The Legend of Joey Trucks: The Accidental Mobster

by Craig Daliessio

  16

  Old Hit-Men

  Never Die

  So by now I knew Phil was suspicious that I was in the mob. But I had no idea that he’d been spreading this rumor around town. I figured it was just him. Him and maybe Larry Erickson. After what Bransford told me, there was no more mistaking it or wondering. Phil was the guy behind the innuendo, this much I knew for sure. We just had no idea how far he’d taken it. That we’d find out after the FBI came knocking at my door. But that part comes later. At this point, I just thought it was one nosy neighbor and his obsession. Of course, Larry (whose real name is “Lars”) “The Swede” Erickson didn’t help matters any, with his ridiculous hints about the mob every friggin’ time he talked to me. I know he was mostly playing, but it perpetuated the whole mess and I really hated it. I also hated how he would always shift into that terrible, phony Sopranos impersonation whenever he talked to me, especially if we were around other people.

  We’d walk into the grocery store and there he’d be with his wife Madge. Madge. It’s 2014 for God’s sake and your only fifty-two years old. Your mom thought it was a good idea to name you after the Palmolive lady? But whenever Anj and I would see Swede and his wife out somewhere, he’d come sauntering up with a gate that was supposed to be Italian somehow, and start motioning with his hands as he talked. I wanted to put him in a straitjacket. He’d move around like Steve Martin in “My Blue Heaven” and talk in that nasally, Minnesotan-turned-New-Yorker accent he tries pulling off.

  Then he’d say, “Yo!” He has no idea how badly I wanted to smash him with a casaba melon when he did that. Why? I’ll tell you why. Because people from New York don’t say “Yo!” they say “How-ya-doon?” as a greeting. “Yo!” is a uniquely Philadelphia thing, and for him to try walking and talking like a New York crime boss and open his mouth and say “Yo!” was enough to make me want to scream.

  Another thing, he was always talking about “Arranging a meeting” and “Talking to this guy about this thing.” Listen, Lars, this isn’t Analyze This here. I thought, I’m not in the frickin’ mob, and I frickin’ hate it when you act like I am! Now, I have to admit, this mistaken identity thing had a few nice perks. The locals who bought into it started giving up their choice parking spots at the baseball stadium, and I got discounts on my gardening equipment at the Co-op. Heck they even tipped real heavy at my daughter’s lemonade stand. But I was sick of it now and I had decided to turn it around on Phil, and Larry the Swede. I wasn’t sure how I was going to do it yet, but I figured the opportunity would present itself eventually.

  I was right. It happened that third summer we were in Forest. It didn’t happen the way I would have planned it either. As it turns out, it happened better than I could have imagined, as most great gags do. It started with a phone call from the Old Man.

  Pop called me one evening in May, late in that third spring after we moved to Forest. He’d gotten a phone call from Richard Green over at the Waste International office...our old building. Green was direct, as he always is, Pop said. He said he was sorry but the edict had come down from the corporate headquarters that our old iconic trash truck, the one Nonno had bought from the township, the one we called The Crusher, had to be removed from the property. They wanted to spruce up the building, and make it more like the main corporate center...blah, blah, blah. The fact is, The Crusher was built in 1947 and he was just an old dinosaur. Pop called me on a Tuesday and told me all about the conversation he’d had. I told him I’d take care of it. The following evening I called Richard Green, just as he would be leaving his office. I was out in my garage as always, and sure enough, like clockwork, here comes Phil Lowery. He had the Swede with him too. I was annoyed at first. But then just as the both of them walked into the garage –reeking of Phil’s Aqua Velva as always- the words I was about to say suddenly became like gold. Pure. Gold.

  Richard Green picked up just as Phil was moseying out of his garage. “Joe!” Green said joyously. “This is a nice surprise.” he continued. “How on Earth are you?” “Oh you know, Richard, doing well. Still haven’t come close to the bottom of that check you wrote me. Life is pretty good.” Green chuckled readily at that. “Rub it in pal, rub it in.” I returned fire right away “Look, don’t play poor with me. You know as well as I do that you didn’t overpay. How’s your jump shot there, Eddie Gottlieb?” Green laughed. “You don’t forget a thing, do you?”

  Just as I was ready to get to the meat of the conversation, Phil and the Swede walked into the garage. They were careful and timid, but oddly, far more at ease than they used to be. I guess three years and I still hadn’t whacked them, counted for something. Sheesh.

  Then it hit me. This conversation could be full of double entendre if I allowed it to be. And as soon as I saw Swede carrying himself like some goombah with a nervous tic, I decided it was going to work. The fun began.

  “Listen Richard, we need to talk about The Crusher.” I motioned to Phil and the Swede to grab something from the fridge and gave them the “give me a minute” sign, knowing full well that they’d see that as a signal that they needed to eavesdrop. Phil and the Swede grabbed a couple of Cokes and started pretending to play darts. Nobody plays darts that badly. Neither of them could have hit an Oldsmobile with a handful of marbles if they were sitting inside it.

  I let them think I didn’t know they were listening, and continued my shadowy conversation. “I understand The Crusher has become a problem for you.” I said, barely able to control my laughter already. These guys were in for a real treat. If their imagination had me in the mob, I was going to cement the deal tonight...pardon the pun.

  Green said “Yeah, it’s becoming an eyesore and management wants it gone.” Now...neither of these two yokels heard this, of course. That made it beautiful.

  “Well, he belongs to you now, that was part of what you bought when you took over our waste management business.” Green agreed with me. “I know it, Joe. But I also know what the truck meant to your family and just as a courtesy I wanted to offer it to you before we just had it scrapped.” Richard Green is a really good guy. This phone call proved it once again.

  I continued, “The Crusher served my family well, Richard,” I continued, “In his prime, there was never a job he couldn’t do for us or a load he couldn’t haul.” I said this with my back to both of my guests, but I could see their faces in the window pane in front of me. “The Mezilli family built our business on his back...especially his ability to get rid of the bigger pieces of trash with ease. And he never broke down. Never. He never missed a pick-up, or a big disposal. I think he deserves to go out with respect.” I heard Phil Lowery joking on the Coke he was sipping. I had to play this right. I turned to Lowery and The Swede and excused myself for a moment. I walked outside the garage and meandered over to the side where the open window would allow them to hear every word in assumed anonymity. I continued my conversation with Richard Green.

  “Richard, here’s what I think we need to do. Either you can just take the old guy out to a scrap yard somewhere and have him cut into pieces, and the final bit of Mezilli family history is stripped from the waste management industry forever, or I can send a guy up there to get him and bring him down here and take care of it from this end.” From outside my garage I heard a low whimper...it sounded like The Swede.

  Richard Green was always a great guy to deal with and he knew what it was I was saying. I also appreciated that he thought enough of me to give me first rights to The Crusher, instead of just having it chopped to bits in a salvage yard somewhere. It was nice of him to call me. I told him as much.

  “Richard, I really appreciate your letting me know about this and giving me the option of handling him myself. That means a lot. I have some great memories with The Crusher, and it’s very first-class of you to show me this respect.” “Well,” Green said, “you just tell me what you want to do and we’ll do it. Personally, it’s a really cool garbage truck and I wish we’d just leave it right here. But Corporate is Corporat
e. You know how that works.”

  “Yep,” I answered, “I understand. Sometimes the new guys have no appreciation for what the old guys did. I tell you what. I’ll make a call to one of my people up there and arrange to have him brought down here. He needs a good final resting place. Maybe out at my hunting camp. Nobody will see him out there and nobody will notice. That’s better than him becoming part of a scrap heap someplace in South Philly. I’ll call you in a day or two when the arrangements are made.”

  “Thanks Joe,” Green answered. “I feel better knowing that your family will still have The Crusher. He really represents you guys. I’ll wait to hear from you.” I thanked Richard Green and then said, just for effect for my eavesdropping neighbors, “Listen, do me a favor. Don’t tell anybody back there about this. The old guy was very popular and a fixture in the neighborhood. If word gets out that it’s then end of the line for him, they might not be happy. We’ll do this quietly. Save you a lot of bad feelings on the block.”

  Green appreciated it and we hung up. I walked back into the garage casually, only to see Lowery, and The Swede practically running over to Phil’s house. This is going to be good! I thought. I just didn’t realize how good. In another year, I’d realize just how far my misdirection had gone.

  Half a Pound of Gabagool

  I decided that if I was going to turn this thing around on Phil and the Swede, I was going to really play it up, and in the process, fix their ridiculous misconceptions about Italian people. Looking back, I think I got a little too indignant. People love Italians. I can’t blame them, being Italian myself, and all. They love mob stories, not for the crime, but for the tradition, loyalty, sarcasm, wit and sheer humor of most Italians. We love our families, and who doesn’t like that, right? We’re a jovial people, even when we’re being smart aleks, and I think that’s what people like, and it’s what they’re drawn to. I mean, take away the crime, and who wouldn’t want to be a Corleone? As long as you’re not Fredo, I mean.

  But at the moment, Phil and the Swede were just on my nerves. As time passed, they’d begun asking me more questions about the mob, about this gangster, or that Don. I’d usually answer them with a smart-mouth retort. “How the heck would I know anything about Joey Bananas?” I’d bark. “He ran the Gambino’s in New York. I’m from Philly and I was in Waste Management.” Phil would stare at me with his mouth hanging slightly open. Then he would inevitably say, “Right. But you knew Joey Bananas, right?” That’s why I finally decided to just give in and play the role for a while and hopefully make it blow up in their faces. If I couldn’t convince them straight-up that I wasn’t connected, then maybe I could use it for my own benefit in the neighborhood, while I figured out a way to set them straight once and for all. Sometimes, I have to admit, it was fun. Like when the topic of speaking Italian was broached. Now, here’s what you need to know about my grasp of the mother tongue. I have none. My grandfather refused to teach the language to my father and my uncles. He spoke it around the house, and I heard him talking to my grandmother in Italian...or to his brothers. But he never taught us Italian. He used to say, “We are ‘medicone’ (his modification of “American”) now. We speak-ah the English.” Nobody argued this point with Giuseppe. In fact, nobody argued much with Giuseppe at all.

  I tried explaining this early on to my new neighbors. But they didn’t believe me, or they didn’t want to believe me. Either way, every once in a while they’d ask me how to say something in Italian. Then I’d hear them speaking “Itanglish” whenever they were around me. Let me explain what Itanglish is. If you ask a Hispanic American to speak Spanish, you might get what they call “Spanglish.” It’s not really Spanish, it’s what their mothers and fathers heard from their immigrant parents as they grew up. They were actually hearing Spanish-speaking parents trying to learn English as they went, and using a mix of both. It becomes a tongue all its own.

  Well, Italian’s have done this for generations too. There are words that the average American uses regularly and they think they are using Italian words when they aren’t. Not exactly. For example, like every Italian-American in the country, I frequently use the exclamatory; “Madonn!” For years I had absolutely no idea what I was saying. I just grew up hearing my parents and grandparents and every other adult in the neighborhood say this whenever they were frustrated, aggravated, frightened, or experiencing any number of unnamed emotions. I didn’t find out until I was in my thirties, that this is actually an “Americanized” version of a short, one-word prayer to the Virgin Mary for assistance. The Italians were saying “Madonna!” which is one of the Latin forms of Mary’s name. Well, filter it through three or four generations of broken English, sputtered Italian, and background noise and you end up with “Madonn!” You see how it works?

  There are lots of words like that. Mozzerella is actually pronounced “Molts-ah-lella” but my family called it “Moots-ah-dell” since...heck they still pronounce it that way. Riccota cheese is “riggot,” etc. Oh and while we’re on the subject; it’s Gravy and Macaroni, not Pasta and Sauce. Anyway, it was this whole mispronunciation thing that gave rise to one of the funniest tricks I have played on a neighbor since I moved here. I’d already begun hearing Phil and Hank and The Swede tripping over their tongues trying to say “Maddonn!” and it usually ended up sounding like “Malone.” I’d try helping them, and they’d butcher it even more. So I let it ride and got a laugh out of it at their expense. They’d throw in the occasional “Capisce” or something else they heard on TV, but I let it go.

  One particular summer evening, I decided to have some fun. We were grilling in the back yard with a few families from our church in Lynchburg, and my neighbors. As usual, people were asking me questions about being Italian, the mob, St. Joseph’s Table, Seven Fishes, and which Olive Oil brand I prefer. And then someone asked me if I had a preference for deli meats since I moved here. It was a guy named Chris and he lived out in Alta Vista. He is a really nice guy and I liked him right away. One of the things I liked in particular was that, while he was very fascinated by The Sopranos, it wasn’t the crime that he was enthralled by. Chris was genuinely interested in Italian history, tradition, and, especially, food. We’d had him and his family over several times, and each time, he was simply blown away by some authentic dish Anj or myself would prepare. The real test came when he sampled some of my tomatoes and tripe without being persuaded. He liked it. He even took some home with him, which impressed the heck out of me, I have to tell you.

  After that, I tried educating him as much as I could. It was a lot of fun imparting my limited knowledge of the homeland to a civilian. One day, though, he made the mistake of using some bad Itanglish and it set up a wonderful joke. Here’s what happened. Chris had apparently seen those episodes of The Sopranos where Tony reveals his love for “Gabagool.” Chris had stumbled across a recipe and it called for “Gabagool” and so he called me up one day. “Hey Philly...” he began. Now, a little background is necessary here; Chris had taken to calling me “Philly Joe Mezilli” when we first were introduced, and eventually it just got shortened to “Philly.” I absolutely loved it. For two reasons, one, they have the most unimaginative nicknames here. Back home, your nickname is usually a mangle of your last name or a descriptive of your face or body or hair color or something very personal. Here, they just call you “Bubba” or “Hoss.” It’s never personal and therefore it’s not endearing. The other thing was I really liked being associated with my hometown. I like Forest, but Philly lives in my soul.

  Anyway, that day at our cookout, Chris asked me where to get some good “Gabagool.” Now, I have to admit, I knew exactly what he was talking about because I watched The Sopranos too. It’s not actually called “Gabagool” it’s “Capacola.” The beauty here is that I knew this, but Chris did not. As it turns out, I had, by this point, discovered a really nice butcher shop in Lynchburg and where they sold all the deli meat brands we had back home. Wanting to make a nice sandwich now and then, I started buying all our d
eli meat there. The owner was a little Italian guy named Mickey, from South Jersey. He’d retired to Lynchburg to be near his grandkids, and he opened the butcher shop as a way to stay busy. We hit it off right away, and he always gave me a big box stuffed with pork neckbones. I make my red gravy (what you civilians call “spaghetti sauce”) with neck bones and it was hard to find them in the grocery stores here unless they were smoked, which ruins the taste. Mickey hooked me up. He was a real Goombah that way.

  So Chris asks me where he can get the “Gabagool” and I tell him “Go to the Trieste butcher store on Rivermont Avenue. Tell Mickey you are a friend of mine and tell him to slice it the way he slices it for me. He’ll take care of you.” Now, Mickey really knows how to slice deli meat. You have to slice it paper thin. It’s a texture thing and he gets it. That’s how it’s done back home.

  Well, one afternoon I’m watering the tomatoes and Chris calls me on the cell. “Philly,” he says, “I’m over here at the Trieste and I can’t find any Gabagool. Are you sure they have it here?” It was all I could do to keep a straight face. “Yeah, Chris,” I answered. They usually have both kinds. Is Mickey around?” Chris answered, “Yeah he’s right here.” “Well,” I said, “ask him if he has hot and wet, or dry and sweet. He’ll know which one to give you.” I listened over the phone as Chris asked, “Do you have hot and wet or dry and sweet?”

  Next thing I heard was Mickey barking at Chris from behind the deli counter; “You want Capacola! There ain’t no such thing as Gabagool! What the hell is Gabagool?” Oh let me guess…you’re another one of those god damn Sopranos fans! Listen Uncle June, it’s CAP-A-COLA, is that simple enough for you? This ain’t Satriale’s Pork Store!” There was silence for the longest five seconds of my life, and then I hear Mickey break out in hysterical laughter. By now I’m splitting my sides. Chris gets back on the phone and sheepishly says, “You son of a bitch! You knew all along, didn’t you?” I burst out laughing. “Yeah pal, of course I knew. Listen, tell Mickey you want dry, sweet Cappy for that recipe you’re working on. Tell him to slice it the way I like it and to take care of you. I promise, no more jokes.” Chris has a great sense of humor and he was laughing at himself by this point.