“When two people fall in love and begin to feel that they’re made for one another, then it’s time for them to break off, for by going on they have everything to lose and nothing to gain.”
—Søren Kierkegaard
MEN AREN’T SUPPOSED TO say shit like this, but the fact is that I loved Nicky. Yeah, here’s the part where I’m supposed to say, I wasn’t in love with Nicky. Sorry to disappoint you. I was in love with him, not like lustfully in love with him. Didn’t want to have his babies or anything, not that I could differentiate in third grade. We don’t talk about it much in our culture, but there’s very little can hold a candle to the infatuation a young boy has for his first hero. For some boys, it’s their dads. My dad… yeah, right!
Nick, he hated his father for the way he’d smack him around. I was jealous. At least his dad gave a shit, if not for Nick, for something, anyway. And the rough treatment produced in Nick another quality I admired: rage. We all have anger. I have more than most, but Nick was different. He was a rage cheetah, zero to seventy in the beat of a heart. It wasn’t blind rage either, though he was sometimes blinded by it. He could focus it like a laser sight on the forehead of his next target.
What’s that blues song, “Born Under a Bad Sign”? If it wasn’t for bad luck, I think the lyrics go, I’d have no luck at all. If it wasn’t for rage, sometimes I think Nicky would have no feelings at all. Everything—friendship, grief, even love—seemed to be a permutation of his rage. Only later did I come to the realization that it wasn’t all his father’s doing. Nick had the rage in him like my mom had the sadness in her, on the molecular level.
Guess I should have seen it when we were kids. There was this one time we were playing stickball on the street and Vinny Podesta, the block bully, knocked me down to get to a ball. What an asshole Vinny was. I mean, we were on the same fucking team and he knocked me over just because he could. Nicky like exploded. He broke Vinny’s nose, climbed on top of him and just started smacking him with the back of his hand and I mean hard. Never seen anything like it. None of us kids had.
Yeah, we’d all had street fights. Came with the territory. You live in the rain forest, you get wet. So the thing about most street fights, especially among kids, is that they’re pretty ritualized. They have a form. It’s like when you see two rams butting heads. Before they get to it, there’s gesturing, threat behavior, each combatant giving the other a chance to back down. Watch the next time you see a bunch of boys in a schoolyard. There’s name calling, screaming, then a push. The push is the last chance for backing off. If there’s a push back, the fight’s coming. If the kid that gets pushed reverts to name calling, the fight’s been averted. That wasn’t Nick’s way.
You even looked at Nick the wrong way, he was coming for you. And it’s not like he started off easy and gave you a chance for retreat. No, it was all out from the first punch. Nicky didn’t lose many fights. That was the thing, he had rage. There was this other time, when we were older. We’d been smoking a few doobs and drinking in a trendy Park Slope hole. The bathroom was like the deli counter at Waldbaums: you needed to get a number. Went out to the alley to piss.
Found some mook trying to force himself on this girl, had her by the hair, face pressed to the brick wall, and was tearing at her panties from her lifted skirt. Kicked the ever living crap out of him. Pounded his face. Nicky, man, kicked at him like a mule. Wouldn’t stop. Kept swinging his boot, kicking and stomping. Even the chick we saved was freaked out.
“Whoa, whoa, Nicky,” I said, bear-hugging him and pulling him away. “You’ve got to rein it in, bro.”
“Why?” was all he said.
Things changed for us forever after that night. Even when Nick did his six months in Spofford, a place that would put the devil into a martyr, he was more in control. He really seemed on the edge. Of what, I couldn’t say, but it was nothing good.
The rest of my life changed in short order.
Been working at the airport for my Uncle Harry for a few years out of high school. Could have gone to college, should have, but I didn’t have the heart for more clueless teachers with advanced degrees in irrelevance. My mom was too self-absorbed to protest. I’m sure my dad was disappointed—hell, name me someone or something that didn’t disappoint him—but he wouldn’t have had the stones to say boo. Think maybe if he had said something, I would have gone for him. Of course, he didn’t. Why fuck up a perfect losing streak?
Uncle Harry was a fucking charmer, a real class act. Brought a smoking blonde half his age to my cousin Jay’s bar mitzvah. She knew Harry for the low rent asshole he was. Caught her sucking the drummer’s cock during a band break. Saw me watching. Stared at me. It was like a dare. Grow up in Brooklyn, you recognize a dare. “Go ahead, tell that fat fuck!” her eyes seemed to say. I didn’t say a word.
Anyway, the cargo area at the airport was the Wild West with jets. It was its own fucking little world with its own codes and rules. First thing you learned was that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey had about as much control of the cargo area as a bull rider has of the bull. The Mob ran the unions and the truckers and the container stations and the warehouses. If you farted near JFK, the Boys got their ten percent.
The low level guys ate their lunches at The Owl. The Owl was a real upscale joint, showed porn movies at the bar during lunch, but they did serve great eggplant parm heroes. The Boys on the next level up fucked their whores at the Jade East Motor Inn on the South Conduit. That’s where Harry had met the blonde cocksucker he’d taken to my cousin Jay’s. You gotta love Uncle Harry, a real class act, but the blonde was right about him, he was smalltime. It was that you had to be in that world to know it. To the Boys, Harry was the fat Jew they tolerated because he earned for them.
That was another thing you learned quick. There was no such thing as friends among thieves. These guys would pat you on the back, drink with you, slip you a c-note every now and then, but it was meaningless. They were cold bastards, but the guineas were sweethearts as compared to the donkeys. Christ, the Irish were real fuckers. At least with the Italians, you knew most of their decisions were based on earning. You had some sense of where you stood with them boys. Was different with the boyos. They strayed from logic a bit too often to suit me. Then again I’ve always been a bit of a moth. Show me the flame and I’m there.
Met Boyle and Griffin through Harry, and Nick met Boyle through me. Harry had all of Boyle’s import/export brokerage. Not that I knew or cared what was in the boxes I trucked back and forth from the City to the warehouse at JFK and back again. It was Boyle who offered me my first real money for my first real crime. Initially it was just driving, then we moved onto “other” things: nothing violent, but always with the rush of potential violence. Never knew when someone would walk in when they weren’t supposed to. Boyle, the Bible-thumping hypocrite, had his own imported boyo to do his violence.
Griffin had the real brogue, not the second generation cartoon bullshit that came outta Boyle’s gob. Not that Griffin talked much. A quiet fucker, he spoke with his fists and pistols, a knife too, if need be. Griffin had the real troubles in him, too. He’d been with the Provos, it was whispered, whoever the hell they were. I knew about the IRA, what did I know from Provos and Protestants? Did I give a shit who wore orange and who wore green and who marched through what neighborhood? Truth be told, Jews took guilty pleasure at the concept of Christians at each other’s throats. Guilty pleasure’s the only kind we know. Kept my eye on Griffin even when Boyle spoke. The level of Boyle’s danger reached only as deep as Griffin’s darkness. That made Mr. Boyle pretty fucking dangerous. I’d seen some of Griffin’s handiwork.
Only once he confided in me was after a particularly brutal job. Guy owned a few hot dog trucks owed Boyle several large and was slow to pay. Big mistake being a late payer. Watched Griffin snap every one of the man’s fingers like they were popsicle sticks. Stopped getting nauseous when he switched to his left hand.
“How do you do it?”
Griffin knew what I meant.
“Violence is violence done for whatever cause. You blow up a car in Derry or you snap some tardy fooker’s fingers, it’s violence. Don’t somehow think the Lord keeps two sets of ledgers. You cross the line, you cross the line.”
Such was the extent of his philosophy.
Suppose I was moving up the ladder and I’d gotten Nick some work with me, mostly petty shit, but then Nick discovered he had a talent for boosting cars. He made Boyle and a lot of Third World bastards happy. Then something happened to put a crimp in my career. My mom exercised her prerogative.