G&T
“Why? Tell me why," Nicky’s mother asked him and spun
her head to catch a waiter’s eye. Acknowledged, she pointed to her empty gin and tonic glass, then swiveled to lock back onto Nicky’s eyes, a look between quizzical and accusing.
“Really, Nicky, I’m serious. Tell me why? You have options. Try to get into the National Guard for one. We’ll figure a way for you to stay out of it. The Marines? Vietnam? Why?”
. . .
In a flash of red fingernails, their mother pulled the bread‐basket over and unwrapped the pink napkin covering Jackie’s famous garlic bread.
“Canada. Italy even,” she said, tearing a piece of bread from the loaf. “Remember my second cousin, Gina? She married a man from Palermo. She’s always writing that you should come over for a long visit so you can see where you originally came from.”
Dress Whites
Bobby heard the muffler before he saw Nicky, wearing the Dress Whites of a brand-new Marine Corps Second Lieutenant, ease his red Oldsmobile convertible into the curb between the two chestnut trees that were foul-ball markers when they’d played stickball against the steps.
Tara, tiny in a pale blue summer sweater over a pink blouse, sat thigh-close to Nicky. The Olds’s white top was carefully snapped into place behind the rear seats. The late-afternoon sun popped the edge of a taillight ruby red.
Nicky revved the engine, teasing out one more growl. He got out and stood in the street next to the driver’s door in the shade of the trees. He tugged down his white tunic and carefully reset his billowed white cap, tilting its glossy black brimlow on his forehead. He walked around the car to the passenger’s side, looked up at Bobby standing at the top of the steps, and grinned. He opened the car door for Tara. She swiveled from the seat, legs "firmly together beneath her short, white, pleated skirt, and stepped onto the curb.
Holding hands, they walked up the path—Nicky, shoulders erect, narrow waist, solid pecs, an officer’s gold bar on each shoulder, the Corps globe and anchor emblems and brass belt buckle sparkling just so.
Ways of the World
"Cousin Eduardo just showed up. All of a sudden he was just there, 117th Street off First Avenue—El Barrio to its people, Spanish Harlem to Anglos, who wouldn’t go north of 96th Street without Uzis.
He reappeared after a year in Vietnam. A year of only a handful of letters home, some enclosed with Polaroids of him in Saigon with bar girls draped over him in his favorite spot off Tu Do Street, Saigon’s G.I. playground.
Cousin Eduardo usually had a cigarette dangling from his mouth, a bottle of beer raised in toast, and devil-red-eyes from the flash. His mother had one of the pictures enlarged—not the one with one of the girl’s breasts hanging out.
. . .
Cousin Eduardo sat on the sidewalk, his back against a wall beneath a maroon awning—B-B, for Benito’s Bodega, stenciled in white, old-English script on the front flap. His Marine Corps garrison cap lay flat on the gum-studded sidewalk next to him. A Baby Ruth wrapper skittered past his feet. He was clean-shaven except for shadows of newly conceived civilian sideburns. Dribbled beer had wet his tan Marine blouse. Next to him a paper bag was crimped over a can of Ballantine Ale. A Timex watch peeked out from a cuff.
What’s My Name?
CALVIN JOGS in place in front of the Desert Song motel on the edge of downtown Las Vegas, the pink neon “S” and “O” on the marquee flickering faintly behind him. A black gym bag is strapped across his back. He’s wearing black shorts and a gray sleeveless T-shirt, showing thick, ropey triceps and cut biceps. He’s waiting for a break in traffic before sprinting across the Strip and heading to Johnny Tocco’s, 1.2 miles deeper into Old Vegas funk.
. . .
Traffic slows after a billboard truck passes, advertising “Girls, Girls, Girls” with photos of grinning, glossy-lipped, big- breasted women in bikinis and lingerie and the phone number that’ll order up one or more to a hotel room.
Calvin darts across the road just ahead of a stretch white limo. He reaches the other side of the street as two sets of heads, shoulders, and arms pop out of the roof hatch like whack-a-moles, waving bottles of Bud and whooping him.
Three weeks earlier Calvin had been jogging his route when two cops in a patrol car, flashing lights and shrieking sirens, jumped the curb and cut him off.
“Where you running to, boy? Who’s chasing you?”
There’d been a spate of snatch-and-run thefts of tourists’ necklaces and shopping bags downtown on scuzzy Fremont Street, and Calvin was carrying a bag and running while Black.
Gone the Sun
“Rinky Dink.”
That’s what Bobby said his big brother, Nicky, would have called the tiny playground that Staten Island pols finally got around to dedicating to Nicky all those years after he was killed in Vietnam.
“I’m telling you, Danny,” Bobby said, taking a hit from his second whiskey sour on the rocks at Ray Ray’s. “Guarantee that’s what Nicky would say. Absolutely low-rent. One seesaw, one hoop, a tiny jungle gym, a bench, and a water fountain that’ll break in two months. Not even a sprinkler for little kids to run through in the summer? Nicky loved little kids. I can hear him: ‘Yo! Take my name the fuck offa it!’
“They wait all these years to do it and they do that?” said Bobby, shaking his head. “They preach about respect for Nicky and his guys who never came back? I mean, fuck ’em where they breathe.” He funneled peanuts into his mouth.
“Way it always goes, Bobby,” Danny said, pulling a Daily News over from in front of the empty stool next to him. “They show sad when everyone’s looking but then it’s ‘Whew! I kept my kid outta it all.’"
A Good Shoot
Cousin Eduardo, wearing gray shorts and a Boonie hat with a peace sign on one side and skull-and-crossbones on the other, looked over the second-floor railing at the tiny swimming pool in back of the Desert Song motel on the edge of downtown Las Vegas.
He saw something bobbing in the scummy water. A couple of hours earlier, he’d gone down to save a mouse about to drown. That one turned out to be a waterlogged cigar stub. He turned and went into his room, pulled on a Grateful Dead T-shirt, ran fingers through thick black hair down to his neck, and slid into black flip-flops. Jenny would have insisted—actually foot-stomping demanded with tears in her eight-year old eyes—that they save whatever it was in the pool.
He smiled thinking of Jenny calling herself Florence Nightingale, whom she’d learned about from a television show, when she organized her first rescue mission to save ants and other crawly things going too close to the edge of the town pool where they might drown.
“But, sweetie,” he’d said, “sometimes that’s part of life. Ants might drown, and we can’t save everyone—everything. It’s just the way it is. The way life is.”
“No! No! That’s not right, Eddie,” she’d said, stomping her foot. “We have to do something. We have to try to save them. They deserve to live as much as we do.”
So they built barriers from discarded sunscreen tubes, cigarette butts, bottle caps, and the like to divert them from the pool. Jenny would squeal with delight when an ant, spider, or any creature veered from the pool’s precipice and headed— with her cheering them on—to the overflowing trash can next to the fence.
If they found a dead ant, or any other insect "floating in the pool, they’d have a proper funeral, complete with eulogies like ones she’d seen on TV. She collected her mother’s empty lip-gloss pots for coffins she’d bury beneath the playground’s cottonwood tree. She’d stand over their graves and speak about families left behind and how the deceased were loved by so many other ants and spiders and everyone for their kindness. Then Cousin Eduardo, Jenny, and her mother, Algie, would go for ice cream as part of the wake. So it was perfectly natural, even respectful, Jenny would say, to have a double scoop of fudge ripple to celebrate a life.