by James Lepore
“I didn’t know you kept in touch,” Chris said.
“We talk once in a while. I stop by sometimes to see her mom.”
“She’s sick, isn’t she?”
“She’s in a wheelchair.”
“And the father’s dead?”
“Right.”
Chris said nothing.
“No, not to borrow money,” Joseph said. “I feel sorry for her all alone in that crappy little house, so I’ve stopped in. That’s all. You don’t believe me.”
“You’re not thinking of joining the Peace Corps, are you?”
“No,” said Joseph. “I’m still the same prick you’ve always known.”
“And there’s nothing in it for you? Like inheriting Mrs. Dimicco’s house, or cashing in her savings bonds?”
“Will you help out Danielle or not?”
“Why can’t you do it?”
“Danielle asked me to ask you. She knows I’m a fuckup. She says she’ll pay. She’s worried about her friend.”
“Is she still in Los Angeles?”
“Yes. The roommate moved to Manhattan a few months ago, but she hasn’t been heard from in some time.”
“Where in New York?”
“Not far from you,” Joe answered, sliding a piece of paper across the ebony table top. “Scarpa’s number’s there too.”
“I can walk there from my place,” Chris said after reading the address.
“So you’ll do it?”
“Sure. She probably took a trip to Europe.”
“I doubt it. She’s an orphan, and Danielle has become her only family. Danielle says she definitely would have called if she left the city for any length of time.”
“How long has it been?”
“Over a month.”
“Why did she come east?”
“Something about a guy, and a movie deal.”
“So she’s an actress too.”
“Allegedly.”
“’Allison McRae,’” Chris said, reading from the note in his hand. “What does she look like?”
“Blonde hair, blue eyes. She’s a farm girl from Wisconsin.”
“How old?”
“Danielle’s age, thirty.”
“I liked Danielle,” Chris said. “She was a sweet kid. You did her a favor by standing her up.”
“I know. I liked her too. That’s why I did it.”
“Tell her I said I’d be happy to do this for her. Tell her I don’t want her money.”
“I will.”
They had finished their second drink, and the waitress had left the check.
“What’s up with Jimmy Barsonetti?” Joseph asked.
“I told you, nothing.”
“Nothing you care to talk about.”
“Right.”
“And you’re not worried about Ed Dolan?”
“I am. I agree with you, he’s psychotic. But what can I do? If he comes after me, I’ll deal with it.”
“Too bad Joe Black’s not around when we need him. He killed the father, he could’ve killed the son, too.”
Only a week or so ago, Chris would have cringed at a comment like this from his brother, who spoke of Joe Black as if they were intimate, which they were not, and who was never shy about dropping his father’s name to advance one of his petty scams.
But tonight he simply gazed at Joseph evenly and then shook his head slightly. Instead of replying, he looked down at Fifth Avenue through the thick plate glass. Shooting arrow-straight uptown, cars and people ebbed and flowed on it as on a dark moonlit river, a glittering river at the bottom of a canyon of skyscrapers. When he received the letter from the Bar Association notifying him of his disbarment, Chris’ hand had trembled as he opened the slender envelope and read it. His first thought was that Ed Dolan, once his best friend in the world, had finally gotten his revenge.
It appeared now, if what Joseph was saying was true, that he had been wrong. Ed, the fair-haired companion of his youth, wanted to charge him with premeditated murder, a capital offense in New York, where they executed by lethal injection. He had responded to Joseph’s concerns with a calculated casualness, but in his heart a cold wind was blowing. DiGiglio, Barsonetti, Teresa, they had been a formidable enough lineup of foes. But now here was Dolan, looking for a third and killing shot at him. They had come a long way from their days on the streets together, a long way from their grueling practices on the oval at East River Park, a long way from a boyhood that had one day been happy and carefree and the next loaded with guilt and remorse, hatred and anger.
5.
It’s a mystery why boys bond. It may be as deeply rooted as the need to learn the skills needed to hunt, so that the tribe can survive. One boy spots and admires the future slayer of game in another, and a friendship begins. Hunting to survive has faded away, to be replaced in American culture by sports, which require the same skills: brute force, deftness of hand, foot and mind and bravery.
In the summer of 1976, two fifteen-year-old boys, one of Italian descent, the other Irish, were involved in such a friendship. The Italian, Chris Massi – already six-foot tall, lean and ascetically handsome, with hair almost black and a pair of dark and very arresting eyes – was a quietly confident boy, certain that he would find a way to succeed, indeed excel, in any endeavor. He loved sports and all contests, finding in them an outlet for his abundant physical energy and a competitiveness that seemed to run in his veins. The Irish boy, Ed Dolan, a compact five-nine, with a shock of blond hair and a sunny but infrequent smile, was the more somber of the two. He pursued his goals doggedly. If he lost, his face clouded over and he became angry, at himself and at the world. Chris did not like to lose either. But he was able to analyze his losses, and learn from them, whereas Ed was not. Losing was to Ed a matter of innate weakness, to be willed into submission.
The boys had just finished their freshman year at LaSalle Academy, located on the corner of Second Avenue and Second Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Both had run track at LaSalle: Chris, cross country and then the mile and two mile indoors and outdoors; Ed, sprints and middle distances. Chris and Ed lived within a few blocks of each other. They had their running in common, and they early on formed a friendship that each considered a blessing, awash as they were in a sea of new faces, many of them black and Hispanic, and, what was worse, that is, more alien, many of them from uptown, the land of the rich and the privileged.
A person’s history consists essentially of a series of unexpected events. One of the first such surprises occurred for Chris in the spring of 1974. He had been sitting quietly at the dining room table early on a Saturday morning, reading the Daily News. He had read his horoscope, then scanned the movie ads for pictures of half clad women and was reading the News’ cornucopia of a sports page when Joe Black sat down across from him, and said, without preliminaries, “You’re going to LaSalle Academy.”
“What?”
“You have to take the test, but you’re in. I spoke to Father Nativo this morning.”
Chris could hear the noise from the kitchen, where his mother had been cleaning up after breakfast, stop.
“I’m in?”
“Yes. You have to take the test. But don’t worry about it, you’re in.”
“I’m not worried about the test, Dad. Jesus. What if I don’t want to go?”
By this time, Chris knew that he had no choice in the matter. His father had never approached him on a serious issue before, and had rarely repeated himself. Chris understood with no need for thought that these two factors alone put the importance of the issue at a ten on the Richter scale of parental intention. The knitting of Joe Black’s thick black eyebrows and the firm set of his mouth and jaw were scary, but superfluous.
The resumption of activity in the kitchen Chris read as a sign of his mother’s lack of interest. Rose had chosen to go to war with her husband over her second son, Joseph. Chris knew that she loved him, but also that he was slowly losing her, not to Joseph but to what she had made of J
oseph: the answer to her loneliness. Except for extraordinary moments like the current one, Chris had spent the years since Joseph’s birth with two hands-off parents, a situation he was neither unhappy nor uncomfortable with. He knew his mother’s game plan and her priorities when it came to her children. Rose he could fight, if she cared. But not Joe Black. It took a certain amount of courage to even look him in the eye. When Chris did now, he saw immediately how foolish his last question had been.
“When’s the test?” Chris asked in what he thought was a cold, even biting, tone of voice. He was, in his heart, happy about the prospect of going to LaSalle, where he pictured himself competing and beating out several hundred boys in all sorts of challenging contests. But there was no advantage to be gained, he felt, in appearing to accept his father’s will with grace.
“Next Saturday.”
“Where?”
“At the school.”
“Why LaSalle?”
“You can run there.”
“Run there?” Chris thought he meant he could run to school each morning.
“You run, Chris. When your mother sends you to the store, you run; when you play football on the street, you run like a crazy man; you run down the stairs and up the stairs all day long. You’re always running. When you’re sitting still watching the television, you’re running, like you have a motor.”
“I like to run.”
“I know. LaSalle is the champion of track. You can run there, with a uniform, be a champion.”
Chris did so well on the city-wide entrance exam that he was admitted to Regis, the school for prodigies and geniuses run by the Jesuits on Park Avenue. He was, in fact, admitted to all of the top schools in the jurisdiction of the Archdiocese of New York. But there was no question of his going anywhere but LaSalle. It never bothered Chris that Joe Black had fixed – completely unnecessarily – his admission with the local parish priest. He took this for what it was: a crude but loving attempt by an unsophisticated man to help his son gain access to a world he himself would never know. He never felt like LaSalle was forced on him. After all, how often does one of the gods come down from Mount Olympus – or up from Hades – to deal personally with one of their mortal offspring?
The boys used East River Park that summer of 1976 – their first and last together – to train. The park, built during the depression, had long been a haven for the immigrant and home-grown poor that had been crowding into the Lower East Side’s tenements for two hundred years. Once well kept, the boys knew it only as a ruin, its promenade and amphitheater vandalized and closed, its ball fields and lawns rutted and littered. It had a cross country loop, though, and a cinder oval around a soccer field near the river. They ran punishing distances one day, and then the next they timed each other in the running of their respective events, each urging the other on, each showing off their talent and grit for the other. This training tired them, but not to anything near exhaustion. Fifteen-year-old boys, they could run all day and all night if they felt like it. Often, when they finished their workout, they would join the crowd at the park’s two dilapidated basketball courts near the entrance on Houston Street, looking for half-court pickup games of three-on-three or five-on-five full court if they were lucky.
On one of these days toward the end of the summer, Chris, Ed and a little black kid with a wicked jump shot took on three Puerto Rican boys in bandanas and tight jeans and beat them badly not once but four or five times running. The Puerto Ricans were game, but they were not basketball players. Chris and Ed, on the other hand, were not only good athletes, but they knew only one way to play at anything: full out and to win. They did not notice their opponents’ friends getting restless as they watched on the sidelines, a group that included three dark-haired girls in shorts and skimpy tops who, as the beatings continued, began to smile behind their hands and to whisper among themselves. One in particular, whose wavy black hair fell midway down her back and whose bright yellow halter top showed off a good deal of golden skin, was intent on Chris, who was not wearing a shirt, and whose lithe, tanned body glistened with sweat in the late afternoon sun. As they continued to win, rather than let up, Chris and Ed – especially Ed – intensified their playing. Ed was not a graceful player, but he was strong and he was determined, much stronger and much more determined than the skinny teenager who was guarding him. Ed became near obsessed with taking this boy low and either muscling up a shot or, if the other two defenders collapsed on him, flipping the ball back to Chris or the black kid for an open jumper. There was a glint in his friend’s eye that Chris had never seen before, as if he was angry and determined not only to win but to humiliate the Puerto Rican boys. Elbows flew all the time in these games, but today, if there had been a referee, Ed would have fouled out about midway through the second game, such was the abuse he was reining on his hapless opponent.
Ed scored the winning basket of the last game on one of his typical head-down drives, flipping the ball up and in off the backboard from his hip before crashing full force into his wispy defender. Unfortunately, this blow spun the boy around and propelled him face first into one of the steel uprights that supported the backboard. Head met steel with a clang, and the boy crumpled in a heap to the ground. He lay sprawled on the hot asphalt, unmoving, for several long seconds, while all involved – in the game and on the sidelines – gathered to stare down at him. Groggy, he was helped to his feet by a teammate, blood streaming from a cut above his right eye. Ed had grabbed the ball as it fell through the basket, and now he flipped it to Chris and said, “Next game,” turning to head toward a spot above the foul circle. The third Puerto Rican boy, however, the biggest and strongest of the three, grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around, at the same time drawing a stiletto from his back pocket and flipping it open pointed at Ed’s belly.
“We will play our game now,” this boy said, stepping toward Ed, holding the knife in the classic underhand position.
“It was an accident,” said Ed.
“Accident? So now you will have an accident.”
Before Ed could respond, Chris, holding the basketball under his arm, stepped to his side, ready to go back to back with his friend in a fight he knew – they both knew – they would lose, but hoping, and looking, for a way out. A stillness followed in which could be heard the shouts and thumping of the five-on-five game in progress on the adjacent court. Suddenly, the boy with the knife lunged at Ed, who reflexively put his hand out to ward off the knife that was coming at him. Seeing this, Chris cupped the basketball in his right hand and swung it from his heels into the side of the knife-wielder’s head, sending him flying through the air about ten feet before he was stopped cold by a nearby chain link fence, where he, too, crumpled to the ground. Chris then turned to see Ed holding his left hand to his chest, the front of his white La Salle T-shirt bright red with blood. Seeing this, the crowd disbursed in all directions, leaving the knife boy on the ground and Chris holding Ed around the shoulders.
“I’ll call an ambulance,” said Chris.
“No,” Ed replied. “It’s just my hand. Let’s get out of here.” As he said this, Ed held out his left hand, which was bleeding heavily from a long and deep laceration along the pad of the palm. Chris grabbed his shirt from the edge of the court where he had dropped it earlier and wrapped it quickly around Ed’s wound. Looking around, he saw that the court and sidelines were empty and that the game on the adjoining court was continuing seemingly without interruption.
“You were pounding that kid,” he said.
“Fuck him.”
“Do you know him?”
“They’re swarming like rats, taking over the neighborhood. Taking jobs down on the docks.”
The docks on the Hudson River, near Ed’s West Village apartment, were where Ed’s father worked loading and unloading cargo ships. Chris knew this, but he did not know that Ed Sr.’s job security was under threat, from Puerto Ricans or anyone else. Seeing the light of anger still in Ed’s eyes, and knowing instinctivel
y that pride and shame and teenage pain were somehow also involved, he flipped the basketball toward the knife wielder, who was now sitting against the fence holding the side of his head, and said, “Do we have a story?”
“I fell. There was glass on the track.”
“That sounds good to me.”
In January, two days before his sixteenth birthday, Chris ran a 4:07 mile indoors at the Millrose Games at Madison Square Garden, to this day the third fastest time recorded for any schoolboy in the world. So remarkable was this achievement for a fifteen-year-old that it made the sports pages not only in the city, but around the country as well. Soon afterward, however, his track career ended, as did his friendship with Ed Dolan, as did, indeed, boyhood for both of them. In February, Joe Black Massi killed Ed’s father while trying to deliver a message for his boss – gunned him down in the back room of a bar. Two weeks later, Chris broke both of his legs in a car accident on the Grand Central Parkway, ending his running career for good.
The loss of his friend – whose hatred for the Massi family would endure for his entire life – and the loss of his ability to run, broke Chris’ heart. It was the struggle with this heartache, a struggle that he eventually won, that began to shape him into the man he was to become. You would have to kill Chris Massi in order to defeat him. In that way and in other ways that he would discover at a crucial time in his life, he and his infamous father were very much alike.