Staten Island Noir

by Patricia Smith

  Well.

  A conversation like that, thirty years ago, could have cost you your life. Now it was small talk.

  He watched the neighborhoods morph into hoods, then back into neighborhoods, then back into hoods. What was once a Burger King was now a variety of places to eat, a Sri Lankan restaurant, a Dominican luncheonette, a West African coffee shop. As the bus made its way closer to Stapleton, he took in all that was there and all that had changed. The small post office across from the train station was gone, the Genovese was now a Rite Aid, C-Town was now Western Beef, and the White Castle that sprung out of nothing, in the middle of nowhere, had moved closer to the motorcycle shop. New African-owned shops replaced some of the old African-American-owned shops and the Paramount Theater was still standing strong. Steckman's, the place that made him his number 76 football uniform, was no longer in business.

  The bus turned the corner near the best pizza on the North Shore and the three boys started talking about girls. In the distance he could see PS14. He put his head down, holding onto the cold silver bar, and waited for the nausea to pass.

  Her body was never found. On days he felt nostalgic, he would search for her name on the Internet, just to see what he could find. But what he found were similar names living different lives.

  "Yo, check it out."

  "What?"

  One of the boys pointed outside the window.

  He looked out and saw a beautiful girl, very familiar, not your average pretty, sitting alone on the steps.

  Waiting.

  "Who is she?"

  "I don't know her name but isn't she that fly-ass Mexican girl from the Stapleton projects?"

  He glanced at the girl again, then closed his eyes for a few stops, trying to stop the images of his past from flooding his mind.

  The bus continued south on Tompkins Avenue, past the arch—the old midway point. He got up, rang the bell, and turned back to glance at the young teens taunting each other as they played video game battles on their cell phones, before he exited the bus. He stood on the corner of St. Mary's and Tompkins Avenue watching as the bus drove the boys toward the right side of the Staten Island Expressway.

  Time had changed some things. But the memory of her would haunt him forever.

  TEENAGE WASTELAND

  BY ASHLEY DAWSON

  Tottenville

  The crowd started throwing shit at the stage when the band lit into "Heart of Glass." Angry chants of "Disco sucks!" bounced off the low roof, cutting through the percolating synth rhythms and lush purr of Blondie. Sunny hopped up and down, bouncing in time to the music and catching glimpses of Debbie Harry and her band dodging gum, spit, bottles, and various other projectiles. What was the band thinking, she wondered, performing this disco version of their song at CBGB's, the mothership of punk music in NYC?

  The crowd surged ominously toward the stage. Sunny felt the song's beat all the way down in her stomach, felt its rhythms transporting her through the skyscraper jungle of Manhattan like an elevated subway on speed, but she realized how sacrilegious the band was being with this new, amped-up version of "Heart of Glass." Her magic Manhattan carpet ride got bumpy as she collided in midair with Totò, her cousin, who was bouncing even higher than her and yelling through the din at Jimmy Destri. Blondie's keyboard player, Destri was one of the prime movers steering the band toward the electro-sound that was shaking their bones silly.

  Sunny and Totò had grown up running into the older Destri, whose given name was James Mollica, on hot summer days in Brooklyn. Standing onstage with his hair coiffed in a Beatlesesque New Wave mop, he didn't look much like the Jimmy Mollica she'd seen drenched in sweat, hauling the towering Giglio statue of the Madonna of Mt. Carmel through the streets of Williamsburg with a hundred or so other guys, but she still felt some kind of loyalty to him. Besides, there were Totò's feelings to consider. Pogoing there beside her, he was all smiles. Who really cared whether Blondie was playing punk or disco? All that mattered was that she and Totò were dancing together at CBGB's, in the heart of the East Village. At seventeen, they were finally making it out of Staten Island, just like Jimmy Destri had escaped from Brooklyn. Fleeing the island's claustrophobic suburbs, messed-up families, and time-capsule fashion sense. About time, Sunny thought.

  * * *

  Later, as the ferry carried them home across the dark waters of the harbor, Totò's enthusiasm for the band's new direction bubbled over.

  "Ain't Jimmy's new synth cool? Sounds just like Kraftwerk!"

  "Yeah, I guess," Sunny replied, "but I kinda miss the anger."

  "Whad'ya mean, the anger? There's loads of anger in stuff like 'Heart of Glass.' It's all about being screwed by a boyfriend."

  "I know, but Debbie Harry don't exactly sound angry," Sunny said. "She sings like she's a freaky robot or something."

  "Yeah, okay, but that's the whole point, ain't it? I mean, she's been screwed over so much that she's kinda hollow inside."

  "Maybe, but I figure Blondie is just trying to cash in. Next thing they're gonna be singing 'Stayin' Alive.'"

  "That's total bull. Besides, disco gets a bad rap. It's not all about dickheads like Tony Manero . . ."

  "Yeah, the other night I saw the Corleones at Studio 54."

  "Oh, fuck you," Totò said with a grin, "you can't swallow all that Hollywood crap. There's a whole lot going on that those assholes don't know nuthin' about."

  "You're only saying that cuz ya got a crush on Jimmy Destri."

  Totò made a grab for Sunny, who was already convulsed with giggles. She slid quickly down the graffiti-scarred wooden bench, leaving Totò pummeling the air. Overcome with laughter, the two splayed out on the hard seats of the sparsely populated night ferry. Totò's laugh suddenly turned into a sputtering cough, which shifted into a wracking paroxysm.

  "What the fuck, Totò, what's the matter with you?" Sunny gasped.

  Too convulsed to reply, Totò staggered toward the bathroom. Sunny caught up with him and stuck her head under his arm to offer support. The two lurched into one of the open stalls of the men's room; Totò put his head down and started puking.

  "Fuckin' kids these days," a wino pissing in an adjoining stall groused.

  "Eat me, asshole!" Sunny yelled back, as she held Totò's head over the filthy john.

  Gradually the shudders that had wracked Totò's body died down. When he'd recovered enough to stand up in front of a sink and splash cold water on his face, Sunny turned on him.

  "What the hell's the matter with you, Totò?"

  "I dunno. I ain't been feeling so hot lately. But it ain't what you think. Ever since Vito died, I swear I been off the stuff."

  "You better not be lying to me, Totò."

  "No, I swear, it's something else, like I can't breathe. Maybe I shouldn't go in the clubs no more, but I swear I can't smell nothing in there, cigarettes or anything, my nostrils been so eaten up by the shit smell waftin' off the dump."

  Just then, a crackling metallic voice announced that the ferry was about to dock at Staten Island.

  "Yeah," Sunny replied, "it's a bitch livin' in the city's asshole."

  * * *

  The next morning, Sunny's dad pounded loudly on her bedroom door.

  "Annunziata Cacciatore, you get your ass up outta bed. I don't care if you stayed up all night, you still gotta come to mass. Jesus Christ, it's Pasqua!"

  "Va fan' culo, Dad. It's too friggin' early!"

  "Jesus! If it weren't Easter I'd smack you upside your head so hard. You get your ass outta bed and get some clothes on, Annunziata. And I don't want you wearing no dog collar, neither! Get some decent clothes on for a change."

  Sunny dragged herself out of bed and over to her closet. There wasn't much in there that wasn't black or leather. Her dad would flip out if she wore any of her street clothes to church, but she wasn't about to go dressed like she was heading to her First Communion. Or, on second thought, maybe that was exactly the look she wanted.

  Sunny pulled her old commu
nion dress out of her closet and over her head. Not half bad, she thought, looking in the mirror. The white lace trim on her dress suggested a virgin innocence completely at odds with her tightly sheathed body. I like to keep them on their toes, she thought, without really thinking who the them was.

  Sunny was lithe and tall like a boy, and scared off most Staten Island guys with her ripped-up clothes and Dr. Martens. She teased her black hair up into a billowing Siouxsie Sioux coif, layered white foundation over her face, and finished things off with a thick smear of coal-dark eyeliner.

  Her dad was just finishing his breakfast when Sunny came down the stairs. His mouth dropped open.

  "Madonna! There's no way you're going to church like that, young lady."

  "Whaaat! But Dad, it's my communion dress."

  "I know, but that was four years ago. You're busting out all over it."

  Sunny gnashed her teeth. Her dad was getting more conservative every year. It was as if he wanted to take all his anger at the counterculture of the last ten years out on his daughter, grinding her down into a Catholic schoolgirl Barbie doll. Life with him was becoming impossible.

  Seeing Sunny smoldering, her dad called for backup: "Toni, get a load a this!"

  Sunny's mom stuck her head into the kitchen. "O Dio!" she blurted out. "You look ridiculous. But we don't have any more time. We gotta hurry up or we'll miss the procession."

  "No way. I'm not taking my daughter out looking like that."

  "We don't have time to argue, Pippo. Senti, we gotta go now or we won't make it."

  "Non mi frega, Toni, there's no way in hell we're gonna take Annunziata to church dressed like some kinda puttana."

  He grew more and more red in the face as he argued with his wife. Sunny was left standing in the middle of the room while the two of them argued backward and forward, their voices rising and their vocabulary veering toward scatological Italian. In the middle of a tirade about his honor as a father that involved multiple references to his dick, Pippo suddenly choked and began coughing. Hacks wracking his body, he lurched toward the bathroom.

  "Che cazzo, Pippo?" Sunny's mom yelled. "What the hell's da matta with you? This is the third time this week. Get your ass outta that bathroom."

  "What's going on, Mom?"

  "I don't know, Sunny, he's been coughing and getting sick for a few weeks now. You know him, though, of course he's trying to act like it ain't nuthin'."

  "Wow, that's exactly the same thing that happened last night to Totò."

  "Your cousin Totò is into some bad stuff. I'm not surprised he's sick."

  "That's not fair, Mom. Totò doesn't do that anymore. Besides, last night he said he thought it might have something to do with the stink off the dump. Maybe dad got sick from the same smell."

  "Look, Sunny, that's ridiculous. Your dad puts on a mask every time he goes to work. He couldn't smell a raw onion if you held it right in front of his nose. Besides, I'm gonna kill Pippo long before the Fresh Kills cough gets 'im. Pippo," she yelled, "you get your ass outta that bathroom! We're gonna miss communion at this rate and I ain't gonna burn in hell cuz of you!"

  * * *

  Around midnight, Sunny woke to a rain of pebbles on her window. She pulled on a leather jacket, slid down a drainpipe, and followed Totò into the dark alleyway behind her house.

  In a heavy whisper, Totò told her the news: "My dad said he heard something's going on over at Fresh Kills. When I tol' him I been feeling bad lately, he said lots of other people been sick too. But I couldn't get him to say anythin' else, he just got real sad and stared off into space an' shit. I say we check the place out. You in?"

  Sunny still remembered how confused she'd been as a young girl when Totò's dad Enzo started growing his hair out long. Enzo went over to Vietnam a year after his older brother, but he came back earlier and even more messed up in the head than her dad. Sunny's dad and Enzo had long shouting matches about 'Nam. Eventually, they stopped talking to one another entirely.

  When Totò and his brother Vito were younger, their dad would often be gone, traveling around the country protesting the war. After the troops came home, Enzo still wouldn't settle down. He kept his hair long and refused to take a job working for the city like her dad and so many other men on Staten Island. He was unemployed for a long time, his wife left him, and Totò and Vito spent a lot of time with their grandparents. Totò went through a rough patch, and his brother Vito went completely off the rails. But now Enzo owned a small guitar shop and was trying to make things right with Totò.

  "Yeah, sure, I'm in," she said.

  It was a chilly night, winter not yet having loosed its grip on the city. The moon was scudding between clouds, casting a silver light on the leafless trees. It looked like a thin coat of snow had just fallen on the island. Totò and Sunny walked away from her pale blue two-story house in Tottenville, down Lighthouse Avenue, and then cut off the road and headed across the Jewish cemetery toward Fresh Kills Landfill.

  Sunny's dad had worked for the Department of Sanitation for years, so she knew something about the history of garbage on the island. Fresh Kills was opened after World War II. It was only supposed to stay open for twenty years, but dumping is a hard habit to kick. Fresh Kills was still accepting hundreds of tons of garbage every day. It seemed like her dad had a job for life at the dump.

  As they climbed through the jagged teeth of the chain-link fence that surrounded the place, Sunny whispered to Totò, "Ya gotta watch your ass. There's packs of wild dogs on the hunt at night in here."

  "Yeah, lots of fresh-killed meat around here, I guess."

  "No, wise-ass, that name means the place was filled with fresh creeks."

  "Ain't too fresh no more."

  "No shit, Sherlock."

  "Oh man, it stinks!"

  "Yeah, shit buried in Fresh Kills don't stay underground for very long," Sunny said.

  "Hey, I think I hear something."

  As they climbed over a rise in the rolling landscape created by decades of accumulated garbage, Sunny and Totò were blinded by a half-moon of arc lights. When their eyes had adjusted, they saw a couple of huge yellow bulldozers moving across the reeking piles of waste like giant prehistoric insects. The stench was overwhelming, hitting like a swift kick to the head.

  "What're they doin' workin' here at night?" Sunny whispered.

  "Looks to me like they're digging holes."

  "Oh yeah, you're right, but what the hell for?"

  Sunny and Totò crouched and looked down into the garbage valley until their legs as well as their lungs were ready to give. Just as they were about to walk back down toward the fenced-off perimeter of the dump, a truck came rumbling up the access road, its running lights a piercing red in the near total darkness. It pulled off the road and headed toward the brilliant circle of light where the bulldozers were at work. Sunny and Totò held their breath as the truck pulled up alongside one of the holes dug by the bulldozers. The bed of the truck cantilevered slowly into the air, and some sort of dense liquid began pouring out into the hole. The acrid smell of garbage, which had begun to recede as their senses grew accustomed to the reek, became overpowering. It was as if someone had flung acid into their faces.

  After the truck had emptied all its foul liquid into the hole, one of the bulldozers pulled up with a jerky motion and began to push piles of garbage into the hole, gradually burying the sludge under a mountain of junk. All evidence of the truck's dark contents was soon obliterated.

  Communicating with hand gestures, Totò and Sunny turned away from the infernal scene and headed back toward the hole in the fence through which they'd entered Fresh Kills. As they walked back across the cemetery, their lungs filled with relatively clean air.

  "What the fuck's going on, Sunny?"

  "I dunno. I don't get why they're dumping shit at night, and why they're bringing it in trucks. Usually all the garbage comes in on barges during the day."

  "Whatever that shit was, it stank even worse than the rest of
the dump."

  "Yeah, that's the truth. Must be some evil stuff."

  "Just thinking about it makes me wanna start pukin' again."

  "My dad's been coughing too."

  "What're we gonna do about this, Sunny?"

  "I dunno, Totò, I dunno. You think I should talk to my dad?"

  "Well, he works at the dump, right? Perhaps he knows about what's going on at night."

  "Yeah, and even if he don't, maybe he can find something out. Okay, I'll talk to him."

  * * *

  The next morning, Sunny crawled out of bed at what felt like the crack of dawn. Her dad was busy putting on his heavy overalls when she stuck her head into her parents' bedroom. Sensing her presence, Pippo stopped dressing and turned toward his daughter.

  "You going to school today dressed in your pajamas or what?" he said, an amused glint in his eye.

  "Nah, Dad, I still gotta get ready for school. I wanted to talk to you about something."

  "O Dio! Don't tell me you're pregnant."

  "Naah, course I ain't pregnant! I wanted to talk to you about Fresh Kills. Some kids told me that they heard weird noises coming from the dump at night. And it's been stinking even worse than usual recently. You know about something strange going on there?"

  Pippo's dark eyes flashed, all signs of amusement suddenly draining out of his face.

  "Sit down, Annunziata."

  Oh shit, Sunny thought. Now I'm really gonna get it. He's gonna take out all his shit on me, as usual. Don't dress that way, don't listen to that crap music, don't cut Sunday school.

  It was worse than the Ten Commandments. Ever since her dad came back from Vietnam, he'd been obsessed with how he and his buddies who stayed to fight the gooks had been betrayed by the hippies and his sack-of-shit brother. He lashed out at anyone who questioned the hell he'd gone through and the sacrifices he'd made. Now that Sunny was no longer a cute little innocent kid, he was starting to see her as in league with the Great Betrayal as well.

  "No, there's nothing strange going on at the dump," Pippo said. "I been working there for twenty years, and the place reeks worse every year. After a while, though, you don't smell it too much. So don't worry about me or Fresh Kills."