Angela?
Just get in the car. On your left.
She leaned over and opened the door and moved back. I got in. Her husband, Joey, was driving. He was a small guy and it was a big car. He looked like he was sitting in a hole. It was Buddy’s car, a white Cadillac convertible with rocket fins and red leather interior, but the top was up, black and ominous.
Joey? I said.
Joey stared straight ahead, didn’t even check me out in the rearview mirror. I was disappointed. I thought Joey liked me, but then I was always thinking people liked me when they really didn’t give a shit. I felt better that I was in the backseat with Angela and not in the front with Joey. I knew about the piano wire around the neck, though this was no movie.
I actually felt bad. Until just now, Angela had treated me like family.
We were in the Village, on Barrow Street. I was on my way to meet Buddy at the restaurant he managed, next to the gay club he used to own, before the feds subpoenaed him to testify. He said that was when he learned to sweat and gave up red silk lining in his custom-made suits. Maybe saying the club he used to run is a better way to put it. Only one group of people owned clubs in Greenwich Village, but it was undisclosed ownership. The State Liquor Authority kept close tabs on who got a liquor license and who didn’t.
Why did I know all this? I shouldn’t have. My criminal involvement began and ended with my father’s Prohibition bootlegging days and his stint as a bookkeeper for Tony Bender in the ’30s. Good with numbers and honest, my father wasn’t looking for power and glory, just enough money to start a legitimate business and buy a house. So how did I end up in a white Cadillac with rocket fins and this crazy bitch who was about to become my sister-in-law holding a gun on me?
I asked Angela where we were going. It was a legitimate question, I thought, under the circumstances.
Does it matter? she said.
I shrugged and she pulled my hair.
Staten Island? I said.
Bingo. She laughed.
My brother bragged how you were a college girl, Angela said. Me, I always thought you didn’t have the brains God gave you. Angela really laughed when she said this. Hard to believe we grew up on the same street, she said to me.
I could have mentioned that she was a full ten years older than I was and her father wore overalls to work and gambled his paycheck before he got home Fridays, but her mouth was up close to my ear, her perfume was up my nose, and she was poking that gun hard in my ribs.
I met Buddy in Manhattan but he told me he lived out on Staten Island. Right away I knew something was up. He’d grown up in the Village. Staten Island? For me, Staten Island was Middlin’ Beach and my mother’s stories about the rented summer bungalow thirteen blocks from the ocean her first married summer when she was twenty and had a newborn baby (not me). My father took the ferry out every weekend. My mother thought she’d died and went to heaven. Her eight brothers and sisters thought so too, and came out every chance they got. No screens, no plumbing. I don’t remember the amusement park or my cousins making human pyramids on the beach for the camera but there was an old 16 mm movie of me in white underpants licking the block of ice that sat on the porch.
What I’m saying is that, for me, Staten Island didn’t conjure images of the high life. It was somewhere you went to if you were on the lam, it seemed that far away; where you went when you owed the wrong people money, the guys with the broken noses, Buddy called them, or when you couldn’t go back to the neighborhood, like Angela, who needed a place to keep her husband straight after he got out of prison. Her mother watched the kids and the old man’s insurance policy, which paid double after he was crushed between the ship and the pier, paid for the house on Florence Street that was a primo fixer-upper. Buddy said that when he came back from California after his marriage broke up, they were sitting on orange crates with candles stuck in those wine bottles with the straw bottoms.
We drove through the Midtown Tunnel and onto the BQE and I could see the Verrazano—for my money, the best thing about Staten Island. We turned left off the bridge and drove down what always felt to me like a country lane. The houses were old, the colors of old houses, green and brown. They had patches of grass in the front. Hylan Boulevard curved and looped before it straightened out and you hit the traffic and the local guidos in muscle cars with music blasting, small strip malls with the same three or four stores, Chinese restaurants that would mix won ton and egg drop soup in one bowl, sandwich shops called Angelo’s and Gino’s with an overstuffed sub painted in primary colors on the plate glass window, bridal shops, catering halls, restaurants named Petruzzi’s with lattice and cognac-colored windows and endless parking. The Staten Islanders loved outdoor parking. They loved parking lots better than garages because in a parking lot everyone could admire your good-looking, expensive car, and you could too.
Hylan Boulevard flooded in a sudden rain; it flooded bad. The semi-detached condos that had been built on the graveyard of grand old houses flooded too, and the cars parked to the sides of the front doors were moved to higher ground with the first sprinkle.
Angela?
Shut up, she said.
I turned my head and she rammed the gun in my side.
Don’t look at me.
Why? Because I might recognize you?
Funny. You think you’re so funny. Watch me laugh. You know, smarty-pants, you should have just stayed where you belonged and away from Buddy. So now just shut your big mouth.
Someone should have warned me when I met Buddy that his family was crazy, but who knew they were this crazy? And let me tell you, when I met Buddy I wasn’t planning on anything long-term. All I wanted was a good time. And Buddy was a lot of fun. He knew everybody and had all kinds of connections. We went to after-hours bars and gambling parlors, clubs with private shows in back. We walked past velvet ropes and got the best seats; drinks arrived at the table compliments of the house. There were bear hugs and cheek kisses.
But honestly, did I need a guy who was broke and living with his mother, his two kids, his sister, and a brother-in-law who had five-to-ten in Dannemora under his belt? Living on Staten Island no less? Buddy was pretty quiet about the Staten Island piece and hinted that it wasn’t so bad and maybe we could live out there after we got married. He was awful grateful to Angela for taking him in when the ex-wife grabbed the stash, dumped the kids, and went AWOL with a South American disco dancer named Chico.
We made the turn off the boulevard and onto Florence Street. I was starting to think Angela was really stupid. She kidnaps me at gunpoint and brings me to her house?
When Joey pulled into the driveway, I could see the television flickering with the kids planted in front of it. Angela and Joey had four kids of their own and they all watched television together and made popcorn on Saturday nights. The kind in the aluminum pan that you hold over the stove and the top blows up like a balloon.
Joey, I said, did you ever shoot anyone?
I thought I told you to shut up, Angela said, which made me open my eyes and look at her.
She was digging in her huge black alligator satchel (which for sure had “fallen off a truck,” but who am I to talk?). Before she’d turned nasty, Angela would throw things my way when they came in pairs. Shit, I was wearing an 18-karat gold Rolex that had actually been special order, serial number and everything,
