to push the thought out of my mind the way I do whenever I start going down that road, because it’s unthinkable not to have my dad around anymore and our family ripped apart.
I think of the families of men in prison and how they spend their weekends and holidays getting on buses to spend the day in depressing visiting areas with armed guards standing by. I tell my head to shut up because Super Mario always saves him and always will, no matter what. He’ll get him out of trouble whatever they try to pin on him, otherwise why would they call him Super Mario or Superman?
I look over at Clive and think about what he said and the desperation he must have felt, and I feel sick inside to think of him here, feeling alone and desperate. Life doesn’t get more unfair than that. No kid should ever be left alone with no one to talk to, feeling totally shut out with no options.
I think about my life and I know that no matter what, I will never, ever try to kill myself because death is not a solution. And no matter what happens, you can always find a way to deal. I believe that.
“What?” Clive asks. “What is it, Gia?”
I sit there for a few minutes before I tell him and he leans over and takes my hand.
“Gia, I’m so sorry you are always getting drawn into these messes.”
“Messes?” I look at him in disbelief and then crack up laughing because messes isn’t exactly the word for what perpetually happens to me and my family and it makes me think of something like spilled Cheerios. But really, it’s so crazy and off the wall that, yes, it does fit.
“Messes,” I say out loud, trying it out. Yes, messes does fit. Big fucking messes.
And Clive laughs. “Yes,” he says. “We both live with messes.”
At some time during the night I hear music, only I’m deep asleep and not sure where it’s coming from. And then I realize it’s my cell because Mick Jagger is singing “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” which was the song playing at the bar when I walked in the first time, and it just seemed so symbolic of my whole life that I made it my ring tone.
Only now at—what is it, two a.m.?—I am not thinking about satisfaction. I’m thinking about who is calling me and I look down at the phone and see private, which kind of jazzes my brain because I don’t get too many of those. And what I want to do is just not answer and turn off the phone, but since there’s so much going on with my family…
“Hello…Hello?”
I wait and hear breathing, but not pervy hard breathing, just soft, normal breathing like someone is there but not willing to break the strained silence and speak. And since Clive is here with me, only one other person comes to mind, but I don’t know if he’d do that. Although the more I hold on, the surer I am that it’s him and he’s up thinking about me, and that’s based on nothing but intuition. But I have this built-in radar so that when I know things, I’m rarely wrong.
“God,” I say, almost pleading and then keep holding the phone.
I know he hears me breathing too and this is getting so hard for me because he is so there and it’s like each of us is imprisoned in our separate painful worlds and there’s a barrier between us, like in the visiting room of super max prisons. And what can I do to change that?
I wait a minute more.
Say something.
But he doesn’t. He can’t. Off in the distance I hear the growing whir of a fire engine or an ambulance like a cosmic cry of distress. Is it coming from here or his part of the city? I can’t tell. I feel like I need a compass to show me where on the map I am right now, so I hug the phone to my heart for a few seconds before I press end and then wait.
Call back, please.
But he doesn’t.
The connection is broken.