“You want to sleep with Marty?” Junior said. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“Oh, you’re talking now?”
“What? I’m supposed to talk every minute of every day?”
“That’s what you do anyway. You never shut up.”
“So, you want to sleep with Marty, huh? And I sleep with Erica? Like in the same room, at the same time?”
“What, I’m just saying. It could be fun. Maybe the girls would like it.”
“Sometimes I wonder about you. Where do you get this shit? What do you think this is, the swinging sixties? On the other hand, and no offense, but Erica is like…” He pointed to his head. “You know, smart and stuff. I’m not sure she gets it down here.” He was pointing at his crotch.
“Trust me, she gets it. I’m not getting into it with you but she gets it.”
He made a face. “Let me think about it. Maybe talk to Marty. See what she says.”
“No. Before you do, we need a plan. Like we have to agree first. Otherwise, you know, the girls are talking and this comes up, like Marty knows and Erica doesn’t, forget about it. It will never happen, trust me. We have to have a plan, so you think about it.”
“All right already, I’ll think about he.” He said. “I’ll think about it but first I’m going to eat. And I don’t talk about sex while I’m eating.”
Soldano’s was a decrepit hole in the wall. Actually, it was on a corner, so it was a decrepit couple of walls. Not that any place wouldn’t have a couple of walls but you know what I mean. If you are on the corner there has to be at least an extra wall somewhere, right? Erica would know because it’s like algebra or something.
This old guy Dom owned the place. He was one of those old men that always looked like an old man. And like a lot of the old people in the neighborhood he spoke mostly Italian except for when he said “Gimme the money”. This was how it worked, you went in there and told him what you wanted and he said “Gimme the money”. He never smiled or said much else.
After we ordered two calzones, ricotta and meatball, we sat down and Junior started in on his usually rant. “Look at this table, would you. You think all the money this guy makes he could hire someone to wipe down the tables.” He looked over at Dom but he was busy working and if he heard what Junior was saying, he ignored him.
“You come here for the food, the atmosphere, not so much.” I said. “You always complain about the same thing but when I ask you where you want to go, it’s always Soldano’s.”
“Yeah, I just wish that they’d clean it up a bit, you know. Like so maybe there wasn’t thirty years of food stuck to the table.”
“He’s been here longer than that.” I said.
“Whatever. The fucking point is that if this shit was just from yesterday that would be too long.”
Anyway, I made Junior sit facing the door like some gunfighter sitting in a saloon. He had the gun, so it made no sense for both of us to get killed without firing a shot. “So, your like a sandbag sitting there?” He asked me. “Yeah, something like that. They come in while we’re eating you just shoot. No questions, nothing.”
“Yes sir.” Junior saluted me. “I hope they wait until after we’re finished eating.”
“Don’t worry, they’re not going to come in here. What are the chances of that? After this we go over to the Motor Service and talk to Big Mike.”
The Motor Service Italian League was where the wise guys had a club. It was an old car repair place and someone had put up a sign saying Italian League under the Motor Service sign. Everybody called it the Motor Service and everyone knew what it was.
Finally, Dom came around the counter with our calzones. They were steaming hot and he had them on a round pizza tin. When he got to our table, he slid the tin onto the table and spun it around so there was a calzone in front of each of us. “Hot”, he said, touching his lips before walking away.
“He’s talkative today.” Junior said. “A real Johnny Carson.”
“Ah, leave him alone. He does what does. Who cares?”
“This is what I love, nice Polly-O ricotta, a little basil, some olive oil, and these fucking meatballs. I hear that his wife makes them every weekend, hundreds of them. She’s like a machine. I know some kid delivers groceries to their house. He was up there once carrying the bags in for her and he said that she’s got this pot the size of… I don’t know. Like something you could cook a person in, right. And it’s filled with meatballs floating in the gravy. Now that would be something to steal, I’m telling you.”
The little bell on the door sounded while we were eating. I turned around but it was just two girls. In ten seconds flat, Junior was flirting with them. “So how was school, ladies?” He asked, with a big grin on his face.
The taller of the two girls put her bag down on a table without saying anything.
“Watch those tables. Get a napkin or something to wipe it off. Otherwise you’ll ruin your bag. Listen, our table is clean, come sit with us.”
The girls looked at each other and shrugged before coming over. Junior stood up and said, ”Let me introduce us.”
“We know who you are already. I’m Angela and this is Maria. We’re from over by 86th St.. We know you guys from school. And I know you”, she was pointing at me, “from the football team. “I’m a cheerleader.”
“Oh yeah.” I said. “Right, I know who you are. Angela, right?”
“Yeah. That’s what I just said” Now she was smiling a bit, pretending to be annoyed and already flirting with me.
When the girls went up to the counter to get their pizza Junior yelled over to Dom that we would take care of it and both girls looked back at us before ordering large sodas.
“What are you doing?” I said to Junior, “We have to go talk to Big Mike.”
“Don’t worry, this is nothing, right?”
“We don’t need this shit at the moment. It’s a fucking distraction.”
“What’s that old saying? Don’t look a gift in the nose.” He said.
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
The girls came back balancing their pizza on top of their sodas. Angela sat down next to me and Maria sat next to Junior. Maria looked like every pretty girl’s friend. She was kind of chubby and had curly hair. Not chubby maybe but sort of pear-shaped. Her breasts jutted over the table like two sideways mountains and the fabric on her shirt was being pulled forward like she was being grabbed.
I couldn’t really see Angela because she was sitting next to me but I could feel her hip pushed up against mine. I wasn’t great in situations like this so I asked the obvious question. “So, how’s the pizza?”
“Pretty good.” Angela said. “We come here everyday after school because Maria walks her aunt’s dog.”
“What kind of dog? Junior asked.” I love a dog. Never had one myself because my mother’s English isn’t too good. You know what I’m saying?”
Both of the girls looked at each other before laughing. Maria turned to him and said. “What’s that got to do with having a dog? Who cares what language you speak. People have dogs everywhere.”
“No, you don’t understand. If you have a dog that doesn’t understand English, only Italian, well that ain’t fair to the dog. Think about it, if all the other dogs speak English it’s too confusing. You don’t understand anything anyone is saying. You’re in the dark.”
“When’s the last time you heard a dog say something?” Angela said.
“It’s not what they say, it’s what they hear. If you grow up listening to all this mumbo-jumbo Italian and someone says heel what do you do? You keep right on going, right into traffic, maybe. It’s not safe.”
“I like dogs too, whatever language they speak. I even like Chinese dogs, not that I can understand a word they say.” So here I was being funny. And Junior being Junior was being funny without knowing it.
“It’s all right. All of you laugh at me. I don’t care. I know what I’m talking about. A dog n
eeds to be comfortable, that’s all I’m saying, a confused dog is an unhappy dog, face it. Look at Lassie, does he look confused, no. And look at all the shit he accomplished. He’s like a star. And what language does he speak, huh? Now bring Lassie to Italy and put him on television there he’d run around like a fucking idiot. He’d kill himself; it’s like so frustrating… He wouldn’t know what the fuck they was saying”
“Oh, now dogs commit suicide?” Angela said. “What do they do, hang themselves?”
Junior had that face, kind of like an impatient teacher. “ Please, no they force themselves to die when they are unhappy. Like people, sometimes. It’s a form of suicide. They stop eating. Shit like that. I’m serious. I’ve seen this stuff on Channel 13.”
“My mother doesn’t let us watch that channel, says it’s sick. They play sick stuff.” Maria said. “Like animals having sex.”
“Speaking of sex…” Junior said. The girls just looked at him and I guess I was doing the same thing.
“See. Gotcha. I was just kidding. Listen, we have some weed. When you’re finished eating you want to get high with us? Nothing like a little wacky weed after lunch, right?”
Junior pulled a bag out from his pocket and held it out for the girls to smell. Angela pushed his hand away. “It all smells the same to me.” The girls exchanged glances. Angela sort of nodded and Maria began to smile.
“Not for nothing, but if you don’t want to, we can do it another time. I mean we’re always around.” I was looking at Junior but he was operating and didn’t notice. This is all I needed. We have some guys trying to kill us and need to talk to Big Mike and here’s Junior with his one-track mind. And besides, Erica lived around the corner and if she saw us I’d have some explaining to do.
“What are you saying? There’s no time like the present, right? We’re all here, what the fuck. Let’s go up on your aunt’s roof and get high. No big deal. We’ll take care of that other thing later.”
Everything is a fucking detour. I’m surprised when I come out of my house that after walking for a minute I’m not on my way to China. You just can’t go from here to there around here. I’m serious. It’s like banging your head against the wall sometimes.
Anyway, so after they are finished eating Angela stands up I notice that Angela’s jeans are tighter than Maria’s shirt. And they are nice and expensive-looking too. I must be an idiot because suddenly I’m on board with the idea of getting high. Just like that everything changes, stupid, right?
So we pay Dom for what the girls had and walk across the street. The girls are ahead of us and so I point to my chest and then to Angela. Junior nods and smiles and then says to Maria, “Where’s your aunt? How come you walk the dog? “
“She works, works in the city, some big company. She pays me to do it and Angela usually comes with me, so it’s no big deal.” She said, turning around.
“What if you get sick?” Junior asked.
“Some old lady in the building does it.”
“It always amazes me how much energy these old ladies have, they’re always going somewhere with their shopping bags and baskets. Me, when I get old, I’m just going to sit there. Maybe grow some tomatoes. These old ladies seem coked-up. You ever notice that?”
“Yeah.” Angela said. “I have. And that’s how I make my money. I sell coke to old ladies. They’re real junkies, can’t get enough. Grosses me out, though, when they rub that shit all over their dentures. I try telling them you can’t freeze fake teeth but usually they’re deaf too.” Even Junior was laughing. This girl had some spunk to her.
Maria opened the front door of the apartment building and put her finger up to her mouth. I put my hand on Angela’s back and motioned her inside. I kept my hand there for an extra second and as she went in I could feel the hard muscles in her back moving.
We took the elevator to the top floor and then climbed a flight of stairs up to the rooftop landing. There was a hand-written sign on the door that said no one was allowed on the roof, which we ignored. I pushed at the bolt with the palm of my hand and it slid open. The wind almost blew open the door but we caught it. The roof was cover with gravel so we tried to walk quietly. The air was fresher than it was downstairs. We couldn’t really see much except other apartment buildings but still it was nice. Junior found a milk crate and sat down and started rolling a joint. While he was doing that, Angela and I walked over to the side of the building. She pointed back over her shoulder at Junior and said, “He’s a funny guy.”
“What. I’m not funny?”
“No, you’re something else.”
“You mean like “something else”, like something good, you know the expression, right?”
“No, not like that. Like different. You’re not all stuck-up like I though you’d be. What with football, and everything.”
“What’s football got to do with anything?” I asked, even though I sort of knew. “I don’t have anything to be stuck-up about. Anyway, where’d you get so funny? That thing about the old ladies.”
“It just came out, I don’t know.”
I noticed she had black eyes. Or at least they were very dark. I was close enough to her that I could see the stuff on her eyelashes, which sort of looked like dirt. I couldn’t tell who moved first but suddenly I was kissing her. I had my hand on the back of her neck and could feel it when she swallowed her gum. It was like she gulped.
“Oh… Would you look at this” Junior said. “Romeo and Juliet on the roof.”
Angela pulled away from me and aimed her lips at Junior. “Mind your own business.”
“Get over here and let’s get high. I rolled us a big one.” He said, waving the joint in the air. “Ladies first.”
He handed the joint to Maria and when she put it in here mouth he lit it for her. A plume of smoke shot out of her nostrils as she inhaled. We stood around waiting for her to start coughing but instead she took another pull. ”This girl has an iron lung.” Junior said. She smiled through the smoke and winked at Angela. “You should see her at the beach. She can hold her breath under water for like an hour.” Angela said. “Once at Coney Island all the life guards came running into the water because they thought she was drowning.”
“Once”, I tapped Junior on the chest, “this nut here and I were riding the Cyclone and at the top of the big hill he stands up and hangs from the sign at the top of the rollercoaster. He misjudged how long it sits there before going down the hill, right, and he was left just hanging there. He climbed down like it was the monkey bars or something. I couldn’t believe it.”
“You could have been killed.” Maria said.
“Amazing view up there. Thought I could see, like, Europe, or something. I swear there was something out there.”
“Yeah, Breezy Point.” Maria said
“Or Jersey.” Angela added. “And nobody said anything to you? Or maybe they didn’t notice because it was crowded?”
‘Oh, they noticed. Three cops chased me all over the place. I finally ran onto the beach and they gave up.” Junior said.
“When the ride finished, like two cops were waiting for me along with some of the guys working there. They wanted to know who was the kid was I was riding with. I told them I didn’t know. I go, he jumped in, took the seat next to me. I told them I never saw him before in my life. What could they say?” I added, building my part.
By now I was taking my second hit of the joint and my head was swirling. Pot usually made me antsy before the high settled down into a stupor.
“Let’s go down to my aunt’s house and hang out and listen to music.” Maria said. “She has a nice stereo.”
Brooklyn 1975 Page 9