The Clancys of Queens (18 page)

“I need therapy?” I reply. “
I
need therapy?? There is an oompah band outside, Dad!”

He didn't laugh. And we spent the next six hours drinking Scotch and rehashing every argument, disagreement, and previously unexamined minuscule moment of contention we'd had in my nineteen years of life. From the time Tommy O'Reilly knocked me blind to when I stuck pencil erasers into my ears and he took me to the doctor thinking I was going deaf, from the time he told me not to play in the grass in my Easter dress, so I climbed the tree instead, from how he used to hide all my presents at the O'Reillys', since we didn't have any closets in the boat shed, and when I woke up on Christmas morning, there would be 360 degrees of toys all around me on our pullout sofa bed, to the countless, mind-numbing hours he spent watching me try on sneakers, from my notorious asphalt head dive, all the way to how furious he was at me for getting into so much trouble in high school and for drifting away from him.

Then, if for only a few seconds, he went from blaming me to blaming himself. “I shouldn't have bought you those G.I. Joes when you were a kid! Or the Hot Wheels.”

And then he got quiet and said to himself as much as to me, “What did I know about bringing up a girl? I just did what I could,” and, a second time, even softer, “I just did what I could.”

And then he hugged me—for as long as a pick-up-the-guns/three
S
's/red-light-running/mustache-and-aviator-glasses kind of guy does. And I hugged him back—for as long as a G.I. Joe–collecting/high-tops-wearing/head-down-on-asphalt-diving/Tom Waits–listening kind of lesbian does. And with that, we broke for dinner, across the street at Heidelberg's Schnitzelhaus.

We made small talk. It was still a bit tense, but Heidelberg's Schnitzelhaus is a hard place to stay angry (in addition to the lederhosen-clad waiters and the oompah band soundtrack, the place was strung from end to end with garlands of triangular German flags uniquely interspersed with hanging plastic Bavarian pretzels). Dad confessed that he had asked his new coworkers where to spend the weekend with his visiting teenage daughter. Of course, he'd neglected to mention the nature of the visit and was as shocked as I was when we had arrived in Helen.

Then, somewhere in between the sauerbraten and the strudel, my dad surrendered. He looked up, raised his glass, and said, “Ah, screw it. At least now we have two things in common—whiskey and women!”

You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.

—
M
AE
W
EST

Grandma told me she was going to croak every month for two years before she actually did—I'd come to cut her toenails, and within minutes she'd scream, “I'm gonna croak, you know! Probably soon. So you'd better get ready!” Then we'd crack up.

She died on February 9, 2000, three months before my twentieth birthday. I was home alone at my apartment in Stuy Town, and Mom was home in Queens. She got the news first, of course, but she was such a wreck, both with her own grief and at the thought of having to tell me, that my cousin Danny ended up being the first to call that day, presuming I already knew.

“Yo, T, you okay?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Oh, shit…”

“What!?”

“I thought you—”

“What?!!”

“Shit!”

“Don't—”

“I'm coming over. Shit, just wait—”

“No. No! Oh, no…oh, please. Oh—”

And then my knees gave out. And the phone went flying. And I cried longer and harder than I have ever cried before or since.

The last words I spoke to my grandmother were “I love you.” The last words she spoke to me, in reply, were, “Come closer. Closer,
che cazzo!
I have to tell you something, a secret. In an eyeglass case, in my purse, in the back of the closet, not here, at Lucille's, is a hundred-dollar bill I hid. Take it!” Then I kissed her cheek and walked out of the nursing home, and a week later she was gone.

Her funeral Mass was held back in Brooklyn, at Our Lady of Peace, the same church where she had had her baptism, First Communion, Confirmation, and wedding. And she was buried at Green-Wood Cemetery, alongside her parents, brothers, my grandfather, and my Great-aunt Grapefruits, her beloved sister Mary.

I took two weeks off from school, and when I returned, I was a disaster, but I muscled through the end of that semester and decided to take the following one off, but not before changing my major back to Literature and signing up for a paid internship that summer at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey.

It wasn't until a month after her death that I remembered what she had told me on that last visit. She had been pretty sick, and her memory had been all screwy for months, but I went to my aunt's house to look anyway. And in that purse, way back in the closest, in an otherwise empty eyeglass case, was that fucking hundred-dollar bill—best laugh I had had for a long time.

Birdie and I road-tripped to New Orleans at the end of that summer after my internship. We made a stop in Virginia, where Great-uncle Jelly had since moved, to a condo crammed with birdcages, vases, and what looked like half the furniture from his old antiques shop in upstate New York. He brought out some old pictures and showed us one of a teenage Grandma, in a bikini, draped over the hood of a Model-T Ford. Then he told us a story of how, just before she got married, Grandma talked about singing in nightclubs, like her hero Mae West, and he wondered if she regretted never giving it a whirl. It was the first I'd ever heard of it.

On the drive from Virginia to Georgia to visit Dad, Birdie convinced me to try another writing class.

I balked for my first semester in junior year, but by the second I worked up the guts to sign up for Playwriting 101. The first scene I wrote was a word-for-word account of one of my last conversations with Grandma:

Anyhow, now you know.

It's a beautiful spring day, blue skies, sunshine, ten o'clock in the morning, and I am in a bar—the kind of bar that, well, opens at ten o'clock in the morning. All right, so it's not the Ritz, but it's mine. It's my family's bar in the West Village, the one owned by Uncle Sal, where my mother worked when she was younger, and now that I'm twenty-one, I work here, too. I am a bartender and a senior in college.

On this particular morning, there are only two people in the bar: myself and a regular named Joe Bird. Now, Joe was from South Boston (
Good Will Hunting
–type South Boston, Mark Wahlberg South Boston). He always wears jeans and a flannel shirt and work boots, and I've known him for years, but I don't know what he does for a living. I've kind of presumed he's in construction, but he never offers, and I never ask. He comes in and drinks Budweiser, nothing but Budweiser, and never short of a case, with or without the help of his younger brother, Danny (worse drunk, better teeth). But on this day Danny isn't here; today it's just Joe and me.

The bar has its ups and downs; on the upside, business is really good, because we have a lot of regulars. And on the downside,
business is really good, because we have a lot of regulars.
In fact, we have so many that, just like back at Gregory's, we give them nicknames to set them apart: We've got Big Joe, because he's big, and Black Joe, because he's black, and One-Arm Joe, because he actually only has one arm. Then there are a few guys who got their nicknames based on the kind of work they did: Jimmy Ice Cream sold ice cream, and Vinnie the Fish sold fish. And, we have so many guys named Eddie that one of them is called Goiter Eddie. The giant goiter under his chin isn't his only accessory; he also has an oxygen tank that he drags into the bar behind him, day after day—I'm not sure who decided we should call him Goiter Eddie over Oxygen Tank Eddie.

Now, obviously, there was a lot more to these guys than their jobs or their goiters, but because they didn't go around spouting their life stories, even though people didn't know the first thing about them, they judged. And when I say “people,” I mean me.

At this point, I'm still kind of this little shit—I got the college walk, the college talk, and I'm not yet past overusing the word
polemic
. And here I am, sitting across from Joe, and he's reading the
Post,
I'm reading the
Times
(schmuck), and he looks up from his paper and says, “You see this, kid? Looks like they really are going to ban smoking in bars.” And I say, “I guess that's what you call cultural hegemony.” And he says, “I guess that's what you call—WHAT THE HELL are you talking about??”

Come noon, Joe's still drinking Buds, and I've ordered myself some Chinese food for lunch. The delivery guy hands me the bill, and right away I see that I've been overcharged, and so I say as much, pretty nicely. But he doesn't understand—he's not a native English speaker, and, between how fast I talk and my accent, in some ways, neither am I—but I've been charged for two orders of dumplings instead of one, so I try to pay what I actually owe, and he gets pissed and points to the amount on the bill, and I try to open the bag to see if there's actually two orders in there to show him, and he grabs the bag away and gives me the
pay-up
hand, and I get pissed, and words aren't working, and now we're just yelling, and the bag is going back and forth, and before you know it, we're playing tug-of-war with a carton of pork fried rice…and that's when Joe stands up.

Joe being Joe, when he slides in between us, I figure he's just gonna coldcock this dude, and without thinking, I shut my eyes. But what I hear next shoots them right back open—Joe Bird is speaking slowly and calmly…and completely in Chinese.

This guy, who just an hour ago was drinking a bottle of Bud and eating a bag of Fritos for breakfast, this guy, whom I have known for years and years, his only notable change being a little more or a little less pee on his pants, THIS GUY is rattling on and on in fluent Chinese! What's more, it seems that he and the delivery guy are patching things up; they're patting each other on the back, and they're doing that “Everything's cool, bro” IN CHINESE, and then the guy trots on out, and Joe sits back at the bar and takes a sip of his beer as if nothing ever happened.

I'm now in a state of shock. All I can do is stare at him. I can't speak. But finally, thankfully, Joe does. He says, just as nonchalantly as if he were asking for another Bud, “I sell pigeons.”

My mouth says nothing; my eyebrows say,
What the fuck???

He goes on. “A couple of years back I expanded the business to Hong Kong, and you know, my brother, he doesn't speak Cantonese, and it
really
holds him back!”

Nope. I still got nothing.

“Listen, I know it's weird, but my father started the business years ago, and it was all just an accident.”

That does it. “Joe!” I say. “How the hell do you accidentally sell a pigeon?!”

And with that, we both shut our newspapers and slide them to the side, knowing there's nothing in there that's gonna be better than this.

“So maybe forty, fifty years ago my father was driving through Boston in a pickup loaded with cages of his racing pigeons. He stops at a light in Chinatown, and a woman approaches and asks him the price. He's caught off guard. He explains that he trains his pigeons himself, and no one has ever asked to buy one before, but she cuts him off and explains that she doesn't want to race them, she wants to
eat
them.”

(And, hey, to all of you who just made that face: people eat pigeon all over the world! Even here in New York City, at white-tablecloth joints, they call it “squab” and charge you thirty dollars.)

Joe continues. “So my dad goes home that night, and he really thinks about it, and a little lightbulb goes off—street pigeons!”

“Street pigeons?”

“Yup, street pigeons. They are talentless, but they are edible! And, more important, they're free—no overhead, tons of supply, BINGO! The family business was born! All I did was take it to the next level. Started exporting, you know—”

I interrupt. “Take it to the next level? Joe, man, you're a mogul! It's like, like, what McDonald's did for the hamburger, you've done for the street pigeon!”

Now, of course, all of this is completely illegal, which is why Joe and his brother had kept it a secret. And so, what's the point? The point is that I was an idiot, and for two reasons. One, up until this very moment I had thought that Bird was his real last name. And, two, here I was working in
my
family business but thinking I was ambitious, acting as if I was better than all these “bar people” I had grown up with just because I was in college, only to find out that these “bar people” had actually taught themselves Cantonese to be secret, international, criminal pigeon dealers! How's that for ambition?

Afterward, since his secret was out of the bag, I got to know Joe a bit better. He invited me to his apartment one day, and it was incredible—there were a half dozen jade Buddhas and tons of beautiful, antique, bamboo furniture. And one night, when I ran into him on the street, he showed me how to catch a street pigeon. You have to do this one fluid motion in a split second: you walk up to a pigeon, maybe a foot away or so, and you stomp, they fly, you clap—
bam!
Pigeon. Sounds easy…but it ain't.

It's been over ten years since I last ran into Joe Bird. There's as much of a chance that he's OD'ed as there is that he's now heading a department for Google.

It has also been over a decade since that night in Bridgehampton when I first caught wind of Mark's business's fatal collapse. The cause of which really just boiled down to two things: hard luck and the fact that anyone born to booze and grease simply isn't given a safety net and rarely learns to build one.

Mark's resulting depression never fully let up, and it would one day claim the life of his relationship with my mother. Afterward, due in large part to Mom's strong encouragement, me and other Riccobonos kept in touch with our beloved
Mastagotz.
We stayed in contact until his death, when he was in his eighties, just a few weeks after I started writing this book—for which he gave his proud blessing.

As for me, though it was certainly Mark and our moon and stars talks that first stretched the horizons of my thinking, it took Joe Bird, and the lessons of time, to forever alter the way I look at people, including myself.

A year after I learned Joe's story, I was bartending again, at 10:00 a.m., and again there was only one guy in the bar; a different regular, sitting on the last stool by the window. Outside the window there's a guy walking to work. He's got a briefcase, and he's wearing a suit, and he's staring in as he passes. My regular is staring right back. I'm looking at them looking at each other…and for the first time I realize that they're both thinking the exact same thing:
poor guy.