The Mezzogiorno Social Club
THE MEZZOGIORNO SOCIAL CLUB
ESSENTIAL PROSE SERIES 137
THE MEZZOGIORNO SOCIAL CLUB
ERCOLE GAUDIOSO
TORONTO • BUFFALO • LANCASTER (U.K.) 2017
Copyright © 2017, Ercole Gaudioso and Guernica Editions Inc.
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law.
Michael Mirolla, editor
David Moratto, cover design and interior layout
Cover Photo: Ercole Gaudioso,
Rear of Manhattan Little Italy building
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First edition.
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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2017932210
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Gaudioso, Ercole, author
The mezzogiorno social club / Ercole Gaudioso.
(Essential prose ; 137)
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77183-165-9 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-77183-166-6 (EPUB).--ISBN 978-1-77183-167-3 (Kindle)
I. Title. II. Series: Essential prose series ; 137
PS3607.A964M49 2017813’.6C2017-900602-9C2017-900603-7
Dedicated to my brother, Ralphie. He left us too soon, but managed to sit by my side whispering in my ear through all the writes and rewrites
Contents
PART ONE
The Farmhouse
A Capella— 1955, August
The Tailor— 15 March, 1905
The Lovely Lucia
The Black Hand
Bulldog Joe
Benny Bats
Lina in the Monkey House
The Camorrista Visits Lucia
The Man in the Barrel
East Thirteenth
Philomena Matruzzo One
The Murder Stable
Heat Wave
Zella, Gaga, and the Digger
Crosses
So Many Rescues
Petrosino Does the Right Thing 105
The New Boss
Vito Red
Madison Square
Philomena Matruzzo Two
The Mezzogiorno Social Club
Philomena Matruzzo Three
In Case the Zuccon’ Gets Back
Petrosino Does the Right Thing Again
Lieutenant Petrosino
Retire or Go to Palermo
Palermo
After Joe
Reciprocation
Prohibitions
PART TWO
The Problem
Philomena Matruzzo Four
Nicky Coco
The Speak
Bobbi
Dominic Tonno Loves Bernadina LaScala
Nazis End the Problem of Sonny
Indictments
War, Swing, Doowop.
Pablo Picasso Does the Right Thing for Philomena
Charlie Fish Gets Whacked
Vinny Blond, Hit Man
Cogootz to the Rescue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
PART ONE
The Farmhouse
In the farmhouse at the edge of the neighborhood, an eighteenth-century oil on canvas hangs above a fireplace. The scene is of the house angled in a clearing squared by woods of chestnut and ash. A little girl at an upstairs window gazes out through a pane of glass that is flared by the sun, but her face sharply reveals anticipation.
A barn overlooks a partially harvested field, small flower gardens, and a quartet of black men and boys loading bushels of produce onto a two-horse truck.
Other paintings share walls with shelves of rough lumber. A dozen soft-covered journals lie stacked on a lower shelf, their curled pages filled with hand-written accounts of events that have happened and events that have yet to happen.
Lina the Gnome has lived in this house for perhaps two, maybe three, centuries. Time for her is vague, chronology meaningless. Some suppose she is the energy, the source and soul of what has become the neighborhood, but she is certain that she is merely a component of fate.
It is she, not a child, in that upstairs window.
1955, AUGUST
A Capella
Hot and humid, and rat bastard politicians. Not that Charlie Fish’s father and his crew had nothing to do with the projects. Six buildings, fourteen stories of brick and shadow that dim the streets where Golden Guineas protect what’s left of the neighborhood from Young Satans.
Baseball bats and gloves clutter the four steps of stoop in the schoolyard behind Christ the King Church and School. Three girls sit there, listening to voices a capella from seventeen-yearold tough guys with T-shirts, dungarees and cigarettes.
They are under the stoop in what they call the echo chamber, at a door to the school’s basement. They’re snapping their fingers, tapping their feet, and struggling through a song new to them.
Cogootz, top tenor with a sweet and soaring falsetto, knows all the harmonies, all the words. Annoyed, he says: “Fish, no. Into the bridge, we go up, you go down. Start it off again, man, let’s get it this time.”
Charlie Fish is the bass. He’s tall, tough and wacky. One of the girls on the stoop, the one with the ankle bracelet, is his.
Mike, quiet kid, not as slim as the others, wavy black hair, is second tenor.
Vinny Blond is short and he’s baritone and wears an emblem off a Ford V-8 where the buckle of his garrison belt used to be.
The four sing and grin because now they’re getting it, now close harmony bounces around the concrete walls of the echo chamber, out to the schoolyard, and into the streets, alleys and backyards of the neighborhood.
The girl with the ankle bracelet suddenly stands and leans over a rail at the top of the stoop. “Charlie,” she calls down. “Satans.”
Harmony stops, the girls head out, don’t look back.
At the schoolyard gate, four faces hard and dramatic. Diddybopper haircuts greased and glossy. Bargain store pants pegged tight at the ankles, narrow belts, and white t-shirts. One wears a shiny, red vest.
The Guineas scramble for the baseball bats. Charlie Fish, his bat shouldered like Alley Oop, his big voice: “What you want here? Get fucking lost.”
The Satan with the red vest twists, right hand to left hip, comes back with a zip gun. The crack of a bullet and the smell of gunpowder. No hits, a sloppy run. A Satan falls, gets up, falls again under the slams of DiMaggio wood.
A woman screams.
Red Vest beats it around a corner, into a building, and the Guineas stampede him to the roof. He makes it to the edge, turns, spreads his arms in surrender, and wails the sound of fear.
Charlie Fish shuffles, swings at a high and outside, and a noise from the Satan’s throat scratches the hot and humid. He tumbles into a blur that tries to fly, but bounces off a fire escape and lands like a rag on a neat line of ash cans.
A victory run, then a strut. Like the generations of neighborhood sentries before them, they had performed nobly. Now to the candy store, egg creams and pretzels. And shut up. Don’t say nothing abou
t nothing.
But Vinny Blond says something. He’s excited and he’s smoking, dragging deep. “You guys know what this is?”
“Yeah, yeah, we know,” Charlie Fish says. “Schoolyard murder. When you gonna stop with that crap?”
“It ain’t crap, man,” Vinny says. “Lina ain’t crap.”
“So the neighborhood disappears now because a fucking monkey flies off a roof? It ain’t the projects no more?”
“Yeah, well, we’ll see.”
“Fullashit. Lina too.”
“Better stop with that shit, Fish,” Cogootz says.
“Nobody’s fullashit,” Vinny Blond says. “Lina’s here since before the neighborhood. You seen the picture, her and the dogs.”
“Everybody seen it. So what?”
“So she’s around too long to be an ordinary midget, and she can’t be fullashit.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Tell her to look in those bullshit books she got, find out what number’s coming out tomorrow.”
“That ain’t important.”
“Vinny Blond, you’re a dickhead,” Charlie Fish says, looking to Cogootz, to Mike. “A real jerk-off, this guy. Money ain’t important.”
“Maybe he’s right,” Cogootz says.
“You too?”
“If it ain’t right this time, there could be another guy gets whacked, different guy, you know? In the schoolyard, I mean.”
“Just keep singing, Cogootz, and the neighborhood got nothing to worry about.”
“Holy shit, Fish. My father says the same thing.”
“Yeah, see?”
15 MARCH, 1905
The Tailor
The neighborhood woke before dawn. Milk cans clanged, a rooster crowed, a dog barked. Shadows glided on tenement shades, while the stained-glass windows of Christ the King Church sent muted hues into the churchyard. Beyond the yard’s brick wall, a cop clip-clopped his horse past dark storefronts.
The horse turned at the corner and stopped across from the church, where the man from Bari stood at his shanty stacking newspapers on crates, headlines readable in the thin glow of a kerosene lamp. The lamp, with tins of cigars and tobacco, candies and candles, sat on the pine panel that was his counter.
“Everything okay this morning, Tony?” the cop asked.
The barese’s name was not Tony; cops called Italians Tony.
“Everything good,” the barese said, handing the cop a newspaper.
The cop saluted, made a sound with his throat, and his horse resumed its hollow rhythm.
The fruit and vegetables store and its sidewalk stand had been open all night. This was not unusual. The store’s owner, a calabrese, with his face of leather, never slept more than a few hours at a time. He finished hosing his display of goods with water pirated from a johnny pump, shoved his cap to the back of his head, and sat with coffee to enjoy the last of the morning stars.
Where the cop left the block, slants of light seeped from between the planks of the stable’s walls. The tailor, Enzo Burgundi, quick-stepped past the stable to the newsstand. He picked up a cigar and Il Progresso, wished the barese a good day, and saluted the calabrese.
He stepped across the sidewalk to his shop, where a fourfoot statue of San Gennaro, dressed in wooden robes of gold, silver and reds, stood in the show window, next to a clothes dummy. The dummy wore a jacket of a fine black wool.
This wake-up happened every morning, and not the cop, not the barese nor the calabrese would report that, as the tailor keyed into the glass-paneled door of his shop, two brothers of the stable, Carlo The Arab, with the skin of an Arab, and Occhi, with eyes that looked away from each other, pushed in behind him.
Burgundi, a small timid man, resisted and surprised the thugs with pushing and kicking. But they overpowered him and jostled him to the door at the top of the cellar stairs.
“Give us what the Sardinian left and no harm will come to you,” one of the stablemen said.
“No harm will come,” the other said.
The tailor, stammering, but willing to give up what he had sworn to protect, moved to retrieve it. The Arab, the stronger of the two brothers, may have thought the tailor was resisting again, slammed his fist into his narrow chest and heaved him down the slant of wood stairs to the dirt of the cellar floor.
This floor spread underneath a stone wall and continued into the stable. They dragged the limp man through the door in that wall. Hens scrambled and horses shied, and not till they tried to stand him up did the brothers know that Carlo the Arab had killed Enzo the tailor.
From the dead man’s pockets they took bills and coins, keys, and the cigar from the newsstand.
“Go find the purse,” The Arab, short of breath, said. “And the letter. Don’t forget to leave the letter.”
“Give me the cigar,” Occhi said.
“Just go,” The Arab said, and kicked a spade into the stable ground.
Occhi climbed back up to the shop, careful to bolt the doors behind him. In the thinning darkness he locked the front door, rummaged through dozens of bolts of fabric on shelves and bins, stacks of unfinished garments on tables, and in boxes stocked with socks and collars and factory-made shirts. In the back room, he overturned the drawers of the desk that stood near the sink. He looked into the ice box and the bread box, and found no purse.
Back to the front of the shop, he took the letter, soiled and wrinkled, from his pocket and pinned it on the back of the clothes dummy’s jacket.
Out the rear door, he let it snap-lock behind him. Scrambling down the iron steps and across the cinder-topped alley, he swore at the stupidity of his brother for slamming the tailor dead before finding the purse.
And only now, paces from the stable, did he realize that Don Cesare Strachi, whom the brothers had been trying to please by finding the purse, would accuse them of taking it and keeping it for their own profit. Angered further by this, and by the smell of the smoke of a fine tobacco, he snatched the ax from the woodpile, lifted it above his head, and charged into the stable. The Arab sneered, but backed off, and handed Occhi the tailor’s cigar.
The Lovely Lucia
The elevated railroad cut sharp shadows onto the stones that paved 9th Avenue, where Lucia Burgundi stepped from a horse car and headed for the pier.
She had not been there since three years past, ferried from the confusion of Ellis Island. But the smells of the shushing river, the hot corn, frankfurter and pretzel wagons brought that morning to her.
There had been drizzle and fog and a kind of chill she’d never felt in Salerno. Enzo Burgundi, whom she’d come to Nuovo York to marry, emerged from the fog, a well-pressed figure bearing anticipation as uncertain as hers, but as refined and handsome as in the photo Papa had handed her nearly a year before.
“He is a tailor. Successful,” Papa had said, his neopolitan tongue careful with this important talk. “He assures a good life and a home as fine as any in L’America.”
“‘A zia has done this, I think, Papa,” Lucia said, smiling, as if uncovering a secret.
“Yes. She received his letter interested to know if she was yet a wife. Of course she is, and knowing him since childhood as honorable, she came to me for permission to name you to him. He has viewed your miniature and asks for approval to write to you.”
How unexpectedly the first minutes of Enzo returned now, the way he had taken her under his umbrella, how she took his arm, as if they were not strangers. He smelled of flowers and, as in his letters, called her Bella and Cara and talked so much. He still talked so much, though not with her.
As an easy breeze from the river chilled Lucia, others jostled into positions to eye the passengers streaming through the ferry gate. She settled on the sunny end of a bench, prepared for as much patience it took for Rosina to be received, inspected and ferried from the island.
Rosina was younger than Lucia by two years, taller by inches, and prettier. But for her only sister, Lucia held no envy. And like Lucia, a foc
us of admiring glances, who had traveled unescorted for a man, Rosina traveled alone from a man.
She had written: A good man chosen by Papa. As good perhaps as your Enzo, but one I could not love. And though you say that America is not without troubles, I cannot remain here, and where, without Mama, would I go but to you.
By late afternoon Lucia had finished the bread and cheese she’d wrapped for herself and — stupido — in her bag, the jar of eggplant salad. In the excitement of this day, she’d forgotten to deliver it to the shop, to Enzo. But perhaps he would not anger at this special time. Perhaps he would show something of the care and kindness that ended in the hours after the wedding in the nearly empty Church of Christ the King.
Lucia pushed the hurt of that evening out of her mind and spent her thoughts on Rosina. Her hair, like Papa’s, was black and thick and lustrous with curls as round as American dollars, while Lucia’s black hair, like Mama’s, fell thin and straight and only lustrous. It had always been their gray eyes and lips pouting as flowers about to open that revealed them as sisters.
With a commotion from the crowd, Lucia stood to see a scurry of people dragging valises, baskets and boxes down the ferry’s ramp. Among them appeared Rosina.
Her face so bright, her hips in fashionable form, her spirited step, pleased Lucia. She seemed younger than her eighteen years, the same age Lucia had been when she’d walked that ramp with similar spirit.
Lucia called and waved and Rosina broke into a run, her satchel of patched canvas bouncing against her legs. Lucia ran too, and they collided and embraced, cried and laughed, and Lucia inscribed the moments into forever, for soon these exciting moments would fade. Soon Rosina would learn that Lucia’s letters of happiness had been lies.
***
Seated in a horse car, its floor strewn with straw that needed changing, and driven by an American who spit tobacco and cursed at his sad horses, Rosina must have seen bruises.