Onion Street

CHAPTER TWENTY

As I came off the Gowanus Expressway onto the Belt Parkway, I was less than ten minutes from home. I was unaware I was much closer to eternity. One second I was listening to the radio, driving in the middle lane, doing a rock-steady fifty, and the next second horns blared, tires screeched, and I was bouncing up onto the shoulder of the Belt. When I snapped out of it, the car was a few hundred yards west of the Verazzano Bridge. I was slumped to the side, my head against the window, my hand on the wheel only because that’s where it had been when I drifted into sleep. I managed to pull fully onto the shoulder while shaking the sleep out of my head. Pretty ironic, I thought, to have avoided some lunatic trying to run me off the road in the Poconos only to fall asleep at the wheel and almost get killed within pissing distance of my house. The irony didn’t keep me awake.

The next thing I was aware of was an insistent rapping of metal against glass. I held my eyes wide open, shook my head, and nearly had a heart attack when I saw a man standing just on the other side of the driver’s side door. He was staring in at me, tapping his wedding band against the glass. Then I noticed that he was wearing a squashed-down hat with a badge on its crown above the visor. Great, I thought, just what I needed to complete my night, getting arrested and having Aaron’s car impounded. When the cop saw that I was alert, he stopped banging at the window and made a circular motion with his index finger. I got the idea and rolled down the window.

“You drunk, kid? Stoned?” he asked, shining a flashlight past my chin and checking out the interior of the car.

“Just tired,” I said. “On my way back from the Poconos.”

He was skeptical. “The Poconos, huh? Don’t see no skis on your car, buddy.”

“Brooklyn Jews don’t ski.”

He laughed at that. “Funny, kid, but that’s not an answer.”

“I was visiting the parents of a dead friend, a girl I went to college with.”

“How far you live from here?”

“Coney Island.”

“Okay. Get outta here and sleep it off in bed, not on the side of the Belt Parkway.”

“Thanks, officer.”

Two encounters with highway patrol cops in two days on the Belt Parkway. What were the odds of that? Okay, so the first time I wasn’t driving and it was ten miles away in the other direction, but still, what were the odds? At least this cop had given me a break, hadn’t slammed me against the car, hadn’t frisked or cuffed me. Was that because I didn’t have long hair like Bobby’s, or because this cop had a sense of humor? It was one of those questions that would never get answered, like “Did Oswald act alone?” When I pulled back onto the parkway, something was bugging me, but I was still too cotton-headed to make sense of it.

I looked at the dashboard clock and figured I’d been asleep on the shoulder for about a half hour when the cop rapped on the window. Was I still tired? Sure, but now I was hungry too. I’d probably been hungry the whole time, but I’d been so close to unconsciousness I’d just failed to notice. So instead of heading straight home, I went to DeFelice’s Pizza under the el. The Gelato Grotto in Gravesend was the most celebrated pizzeria in the area. I loved their gelato, but hated their pizza. I’d take slices, regular or Sicilian, from DeFelice’s Pizza any day of the week over the Grotto’s. DeFelice’s regular crust was as thin as a cracker with a perfect char on the bottom, and they used fresh mozzarella, not that gummy crap they used at the Grotto that came in blocks and had the texture of pencil erasers. And DeFelice’s sauce was sweet, not bitter like the Grotto’s. My mouth was watering even before I got off the Belt at Ocean Parkway.

At that time of night there were spots out front of the pizzeria. I guess if I’d been less hungry or less tired, I would have noticed Tony Pepperoni’s ’56 Lincoln Mark II stationed out front. He loved that maroon beast almost as much as he loved to eat, which was really saying something. Sometimes he’d pay kids to stand out on the street and guard the car to make sure nobody got too close to his pride and joy. None of us kids ever had the nerve to point out to Tony P that the subway trains passing overhead shot out hot metal sparks and all sorts of shit that rained down on the cars parked below.

“One regular slice, one Sicilian, and a small Coke,” I said to Geno at the counter, his face and hands white with flour.

“I got fresh pies comin’ out in a few minoots. Go ’ave a seat. I call you when they ready.”

I was alone in the tiny dining room, but knew I wouldn’t be for long. It wasn’t that I was a mind reader or anything. It was that the place was a tiny hole in the wall and the dining room was so cozy that the bathroom was situated just behind a thin wall at the back of the place. When the restaurant wasn’t crowded, which was almost never, and no subways were passing overhead — again, almost never — a diner had a pretty good idea of what was going on in the bathroom. So it was that night. The toilet flushed and the sink ran for a few seconds. The gentleman inside whistled “Volare” loudly enough to be heard over the hand dryer. The door creaked open, and into the dining room stepped Tony Pepperoni.

The funny thing is that when he saw me, he looked surprised or maybe confused, like he expected to see anybody else there but me. Maybe it was just that he didn’t expect anyone to be there at that time of night. It didn’t matter, because whatever I saw in his expression was gone as quickly as it came. Tony may have had a complexion like the lunar surface, but he had a perfect neon smile. He flashed it as he walked up close to me. I thought back to Lids’s crazy ramblings about Tony P, and realized it was the first time I’d thought about Lids all day. Tony P didn’t give me a chance to worry about Lids or to wonder if Bobby had had success tracking him down.

“Moe Prager, as I fuckin’ live and breathe,” he said, pinching then patting my cheek. “What a surprise. Hey, what’s that behind your ear?” And with lightning speed, he reached behind my left ear and produced a quarter. “Jeez, will ya look at that, a quarter. Do you crap gold bricks?”

He laughed at his joke then proceeded to manipulate the coin, flipping it over and under all of his fingers with great aplomb. He’d been doing this stupid trick, telling that same stupid joke for as long as I could remember. He held the quarter out to me, but I wasn’t supposed to take it. The magic part of the show was over. This part was kabuki. There were prescribed roles to play and lines to say.

“You want it, Moe?” he asked.

“Yeah, sure,” I answered as expected.

But as I stretched out to snatch it, Tony jiggled his hand and the coin vanished. It was all going according to script until Geno cried out, “You slices, they ready!”

Tony P’s face turned even redder than normal, the veins popping out of his neck, his eyes going all crazy. “Shut the fuck up, Geno. Shut your fuckin’ mouth!”

“Sorry, Tony, ’scusa me.”

“What the fuck did I just say to you? Shut the fuck up!”

This time there was no apology. Tony waited a beat or two, jiggled his hand, and the quarter reappeared.

“You want it, Moe?”

“Yeah, sure,” I repeated as I reached for the coin.

Tony jiggled his hand again. The coin disappeared and then Tony got to say the line he’d been building up to, “Maybe next time, kid. Maybe next time.”

When Bobby and I were little, there was another line we used to say, but at this stage not even Tony expected us to say, “Gee, how did you do that? Can you teach me how?”

Geno brought my slices and Coke over, averting his eyes from Tony P’s glare. “On the house,” he said.

Tony nodded in approval, then jerked his head at Geno to disappear. Tony sat his three-hundred-plus pounds across from me.

“Been a long time, Moe. How’s school?”

I didn’t answer right away because not only did I have a mouthful of doughy Sicilian pizza, but because I hadn’t given serious thought to school since the day Mindy had been hospitalized. I never imagined a question from a guy like Tony Pepperoni would stump or shake me. The truth is that school felt irrelevant to me. That wasn’t what scared me, though. What scared me was the sense that I might never stop feeling that way. For a Jew raised to honor education above all else, you have no idea just how frightening it was to be without that sense of purpose. It was like getting your backbone ripped out and having nothing to put in its place.

I finally said, “Okay, I guess.”

“What kinda fuckin’ answer is that? Don’t be a mook, kid. You’re one of the smart kids around here. Don’t be pissin’ on that.”

“I know.”

“Bobby was in the other day and told me about your girlfriend. She doin’ okay?”

“Better.”

“Good, that’s a good thing.” Tony P looked at his gaudy diamond and gold watch. “You know, Moe, it’s pretty late. Where you been that you’re comin’ in so late?”

“Long story, Tony.”

“I got time.” Tony P wasn’t the type of guy who would take no for an answer.

“I was up visiting in the Poconos.”

“That’s nice,” he said with little enthusiasm. “That’s the whole story?”

“On the way home it was snowing like crazy and some asshole tried running me off a road up there.”

“No shit? Up there? That don’t figure. Why, you cut him off or something? You flip him the bird?”

“Nah. Maybe it was my New York license plate pissing a yahoo off or because I’m young. I don’t know. Who knows why people do the things they do?”

Now he was curious. “So what happened?”

“I got lucky. I was coming up to the crest of a hill and a semi was coming up in the other direction just as the guy who was chasing me tried to overtake me. I didn’t see what happened, but I heard the crash. It didn’t sound as bad as it could have been, I guess. It wasn’t head on. There was — ”

The phone rang and that got Tony’s attention. I took the opportunity to take another bite.

Geno called out, “It’s somebody callin’ for you, Tony. He says is important.”

“Excuse me, kid. I gotta take this. I hope your girl gets better real soon.” He took a step away, then turned back. “And hey, Moe, you think maybe you should stick to your schoolwork? It’s a lot safer than real life, no?”

Outside, a D train ka-chunged ka-chunged along the el tracks, its brakes squealing as it stopped. I gobbled the rest of my pizza, washing it down with the Coke. When I walked to the front of the pizzeria, Tony Pepperoni was gone and Geno looked relieved. I nodded goodnight. As I drove the few blocks back home, I remembered there had been something bothering me about what had happened with the highway patrol cop, but I was even further away from it now than I was before.