“Sorry, Pop,” Conway said. “That was Alessandra Biagini. From MPB. You remember her?”
“I don’t remember her. Who wears sunglasses in church?”
“Yeah, I don’t know,” Conway said, wanting to follow Alessandra as she walked the few blocks to her house, knowing maybe he would’ve if Pop wasn’t around, just wanting one more look.
“Pretty girl, though,” Pop said, softening.
Conway, casting Alessandra in his mind’s newest movie, something about her and him locked in a thrashing fuck session in the confessional box, said, “No joke.”
Four
Eugene was in Augie’s Deli. He tried to look like he was shopping for Ring Dings and Doritos and Gatorade, but Augie—with his big hairy hands and drooping chin—was on heavy-duty lookout, knowing Eugene would swipe whatever he could get his hands on. Spaldeens, Bazooka, porn mags. It was hard for Eugene to be any kind of graceful with his limp. Hard not to creak and claw through the aisles. Not to mention his headphones thudding. Eugene bopped his head to Scarface’s “Guess Who’s Back,” a joint from back when he was in second grade, and Augie tracked him by the sound even when he disappeared behind the tallest racks. The only shot Eugene had at getting away with anything was if Augie got distracted with another customer, some Chinese girl buying Now and Laters or an old man like Tommy DeLuca from the corner coming in and ordering a deli sandwich. Right now it was just him and Augie.
Augie said, “You getting anything today?”
Eugene sniffled, wiped his nose with the back of his sleeve. He pulled his headphones down around his neck. “What’s up?”
“You buying anything?”
“Maybe.”
“Buy something or get out,” Augie said, stomping out from behind the counter.
Eugene grabbed his nuts and yanked. “Suck my dick.”
“Get out,” Augie said.
“Make me.”
Augie got red in the face. He looked like he was about to have a heart attack. He reached around on the counter for something to wield as a weapon. He picked up a box cutter and showed it to Eugene.
Eugene said, “You gonna cut me?”
“Get out.” Augie moved closer. “I’ll call the police.”
Eugene laughed. “Six-Two ain’t shit.”
“Why don’t you act how you’re supposed to act? Your pants all low. That rap. From the projects, that’s what you think?”
Eugene pushed his pants down even further, showing the full fly on his boxers.
“I know your mother. She’s proud of what you are?”
“You don’t know my moms.”
“Get out, you little thug. How old are you? Fifteen? Fifteen and already a thug. You make me sick.” Augie put down the box cutter and went back behind the counter. He picked up his cell. “Just like your uncle. Look what happened to him. Same’s in store for you. Prison. You’re on the road. You ready for that?” He was dialing. “Few years, you’ll be in jail, guaranteed.”
Eugene threw his fists out and toppled a display. Packaged butter crunch cookies went everywhere, spinning across the sawdusty floors like pucks.
Augie said, “Little prick.” Paused. He was on the phone with a dispatcher from the precinct now. “I’ve got a kid here, little thug, over here at Augie’s, you know the place? Little thug’s shoplifting, getting ready to, threatening me, knocking stuff over.”
“Threatening you?” Eugene said, laughing. He limped out of the store, letting the door clang shut behind him. Outside, he kicked over a rack of newspapers with his good leg and said, “Fuck you,” loud enough so Augie could hear him through the front glass, loud enough so people sitting outside Giove’s Pizza across the street looked up and shook their heads. Little thug, yeah, the whole neighborhood seeming to nod. “Pull a box cutter on me,” Eugene said. “That’s some bullshit right there.”
Sirens tore up Bath Avenue. The Six-Two was taking Augie’s call seriously. Eugene tried to book it up the block, but his leg hitched him up, and he disappeared into an alley next to Mikey Elizondo’s house on Bay Thirty-Eighth. He hunched over behind a garbage can and took out his cell. He dialed Sweat Scagnetti, who was probably playing Call of Duty in his living room with a gallon of Pepsi and a Nutella sandwich.
Sweat answered with a huff. “What?”
“Pick me up.”
“Where you at?”
“Alley next to Mikey Elizondo’s. Augie called the cops on me.”
“Stupid motherfucker.”
“Come get me.”
“Chill, I’ll be there.”
Sweat pulled up in his Mazda ten minutes later, wearing a powder blue XXL cardigan, J. Crew pants, and loafers. His speakers were thumping last year’s Jay-Z. He had a Bluetooth in his ear and a stick of pepperoni in butcher’s paper in his lap. His father owned a pork store in Long Island City and they lived in Dyker Heights. Ten grand for tuition at Our Lady of the Narrows, where Eugene and Sweat went, was a drop in the bucket for the Scagnettis.
For Eugene, fatherless, living with his mother and aunt, that tuition was a big deal. He heard about it every day, especially when he got in trouble. Less than a month into being a sophomore at OLN, Eugene was sick of the place. The uniform, the preppies, the brothers with their curly hair and big crosses and blue-and-gold sweaters. But he’d lucked into being buddies with Sweat, who was driving at fifteen with no license. His mother and father had given him the okay. No biggie, they said. Rich bastards. Sweat gave Eugene hand-me-down iPods and phones and video game systems, getting the newest stuff as it came out.
Eugene got in the car, head down, slumping in the seat. He slapped hands with Sweat, whose squat fingers glistened with pepperoni grease.
“Where we going?” Sweat said.
Eugene said, “Wherever. Coney?”
Sweat swung the car away from the curb, not even checking to see if anyone was coming, and then made a left onto Cropsey.
“You see cops back by Augie’s?” Eugene said.
“One car. Just a guy talking to Augie. Didn’t look like they were gonna send out the dogs. What’d you do?”
“Nothing. Bullshit. Dude pulled a fucking box cutter on me. We should go back there, fuck the store up, Molotov cocktail right through the window.”
“They’ll know it’s you.”
“I give a shit?”
Sweat parked over by Gargiulo’s, his wheels up on the curb, and they got out and headed for the Boardwalk. It was pretty cold, low fifties, and the streets were mostly empty. A couple of guys were hustling at an empty pay phone bank. Old Russians were scattered on benches by the ramps up to the Boardwalk, shopping carts scissored at their feet, this weather beautiful to them. The sky was gray, mangled-looking.
Eugene was always embarrassed walking with Sweat because of the way he dressed and that Bluetooth. But the benefits outweighed the bullshit. Sweat was always quick to pay Eugene’s way for hot dogs, freak shows, arcades.
Eugene knew Sweat felt the same way about him. With his bad limp, he looked like he’d been shot. He was almost a bad enough crip that people stopped and stared. The limp was something he developed as a kid, something about his hip actually, the bones not developing correctly on his left side. His whole life he’d heard about it. They called him Limp or Gimp in grade school, Crip, Frankenstein, Fuck Leg, Drag. He always lied about it now that he was in high school. Told people he did get shot as a kid. Drive-by attempt on him and his mother outside Martin’s Paints. Kids started to buy it, saying wow and holy shit. So Eugene developed the story further. The Russian mob was after his mother for a loan she took out. He was unfortunate enough to catch a bullet meant for her. The docs said it was a miracle he lived, the bullet missed an artery by this much. It got so he enjoyed telling the story. He was even starting to believe it himself.
“Fuck we gonna do?” Sweat said.
“Talk to Lutz lately?” Eugene said.
“You can only hit that so many times.”
“Yeah, but.”
“Call her, tell her get one of her friends over, we’ll have a party, whatever.”
Eugene had lost his cherry at eleven to a girl with a lazy eye named Cindy, a seventeen year old who hung out in the Cavallaro schoolyard and smoked cigarettes on the swings. Then there’d been Denise and Dyana, twin sisters who liked to tag-team Eugene. Sweat had introduced him to Lutz a couple of weeks after starting at OLN and she had an endless supply of friends. Eugene was learning to last. He was taking five, maybe ten minutes to shoot out in his rubber.
Sweat was on the phone with Lutz in a second, saying, “It’s Sweat. Me and Eugene. Little while. Your friend there?”
“Ask her to get the one with freckles,” Eugene said.
“The one with freckles,” Sweat said. “Quincy? Yeah, okay.” He shrugged. “In a few then.” Hung up.
“It her?”
“I don’t know. Whatever.”
They walked the few blocks to Lutz’s apartment building, part of the Monsignor Burke complex across from the aquarium. She buzzed them in.
When they got upstairs, Lutz opened the door. Her hair was piled on her head in curls, her makeup fresh. Eugene could see Quincy behind her, sitting at the kitchen table, not the one he wanted, but not bad. He could feel a great swath of warmth coming from the apartment, the heater going full blast in there.
“Hey guys,” Lutz said. “Come in.”
Sweat and Eugene walked in, getting swallowed up by the warmth.
About an hour later, back in Sweat’s car, Eugene was looking at himself in the mirror on the passenger visor. His cheeks were red and splotchy. “Feel like I been attacked by a lion,” he said.
“Where you wanna go?” Sweat said.
Eugene shrugged.
“Home then.” Sweat hunched over the wheel. “I got dinner soon.”
“Whatever, yo.”
They rode in silence back to Eugene’s house. Sweat turned up the music with a button on his steering wheel. The speakers went buzzy. The windows down, they moved their heads to some Raekwon.
Sweat pulled up on the curb behind Eugene’s mother’s ‘95 Ford Explorer with its faded Rudy for President bumper sticker. Blue plastic was taped over the broken back window.
Eugene and Sweat slapped hands, and Eugene said, “Peace.”
Sweat turned the music up even louder and nodded.
Eugene got out and walked down the alley next to his house, kicking a coiled hose out of the way, and he went in the back door on the deck. It was the only way he ever went in. His mother and aunt liked to keep the front door permanently locked. On the deck, tomato plants were growing in an old wrought-iron, clawfoot tub and dusty, rain-damaged deck chairs sat overturned. Eugene could hear something going on in the house. He wasn’t sure what. People were talking. He heard a guy’s voice that he didn’t recognize, and then he heard his grandmother and grandfather.
He walked in. His Uncle Ray Boy was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and eating a grilled cheese. Eugene stopped and took it in. His grandparents sat on either side of Uncle Ray Boy, and his mother and Aunt Elaine were standing by the sink, lit up, so happy.
“Yo,” Eugene said.
“You okay?” his mother said. “You look flushed.”
“I’m fine.”
“You remember Uncle Ray Boy, right?”
“Course.” Eugene hadn’t been born when Uncle Ray Boy went to jail, but he’d been with his mother to visit him in jail a couple of times. His mother didn’t like the idea of taking him there, but she’d had to once when he was six because she couldn’t find someone to watch him. The other time, when he was ten, she just got into her head that he needed to get to know his uncle. He was also already getting into trouble in school at that point so she wanted him to know what could happen to him.
Truth was his Uncle Ray Boy had become a hero to him. There was a lot of mythology surrounding him in the neighborhood. Stories of how wild he was. Some people thought he got a raw deal—he didn’t really kill the kid after all—and that he should’ve been out, back up to his old tricks, way sooner. Sixteen years. Fuck. Eugene was a year away from being sixteen. That was a lifetime. Once, Eugene had found pictures in his mother’s closet of Uncle Ray Boy looking like a badass in a wife-beater with girls in leather jackets on his arms, hair slicked back, smoking unfiltered Marlboro Reds. The pictures came from a time that didn’t even seem real. The early Nineties. There were more snaps of Uncle Ray Boy at Yankee games, sitting on the hoods of long, solid cars, playing stickball in the P.S. 101 schoolyard.
“Hey Eugene,” Uncle Ray Boy said. “You’re big.” He was wearing funny clothes, a loose T-shirt and too-big sweatpants. He wasn’t dressed tough at all. But he was cut, Eugene could tell, and tatted up and his face was scraped like he’d been in a fight.
“You’re back?” Eugene said.
“For a little while.”
“Hell yeah.” Eugene sat across from his uncle at the table. He said hey to his grandparents. They looked like they’d been put back together, their three kids and one grandkid all in the same room. A family.
“So, how’s things?” Uncle Ray Boy said.
“Solid,” Eugene said. “What happened to your face?”
“Nothing.”
“He won’t say,” Eugene’s mother said.
Eugene said, “How was the joint?”
Uncle Ray Boy laughed. “The joint?” Paused. “Joint sucked, man.” Moving away from it. “How’s the leg? I remember you had something wrong with it.”
Eugene thought, This guy busting my balls right now?
“It’s okay,” Eugene’s mother said. “It’s been a lot of trouble. Eugene doesn’t like to talk about it.”
Eugene said, “Just a little limp. I get by.”
“How’s school?” Uncle Ray Boy said. “What grade you in?”
“Sophomore.”
“OLN?”
“We wanted him to go to Catholic school,” Eugene’s mother said. “Lafayette’s a mess. Metal detectors. Across the street’s the projects. It’s even worse than it was. But OLN’s very expensive now.”
“OLN sucks ass,” Eugene said.
Grandma Jean reached across the table and slapped the back of his hand. “Gene, language,” she said.
“It’s a very nice school,” his mother said. “All the money we spend on it, you need to take advantage, Eugene.”
Eugene shrugged. “No girls,” he said.
Uncle Ray Boy said, “I went to OLN. I liked it okay.”
“Maybe if you went to Lafayette,” Eugene said, “maybe you wouldn’t have,” and then he stopped talking, realizing what he was saying, what he was bringing up.
Uncle Ray Boy said nothing, just sat there playing with the crust of his grilled cheese.
Eugene’s mother tried to reel things back in. “You’re gonna stay here, right?” she said to Uncle Ray Boy. “Or you gonna stay with Mommy and Daddy?”
“He’ll stay with us,” Grandma Jean said. “Of course he will.”
“Just for a couple days,” Uncle Ray Boy said.
“How was the house upstate?” Grandma Jean said. “I had this guy from Monticello do some work on it, but you know these cheapskates. Middle Eastern guy.”
“House was fine. Is fine. Nice up there. I’d forgotten.”
“You never wanted to go up there, not since you were eight or nine.”
Uncle Ray Boy was quiet again, looked depressed, defeated, not at all like Eugene imagined he’d be. He’d always pictured his uncle coming back to the neighborhood with sunglasses on, head shaved, pissed for being sent to jail, ready to throw down with the world.
“You gonna tell us how you wound up down here?” Grandpa Tony said, over being happy about his son’s presence, now wanting to know what his ulterior motive was.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Aunt Elaine, throwing her arms up behind her head, said, “I picked him up off the Belt in his boxers. He c
alled me from the last pay phone on earth. Collect.”
“What is this about?” Grandma Jean said.
“Nothing,” Uncle Ray Boy said. He got up, turned to Eugene’s mother. “There somewhere I can lie down for a little while, Doreen?”
“Sure, yeah, of course,” Eugene’s mother said. “My room. Upstairs. First door on the right. Rest. We’ll catch up later.”
“Thanks for the coffee and the sandwich.” Uncle Ray Boy went upstairs, and Eugene heard his mother’s door close.
“He’s exhausted,” Grandma Jean said.
“Is it drugs?” Grandpa Tony said.
“Who knows?” Aunt Elaine said. “What that does to you, who knows? Sixteen years. Might take him a long time to reacclimate.”
“It’s good he’s here,” Eugene’s mother said. “We need to convince him to stay, not go back upstate. It’s better for him to be around his family.”
“There’s going to be press. That thing just ran in that paper about him.”
“He needs his family.”
Eugene got up from the table and went down to the basement. He had a room upstairs but he preferred to hang out in the basement. He had a sweet set-up down there. An old school boombox with some discs he’d bought at a Salvation Army—N.W.A. and Ice Cube and Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg—and he had some weights and some porno mags stashed under an old dresser in the corner of the room next to the washing machine. He went over and turned on the stereo, “Lil’ Ghetto Boy” coming on mid-song, and sat down on his weight bench and started to do curls with his fifteen pounders. He might’ve had a limp but he was planning on being built by junior year. He always felt soft in the locker room, wore his gym clothes under his uniform so he didn’t have to be naked for even a second, and he’d had these big dreams to get a six-pack for a long time. Now was time to act on it. He’d been taking Creatine in the mornings and pumping weights for two hours every afternoon. He wanted to talk to Uncle Ray Boy about it, see what he’d done to get the way he was. In prison there was probably nothing to do but lift weights. And get buttfucked by gangbangers. Eugene wondered if that had happened to his uncle, if maybe that was why he looked like he’d been crushed by the world, his asshole just torn to shreds.
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