Read an Excerpt
So she says to me, ‘Young man, you got maniacs hanging around your
store,’ and I tell her, ‘You’re right, lady, you’re a hundred percent
right. I got maniacs outside my store, I got them inside my store, I got
maniacs on the roof,’ I tell her.”
Desi flicked a length of ash into the ashtray we were sharing. The
end of his cigar was slick with saliva. He shifted it to the side of his
mouth and continued. “What am I gonna do, argue with her? Kill her? I
mean, please, some of these people should maybe look in their own
backyards before they come around here making comments. There’s an
old Italian saying, ‘Don’t spit up in the air, because it’s liable to come
back down and hit you in the face.’ ”
“I have no idea what that means,” I said.
“It means what it means, man,” Mitch called from the other end of
the counter. “Everybody’s everything. Can you dig it?” He had a six-
pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon under the arm with the rainbow tattoo and
was taking a Camel non-filter from a freshly opened pack he’d just purchased.
He tapped his cane twice against the counter and then winked
at me before hobbling out the door. Mitch lived at the opposite end of
Comanche Street, in one of the rooms at The Starlight Hotel that looked
out over the ocean and smelled of mildew and seaweed. This was the
third six-pack of the day he’d bought at Eddy’s; he had to make separate
trips because he could only carry one at a time. It was close to the end
of the month, when his disability check ran out, which was why he was
buying six-packs instead of sitting on the corner barstool by the jukebox
in the hotel lounge.
Desi shook his head, mopping up a puddle of liquid on the counter.
“Yeah, yeah, just ask Peg Leg Pete over there,” he muttered as the door
closed behind Mitch.
“Don’t call him that, man,” I said. “I thought you liked him. I thought
you were friends.” I felt a vague panic that this might not be so.
“Hey, hey, did I say I didn’t like the guy? I love the guy,” Desi said,
wringing out the rag, running it under the faucet behind the counter.
“But he’s not the only one sacrificed for his country. A lost leg is not an
excuse for a lost life. And besides, he only lost half a leg.”
“Desi, Jesus—”
“Don’t ‘Jesus’ me, what are we, in church? And what are you, his
mother? Half a leg, no leg, whatever, he don’t need you to defend him.
He can take care of himself.” He shook his head. “You kids, you think
you know everything.”
“I don’t think I know everything,” I said wearily. Most of the time, I
didn’t think I knew anything.
“Yeah, well, you,” Desi said, moving down the counter to the cash
register to ring up Mr. Meaney’s Daily News. “You’re different from the
other kids around here. You want my advice? Get out of Dodge. Now.
Pronto.” My stomach winced. I was glad no one else was around to
hear him; Mr. Meaney didn’t count. I’d been hanging around Comanche
Street for three years and there were still times when it felt like I
was watching a movie starring everyone I knew in the world, except
me. The feeling would come up on me even when I was surrounded by
a million people: in school, on the beach, sitting at the counter in
Eddy’s.
Desi owned Eddy’s, the candy store on the corner of Comanche Street
and Lighthouse Avenue in the Trunk end of Elephant Beach. The original
Eddy had long since retired and moved to Florida, but Desi wouldn’t
change the name. “Believe me, it’s not worth the trouble,” he said. “Guy
was here, what, twenty-five years? I pay for the sign, I change the lettering
on the window, and then what? People are still gonna call it Eddy’s.”
He was right. They did.
Sometimes in February, I’d be sitting in Earth Science class or World
History, and outside the windows, frozen snow would be bordering the
sidewalk and the sky would be gunmetal gray and I’d start thinking
about having a chocolate egg cream at Eddy’s, and suddenly summer
didn’t feel so far away. If I thought hard enough, I could taste the edge of
the chocolate syrup at the back of my throat and it would make me
homesick for sitting at the counter, drinking an egg cream and smoking
a cigarette underneath the creaky ceiling fan that never did much except
push the stillborn air back and forth, while everyone was hanging out
by the magazine racks if the cops were patrolling Comanche Street, or
sitting on the garbage cans on the side of the store where, when it was
hot enough, you could smell the pavement melting. Sometimes Desi’s
wife, Angie, would open the side door and start sweeping people away,
saying, “Look at youse, loafing, what would your mother say, she saw
you sitting on a trash can in the middle of the day?” And Billy Mackey
or someone would say, “She’d say, ‘Where do you think you are,
Eddy’s?’” Then everyone would laugh and Angie would chase whoever
said it with the broom, sometimes down to the end of the block, right
up to the edge of the ocean.
Eddy’s was open only in summer, from Memorial Day to Labor Day,
sometimes until the end of September if the weather stayed warm. Desi
and Angie and their kids, Gina and Vinny, moved down from Queens to
Elephant Beach and lived in the rooms over the store, where they had a
faint view of the ocean. On Sundays, when Vinny or Angie worked the
counter, Desi would walk down to Comanche Street beach and put up a
red, white and green umbrella (“the Italian flag”) and stretch out on a
lounge chair, wearing huge black sunglasses, a white cotton sun hat,
polka-dot bathing trunks that looked like underwear, and white tennis
shoes because once he’d cut his toe on a broken shell and needed
stitches. He’d lie out on that lounge chair like a king, smoking a cigar,
turning up his portable radio every time a Sinatra song came on. If any
of us tried talking to him, even to say hello, he’d say, “Beat it. Today I’m
incognito.”
“I’ll tell you what the trouble is with you kids,” Desi said now, walking
back to where I was sitting. He took my empty glass and started
mixing me another egg cream. He squirted seltzer and chocolate sauce
into the glass and stirred it to a frenzy. He slid it back across the counter
and I tasted it and it was perfect.
“The trouble with all a youse is you don’t know how to shut up. I
mean, who am I, Helen Keller? I can’t see or hear what goes on the other
side of the counter? It’s sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll all day long and
mostly sex, and now it’s not just the guys talking.” His voice dropped a
shocked octave lower. “It’s the girls. The girls. ‘So-and-so got so-and-so
pregnant,’ ‘So-and-so had an abortion,’ I mean, please, what do I need to
hear this for? Look at that little girl, what’s her name, the one got knocked
up didn’t even finish high school, waddling in here like a pregnant duck.
Nothing’s sacred, nothing. And then you wonder why.” Desi shook his
head. “Believe me, there was just as much sex around when your mother
and I were young. Thing is, we weren’t talking about it. We were doing it.”
We both looked up as the door banged open and then just as quickly
banged shut. Desi shrugged.
“False alarm,” he said.
He opened the ice-cream freezer and the cold heat from the freezer
melted into the air. He began scooping ice cream into a glass sundae
dish, vanilla, coffee, mint chocolate chip, and then covered the ice
cream with a layer of chocolate sauce, then a layer of marshmallow topping,
and finally a few healthy squirts of Reddi-wip.
He picked up a spoon and casually began digging in. Angie hated that Desi could eat
like that and never gain an ounce. She said that all she had to do was
look at food and she gained ten pounds. Desi said she did a lot more than
look, but only when Angie wasn’t around.
I glanced up at the Coca-Cola clock behind the counter, wondering
where everyone was. I’d left the A&P, where I worked, at three o’clock and
figured I’d hang out at Comanche Street until it was time to go home for
dinner. It was one of those dirty, overcast days in early summer and no
one was at any of the usual places. They were probably at somebody’s
house, in Billy’s basement, or maybe at Nanny’s. I thought about calling
but the taste of the egg cream, the whoosh of the overhead fan, Desi’s
familiar gluttony were all reassuring. Part of me was afraid I might be
missing something, but I was always afraid of missing something. We all
were. That’s why we raced through family dinners, snuck out of bedroom
windows, took dogs out for walks that lasted three hours, said we had
school projects and had to hang out at the library until it closed at nine
o’clock at night.
The way I felt now, though, unless Luke was involved, there wasn’t
that much for me to miss. Part of me was hoping he’d come into Eddy’s
to buy cigarettes or the latest surfing magazine. Something. I’d only seen
him once since he got back from Vietnam last Sunday, right here in Eddy’s.
I hadn’t been prepared, though; I hadn’t washed my hair or gotten
my tan yet, and I hid in one of the phone booths in back until he left.
Since the summer before tenth grade, I’d been watching Luke McCallister,
from street corners, car windows, in movie theaters, where some girl
would have her arm draped around his back and I’d watch that arm instead
of the movie, wanting to cut it off. I’d comfort myself that she was
hanging all over him, that if he’d really been into her, it would have been
the other way around. Luke was three years older, his world wider than
Comanche Street and the lounge at The Starlight Hotel, all the places we
hung out. But I was eighteen now, almost finished with school and ready
for real life. It was summer, and anything was possible.
“Mystery,” Desi said, and I jumped a little, thinking he could read
my mind. That’s exactly what I was thinking about Luke, that he was
more of a mystery now than before he’d left for the jungle two years ago.
I looked at Desi, who was scraping the last little bits of marshmallow
sauce from the sundae dish. He pointed the stem of his spoon toward me.
“You gotta have mystery, otherwise you got nothing.”
I slurped the remains of my egg cream through the straw, making it
last. Then I lit a cigarette. “I still have no idea what you’re talking
about,” I said. “Speaking of mysteries.”
Desi sighed. He carried the sundae dish over to the sink and rinsed
it, then set it in the drain on the side. He came over to where I was sitting
and put his palms flat down on the counter and stared at me, hard.
“Here’s what I’m talking about,” he said. “A girl comes in here, she’s got
on a nice blouse, maybe see-through, maybe she’s not wearing a bra, I
don’t know. I look, I’m excited, I start imagining possibilities. But a girl
comes in here topless, her jugs bouncing all over the counter? That’s it
for me. I’m immediately turned off. Why? Because now I got nothing.
There’s nothing left to my imagination. There’s no mystery, you see what
I’m saying here?”
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, right. Like some girl would come in here
topless and sit down at the counter and you’d have no interest.” But I
could see that Desi wasn’t listening. He was just standing there, leaning
against the counter with this dreamy little smile on his face.
“What?” I asked finally.
“Nothing,” he said after a moment. “I was just—”
He picked up his cigar from the ashtray and relit the stub. “There was this girl, see. Back
in Howard Beach. Before I started going with Angie. She used to wear
this sky-blue sweater when she came around the corner.” He took a long
pull from the cigar. “Little teeny-tiny pearl buttons, all the way up to her
neck.” Embers spilled from the cigar stub and showered the counter.
“All those buttons,” Desi said, gazing through the smoke, as if he
was watching someone walking toward him. He put the cigar back in the
ashtray and sighed again. He picked up the rag and began wiping the
dead embers off the counter.
“Ah, you kids,” he said. “You think you invented it. All of it! Everything.
You think you invented life.”
