Frank starts at the beginning.
10
His first hit was on a guy who was already dead.
That was the weird thing about it. Well, the whole thing was weird, Frank thinks now, looking at the rain coming down outside.
The whole thing with Momo’s wife.
Marie Anselmo was a hot little number.
That’s what we would have called her back in 1963, Frank thinks. Nowadays the kids have shortened it to just “hottie,” but the idea is the same.
Marie Anselmo was hot and she was little. Petite, but with a nice rack tightly packed in that blouse, and a pair of shapely legs that led Frank’s nineteen-year-old eyes up to an ass that would give him an instant woody. Not thatthat was so tough, Frank remembers. When you were nineteen, anything would get you hard.
“I used to get a chubby riding to school in the morning,” he once told Donna, “just bouncing in the car. For two years, I had an affair with a ’57 Buick.”
Yeah, but Marie Anselmo was no Buick. She was pure Thunderbird, with that body, and those dark eyes, and the bee-stung lips. And that voice, that smoky come-do-me voice that would drive Frank up the wall, even if she was just telling him where to turn.
Which was mostly all Marie ever said to Frank, whose job it was in those days to drive her around in Momo’s car, Momo being too busy collecting the money he had out on the street or running his gambling wire to take his wife grocery shopping, or to the hairdresser’s or the dentist’s or wherever.
Marie did not like to stay home.
“I’m not one of your standard guinea wives,” she said to Frank one day after he’d been chauffeuring her for a couple of months, “who’s going to stay home, crank out babies, and make the pasta. I like to get out.”
Frank didn’t answer.
For one thing, he had a hard-on that could cut stone, so most of the blood in his body wasn’t concentrated in the part responsible for speech. And two, he wanted tokeep the blood in his body, which could be an issue if he started to discuss anything of a personal nature with a made man’s wife.
That was not something that was done, even in the more than casual mob culture of San Diego, where there was barely a mob at all.
Instead, he said, “Are we going to Ralph’s, Mrs. A.?”
He knew they were, although Marie wasn’t dressed like most women dress when they are going to the supermarket. That day, Marie had on a tight dress with the top three buttons undone, and black stockings, and a string of pearls around her neck that drew your eye right to her cleavage. Like her cleavage couldn’t have done that all on its own, Frank thought as he sneaked a glance and wondered if she was wearing a black bra under that dress. When he pulled into a parking spot in Ralph’s lot and stopped the car, her skirt rode up as she got out and he got a peek at those white thighs against the black hose.
She pulled her skirt down and smiled at him.
“Watch for me,” she ordered.
It’s going to be a long struggle with Patty tonight in the Ocean Beach parking lot, that’s for sure, he thought. He’d been dating Patty almost a year by then, and the most he could get was a little tit on the outside of her blouse if he pretended it was an accidental brush. Patty had a set on her, too, but her bra was built like a fort, and as for goingdown stairs, forget about it, it wasn’t going to happen.
Patty was a good Italian girl, a good Catholic, so she’d steam up the windows French kissing with him because they’d been going steady a year, but that was it, even though she said she’d like to give him the hand job he’d been begging for.
“I got blue balls,” he told her. “They hurt.”
“When we’re engaged,” she told him, “I’ll jerk you off.”
But it’s going to be a long night tonight, Frank thought as he watched Mrs. A.’s ass switch across the parking lot. How a guy as ugly as Momo Anselmo had nailedthat was a question for the ages.
Momo was this skinny, kind of hunched-over guy with a face like a hound. So Marie sure as hell hadn’t fallen for his looks. And it couldn’t have been the money-Momo did well, but he didn’t dogreat. He had a nice little house and all, and the required wise-guy Cadillac, and enough cash to flash around, but Momo wasn’t no Johnny Roselli or even Jimmy Forliano. Momo was a big deal in San Diego, but everyone knew that San Diego was really run from L.A., and Momo had to kick up heavy to Jack Drina, even though the word was that the L.A. boss was dying of cancer.
But Frank liked Momo a lot, which is why he felt a little bad lusting after the man’s wife. Momo was giving him his shot, letting him break in, even if it was as an errand boy, but that’s how most guys broke in. So Frank didn’t mind going out for the coffee and doughnuts, or the cigarettes, or washing Momo’s Caddy, or even driving his wife to the supermarket. At least he didn’t have to go in with her and push the cart around-even an apprentice wise guy wasn’t expected to do that-so he got to hang out and wait in the car and listen to the radio. Even though Momo bitched that it ran down the battery, Momo didn’t have to know about it.
Which beat the hell out of busting his ass working on the tuna boats, which was what he would have been doing if Momo hadn’t given him a shot. That was what Frank’s old man did, and whathis old man had done, and whathis old man had done. The Italians had come to San Diego and taken over the tuna-fishing business from the Chinese, and that was what most of them still did, and what Frank had done from the time he was big enough to shovel bait.
Out there on a tuna boat before the sun came up, cold and wet, ass-deep in a smelly bait pit, or, worse, cleaning out the scuppers. When he got bigger, he’d graduated to working the net, and then when his old man figured he could wield a knife without cutting his own hand off, he’d gotten to clean the fish, and when he complained about how disgusting and filthy it was, the old man had told him that was why he should finish high school.
So Frank did. He got his diploma, but then what was he supposed to do? His choices seemed to be the Marines or the tuna fleet. He didn’t want to stay on the tuna boats or get his head shaved at boot camp. What he really wanted to do was hang out on the beach, surf, drive up and down the PCH, try to lose his cherry, and surf some more.
And why the hell not. That was what you did when you were a young guy in San Diego in those days. You surfed with your buddies, you cruised the strip, and you chased girls.
Just one of the guys trying to find a way to keep up the sweet life.
Which wasn’t the tuna boat or the Marines.
It was Momo.
The old man didn’t like it.
Of course he didn’t. The old man was old-school. You get a job, you work hard, you get married, and you support your family, end of story. And even though there weren’t a lot of wise guys in San Diego, the old man didn’t especially like the ones who were there, Momo included.
“They give us a bad name,” he said.
And that was about all he’d say, because whatcould he say? Frank knew full well why the old man got a fair price from the fish buyers, how his catch got unloaded while it was still fresh, and why the truckers took it straight to the markets. If it weren’t for the Momos of the world, then the good, honest, hardworking civilians of the business community would have screwed the Italian fishermen like a two-dollar whore in a Tijuana donkey show. You ask what happened to the longshoremen in this town when they tried to get a decent wage and organize a union and they didn’t have the wise guys backing them up. The cops beat them and shot them until blood ran down Twelfth Street like a river to the sea, that’s what. And that didn’t happen to the Italians, and it wasn’t because they worked so hard (which they did) to support their families.
So when Frank started to spend less time on the boat, and didn’t go into the Marines, but signed on with Momo instead, the old man griped a little bit but mostly kept his mouth shut. Frank was making money, he was paying room and board, and the old man didn’t really want to know the details.