Early Winter 1972

A Small Middle-Atlantic City

(exerpted from the unpublished novel Powers and the Glory)

          DiForza drives in his piece-of-shit car, burning oil, to a small, nameless suburban strip shopping center. A drug store, a barber shop, a beauty parlor, a sub-shop-and-delicatessen, a corset shop, and a tavern called the Carriage Light. The Carriage Light caters to working-class high-lifers afraid of being square but profoundly distrustful of hippies. All its customers are white folks, with just a wee tendency toward trashiness. It’s a place for teenagers of all suburban classes to test their phony IDs, and for a few old farts still proud of their drinking to get away from their wives. Fights are not unheard-of.

          He sits down by himself at an empty end of the bar. It’s cold outside. The place is quiet. It’s too early for action. The bartender looks to be a hard 30; the waitress is Irish in her early 20s. They both have black miniskirts, white blouses, nice legs, desolately cheerful faces, and long black hair teased out like country music singers’. The bartender and waitresses who come on duty later, when things get busy, look the same.

          The bartender greets DiForza with a, “Hi, honey, what’ll ya have?’ in a particularly thick, exaggerated version of the local accent. There can be no doubt that everybody is honey to her. DiForza politely orders a wet roast beef sandwich and a draft. She serves him and drifts away. He looks at her legs.

          He eats his sandwich and drinks his beer and then another sandwich and a couple more beers. The place slowly fills up. The jukebox plays Chicago and Cher and Blood, Sweat, & Tears, and so on. The air rings with good humor and much shouting back and forth amongst the guys. Eyes follow the waitresses’ legs. Some couples on dates cram into booths, the guys treating the girls with prom-like courtesy and reverence and lust. All four pool tables are in use.

          Sally Osterle had left her ass-hole husband, kids and all, in their $38,000 tract house two days before to go on a bender. She’d just found out that he’d been balling his secretary for years. His secretary! Anyway, Sally’s looking to have herself one hell of a time. She spent the morning in a downtown hotel with a mechanical engineer — or at least that’s what he’d said he was — but has since lost him somewhere along the way and doesn’t care. It hadn’t been a piece of cake to play it straight for 17 years with that bastard she’d married, and here he’d been living it up probably all that time. Sally figures now it’s her turn. Make up for lost time.

          She’s never been in the Carriage Light before. She was just cruising in a semi-daze in her new Buick Riviera and saw all the cars in front of its lighted sign and figured that she might find some action therein. She locks the car and straightens her dress. Well-made, good-quality clothing holds up fairly well on a bender, she thinks. Inside, she sees an empty barstool and sits down next to a halfway decent-looking wop. She orders a scotch and water and nips into most of it with the first swallow. Good. Now, about that paisano —

          DiForza notices that the well-dressed, fortyish broad sitting next to him has begun to stare. She is looking at him shamelessly. That’s the only word he can think of that fits: shamelessly. No pretence, no subtlety at all. She just looks at him.

          Then she says, “Excuse me ...”

          And DiForza says, “Huh?”

          Cool, or what?

          “Yeah. Hi. Would you mind if I asked you a personal sort of question?”

          “Shit, no. Go ahead.”

          “Are you a gangster?”

          “A gangster, lady?”

          “Call me Sally. Yeah, a gangster. Y’know, mixed up with the mob.”

          “Not unless you call stealing hearts a crime, Sally-babes,” and he gives her his charming smile. That was better.

          Doo-wah, doo-wah.

          Sally does a bit of a take at that. She doesn’t know exactly how to take it. He certainly seems worth a ball, but, y’know, you gotta talk some first, she thinks.

          “Then are you a beatnik?”

          DiForza laughs, almost blowing a mouthful of beer. He manages to swallow safely, just. “What?”

          “Y’know — a beatnik. I can tell you’re not a square. My grandmother, God rest her soul, she used to tell me you can tell a lot about a man by the shape of his ears, y’know, so you can’t fool me, Good-Lookin’ — You’re a beatnik, right?”

          “No. Nope, not a beatnik, either. Sorry, lady.”

          “Sally.”

          “Uh, yeah. Sally.”

          “Well, you must be something!”

[    [    [

          A concert hall in Pittsburg in 1959: DiForza isn’t just younger. He’s greasier, too. And richer. And famous — only with a different name. He’s Tony Powers, lead singer of Tony and the Madisons, the sixth largest record-selling act in the country. He’s performing in a gold silk suit in front of a wildly enthusiastic teen-age audience at a rock & roll show, backed up by a band and his three buddies from the old neighborhood in the Bronx: the Madisons. The Madisons wear matching get-ups coordinated with Tony’s outfit and sing the doo-wahs. Choreography galore.

          Tony and the Madisons all grew up together, went to school together, got in trouble together. Now they’re stars at their zenith. They’re extremely slick and greasy — after the style of the period — but they also have some real musical talent and are not at all unhip. Their musicians like working for them. The show is a gas to do. Teen-aged girls besiege their dressing room after the concert, chanting, “We love you, Tony! We love you, Tony!” over and over again.

          He remembers the whole scene in its entirety, stripped of sequence and time.

[         [         [

          DiForza’s eyes only go out of focus for a moment, then he says to Sally, “Yeah, everybody gotta be something, I guess.”

          “Then, what are you?”

[    [    [

          New York in 1963: Tony Powers is a dirty, scruffy, half-crazed, skinny junkie, shivering despite his leather coat against the early New York grey winter morning, a stolen .38 automatic in his coat pocket, watching a bald, placid old man unlock a small appliance store in order to open up for the day’s business. Tony moves forward half-carefully through the deserted alley, clearly intending to commit armed robbery.

[    [    [

          DiForza looks at Sally and puts on his charming smile again. “I’m an ant,” he says.

          “What?”

          “I’m an ant.”

          “An ant?”

          “Yeah. You know, one of them little crawly bugs that fucks up people’s picnics.”

          Sally finishes her drink and stares at him drunkenly for a moment. Then, “Nah! No, you’re not.”

          “Oh, yes I am. Just an ant waitin’ to get stepped on.”

          “Oh, go on — be serious!”

          “Nothin’ but an ant. An insect. A bug. I love to find cookie crumbs on the floor. Highly developed mandibles.” He snapped his teeth at her.

          “You’re really being serious, aren’t you?”

          “Dead serious, Sally-babes. As serious as a heart attack.”

          Sally turns pointedly away and signals to the bartender for another drink, which she polishes off quickly. She’s looking to make up for lost time and all, but she isn’t ready to go this far out. She turns to the 21-year-old boy who’d just sat down at her other elbow and starts checking him out. It occurs to her that she’s old enough to be his mother. That she can handle. She asks if she can buy him a drink. Calls him “Cutie”.

          DiForza smiles into his beer. Sometimes I tickle me, he says to himself, I really do. He finishes the beer and gets up to go take a piss. Inside the MEN’S room he leans his forehead against the well-written-on wall over the urinal and closes his eyes as he pisses. “Go poisons, go,” he mumbles, barely audibly, “Drain out; drain thee out of me, piss, and flow on down through the sewage system to the sea.”

          Zipped up again and ready or not, he starts working his way back to the bar through the now-crowded tavern. A man sitting in a booth with a couple of others calls, “Hey, Ant’ny!” at him. It’s his supervisor on the job site, Dave MacInnes.

          MacInnes is about five or six years older than DiForza, but looks as if he could be younger. He has fine, regular, almost pretty facial features, but there’s something about their expression which makes him more ugly than handsome. He manages to convey an arrogant smugness, a confident narrowness, and a tinge of unadmitted kiss-ass covered with self-righteous defensiveness without saying a thing. He has thick, wavy blonde hair made thicker by ample grease, combed with excruciating care into something like a preppy style — greasy ivy-league.

          Doo-wah, doo-wah.

          Not pleased with the idea, DiForza works his way over to the booth to respond to MacInnes’s greeting:

          “Hey, Dave. Howya doin’.”

          “Harry, Sal — this-here’s Ant’ny DiForza. Al Barri’s brother-in-law. You know Al.”

          “Sure.”

          “Good man, Al.”

          “Ant’ny’s one of my boys.”

          “Gladtameetcha.”

          “Gladtameetcha.”

          “Why’nt you sit here and have a beer with us, Ant’ny, or are ya too fuckin’ good for us?”

          That’s MacInnes all over. DiForza says, “Aw, shit, Dave,” and sits with them.

          MacInnes orders him a bottle of Schaeffers — not a draft. The three of them then explain to DiForza the superiority of Schaeffers over all other beers in the world. DiForza casually comments that he didn’t know all this, and they express surprise and condescension toward his ignorance.

          Harry tells of his inability to buy Schaeffers on a fishing trip down South. He’s indignant that they’d never even heard of it. Harry is lean and stringy, with lines all over his face. Sal tells how he had a bottle of one of those expensive imported foreign beers a few months ago — that crazy kid with the long hair who used to work with Ventresca on the street crews over Singely Towers — Barney, his name was — well, Barney, he talked Sal into drinkin’ it last summer, and Sal can’t honestly see how people can actually drink that dishwater. It was like onion juice. Him, he’ll stick with good old Schaeffers. Sal is fat. Hearty.

          The waitress brings DiForza’s Schaeffers and takes refill orders from the others. MacInnes insists on paying. DiForza thanks him and the waitress. He drinks. Tastes like any other beer to him. He doesn’t say anything. The other three have gone on to discuss that crazy kid Barney. It seems as if he has another job now, according to Harry.

          MacInnes says, “Oh, yeah. I remember him now. He’s a regular little flower child all right.” He spits out the words ‘flower child’ with exaggerated depths of sneering venom, as if he was saying ‘pig fucker’ or ‘snot eater’. “Probably one of them protesters. Yeah, I remember who he is now. Wears a necklace!”

          Sal says, “I don’t know, Dave. He didn’t seem like too bad a kid to me ...”

          “Naw, listen,” MacInnes leans forward, his eyes gleaming, “my brother’s boy knows him — used to drink with him in high school. Now listen to this: he tells me that that flower child Barney’s started runnin’ with this nigger bitch down Oak Mill Farms. Now if that isn’t ...”

          Sal half-shouts, “No!”

          Harry’s quick to add, “That sort of shit makes me sick.”

          “Fuckin’ right!,” MacInnes goes on, “Now, I don’t have nothin’ against the colored. I mean, I worked with some all-right colored guys when I was with Ventresca, but these young niggers nowadays are — well, they’re nothin’ but a bunch of niggers! The worst kind, and these white protesters that go runnin’ with ’em and dressin’ like ’em ...”

          “Yeah,” Harry agrees, “I guess there’s good niggers and bad niggers, all right, but the one thing no nigger is or was or ever will be is white.”

          Sal squints his eyes and says, “And the ones that go hoppin’ into bed with white people! God, I don’t see how any white person could do it! Those big, smacky nigger-lips — Makes my flesh crawl just thinkin’ about it. Look!”

          Sal points to goose flesh on his beefy arms. DiForza drinks his beer in silence. His mind flows away again.

[    [    [

          New York in 1962: Tony Powers, wearing ragged clothes and his leather jacket indoors, is sitting in the kitchen of his dilapidated walk-up apartment in a run-down neighborhood in lower Manhattan. It’s about an hour since he did up some smack and he’s feeling mellow and stupid. Andrea lets herself into the apartment. She lives there with him. She is young and black, but she is not the standard foxy spade chick of the blaxploitation industry. Her clothes are plain: blue jeans and a sweatshirt. Her face is broad and dark and very African. No high-yeller, her. Her eyes are definitely intense, yet kind. She is short and just a shade pudgy. All her unspoken language makes it obvious that she loves Tony enormously.

          “That you, Andrea?”

          “Well it sure isn’t Jacqueline Kennedy.” She puts down a basket of clean laundry and comes into the kitchen. “I swear! Sometimes that mother of mine — Tony! No!”

          “Tony yes.”