Don Dimaio of La Plata

by Robert Arellano

  Mama asks why I’m so forlorn. “I want us to move to Kansas.” When I tell her it’s because of Liason of Wichita’s Untame Domain, she smiles and sets me up in my father’s office with a stack of magazines. The photographs are terrific, all my favorites: cheetahs, elephants, giraffes, water buffalo. They must have been shot in Wichita. After I’ve flipped through the entire stack I pick another magazine off my father’s shelf, open it, and find the place where the pages lay flat. That means someone looks at this spread a lot, where there’s a picture of a different kind of animal. In my father’s leather chair, by the dim yellow light coming through the pulled shade, that’s where it first surprises me: the stiffness. I think something must be wrong with me. The only time I’ve experienced swelling like this has been after falling off my bike, and that was my foot, not my weenie. What hit me? I don’t make the connection with the pictures.

  My dad comes in and sees me in his leather chair. “What the hell are you doing in here?” He spots the journal spread open on the desk. The corners of his mouth curl down and his eyes dart to the empty spot on the shelf. He looks back at me and his upper lip wiggles. It’s ugly, that face. It’s like the hyena’s on Untame Domain. What did the announcer say that expression is supposed to mean? Fear? Arousal? A combination? Liason of Wichita is into combinations. The red flush on my father’s bald head is like when he drinks wine and listens to records late at night. I turn red too. At least I feel like I do. My cheeks are burning. My father marches over and flips the magazine closed. I’m looking down at the desk and the embossed lettering on the cover. Although it’s much longer than my three- and four-letter specialties, the word looks familiar because I’ve seen it written a bunch of times after my father’s last name, which is my last name, and I’ve heard it pronounced with words whose parts sound pretty much the same. “Practice,” “doctor,” “apology.” My father’s huge, nimble hand rests on the gray dust jacket. There’s the silver ring that says he went to school to be a doctor, right alongside the gold band that says he married my mother. He slowly slides the magazine out of sight of my downturned eyes. Do I know what’s coming or do I just think I knew it was coming a second after it happens? It’s so fast—whack!—not the soft leather of his open hand but the embossed cardboard of the magazine cover. It brands the side of my face with the word “Proctology.”

  It’s in one of my father’s medical journals that I get my first look at a woman’s ass. Then again, who knows? In extreme close-up, it could have been a man’s. Either way, the ass was diseased. From then on, the doctor’s office is kept locked.

  HE PREFERRED Harry Reems, who in Deep Throat had played the Doc, despite the smarm the latter bore, availing himself of the microscope which he coolly employed when he examined Linda Lovelace, the clit in the back of her throat.

  CHANNEL 8, SUNDAY, 6:00 PM

  Linda: “A white-cheeked gibbon is on the loose after escaping from William Rogers Park zoo during a routine feeding late last night.”

  Harry [stock footage: monkeys]: “Monkeys have tails. Apes do not. Gibbons have no tails, so they are not monkeys at all. They are apes.”

  Linda [stock footage: mayor cutting ribbon]: “Mayor Donald ‘Pally’ Dimaio opened the new William Rogers Park zoo with a ribbon-cutting ceremony during his first administration. Two hundred thousand people visit there every year and so far there have been no escapes.”

  Harry [repeat stock footage: monkeys]: “While this gibbon is not considered particularly dangerous, apes can carry diseases such as rabies and tetanus in their saliva, and citizens of La Plata are warned to keep pets inside and windows and doors closed. If you see the gibbon in your neighborhood, keep away and call the police, whose veterinary professionals will return the gibbon to the zoo for his own health and protection. Say, Tony, what’s the weather going to be like for that gibbon tonight?”

  Tony [cut to: meteorologist]: “Well, Harry. Gibbons are native to the Asian rainforests, and it looks like we’ll be able to give him some of that in the forecast for tomorrow. Heh heh.”

  HE HAD much good to say for Emanuelle, who, though she belonged to the haughty, overbearing race of ’ginas, was of a stackable position and well bra’d up.

  EDEN STREET, SUNDAY, 9:00 PM

  Cruising down Adams Avenue we blow by Arousing Superstore and I start telling Sanchez some more about the girlfriend he’s never met. “Dolly turns it on whenever I want. Where other sluts let up, she always carries on, and when I’m finished, she doesn’t bitch about an orgasm. Dolly presses her own button. Sometimes I like to sit back and watch.” We’re almost at the Arrow Street bridge when I realize I’m on my last smoke. “Oh, Pancho?” I say lovingly, like his fucking father.

  “Jes, jorona?”

  I lean over the frontseat and exhale a cloud of mentholated smoke in his face. “Pull over at the gas station and get me some fucking cigarettes, you lard-ass spic.” Some dogs are happier on a short leash. This is one of them.

  Sanchez parks near the pumps at the Eden Street Sesh station and leaves the engine running. I’m watching him cut to the front of the line and push a bill in the cashier’s trap door when all of a sudden there’s a sharp tap at the glass. Outside the back window something dark spins into my periphery. A pistol! I duck and ball myself up on the floor between the seats, but I know it won’t do any good. Whoever it is—a Matriarcha-made man or a fanatical feminist—has finally caught up with me and brought a big enough gun so the bullet-proof glass won’t make a difference. Time’s up. Here comes the slug. Dear Jesus, please forgive me for all that dirty stuff!

  Nothing happens.

  I peek and there’s the pistol, still spinning in the tinted air, but turns out it’s just a gas nozzle. What the fuck? The fuel line wiggles up in the window like the charmed snake in Ali Baba. I push the button to lower the glass, peer outside, and see the hairy fist.

  “Ook ook! Ai ai ai!”

  The white-cheeked gibbon twirls the gas line like a swinging vine and catches the nozzle in his other paw. He rolls back the plastic hood, the part that’s supposed to lower emissions, and squeezes the trigger, squirting a stream of 87 octane, the cheap shit, smack in the middle of my lap. The gasoline soaks through the wool pants and the vapors start to burn. In reflex I brush the spill with the back of my hand but I’m still pinching the butt end of my last cigarette and I accidentally tap red ash. The pants light up. I fling open the door, knocking the nozzle out of the escaped ape’s hands and sending the little fucker tumbling. I lunge for the windshield cleaner, upending the suspended bucket and splashing sudsy liquid on my crotch just in time to save my balls from burning off. I kneel wheezing on the asphalt by the side of the sedan. My pants are sopping wet and reek of blue fluid. Sinatra is singed and freezing but the fire is out.

  Sanchez comes back to the car with my carton of smokes. “Jorona! Wha’pen?”

  “You fat fuckface! Catch that little shit!”

  “What leetle sheet?”

  “The goddamn gibbon!”

  Sanchez spends half an hour searching the station and surrounding blocks, but the fugitive has disappeared into the night. “I swear it was that fucking ape. He was laughing like a fucking hyena.”

  Or maybe it’s like a gibbon he was laughing.

  BUT, ABOVE all, he cherished an admiration for Long Dong Silver, especially as he beheld him sallying forth from his asshole to rub all those that crossed his path, or when he thought of him overseas peeling the phalange of Sex Freaks which, so the story has it, was below his knees.

  YOUNG DON SNIVELER

  In catechism class, Sister Marie Aloysius, flashing her half-toothless grin at me, rants, “Young man, either you believe in God, or you’ve got to believe you are God.” That checkerboard smile is challenging me. Make God, boy, it says. Be God. It’s around this time that the question is posed to me: “What do you want to do when you grow up?” My first thought is I want to be on television, but not like Eisenhower or Cronkite. I want to be Durante.

&nbs
p; The thought of my father’s closed, locked office haunts me throughout my childhood. To distract myself I watch more TV. You can depend on television. You’re not going to see a picture of someone’s blistering anus, for instance, wedged between Liason of Wichita’s Untame Domain and an ad for Mick’s Mentho-rub. There’s a local kiddy show called Child’s Play. My mother telephones the lady producer, a friend of hers, and makes an appointment for the woman to be my voice coach. In a few weeks I’m on TV wearing oversized overalls smudged with stage mud and a little wax moustache on my upper lip, singing, “Where do ya worka, John?” Around the set of Child’s Play they call me their Everything Boy.

  In the middle of the season I catch a chest cold that keeps me off the show for two straight weeks. My father brings me a little brown bottle. “I probably shouldn’t be giving this to you, but it’s the best remedy there is.”

  Codeine. I start with a measured teaspoon like the label says, but before long I’m pouring a lazy capful, then swigging a teaspoon or four straight from the bottle. Every six hours turns into every coupla hours turns into what the fuck is a clock? I understand I’m onto something special. I start to fake coughing fits. I sneak my mother’s smokes to give myself yellow phlegm.

  One day, home “sick” from school on a cruise as Kid Codeine, I’m curled up with some pillows and my bottle on the living room couch, where my mother has set me up in front of the TV at the edge of oblivion. I swoon in an opiate surge and find my hand pinned between my hip and the back of the couch. I can’t feel my fingers and I can’t move the arm. The whole shebang has fallen asleep. I figure I’ll pry the pinned hand out from under me with my other arm, but that won’t move either. I’m paralyzed. I can’t move anything at all. My eyes are open, my chin against my chest, and I can see down the length of my prone body, but nothing will budge. Maybe I’m dead. I’ve heard about overdoses. This must be how it happens. Have I already been embalmed? I lie there unable to move, speak, or cry. Finally, after ten seconds that feel like forever, a tingle comes to my fingers, and by a mammoth concentration I make the fingertips wiggle. My hand gives a weak squeeze, the arm aches back to life, and I stiffly rise from the couch.

  A few years later in prep school at Abraham Beige Academy I first try cocaine. Some kid’s dad is addicted and one day he just leaves a pile out on the kitchen table, so we stick our faces in it and start huffing. Nicholas Capellini, the kid whose house it is, fritzes out on the spot and ends up with some kind of nerve damage. They have to take him off the wrestling team. Me, I feel nothing unusual. Just the back of my throat goes a little itcy-numb like at the dentist.

  Twenty-five years go by before I try it again, at a bachelor party for a buddy. He presses a miniature baggie into my palm. “What is this?” I say. “I don’t want this. I’m going into politics.”

  “Trust me, you want this.”

  “I don’t want this!”

  “Pally, you want this.”

  I try it. He’s right. I want it. Before long barely a week goes by without a noseful. After a few months it’s more like never a day. For a while I try to keep the noon rule: no coke in the morning. Of course, it doesn’t count as morning if I stay up all night. When three grams takes me straight through to 6:30 AM, then the twentieth line before passing out at sunrise is still the last line of the night. Then one Monday when I’m already mayor, Sanchez is waiting out in the car at quarter-to-12 for a lunch appointment across town in Mount Govern and there are still lines left over from the weekend laid out on the bedside table so I say fuck it, just this once. Fat fucking chance. The next day it gets started at 8:00 AM. I try holding myself to a couple of lines at a time. Nuh-uh. She won’t have it. Mrs. White is a wicked mistress. It reaches the point where kicking off a thousand dollars a week isn’t something I question. Instead the logic is: Here he is, the guy with the coke. I want it. I need it. Take the money, however much, but give me that stuff. It’s mine. I once go cold turkey. I do it. For a week. For a week I want to die. I say fuck it, it’s better to live happily than to kill myself.

  Sister Marie Aloysius told me, “Young man, either you believe in God, or you’ve got to believe you are God.” I’m not saying I think I’m God. I’m just saying I believe in living like I might as well be. There’s nobody else as qualified to look out for my own interests as me.

  AND HE would have liked very well to have had his fill of pricking that Dolly gal alone, a privy for which he would have shriven his housekeeper with his piece thrown into the garbage.

  POTENCY STREET, MONDAY, 10:45 AM

  I call into the office. “What we got, Dot?”

  “A groundbreaking and three grand openings this afternoon. Tonight Mr. Cantare and Mr. Spazini have arranged a private party for you at Wolfswamp.” Wolfswamp. Whoopie. Is that tacky, tom-tom-banging, gambling Disneyland the best Cantare could cook up? “Mr. Cantare asked me to tell you that he’ll be kind of tied-up in the honeymoon suite, so Mr. Spazini will be hosting you.” So now that he’s gotten hitched, Hank is dumping me with the Spaz, who when he got washedup (which if you ask me was around the time of his first bout), became those dumb-ass Injuns’ lame-ass excuse for a celebrity endorsement.

  “Send Sanchez over in ten minutes, Dotty. And call Nicky and tell her I’ll be stopping by for a trim this afternoon.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Anything else, Dot?”

  “Just happy birthday, Mayor.”

  I hang up, get up, pull the blinds up, and snort up. I’m sixty years old and, as predicted, it’s raining in La Plata.

  HE OFTEN whacked it over with the village pervert, who was a lurid man, a dropout of Syracuse, and they would ho’ long, disgusting ass to who had been the better night erotic, Donaldo of Atlantic City or Sir Hugh of Chicago.

  MT. MACREL, MONDAY, 12:00 PM

  I have Sanchez swing by the office so in honor of my birthday I can exchange the Cupid for John the Baptist. On the way to the first grand opening I make a little pit-stop. My hand jerks across my chest in a reflex at the entrance. It’s a big, dimly lit hall with a line of private booths against the wall. A green light over a door means open for business. Can’t smoke in here so I pop a cinnamon lozenge in my mouth. I walk up the aisle and duck behind one of the curtains. A wood panel separating the two sides of the booth slides open onto dark mesh.

  “Bless me Padre for I have sinned.”

  Thought I was talking about a porn shop for a minute, dinja? Hell, these places probably use the exact same set-up on purpose. Makes all those Catholic men with their icequeen wives feel as at home here in the confession box as they do on the sticky seats at Arousing Superstore. I bet a lot of guys show up both places every week.

  On my birthday I have two traditions: confess and get a haircut. Actually, it’s more like twice a month I get a trim while I drop in on this establishment maybe every other year, mostly when elections are coming up. I wouldn’t call it conscience exactly. It’s just that a partial admission every now and then keeps transgression in perspective—especially when the guy you tell it to can’t be coerced into telling anybody what you confessed, not even under oath. There’s something about Padre Perro I trust, something to do with him being a spic. An Italian priest will take your dirty laundry and turn it into next Sunday’s homily. Not Padre Perro.

  “It’s been a month since my last confession.”

  “You always say that, Don. And you come here once a year tops. Happy birthday, by the way.”

  “I thought you weren’t supposed to be able to see through that screen.”

  “I don’t need to see. You’ve got your own special combo of menthols and cough drops.”

  “Okay, Padre. But your professional oath still stands, correct?”

  “Yeah, whatever. But really, Don, what could you possibly tell me I don’t already know? Fornication, adultery, gluttony, stealing, onanism, name of the Lord in vain—it’s been the same for decades.”

  “I’ve got a new one to add to the list.”

 
“Really? How exciting! Murder? No, you’d never kill anybody, Don—at least you’d never admit to it.”

  “Let’s call it…lust.”

  “Lust? That’s nothing new for you.”

  “I’m not talking in the sex sense, and even there I don’t really lust. I take care of it. I just jack off or fuck.”

  “Jesus, Don! This is a church! I’m a priest!”

  “Sorry. Fornicated. Masturbated.”

  “That’s better. So what’s got you lusting?”

  “On second thought, Padre, maybe it’s actually idol worship. Yeah, that’s more like it. I’ve been worshipping an idol. Only I’m not willing to say it’s a false idol. It’s as real as anything I’ve ever felt in my life.”

  “What are you talking about, Don? Spit it out.”

  Something about the way Padre Perro says “spit it out” makes me swallow the hot cough drop. I say to myself there’s no way I should be kneeling here, not now. I think about how much money is in the campaign fund and the fact that there’s no limit to mayoral terms in La Plata, not to mention that nobody—at least nobody serious—has run against me in ten years. I can’t be kneeling in a confessional. Not yet. Christ, I need a cigarette!

  “Forgive me, Padre, but I have to go.”

  “Oh great, Don! Just like when you last came around.”

  I get up from the kneeler. “I’ll come back another time.”

  “You know what they say, Don: There might not be time.”

  I push the curtain aside, get out of the booth, and make my way back down the aisle.

  Padre Perro’s voice echoes in the empty church. “You know it isn’t confession if you don’t confess!”

  BUT MISTRESS Nicky, the barber of the same village, was in the habit of saying that no one could come up to the night erotic Barry of DC, and that if anyone could come-pear with him it was Whitey, brother of Willy of Boston, for Bulger was ready for anything—he was none of your finical night erotics, who went around whimpering as his brother did, and in point of vigor he did not flog behind him.