of myself—fearful that she might sense my noticing her—so I slid between a pair of Chevys on Mulberry Street and hunched down, continued spying on her from a safe distance.
Her old man stretched as though he’d driven straight through from Boston or Philly, threw his arm around his wife and planted one on her. The little girl seemed to adore this, giggled as though it embarrassed her but stared like it was her favorite scene in a film. They all chatted briefly about the restaurant—my father’s—then attempted to open the door.
It was 7:12 a.m. on Sunday morning. The restaurant was closed; Mass was coming soon.
Here is the first truly regrettable moment of my life: I stood back up and made steps their way in an effort to tell them the place was closed—but as I caught another glimpse of the girl, my feet faltered. Had I completed this mission, spoken a half dozen words, the story would have ended here, complete with a built-in happy ending.
Instead it went like this:
I slid back between the cars, rested myself on the hood of a Camaro, and watched them tug on that door with enough determination to loosen the hinges. Then came the conversation that suggested they might find somewhere else to go—a tough bill to fill on a Sunday morning in New York’s Little Italy. Instead, the father slipped down the narrow alley adjacent to the eatery and headed toward the kitchen, waving them his way; mom and daughter followed.
That’s the last I saw of them for about forty-five seconds.
I sat staring at the rear of their Oldsmobile, wondering what brought these folks in from Jersey, pretending to convert their license plate into a vanity tag. My brothers and I would fancy that the rich and famous were riding covertly through lower Manhattan disguised and hidden in average cars, slipping out of hotels and restaurants with no one being the wiser. It became a regular competition between us.
783-JCM
John Cougar Mellencamp, 783 concerts performed.
025-SRL
Sugar Ray Leonard, 25 wins by KO.
1037-EVH
Eddie Van Halen, 1,037 fully consumed bottles of Jack Daniel’s.
I focused on that Olds with all my might but the combination of letters and numbers left me struggling: FNP-18X. Plates from New Jersey routinely stumped us, as the state had just started replacing the last digit with a letter on all their tags. I sat on the verge of progress—Florence Nightingale? Fig Newton?—when the screams startled me back to awareness. Down the alley came the three of them, the mother hobbling in front of the father, the little girl tossed over his shoulder like a sack of flour, the females screaming, the man a shade whiter than when he ventured down that alley, cap now missing. I remember thinking that people squeamish at the sight of rats shouldn’t go down alleys in New York.
If the mother had been trying to loosen the hinges on that restaurant door, she was now attempting to completely rip off the door of the Olds with her bare hands. Dear old dad tossed the girl in the backseat like old luggage, then fumbled with his ring of keys to find the one that fit the ignition, all while staring down that alley of trash and shadows. He slammed the door, started the car, gunned the accelerator. And I guess the guy had it in him; it may have taken him forty-seven back-and-forths to parallel park his bomb, but it took him one to get out. Then the squeal of the wheels, the fishtailing, the coughing exhaust, the fade.
That must have been one gigantic rodent.
A minute or so later, my uncle Sal came strolling out. The guy was all salt and pepper: his hair, his freckled skin, his personality. Sal lit up a Camel, casually drifted my way, and blasted me one in the shoulder, messed up my hair. He blew a cloud of smoke in my general direction. “You stay out of the restaurant, kid, eh?”
I stared at him, but he understood I was saying sure. “Rat in the kitchen again?”
He took a drag long enough that he burned through a half inch of cigarette, two minutes’ worth of nicotine. He looked up and down the street looking for something, for the absence of something, exhaled slowly in both directions. Then, walking away from me, toward the restaurant, he muttered, “Yeah, big fat friggin’ rat.”
I walked down the block to the corner store and got a Pepsi out of a near-historic vending machine resting alone on the sidewalk. This