Manhattan Mayhem (40 page)

“All yours, you want some,” I tell Mikey.

“Gina’s on her way.”

“So?”

“You know.”

“You don’t know nothin’. We got some work to do later tonight.”

“When?”

“When you’re done with Gina,” I say. “So, don’t take too long.”

I drove my Impala. We crossed the Williamsburg Bridge and went into Queens. It was a hot night, and my air conditioner was shot.

“What are we doing?” Mikey asked.

“Pest control,” I said. “My sister Julie bought a car from a guy out here, and now he won’t give her the money back.”

“What’s wrong with the car?”

“She don’t like it, Mikey. I talked to him on the phone, but he won’t listen to reason. Already got himself an Eldo. Don’t have the money now. A black. You know.”

“You made him an offer he
could
refuse.”

“Yeah, yeah, shut up about it.”

Me and Mikey had seen that movie at least a dozen times. Best movie they ever made ’til
Scarface.
The violence was right on, especially how Sonny takes care of Carlo. Mikey tried to tell me the flick was about honor and commitment and loyalty, and all that was fine with
me, but when they got Sonny at the toll booth, it made me want to pick up a tommy gun and start blasting away myself.

Mikey didn’t like it that, in that movie, it always came down to the money. To business. Welcome to the real fuckin’ world, I told him. I also told him that business could
be
personal, that it didn’t have to be all one or the other, that the movie oversimplified that issue.

In Jamaica, I drove alongside the expressway. It was all Rasta this and that, every block. You could smell the ganja burning. It was hard to find the right street through my dirty windshield. Finally, I did, and I drove by the address, and sure enough, there’s a late-model Caddy Eldo, black and gleaming with white sidewalls, exactly like you’d figure for a black dude.

I drove past and parked along the curb and watched a minute. “We’re gonna detail his car for him.”

“How?” asked Mikey.

“Monkey see, monkey do.” I swung open the trunk and we put on the ski masks and got the bats. The new aluminum ones. “Come on. This’ll be fun.”

We crossed the street and came up on the car from behind. There were lights on in the house, but I didn’t care. I smashed the left brake light, then the turn signal. The aluminum made the plastic explode. The Caddy’s back windshield took more hits because the safety glass cracked in place but didn’t blow up like the plastic.

By then Mikey was on the other side. I only glanced at him, but he was slugging away like a pro. I was whacking the driver’s side door when the porch light came on and a big black dude in gym trunks and flip-flops came running down the stoop with a baseball bat of his own, the old-fashioned wooden kind. He stopped short and looked at me.

I said, “Give me the money you stole for that piece a shit Mercury, and we’ll stop.”

“That money helped buy the Cadillac you wreckin’.”

“Up to you, man.”

“You be sorry.”

He came at me in a funny-looking way, sideways kind of, with the
bat cocked over his shoulder. I stepped back like I was confused, then ducked in and took out his kneecap. He yelped and caved in both at once, and I let him have it with the bat. Over and over. Then I thought I’d be like Sonny and kick him, so I did that, too. He was bleedin’ and yellin’, and I couldn’t believe the weird charge of adrenaline going through me. Felt like a river of electricity. Like something I could ride all the way to the moon and back.

“Finish the Eldo!” I screamed at Mikey.

“It’s finished! It’s done! Let’s go!”

I kicked the man once more in the face and told him, “Next time, you give the girl her money back.”

All he could say back was “Uck ou,” which made me laugh, so I kicked him again and headed for the car.

Mikey drove. I talked the whole way back to Little Italy, I was so high on the violence, the crack of the lights and the crack of his knee, and the whole glory of having power over a bigger man, the glory of having power itself.

“We gotta do this again sometime,” I said. My mouth was dry from panting so hard.

He gave me a funny look. “That was some ugly shit, Ray.”

“What do you mean, ugly?”

He looked pale and used up. “Forget about it.”

We did do it again. A lot. Stuff like that and stuff worse. Mikey, the deeper he got into the enforcement side of the business, the more serious he got. One night, drunk, he told me this life was worse than he had dreamed and feared when he was a boy. Much worse. He hated it.

The family business.

Marriage and children for both of us.

Twelve years went by.

During that time, Mikey’s father, my Uncle Jimmy, took a RICO fall, along with Matty Maglione. They got ten years for bribing, then trying
to extort a Pennsylvania trucking company owner who turned out to be wearing a wire. Mikey’s mom, Christina, died of cancer. My pop, Dominick, became acting head of the family business. Paul Castellano got whacked just before Christmas of ’85, and the so-called Mafia Commission Trial dragged on. Junior Persico was running the old Colombo outfit, which of course affected us LiDeccas, not exactly fans of the late Joseph.

Personally, I thought the worst part of those years was all the Chinese swarming into Little Italy. Overnight, it seemed. Weird people. Glass tanks of live fuckin’ frogs and turtles to cook. All these signs you couldn’t even read. Not hardly any Italian left. Just Italian for tourists, which is different. I hate change.

Personally, I tried to bring some style to things, the same way Joey did. I blew lots of money on clothes and dinner parties. I got to know the tabloid photogs, and they liked me. I have good, straight teeth and a kinda round face, so when you put both of them over an eight-hundred-dollar suit, I looked kind of lovable and wicked at the same time. Which is exactly what I was. Girls on my arms, but never my wife, of course. And I’d pop off to the reporters, give ’em good copy. I’d tell ’em what sports teams and casinos I liked, and what movies, and what the good wines and restaurants were, and I’d bad-mouth the feds every chance I got, take pity on ’em for being so dumb. The cops were okay, but the feds hated me. They harassed my family and threw charges at me to prove it, but what they couldn’t prove was me being guilty. I left courtrooms with a trail of dropped charges and not-guilty verdicts behind me. I loved every minute of it.

Mikey went the other way. Hardly saw him. Regina dumped him outta nowhere, took off on tour with a Jersey bass player. That killed Mikey, having tried to be a musician once himself. Which was exactly her purpose, I pointed out. She left their children—Danny and Lizzy—with him, which was the only good thing Mikey seemed to get out of those twelve years.

He called me Christmas Day of 1986. He sounded happy and desperate at the same time. “We’re going to California to live,” he said.
“Danny and Lizzy and me. I’m out, Ray. I’ve worked it out with Pop and Uncle Dom and—”

I hung up on him because I was furious.

Later that day, Christmas Day, Pop told me they’d arranged to let Mikey out of the family for as long as Jimmy was alive. So, Mikey didn’t exist no more. Obviously, this was out of respect for Jimmy, and not his coward of a son. All I could say on the phone to my own father was, “I’m sorry, Pop—I’m sorry I was the one brought Mikey along and couldn’t teach him one bit of sense or even the most basic rules.” Mikey was my failure.

Not long after, in the summer of 1987, Mikey did something even worse.

The video was sent to me by a friend in L.A. At first, I figured it was some more good San Fernando Valley porno, but no, this was a PBS news story showing some meatball walking across the stage at something-or-other junior high school in Irvine, California. And the meatball is Mikey.

The auditorium is full of children. Mikey’s got himself a cheap-looking suit and a white shirt but no tie. He’s put on some weight. He’s got a real serious look on his face. A fat lady introduces him as Michael Ticci, and Mikey goes to the podium and takes the microphone.

And he tells the students he comes from a prominent crime family in New York, where he was born and lived for all his life until a few months ago, when he quit crime, moved to California, got straight. He doesn’t name the family business. He tells about growing up in Little Italy, how it was a wonderful place for a kid, but he always thought there was something wrong about it. Then he tells how his great-great-grandfather built up a “wholesale food and produce” business before not-completely-honest men took it over. He’s standing up there with this kind of frown on his face, talking shit about his own family. In public, on TV, to a bunch of children!

And you could see the emotion in him. His eyes go kind of squinty and he gestures with his hands and his voice cracks when he talks about “beating that man until he nearly died,” and “Uncle Lou coming back from prison white as a ghost, with black hatred in his eyes,” and how difficult it is to get the smell “of another man’s blood off your hands,” and “what it’s like to live in a world where men substitute love of money for love itself, where money and power are all that matter, where there are no laws or limits.” He said Little Italy was gone now, it was just a skeleton of what it used to be, because organized crime had eaten it out “like a cancer.”

I watched the whole thing with my guts in a knot. Mikey had finally found something to say. I’d have gotten on a plane to California that day if it wasn’t for the family. I’d have choked him to death bare-handed and pissed on his face when I was done. But the arrangement was the arrangement, and there was nothing I could do about Mikey while Uncle Jimmy was alive.

Ten years went by, and I’d like to say I didn’t think about Mikey out there in California, but I did.

I thought about him a lot.

People like to think God lets things happen for a reason, and they’re right. Why else would the family decide to have a sixty-fifth birthday party for Uncle Jimmy? And why else would Mikey LiDecca decide to sneak back and see his father? And why, when Mikey went to his old house on Grand that morning to see his old man for the first time in eleven years, walked right up and rang the intercom on the gate outside, and when Jimmy heard his son’s voice, of course he let him in, why, when they sat in the old kitchen with Christina and the girls long gone, did Jimmy’s heart just give up? Why did he die in Mikey’s arms right there, one day before he was going to turn sixty-five? Answer me that.