Onion Street

CHAPTER SEVEN

While I was walking back onto campus, Lids’s words went round and round in my head. Not the esoteric stuff that had sent him spinning off into his own universe there at the end. No, I was used to that. Even before he went over the edge, even before the drugs, Larry had been out there on an astral plane somewhere. It was the part where he claimed to know people who would do violence on my behalf that surprised me. I guess I shouldn’t have been. I mean, Lids was a pusher, and I couldn’t help but see him as poor, pathetic Larry. So he sold a little pot, so what? But really, I had no idea what he sold, or how much he sold, or to whom. Of course he knew some “people” — everybody in Brooklyn knew someone connected to the mob.

The guy I knew, who Larry and everybody from Coney Island and Brighton Beach knew, was named Tony Pistone. They called him Tony Pizza because he was a fat slob who could demolish two whole pies at a sitting, and because he and his crew hung out at DeFelice’s Pizzeria, under the el on Brighton Beach Avenue. Behind his back, though, everyone in the neighborhood called him Tony Pepperoni because he had a red, acne-fucked complexion like a pepperoni pizza. I guess he was okay as far as it went. He was what my dad called a real character. My dad never defined what that meant exactly, but when you looked at Tony you understood. Tony P did magic tricks. You know the kind of thing: pulling quarters out from behind your ear, ripping up five-dollar bills and somehow making them whole again. He was always flirting with the young girls, doing his tricks for them, and joking with us guys when we came into DeFelice’s. He’d throw me a dollar sometimes to go get him the racing form or the afternoon paper. The only reason anyone took Tony P seriously was his muscle, a guy they called Jimmy Ding Dong. Jimmy was a stone-cold bastard and we avoided him at all cost. None of us would even look at him if we could help it.

The only business I ever did with Tony P was buying fireworks from him. That didn’t make me special. Everybody bought their fireworks from him, even the cops. Of all the kids in the neighborhood, Bobby was closest to Tony Pizza. Two summers ago when I was making quarter tips from the old ladies as a bag boy at the Big Apple supermarket on the corner of Brighton Beach Avenue and Ocean Parkway, Bobby was running errands for Tony. What kind of errands, Bobby wouldn’t say. He told me once that he had sworn the Mafia blood oath to Tony never to share. I knew he was full of shit, but some of the other guys believed him. Idiots. Still, Bobby never was very forthcoming about his summer as a mob errand boy. What I did know about that summer was that Bobby earned enough to buy that sweet Olds 88 he drove, and that I earned enough to ride the Cyclone every now and then and to buy a Nathan’s hot dog. Like I said, Bobby had a nose for money.

He also had a nose for me, apparently, because when I was just walking past the library and coming down the steps to the snow-covered quadrangle, he grabbed me by the shoulders. I shrank in pain.

“Sorry, I forgot about your shoulder. But Jesus, Moe, I been looking everywhere for you,” he said, worry in his voice. And for the second time in the last few days, his smile was nowhere to be seen. “Did you hear about — ”

“Mindy? Yeah, I heard. I was at the hospital already.”

“Why didn’t you call me?”

“I wasn’t thinking straight. Aaron left me a note: ‘Your girlfriend’s in Kings Highway Hospital. It’s serious.’ I mean, my first thought wasn’t that I should call you.”

“Sorry, man. What happened to her? I’m not clear on that.”

I repeated for him what I had just minutes before repeated for Lids.

“Mugged. Shit.” There was a glint in Bobby’s eyes — a mixture of puzzlement and mischief. “A light-skinned black guy, you said?”

“Yeah, a young guy, and he had pink blotches on his hands and face. That’s what the cops told Mindy’s dad. He says the prick beat her up pretty good. She was bruised up all over. Why do you ask?”

He ignored the question. “What was she even doing over there? She lives in the other direction.”

Seemed to be a popular question, and I didn’t have a better answer for him than I’d had for Lids.

“Don’t know, but that’s where they found her.”

“You doing anything right now?” he asked.

“I was gonna go to class, but I can’t think or keep a thought in my head. I don’t think I ever cared less about school in my life. I mean, shit, what the hell does any of this crap mean now?”

“Relax, Moe. She’ll be okay. She has to be. Since you’re not going to class, come with me. I’ve got to make an airport run.”

Airport runs were Bobby’s latest and craziest money-making scheme. He would pick you up at your door, drive you to the airport, and carry your bags into the terminal for free. The thing was, if you took him up on the offer, you had to take out flight insurance and name Bobby as the sole beneficiary. If there were two of you, both of you had to take out policies, if there were three … I’m not kidding here. Sick as it was, he had about two people a week take him up on the offer. Word of mouth really was the best way to advertise. He’d been doing it for about six months and so far, thank god, he hadn’t cashed in.

“Matter of time,” he used to say when I’d bust his chops about it. “Matter of time.”

“You have a better chance of getting killed in a car crash on the way home from the airport, you sick bastard. What do you do, listen to the radio all day to hear if the plane goes down?”

“Sometimes,” he’d answer with a poker face. “You don’t understand business very well, do you, Moe? It’s a risk vs. reward kinda thing: small risk to me, long odds, big payoff. Besides, you don’t need to worry about me, buddy. I got more than this one oar in the water.”

He was right. I didn’t know much about business, and didn’t want to. I don’t know whether I was just born this way or if it was that my dad hadn’t set a very good example. He wasn’t skilled at making money or at business in general. His only talent was for bad investments and failure. As it was, money never much mattered to me. I wasn’t stupid. I knew money would be nice to have, but other things just mattered more to me. Love, family, girls, sex, books, sports — they were always more important to me than money. Maybe my outlook would have been different if I’d had any money to begin with. Maybe if I could have experienced what having money was like and then losing it, then I might have invested more of my being into getting more of it or getting it back. I’d tried, I’d really tried to will myself ambitious, to be more like Bobby and Aaron. I’d tried to trick myself into putting money at the top of my pyramid. No luck. And Bobby needn’t have bothered to comfort me that he’d be all right even if the airport runs never paid off. Bobby Friedman was golden, bulletproof. Somehow you just knew he would always land on his feet.

As crazy and twisted as his airport runs were, I was glad for the distraction, glad to be invited along, glad to have someone making small talk. For the moment, I conveniently ignored Mindy’s dire warning about keeping away from Bobby. My frustration over what had happened to her, my need to do something about it, and my impotence in the face of that need were eating me up. My guts were on fire. We picked up Mrs. Cohen — Stevie Cohen’s grandma; he was one of our Burgundy House brothers — at her apartment building on Ralph Avenue, settled her comfortably in the big back seat of Bobby’s Olds, and headed off to the Eastern Airlines terminal at Kennedy Airport.