Skeleton Crew

feel better. Holler down to where she was, inside all that flab. But I couldn't think of a single thing.

So I just said, 'I have to go. We have to play another set.'

'Of course,' she said softly. 'Of course you must... or they'll start to laugh at you. But why I came was - - will you play 'Roses of Picardy'? I thought you played it very nicely at the reception. Will you do that?'

'Sure,' I said. 'Be glad to.' And we did. But she left halfway through the number, and since it was sort of schmaltzy for a place like Englander's, we dropped it and swung into a ragtime version of 'The Varsity Drag.' That one always tore them up. I drank too much the rest of the evening and by closing I had forgotten all about her. Well, almost.

Leaving for the night, it came to me. What I should have told her. Life goes on—that's what I should have said. That's what you say to people when a loved one dies. But, thinking it over, I was glad I didn't.

Because maybe that was what she was afraid of.

Of course now everyone knows about Maureen Romano and her husband Rico, who survives her as the taxpayers' guest in the Illinois State Penitentiary. How she took over Scollay's two-bit organization and turned it into a Prohibition empire that rivaled Capone's. How she wiped out two other North Side gang leaders and swallowed their operations. How she had the Greek brought before her and supposedly killed him by sticking a piece of piano wire through his left eye and into his brain as he knelt in front of her, blubbering and pleading for his life. Rico, the bewildered valet, became her first lieutenant, and was responsible for a dozen gangland hits himself.

I followed Maureen's exploits from the West Coast, where we were making some pretty successful records. Without Billy-Boy, though. He formed a band of his own not long after we left Englander's, an allblack combination that played Dixieland and ragtime. They did real well down south, and 1 was glad for them.

It was just as well. Lots of places wouldn't even audition us with a Negro in the group.

But I was telling you about Maureen. She made great news copy, and not just because she was a kind of Ma Barker with brains, although that was part of it. She was awful big and she was awful bad, and Americans from coast to coast felt a strange sort of affection for her. When she died of a heart attack in 1933, some of the papers said she weighed five hundred pounds. 1 doubt it, though. No one gets that big, do they?

Anyway, her funeral made the front pages. It was more than you could say for her brother, who never got past page four in his whole miserable career. It took ten pallbearers to carry her coffin. There was a picture of them toting it in one of the tabloids. It was a horrible picture to look at. Her coffin was the size of a meat locker—which, in a way, I suppose it was.

Rico wasn't bright enough to hold things together by himself, and he fell for assault with intent to kill the very next year.

I've never been able to get her out of my mind, or the agonized, hangdog way Scollay had looked that first night when he talked about her. But I cannot feel too sorry for her, looking back. Fat people can always stop eating. Guys like Billy-Boy Williams can only stop breathing. I still don't see any way I could have helped either of them, but I do feel sort of bad every now and then. Probably just because I've gotten a lot older and don't sleep as well as I did when I was a kid. That's all it is, isn't it? Isn't it?

 

 

Paranoid: A Chant

 

I can't go out no more.

There's a man by the door in a raincoat smoking a cigarette.

But I've put him in my diary and the mailers are all lined up on the bed, bloody in the glow of the bar sign next door.

He knows that if I die (or even drop out of sight) the diary goes and everyone knows the CIA's in Virginia.

500 mailers bought from 500 drug counters each one different and 500 notebooks with 500 pages in every one.

I am prepared.

* * *

I can see him from up here.

His cigarette winks from just above his trenchcoat collar and somewhere there's a man on a subway sitting under a Black Velvet ad thinking my name.

Men have discussed me in back rooms.

If the phone rings there's only dead breath.

In the bar across the street a snubnose revolver has changed hands in the men's room.

Each bullet has my name on it.

My name is written in back files and looked up in newspaper morgues.

My mother's been investigated; thank God she's dead.

They have writing samples and examine the back loops of pees and the crosses of tees.

My brother's with them, did I tell you?

His wife is Russian and he keeps asking me to fill out forms.