What’s in a name? E-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g—if you have my name. Everything if instead of working in a law office or a bank or maybe the IRS, your dad hangs out in a social club that’s probably bugged by the feds.
Everything if he’s been perp-walked in front of the TV cameras more times than I can remember.
Everything if he’s the one whose last name they whisper when people disappear.
If you haven’t caught on yet, I’ll bring you up to speed. My dad doesn’t have a boss, he is the boss. The capo di tutti capi. Translation: boss of all bosses.
There. Now leave it alone.
And me? His seventeen-year-old daughter who half the boys in school are afraid to walk near, and the other half swoon after for their own sick reasons, which gives me the dubious distinction of being the most hated/loved girl in school.
Not that I care.
They call me Gia. Just Gia. Even the teachers taking attendance. Never mind my last name with the operatic mouthful of syllables and vowels. Unless you need a dinner reservation in a place that’s booked, then doors open and you get comped with antipasti and fritto misto, and after the main course when you’re stuffed, Napoleons and cannoli appear when you didn’t order dessert, and then we act impressed and my dad overtips.
Aside from the name buzz though, my dad and mom insist that, after all, we are just like everyone else. A normal, middle-class Italian family that goes to church, raises money for the nuns in Palermo who run the children’s cancer hospital, helps the neighbors when they fall on tough times, but most of all, minds its own business.
Only how do I explain Frankie with the Glock who drives me to school every day in a Cadillac Escalade and then waits in front of the hydrant for me at three o’clock, and Vinnie—aka “the Nose”—who routinely sticks his into my life so he can snitch to my dad about who I’m hanging out with? Fortunately Vinnie is such a dick that he has no clue that the cop with the electric green eyes…
But I’m getting ahead of myself.