by Albert Demeo
As we walked toward the tailor shop, a man stepped out of the entrance onto the sidewalk. He was middle-aged, expensively dressed in an Italian suit, with black receding hair. There was a feeling of power surrounding him that I sensed right away. In spite of the deepening gloom, he wore black sunglasses that completely hid his eyes. I remember thinking how odd it was. I had never seen anyone wear sunglasses at night. How could he see when it was already so dark outside?
Nino turned as we approached and greeted my father warmly, embracing him and slapping him on the back. My father kept watching Uncle Nino's face and smiling at him. It was the first time I had seen my father seem anxious to please someone. Nino bent to me next and introduced himself as my uncle Nino. He was very nice, very friendly. I kissed him obediently on the cheek as I had been taught to do, the standard gesture of respect. Nino smiled at me, and I wondered if his eyes were smiling, too. Later I asked my father what color Nino's eyes were. Dark brown, he told me. I didn't see Nino's eyes that night, or any other night for that matter. He never once took off those dark glasses.
After laughing with my father and showing off the new coat his wife had had made for him, Uncle Nino and my father began strolling down the street, chatting in low voices as we walked. I walked quietly by my father's side, listening to their curious conversation without comprehension.
“Did you take care of that thing we talked about?” Uncle Nino asked my dad.
“It's done.”
“And the other thing?”
“Just as we discussed.”
“Bene.” Then, turning to me, Uncle Nino asked, “So Albert, I hear you started school. How is that going?”
I said it was going pretty good. After a few more minutes of polite chatter, Nino bid us good-bye and continued down the street.
Back in the car a few minutes later, I turned to my father. “Is Uncle Nino your boss, Daddy?”
My father considered the question for a minute. “Not exactly. He's more of an associate. We work for the same family.”
This was interesting. “Uncle Nino works for our family?”
“Not our family, son, not the way you mean. Uncle Nino's been around a little longer than I have, so I pay attention to what he says. It's important to pay attention to more experienced men.”
I nodded thoughtfully. Uncle Nino must be very important if my father turned to him for advice. My father knew everything.
two
PRIMARY LESSONS
Train up a child in the way he should go;
and when he is old, he will
not depart from it.
—PROVERBS 22:6
When I was in the first grade, our teacher asked us to tell the class what our fathers did for a living. The other children got up one at a time and explained that their dads were doctors or businessmen. When it was my turn, to my great embarrassment, I didn't know what to say. I wasn't sure what my dad did. Worse yet, a couple of the kids from my block looked at each other and smiled funny when I went up to share. So I asked my mother to take me to the library, and I got one of those children's books on “What Daddies Do” and tried to find my father's job. But the more I looked, the more confused I became. My father carried a gun, but he wasn't a policeman. He must be doing something dangerous; else why did he carry a gun? He wore a suit, but he didn't work in an office. He didn't have an office, and the suits he wore weren't like the ones worn by other fathers. He wore custom-made suits, and he never wore a starched shirt and a tie. As I looked through the book, my stomach began to hurt, yet I didn't ask my mother.
I began to notice differences when I was at home, too. My playmates' fathers were referred to by their profession: Jimmy's dad was a policeman, Tony's a mechanic. But no one in the neighborhood ever said a word about what my father did for a living. Most fathers talked about what they did at the office or the precinct when they stopped by on a Saturday to chat. They asked each other how it was going at work. None of the other men asked my father about his work. I wondered why.
Even in our house, no one talked about Dad's business. One evening, at Sunday-night dinner, my aunt Marie asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I promptly replied, “I want to do what Daddy does.”
She and my mother exchanged a look; and after a silence, my mother prompted me, “No, you don't, Al. You should pick something you want to do.” Looking at my plate, I was at a loss for words.
So the next time someone asked me what my father did, I made something up. I was taking my first step toward the most basic survival mechanism in a crime family: lying. While other children were listening to fairy tales, I was learning to tell them. Since no one was giving me any answers, I provided my own and tried to believe they were true. If anyone asked, I said my father was a car salesman.
Other small oddities began to strike me as well. I wondered why my father left for work so late in the day, sometimes coming home long after midnight. I wondered why he always carried a big bag of change for pay phones. When we went out together, he nearly always stopped at particular pay phones to make calls. Sometimes one of the phones would ring while I waited in the car, and the call was always for my father. How did he know it would be for him? Why didn't he use the phone at home like other fathers? And why did he keep money in envelopes instead of in his wallet?
The neighbors were universally friendly. But if they thought I wasn't looking, they nudged each other when my father pulled into the driveway in a different luxury car every six months. No one else had new cars as often as we did. No one I knew had as much money as we did, either. My sisters and I got complete new wardrobes several times a year. We even had our nails manicured regularly. Still, people liked us, so perhaps it was just my imagination.
School itself went well enough in most respects. I had trouble learning to write, so my parents hired a tutor to work with me. Each day after school I would work with him at the big table in the small kitchen upstairs. Fortunately, I learned to read quickly and proficiently; by the time I reached second grade, I could read at a sixth-grade level. I was polite and well behaved, and the teachers seemed to like me. I got along fine with the other children, too, but I seldom invited them home to play. Somehow it didn't seem like such a good idea. I never made a best friend like most children do when they go to school. My father remained my best friend. It was with him that I spent my weekends, and as I grew older, he would begin the slow process of introducing me to his world.
Usually it was on Saturdays, when Debra was with her junior high friends and Lisa was at home with Mom. Dad and I would drive down Sunrise Highway and around Long Island, while my father pointed out the make and year of the cars we passed. By the time I was seven, I could accurately identify most automobiles on sight. We would stop occasionally at a barber shop or cleaner's while Dad went in, then returned a few minutes later and resumed the drive. He usually left me in the car because the stops were business and would only take a minute. Sometimes I saw him put an envelope in his jacket pocket as he came back outside. Our last stop was often his favorite place: one of those old-fashioned hardware stores that had everything you could ever want. The proprietor was an old man who had run the place for years, and my father loved talking to him. Dad would describe an item he needed for a home project we were working on, and within minutes the man would go into the back room and reemerge with exactly the right tool or fastener. I remember being amazed when my dad described a crystal doorknob to match one that had broken on a bedroom door and the owner came back with an exact duplicate. It seemed as if the owner had everything a person could want in that mysterious backroom.
Dad also began introducing me to more of his friends. One was Freddy DiNome, a friend of my dad's from the old days in Brooklyn. Freddy was a drag racer who had an auto repair shop not far from the house where my father grew up. Freddy's racing name was Broadway Freddy. Freddy was semifamous, my father told me. Freddy raced his cars in Englishtown, New Jersey, and he was pretty good. Sometimes I heard his races mentioned on the
radio when I went somewhere in the car with Dad, and my father had shown me pictures of Freddy's races in the newspaper. One Saturday afternoon Dad took me to meet Freddy at the car repair shop in Brooklyn.
It was a hot summer afternoon when we pulled into the driveway of Freddy's garage. Freddy was bent under the hood of a car when we got there, fiddling with the engine, and he didn't hear us when we first drove up. The person who looked up at my father's greeting was the filthiest human being I had ever seen.
Freddy was a husky guy about five feet, nine inches, a little shorter than my father, and every inch of him was covered with grease. He seemed to exude engine grease from his very pores. Freddy had dirty blond hair, a lopsided nose, and tattoos covering both arms. His teeth were stained and crooked, and his fingernails were filthy. My father had his own nails manicured every week, and I thought it was odd that he would have a friend with nails that black. Yet the face looking down at me had warm brown eyes, and when Freddy scooped me up to give me a hug, exclaiming, “So this is Albert!” I liked him immediately. I liked him even more when he began looking around for a piece of candy or a soda to treat me. When he returned a minute later with an ice-cold Coke in his hand, I settled down comfortably to sip it in the cool darkness of the garage while he and my dad talked.
“Got the truck all tagged up for ya, Roy,” he said as they walked outside together. Freddy pointed at something down the street. A few minutes later another man pulled up in front of the garage in a well-kept Chevrolet. He got out of the car and walked over to Freddy and my father. The new man wore dark blue pants and a shirt that looked like a gas station attendant's uniform, and his fingernails were almost as black as Freddy's. Freddy seemed to know the man; Freddy nodded at him and said something to my dad. Dad and the man talked a minute, then started down the street where Freddy had pointed. By this time I had finished my soda. I wandered over to the corner where Freddy and Dad had been standing. Halfway down the block I could see a tow truck parked by the curb, across from an empty parking lot. The new man walked around the truck, nodded at my dad, and took a white envelope from his pocket. Dad took the envelope, slipped it inside his shirt pocket, and then shook the man's hand. I heard the truck's engine start up, and the man drove away as Dad and Freddy walked back to where I was waiting. Dad said it was time to go.
“Thanks for the soda, Mr. DiNome,” I said as we headed for my father's car.
Freddy grinned at me. “Call me Freddy,” he told me, and my father told me to kiss Freddy good-bye. I planted a polite kiss on Freddy's greasy cheek and got in the car with my father.
As we pulled into traffic, I asked my father, “Why is Freddy's nose so crooked?”
“He broke it a few times,” my father answered.
“In car races?”
“Yeah, that way. In fights, too.”
Hmm. “Daddy, what did Freddy mean when he said the truck was tagged? I didn't see any tag.”
My father glanced at me, then replied, “Tagging means replacing the identification tag that comes on a car. If you want to sell a stolen car, you have to put a new tag on it so the police can't tell who it belonged to.”
I absorbed this information in silence. I already knew my father had a car lot on the highway not far from our house. He had taken me there plenty of times. Now he was talking about stolen cars. Freddy had changed the tag; I'd heard him say so. But the man who came and got the truck had given an envelope to my father, not to Freddy. What was in the envelope? Sometimes, when I sat with my dad while he undressed at night, I saw him take envelopes with money in them out of his pockets and put them in a drawer. Did this envelope have money in it? A small knot grew in the pit of my stomach. I ignored it. If my father was doing it, it must be all right.
I saw Freddy often after that. I could tell from the beginning that Freddy adored my dad. He looked at my father with the admiration of a faithful dog, and a few weeks later I found out why.
Dad had taken me by Freddy's house to play with Freddy's children while he and Freddy talked some business. I had never been to Freddy's house before, and I thought the whole place was incredibly cool. The house was set on nearly two acres, and Freddy's backyard was like a Hot Wheels racetrack. He kept race cars and motorbikes there, and he promised me that as soon as I was big enough, he'd let me ride one of the bikes. He also had a basement filled to the brim with electronic equipment. Hundreds of new electronic devices—televisions, VCRs, stereos, anything you wanted—covered his basement in stacks, all still in their boxes. It was great fun to go exploring there, for as I soon learned, the selection changed constantly. Wandering through Freddy's basement was like being set loose in an electronics store.
After my father and Freddy finished talking their business, Freddy's wife brought snacks and cold drinks into the living room for all of us, and Freddy started talking about what a great guy my father was. “Did you know your father was a hero, Albert?” he asked me. I just smiled at him as he continued, “Did you know your father once saved my life?”
Now that was interesting. “What did he do, Freddy?” I asked him.
“He saved me from a fire, that's what he did,” Freddy went on. “Here, I'll show you. I got the tape.” And he immediately went in search of something in the next room while my father protested in embarrassment. Ignoring him, Freddy returned a few minutes later and popped a videotape into the VCR. A few seconds later a picture crackled into view. It was news footage of one of Broadway Freddy's races.
The film showed Freddy's car veering out of control on a racetrack, then slamming into a wall and bursting into flames as the watching crowd screamed in horror. A rescue team went running toward the car, then pulled back as the heat from the flames hit them. I could barely make out Freddy, slumped unconscious over the steering wheel inside. Suddenly another man rushed toward the door on the driver's side, shoving his hand into the fire and pulling the door open. The rescue team was shouting for the man to get away before the car exploded. I could see the man struggling with something inside as the newscaster explained that the unknown good Samaritan was cutting the seat belts off Freddy with a knife. In the time it took the newscaster to tell it, the man pulled Freddy from the flames and carried him away from the car, staggering under Freddy's weight. As the car exploded in the background, the man put Freddy on the ground and collapsed beside him, panting. When the man looked up at the camera, I could see my father's face.
It was the most amazing thing I had ever seen, like something out of a movie, except this was real life. Tears of pride filled my eyes. I listened as Freddy, his face glowing with gratitude, told me the end of the story. Freddy had suffered a concussion and minor burns that day, and my father had burned his hands and forearms pulling Freddy from the flames. Both had been taken to the hospital to have their wounds treated, but neither suffered permanent injury.
“If it wasn't for your daddy, Albert, I'd be dead,” Freddy told me. Then turning to my father, “I won't never forget that, Roy. Never.”
My father, clearly uncomfortable, announced that it was time to go. The glow of pride inside of me lasted all the way home. That night, when I went to bed, I drifted to sleep dreaming of heroic deeds. I was going to be just like my dad when I grew up.
One of my favorite trips with Dad was our visits to Uncle Frank in Greenwich Village. Unlike most of my other “uncles,” Uncle Frank really was a relative, a great-uncle on my father's side. He was head chef at a restaurant called the Vineyard that my father owned in Greenwich Village. Uncle Frank's exploits in the war were a favorite family story. Uncle Joe loved to tell me the tale, and he never told it without laughing.
Uncle Frank had been General MacArthur's personal chef in World War II, stationed on a ship that transported the general from port to port. Like several of my ancestors, Uncle Frank was a little too fond of a good bottle of wine, and every now and then he would crawl into the 50-mm gun ports on deck to sleep off a bottle or two. On board his ship in Pearl Harbor one day, Uncle Frank decided to t
hrow a little party for some visiting nurses. After they had eaten and drunk themselves into oblivion, Uncle Frank crawled into his favorite gun port to sleep. Unfortunately for him, this was not an ordinary day. It was December 7, 1941, and no sooner had he settled deep into a drunken slumber than the Japanese attacked. Startled out of his stupor, Uncle Frank held on to the huge gun for support and began firing wildly into the air. Entirely by accident, he happened to hit a Japanese kamikaze plane. Uncle Frank not only survived the attack but became a war hero, medals and all. What made the incident even more ridiculous was that afterward, he could barely even remember firing the gun.
I thought the story was hilarious, but I didn't care whether or not Uncle Frank was really a war hero. I was just happy eating his food. Every time I walked into the kitchen at the Vineyard, delicious aromas engulfed me like a warm embrace. Uncle Frank always had a fresh plate of antipasti or linguini and clam sauce waiting for me to nibble while he and my father talked business. When I finished my plate, I had the run of the kitchen. I picked my way through the kitchen where pots simmered with marinara sauce, lasagna baked in the ovens, and the walk-in refrigerator held shelves of pies and Italian custards. It was all mine to choose from. The undercooks smiled at me and offered me samples as I passed. As if that weren't exciting enough, my father also owned a pizza parlor across the street, and after talking with Uncle Frank, we usually wandered over there to sample the deep-dish pizza. Stuffed with pasta and sauce after an afternoon in the Village, I could barely keep my eyes open on the drive home.
A guy called Crazy Mark was usually hanging around the Vineyard when we visited there. Mark did odd jobs and errands for my father. Everyone called him Crazy Mark because he sometimes heard voices in his head. I think my dad felt sorry for the guy, since no one else would give Mark a job. To me Mark seemed a little weird but harmless. Crazy Mark was always eager to please my father and me. If I wanted anything, from a stick of gum to a candy bar, Mark would race off to fetch it. Within minutes he would be back, asking me if I wanted anything else.