I got it wrong, the guy never lost his cool, would just smile and slap my back and say, “Let’s try it again, Johnny.” It might be best explained as a matter of culture, but to exist around these men and women is a warm thing. Tommy Fingers, a near-illiterate man of girth and fury, used to spend most mornings making breakfast for whoever would break bread with him, a culinary artist of notable capability in any other setting. All you’d have to do is casually say to yourself, “Man, I’m hungry,” and the next thing you know Tommy is sliding a steaming bowl of pasta fagioli in front of you—unless he’s out muscling some guy into submission. (Tommy got his nickname from his calling card, what we routinely called a souvenir, something to act as a permanent reminder of our power and the related event; Tommy’s was the snapping of the middle finger of whoever he assailed.) I wanted Tommy to celebrate with me, put his thick arm around me and talk food. I wanted Paulie to argue with anyone who would listen about what Steinbrenner was doing to the Yankees. I wanted Peter to be my older brother and my dad to be my father and my mother to be my mother, just for one day. I wanted a room full of laughter, glasses filled with beer and wine, and the simple excuse to eat to the point of discomfort.
The silence that continued in the Suburban hinted at one of two things: Peter’s suggestion was either being considered or completely ignored. We circled the block before entering the Gerard Avenue lot. Disregarding the valet, my father snaked our monster into a tight spot in a lot where the lines were readjusted year after year into slighter spaces. All four doors opened and slammed into the Benzes on either side of us, then Pop chucked the keys in the general vicinity of the nearest valet, over the hoods of two rows of cars, and the valet dove for them like he’d been tossed a handful of diamonds; no return ticket was handed our way, never was.
I remember thinking that day was going to be great—the Yankees were playing the Orioles, after all—but I’d become jammed up, leveled by the reminder that I was a Bovaro and that that meant something the way it meant something to be a Kennedy, a Rockefeller, a Du Pont; the expected legacy is expected for a reason, and fulfillment a near requirement.
Peter set me up, the bastard. There would be no way to avoid accepting the task. To back down would be weak, to let—continue to let—others clean up my childhood embarrassment and not feel some sort of anger over what happened. The McCartneys had dared to testify against my father, and for that reason I should have been incensed myself, insulted to the point that retribution served as the only natural course. But I knew as my family did—they were the ones to educate me—that the fear we perpetrated upon the masses was only bolstered by the stories told by the feds to encourage, to frighten, people into testifying.
I had to take whatever assignment they asked of me, lest I become the standout. The loser. I had one hope only: that my father would ignore the entire suggestion, that his pride and reputation regarding a matter of many years prior was rightly no longer an insult, that he would never consider asking his almost twenty-one-year-old son to empty a clip into the bodies of innocent people.
My father’s decision had been concealed right up to our entrance of the cheer-filled stadium. He put his arm around me, tightened it around my shoulder as we walked together toward our seats, Bovaro men, and said to me gently, “Don’t worry, we’ll get you the car, too.”
The first time you hold a gun is like the first time you hold an infant. You’re not sure what to do with it. You watch the people around you for some signal that you’re holding it correctly. You bounce it a little and comment on its weight. You’re amazed at how beautiful the thing is. You prefer it to remain in a state of deep sleep. And ultimately, you wonder what it would be like to have one of your own.
No one ever gets a gun and thinks, I wonder what it would be like to kill someone. Unless you’re a hunter, most balanced people never want to discharge a