by R. P. Lester
***
Don Balls was aware of Marco’s origin from the get-go. For him, the lineage was a technicality. He was often heard to joke in his thick Cajun accent, “The little fucker was ugly as sin! When the priest would go down there to pray over him, me and the boys would take bets on how many novinas he’d have to say before he purged the demon! Hahaha!” He’d slap his knee with a great belly laugh. ”Aw yeah, everybody in the neighborhood knew where that gargoyle came from. But you know me, I said, ‘Sure, I’ll raise the little elephant man. And if I can’t fix him, maybe I can sell him to the circus!’ Hahaha!”
Marco had usually excused himself from Christmas dinner by the time Don Balls got to the finale of his story.
The Don clutched the tot in his talons, raising him as one of his own, giving him all the perks that come with having a father who can buy your grades or bury obstinate teachers. He showered him with gifts, money, plastic surgery, and affection, same as his other children, though the plastic surgery was somewhat mostly really for Marco.
As the boy grew, he came to know the origin of his birth, having been clued in by a relative when he was five. It changed the dynamics of his world dramatically.
Marco built a wall of estrangement, shutting himself off from his adopted family and blooming in a bubble of his own creation. He knew he’d never be a blood heir to the Don, and his frustrations manifested themselves in disturbing fashions. He began to show rot of a bad seed.
Consensus held that Marco was a depraved child who turned dangerous when he didn’t get his way, bullying other children and pulling practical jokes that bordered on the alarming. Favorite pastimes included pissing on the narcoleptic butler when he had an attack, substituting cap guns for the crew’s Sig Sauers—a laugh riot at one of the Don’s assassination attempts—and replacing the maid’s tampons with string cheese and Nerf bullets. His personality intensified one hundred fold as he got older, running his own clique with the maturity of a spoon-fed toddler.
Poliona became a self-indulged prima donna with no concern for the happiness of his crew. Then he became my boss.
***
I was brought directly from the restaurant to meet Don Balls at one of his Haitian massage parlors. It was located in a Godforsaken part of the city just two blocks past a day-old robbery/homicide at a corner liquor store. Marco and I walked into the lobby of the brick building where I was instantly smacked with the scents of sex and cocoa butter. A woman with skin like dark roast coffee leaned on an empty glass case in the lobby. She flipped tediously through a foreign magazine and ignored me when I spoke. Marco divulged that she knew just enough English to arrange a service and collect the dough.
Red light bulbs suspended in track lighting lit a red carpeted hallway with blood red shag on the walls. A closed door at the end offered a woman screaming profanities—at least they carried the force of profanities—in Haitian Creole. Followed by the lightning crack of a whip.
I glanced at Marco. He gave me a horrific leer normally reserved for pederasts. I choked back my vomit and followed him to the Don’s office at the end of the hallway, past the screaming girl.
Her cursing had turned to quiet sobbing.
Before Marco could shut the door, the Don was heaving his portly, red-tracksuited frame up from the well-worn armchair to shake my hand and introduce himself. I told him my name and where I was from. His chunky cheeks pushed his horn-rimmed glasses to his forehead when he smiled. He said he had family around there, lamenting that he hadn’t visited in some time. After a brief trip down (his) memory lane caboosed with a drink offer at 7:45 in the morning, we got down to business.
The Don said he’d been having problems satisfying debts from gamblers and bit-borrowers. Said he was looking for a collections man. He eyeballed me like a pimp inspecting a new girl, saying I’d be perfect for the position provided I checked out (re: wasn’t a cop). He said I was a “big fucker” and looked like I could really “put it on ‘em.”
I decided to tap the Don’s funny bone to score some points. “Well, I don’t know about ‘puttin’ it on ‘em,’ but I sure did ‘put it in ‘em’ a few times when I was in the clink! Bent ‘em over their bunks and everything! They weren’t gonna put cherry Kool-Aid on my lips! No, sir!”
The two of them stared at me like I’d been caught jerking off in church. You could hear a flea fart. I was beginning to think my attempt at cute had earned me the oil drum, maybe a railroad spike through the neck. The Don did a double-take and laughed so hard I thought he was going to piss his chic running suit.
He looked to Marco with an arched, bushy eyebrow, grinning and grumbling something in Italian while giving an imperious wave. I just knew it was sign language to put a bullet in my head. Instead, when I looked at Marco, he gave me a nod, his face still twisted from my ill-timed sodomy humor.
Don Balls was a busy man and our meeting was drawing to a close. Getting up from our chairs for farewells, I nonchalantly asked what’d happened to my predecessor. He grinned and said he’d “grown a conscience,” his tone indicating that whatever befell him would happen to me should Jiminy Cricket set up shop on my shoulder. I didn’t need him to elaborate.
***
I immediately went to work, rising quickly through the ranks, forging friendships in the process and growing closer to Don Balls every day. Soon, my stance as a small-time street collector morphed into a grander position, one of stature, responsibility. Muscle and moxie may have been my entry-point, but loyalty and diligence earned me a spot that was normally held for those with pure marinara canoeing through their veins.
Out of the blue, Marco asked me to attend a dinner on the edge of the city. He was being nice. I knew damn good and well he wasn’t “asking” me anything. The tones of his invitation seemed ominous; the Don never ventured that far out of his enclave and I didn’t like my chances for survival. My paranoia told me that dinner was going to be an entree of lead with a side of concrete.
Thank the fuck Christ, sometimes it pays to be wrong.
After a bottle of red wine and some wonderful Italian cuisine, I was given the dubious title of Man Mixer in the Don’s organization.
Sounds like a dating site ran by The Village People, huh? That’s what I thought, too. But no, it wasn’t that sinister.
I was the last frontier of bad debt for Don Balls, acting as umpire in the deadly game of Mafia Bankruptcy. Only the outfield extended well beyond Chapter Thirteen.
To hear him describe it, my job was to, “exact retribution on the borrowers who did not recompense loans in a timely manner,” when in truth what I did was locate deadbeats who didn't pay their loans and mixed the last pair of shoes they ever needed, sending them screaming off the starboard side of a yacht for a one-way plunge into Fishville.
It sounded less evil when he said it.
And don’t judge me! I had a goat to take care of.
***
Things couldn’t have been better. The Don was pleased with my work, I was making money hand over fist, and Fred had a blast playing with the new toys I got him (you never know the durability of a pocket pussy until it’s been gnawed to the rectum by a wild goat). Things were looking up for the first time in a long time. Too bad there was a drop of piss in my orange juice.
Ever since I’d gotten the promotion, Marco had acted cagey. I felt the cold shoulder that night at dinner, but in the following weeks he shit icicles whenever we shared the same space. It started with the little things: gone were the rides to work together, getting high as we rode around collecting debts became a thing of the past, and freebies from my favorite Haitian girl were a distant memory. What made it all the more unnerving—what we didn’t talk about—was that I knew what was bothering him:
Jealousy. The way he saw it, an outsider absent of Italian heritage had come in and usurped a position that rightfully belonged to him, or at least another Made Man. What I didn’t foresee were the lengths to which he would go to reclaim his place.
***
&
nbsp; Picture it: a one-room cinder-block shack housing farm equipment somewhere on the rim of the Big Easy. Hidden by sickly-sweet stalks of unrefined sugar in one of the Don’s cane fields. An indoor spigot jutting from the wall with a hose attached. Water droplets clawing their way through the cracked ceiling as a hurricane drives the living to seek dryer conditions. Buckets strewn about the room to catch it all. Me and one of Marco’s boys milling around performing mafia duties. Some blubbering deadbeat tied to an old chair with strips of bare wood showing where paint used to shine. Crying like the little girl who didn’t get the pony for her birthday. Shoeless feet in a silver wash tub. Gas heaters to combat the humidity.
Quikrete needs help in that kind of weather, you know.
***
Sal and I circled the guy like vultures waiting for a horse to keel over in the desert, smoking cigarettes, sniffing lines, enduring what seemed like an endless wait for the concrete to solidify, chewing the fat over a vacation that Sal had planned and periodically telling that crying bitch in the tub to shut his mouth. The concrete was hard but nowhere near to acceptable standards. His whining was becoming unbearable and I wanted to put a bullet in his brain just so he’d shut the fuck up. But the Don wanted him drowned, not shot.
We’d been there for over twenty-four hours.
I told Sal I was going to retrieve another heater from my Chrysler parked just a few yards from the shack. He’d forgotten to bring the raincoats like he was ordered to and I was drenched as soon as I opened the door. I ran to my car and unlocked the trunk, slamming the lid when I had all twenty-three-thousand BTUs cradled snugly in the crook of my left arm. I hurried back to the rickety wooden door and kicked it open to bask in the warmth of dry shelter, only to find Sal filling the tub with water from the goddamn fucking water hose!
I felt like a child catching his parents during coitous and discovering why the cucumbers were always a bit tangy.
I placed the heater at my feet, not even shutting the door. Over the deafening wind of a category three hurricane and sheets of stinging rain beating my back, I politely asked that joker, “Sal! What the fuck are you doing?! This guy has had six months to pay up and the Don wants him gone!”
He looked up from the deadbeat and snickered, two feet of green water hose curved downward from his right hand cascading water into the tub, thinning the concrete with every drop.
“Aw c’mon, Innis, I was bored just waiting around. I was only fuckin’ with the guy. We’re right here, man. It’s not like he’s gonna get away or anyth-”
A flash of screaming flannel barreled passed me into the great deluge.
The deadbeat left wet clumps of Quikrete in his wake. I had no choice but to pull my piece and let one fly, shooting him in the back to put him down. He crashed on his face next to the driver’s side of my car. The Hydro-Shock ripped into his left lung and he was still kicking with life. Soaking and pissed, I ran to him and put one behind his right ear before he could try to get up. His problems were over.
Asshole should’ve known he wasn’t going to get far with his arms tied to his waist, especially in a hurricane. What’s more, I don’t like shooting people in the back if I can help it, but that idiot Sal had forced my hand. If you think about it, though, I did the guy a favor:
Drowning or getting a quick shot to the head. What would you choose?
Sal’s bullshit stopped all conversation. We silently worked around each other the rest of the night, dragging that dead bastard back inside and tying him to cinder blocks with link chains. I grabbed some bolt cutters and cut off his fingers (something we didn’t normally do because concrete didn’t give fingerprints a chance to resurface). The next day after the storm had blown over, we sailed a few miles into the Gulf and threw him over the side of the boat.
Fuck it, I thought. If by some chance he came loose from his cocoon of chains and cinder blocks, hopefully the fish would do me a favor with his face before he reached the surface, if the sharks didn’t see to him first.
I brought it up to Marco that afternoon, thinking he would do something with Sal because that shit couldn’t happen again. His reaction was less than satisfactory.
“So what? The guy was having a little fun. What’s the deal, Innis? Big, bad Coxman can kill a man but can’t handle some jokes to kill time? Hahaha!”
I was told to forget it. Not to worry about it. Outside the bar that served as Marco’s office, one of the boys took me aside, dropping a bug that Marco had always been lax in disciplining rule breakers. It was nothing new. The Don had tolerated it for years because Marco was who he was. Said that when problems arose within the crew, we were expected to handle it amongst ourselves.
***
Noted.
***
Sal and I later had a come-to-Jesus in one of the Don’s empty warehouses where my baton extracted an apology from that silly clown.
I wish I could tell you that things got better. I’d love to say that the Don sat Marco down and he began taking his duties more seriously. I can’t, though, because that would mean I was still with the Outfit and you and I would’ve never met (and that would suck for you). Instead, Marco upped the ante when he began sabotaging his own men.
***
Case in point: there was a hitman in the crew named Asston who’d had a long, intimate relationship with the family. For as long as anyone could remember, he’d been schtooping Fellationa, the Don’s well-endowed and orally fixated daughter. It was supposed to be one of those “hush-hush” type of things, which meant that everyone from the city treasurer to the paperboy knew about it. Of course, the Don was aware, but turned a blind eye to their trysts. Ballasacko had known Asston and his family for years. He and Fellationa had been high school sweethearts before time pulled them apart like so many young couples. As they reached adulthood, they realized their love for one another still burned like a fresh STD from Vegas. Asston was married, but the Don’s silence condoned their arrangement.
And whatever Don Balls said—or didn’t say—was law.
Poliona threw down the bullshit card. He didn’t like someone in his crew boning his sister, not even Asston. Despite the fact that they were old flames; despite the fact that his and Asston’s friendship went all the way back to high school football. Marco strayed from the rules of family, friendship, and the mafia itself.
He fed his friend to the cops.
Through a convoluted plan that Ray Charles should’ve seen, that Benedict Arnold framed Asston for a string of break-ins that’d been occurring at a sperm bank in Metairie, a city just west of New Orleans.
Marco tore his sister’s heart out.
And Asston is doing twenty years for burglary and theft (stealing the juice of life can put you down for a while, apparently).
Any respect I’d had for the Don’s son vanished like Hyper Colors. I couldn’t stay in the family anymore, knowing that he was free to conduct himself in whatever manner he saw fit, casting the needs of his people to the wayside, sending good, innocent guys to jail to suit a need for control (or however good and innocent a killer can be, but you get my drift). It made me think of what would happen should he ever decide to turn on me.
I needed to go see the Don.
***
I’d always heard that the only way out of the mob was to be killed, even if you were just an associate. Jesus, I hoped that was a rumor. When I went to the massage parlor, I wasn’t sure whether I was going to leave on my feet or stretched out in a plastic bag.
The Don was seated at a white card table when I entered his office, conferring with his consigliere over some business matter, flanked by two massive soldiers whose brutality dwarfed their biceps. My fear was underscored by the memory of their last interrogation, a bloody Q & A of a snitch that ended with fingers on the floor and ball peins to his teeth.
There was no need to preamble. I gave the Don a respectful greeting, then told him straight away I needed out.
And why.
“Innis,” he said in his frogg
y voice from behind a rocks glass, “Marco is my son and I love him very much. I’ve tried to teach him the meaning of respect. What it means to be a leader. To be honorable, to listen to the problems of your men, to try and help whenever you can. After all, a happy crew is a loyal crew, no?” Sigh. “But it never took. The piccolo bastardo could never understand that. He always had to be pigheaded. Always had to be the big shot. I’ve dealt with his irresponsible ways for years. Cleaning up his mistakes, hoping he would change. But this deal with Asston”—circling his free hand at the ceiling—“I see now what has to be done with him.” He lightly slapped a knee. “Questa e la vita, eh?”
He put his drink down and stood, the silent soldier on his right immediately stepping back to give way. When he’d waddled around the table and reached me, he cupped my face in his hands. They were huge and rough and enveloped my entire mug.
He didn’t need soldiers.
Even at his age, he could’ve crushed my head like a graham cracker.
“Yes, my boy, you can leave. You’ve always done a good job for us, Innis, and I hate to see you go. But you’re free. May you have a long life filled with peace and prosperity.” He dropped his hands, smiling like a predator who’d cornered its quarry.
“I ask only one small favor of you in return.....”
***
Fred and I left the Crescent City that night. We had our belongings all packed and ready to bounce after I did the deed. He was so happy when I walked through the door that he spat out the old bra he’d been chewing on and tackled me.
***
My previous dealings in the underbelly had instilled in me a criminal code of ethics; a form of street conduct adhered to even by pimps, junkies, and purse snatchers. But my time with the Ballasacko Family—being around men who lived and died by the gun, watching how they interacted with one another, the exchange of respect that was required to make the Family operate at its prime—that ingrained the definition of loyalty for me deeper than Old Yeller ever could.