to regret every blow. Were it me, I would have stopped, set Greg free, and ended the event, but Peter thought it was downright hilarious, only made him pound longer, kept going until he grew bored of that, too.
Even as we all walked away, Greg was still rambling on through slurred speech. “You’re gonna get it, Bovaros. You’re gonna get payback,” he muttered between winces and coughs. “Gonna make your whole family pay.”
Nearly a week later, I walked into my folks’ place and saw my mother rocking in my father’s arms, weeping like a child. My first thought was someone on my mom’s side had passed away—except my father was staring into the distance with tear tracks marking his cheeks. My next thought was that one of my brothers had died. I remember the lightheadedness and vertigo that came upon me, how I quickly moved to lean on the doorjamb.
My father had a look on his face he’s only had a few times. In his look I read that someone was going to have to die.
I was the first to arrive at their house that evening, the first to receive the news: Gregory Morrison had raped my mother in the parking lot of a small Italian grocery store a few miles from our home, attacked her while she was loading bags of food into the trunk of her car. The entire time, all while insulting and slapping my mother, calling her a whore, Morrison kept repeating, “Tell your boys payback is hell.”
My father helped my mother up to their room, got her to rest on their bed. I waited outside their door. A few minutes later he quietly came out and took me aside.
“I gotta stay with your mother,” he said. “You’re the only one who knows about this right now, Johnny.” To my recollection, my father only cried five times in his adult life: at each of his sons’ first Communions, and as he spoke those words. While he fought the tears—difficult to see on a man who’s lost no battle—he grabbed the back of my neck, gave it a tight squeeze. “You go make things right, capice?”
I nodded, carefully walked down the creaky wooden stairs of their home, wanted to vomit at the thought of what had happened to my mother. She was—just like Melody—a casualty of being anywhere near our criminal family, another woman virtually destroyed, stripped of dignity and tossed aside, all because the leaders around her were violent, self-serving men.
And in that moment, the violence emerged in me. A lifetime of experience instructed me the one way to correct the situation. With each step toward my car, the fright and anxiety of what had happened to my mother converted over to unabated hatred for Gregory Morrison, the formation of undiscovered wrath.
I sped to the rathole apartment Morrison shared with two of his buddies on the Lower East Side, kicked in his door so hard the bottom hinge snapped off. Five feet away was Morrison, sitting in a torn, stained recliner, directly facing the door like it was a widescreen television, waiting. He lifted a small handgun, aimed it directly at my chest, said, “Payback,” and pulled the trigger.
All he got for his planning and patience was an empty click. Nothing. Morrison cursed at top volume, looked down sideways at the gun, reached for the clip—of course, by this time I was in midair. I landed on him square and we both went flying off the back of the chair and onto the fringe of his kitchen, the gun flying across the room toward the window.
Morrison grabbed his rib cage and moaned. I stood as he remained in the fetal position, picked up a wooden chair from under his kitchen table, and smashed it over him again and again until the thing had broken into kindling.
Morrison was not the only one with patience. I sat in his roach-filled pit for over two hours waiting for him to return to consciousness. I would not allow him to sleep through his misery. He was going to be wide awake, he was going to live through the excruciating pain and suffering just like my mother had to be awake and aware through hers. He was going to remember, for every one of his remaining days, the mistake he made.
I cannot retell how I implemented vengeance upon Morrison; for all my claims of strength, I can’t confess the truest darkness of my life. Though the images are forever clear in