Then one day a silence falls as Tony is bending over a shot. He turns around and there’s Russ. Tony starts to bolt, but Russ has him by the collar. He lands a hard punch to the head, then another. He’s a pretty meaty guy, and his kid’s a skinny thing. Mike makes a move to step in but thinks better of it.
The beating itself wasn’t the thing. What hurt, made this different from before, was the public humiliation. The businessmen, the off-duty cops. Sappy and Rip and Pippy. And Mike. In front of everyone, Russ told him, “I ever catch you here again, I will break your leg.” And booted him out of the place like a bum. Rejection. Why? There was no answer. His father didn’t explain with words. He spoke in gestures. You had to decipher them.
11
The Contradiction
THREE YEARS WENT by after Mike fractured the notion I had from childhood—that Russ had tried to pull Tony into the business but Tony had resisted—before I said anything to my father. Three years since Mike had told me it was the other way around, that Tony had wanted in but Russ beat him up in order to keep him out.
I’m not sure what held me back. Maybe wrestling with this topic threatened to breach a boundary I had established between my dad and me. Since his near-death experience we had become closer as we worked together on the mystery of who his father had been, but there was still a barrier of some sort. It had moved, softened, but it was there. And what was the purpose of this barrier? Maybe there was something beyond it that I would rather not know. Maybe there was a kid inside me who needed that original image intact.
Then he fell, right in front of me. We were leaving his house; I was going to take him to an appointment and then we were going to visit one of the old neighborhoods. He was supposed to use a cane or a walker when he went out, but he almost never did. There’s a little stoop at my parents’ house. I was standing on it, he was at the door. His condition affected the leg muscles in particular—my parents had had to get one of those stair lifts installed in their home—so I held out a hand to help him step down. He reached for me, and as he stepped down he just collapsed. It was like his leg was made of twigs. Suddenly he was a pile of clothing on the stoop.
“He pushed me,” he said later, when the doctor asked him what happened. Tony chuckled and I rolled my eyes. Next thing we knew, he was in the rehab unit of a nursing home. We were told the stay might be only for a couple of weeks, to monitor him and get him some physical therapy. But I knew better. These places didn’t have revolving doors on them. We had reached a milestone in our journey.
The first time I visited him in the nursing home confirmed this. He was asleep. He slept the whole time. I watched him. I wasn’t in a hurry. I thought about this, this project, and how we—him, me, his father, his grandfather—were beads on a string. The second time I visited, we chatted for a minute, then he fell asleep. For years now his sleep has been painful to watch: laborious, an enormous expenditure of effort to pull oxygen into those abused lungs. His mouth was open, his chest muscles snatching and straining. His stomach—which had still been quite large a year or so ago—was flattened and flubbery now; it contorted violently with every breath. He wasn’t so much snoring as snorting, almost angrily, it seemed. A wave of anger shot through me. For a second I was just as mad as I was when I was a kid in the car and he insisted on smoking cigarette after cigarette, poisoning our air, clouding our childhood. He’d give a harsh chuckle at our pleas that he open his window, make a little joke out of our quibbling. Expertly unwrapping the cellophane top of the next pack, tossing it out the window (“Daaad … litter!”). Filling the dashboard ashtray with butts. Pushing in the dashboard lighter; when it popped he’d reach for it and bring its orange tip to the end of the next cigarette. Squinting through the piercing knife of smoke as he peered into oncoming traffic. The strained contortion on his face as he continued sleeping reminded me of the faces of some corpses you see, with the skin stretched taut, frozen in a final rictus. I sat there staring at the black-and-blue back of his hand as it clenched, and wanted more than anything to will him back into that thin, young father of four, that jazz-loving practical joker, bartender–cum–encyclopedia salesman, high school dropout in love with the idea of knowledge. One of his regular refrains was a statistic: that 90 percent of all scientists who ever lived were alive right now. He liked to sling brash insights, that guy, insights to shake your world, and he expected a “wow” to follow, and would look a little wounded if it didn’t. He got his ideas from odd little magazines, the size of TV Guide, that blended business and marketing tips—“selling the sizzle”—sometimes with vaguely Christian messages. That ’60s dad had broken free of the old world, the smalltime, small-town Italian American stuff, and was swimming in modern America. Mod furniture in the living room, Latin jazz on the console, fond of showing his exuberant love of life by giving his pretty wife a sharp slap on the ass, which embarrassed and thrilled us.
His phone starts ringing. It lurches him awake. “Oh, Russ.” Rheumy eyes take me in. Then he completely surprises me by dropping his legs over the side of the bed and pulling himself up to sit. Hands on his knees, and we start talking. His voice is hoarse but he is here, with me, my dad.
There’s a rustle from the bed on the other side of the room. “Did you meet Frank?” my dad asks. His roommate, it turns out, is Frank Pagano. I’m taken aback. “You mean from the Pagano brothers?”
“Sure!” Frank says.
I stumble into the mode of researcher, go over and shake hands, turn on the recorder on my phone. The Paganos ran a book back in the day. They had their territory. I had it on my list to track down and talk to someone who could tell me about it. I had a theory, or an idea anyway, which related to the murder of Pippy diFalco. It seemed too farfetched to think Little Joe would have had Pippy killed for skipping on his payments, but it was possible that Joe or Russ had told someone—maybe Rip—to put pressure on Pippy, and that things had gone too far. It was possible, in other words, that my grandfather had had a hand in the murder that sat near the center of this story. (My feelings on this question seemed to teeter both ways. On the one hand, I wanted to exonerate my namesake. On the other, were he involved in the deed, even indirectly and inadvertently, it would be pretty badass, and there was something thrilling in that, as if I might be able to convince myself that some of that had transferred to me.) But over time, as I talked to more and more people about how things worked, I formed the idea that the Paganos and their operation made that theory unlikely. From what everyone said, the Paganos didn’t turn in a portion of their proceeds to Little Joe. And if they were able to be independent, I told myself it didn’t make sense that another, even smaller-scale, bookie would be killed for exercising the same kind of independence.
I sat down beside Frank. He told me he was eighty-nine and that his wife was in here too. They could have put them in a room together, but she wanted her peace. So instead, as a consolation prize, he was rooming with Tony Shorto, whom he’d known since childhood. His arms were bone-thin, with silvery skin hanging off them.
I started asking questions, and a funny kind of triangle ensued. There was a divider in the middle of the room between the two men to give them privacy, but there was a mirror on the opposite wall, so they could look at each other that way. Both of them sat up in bed and we were all able to see each other in the mirror as we talked. I would ask Frank a question, he’d answer, then my dad would chip in some commentary.
RUSSELL: So, Sam was your brother, is that right?
FRANK: Sure. He owned Melodee Lounge—my brothers bought it from Russ and Joe. What an entertainment spot. They had all the big names there. Tony, you remember Jon Eardley? Sensational trumpet player.
TONY*: Melodee Lounge is where Jon Eardley wrote “A Russ for Rita.”†
FRANK: He played with Gerry Mulligan.
TONY: And Chet Baker.
FRANK: His wife was a wacko. The type of person who would have her Christmas tree up in July.
TONY: Frank worked at City Cigar.
>
RUSSELL: Really?
FRANK: Sure. I did everything. Racked balls. Took care of the place. I worked there when Buster managed it.
TONY: He means Buster Tanase.
FRANK: He was married to my sister Kate. God, what a death he had.
TONY: I told you about that.‡
RUSSELL: What was Russ like?
FRANK: Good guy, but he ran a strict ship. Pretty quiet. He had so much going on. They were good dressers, him and Joe. Hottest day of the year, white shirt and tie. Nice people to deal with.
RUSSELL: And what was Little Joe like?
FRANK: The mildest guy you’d ever meet in your life. He couldn’t say the F-word for a mouthful.
RUSSELL: And he controlled everything?
FRANK: Everything. All the gambling.
RUSSELL: But your brothers had a separate bank, right? That’s what everybody says.
FRANK: Nah! They liked to act like they were on their own. But at the end of the month every penny went to Russ and Joe.
This stopped me. There went my theory. I had it in my mind that the independence of the Pagano bank was exculpatory for Russ and Joe. It wasn’t, really, but that’s what I had decided. I had created a circumstantial out for my grandfather. And Frank had just destroyed it.
I asked Frank who he thought killed Pippy. “Rip was a shady guy,” he said. “Rumor was he’s the guy that killed Pippy. There was a lot of desperados in those days. But he was badder than most. You didn’t want to get too involved with him.”
Same story I’d heard from most of the others.
Frank then asked me to help him pee, which was a little forward, I thought, but I did it. Then he went to sleep. I went back over and sat beside my dad again. I told him I had made an appointment to talk to someone else I’d heard about from the old days, a guy named Tony Trigona, who had apparently been a bookie both in Johnstown and in New York City.
“Tony Trigona, sure!” Of course he knew him. This started a reflection. Tony Trigona was a cabinetmaker. My dad told me he had hired him to design the bar at the Factory, the disco he owned in the ’70s, when he was at the height of his career as a small-town entrepreneur. “The whole time I was a bar owner I hated the look of bars,” he said. “They’re designed for losers. You all sit in a row and stare at bottles of alcohol. Even when I was a drinker I didn’t like that. I asked Tony Trigona to make me a bar with curves, so people could naturally mingle. And it worked! It was the longest, curviest bar in western Pennsylvania. A lot of people met there and later got married.”
Which brought me back to thinking about my dad in his prime. He’d been such a social animal. Again I thought about the contrast with his father.
I gave him a hug as I got up to go, feeling pretty sure this room was going to be his last home.
BUT DAMNED IF he didn’t come back again. He hated doing physical therapy, but he knew they wouldn’t release him unless he could walk twenty paces up and back on his own. He’d visited enough friends who had never gotten out of these rehab centers that he called them morgues. So he worked at it—not too hard, but hard enough—and in about three weeks he got himself sprung.
On my next trip to Johnstown we were sitting at my parents’ dining-room table, Tony and me. His skin was saggier than ever—he’d once been overweight by a hundred pounds or more—but he was feeling pretty chipper. My mom was in the kitchen, which was about two steps away. It was afternoon, a milky light out the windows reflecting on the little windowpanes in their 1970s-era china cabinet. And now I was ready to talk, or rather to listen. Before coming I’d prepared myself by listening to the recording of my conversation with Mike of three years earlier, when he had corrected the story I’d grown up with. “I’m sorry, Russell … it wasn’t like that … Your dad wanted to be a mobster in the worst way.” I started by asking my parents how it was that I even knew, as a child, what my grandfather’s business was. They didn’t have an answer to that. We eventually agreed that kids just intuit things.
Eventually, in a sauntering way, I got around to wondering aloud when in my childhood I would have been told the story of Russ wanting Tony in the business but Tony refusing him. Here is what my dad replied:
“One of the things that came to light for me recently was I used to think that the horses that my uncle Joe and my dad had were at a farm right across from Pantana’s farm. But that’s not where it was. They kept them somewhere else. And I remember that now, but for years I thought that.”
This was such a thorough non sequitur I could only see it as a dodge. He didn’t want to go where I was going, so he just started talking about whatever. But I persisted. I said I grew up with the firm idea that he had rejected the mob career that his father had planned for him.
“No,” my dad said then. “No.”
My mom was suddenly right there with us. “No, it was the opposite,” she said. “His dad didn’t want him in the rackets.”
“I know that now,” I said, “because Mike Gulino told me.”
“Yeah,” my dad said. “Mike would have known that.”
“But then why did I grow up thinking the opposite?”
Tony shook his head and gave a chuckle, as if he’d never heard such a silly thing. “I don’t know,” he said. “In fact, I’ll tell you, my dad really beat me up when he caught me in the poolroom.”
This was strange—sort of dismaying. I had expected, dreaded, and maybe also hoped for, a tussle when I finally confronted my parents with this contradiction. Or else there would be an apology. I lied to you, made up a story. I wanted you to think I was a good guy. I didn’t expect total negation of the memory.
“So why did I think that was the way it happened?” I asked again.
“Maybe you just …”
My mother stopped. Maybe I just … made it up? That’s what she was going to say. And why would I do that? To put a rosier gloss on things? But I didn’t even know what those things were. I let the matter drop. But later, in the hour’s drive home, I kept thinking about it. Was it possible? I’m traversing the terrain of memory, working with the reflections of the elderly, trying to tease things out of them that happened sixty, seventy, eighty years earlier. Memory, as we all know, is hardly an exact record. The mind fuses together events that happened years apart. People get added to a scene who weren’t there at all. A red shirt becomes a yellow dress. And memories form and reshape over time, as if made of wax. They say that each time you recall a memory the physical act of recalling changes it a bit. The unconscious mind might need to soothe a raging conscience, or to ease the pain of a hurt that’s too great. In the interest of self-preservation, that past will now be this past. In the case of my father, I’m trying to chip away at walls he may have built to protect himself from childhood pain. As a general procedure, I’d been doing what I could to check memories that all of my interview subjects were unearthing for me against hard documentation: police records, FBI files, news accounts. As well as against other people’s stories. Trying to anchor the slippery stuff of human memory.
But what about my own memory? When had I been told this story about Tony and Russ? Who had told me? If I were being honest I needed to consider the possibility that this was some kind of childish invention.
I hit on an idea. I sent a text to my siblings. I kept it general. What did anybody remember from childhood about our dad and our grandfather and the mob?
Eva, the youngest of us, wrote right back. She had no childhood memory of any of it. Nobody ever talked to her about the mob or gambling or anything; most of what she had heard was recent, basically since I had begun working on this book. This made sense. I had a strong feeling that I had taken this information in quite early. At six years younger than me, she wouldn’t have been aware of it.
Scott, who was next youngest, didn’t reply to my text, which was typical—he doesn’t like to get involved in family dramas, which he seemed to suspect this could become.
Then Gina texted. She is closest to me in age. And she reme
mbered it pretty much the way I did, and recounted it in a way that suggested she still felt proud that our dad had stood up to the mob for us. I called her and we talked about it. She didn’t remember how far back she had heard it, but she too thought it was quite early.
OK, that righted me. I could go on with my work. I hadn’t invented the story. Somebody else had done it for me.
FRANK FILIA CALLED me. “I thought you’d want to know. Mike had a stroke.” I hadn’t been in touch with Mike Gulino for a year or more. I was involved in another book project, and had set the Johnstown interviews aside, except for these conversations with my parents. I’d meant to keep in touch with Mike, though, and instantly regretted not doing so. I called his house. Eleanor answered. She said Mike had actually had two strokes, and was now blind and had dementia. “He’s in a nursing home. I couldn’t handle it anymore.” I asked if I could go see him. She said I could, but that he might not remember me or much of anything.
I went, expecting simply to sit with him, to be a friend, which I considered I was by this point. He was dressed, sitting up in a chair, staring straight ahead. The TV was on, on the opposite side of his room, but it was clear he couldn’t see it. He was clutching a plastic Tupperware container with a lid on it. He could tell someone had come in, and turned toward me. I told him who I was.
“Russ Shorto! Goddamn son of a bitch, sit down and let’s talk!” So that was a relief. I asked him what he was holding. “These are called hemp hearts. Nothing to do with marijuana. These are gonna save my life. If I’d run across hemp hearts sixty years ago, I wouldn’t be in here. I’d be out walking around and enjoying life. I bought four cases. I eat them with my cottage cheese.”
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