After they gathered empty bags and soda cans, stuffed them into their backpacks along with their towels, headphones, and iPods, they stepped into their jeans, slipped on their t-shirts, and headed back to Tucci’s house. It would have been disrespectful not to visit. On their way to the house, Frankie glanced at the remnants of the long-ago bungalow — a stone fireplace and chimney where Gennaro and he once found rusted metal matchbox trucks and cars, toys that Tucci, Lasante, and DiCico children played with years ago.
The television still blared, but they found Tucci leaning against his cluttered kitchen counter, holding an almost empty can of dog food in one palsied hand and a spoon in the other. He looked puzzled, and Gennaro rested his arm around Tucci’s bird-like shoulders and shouted above the sound of the television. “It’s Gennaro DiCico and Frankie Lasante. We were just swimming out back. Damn, the water’s cold. Didn’t you pay your heating bill?”
“I pay too many bills already,” Tucci scoffed. “Now you want me to heat the waterfall. That’s God’s job, not mine.”
“I’ll take that,” Gennaro said, and he took the bowl of dog food from the counter and placed it on the floor before the drooling old bulldog. He then took Tucci’s elbow and escorted him back into the living room and turned down the television’s volume. Gennaro flashed Frankie a grin and nodded towards an empty bottle of homemade wine and a stained glass that sat on the cluttered table next to Tucci’s chair as if to say: He’s okay. It’s the wine that makes him foggy.
“So did you boys have a good swim?” Tucci asked.
“Great!” they responded simultaneously.
“And how’s your father?” Tucci looked at Frankie. “Lenny’s a good man — lousy luck — but a good man.”
“He’s doing well. I’m sure he’ll drive up to see you this summer.”
Tucci turned to Gennaro. “And your family? How are they? I haven’t seen your father in a long time.”
“They’re all good. Tomorrow’s my old man’s big Fourth of July blowout.”
“Your father should come up here sometime with Lenny. It’s good to get out of the city ... too many people in the city ... too much trouble.”
“You know how my old man is. He don’t like to leave the neighborhood.”
They visited with Tucci for over an hour — Gennaro carried most of the conversation, while Frankie washed dishes, cleared tables and kitchen counters, and emptied the wastepaper baskets from the kitchen, living room, and bathroom into a large plastic bag. Tucci told him not to bother, but this long-established Lasante ritual of trying to make life a little easier for Rocco Tucci dated back to the time of the fatal car accident. Frankie wasn’t about to break tradition. Gennaro on the other hand held up the DiCico tradition of gabbing.
Toward the end of their visit, Tucci became confused, calling the boys Lenny and Vinny, although Gennaro looked nothing like his father, but they didn’t correct him. Finally, Gennaro pointed to his watch and gave Frankie a look, while Frankie crammed a bunch of foul-smelling wilted flowers into the overstuffed plastic trash bag.
“Well, Mr. Tucci, it’s getting late, and Martha Stewart and I have to hit the road,” Gennaro said.
“Martha who?” Tucci said.
“No one special. Just a girl that has the hots for me,” Gennaro said, laughing.
Frankie rolled his eyes.
They each gave Tucci a peck on the cheek and patted old Meatball, who was sleeping off dinner. He wagged his tail but barely opened his eyes.
Frankie wondered if it might be the last time they’d see Tucci, but then he always feared that. Frankie was a worrier.
As they got back into the car, Frankie shared his concern that Tucci seemed more feeble than last summer and his fear that someone might hurt the old man, but Gennaro told him to stop making something out of nothing, which was what Gennaro often told him.
“He’s fine,” Gennaro said. “Didn’t you smell the wine on him? That’s what was making him groggy. Plus he’d blow someone’s head off before they had a chance to hurt him.”
“He didn’t blow anyone’s head off when we snuck into the house. He didn’t even hear us.”
“So you’d feel better if he blew our heads off? Then you wouldn’t have to worry about him.” Gennaro twisted his mouth to the side and shook his head. “You’re a trip, Francesco.”
After driving a few miles they turned into the parking lot of a beat up motel — a one-story stretch of doors in dire need of fresh paint, side by side with dirty picture windows and yellowed blinds, the kind of motel where folks rented rooms for reasons other than sleeping, but the price was right. Last summer they had stayed there with another friend, Johnny Pickle, and spent half the night overhearing a man in the next room talk dirty and moan as if he were in a porn flick.
The following morning when they heard him leave his room, the three boys peeked out through the yellow broken blinds, pulling them off the window. They wrestled with the Venetian blinds as the tidy, little, balding, middle-aged man dressed in a three-piece pinstriped suit, white shirt, and red tie, carried an attaché case and leading a pug on a rhinestone-studded leash. The man adjusted his sunglasses, scooped his dog into the car, and disappeared behind the smoke-tinted windows of his SUV.
The boys roared their way home from the Catskills.
“Wow! This is the best I’ve ever had,” Gennaro said.
“That’s it, scratch me behind my ear,” Johnny yelled followed by panting and howling, and rubbing his knuckles behind his own oversized ears. Johnny was all legs and arms and ears, like a child’s drawing of a stick figure.
This time Frankie remembered to pack earplugs, just in case.
Inside, the motel office smelled of Pine-Sol and stale smoke, and behind the front counter a woman with red shiny lipstick bleeding into the creases above her upper lip watched the same reality police show that, by now, Tucci was probably snoring through.
“Excuse me, Miss.” Gennaro cleared his throat as the woman pointed to a coffee-stained sign on the counter that indicated the motel was full.
“There’s a hot air balloon festival going on and motels are booked for miles around,” she explained between drags on her cigarette. Her eyes teared from the smoke, but remained focused on the television screen.
“Hot air?” Gennaro said and flashed a smile.
The woman’s eyes strayed from the television to Gennaro, first his hazel eyes framed with long lashes, and then to his shoulders, arms, and hands — broad, veiny, and pressing down hard on the top of the counter. Finally, she looked back into his eyes.
“Yeah, hot air,” she said. “Something I bet you’re an expert on.”
Gennaro laughed and threw his arm around Frankie. “Come on, Francesco, let’s get out of here. We got our reputations to consider.”
Frankie rolled his eyes, inhaled the scent of Gennaro’s perspiration mixed with suntan lotion, and yielded to Gennaro’s tug.
After 30 miles of no vacancies, they stopped at a mom-and-pop gas station and convenience store and bought a couple of premade subs wrapped in cellophane, two cans of cream soda, and a large bag of jalapeno flavored chips.
“I guess it’s for the best,” Gennaro said as they walked from the store back to the car. “If we drive back tonight, I’ll be home all day tomorrow to help my old man and brothers get ready for the block party. Your dad gonna keep you trapped in the store tomorrow?”
“Probably. You know how he is,” Frankie said, tossing the bag with their convenience store dinners onto to the front seat.
“Help me get the top up,” Gennaro said. “Funny, during the day I like the country — well, except for all those creepy crawling things — but at night there’s too much sky. All these stars give me the creeps.”
They secured the top of the convertible and continued their trip back to the familiar, where buildings framed patchworks of sky and streetlights replaced stars. Crossing the Tappan Zee was the last thing Frankie remembered until pulling into the DiCico’s drive
way where two sentinel lions guarded the DiCico’s white arched wrought iron gates.
It was 2:00 a.m. and all of 104th Street was asleep, except for Mrs. Pentaro’s black and white cat that lifted its face from the mangled rat under its paw and narrowed its eyes as Gennaro and Frankie stepped out of the car.
“It’s late, ya wanna just sleep in the basement?” Gennaro asked. The DiCicos lived in a gentrified and expanded one-family, white elephant of a house that was once a modest two-family on a double city lot. In the basement was a second full kitchen, a game room with a bar, bedroom, and bathroom. Several neighbors on the block had a second kitchen in the basement. Their flats were for show and the basement for actual living. But the DiCicos, as with everything they did, took this ethnic idiosyncrasy to an extreme. Their basement was more posh than their neighbors’ main homes. In turn, Gennaro’s two older brothers and their brides had lived in the DiCico basement after they married, until Big Vinny bought the first couple a house in Howard Beach and the second a house in Broad Channel.
Frankie agreed to spend the night, claiming that he didn’t want to disturb his father by coming home so late. That was the excuse he gave Gennaro and himself.
Gennaro unlatched the oversized wrought iron gates, and Frankie followed him past Big Vinny’s Lincoln and through a maze of ornamental roses, evergreen topiaries, and cement statues. In the dark, the DiCico’s yard resembled a cemetery. Garden lights shone on a statue of Saint Lucy baring her eyeballs on an oval platter as if she were serving escargots. In the Lasante’s yard there was an arbor, heavy with purple grapes in late August, a fig tree, roses and hydrangeas, and the ubiquitous vegetable garden thick with tomatoes, zucchini, peppers, and eggplants in the fall. There was also the required statuary, but just one, a small replica of Saint Francis, Frankie’s namesake — about three feet tall with a bird perched on his shoulder and a wolf resting at his feet, but the three-foot Saint Francis, despite the stigmata imprints on his hands and feet, paled in comparison to the DiCicos’ life-sized Saint Lucy carrying her eyeballs. A few steps past Saint Lucy, water trickled from the dueling cement penises of twin boys peeing into an oversized cement clamshell. The sound reminded Frankie of his own engorged bladder, and in the basement, more water trickled from the filters in three fifty-five-gallon saltwater fish tanks. Frankie pushed past Gennaro, around a pool table, and into the bathroom. After relieving himself, and then a little soap and water under each armpit, two quick swipes of deodorant, and rubbing toothpaste on his teeth and gums, he joined Gennaro back in the bedroom where multiple Frankies and Gennaros appeared in a V of mirrored closet doors. Upstairs in the master bedroom were more closets, also with mirrored doors. Marie DiCico was quite the fashion maven and, outside his home, Big Vinny always dressed like a CEO. He could be flipping steaks on a grill and the most he’d remove was his jacket — never his tie. Maybe he’d loosen it.
Frankie sat on the satin bedspread and removed his sneakers while Gennaro took his turn in the bathroom, but before he had the chance to step out of his jeans, Gennaro jumped him from behind and pinned him to the bed.
“I don’t know, Francesco, you’re too easy,” Gennaro said, then ruffled Frankie’s hair, gave him a kiss on the cheek, and said something about going to sleep because tomorrow was his old man’s big day.
Like a rock, Gennaro fell asleep while Frankie lay there struggling not to think, or more accurately not to feel, Gennaro’s warm breath on his back. Whenever Frankie stayed at the DiCico’s house he swore to himself that it would be the last — it wasn’t worth the torture — that is until the next time Gennaro asked him to stay over.
3
Gennaro was 19 and Frankie 17. Frankie had long admired Gennaro’s cool confident ways, but at some point — he wasn’t sure when — admiration became feelings that Frankie didn’t understand, until he did understand. Prayer didn’t help, but that night he prayed until the morning light filtered through slits in the basement’s short vertical blinds and illuminated Gennaro’s silhouette. Frankie fell asleep somewhere between Hail Mary and forgive us our trespasses, while imagining Gennaro with his arms outstretched and perched as if on a pedestal atop the falls at Tucci’s place.
When Frankie woke, he found a note from Gennaro taped to the mirrored doors explaining that he had gone to the Canarse Markets with his brothers to buy beer and other supplies for the party. Frankie went home, and after he showered and changed into a clean pair of jeans and a t-shirt, Grandma Filomena insisted he eat breakfast before he helped his father in the store. Frankie was anxious to see if Gennaro had returned from Canarse and was outside helping his brothers set up for the block party, but Filomena was not someone you refused. When she said eat, you ate.
“So how is Mr. Tucci?” she asked as she added two slices of mozzarella to the sizzling eggs and then covered the cast-iron skillet. She appeared taller than she actually was — her chin held high and her perfectly squared shoulders added to her stature and gave her an air of confidence and authority. She had been washing windows and was still wearing a housedress, but once her housework was done, and whether she planned to help out in the store, run errands, or sit in the house and crochet, she would change into a more presentable dress. She lifted the cover from the skillet and folded the omelet with the precision of a star chef.
“He’s good,” Frankie said. “I don’t know ... somehow different. Older I guess. Gennaro said he was fine.”
“You’re a good boy, Frankie. Gennaro’s a good boy too, but too much like his father. He doesn’t take the time to really see a person. All the DiCico children are too much like Big Vinny. Poor Marie. She’s a good mother, but even a good mother can do only so much.” Filomena lifted the omelet with a spatula, slid it onto a china plate, and then buttered two chunks of Italian toast.
Frankie removed a placemat and silverware from the drawers next to where Filomena prepared his breakfast. “I don’t know, Grandma. I think Gennaro is more like his mother.”
Filomena set the plate before him at the kitchen table. “He looks like her anyway,” she said. “Lena and Gennaro have their mother’s good looks. Michael, Jimmy, and Big Vinny look like triplets. God forbid.”
Filomena made the sign of the cross, and they laughed as she poured herself a cup of coffee, and then joined Frankie at the table. A string of mozzarella stretched from the omelet to Frankie’s mouth. They continued to chat while Frankie devoured his omelet, Italian toast with whipped butter, and two glasses of milk. He yawned numerous times, but neglected to mention how difficult it was for him to fall asleep when lying so close to Gennaro.
He placed his empty plate, glass, and silverware in the sink, kissed Filomena on the cheek, told her she was the best, and then dashed from the house, through the breezeway, and into the store to help Lenny, or at least he pretended to be a help — making an inventory of dry goods that needed to be shelved, while he mostly stared out the front door looking for Gennaro.
Across 91st Avenue, three old men sat on metal folding chairs around a small card table in front of Big Vinny’s club — a storefront with tinted windows. Inside, the club resembled an old-time pool parlor except for the large flat screen TV and wet bar. A locked door separated Big Vinny’s office from the rest of the club. The old men alternated sips of espresso with puffs on De Nobili cigars, and several of Big Vinny’s sidekicks drank beer from plastic cups while Michael and Jimmy unloaded gas grills from a van, but no sign of Gennaro.
Jimmy dropped his end of the gas grill. Michael flailed his arms, as did Jimmy, and Frankie knew they were arguing and probably shouting a litany of curse words. It didn’t take much to set them off. In hushed tones, neighbors often called them Cain and Abel.
Lenny ate a salami sandwich on a Kaiser roll while Doug Turner sat on a stool across the counter from him and also ate a sandwich, but his was capicola on white bread. Doug worked in the auto-repair shop across 91st Ave., next to Big Vinny’s club. Having lunch with Lenny after the noon rush was Doug’s standard practice, on
ce workers from surrounding banks, shops, several small factories, and warehouses had already descended on Lasante’s during their lunch breaks and left.
In a neighborhood where nicknames were as common as flies, most folks, except for Lenny, called Doug Prosciutto. When boning a prosciutto, Lenny saved the hambone and fat for Doug, who boiled it with greens — hence his nickname. He was an upbeat, friendly man, and Lenny enjoyed his company. They had become fast friends soon after Doug began working at the auto-repair shop four years ago — maybe because they were both single dads, or because they liked talking about politics and had similar views, or because they each felt a little out of sync in the neighborhood, though for different reasons. Doug was African American.
“Great sandwich as usual,” Doug said. “What do you call this ham again?”
“Capicola,” Lenny said.
“Whatever it is, it’s delicious.” He was a tall, gangly, and animated man, and as he sat on the stool across from Lenny and ate his sandwich, he looked as if he couldn’t quite figure out how to manage his arms and legs.
Lenny asked Frankie why he kept looking out the window.
“Nothing. Just being nosey,” Frankie mumbled.
“From here I can see that we need a case of ziti and a case of cappolini,” Lenny said.
“Leave the boy alone,” Doug said. “How many boys work as hard as he does? Good student. Works in his father’s store. Most kids today act like taking out the garbage is a fulltime job. You’re a good kid, Frankie.”
“Thanks, Mr. Turner.” Frankie feigned writing on his pad.
A customer examined a red pepper as if she were a dermatologist diagnosing a carcinoma, and another customer asked Frankie to get her a roll of toilet paper. “I can’t reach up that high. Your father thinks we’re giants. And don’t get me none of those used rolls.”
“The board of health made us stop selling used toilet paper,” Lenny said.
“Man, you’re a piece of work.” Doug shook his head and laughed.
Most Precious Blood Page 2