“Come on, babe. You don’t leave until the end of next summer, and who knows where I’ll go to school. Maybe those Trojans will come knocking.” Sometimes I had to lie.
She turned onto her side and started to cry.
“But don’t worry, my flock, for salvation is open for those who repent and avoid the fiery depths of Hell! Call the number at the bottom of the screen…” A number at the bottom of the screen twinkled to the same ethereal jingle I had heard as a kid. “And receive the blessed Survival Button in the mail this week.”
An infographic for the Survival Button appeared on the screen for the low, low price of $9.99 (plus S&H) to absolve those you love from their sins of fetal homicide.
The paisley bedsheets wrapped around Maria’s bottom half like a mermaid’s tail as her bare back convulsed lightly and her shoulder blades pinched together while she wept. I could have cried with her, I wanted to—I had to ask the proper authorities if I was allowed to cry since making the (figurative, not literal) plunge into manhood—but what good would that do? I loved her; I never knew a truer truth.
I pulled her in close and she tucked herself up underneath my arm in postcoital hibernation—a different sort of flesh-on-flesh contact that gave me the “warm and fuzzies.” I was transported back to Glenwood, sitting in that slowly forming circle to the sound of tennis balls gliding on linoleum as Ms. O’Donnell was using that term—“warm and fuzzies”—to describe how she did not feel when Pierce Stone had called Olena Lazarenko’s family “refugees.”
“I’m feeling the ‘cold and pricklies,’ Pierce, and so is Olena. I think she deserves an apology.”
Then I was transported back to the woods behind Glenwood on the day we had searched for Hell. And to the Geigers’ attic as Karl and I ascended to Hell, and on Clinton Road, as my car full of paisanos plunged through Hell, and there were cachinnating Sun Devils dancing in circles with naked California quarterbacks impaled on their tridents while bird-monsters and toad-monsters and snails devoured them whole and dragged their mangled bodies into the deepest depths of Hell like a Hieronymus Bosch painting. And when I came to, I was vigorously flipping through the channels, hitting those infomercials that dominated the 3:00 to 5:00 a.m. time block but always returning to the neon shine of Tom Jones Cleaver’s electric-white smile: “And that is the truth that follows the coming of the Lord!”
A pool of Maria’s tears was forming in my armpit. I pulled her in closer and her hand rested on my chest and I realized that Hell was everywhere without her.
“Maria.”
“Yeah, Victor?”
“I love you back.”
Tank and Carina had the house to themselves because their mom was out in the City or down the Shore or out in Canada or Cambodia with Roger and they wanted to have a party. Unfortunately, such soirees had evolved from ordering Dominos and trying to spot boobs on HBO to the occasional cigarette to blowjobs in the bathroom to the liberation from virginity to wanton revelry of Caligulaic proportions—its current threshold—where the DeVallo household became a stopover for kids from Bayonne to Bloomingdale to trade in every pill and powder known to man like a Garden State Samarkand. It was at such a soiree—an exchanging of indulgences—that André, zooted like a Lusitanian Tony Montana, convinced Joey to go see “Katie and them” in Westfield even though Joey hadn’t spoken to Katie in like a year—the things we do for lust.
When the cops arrived at the scene, the cream Audi was wrapped around a telephone pole on Route 22; they were both beyond recognition.
At Joey’s wake, being good Italian Catholics, his family had an open casket—a practice that, along with the prohibition of clerical sex, should be abolished. “If you have an open casket for me, I’ll come back to haunt you,” Mum Mum would always say.
Joey lay there in the pillow box looking like he was molded from clay. I imagined stealing the coffin with my remaining paisanos and sending it down the Rahway River followed by a flaming arrow: a warrior’s passage into the next life. I gave him two Our Fathers from my knees (I remembered them this time) and hurried to my feet so the growing line could get moving—Audis from as far south as Neptune were pulling into Galante’s Funeral Home parking lot on Springfield Avenue.
Carmine, Sonny, and Tank were standing in line with Ms. Lampedusa, receiving condolensces as if they were family; Joey didn’t have any siblings.
I had rarely seen my paisanos in the months leading up to Joey’s death. I wanted to balance my time with them and with Maria but quickly discovered it was an insoluble mixture. I even tried bringing Maria to a recent soiree at Tank’s, but the place had been a drug bust waiting to happen. I felt like I got a contact high doing that three-step handshake shoulder-hug with Pierre and Henri.
“Look at this real Slim Shady!” Pierre reached out to mess up my newly bleached blond hair.
Tank had burst out of his room with this girl, who looked way too young for him and was way too thin, tucked up under his arm and a little white ring lining his right nostril.
“Eyy ohh! Vito! I got plenty more of this!” he’d said, flinging the little bag of powder in his forefingers like it was a tea-time bell. “And this!” he gave his arm candy a wound-up smack on the ass—I thought Maria was going to faint.
Plus we couldn’t risk Maria getting tagged in a picture on Facebook with a beer or shot of vodka:
