by James Lepore
Jay looked at his mom and nodded, trying to understand this thing called a wake, where a dead person was laid out, and where he was supposed to say something to Phil Franco’s wife, whom he’d never met. He couldn’t imagine any of this, but he trusted his mother implicitly and was not afraid. Years later he would come across the concept of grief counseling and recall that, in two or three sentences, his parents had given him all he would need to deal with the strange mix of exhilaration and anxiety that had been pressing on his heart since witnessing the cold-blooded killing of the cop Phil Franco.
“Your friend’s father says you went to the church to pray,” said A.J., who had called Dan’s dad as soon as Jay walked in the door.
Jay stared at the Formica tabletop, suddenly fascinated by its squiggly yellow and blue lines.
“Look at me, Jay,” A.J. said, and Jay, knowing he had no choice, did. He saw not anger on his father’s face, however, but fatigue and relief, and perhaps the beginning of a smile.
“Is that right?” A.J. said.
“Why not?” said Carmela, coming swiftly to Jay’s rescue. “Anybody would want to pray at such a time.”
Jay knew what lying was, and that it was supposed to be a sin, but it was by his suggestion that they conspire to lie together—a compact that by its nature excluded the rest of the world—that Dan had offered himself as a friend. What was the committing of a sin against an abstract and lifeless God compared to the betrayal of a flesh and blood friend? Nothing. And so Jay held his father’s gaze, prepared to lie, exhilarated at the thought of having a friend and a life separate from his parents.
“Don’t answer,” said A.J., giving way to a full-blown smile. “Nothing could be more absurd. But somebody had balls to think it up.”
At seven o’clock, after drinking a cup of hot milk laced with a teaspoon of whiskey, a guaranteed restlessness remedy usually reserved for Christmas Eve, Jay was in bed. Carmela sat next to him for a minute or two until he pretended to be asleep. After she left, he lay there and listened as she and A.J. sat in the living room of their tiny apartment watching the looting and burning of their city on television, occasionally murmuring something to each other he could not hear.
He fell asleep thinking of friends lost, Phil Franco, and found, Dan Del Colliano, his exhilaration finally giving way to his exhaustion.
A.J. and Carmela Cassio were stunned by what they saw on their television that night, especially the images of rifles sticking out of windows at the Columbus Homes and the sacking and torching of Big Red’s on nearby Mount Prospect Avenue, the last supermarket in the Ward. During a commercial break, A.J. called the two young men who helped him make the bread every night at the bakery and told them not to come to work that night, and possibly for another day or two. An unbroken string of nights, going back to 1903, in which bread had been made at Cassio’s, had come to an end.
If you had an aerial view of the city that night, as New Jersey’s governor Richard Hughes did for example, from a helicopter, you would have seen buildings and cars burning; people smashing windows and looting stores and dancing around bonfires in the streets; the streaking overhead lights of police cruisers and ambulances; and the smoke from tear gas as the police tried to flush snipers from buildings in neighborhoods thick also with hatred and tension and fear. You would have seen all this, and more, but you would not have seen A.J. Cassio sit up abruptly in his bed at two thirty, his usual rising time, and begin to fumble for his slippers, nor his wife rise also, to gently place her hands on his shoulders and say softly, “Jay, you forgot, you’re not making bread tonight,” nor A.J. grunting and shaking his head as Carmela slipped off her nightgown and encircled her husband’s body with her arms, pressing her breasts against his back while caressing his chest and stomach and loins and, pulling him down beside her, murmuring, “hold me Jay, hold me, sweet-heart . . .”
8.
10:00 AM, September 17, 2004, Newark
Jay gave the eulogy at Danny’s funeral mass, held at St. Lucy’s, still standing amidst the rubble of the old neighborhood, including the rubble that filled the empty lots where the Columbus Homes—demolished in 1994 by the same federal government that built them—had once stood. He kept it simple, speaking of Danny’s love for his mom and his two sons, his loyalty to his friends, his contagious smile. Kay Del Colliano, dressed in black, sitting in the front pew next to the casket, an arm around each of Danny’s boys, had had a hard life, and now had lost her only son. At the wake she had told Jay that she was afraid that Dan’s ex-wife—class conscious and ashamed of her Italian roots—would not let the boys see much of her now that Dan was gone.
“Your son—and your father,” Jay said, looking at Kay and the boys, “lived every second of his life to its absolute fullest. I never saw him back down from a fight. I never saw him do anything halfway. If he was afraid of anything, I never knew about it. I often wondered where his energy, his happy spirit, came from, especially in a world where many see only sadness and misery. I now realize that Dan was a gift—from God, from the universe—to all of us who knew and loved him. But great gifts are not meant to last forever. We were lucky to have him as long as we did, and we will need each other now more than ever before. Danny will speak to me always. I know that I will see him again one day, recognize him instantly, and smile . . .”
Jay was no stranger to sudden death or change. His parents had been killed on their way to his law school graduation in San Francisco in 1987. The universe had stopped that day for Jay, and never really started moving again. Numb, he married his girlfriend at the time, whom he did not love and barely knew. Unhappy, childless, they were divorced a year later. Jay moved into an apartment in Montclair, but spent most of his time at work, finding refuge in an ethic of sacrifice that almost, but never quite, defeated the demons of heartache and loneliness that haunted him.
Quietly, without ever speaking of it, Danny fought these demons with him. He knew, somehow, that pain cannot be conquered, only endured, but he also knew his friend, knew how harmful Jay’s natural tendency to isolate himself and brood could be in the wake of such a loss. And so, knowing that he was the only person capable of it, he forced diversions down Jay’s throat, dragging him to golf in Florida, to fish in the Sea of Cortez, to gamble in Las Vegas. One night in New York with Danny, Jay met an adventuresome, sexy redhead who he dated for a year, a year in which his heart returned more or less to normal. By living, we outwit death, but who would help Jay outwit it now that Danny was gone?
Jay did not ride in the funeral cortege after Danny’s mass. Frank Dunn asked to be taken on a quick tour of the neighborhood before heading to the cemetery, and Jay grimly complied. Dunn stared silently as Jay pointed out the tenement on Seventh Avenue that had housed the family bakery and three generations of Cassios, now a boarded-up shell; and the duplex on Garside Street where Jay and Danny lived side by side, with their families, for eighteen happy months from 1970 to 1971.
They headed out of the city toward Bloomfield, where Danny would be buried in Glendale Cemetery, next to his father. On the visor of Jay’s car was a postcard he had received from Danny the day after he learned of his murder. “Finally made it to Jupiter before I died,” it read. “Not at all like the other planets. Miss Kelly says hello . . . Dan.” Jay had brought it with him to the church, thinking he might use it in his eulogy. In the end he decided not to. These were Dan’s last words to him, which he would keep to himself.
“That was a nice thing you said about needing each other more now,” said Dunn.
“Thanks.”
“I don’t think it will work, though. The ex-wife’s a bitch.”
“I know.”
“Do me a favor,” Dunn said.
“What?”
“Have a drink with me after the funeral. I believe I’ll need one.”
9.
July 1967 - July 1976, Newark
Jay got a new bike for Christmas, 1972, a shiny red and white beauty that stood in the basement of the Cass
ios’ new apartment through a stormy winter and a cold, rainy spring. In late May the weather broke and, after school one day, he decided to take it to Branch Brook Park, whose endless, winding cinder paths had been calling his name for four long months. The day was warm and beautiful, and the park was only three blocks away. His father was asleep, and could not be woken to ask permission, and his mother was far away “at work.”
He rode like the wind for a half hour before he was hailed down by two teenaged black boys who he thought wanted to talk. Before he could come to a full stop one of them punched him squarely in the mouth, knocking him to the ground. Instead of trying to get to his feet, he rolled over and spread himself over his bike, which had toppled over next to him, one hand in a death grip on the handlebars, the other enmeshed in the spokes of the rear wheel. The two boys pounded him with their fists and feet for a minute or two, but he clung all the tighter, hoping they’d go away or that someone would come to his rescue. Then he felt a sharp pain down his right upper arm. Without thinking, he grabbed his bicep and soon his hand was full of blood. At the same time the boys flung him to the side of the path and were gone, with the bike, which he never saw again.
The next day Kay Del Colliano, who lived four blocks away, came over to commiserate with Carmela, bringing Danny, who laughed when he saw Jay’s swollen lip and missing tooth.
“How many were there?” Dan asked. They were sitting on the porch of the Cassios’ sagging duplex apartment on Garside Street, eating ice cream, one of the few things Jay would be able to eat for the next week or so.
“Two.”
“How old?”
“I don’t know. One was big.”
“Did you hit back?”
“Yes,” Jay answered, lying.
“That was dumb,” said Danny. “It was two against one. You should have just covered up, or run, and let them take your bike. It’s only a bike.”
A faint smile—his first in twenty-four hours—crossed Jay’s face as he looked at his friend. Danny was smiling, too, the wicked smile that by now Jay had seen many times, but could never quite get used to.
“I know a way to get even, though,” said Dan. “But first you have to get better. It can wait a week or two.”
Two weeks later Jay and Dan went to the park, and Jay rode Dan’s bike on the same cinder path for an hour while Dan crouched in the bushes nearby. They did the same the next day, and the next. On the fourth day, the two bike thieves appeared on the path.
“Motherfucker,” said the bigger one, smiling, as Jay came to a stop. “The boy brought us another bike.” The smaller of the two—still a head taller than Jay—stepped up quickly and shoved him off the bike, but Jay was holding a baseball bat at his side, which, taking a stance and rearing back, he swung as hard as he could at the boy who had punched him in the mouth two weeks ago, hitting him in the elbow, which snapped in two. As this was happening, Danny flew out of the bushes and headbutted the bigger boy in the chest, knocking him to the ground and flinging himself on top of him. Jay stood still as Danny—ten years old and all of fivetwo—pounded the boy’s face, his fists working furiously, like pistons gone haywire. The first black kid, his forearm dangling from his elbow joint, seeing this, fled. When Danny got to his feet, his dark face was flushed, his eyes wild. Jay stared at him, getting the only glimpse of the devil in Dan Del Colliano he’d ever need to see. The boy on the ground was half conscious, his face swollen and bruised.
“Who’s a motherfucker, now?” said Dan, kicking him in the ribs and spitting on him. “You are, you motherfucking cocksucker. I’ve got two brothers bigger than me. If you try something again, they’ll fucking kill you, and they’ll burn your fucking house down with your family in it. You’re the motherfucker now!”
The riots left Seventh Avenue and its environs in ruin, and A.J. was forced to abandon the bakery, leaving behind the new ovens and counters he purchased in 1965, but taking with him the nine thousand dollar note he signed to finance them. He also lost the four-story tenement that housed Cassio’s, inherited from his father in 1962. Two of the apartments were already vacant, and the remaining two tenants fled after the riots. His new tenants, when he could get them, either destroyed their apartments or didn’t pay their rent, or both. He had three thousand dollars in savings, which he used to make repairs, but when this money ran out, he fell behind on his taxes and, after trying with no success to sell the building, in 1972 he deeded it to the city.
He had moved only once in his life, in 1957, from the second to the fourth floor of his father’s building with his new bride, but in the years from 1967 to 1976, he moved his family four times, each time to an apartment in smaller and smaller Italian-American enclaves within the Ward. Carmela did not complain, but those years aged her, and sometimes, when she didn’t think he was looking, he saw something close to despair in her eyes. Though he seemed outwardly the same—steady, methodical, optimistic—A.J. Cassio was not a happy man as he set out, at the age of forty-one, to rebuild his life.
He took a job in the bakery of an A&P supermarket in nearby Belleville where, in a midnight-to-eight a.m. shift, he made white bread and party cakes for mass consumption. Carmela tried to resume teaching English and Greek and Latin Mythology at Webster Junior High in the Ward, but she quit after a forearm from a two hundred pound fourteen-year-old girl broke her jaw one spring day in 1968. In the fall she began substituting in grammar schools in the city. They did not intend to stay in Newark as long as they did, but the rents were cheap, and it took them a long time—seven years—to pay off the loan for the ovens and put aside money for the down payment on a house.
In July of 1976, one of A.J.’s coworker’s at the A&P told him about a house that was for sale in his neighborhood in Montclair. The owner was a woman whose husband had died, and who was moving in with her daughter in a house on the same block. She was willing to take back a mortgage, at less than the market rate, so that she could have a steady income to supplement her Social Security, and she did not require much of a down payment. When A.J. and Carmela went to look at the house, Jay in the backseat, they made a wrong turn and saw parts of Montclair that left them speechless : spectacular homes with broad lawns running down to leafy avenues presented themselves in all their splendor. Only the very rich could live in such mansions, they thought, and they were right, but the house they looked at was in a modest neighborhood, a few blocks from Bloomfield Avenue, a busy thoroughfare that ran for miles through the thickly populated suburbs west of Newark. The house, a yellow ranch with three bedrooms, a fireplace, two tall pine trees in front, and a quiet backyard, was more than A.J. and Carmela had let themselves dream of, and they made the deal immediately. By the middle of August they had moved in, and their last nine years in Newark were soon a distant memory.
Earlier that summer, the Del Collianos had moved out of Newark as well, but under different circumstances. In March, Dan’s dad, Dominick, a gambler with a violent temper, had been killed, presumably by loan sharks or book-makers, his body found in the trunk of his car in the parking lot of a discount store in Kearny, a factory town on the banks of the Passaic River. To Kay, her husband’s death could not have come a minute too soon. The week before, Dan, who had just turned fourteen, had intervened while Dominick was slapping her around the kitchen of their apartment, and Dan had wound up with a broken nose, blood streaming down his face as he and Kay watched Dominick fling himself out the door.
Two weeks after he was buried, a representative of Dominick’s mason’s union appeared at Kay’s door with a check for twenty-five thousand dollars, the proceeds of a life insurance policy that the union gave as a fringe benefit to all of its members. A fatalist, like many Italian-American women of her generation, Kay saw in her husband’s death, and the miraculous life insurance policy, the hand of God at work, compensation for putting up with an abusive husband for fifteen years. She used the money to buy a small house in Bloomfield, where her son would no longer have to run the streets and where she planned on li
ving out her days in peace.
Jay did not mind the smaller and smaller apartments and the successively more crowded neighborhoods they lived in those post-riot years in Newark. He did not learn until years later the price in lost pride that his parents paid as they watched their friends move to the suburbs to raise their children among trees and lawns and safe schools. Jay was too young to know about those things. He did know, however, that his friend Danny’s father, Dominick, was violent, and beat his mom, Kay. He had heard Danny say many times that he planned on killing Dominick when he grew up; and Jay, knowing Danny, believed him. So, although he was sad to see his friend go, he was relieved that he would not have to commit murder. At the time Jay thought it possible that he would never see Danny again. But the following Saturday—and every Saturday that summer—Dan rode his bike to Newark, and he and Jay played stickball in the schoolyard. In August the Cassios moved as well, and though the boys went to different high schools, Jay stopped thinking that he might never see Danny again, that their friendship would not last forever.
10.
2:00 PM, September 27, 2004, Newark
Jay took a week off after the funeral. On the following Monday he put on a lightweight summer suit, white shirt, and dark tie and went to work. Cheryl, a single mother with problems of her own, smiled quickly when he walked in and then returned to her typing. She had taken care of the office while he was home, putting everyone and everything off except for Melissa Powers, who had insisted on an appointment for today. He looked around his office for a moment and listened to the traffic below. The week’s mail, opened and sorted by day, was in a folder on his desk. On top of it were his calendar for the week and reminder notes. The case files that needed attention were lined up on the floor to his right, next to the large potted plant that Kay Del Colliano had sent him eight years ago when he left his former law partner, then under indictment for attempting to bribe a cop, and started his own practice.