Not long after he walked out on Jimmy, Hank slipped into a bar called Cecille’s. He sat by himself, drinking and minding his own business.
Three egghead college boys from out of town were yukking it up near him. They didn’t know who the hell Hank Piasecny was. All they saw was an old buck in a fedora hat. That hat cracked them up. They rode him about it like goddamn Seabiscuit.
Hank sat there steaming mad.
Fortunately, a guy Hank knew, Butch, was also in the bar. Butch came over and asked Hank why he didn’t clock those punks. When Hank explained his predicament, Butch got mad too.
He clocked the punks for Hank. One. Two. Three.
“I wish I’d been there,” said Jimmy when Hank gave him the blow-by-blow the next time he stopped by. “I woulda stuck my Nazi knife in them and dumped their bodies at sea. The world woulda had three less eggheads. Good riddance, fish bait.”
Hank laughed pretty hard at that and they drank a toast to Butch.
If Hank couldn’t defend his honor, there were still a lot of guys around who would do the job for him.
But not every social outing turned out so well for him.
Soon after, Jimmy invited Hank to go out clubbing with him and Shirley, just like in the old days. Hank was going stag, but Jimmy assured him there were lots of desperate broads at the joint they were going to who would go for an old buck like him.
As usual, Jimmy made Shirley try on a bunch of dresses before they left. I helped her zip and unzip them, getting the fabric caught in the zipper a few times ’cause Jimmy kept telling us to hurry the hell up. Hank was meeting them at the club and Jimmy didn’t want to keep the big shot waiting.
When they got to the club, though, none of the desperate broads wanted to fox-trot with Hank. They didn’t want those hands that had ventilated two people wrapped around their rib cage. One by one, they turned Hank down. Jimmy whispered to Shirley to get her ass up and dance with Hank so he didn’t look like a palooka. Shirley did as she was told, praying that the song would be a short one. While they were dancing, the owner of the joint, a Greek guy, came over to Jimmy. He asked Jimmy to please, please not bring Hank in there again ’cause he was scaring all the women. He asked real nice ’cause he knew Jimmy had a temper. He promised Jimmy free drinks whenever he wanted and that got Jimmy to go along with the plan. When Hank and Shirley returned to the table, Jimmy was already standing up.
“Let’s blow this joint,” he said to Hank. “I shouldn’t have taken you to such a dive. You couldn’t pay me to sleep with these broads.”
“Me neither,” said Hank. “I wouldn’t do ’em for free.”
Susan Grows Up, Not Me
Around the time that Hank got out of the nuthouse, Susan finally returned to college. She’d gotten her head mostly straightened out and she still dreamed of going to medical school. She enrolled in the University of New Hampshire and planned to study real hard and graduate in a year.
I was excited to hear that Susan was back to being Susan, that her old man being a murderer hadn’t totally messed up her life.
Jimmy gave himself some of the credit. He said he’d had a talk with her. He told her to get her ass back in the ring. He said she was ahead on points and it was no time to throw in the goddamn towel.
All that fall I kept pestering Jimmy about how Susan was doing. He said she was breezing through her classes and already applying to medical school.
I pictured her in her white coat saving dying pip-squeaks right and left.
But right before Christmas, at the end of Susan’s first semester, I heard some startling news.
“Susan got herself hitched,” Jimmy said.
I couldn’t believe it. What about all the dying pip-squeaks?
“She’s not dropping out,” Jimmy assured me.
Still, I felt Susan had let me down. Maybe she was still messed up in the head? ’Cause who in their right mind would want a stupid husband—someone telling you where to go, what to do, what to wear?
I grilled Jimmy about the guy, but he didn’t know much. He said he was a lot older than Susan and he’d been in the military.
“Did Hank make her get married?” I asked, immediately putting the blame on him.
“Nah. Hank doesn’t even care for the joker.”
“So why would Susan do it?”
“All girls need a husband. Otherwise everyone thinks they’re a whore or a lesbian.”
“Why do people think they’re Lebanese?”
Jimmy cracked up.
“Not Lebanese, dum-dum, lesbian. It’s when two girls wanna jump in the sack together.”
Jimmy could tell I was confused. That amused him even more.
“Hell, I woulda thought you had put all this together by now. You’re s’posed to be a brain. Didn’t the kids at school tell you about fairies and dykes?”
“Sure,” I said. “I know all about fairies.”
“You’re not as smart as you think you are, kiddo. You’re not such an egghead. How much do you know about the birds and the bees?”
“I know all about that,” I mumbled, feeling my face burning up and wishing I could turn into a fairy and fly away.
“I knew the score when I was way younger than you. Hell, I wasn’t much older than you when I lost my cherry. I’ll never forget it. I played hooky and went to Hampton Beach and met this woman, a real knockout. She took me under the boardwalk and made a man of me.”
I just kept looking down at the kitchen floor, counting the squares of cracked linoleum, hoping Jimmy would shut up. But he didn’t.
“I took right to it, like a duck to water. She didn’t even know it was my first time.”
“It’s my bedtime,” I finally blurted out. “Can I go to bed?”
“Yeah. Just remember one thing. It’s different for boys and girls. Boys are s’posed to fool around. Girls gotta stay pure as the driven snow. Not ninety-nine percent Ivory Soap pure. One hundred percent pure. If I ever catch you fooling around, I’ll put a bullet right here.”
He put a finger right between my just-beginning-to-rise breasts.
I shot out of the kitchen and up the stairs and into my bedroom.
The room was icy cold. Virginia had the window cracked and was blowing cigarette smoke out the crack.
“Daddy’s creepy,” I said.
“Tell me about it,” she said. “Five more months and I’m outta here.”
“Susan went and got married.”
“That’s probably the only way she could get away from creepy Hank,” said Virginia as she blew a perfect smoke ring out the window.
“Can you teach me how to do that?” I asked.
“You’re too young to smoke,” she said, but I begged her, knowing she’d give in.
I got the hang of it real fast.
As I blew smoke rings I kept thinking about Susan getting hitched and vowed never to follow in her footsteps. More and more, I was seeing the world in a new light. It was 1966, for cripes’ sake! Things were changing. Didn’t Susan know? I sure did. Virginia had given me some pot to try a few months back and life was full of possibilities. Marriage was for squares. Old fogies. Grown-ups. And grown-ups were the Enemy.
So I kinda wrote Susan off. Sayonara, Susan.
That Christmas, Shirley’s Secret Present to me, the thing I wanted most of all in the world, was a pair of white go-go boots. I danced around my bedroom in them, planning to audition for Hullabaloo as soon as I turned eighteen.
Right after New Year’s, a man named Albert DeSalvo, who had confessed to being the Boston Strangler, was locked up for life. Jimmy did his best to convince me that they’d nabbed the wrong guy. He insisted the Strangler was still out there ready to pounce. But I was twelve by then and didn’t scare so easy. What bothered me more than what Jimmy said was that the Strangler didn’t turn out to be a loner like Norman Bates. He was a dago who coulda passed for a Greek and he had a wife and two kids. Even scarier, he had the same headshrinker, Dr. Harry Kozol, who had helped Hank beat th
e rap.
“Maybe that headshrinker will decide the Strangler is normal like Hank and the Strangler will get sprung one day too,” I said to Jimmy.
“Don’t be a dummkopf,” he replied. “The Strangler was found guilty by a jury and Hank wasn’t.”
“How come?”
“Because they said Hank was nuts and the Strangler was sane.”
“I don’t get it.”
“It’s all a big song and dance, kiddo. Maybe if the Strangler had had Hank’s lawyer instead of that palooka F. Lee Bailey he’d be knocking on our door right now.”
That night, Jimmy scratched on my bedroom door, pretending to be the Strangler. I didn’t cower in bed like I used to. I jumped down from the top bunk and threw open the door.
“Ha ha, you can’t fool me anymore,” I said, when Jimmy looked surprised.
“You’re a little killjoy,” he said. “You wait, I’ll get you next time. I’ll get you good.”
I closed the door and went back to bed, trying not to think about what murder or mayhem he had in store for me.
I was tired of thinking about murder and mayhem. I was almost a teen-rager and what I cared about was peace and love.
Not that I could let on to Jimmy what a peacenik I had become. I still acted like the same pip-squeak who ate up Blood Feast. I pretended to be all gung ho to see Frankenstein Created Woman when Jimmy took me to it. But even he had to admit the movie was a real stinker.
“It’s those bleeding hearts, they’re ruining the movies,” railed Jimmy on the way home. “There hasn’t been a decent slice-and-dice since Blood Feast. The raggedy-ass do-gooders don’t want us to see blood, not in the movies, not in Vietnam, not in a goddamn hamburger. They want us to live in a goddamn bloodless world and eat weeds. Well, I got news for them. Real life is bloody. It’s a bloody horror movie.”
I sat there feeling smug. Jimmy was wrong.
The darkness was lifting and he was blind.
Turn on, tune in, drop out, dummkopf.
Good Blood, Bad Blood
Not long after that, I started to bleed. I woke up one morning and there it was. Virginia had once told me that I would start bleeding Down There, but I thought she was trying to scare me.
I ran downstairs to Shirley, who was just home from work, nursing a highball and looking like she’d just set a new world’s record in sunglass making.
“I’m bleeding to death,” I blubbered.
Shirley assessed the situation and turned bright red.
“You’re fine,” she mumbled.
“I’m not fine. I’m dying,” I cried.
“It’s not bad blood, it’s good blood,” she said.
She quickly explained I’d have cramps and have to wear a napkin once a month from then on. She told me to hide the napkins in the garbage so Jimmy would never know they were there.
“He can’t stand the sight of woman’s blood.”
“I hate blood. I don’t wanna bleed.”
“It’s good blood,” Shirley repeated. “It’s so you can have a baby someday.”
“I don’t want a squalling brat.”
“You sound just like your father.”
“I do not.”
“The blood means you’re becoming a grown-up,” she said, thinking that might cheer me up.
“I don’t wanna be a grown-up. I hate grown-ups.”
“You hate me?” she asked, sounding hurt.
“No, you’re not a grown-up. You’re my mother.”
“I sure feel like a grown-up,” she said. “I feel like an old lady. My baby’s not a baby anymore.”
It was true, we were all getting older.
Virginia finally turned eighteen, in May 1967. I thought she’d split for England right on her birthday, but she didn’t. Shirley made her a cake and as she blew out the candles I asked what she was wishing for.
“To win the sweepstakes, dummkopf.”
“The sweepstakes is gambling for dummkopfs,” said Jimmy. “For Joe Blow too dumb to handicap a race.”
“You wouldn’t say that if we won,” countered Shirley, who had taken to secretly buying sweepstakes tickets and hiding them in a Kotex box.
“No one from this family is gonna win, ’cause the odds are a billion to one and we’re cursed with Norris Luck.”
“It doesn’t cost anything to dream,” Virginia said.
A month later, she graduated from high school and got a job as a waitress at the restaurant in the Carpenter Hotel, where people drank tea just like they were in Merry Olde England. Jimmy made her turn over most of the money she made to pay for her room and board ’cause that’s what Papou had made him do.
One Saturday morning after Shirley got home from work, she took me to the Carpenter so we could see where Virginia worked. We went for breakfast because that was the cheapest meal of the day. Shirley did her hair up like she was going out clubbing and we both got dressed up. I wore a minidress I had talked her into buying me. She let me wear it because Jimmy was out fishing on the Aristotle Onassis.
The dining room seemed grand, but Virginia looked miserable. She was dressed like a maid and her hair was pulled back instead of hanging in her kisser the way she liked it. She was small, barely 5'1"—I already towered over her—and she was dwarfed by the big plates of blueberry pancakes we had ordered.
“My wrists are killing me,” she said when she awkwardly dropped the plates in front of us.
“You look nice,” I lied.
“I do not, you little liar,” she said.
“It’s like Buckingham Palace in here,” said Shirley. “You won’t want to eat my cooking after working here.”
“Those pancakes are as tough as a Frisbee compared to yours,” Virginia said, and she was right.
We left her a big tip even though she wasn’t the best waitress in the world.
“She’ll get the hang of it,” Shirley said. “It sure beats slaving away in a factory.”
Meanwhile, Susan had also graduated. She was twenty-five and her big dream was coming true. She would be heading off to medical school at the University of Vermont in the fall, one of just a few girls there studying to be doctors.
Hank came over to share the good news.
“I always knew she’d go far,” said Jimmy. “Maybe she’ll find a cure for the Big C.”
“For Chrissake, shut the hell up about the Big C.”
“Hey, it don’t matter how tough you are. Any one of us could get it. Even you.”
“I’m not afraid of any goddamn cancer.”
“Don’t say that word in this house!” Jimmy barked, superstitious about saying the word cancer ’cause YaYa had made him superstitious about saying it.
“Jesus, you Greeks are all goddamn head cases.”
“Yeah? Look who’s talking, the guy who whacked his wife.”
Jimmy burst out laughing and I thought Hank was gonna slug him for sure, but Hank just laughed too and they had a drink to celebrate Susan’s success.
After that, Jimmy made me go and get my seventh-grade report card. He flashed it at Hank. I had gotten all As again that year.
“See that? You’re not the only one with an egghead daughter,” he said. “Maybe my kid will find the cure for the Big C, not yours.”
“Susan don’t wanna cure the Big C,” Hank insisted. “She wants to study blood.”
“Oh yeah? Hematology?” said Jimmy. “Hey, that’s a damn good field. They say everything, and I mean everything, starts in the blood.”
Good Goddamn Riddance
That summer the whole world moved to KooKooLand and Jimmy said they oughta drop a bomb on it. It was the Summer of Love.
I almost ran away but I didn’t.
Virginia didn’t get the hang of things at the restaurant like Shirley said and got canned. Jimmy told her she better find a husband quick, preferably one who didn’t know she was a hopeless case in the kitchen department. He said he was gonna ask around and find a Greek boy just off the boat for her to marry.
/> That got Virginia to finally twenty-three skidoo. She’d been dragging her feet about it for several months. For one thing, it was taking her a long time to save up enough dough ’cause Jimmy was taking it all. For another, she was afraid Jimmy would kill her before he let her walk out the door.
She was almost right.
When she told him she was moving out, all hell broke loose.
“You’re not leaving my goddamn house to go whoring around and ruin my good name!” Jimmy shouted at her, blocking the front door.
Virginia was lugging two shopping bags that I had helped her pack, both of us blubbering all the while.
“It’s the law,” Virginia sobbed. “You can’t stop me.”
I hovered right behind her, not wanting her to go either.
“She’s gotta go sometime,” Shirley choked out. “You were fifteen when you left YaYa and Papou’s and—”
“I was going off to frickin’ war, not to screw around,” he shot back, which didn’t make sense since he was always bragging about making it over there with a bunch of German dolls.
“I’m just saying, she’s grown-up—”
Jimmy stuck his face right into Shirley’s.
“Keep your snout out. She’s not even your goddamn kid.”
While Jimmy was distracted by Shirley, Virginia bobbed and weaved around him and made it out the front door.
Jimmy went tearing after her.
Sylvester shot out the front door like he wanted to jump in one of those shopping bags.
I stood frozen for a moment, then charged outside too, with Shirley right behind.
Jimmy was slapping and kicking Virginia all the way down the sidewalk as she tried to get away.
“Jim, don’t!” cried Shirley.
“Don’t hurt her!” I sobbed.
He didn’t seem to hear us. He looked like he was in a trance. He kept slapping and kicking.
I was sure he was gonna kill her. I had to do something. So I jumped on his back and wrapped my scrawny arms around his broad chest like when he used to carry me through the Combat Zone.
“Leave her alone leave her alone leave her alone!” I screamed, my face scrunched up like a little fist.
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