24

J.R.: What I was thinking by getting involved with the wife of an older wiseguy is beyond me. I wasn’t thinking with my brain, obviously.

The woman’s name was Marie. Her husband had a guinea name like hers: Luigi. Luigi worked with Phyllis’s father. That’s how I met him and his wife. He was an older man in his fifties and she was in her forties.

I can’t account for why I started fucking Marie. She was the oldest lady I’d ever been with, but I could not get enough of her. She did things I’d never imagined could be done. While we were fucking, Marie could wrap her feet behind my head and give me a toe massage. This old broad could fuck for hours—fucking me, massaging me. Marie taught me this: Some women have a great pussy, no matter how old they are.

Marie and Luigi had a little rathole apartment off of Mulberry Street. Luigi had never been a big earner. He was just a big dumb greaseball who did whatever his boss told him. I hated going to that place. It was depressing. But Marie had to stay home so she could answer the phone whenever Luigi called. I swear to you this old lady could fuck, give me a massage, talk to her husband on the phone, and smoke half a pack of Pall Malls at once. I knew in the back of my mind I should not go there. But I’d fall into that pussy of hers for hours. It felt like she had golden wheels inside her pulling me in.

Just like I knew would happen, one night I was at her place screwing my brains out when we heard the front door open. It had to be Luigi.

I wasn’t afraid of Luigi. But he was a typical macho Italian guy, and if I confronted him, he would lose face and be forced by his pride to try to kill me. No matter what happened, it would be a losing situation. If he killed me, my uncles would want payback. If I killed him, he had people that would want payback. Two people like us should never try to kill each other. The best thing was for me to try to run out of there.

Luigi’s footsteps came toward the bedroom door. The only way out was the window to the fire escape. But when I grabbed the window, it had burglar bars on it and was locked with a padlock. I asked Marie, “Where’s the goddamn key?”

She was lying back, with her legs open showing her bush like she didn’t have a care in the world. She said, “How do I know where the key is?”

When Luigi came in the room, I had nothing on but my wop T-shirt. His wife was there with her tits out like it’s a normal night at the opera. Luigi pulled out his gun.

This wasn’t like when the guy shot me outside Hippopotamus. I had no plan in my head. I jumped off the bed and fucking ran. Luigi started shooting.

I made it past Luigi into the living room, and a shot hit my back. The force of it knocked me down. He had shot me at the coccyx—my tailbone. Everybody has a tailbone. It’s like if you’re a monkey, it’s the bone that you have so when you walk on all fours, your tail sticks up. It’s one of the more useless things a person has on his body. I’d never thought about mine until it was shot.

This hurt so bad, I thought he’d hit my spine and paralyzed me. Normally, I could take a lot of pain, but my mind checked out. I felt like a bug stuck to the floor with a pin. I could not move. Later I found out that when Luigi hit my coccyx, the bone shattered and the splinters exploded into my intestines. The bullet tore my pancreas and part of my stomach. I had blood coming out of my asshole and my mouth. I was puking blood and bile. I nearly passed out, and if I had passed out, Luigi would have shot me again.

Luckily when I saw him coming toward me, I got enough control of my brain to try to reason with him. I said, “You know who I am. If you shoot me again, you better put a bullet in your own head, bro. Because you will pay. Everybody will talk about you.”

That was one positive of dealing with a macho Italian guy. If he killed me, he would have to justify it to my family. To justify it, he would have to tell everybody I was screwing his wife. Luigi knew that, and the last thing he wanted was everybody laughing at him because of what his wife did to him with me. I saw in his eyes he had some reason in his head.

He walked closer to me and spat. He began kicking me. His natural man reaction took over. He kicked and kicked. I couldn’t fight back. I put my hands over my balls and jammed my head under the couch, so it was harder for him to kick my face in.

It takes a lot of energy to beat somebody. Luigi’s kicks slowed. He started to wheeze. He stopped kicking and went silent. Then he said, “Well, what do we do now?”

I looked up at him and said, “Are you a scumbag? Put me on the street and call an ambulance.”

“I’m not calling you an ambulance.”

I said, “You got your satisfaction. If you don’t want trouble, you got to fix this.”

“Okay,” he said.

This asshole dragged me down I don’t know how many flights of stairs. I’ve seen corpses rolled up in carpets that were treated more gently than me. After he dumped me on the sidewalk, the motherfucker did not keep his word. He never called the ambulance.

It was the dead of winter. I got nothing on but my T-shirt. I was on the sidewalk bleeding out my asshole, throwing up chunks of shit I’d never seen before. It took a stranger who saw me there to finally call an ambulance.

I WOKE in the hospital a day or a week later. I don’t know. I felt worse pain in the hospital than when I was shot. I started to scream, it was so bad. Then I heard somebody laughing. I looked over and saw two cops.

Here’s why I hate cops. I’m screaming bloody murder, pissing in a tube, and they start their typical jerk-ass shit, wanting to know who shot me. They know I’m not going to say a word, but they got to play the game.

Finally, my uncle Sam showed up with some of his goons to watch over me. With them in the room, I passed back out and slept very peacefully. When I finally woke up, my uncle Sam was leaning over me, laughing. He said, “You little motherfucker.”

I saw Andy in the room with my uncle. Andy must have told him about me and Luigi’s wife. My uncle said, “I’ll take care of everything with the family, but you’ve got to think of a story for the police.”

After my uncle left, one of his goons said, “Why do you want to be fucking a lady forty years old?”

“Don’t knock it until you try it,” I said.

“You’re out of your fucking mind,” Andy said.

Andy was laughing, but I could see in his eyes he was tired. People were getting worn down by the trouble I made. When a wiseguy got shot, the police made special reports for the FBI. The heat believed that if one of us was shot, it was the start of a new war, and so they would question everybody for weeks.

In the family, everybody looked down on screwing another guy’s wife. When I got a little better, my uncle Sam, who normally would laugh with amusement at the things I did, came to me with a black look in his eyes. He said, “You ever screw someone’s wife again, I’ll cut your cock off myself.”

Phyllis was another one not happy with me. As open-minded as she was, my getting shot for screwing the wife of her father’s business partner was rubbing her nose in it. Phyllis had her natural woman reaction, just like Luigi had his natural man reaction. She sent her sister Fran to tell me not to come home until my wounds had healed. Phyllis did not think it was right she should nurse me back to health for the trouble I got into from screwing another woman.

I understood why Phyllis put me out, but it caused something to happen that I hadn’t expected. I fell hard for another girl.