And he was a goddamn pretty boy. What more did he want?
Finally, Jimmy told Terry not to overtrain because with horses that was the kiss of death and people were the same as horses. Then Jimmy got back in the car. Terry gave me a little wave. I waved back at him.
Maybe he’ll fall into a garbage truck or a snake pit, I thought. Maybe the Boston Strangler will get tired of strangling women and start strangling a few men.
You never knew. Something bad could always happen.
I still had hope.
Nick’s Ringside Cafe
The Great Jack Dempsey was staring down at me. He had his arm around my grandfather, Papou Nick. Papou was wearing a fancy suit and a shiny tie and a white shirt with a collar all stiff and tight like it could choke him to death. Papou looked like a million bucks. Like a millionaire, even.
But that was a long time ago.
I studied the picture of Papou and the Great Jack Dempsey that hung above the cash register in Nick’s Ringside Cafe. We had stopped there on the way back from Hank’s. As I stared at the photo, I tried to figure out what had gone wrong. Why wasn‘t the Great Jack Dempsey in our lives now?
I glanced around the place. The truth was I didn’t think a world champ would be caught dead in a joint like this. Everything was piss yellow from the haze of smoke that never went away. Even the picture of the Great Jack Dempsey was all yellow. There was sawdust on the floor that had beery spit in it, and three big dusty jars on the bar with gray things floating in them. Pickled eggs. Pickled pigs’ feet. And kielbasa sausage, which was a Polack food for any Polacks who might be stopping by. I had seen a guy eat a kielbasa once, but nobody ever seemed to touch the pickled eggs or feet. I figured maybe they were just there for decoration like the picture of the Great Jack Dempsey. But then Jimmy had explained to me that you had to pretend to serve food in a beer joint or the city would shut you down. You had to have a grill in the back and a few hot dogs and some raw hamburger meat to throw on it when some pencil pusher from the city pulled a sneak visit. You had to offer the pencil pusher a grilled dog and a cold soda, which he would turn his nose up at before he got the hell out and let the paying customers get back to the business of drinking themselves half-blind.
The paying customers needed to drink themselves half-blind, Jimmy said, ’cause they all hated their Mickey Mouse, collect-a-paycheck-every-Thursday jobs. They were a bunch of poor alkie mill workers caught in a cage like Squirmy our hamster. The mill workers didn’t own racehorses and had nothing to look forward to except a lousy week or two off in the summer and a frozen Butterball at Christmas.
No wonder they turn into rumheads, Jimmy said. I wasn’t sure why he called them that since the only thing Papou and YaYa sold was ten-cent beers.
YaYa started to yell at Jimmy.
“Why do you do this? Why do you keep bringing her in here? You know we could get shut down again if a policeman sees her!”
“Relax, will ya?” Jimmy said to YaYa. “If a copper comes in, I’ll hide her under the bar—she’s skinny enough to fit anywhere. Skinny like her Olive Oyl mother. Besides, don’t you want to see your own granddaughter? What kind of good-for-nothing grandmother are you?”
He was kidding around with her, yanking on the ties of her apron.
YaYa smacked him away and retied the bow on her perfectly starched apron. Then she smoothed down the front of her fancy blue dress. YaYa, like always, was dressed to the nines. Jimmy said she dolled up for the beer joint like she was going to the Carpenter Hotel, the place where all the Yankee ladies sipped their limey tea. She even wore diamond jewelry. Shirley told me the jewelry was as phony as a three-dollar bill, but I didn’t see how anybody could tell the difference.
“Whose fault is it I don’t see more of them?” YaYa snapped at Jimmy. “Why don’t you let me bring her and Virginia to church this Sunday?”
I knew what he’d say about that. No f’in’ way. No kid of his was going to have to suffer like he did when he was a boy with all that smelly incense and those priests in their big, goofy hats.
“These kids don’t even speak Greek,” he said. “It’ll be mumbo jumbo to them.”
“Whose fault is that?” she barked. “Who wouldn’t let me send them to Greek school when I offered to pay for it?”
She shouted something at him in Greek for good measure. Jimmy answered her in English.
“I don’t need your dough. Not one red cent. And she don’t need Greek school. She’s an American kid, for Chrissake. She don’t want to be stuck in some dungeon after school learning a language she’ll never use. She wants to be outside in the sunshine playing with the other American pip-squeaks.”
He turned to me to back him up.
“Don’t you, Dracula?”
He waited for my answer. YaYa waited too. Her eyes were black as licorice dots.
I didn’t know the right answer. The answer that would make them both happy.
“I don’t know,” I mumbled.
“Of course she doesn’t know,” YaYa snapped. “Children do what their parents tell them to do—unless they’re bad like you. I hope she doesn’t take after you, that’s all I can say.”
“She does take after me. She does in spades.” He pumped me again. “Don’t you?”
“I don’t know,” I mumbled again.
I could see he wasn’t happy with my answer.
“I guess so,” I chirped.
I wanted out of there.
“Daddy, I’m hungry,” I blurted out.
“How ’bout a pig’s foot?” he suggested. He started to unscrew the top of the jar.
I stared panic-stricken at the floating feet.
Jimmy burst out laughing.
“Look at her. She thinks I’m serious.”
He bopped me on the head.
“Take it easy. Nobody’s gonna make you eat that. It’s been here since the Stone Age.”
He looked back over at YaYa, who was taking a dime from an alkie and putting it in the cash register.
“Make Dracula a hamburger,” he ordered her. “Nice and bloody.”
I didn’t want it nice and bloody and said so, but Jimmy said that was the only way to eat meat. He said if I went to a swanky restaurant in Paris and ordered filet mignon cooked black as a nigger they’d call me a Yankee greenhorn and throw me the hell out of there.
YaYa went in the back and soon I could hear the sizzle of frying meat.
Jimmy covered the bar while she was gone. He poured frothy beer from the taps and collected more dimes from the alkies.
When he opened the cash register to drop the money in, I saw him slip some bills from the drawer and shove them in his pocket.
Playing the accordion, he called it. Skimming a little off the top.
I pretended I didn’t see.
I had another secret and knew I had to keep it. Keep it on a stone wall.
Jimmy called me over and held out a nickel.
“Some music, maestro,” he said.
I knew what he wanted me to play.
D-4. The buttons on the jukebox were hard for me to push with my pip-squeak fingers. The machine went and found the record I picked and dropped it on the spindle. Louis Armstrong’s “When the Saints Go Marching In” started up.
I looked over at Jimmy. He nodded his approval. I knew in a few moments he’d be making trumpet sounds for the alkies and they’d be telling him he sounded pretty damn good.
YaYa put my hamburger on the counter with an Orange Crush and a slice of cool watermelon and I crawled up on a stool between two half-blind alkies. They made room for me.
I took the first bite of hamburger. No blood seeped out. I could see the outside was nice and black. I looked over at YaYa.
“How is it?” she asked with a wink.
“It’s good,” I said. “Mmm-mmm good.”
YaYa went back to serving the alkies. She smiled and joked around with them. As I watched her yank on the tap, I thought about what Shirley had once told me. YaYa had
been an alkie too when Jimmy was a kid. She drank like a fish in a barrel of booze until one day she took Jimmy out in Papou’s car and drove right off the road. “Women drivers!” Jimmy woulda said if he’d been part of the conversation. Luckily nobody died and YaYa vowed to never touch a drop of the stuff ever again.
If you ask me, she meant to kill herself and your father, Shirley insisted. Papou drove her to drink. Drove her right off that road and into a ditch.
I gnawed off another hunk of hamburger. When I glanced back up, I saw YaYa’s smile drop off her face. I didn’t have to turn around to know why.
Papou Nick had just walked through the door.
Jimmy’s Baptized and I’m Saved
I wanted to run and hide under the bar.
Ever since I could remember, Papou scared the daylights out of me.
He’s the toughest S-O-B going, Jimmy bragged, and nobody, not even Hank, would argue with him.
The person Papou most reminded me of was Edward G. Robinson in those gangster movies, except Papou was built like a boxer, not a shrimp like Robinson. You could easily picture him saying, “Go ahead, plug the guy,” and not feeling bad about it for a second.
Once Papou had almost drowned Jimmy, and I was afraid he might try to do the same to me. Jimmy told Virginia and me the Almost-Drowned Story a lot to keep us in line.
The story went like this: Jimmy had been sickly as a baby and was crying all the time. When company came over Papou would hide him in a laundry basket in a tree ’cause Greek boys weren’t supposed to bawl like babies. One day when Jimmy wouldn’t stop bawling, Papou told YaYa to yank him outta the tree and stick him in the car. They drove to Salisbury Beach and Jimmy cried the whole way there. He cried from the car to the beach and he cried on the beach in the penicillin sunshine. Papou grabbed little Jimmy and ran toward the water. YaYa screamed and ran after them, but Papou told her to get the hell back to the blanket. He charged into the icy Atlantic ocean that would turn your feet into Popsicles in a lick. He held Jimmy under the water until he stopped his damn blubbering.
A Greek baptism, that’s what Jimmy called it. He’d had the usual kind in the Greek Church, but this was the one Jimmy felt did him the most good. It toughened him up and after that he wasn’t sickly at all. Well, except for that one time when he had a bellyache and Papou said he was faking and sent him to school and his appendix burst. But that could happen to anybody. That was just bad luck. Norris Luck.
Papou never had to give Jimmy a Greek baptism again, but he once gave one to Jimmy’s cat. He threw the sickly cat into the canal and said it would sink or swim. It swam and found its way back home and lived a few more years. And that was proof that the almost-drowning cure really worked. It worked for animals as well as people.
Still that didn’t mean I wanted it tried out on me the next time I got an earache. It was bad enough having Jimmy pour hot olive oil in my ear. I sure as hell didn’t want him throwing me off the Amoskeag Bridge as well.
Not unless Susan ran out of Hank’s and jumped in the Merrimack River to save me. Then I guessed it would be worth it.
“Hey you! Eat up! Kids are starving in Greece!”
Papou’s voice made me jump. He was glaring down at me.
I jammed the rest of my hamburger in my mouth and tried not to choke on it. The last thing I wanted was Papou force-feeding me the way he had done with Virginia when she was little and wouldn’t eat her scrambled eggs.
YaYa leaned down and kissed my meat-stuffed cheek that looked like Squirmy the hamster’s. Then she hung up her apron and went home to fry some mackerel that Jimmy had brought for Papou’s supper.
A new shift was coming in and the place was getting more crowded. Jimmy lit another Lucky Strike and Papou lit a cigar that was even bigger than Hank’s. I took a bite of watermelon and spit the seeds onto the floor, trying to hit the ones that I’d already spit with the ones I was spitting. Then I tried to see how far I could stick my tongue down the neck of the Orange Crush bottle without getting it stuck.
Jimmy and Papou began talking about this horse and that horse and whether the horse Jimmy had bought oughta be hopped up or not.
Shirley said Jimmy and Papou were two of a kind.
Con artists. Operators. Flimflammers.
They were always cooking up scams. In one scam, Papou would call Tarzan the bookie from a phone booth to place a bet on a horse. Jimmy would be in the next booth getting the early results of the same race Papou was betting on from a guy he knew who worked at the track. Past posting, they called it. Cheating and stealing is more like it, Shirley said.
Nobody would’ve suspected Papou of pulling a fast one like that.
Everybody looks up to the old man, Jimmy would say. Even the Greek priests in their goofy hats.
The Greek priests in their goofy hats admired Papou ’cause even though he had become an American wheeler-dealer who rubbed shoulders with a heavyweight champ, he still respected the ways of the old country. Even though he’d taught himself to read, write, and speak English—with no banana-peddler accent, Jimmy boasted—he still sent his sons to Greek school. And even though he’d changed his last name to something Yankees could pronounce, he’d kept every ounce of his Greek pride.
Most of all, though, Jimmy said the priests loved Papou because he greased their wheels. I couldn’t picture Papou, who always dressed like a big shot, sprawled under a car greasing some priest’s car, but then Jimmy had explained that wheel greasing was when you paid somebody to do stuff for you.
What did he pay the priests to do? I’d asked.
Get him into heaven, dum-dum.
Lucky for me, Papou had also done a little wheel greasing on my behalf. The year before, at the start of third grade, my new teacher, Miss Rogers, had stuck me in the back row and acted like she didn’t know I was alive. At first, I’d tried some wheel greasing on my own. I spent some of my tooth fairy dough on the biggest, reddest apple I could find at the Temple Market. I blew on it and polished it with my sleeve until it was bright and shiny.
Miss Rogers took it from me like it was Snow White’s poison apple.
I told myself maybe she wasn’t a fruit lover. Or maybe she would’ve preferred a slice of cool watermelon instead.
But in my gut I knew it was because she had seen the name of the street I lived on. Ahern Street. One of the project streets.
“Those snooty teachers treat all the project kids like they’re juvenile delinquents,” Virginia had informed me as she was forging Jimmy’s signature on an excuse note to cover the fact that she had played hooky.
“Not me,” I argued. “I’m always the teacher’s pet.”
“That’s ’cause you’re a brownnoser and an egghead like Daddy says.”
“And you’re a crook and a cheater like Daddy.”
“Hey, it’s ’cause of me you’re teacher’s pet. Don’t you forget it.”
I couldn’t argue with that. Virginia had taught me everything I knew. Before I was even in first grade, she had drilled me in reading, spelling, adding, subtracting. She’d also made me memorize the names of all the countries on the globe YaYa had given us so we’d know where the hell Greece was. Virginia didn’t go in much for school herself, but she taught me stuff to amuse herself, just like she trained Squirmy to stand on his hind legs and eat feta cheese from her lips. Jimmy thought it was great that I had learned to read so early ’cause then I could slack off for the first few years. Plus, he was crazy about reading himself. He liked World War II stories and The Call of the Wild and Orwell’s 1984 ’cause he said Big Brother was breathing down our frickin’ necks.
But it was tough to show off your reading skills if no one ever called on you. And that’s how it was in Miss Rogers’ third-grade class, until one day I came home from school blubbering to Shirley about it and then Jimmy came home and asked what all the blubbering was about. When Shirley gave him the lowdown, he turned as red as that poisoned apple I had given Miss Rogers.
“I’ll go pop that old
biddy in the breadbasket!” he shouted, and started to head for the door.
“No, Daddy,” I pleaded, “I’ll get expelled.”
“Have a drink first,” Shirley suggested, trying to calm him down. “It’s happy hour.” She handed him the highball she already had waiting for him.
Jimmy took a slug of the highball and reconsidered his options. He mentioned something about popping the old biddy’s kneecaps. He said he knew some dago gangsters in Revere who would do it for him, for nothing too, if they heard somebody had even looked at one of his kids sideways.
That sounded better to me. Unlike with Jimmy doing something himself, I didn’t see how the dago gangsters could be traced to me. But then it occurred to me what if the dagos were squealers? What if they got caught and squealed and maybe I’d be seen as an accomplice and end up in the slammer along with them?
Right about then Papou called with a tip on a horse. Jimmy started ranting about the old biddy and the dago gangsters and Papou cut him off. Papou said forget the dagos, he knew what to do, he’d take care of it.
The next day an alkie from the beer joint, clean-shaven and dressed in one of Papou’s fancy suits, delivered a whole case of Orange Crush to my classroom. Then he lugged in a case of grape soda and a box filled with Fig Newtons and Lorna Doones and some party hats left over from the big wingding Papou threw every year for all the alkies. Then he handed Miss Rogers a note and a red rose.
Miss Rogers got all giddy like the lady at the office when Jimmy gave her that Mickey Mouse lighter.
Miss Rogers asked me to read Papou’s note out loud to the class. It said we should have a nice party on him and work hard and mind our wonderful teacher and he signed it Mr. Nick Norris, owner of Nick’s Cafe. I noticed he had left out the Ringside part.
That very day Miss Rogers moved me to a seat in the front row and from then on it was smooth sailing. In June when I took home my final report card, there were nothing but As on it for the whole year.
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