heard that from Ralph.” My father pointed at the bartender.
“Huh. How did you get mixed up in it?”
“I’m not mixed up in it. You’re a songwriter. You’re a big shot now. Thought maybe you could help her.”
I immediately started shaking my head. I didn’t want to get involved. I wouldn’t do it for Berry Gordy, and I didn’t want to do it for Esther Mine.
But my reluctance disintegrated beneath her rendition of “Maybe” by the Ink Spots.
It was a simple little song that shouldn’t have worked with her voice. But she sang it like a threat, and it bored a hole into my chest.
“Well, damn,” I whispered.
“She’s good, right?” my father murmured, his mouth by my ear. He sounded pleased with himself.
“Yeah. She’s good, Pop.”
I stayed for the entire set, standing next to my father, but when we walked outside, I told him to go on back to La Vita without me.
“You don’t want a ride home?” he protested.
“Nah. I’m at the Park Sheraton. I’ll walk. I think I’m gonna go to Charley’s for a bite.”
“Come home, Benny. No reason to spend money on digs when you can sleep in your own bed.”
“I’ve outgrown that bed, Pop.”
He stared at me for a moment, stuck a cigar in his mouth but didn’t light it, and turned toward La Vita. “I bought you a new one. Come home. And next time you’re in town, don’t make me hear it from Sal. It embarrasses me.”
I didn’t apologize, and I wouldn’t go home. Not tonight. My skin felt hot, and my chest ached. I was getting sick. Elvis sang about it. About his hands shaking and his knees being weak.
“Well, damn,” I said again. Pop was gone. No one was listening. All shook up or not, I would probably be back at Shimmy’s tomorrow night to hear Esther Mine sing.
I didn’t go to Charley’s. I wasn’t very hungry. I walked instead. There’s a freedom afforded a big man in an expensive suit that allows him to aimlessly walk without worrying about the lateness of the hour or the part of town. I kept thinking of another big man, a man I hadn’t thought of in years. Bo “the Bomb” Johnson. It was the oddest thing, but the rumble of his voice wouldn’t leave my head. I’d heard an itty-bitty Negro singer belt into a microphone, and Bo Johnson rose from the dead—or wherever he’d ended up—to walk with me through Manhattan.
My grandfather, Eugenio Lomento, emigrated from Sicily at the turn of the century and taught my father to box by beating him to a pulp every night after dinner. My father figured he might as well get paid to get the shit knocked out of him and was only sixteen when he fought his first sanctioned bout. He was so good nobody even questioned his age. In the ring he was Jack “Lament” Lomento, and the biggest name in East Harlem.
He was the heavyweight champ for a decade and never lost a fight until Bo “the Bomb” Johnson knocked him out so cold he didn’t wake up for a week. He didn’t fight after that. At least not in the ring. He started working for Sal Vitale at his club in Harlem, a bouncer instead of a boxer, a fixer instead of a fighter. That’s when he met my mother, Sal’s sister. My father said Bo Johnson did him a favor taking his title the way he did.
“Bo knocked some sense into me,” he said. “If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t have ever stopped. No Giuliana. No Benny. Just boxing.”
The first time I saw Bo Johnson, I didn’t know how my father ever survived that fight.
Bo Johnson was the biggest, strongest man I’d ever laid eyes on, even bigger than my father, and his voice was like the pipe organ at Mass—rich, deep, and resonant. I tried to hum the pitch, but it existed below my register.
A few months after my mother died, I awoke to that voice seeping, along with the light, beneath my bedroom door. I leaped from my bed, thinking I’d found heaven, and God was in the other room. God and my mother. The voices were a mixture of familiar and strange, high and low, and a cat was yowling. I threw open the door and stood, blinking at the light, my hands shaking as they shaded my gaze.
But my mother was not there.
God was not there either, though the stranger in my living room could have been a