Island of Divine Music (9 page)

Hey, Lu, Ciso called.

What the hell do you want? Lu paced around the next tee.

Lu, this boy’s a natural. He’s like that goddamn guy in Reno. What the hell’s his name?

Ciso, don’t talk to me right now. While Lu paced, Joe grinned and elbowed Ciso. The boys grinned as well, but Lu’s sons knew better than to laugh aloud. Joe crooned like Sinatra and teed his ball. One of those bells that now and then rings, Joe sang. Just one of those things.

We gotta take this boy to Reno, Ciso said. Joe, Joe, Joe. He’s a natural. He’s like that goddamned guy at Harrah’s.

You can’t take a kid to the casino, Joe said. It’s against the law. He smacked the ball beautifully, a straight, lofty drive that disappeared a moment in the blade glitter of the eucalyptus beyond the green and then reappeared on the fairway, and as Angie watched it and heard the clapping and hoots of approval he saw himself under the flickering marquee lights of Reno. His lips, an inch from the head of a nine iron, mouthed the words:
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I love you, you’re beautiful. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

T
wo weeks later Angie climbed from the temperate bay and the steamy valley over the granite spine of California, then dropped to the Nevada desert. His ears and sinuses popped and shrank until it seemed the geography of his face might change as much as the
terrain out the window. He listened to the guys talk about gambling strategies, Lu and Bobby Rich, the highway patrolman, in the front seat of Ciso’s Cadillac, with Ciso adding his two bits from the back with Angie. He watched the desert surround them like a wilderness of certain death. He rubbed his sweaty palms together.

It was Ciso’s cockamamy idea to let his nephew join their routine junket. The guys drove up here twice a month on a Friday morning and came back sometime Saturday or Sunday. They always took Ciso’s car and never let Ciso drive it. Their wives gave them a set amount to lose or win, and every few months the ladies came, too, and insisted on motel rooms. Rich, the cop, always lost everything, got drunk, and begged money off Ciso, who always gave him some. Lu would come out ahead about one time in five, just enough to make him agonize over every card or number. Ciso would watch the shows, flirt and talk, and occasionally play and win or lose. He’d get corralled by real estate schemers, religious fanatics, and transparent con men with dead eyes. He’d run into mobsters whose fathers knew him from the old neighborhood in San Francisco. He’d laugh and nod to everybody.

Ciso’s plan was to let Angie hang out in the restaurant with him and, after a while, sneak into the gaming area at his side. They’d spent a half hour drinking coffee and Cokes before Angie watched the ugliest man he’d ever seen shamble up and shake hands with his uncle. This swarthy monster, a man with huge lumps on his face and pointed yellow teeth, talked about horses with Ciso, then motioned for him and Angie to follow him to the slots.

Ciso gave his nephew a stack of nickels to drop into a slot machine
while he talked with the behemoth, a guy Uncle Lu later referred to as Jimmy the Finger. Angie won a dollar on a nickel. The machine flashed and jangled as the coins spilled into its receptacle. The two men laughed and slapped his back.

It was a few years after Sputnik, which had happened the same week Angie’s grandfather had dropped dead in San Francisco. He always connected the two events in his mind, the old womanizing Italian patriarch keeling over on the beach and this tiny Russian spirit beeping in the heavens, circling dangerously about the earth. It was the year before Nikita Khrushchev got the notion to slip some missiles under Jack Kennedy’s nose. It was a night that changed Angie’s life.

It had something to do with the wrinkly necks and the old-goat tobacco and Brylcreem smells of his uncles while they stood in that crowd of people waiting for the floor show. After his long day of travel and gambling nickels and walking down the streets of the desert town to snoop in pawnshops and field questions from winos and con men, he imagined he would look and smell like his uncles someday, that he would shuffle into the darkness with other souls, all of them waiting for something which they couldn’t understand and were anxious to see. The gates to the show were guarded by Jimmy the Finger and two other monsters, and the people who descended stepped uncertainly like frightened children, their drinks held aloft like lanterns and their small miseries plain on their faces. Angie felt almost invisible among these people in the middle of their lives, people feeling their way down a dark path; he felt unformed
while they were shaped and sculpted grotesquely by the beliefs and fears of a lifetime, wrinkled by worries and greed and cheating, swollen by depression and gluttony and lust. When the monster with yellow fangs touched his shoulder and parted the aisle to lead their foursome to a front-row table, the stage lights glowed before him like embers. Angie breathed deeply.

Rich stifled sobs and wiped his florid face. Angie’s uncles patted the patrolman’s shoulders and offered cheerful words, but the old cop said he was a worthless piece of shit who drank and gambled and didn’t deserve his lovely wife. He needed to tell all of them that he had been a good man once, a decorated soldier and steady husband and father, before he’d become a worthless piece of shit. Chorus girls and a singer in sailor blues did a couple of numbers, the women’s legs and breasts swinging hypnotically before Angie’s face as the old cop snuffled. Then the main act walked on stage.

A man known as a lovable cherub with a speech disorder in movies and TV became a foul-mouthed, crotch-snatching, mean-spirited wise guy on stage. Rich’s blubbery face blended with the embarrassed, laughing ones around him, and Angie sat, stunned. It was beautiful and horrible to watch the performer and his audience. The man spoke of hemorrhoids, and the people squirmed in their seats. He spoke of cruelty and infidelity, of alcoholics and immigrants with thick accents, while people keeled over. A spotlight swept the casino and came to rest on Angie. You, the comedian said. Come up here.

He froze until Ciso and Lu nudged and practically lifted him on
stage. Then he stood on some ledge above the contorted faces in brilliant light, afraid to move. When the mike swung under his face, Angie asked, What do you want?

What do I want? People laughed, and the comedian waited. Angie’s knees shook, his heart pounded in his throat. What do I want? Well, I don’t want any shit from you, kid! What’s your name?

Why?

Why?
The casino shook with laughter. This goddamned kid don’t trust me! Hey, I’ll tell you what I want: Why weren’t you laughing at my shtick?

I thought I was. I’m sorry.

HEY! DON’T PITY ME, KID!
Angie could see the beads of sweat shake off the comedian’s face, the slick makeup. You ain’t perfect yourself! I noticed you got a few zits on your face, Kid!

Angie waited for the noise to die down. He caught his breath. Actually, sir, I got a whole mountain range of zits.

Mountain range? Like the Sierra Nevada? You got ski resorts, too?

I don’t think so, sir. I mean, don’t you need snow?

The comedian waited for the laughing to stop and eyed Angie with the same aggression he’d seen in the eyes of Jimmy the Finger when he’d tossed a drunk out the door. Then he put his arm on the boy’s shoulder and looked around. It was a hammy, conspiratorial gesture. When I was your age, he said, they told me that the only way to get rid of my zits was to go get schtooked.

Angie waited a long time. His heart was pounding so hard he thought he would keel over, but a voice was coming to him. The
voice he found was an adolescent version of the man’s beside him: And where does a guy get schtooked, if you don’t mind my asking?

Again the comedian had to wait. Something between a smile and a grimace crossed his features. I’ll tell you what
not
to do, kid. Don’t go into a drugstore, like I did, and ask, Can I get schtooked here?

Angie could hear moans and barks of laughter. The comedian’s thick hand was still on his shoulder, damp and warm as a facecloth. Angie cleared his throat. You mean the pharmacist wouldn’t let you get schtooked?

NOT EVEN FOR SIX BITS, KID! NOT EVEN BACK THERE NEXT TO THE GERITOL AND THE PREPARATION H!

Jeez. Angie shook his head. He could see Uncle Lu’s teeth gleaming red with the lights and Rich’s contorted face leaning against Ciso’s shoulder. Well, since you ain’t got zits no more, you musta got schtooked somewheres.

Kid. The comedian shook his head, patted Angie’s shoulder, and looked around the theater. Kid, I got schtooked so many places and in so many ways, if I told you half of them they’d kick me outta this place. They’d toss me in the middle of Lake Tahoe.

Wow. Angie stood with his mouth open a moment, gazing into the spotlights, while the crowd roared and convulsed. A woman with sciatica bent double and had to be carried out at the end of the show. An obese Realtor choked on a wad of Bazooka Bubble Gum. Must be one of them product advertisement restrictions or something.

You might could say that, kid.

I never even seen one ad for getting schtooked, though.

The comedian started to speak, but an amazing thing happened: his mouth widened into a laugh! People were crying, blowing their noses, falling and writhing on the floor while the comedian laughed and Angie stared in wonder at the lights. Years from then he would remember the lights and the man’s hand on his shoulder, damp and warm through his acrylic dress shirt. When his brother would return from Vietnam crazy and addicted to heroin, when his father would take him to see Bobby Rich’s yellowish body in the casket; when his older sister would disappear with the criminal she fell in love with, he’d return to that evening onstage beside the comedian.

Kid, you’d be surprised.
Ahem!
The man was having trouble speaking, his hand was twitching, and all Angie had to do was stand there with his look of innocence, with his all-American gaze of ignorance and awe. Kid. If I’m not mistaken, there’s some ladies,
ahem!
There’s some ladies right in this casino who advertise for getting schtooked, but don’t quote me on this.

Certain advertising restrictions must apply, Angie said.

Exactly. And let me give you some . . . The man’s voice trailed off, and his eyes squeezed shut. His entire pudgy body shook in the stiff tuxedo. People were coughing, choking, dropping out of their seats. An incontinent army colonel fell to one knee and wet his trousers before he could reach the boys’ room. A Catholic priest seated beside his mistress had a heart fibrillation and thought he might die. Kid, the man started to say.

He would return to that evening. Whenever he’d read about
people gassed or shot and dropped into the trenches they’d just dug, whenever he’d walk past the dying drunks and junkies on city sidewalks, he’d remember that night above the crowd. He’d remember the man beside him, the grotesque faces, the agonized bodies beneath them, and a small voice. It said,
Not you, kid. Not you.

Paulie

A
keenness left Paulie Verbicaro that summer. The oak leaves lost their teethed edges, and a ball slapped the catcher’s mitt before he saw it. He drifted into the watery light of distant blue gum trees and the sudden nebula bursts of passing windshields, not knowing, for some weeks, why the world had changed, why he had fallen from grace.

Put simply, his eyes were getting weak. But the loss had been gradual, and he only sensed that he was losing his game for some bizarre reason—timing, coordination, God’s idea of justice, who knows? It was Uncle Ludovico who first noticed it was vision, while they were heading to give an estimate for a driveway. Hey, you drove right past it, he said. I told you 2525, on the mailbox.

It was on the mailbox?

Yes. You blind?

No.

Lu had played third with the best, before Paulie was born, in old Seals Stadium on 16th and Bryant. In fact, he and Paulie’s father, Joe, had shared the sandlots and fields of San Francisco with future
stars, playing on Boys’ Club teams sponsored by olive oil and produce companies. They’d chased line drives hit by the Italian pantheon which Paulie’s father and all the older men spoke of in hushed tones. Frank Crosetti, who moved like a cat to snatch the ball an inch above the ground. Tony Lazzeri with his big bat and shrewd smile. The shrimp Billy Martin of the Oakland Oaks, who played like a Tasmanian devil in his private fury. On fields more gold with dandelions than green they’d played pepper with any of the DiMaggio brothers who could escape their father’s fishing boat long enough to get on a diamond, Mike, Tom, Vince, Dominick, a family of prodigious hitters, three making it to the majors. In the same old wooden ballpark, under the Hamm’s smokestack and against Potrero Hill, where Paulie and his father had seen the Giants play their first two seasons, Uncle Lu had swung a bat for the Missions and popped a Texas leaguer to the greatest of them all, Joe DiMaggio.

Can you read the numbers on that house?

What numbers?

Christ, no wonder you’re hitting like that Who’s Who Alou kid on the Giants. You need specs, like your old man.

A week into the school year he got them, big black frames like Buddy Holly’s, but he left them in his glove box and only put them on to drive or to watch TV. His season was over, and he wondered if he could recover his game come spring with new eyes. Now and then he tripped on a step walking from the TV to the fridge. His feet seemed three yards from his head.

His French teacher, Mrs. Rinaldi, noticed the problem one day when she was at the board. She asked him to stay after class for a
few minutes. You’re off on a bad road, she said. Right now your grades are in the dustbin.

The dustbin?

And my husband says you want to play for some hotsy-totsy university.

I hope.

Which mightn’t consider you if you fail this class. She sat sideways in a student desk, facing him. Her long, crossed leg swung, and Paulie could see a bit of her thigh and the lace of her slip. Can you see?