I'm afraid the comparisons diverge into wild speculation after that. He's got much better taste in music, a more voracious appetite for literature and better vocabulary for defending his stance on any particular film you'd care to challenge him on than I ever will. He's also big in France as of this week (check out the cover for the French edition of Gravesend). Hey, Boyle, kiss my ass, how 'bout.
When I started the CriMemoir series the following is a fine example of the sort of wistful little essay I dreamed of getting. Read this, then go pick up Gravesend (if any of you haven't yet) or Death Don't Have No Mercy and you'll find the romantic imagination of the kid in the essay has grown into the full tragic beauty of the author's work today.
CriMemoir by William Boyle
I
grew up on the border of Bensonhurst and Gravesend in the apartment where Gaspipe
Casso used to live. He cooked his eggs and boiled his coffee on my stove.
Whatever else he did there, it was right before he ate a meal or right after.
Maybe during. I always pictured him munching biscotti dunked in espresso with
one hand and crunching some sad sack's neck with the other. The sad sack, in my
mind, he'd wronged Gaspipe. He'd skimmed money. He'd slept with the wrong
broad. Gaspipe probably gnawed calimari and plotted hits at the oak table we
inherited from him. Polished guns. Maybe he even chopped people up in the
bathtub. As a kid, those are the things you think.
My
second shooting was a drive-by in front of Mamma Mia across from my house. I
used to watch out my bedroom window every night before I went to bed. It was
better than TV. The corner boys always got rowdy, and the guy from Jimmy's Deli
would slam the riot gates down and curse in Chinese. The streetlights made
everything swampy. That night, a young guido in baggy pants and gold chains
came out of Mamma Mia with a hero and got behind the wheel of his Buick.
Another Buick rolled up next to him and a red-haired kid leaned out the window
and fired into the guido's car and then drove off. The guido slumped over the
wheel and the horn blared. It's a sound that should follow every murder. Mario,
the owner of Mama Mia, came running out in his sauce-stained whites. That place
was my grandfather's hangout. I never liked the food. Nobody knew I saw that
shooting and the shooting didn't even happen inside Mamma Mia but from then on
I always heard that horn when I folded one of Mario's greasy slices or ate his
baked ziti out of a tin tray.
A
couple of summers ago when I was home a guy got knifed coming out of a taco
shop on Eighty-Sixth Street. We heard the sirens, saw the yellow tape, read
that the killer lost his dentures at the scene, and laughed about it. Next day
we walked up and saw where they'd hosed down the sidewalk. You could still make
out how the blood had browned the curb under a parking meter. I'd never eaten
there. Now I don't think I can. I'd worry about getting stabbed on the way out.
All
the Italian restaurants I went to as a kid were the ones you see in the movies.
Big, well-dressed guys who hugged. The smell of gravy and garlic in the air.
Wine like water. Everyone was lovely, especially the connected guys. They
pinched my cheeks. I always wondered what went on when the regular people like
me and my family weren't there eating. Was that like the movies? Guys getting
their heads smashed in vises in the back? Their fingers run through meat
grinders? Probably. You could smell the blood in those joints. You could feel
the beautiful ghosts of savagery.
Crime beat stories occupied me. Michael DeBatt shot behind
Tali’s on Eighteenth Avenue on Sammy the Bull’s orders. Hits at Joe &
Mary’s and Gravano’s Bus Stop club. I clipped them from the newspapers and
taped them into a marble notebook.
Once I saw Stevie Ceretti thwack Gene Villani in the face
with an aluminum bat in Shady Park, not far from Spumoni Gardens. I can still
hear the sound of the bat against his head across the distance of years, and it
still makes me feel like I was a part of something big.
I live in the south now. I like how everything feels new,
even learning about the past, but I miss being a kid in Brooklyn: the blood and
concrete and pizza and how it was all wrapped up in wanting to be something
that I could never be.
1 comment:
Nice.
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