by Tim Sultan
One year they even invited him to their Christmas party (yes, apparently the mob has Christmas parties). Sunny made sure not to pay attention where they took him. “I think every Mafioso that lived in Brooklyn was there,” he told me afterward, though remaining deliberately vague about the details as was his custom. “I was introduced to so-and-so and shook hands with so-and-so. There was this elderly woman, seventy, seventy-five years old, sitting at my table. And I don’t think I will ever forget this because it sticks in my mind. It sticks in my belly. When I was introduced to her, I kissed her on the cheek. After doing that, this woman gave me a lot of attention—the attention a mother might give a son. I had my arm on her shoulder and she would tell me a little joke and I’d giggle and I’d give her a little kiss and after a while this guy came over and said to me in this rasping voice, ‘You kiss my mother once more, and I’m going to think you’re my father!’ I said, ‘Fuhgeddaboudit!’ I stayed away from his mother!
“There was a balcony in the place and at one pernt, this guy got up and he made a Christmas speech. He said, ‘I just want to use this opportunity to thank all of you, my dear friends. And also to welcome our new friends to this very special gathering we do at this time of year. I raise my glass to our brotherhood and our friendship.’ We held up our glasses and me, I’m thinking, ‘What the fuck am I doing?’ ”
Sunny never expressed misgivings about these friendships; on the contrary, his sense of fraternity was deep-seated. What mattered to him was not a person’s occupation, but his having character as well as being one. He showed these made men respect, though not submission, and gave them attention and friendship not for what they did collectively but for who they were individually to him—something, it occurred to me, they may not have been that used to experiencing.
In time he would continue to loosen but never entirely abandon his code of confidentiality. He might point out spots as we drove through Red Hook, for instance, and say, “That’s where so-and-so killed so-and-so.”
“Who’s so-and-so?” I’d ask.
“He was the brother of what’s-his-name.”
He never did say names, and he could do this without feeling apologetic about it because he always had made it a point not to know names—or quickly forget them if he did.
The only exception I ever knew him to make was for his friend Blackjack, and then only because he was no longer alive and Sunny felt compelled one night to give a spontaneous eulogy, even if it was only an intimate one in a car outside of a restaurant while he finished a last pre-dinner cigarette. He would often do this, bring up a person, an event, out of the blue, a sign that his mind was in at least two places at once.
“I had this friend once. He wasn’t a made guy but he might have been connected only because his brother was a made guy. I really loved him. I won’t say his full name but his nickname was Blackjack. I never called him that. I called him by his first name, Frankie. He was famous for using a blackjack whenever there was some kind of trouble. Frankie, he had a great sense of humor and nothing he would say didn’t have something that wasn’t humorous in it. He talked really rough, like, ‘I’ll cut that fuckin’ guy’s balls off! I’m gonna get that son of a bitch.’ He looked a little like Al Pacino. I actually don’t really like Al Pacino because I always get this feeling he’s playing my friend Frankie. It always sounds to me like he’s trying to copy him but never quite making it. Frankie was the real deal, but this other guy, Al Pacino…Frankie, if he had been an actor, he would have played himself. It was like that, aye?
“Frankie loved clothes. He would sometimes show up at the bar like he was going to play golf. A golf suit, a colorful hat. He was always impeccable, even when he was hurting. He had diabetes and after they cut his toes off, he was supposed to use a wheelchair but he had too much dignity for that. So he would use a little cane and every day he would get out. He had one seat that he always sat in. The last booth, closest to the terlet. He wasn’t supposed to smoke but smoking to him was an art. Frankie would sit down and put his ashtray here, he’d put his cigarettes here, and he’d put his beer over here. And a napkin. All in a row. As rough and as gruff as he was, he was so fuckin’ neat, aye? So beautifully put together. Everything had a place and everything was in its place. You never went up to his table and said, ‘Frankie, can I have a cigarette?’ and grabbed it. You would never do that because you respected him so much and you didn’t want to disrupt his style of life. And you didn’t just go sit next to him either. You’d say, ‘Frankie, may I sit?’ In doing these things, you didn’t feel like you were being humbled or your sense of pride and dignity were being diminished. You did them simply because he would do the same for you.
“Well, when we started getting a little busier here at the bar, and by busy, I mean two dozen people, I said to Frankie one night, ‘I can’t handle this by myself. I need your help.’ He said, ‘Sunny, I can’t work behind the bar. I got to hobble. It’ll take me ten minutes to get from here to there.’ So I said to him, ‘Why don’t you just hang out up by the front of the bar, greet people, take their orders, and I’ll do the running around?’
“He went home, took a shower, shaved, came in wearing a pressed white shirt, and he did a beautiful job, aye? We continued for several weeks like this.
“So what happened, at some pernt, some of the people coming in…well, some might have been gay, some not, but they had an educated manner. If you didn’t speak a certain way, if you had a little bit of something sissified about you, you were in trouble with Frankie. Which is why it always got me that he befriended me because I’m not what you would consider a typical Brooklyn guy, you know?
“Anyway, on one particular night, Frankie and Casey, who was a good friend of his, were here and the place started filling up with what he called ‘the fuckin’ ricchioni.’ That’s Italian slang for, ‘Here come the faggots.’ He embarrassed somebody and so I said to him, ‘Frankie, if anyone here is a ricchione, the biggest ricchione is me!’ Now, Frankie’s respect for me was such that when I said that to him, he felt he might have offended me because now he was uncertain as to what my persuasion was. And after he went home a little while later, Casey came to me and said, ‘Sunny, I have never, never heard somebody speak back to Frankie the way you did. And by you saying what you said, you turned him around in such a way, he’s never going to call somebody a faggot or a ricchione again, because of his respect for you.’ I could tell by this that Casey wasn’t certain as to what my persuasion was either so I said, ‘Casey, I had to say that because in what other way am I going to be communicable enough, tactful enough, diplomatic enough? I can’t tell him, “Leave the fags alone.” I know that he loves me and if he thinks of me before he says something like that, he’s not going to say it.’
“Frankie, he was a sweet guy. When he was in the hospital not too long before he died, Casey and I went and visited with him. And Casey, he cried.”
* * *
16
Two Roses
Somewhere in the National Archives there is a service record for one Airman Antonio Raffaele Balzano. I suspect it’s as deeply buried as that of Beetle Bailey, who enlisted in the army the year before him. Sunny may have been, by his own design, the most inept serviceman in all the branches of the military. That he ever served at all was an implausibility on par with the military careers of Private James M. Hendrix, 101st Airborne, and Staff Sergeant Leonard S. Nimoy. After all, the Sunny I knew was something of a latter-day Oscar Wilde—the embodiment of freethinking individualism and compliance to no other authority than one’s own conscience. The only movements in which he was a believer were Cubism and Abstract Expressionism. Whatever customs, discipline, or ideology the United States Air Force might have imprinted upon him, none of it remained.
Though it was the height of the Korean War, it was a sexual rather than a patriotic fervor that prompted Sunny to enlist in the first place. As a teenager, he attended George Westinghouse, a trade high school in downtown Brooklyn, where he studied si
lver- and gold-smithing while also apprenticing to a jeweler in lower Manhattan. In the afternoons, he boxed with the Red Hook Police Athletic League, where his stablemates shared their green-and-white shorts and their crabs. He was undecided whether he wanted to become a boxing jeweler or a jewelry-making boxer when he was surprised one day by his best friend, George Hunt, who showed up at his school. “I’m going to sign up for the Air Force and serve for four years instead of waiting to get drafted into the army for two and being sent to Korea and fuckin’ dying,” he had said. “Why don’t you come with me? If we’re lucky, we might get sent to Italy or Germany. Or the South Pacific. We’ll see the world together—or at least something else. You’ll lose your virginity to a Fräulein with big tits or to whatever they call the women in Okinawa. Anyway, we’ll get the fuck out of Red Hook, that’s for sure.”
Sunny had never given the idea of enlisting any thought before but he had given his virginity the near-constant consideration of any seventeen-year-old. George was a couple years older and he always seemed to know his vulnerabilities.
Sunny was not of enlistment age and needed a parent’s consent, so he had gone to his father. “I don’t want you to go,” his father had said. “You’re my oldest son. I always hoped you would stay and help Uncle John and me run the bar. And in time, it would be yours. Not Uncle John’s bar. Not Ralph’s bar. Sunny’s.”
By then Sunny had begun to hate the bar. When he had been younger, he had often come in after school for his lunch and his father used to put his arm around his shoulders and introduce him to customers by saying, “This is my thoroughbred.” Sunny hadn’t been sure what that meant, only that it made him feel good about himself. His father always seemed to have that ability. But after his uncle John returned from fighting in France, Sunny began avoiding the bar. Gloomy and ill-tempered, John was the type of man to whom one never wanted to express one’s hopes or enthusiasms. If he displayed any affection toward a customer, it probably meant he didn’t like him. He never complimented Sunny and more typically said things that made him want to crawl into a corner. Once, Sunny walked in with a new dream in his head and announced to his father that he would like to become an actor. His uncle gazed over the bar at him and sneered, “Who do you think you are? Paul Muni?” He was a joy killer.
So in response to his father’s pleas to stay, Sunny said, “Dad, I can’t do that. I don’t want to stay in the neighborhood and I don’t want to end up like you.” Right away he felt sorry he’d said it that way but his father just replied, “This is not something I want you to do, but if your heart is set on it, I’ll sign the paper.”
The recruiter had promised that if Sunny and George enlisted together they would serve their tours of duty together, but the day of their induction was the last Sunny spent with George Hunt. Subsequently, of the world he saw Plattsburgh, New York; Amarillo, Texas; and Riverside, California. There were no Fräuleins, only a two-day leave with other enlistees to a brothel in Tijuana where he found himself in a dimly lit, cavernous room humping a woman on a well-worn cot several feet away from another airman humping on a cot who was several feet from the next airman humping—and so on down the line. Apparently in the military, even this was done in formation.
He had thought that his jeweler’s knowledge of the properties of metals might qualify him to become a metallurgist. But instead he had been sent to aircraft mechanics school in Texas before being stationed at March Air Force Base in the San Bernardino Valley. His last illusions of becoming a prizefighter had been beaten out of him in basic training by a heavier man goaded into a homicidal mood by the commanding officers. He knew he had made a great mistake and that he was entirely unsuited to the military and to being a mechanic. The sergeants reminded him of the spiteful nuns in school, and the noise, the oil, the smell of kerosene reminded him of things he’d hated in Red Hook. Not long after his arrival in California he plotted his own general discharge. He decided that in the course of the next spot inspection by the maintenance crew chiefs, during which mechanics were quizzed about various operations of the aircraft, he would respond with blatantly stupid answers. Of course he knew the correct terminology and right answers—he would have to work at being stupid. Brooklyn stupid.
When the day of the inspection had come, an officer led him over to the back of one of the six jet engines on his aircraft, the B-47 Stratojet, and pointed to a component and asked, “Can you name these particular parts of the aircraft and describe what degree of importance they have?” The officer was expecting to hear, “Those are discharge thermocouples that measure the exhaust temperature and send a voltage reading to the exhaust gas temperature gauge located on the right side of the pilot’s instrument panel,” but instead Sunny replied, “Oh, dees things? Dey’re like candles. Dey get hot and dey’re wired to de area where de pilot sits and what dey do is dey tell de pilot and de navigator how much heat is comin’ out of dis part of de airplane.” The inspector recorded everything Sunny said on a clipboard. Then he pointed to a hydraulic accumulator and asked him to explain its function. Sunny knew that the accumulators stored pressure that is always kept at a constant in order to hydraulically move sections of the bomber such as the nose wheel, the wing flaps, the windshield wipers. So he explained, “Dis is like a balloon. It holds de air and when de men who sit in de cockpit want to turn de airplane, dey press a button on der instrument panel and it releases de air from de balloon.”
Sunny was ordered out of the hangar on the spot.
For a period of time, Sunny became the company artist, illustrating aircraft maintenance tips for its monthly bulletin. He felt his natural abilities were finally being recognized, but this period of relative contentment only lasted until the next wing redeployment when Sunny, left behind, was appointed squadron gardener. He carefully mowed the flower beds and pruned the lawns and decimated the roses that ringed the officers’ quarters, but no one seemed to notice his horticultural ineptitude. Undaunted, he developed a case of phantom back pain. At the sick bay he punched the air, howled, and wept until his superiors capitulated. He was relieved of his gardening duties and assigned to the military police, though not the branch that wore uniforms and carried sidearms and did actual policing. Instead, he was delivered every night to guard duty on the flight line, so far from all activity that took place on the base that it felt like he was being sent into overnight exile.
He hadn’t ever known such cold. Growing up, his home had often seemed like the coldest address in New York. Where there was a breeze elsewhere in Brooklyn, there was a bluster in Red Hook and an all-out gale on his block. Closing the front door was often a minor battle. But here, the cold not only got into one’s boots, one’s feet, one’s chest, but into one’s thoughts. It was the cold of the desert in winter, the cold of the stars, but also the cold of being alone in the dark on a deserted tarmac. He didn’t remember ever feeling so forlorn and forgotten and out of place in his life.
There were other men like him out in the dark, assigned to guard duty on the far end of the flight line, each separated from the next by a row of aircraft. He assumed they all did as he did—curl up on the ground soon after the taillights of the truck that delivered them to these remote runways disappeared, half-sleeping and half-listening for the hum of the hourly patrol jeep ferrying the sergeant-in-charge and sometimes hot coffee around the airfield. Occasionally a fire engine would make a training run up and down the runway. The nights could get tremendously foggy in this part of Southern California and on one such night a fire truck ran over the head of one of the guards. After that, Sunny had begun lying directly underneath the planes. In their bellies hung nuclear bombs meant for targets across the Pacific Ocean, and he sometimes felt a momentary wonder at his proximity to objects of such power and purpose; other times they only served to remind him of his own impotence and aimlessness. When he slept he often dreamt of home but also of detonations in distant places. When he awoke intermittently he would concentrate to hear something, anything, but usually he heard no
thing. No crickets, no birds, no Soviet agents, no Korean saboteurs. He would tuck his chin into his jacket and close his eyes again, though the sheer stillness would keep him from falling into any kind of deeper sleep. Often he would go over in his mind the turns of fate that had brought him to this unhappy place. He thought of his mother and father, of George Hunt, of girls.
One night he thought of another night.
He had been brought to a bar, several blocks up Conover Street from his family’s place, by his friend Nicky Rose. Nicky was older and of drinking age. The only other people there were the Irish owner, Joe; his bartender; and a girl whose name also happened to be Rose. Just Rose. Nicky wasn’t quite a criminal but he had ambitions of being one, and in the past Sunny had accompanied him as he ran small errands for the oldest of the Gallo brothers. The bar owner had never done a good deed in his life as far as Sunny knew. He was the kind of person who would never challenge anyone if he had any doubt he could beat them. The bartender was even worse. Both men hurt people and didn’t have a conscience about it. And then there was Rose. She was slow, and it was said that she would sleep with anyone. What this really meant was she would sleep with the navy sailors and merchant marines who were in port. Servicemen and seamen were usually so hard up, they had few compunctions about having sex with someone who was trusting and slow of mind. Sunny would have been glad to be anywhere else at that moment, but he was in a stage of his life where he still deferred to people who were his elders, even if by only a few years. Nicky wanted to be in good standing with Joe and Sunny wanted to be in good standing with Nicky, so they were all together that night.
A sailor came in, from where no one knew. He sat at the bar and after he had a few drinks, he said to no one in particular, “I’d really like to suck her cunt.”