the one to suggest anger management when Vinnie used the metal pincers of his brand-new government-financed limb to eviscerate a toy duck into a million bits of foam the day he couldn’t manage to lift and lower the yellow duckie even once.
Vinnie took a deep breath. Closed his eyes. Rewind. Rewind. Rewind. He pictured himself walking over to the table of kids and laughing along with them, showing them his arm, genially explaining how sophisticated the technology was, how certain of his nerve endings had been surgically regenerated so that he could actually control the artificial limb with his brain. I guess I am Robocop, he’d say, part man, part robot.
Wow, the kids would say. Can we touch it? Sure, Vinnie would reply, then laugh and cuff one of them lightly on the shoulder (with the real arm). Go ahead, he’d say, touch it. It’s as good as my old arm. It doesn’t get hot or cold or cut or bruised. It’s better than the old arm!
Better, that is, unless you were Amy, Vinnie’s ex-fiancée, in which case the new arm was definitely not better than the old arm. If you were Amy, you’d pretend to be fine with the new arm, plaster a grim smile on your face, spout platitudes like “It’s what’s on the inside that counts” until the day when Vinnie, finally starting to feel at ease, casually put his arm around her waist and she flinched. Vinnie didn’t feel the flinch, of course (Hey, kids! The new arm doesn’t feel betrayal!), but he saw it; he wasn’t blind. Worse, because he’d unthinkingly touched her with the robot arm, he didn’t even get the pleasure of feeling his fingers sink a little into the soft ribbon of flesh above her hips that he loved so much, didn’t get to feel anything before he saw her recoil and then look at him, petrified and—
Stop. Rewind.
In his mind he went back to talking to the kids at the table and imagined how even the redhead would stop snickering. How they’d all be impressed when he picked up the tiny, plastic, greasy saltshaker. Not the bigger cardboard container of garlic salt, whose mere presence he found offensive. Don’t get him started on how the Mexicans in the neighborhood covered their perfectly seasoned pizza with the garlic salt and sometimes even hot sauce that they’d take out of their pockets in little travel bottles, as if his grandfather, whose recipe Vinnie and his father, Vito, still followed, hadn’t learned to make tomato sauce in Naples where they fucking invented tomato sauce.
Stop.
He’d pick up the real saltshaker and daintily shake a few grains into his fleshy palm, throwing them over his left shoulder to thwart the devil like his nonna taught him. The kids would applaud.
Yeah, Vinnie would say, winding up his demonstration with something positive and forward looking, trying to avoid bitter and self-loathing. I’m one of the lucky ones, he’d say, winking at them like he was a goddamn movie star.
HERE WAS THE THING: Vinnie was one of the lucky ones and he knew it. He could have lost more than one limb. He could be dead. When the IED exploded, he could have been walking on the left side of the path instead of the right like his buddy Justin who was alive but not. Traumatic brain injury they called it, instead of what it was, fucking retarded. Justin, back home in Virginia sitting and drooling in front of a television set all day, every day, bathed by his mother, spoon-fed by his father, wheeled out onto the porch for a little sun and fresh air so the neighbors could peer out their windows and feel blessed, shake their heads and say, There but for the grace of God. Justin, carried to bed by his brother every night, only to wake up the next day and start the whole depressing regimen all over again until he finally did kick it and was out of his misery for good. Justin, who had been five measly days away from completing his tour and going home—whole.
So yes. Vinnie was lucky. Fortunate. He was still strong, mostly healthy. He could take over the family businesses whenever he wanted, not only the pizza place but also a nice Italian grocery across the street, mostly imports, that his grandfather had opened on Arthur Avenue back when the neighborhood was all Italian, only Italian, before the ever-increasing influx of Mexican families over the decades. He had