Casino Moon

7

OVER THE NEXT few days, I began to see new vistasand opportunities opening up before me. Soon I’d be negotiating major endorsement deals and worldwide satellite hookups with men twice my age at mahogany conference tables.

One of the great things about boxing is that it’s easier to get a manager’s license than it is to get hired by a casino. There’s not as much checking into your background. For once my family connections wouldn’t hold me back.

I even managed to forget about Larry lying there with the ice pick in his side. Or at least I did until I had to go to Teddy’s sixtieth birthday party on Wednesday night. I showed up at the restaurant called Andolini’s, just off Arctic Avenue, at about quarter past eight.

A dozen of the guys from the crew were in the back room talking over their latest scam. What they had on the table I can only describe as a pigsty. Pieces of salami hanging off plates. Slices of provolone and cigarette butts in the ashtrays. Lumps of red peppers on the checkered tablecloth. And presiding over it all, Teddy, the king hog in his cheap Sears suit.

I sat next to my father, two seats down from Teddy. My old man was busy explaining some new idea to all of them.

“This guy Murray Weisbrod works at the savings and loan up the parkway,” he said. “He got in deep with Danny Klein. Owes him about three K. Now he’s working for us. He’ll vouch for any of our people. So all we gotta do is send a guy over to the casino, have him play awhile and then ask for a nine-thousand-dollar marker. They check our guy out with Murray, he’ll say the player is okay, and the casino will give our guy nine thousand in credit to buy chips. So then our guy cashes his chips and splits the money with the rest of us.”

“And who we gonna get as a player?” asked Teddy, spitting out two olive pits and laying them alongside the provolone in the ashtray.

“I was thinking about my boy Anthony here,” said my father, putting a dry hairy hand on the back of my neck. “He hasn’t been in to play that much. I can’t think of a single reason they wouldn’t want to lend him the money. It’s not like he has a record already or anything.”

His breath smelled from scampi and wine. The waitress brought in a few more platters covered with veal chops in mustard sauce, osso buco, garlic bread, anchovies, eggplant parmigiana, and strips of marinated steak.

“How do you eat that shit?” I said as she set the plates down.

“What’re you talking? ‘How do I eat it?’” Teddy sucked his teeth and hooked his arm protectively around his plate. “It’s food. What’s the matter with you?”

“It’s not food, it’s a hospital bed.” I started picking the red candle wax off the Chianti bottle in the middle of the table. “My arteries are clogged just looking at it.”

“So order something you want. It’s a free country.”

“You got any plain fish?” I asked the waitress, a pale chunky girl with dark curly hair. She shook her head.

“What’d I do, Teddy?” said my father, wringing my neck and pinching my cheek. “I raised a fuckin’ yuppie.”

“I’m just trying to watch my cholesterol,” I said as the rest of them laughed along with him.

It didn’t matter, though. All those guys were slobs anyway. Faces as rough and scaly as tortoiseshells. They all wore polyester polo shirts with horizontal stripes and ropes of gold chains around their necks. Not a suit among them, besides Teddy’s. A bunch of no-account jerk-offs who couldn’t tell a quartz watch from one with a Swiss movement or understand why Jerry Vale wasn’t as good a singer as Frank Sinatra.

I noticed Richie Amato trying to stuff a three-inch-high hero into his mouth at the other end of the table. He was sitting next to a guy called Tommy Sick, who was always smiling and saying things like “That’s sick” or “I’m sick!”

“The youth,” said Teddy, running three sausage-like fingers through his oily dyed-black hair. “They’re always going around like they got some kind of stopwatch jammed up their ass. They don’t know how to stop and enjoy the finer things.”

Truthfully, Teddy’s life was about as interesting as scrap metal. Sitting around all day sipping espresso with Vin at a social club with torn-up green vinyl chairs and Italian flags on the wall. Maybe once a week, they’d hear about a hijacked truck full of toothpaste and drive for an hour to get someplace where the other guys wouldn’t show up. And by then it’d be dark and time to think about dinner.

“I got my own schedule, Ted,” I said diplomatically.

“I’m telling you you oughta learn to go with the flow.” Teddy speared a piece of prosciutto off my father’s plate. “Listen to your old man when he has a good idea. I seen you rolling your eyes just now when he was talking about you getting a marker off the casino.”

“Yeah, that’s all right, but I’ve got my days planned out already.”

I wasn’t going to mention anything about my talk with John B. I already had Teddy hanging over my shoulder looking to grab half of whatever I made.

“Look at it,” said my father, reaching into my pocket. “He’s got a little black book he carries around with him.”

I pushed his hand away from my Filofax as the rest of them started to crack up again. As the laughter started to die out after a couple of seconds, I heard a round of sniffling from the other end of the table. Maybe some of these guys still had their cocaine habits after all.

“Listen,” I said, fixing my cuffs and smoothing back my hair. “If I got a clean record, why would I wanna blow it for a nine-thousand-dollar marker?”

“The high roller,” said my father, grabbing my arm and punching it playfully.

I ignored him and went back to scratching the wax off the Chianti bottle. “All I’m saying is I don’t need the pressure. I got better things to do with my life.”

Teddy stopped chewing and just looked at me. It suddenly got very quiet. I could hear the busboy stacking dishes in the kitchen.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Teddy touched a spot just below his stomach.

No one was talking. Even the mural of Caesar on the wall looked tense.

“Nothing,” I said.

These were guys who’d just as soon blow the back of your head off as change a television channel. And since I’d seen what happened to Larry, I had a good idea of what that might feel like.

“No, go ahead,” Teddy said in a cold voice. “You were saying you’re better than us.”

“No, I wasn’t saying I was better, Ted. I was just saying I got other plans.”

Teddy sucked his teeth again and tugged his earlobe, the way Humphrey Bogart would. In his mind he was a dead ringer for Bogey, even though he weighed three hundred pounds.

“I give you all this money and get you started in your own business, and you’re making ‘other plans’?” he said.

I saw my father almost doubling over in his chair from discomfort. When he’d originally loaned me the money to go to college and start my own business, I had no idea how it would change my life. Now I had no way to pay it back. I’d tried everything. A couple of years before, I’d had a legit job managing some buildings on Atlantic Avenue. So Teddy muscled in on them, went partners with the owners, and burned them down for the insurance money. A few months later, I was running boat tours around the island Atlantic City is set on. What happened? Teddy got interested and all the boats sank. The same thing would happen with Elijah and the boxing match if I wasn’t careful.

“I’ll get it all back to you with interest,” I told Teddy. “Just be patient.”

“And what am I supposed to do in the meantime?” His eyes tightened. “Watch my favorite niece and her children starve because you can’t provide for them?”

“Hey, Teddy, I’m doing my best. I just haven’t gotten the right break yet.”

It was like trying to put out a fire with gasoline.

“The right break?!” His lip curled. “My own son, rest his soul, should’ve got the same breaks as you.”

His son Charlie hanged himself when we were in school together. He’d been a friend of mine. Skinny intense kid, who always listened to the rock group Kiss. Instead of saying “hello,” he’d say, “Love Gun!” I used to smoke pot with him under the Boardwalk. He couldn’t stand being part of his father’s life either. Every day he’d get teased by other kids at school: “Okay, Mr. Mafia’s son, let’s see how tough you really are.” And every day they’d kick the shit out of him. He didn’t have someone like Vin to protect him around the schoolyard. So he’d run home and have Ted ride him for being a weakling. As long as Charlie lived, his father’s enemies would be his enemies. He killed himself at the beginning of eleventh grade.

I took his suicide as an object lesson of what would happen to me if I didn’t get out one day. And judging from the look Teddy was giving me, I should’ve already been buried on the mainland.

“Charlie had problems,” I said, maybe a little too offhandedly. “He was, you know, like clinically depressed.”

Teddy looked at me like I’d just tried to bite his nose off. “Clin-ically de-pressed? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m just saying he had problems. He hanged himself.”

Teddy began stroking that spot below his stomach faster. “So what’re you saying, it’s my fault he’s dead?”

“No, Ted, I’m just saying he was depressed. You know, he was always talking about ‘Love Gun.’”

I heard Richie trying to say the word “clinical” in the background while Tommy Sick giggled and muttered, “That’s sick.”

“You little motherfucker, I’ll give you something to be depressed about.” Teddy stood up abruptly and reached into his pants.

You would’ve thought we were in the middle of a rodeo with the way all the other guys jumped up, trying to calm him down: “Whooa Ted! Down Ted! Chill Teddy!”

But Teddy was like the bull about to charge. “This little prick’s saying it’s my fault Charlie’s dead!”

He pushed them all away, snorting hard through his nose and staring me down with those beady red eyes. This was the way things started with them. You’d say you didn’t like the color of their car and wind up locked in the trunk.

My father reached up and put a hand on Teddy’s shoulder. “Hey, Ted, take it easy. Anthony didn’t mean nothing.”

But then Ted turned that same dead-eyed glare on my father. “You just watch it, Vin. You could die too.”

I started thinking maybe I’d try talking Vin into retiring to Florida if I managed to get out of this place alive.

“Hey, Ted,” my father repeated. “Sit down. We’re not done eating.”

“... trying to blame me for putting a rope around my boy’s neck,” mumbled Teddy, his lips turning white.

“Teddy?” My father cleared his throat. “Why don’t you just back off a little? Ha? Anthony did right by you the other night, didn’t he?”

Teddy grunted.

“So maybe you oughta cut him a break. Right?”

I didn’t know what he meant at the time, but it stopped Teddy in his tracks. He dropped the fork and slowly sat down. The other guys at the table lowered their eyes and exhaled in relief.

“Remember,” said my father, still keeping a hand on Ted’s shoulder. “Anthony’s had a lot of frustrations too. Like we talked about the other night. Maybe he thinks he’s owed something.”

I still didn’t know what he was talking about, but Teddy’s mood was cooling by the minute. He took an enormous slab of meat off my father’s plate, and comforted himself by chewing on it. As his face began to soften, I knew I’d probably live through dessert.

“Yeah, I guess,” said Teddy grudgingly.

“You wanna tell him something about that?” said my father, holding Teddy’s gaze the way a lover would. “What we talked about?”

Teddy wiped his mouth and looked over at me. “Thank you, Anthony,” he said, like a little kid who’d just been scolded for his bad manners.

I was going to ask for what, but my father cut me off.

“What about the other thing?” he prodded Teddy. “The thing you were going to see about.”

Teddy just looked at him, not prepared to give any more ground. “I can’t do it, Vin. I’m sorry.”

I realized there was a whole level of the conversation I was missing. Some of the old-timers at the other end of the table were getting it, though. They were whispering to each other and pointing at me.

“Look, Anthony,” said Teddy, his mood shifting for about the third time in five minutes. “I know you been under a lot of pressure. We all been under a lot of pressure. I hear from your father that things haven’t been going exactly the way you might’ve planned with getting made and all. But I just want you to understand we appreciate everything you already done for us.”

I must have given him a blank look. I hadn’t done anything for Teddy lately. But he coughed and went on.

“Larry and his son were becoming pains in the ass to all of us,” he said. “Thanks for helping us send a message.”

All of a sudden, everything was clear. When I saw my father folding and unfolding the napkin on his lap, I knew he’d told Teddy that I’d whacked Larry. And here was Teddy saying it out loud in front of a dozen potential witnesses. My mouth went dry.

I saw my father and Richie exchange a look down the length of the table and understood instantly they’d made a deal not to talk about what really happened.

“Now normally,” Teddy said, smearing some butter on his garlic bread, “that would be enough to get you made. But tradition is tradition. If you ain’t got the blood of Sicilians running through you, I can’t make you.”

My father’s mouth twisted. “Hey, Teddy, we can bend the rules a little. Can’t we? It’s not etched in stone.”

“I’m sorry, Vin,” Teddy said. “I already considered it. I know it’s hard and I know it’s unfair. But somebody’s gotta uphold the old ways.”

That was maybe the biggest joke of all. Teddy upholding the old ways. The only reason he ever got to be a boss was because he happened to be living in exile in Atlantic City when the referendum on casino gambling passed. And by then, he’d been out of the Mafia mainstream for so long he actually had to call somebody up and ask them how to perform the induction ceremony.

“So again, Anthony, I must apologize,” he said. “I can’t change what’s come before. It’s tradition that makes us stronger. If we lose that, we lose everything.”

Actually what made Teddy strong was being willing to stab his friends in the back when they had something he wanted. My father passed a palm over his plate, signaling to me that he’d work things out later.

“It’s all right, Teddy,” I said. “I understand.”

“So that’s why you should do the right thing and listen to your father,” he said, taking half my father’s veal off his plate. “You may never get the button, but you can make a few dollars doing this casino thing he was talking about. Be smart is all I’m telling you. Take your breaks where they come. The rest is up to you.”

“Yeah, I’ll think about that, Teddy.”

He reached over my father and pinched my cheek so hard I almost yelped. “You know what I figured out?” he asked in a fake-affectionate voice. “I figured we’ve been too lenient with you and it hasn’t been doing you any favors. We been spoiling you. So maybe it’d be better if we put you on a schedule. Say if you don’t pay me the full sixty you owe in six months, you come work for me full-time.”

Which meant I’d have all the risks and none of the protection of a made guy. My butt cheeks slammed tight as a cell door. Made guys looked out for each other. But unmade guys, like I would be, had all the exposure. They wound up in prison or dead by the side of a service road with twenty-dollar bills stuffed in their ass. Not me. Now I had twice as much pressure to pull this boxing business off in six months.

I stood up and asked to be excused.

“Here’s looking at you, kid,” Teddy said, cramming the veal into one side of his mouth.

I bowed to the other guys at the table and asked my father if I could talk to him a minute out by where the cars were parked.

It was a cool night and all the stars were out. I could see Ursa Minor hanging over the red-brick housing projectacross the street. My car was parked by the curb right in front of the restaurant’s door. In the old days you could just leave it there, because even in a bad neighborhood like this, people understood the meaning of respect. Especially for guys who ate at Andolini’s. But now any little hood from the projects thought he could just slash your tires with impunity. So the owner had a guy sitting out front in a lawn chair, making sure nothing happened.

“So you told him I pushed a button on Larry,” I said. “That’s terrific. I’m just overflowing with gratitude.”

“I didn’t say nothing about it. I just told him you were man enough to do the right thing.”

“Why’d you go and do that?”

“I wanted him to show you some respect. Or at least set it up so you could handle the envelope.”

“And now I got six months to pay him off. Very nice.”

Across the street, I could hear the sound of children’s laughter echoing through the housing project. But all I saw were clotheslines full of sheets and shabby shirts strung up between the little red buildings. It was kind of eerie, like hearing the ghost of a good time.

I thought of the dead-eyed look I’d seen Teddy give my father inside.

“Hey, Dad,” I said suddenly. “What happened to Mike?”

I don’t know why I thought to ask about my real father right then. The question just popped out of me. Maybe because I’d been thinking lately about how my life could’ve been different if he’d stayed alive.

Vin looked like I’d just dropped a safe on his head. “Why the fuck you asking about that now? We been over it a million times.”

And the answer I got from him was always the same. “I don’t know.” “He must’ve made a mistake.” “It’s better not to think about it.” But I wondered. Especially after seeing that look on Teddy tonight. I wondered if somebody gave my real father a look like that before he disappeared.

“Why you gotta bring that up again?” asked Vin. “Ain’t I been a good father to you?”

“Yeah, of course, but that’s not the point...”

“Haven’t I always provided for you? Given you everything you ever wanted?”

I could see he was hurt that I’d even thought to question that. He had been a good father, in spite of his obvious shortcomings. Vin wasn’t cut out to be a family man. He was put on this earth to scam and squeeze to muscle and murder. If he’d run a car dealership, he would’ve had me working out on the lot. But the mob was the only world he knew, and borrowing money from Teddy was the only way he could think of to help. So I cut him a lot of slack. Maybe too much, as it turned out.

Above the jagged rooflines across the street, I could see light green laser beams shooting out of one of the casinos on the Boardwalk and crisscrossing the sky like marionette strings.

“I don’t know what happened to Mike,” he sighed. “It could be he had a problem with the old man in Philly. Maybe one day you’ll find out and tell me. He was my best friend in the world besides Teddy.”

For the first time, it occurred to me that he might be lying to protect someone.

“Listen,” he said, putting an arm around my shoulder. “I’m sorry if you were upset about what happened in there. Teddy and me, we’ve been getting all stressed lately.”

“Yeah, well, you shouldn’t have told him that I was the one who whacked Larry.”

“I know, I know.” He ran the comb through his wild hair again, but it had no effect. “I’m just trying to get you the button, that’s all.”

“But I don’t want that,” I said vehemently. “I want you to go back in there and straighten it out. Tell him what really happened.”

“Yeah, yeah.” But I could see he was thinking about something else. His hair was still standing up higher than usual.

“I’m serious,” I said. “Don’t help me with the button anymore. I’ll help myself.”

“One day you’ll appreciate what I done for you,” he told me wistfully.

“Yeah, right.” I gave him a hug just to let him know everything was okay between us. “So next year on my birthday, don’t get me anything, all right? The kind of presents you give, I’ll end up doing eight-to-twenty-five in a state prison.”