That weekend we got an unexpected blast of Indian summer, and I had to go with Gina to a barbecue at her brother’s house on Staten Island. Most of her family was there and it was about as much fun as root canal. I was a veteran of these get-togethers, so I knew what to expect; I started drinking before I had my jacket off. There were relatives I knew, and other people I’d never seen but who couldn’t have been any other creatures but relatives. Then, of course, there were the friends. Victor, Gina’s brother, was a CPA who watched golf on television and dreamed about moving to New Jersey, but all his friends weren’t quite as exciting. They sat in lawn chairs in the tiny backyard, airing their spare tires by lounging in running suits that were two sizes too small. One day I would have to find out if clothes dryers were that much hotter on Staten Island, or if this was a fashion statement.
Gina spent most of the day in the kitchen with the women and I spent most of the day alone, avoiding the morons in the yard and the gaggle of children and dogs that periodically charged through the rooms. After bolstering myself with a half-dozen beers, I risked a brief foray out back to steal some food. As I passed the doorway to the kitchen I heard Gina’s mother’s gratingly familiar sing-song voice.
“Jesus was killed for thirty pieces of silver. My Henry was killed for eight dollars and forty cents.”
This was a litany I’d heard often—almost every time I walked through the door at their house, which was why I tried so hard not to. I would have been more than happy to give her the eight-forty to shut the fuck up, but I didn’t think it would work.
I did find it impressive that she was capable of making a connection between her husband—a deadbeat gambler and bottomed out alky who owed everyone from here to Jersey—and the son of God. I’d asked around about Gina’s father when the two of us first started dating. My father remembered him and was able to fill me in on the details.
The eight bucks and change part was pretty much correct, story being that he’d been caught cheating in a poker game, and that was the size of the pot. The guy who did it had to take off; my father thought he’d moved to L.A. Gina was ten when it went down, and I was sure she had no idea what had happened. Her brother would have been about seventeen then, certainly old enough to pull a trigger. But he was probably already a suit-and-tie-loser-boy-rodent in training, and far enough down the food chain already to be worthless. I’d never talked to him about his father and I never would. Whenever Gina mentioned her old man it was like he’d won the Nobel Peace Prize, but that was how it should be. I wouldn’t fuck with that illusion, even when she got me really pissed.
When I stepped into the yard Victor was prodding hot dogs with a fork and talking to his friends about one of their group who had been fortunate enough to have missed this particular soirée.
“He’s a bum; the man’s a bum,” Victor said. “Don’t get me wrong— he’s a nice enough guy, but he’s got no ambition. He’s the kind of guy who’s content to sit back and make his sixty grand a year. He doesn’t want to move—to grow. My opinion, a man like that really isn’t thinking about his family. Hey Mike, come on over, have a frank. You know the guys.”
The guys smiled and grunted, and I smiled and grunted. I had no idea whether I’d met them or not. They all looked alike and I suspected their heads were interchangeable. I took a hot dog and tried to slink away, but somehow I got sucked into the conversation.
“So, Mike,” a guy introduced to me as Leo started, “you live on the Island?”
“No,” I said. “I live in Brooklyn.”
“He’s over by Mom and Gina in Bensonhurst,” Victor added.
“Bay Ridge,” I said.
“Bensonhurst,” Leo said. “That’s the heart of the old country. Time to immigrate, kid. Get away from the niggers and spics and the hebes that sold us out to ‘em. Move back to America.”
“Yeah?” I said. “Immigrate is such a code word for run away. I should move to this radioactive swamp, and raise kids that glow in the dark? Leo, tell me—where do you buy bread?”
“Bread?”
“Yeah, bread. I buy my bread at Santo’s on the avenue. When I go up there Sunday mornings the old man’s been making it for five hours, and the whole store and half the block smells like fresh bread. Where do you buy your bread?”
“At the mall.”
“What does it smell like?”
“What do you mean, what does it smell like? I don’t know. It smells like mall.”
“Exactly. This whole fucking island smells like mall.”
“Hey Mike, chill out,” Victor said, giving me what was probably a stern look for a CPA.
“I’m fine,” I said, grinning and taking a beer from the cooler they had out there. “Hey, Victor doesn’t mind venturing into the urban jungle for stuff he can’t get at home.” Victor looked like he was going to burst a blood vessel. Six months ago, I’d walked into the 49street Cafe in Sunset Park and caught him cuddling up to his Puerto Rican girlfriend. Ever since, the time I was forced to spend in his company had been a little more tolerable.
“There’s nothing wrong with the neighborhood, Mike,” Victor said, forcing a smile. “Nobody’s saying there’s anything wrong. Don’t be so defensive. It’s just that a guy—you know—should try to better himself. Don’t you wanna do good and buy a house? You don’t wanna be upstairs forever, living over Mom, after you and Gina get hooked. Believe me, you don’t really want to raise your kids there.”
“You’re young,” Leo said. “Maybe you should forget Staten Island altogether. There’s no Staten Island people left anyway. It’s all Brooklyn people now. The Staten Island people are all in New Jersey. That’s what you should do—jump straight to Jersey.”
“Where are the Jersey people?” I asked.
“Pennsylvania, mostly.”
“Maybe we should move to Wyoming and wait for everyone to catch up with us.”
“Out west is nice,” Leo agreed enthusiastically, happy that we were all friends again. I’d had as much as I could take, so when Victor’s wife came out to clear the used paper plates and cups I gave her a hand and got back in the house.
I managed to leave shortly thereafter without having to talk to anyone else, a major victory. Gina was a little pissed about our abrupt departure, but deep down she knew her brother was an asshole, so I don’t think she took it too hard.
I was starving. Since the food had been guarded by the Sears Roebuck army I’d only had the one hot dog all day. We drove over the bridge and stopped for dinner, then caught a movie at the Alpine. We’d been together all day and half the evening. It was making me feel old and domestic.
The movie was Hellraiser II. It wasn’t bad as horror flicks go, but I felt distracted. The show ended at ten minutes to eleven. I was supposed to meet Joey and a few old high school friends at Peggy’s at midnight. I started yawning but Gina wasn’t buying it. She said that she wanted to talk. I parked along Shore Road. We started fooling around, and before long she had my defenses down and bird in hand. As she ducked her head in my lap I checked my watch. I had time, but just barely.
When she was finished, I put the car in gear before zipping up.
“I thought we were going to talk.”
“I enjoyed this conversation,” I said, as I pulled into traffic. She wasn’t amused.
“You’re taking me home?”
“It’s late, honey. I have to be at work at eight tomorrow morning and I still have homework due on Tuesday.”
“You’re full of shit. You don’t want to talk because you know what I want to talk about.”
“It begins,” I said, sighing. We were across Fifth Avenue and making good time.
“When are we gonna talk? Are we ever gonna talk? When the hell are we getting married?”
This was not on my agenda for tonight. “Gina, we’ve been over it a million times. Let me see how school works out this semester. When I get my grades I’ll make some sort of decision. Right now I’m making a hundred and a half a week part-time and I can’t even think about getting married.” I made the light on Eleventh Avenue.
“Your father could get you into Sanitation.”
“I don’t fucking want to be a garbageman. I don’t know what I want to do.”
“You know you don’t want to get married.”
“Bullshit. I do want to.”
“My mother says we can live rent free until you get a job if you want to stay in school, so there’s no extra expense.”
Jesus Christ. That threw me a curve. I didn’t think the old bitch would stoop that low. Next thing she’d be telling me she had cancer and wanted to see her only daughter married before she died. “You know I’m not gonna take something like that from your mother. When we move up there, it’ll be when I can pay a fair rent.” Fifteenth Avenue.
“She’s not getting anything with the rooms sitting empty.” She raised her voice.
“That’s her goddamn choice,” I yelled back. Seventeenth.
“You just don’t wanna marry me. You don’t wanna get engaged. You don’t wanna do anything. You just wanna go to the movies once a week and get your dick wet in the backseat of the car.” She was screaming in my ear. “So until you’re ready to talk commitment, until you’re ready to talk serious, don’t talk to me at all.”
“Fine. You got it,” I said as I stopped the car. Twenty-first Avenue. She jumped out, slammed the door, and ran up her steps. I checked my watch. Eleven fifty-five. Close.
I got to Peggy’s about ten minutes late. No one seemed crushed. We played a couple of hours of uninspired poker that I turned a small profit on, then cruised out to Nathan’s for chili dogs at about two-thirty. After everyone left I drove around drunk for an hour or so, wondering if I’d see Nicky sleeping in some doorway. No one had talked about him in Peggy’s. It was as though he’d fallen off the planet. Eventually I went home, parked half on the sidewalk, and crawled to bed.
Within an hour I was jarred awake by a sound that was all too familiar. A car down on Sixty-ninth Street had plowed into something. I dragged myself over to the window, but I couldn’t see a thing. I had parked just off Eleventh, and that seemed to be the direction the sound had come from. I dressed as quickly as I could, which was not quickly at all. I was in that hideous state of waking up still drunk. I think I preferred hangovers to that terrible disoriented feeling. Before I left I looked into my old man’s room, but he hadn’t come in yet. I went downstairs and made my way to the corner.
There had been an accident all right—a classic—but my car was okay. A brand new Buick Regal, candy-apple red with Connecticut plates, had been driven straight into the brick wall of the old apartment house on the corner, next to the bus stop. Nobody was in it and the driver’s door was hanging open, so I guessed no one was hurt.
A group of people from the after-hours on Seventieth Street was already there and speculating about how it happened. Apparently nobody saw the driver leave. I figured that he had stolen the car and thought it wise to get clear of it before the cops arrived, which they did while we were standing there. They talked to a few people and wrote some things down, but they didn’t seem awfully excited. They left after a few minutes and the crowd dispersed, each person looking longingly at the car and wondering how soon he could sneak back for the radio, tires, or battery. The cops were probably wondering the same thing.
I was wide-awake by then, though still buzzed. One of the bouncers from the after-hours, who I knew to say hello to, invited me back for a nitecap, and since the alternative was going home to sleep, I accepted.
I left during twilight because I hated to step from a bar into sunshine. It killed my whole day. As the door closed behind me the blasting dance music was reduced to muffled thumping. They’d done a good job soundproofing the place. When I was halfway down the block I heard different music, farther off but not muffled. I was at the corner when I realized it was coming from the wrecked car. I couldn’t believe no one had lifted the radio yet. I started to cross the intersection toward it, then saw that somebody was in there. Approaching from the back, I was almost up to the still-open driver’s door before I saw that it was Shades. His right arm was draped casually over the steering wheel and his left leg was out of the car, foot on the sidewalk, pumping up and down to the music. He had it cranked all the way up. His head was tilted back against the headrest, and he was screaming along with the song, that “you gotta fight for your right to party.”
I knew he hadn’t seen me, and I really wasn’t up to finding out what his story was right then, so I left him there and went back home, just beating the sun.