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Chapter One
Phil
Yeah, this door looked spank as shit.
I sat back, my ass on the floor of my best back home buddy Bobby Delongo’s body shop, and admired the smoothness of the sanding I’d just done. Once I got the doors done, we’d be good to start taping and painting. When she was prettied up all cherry red—the gloss so deep it would be like gawking at yourself in a mirror—she’d be ready to roll. Mostly. Still needed tires and an inspection but those were inconsequentialities. Uncle Raymond had a friend who did inspections in exchange for hockey tickets or various sundry odd jobs one might be willing to perform. My cousin Mackie would order the tires for me at the employee discount he got working at Tire Emporium and Valve Stem Heaven over on Ash Avenue beside the kabob house.
It had taken me years of digging around in various junkyards all over the five boroughs of the Big Apple, not to mention the Finger Lakes region of New York, to gather all the required parts for my grandfather’s Olds Rocket 88, first produced back in 1949. Pops had always talked about fixing it up with me, but then he died at forty-two from a massive coronary and the car had sat in some field next to a pile of cow shit until I was cash ready enough to have it towed to my friend’s body shop three years ago. Now here she sat. Sexy as hell. Close to being done.
Ma was going to split her pantaloons when she saw this car. She talked all the time about being a young girl and riding around in her father’s Olds back in the day. Her dad, like mine, had died far too young. Men in our family tended to keel over while still in their prime. Not sure why. It’s a known fact that Italians live longer than most other people. It’s the food and wine. ?Course my father wasn’t 100 percent Italian exactly. He was half Italian and half Irish, which was just barely good enough for my mother’s parents to accept him into the family. Ma said that was why I had the twinkle of a leprechaun in my eyes. Might account for the red tint in my hair and whiskers too. Oh, and the gift of gab, but in all honesty, no lie, the Italian side of my family could talk nonstop too, so who knew why I was so communicatory? Genetics, I liked to say.
So maybe it was the Irish blood that clogged up his arteries? Probably not. Probably it was all the tar in those cigarettes he puffed that did him in so young. Sighing, I glanced at the signs all over the wall telling people not to smoke on the premises. It was kind of a thing with me, smoking, and sometimes I got vocal. Just sometimes. Rarely. Like hardly ever. Always.
I smiled at the car door, my head moving to the sound of Bon Jovi when suddenly, like a bolt from the sky, the garage fell silent.
My head spun like I was an owl to find Bobby standing by the old boombox, looking as guilty as a sheep farmer caught in the barn with his pants down.
“Yo, Bob-O, what the deuce, man?” I shouted and then ran my fingers over a rough patch that I’d missed. “Turn that back on. You know my brain works better when there’s classic music playing.”
“I thought classic music was Bach and that Beethoven guy,” he replied but didn’t turn the tunes back on.
“Nah, that’s spinet shit.”
“Oh, okay.” Bobby was an agreeable sort. “Your ma just called the front office,” Bobby said, hustling over to me, nearly tripping over the bumper for a Prius that was slated for his first job of the morning. That got my attention. I shot to my feet, slapping at the rusty dust coating my T-shirt and shorts, the fans in the huge bays sucking the dirt and debris into a filtration system of some sort. Shame it didn’t suck the dirt off me.
“She okay?” I asked, hearing the panic in my voice. Ma and I were close. It had been just me and her sharing a one-bedroom apartment, rent free, over my aunt Mona’s bakery for years and years. I worshipped my mother as any good Irish-Italian boy should.
“Oh yeah, she’s good. She said you left your phone on the kitchen table again so she couldn’t get ahold of you other than calling my sister in the office. Clarice didn’t mind.” Bobby motioned to his younger sister sitting in the cramped office, waving a phone with a short cord over her black curls. Bobby had those same curls and deep brown eyes. At one time me and Clarice dated, but it didn’t work out. She wanted to find someone who would get her out of Flushing. And that someone wasn’t me.
I was happy calling Queens my home in the off-season. Clarice didn’t want to live here or in Watkins Glen, she had aspirations. Like a career in film and a rich husband who played for the Lakers, not a goof who never went to college and had to claw his way into playing for a minor league hockey team. Whatever. People who were stuck-up rubbed my goolies raw. Not that Clarice was stuck-up all that much. Just a pinch. I knew some people who were way more nose in the air. People who sat on high like a pigeon deciding whose head to shit on that day. Snooty people got my goat. People like Henri “Look at my sexy French self” Gaudion back in Watkins Glen. I’d trade him in for a gum wrapper most days. Shaking off Mr. Gaudion and his fancy silk suits, I snapped back to the here and now.
“…your place back in Watkins Glen had a small leak accident.”
I gaped at Bobby. “Small leak accident?”
“Yeah, that’s what she said.” He rubbed a hand over his curls to stimulate his brain into action. His memory was atrocious. Which was why the bumper for the Prius was still in the box and not on the Prius. “Something about the bathtub in the apartment above yours falling through the floor and into your living room.”
“It did what?!”
I made the dash to the office in record time, skidding up to the old metal desk Clarice sat so brazenly at, her long lashes fluttering with impatience.
“You know this ain’t a free secretarial service I’m providing here, right?” She cracked her gum for emphasis. “Like, I love your mom and all, but next time make sure you have your phone with you. Pops would shit a brick. He would say ‘This ain’t your clubhouse. This is a business and you jabbering on my phone is costing me cash.’” She pretend spat into the corner of the office.
That made me chuckle. She did the best imitation of her father I had ever heard. Aldo DeLongo looked just like Nelson Fox from the Brooklyn Dodgers, always walking around with a wad of chewing tobacco in his face.
“Yeah, well, I pay for my time here by charming his daughter.”
“Get your face out of mine. You stopped being charming after you graduated sixth grade,” she parried, but the words had no real bite. “Just make sure you have your phone, you goof ass.”
“You do know that my ma is best friends with your ma, right? Also, and this ain’t no small point, your ma is my godmother and my ma is your godmother so I’m like your big brother in the loosest terms so you should respect my age and not give me grief about my phone.”
“You got the brains of a hood ornament,” she fired back, waving a bright pink ceramic fingernail at my nose before handing me the phone, and then left the office to go give Bobby orders. Poor guy. Not that he didn’t need someone to steer him through the day, but Clarice was a taskmaster. Even Aldo jumped when Clarice barked.
I had to smile just a little. “Hey, Ma, what’s going on with my place?” I asked as soon as I got the receiver to my ear.
“Philip Darragh Greco, why are you talking to your godsister like that?” Ma asked as I moved around the desk to sit. The rolling chair squeaked loudly as my ass hit it.
“Ma, there ain’t no such thing as a godsister, and she needs to be reminded that I’m older than her and quite the charmer.”
