from Sled Run

a novel about growing up in an Italian-American neighborhood amidst loan sharks, hoodlums, friends, and family in upstate New York in the early sixties

 

by Ross Talarico

 

 

When I looked up, it was my father above me, and for a mo­ment I thought it was the recurring dream of being lost again. . . . But he was waking me, tugging gently at my shoulders.

“Come on Rosey—downstairs, Danny and Cos are here. Some bad news son. Come on. . . .”

It had been a pleasant rest that night—reliving Leona’s kiss over and over, covering my own arm with kisses in a series of in­tensified dramatic replays. I must have lay awake quite a while. Like most young romantics, I assumed one kiss would warm the heart forever. I had been waiting for such a long time. I must have thought of a dozen excuses to go by her house the next day. The thought also occurred to me that Leona, after drinking the wine in Cosmo’s garage, had been too drunk to remember the kiss, and I would have to wait once more—perhaps another two years!—for another opportunity.

But that fear quickly passed in the notion that some important part of my identity had been revealed to Leona—the warm, car­ing, passionate part of me which, for all of us, had such a tough time rising to the surface. Indeed, wasn’t that the reason, consid­ering the repression of those qualities in the name of manhood, that men (or boys really) crumbled into marriage on their first ro­mantic (and sexual) encounters. I thought of my own identity—identities really—represented, it had occurred to me as I lay rest­less in my bed, by the different nicknames I seemed to be picking up in my early life. Bones, the one I hated—because of its graphic description which was, I knew, a little more accurate than I cared to acknowledge. Dutch gave it to me—that pale-skinned, freckled, red-haired northern European with the flabby flesh. The trouble was, it caught on, and I suffered through a couple of years of hearing it—not just in the neighborhood, but at the playground and even at school. I confided in Cos and Danny, and it seemed when they stopped using it, so did others.

And of course there was Rosey—my real name—from my first years in this world because, according to my mother, I had such rosy cheeks, and, being the boy my parents had always wanted, I was the “prize rose of the family.” More than that, it was the sound, Rosey, that carried with it the love and concern I heard in the voices that surrounded me. I knew it was a girl’s name—but it didn’t bother me enough to think of changing it until Leona ob­jected to it. But although I would turn responsively forever at the sound of it, I wanted to be called something else.

But Ross! So short, and blunt. Rhyming in a way with sauce, boss, moss, loss, and even horse—which I discovered, when I looked it up in my mother’s names for baby book, it actually meant in its Scottish origins (the skirts, the bag-pipes, ugh!), and I certainly didn’t see my skinny self as a horse—nor did I want to.

But then it was Leona’s choice. And after all, didn’t she see a part of me that others didn’t? I felt I should respect her taste, even if it meant putting up with the ridicule that I encountered when others heard her say it, Ross, the previous night in Cosmo’s ga­rage. Maybe, my romantic mind suggested to me, she simply wanted to have her own name for me—something different or new. Something continental I convinced myself, hearing myself whisper Ross and I gave my arm another passionate kiss as I lay there contemplating the future with Leona.

To tell the truth, the name I liked, the identity that pleased me, was the one Carm Carlotta coined: Bright Boy. Despite my lying about my grades every report card period, I was sure there was a certain power if not prestige in being quicker in thought than those around me. Carm’s name for me was the first acknowledg­ment of the validity of that notion. It was, I thought, a congenial recognition of a strength I possessed—in fact, the antithesis of Bones. That’s why however sarcastic any of the guys mimicked the name Bright Boy, nobody disputed it. I recognized, of course, my father’s intelligence. But I saw too it had only caused him frustra­tion and disappointment in his own life—the solitary neighbor, the strange relative, no one to sustain or argue his insightful quirks into human nature. His most beautiful pronouncements of his life, his poetry, locked up in some dusty shoe box in the dank closet of a mortgaged home. No I would not allow myself to suf­focate in whatever intelligence god had granted me. I would turn it into something. My god, I told myself, this is America, land of ideas and ingenuity. If Carm wanted brawn, he would have chosen Billy, or Mike, or any of the others for Sled Run. But he choose brain—and I would show him he made the right choice.

 

. . . Coming downstairs to the kitchen that Saturday morning, I found Cos and Danny sitting at the table with my sisters, all looking glum, and my mother sniffling, dabbing her eyes with a Kleenex. I could see that Cos had been crying too. My father held out a cup of coffee for me in one hand, and the newspaper in the other.

Before I could finish reading the headline—RIOTS ESCALATE: TWO YOUTHS KILLED—Cos blurted out what everyone in the room knew except me: “Billy’s dead Rosey—last night, right in the chest . . . he’s dead.”

I sat down, glancing at the first page and seeing, sure enough, Billy’s photo—right next to a photo of a black youth, who was killed also.

“He got it last night,” said Danny, stoic but shaken, “sometime after midnight—didn’t have a gun or nothin’. Just walked up to a couple of niggers up by the playground to see what they was up to—and bang, one of ’em took out a gun and shot ’em—once—right in that big chest of his.”

“Who shot him?” I asked, pointing to the photograph of the other kid killed, “this kid?”

“No . . .” said my dad and Cos at the same time. No one said anything else. My mother was crying softly to herself. My sister Judy got up from her chair, shaking her head disgustedly. “Stupid, fucking kids—you too Rosey!” she said, walking out of the kitchen. My mother began to protest Judy’s language, and I saw Danny’s and Cosmo’s jaws drop—but my father just put out his hand as if to motion to let her go, and nobody said anything.

“How’d this guy die?” I asked, pointing again to the black youth. For a moment, everyone just sat there. Then Danny spoke up:

“One of us—nobody knows who, or nobody’s sayin’. After Billy got shot, somebody shot that kid for revenge,” he said.

“Jesus,” I said, feeling suddenly faint, “Jesus Christ, poor Billy.”

“Of all the guys to get shot,” added Cosmo.

“It’s always somebody,” said my father in his metaphysical manner.

“It coulda been us,” said Danny, getting up and walking over to the stove to pour himself more coffee.

“We weren’t out there last night,” I added, trying for a degree of realism at a moment when nothing seemed real.

“Well, it coulda been,” Danny shot back, then adding “Goddamn, poor Billy.”

For the neighborhood, the loss of Billy would be felt for a long time, but the significance of his death along with that of the black boy (Kinston Brown, eighteen-years old, a year older than Billy) would not affect us the way it would the rest of Rochester. That night, Billy and the other youth’s photos filled the television screens as well. Mayor Lang eulogized the two youths and an­nounced that bronze statues of the youths would be constructed on either side of the new Liberty Pole in the heart of Rochester on Main Street. It would be a reminder for all of us, he went on to say, of the tragic consequences for the young when social and ra­cial unrest rises to violent levels. No one benefits, he said, when neighbors do battle, and from this day on (he spoke on Saturday night, the day after the killings) the statues of Billy Special and Kingston Brown would symbolize the absurd price uncivilized behavior would demand on us—along with the pride we must take in our city to make sure our youth would not waste their lives needlessly. It was a stunning, emotional speech—surely Mayor Lang’s best, people remarked.

And it must have been because the riots subsided almost im­mediately. Saturday night there were a few scattered fires and looting, and by Sunday the curfew was lifted. On Monday morn­ing the Mayor arranged a funeral ceremony at St. Joseph’s on Clinton Avenue in downtown Rochester—for both Billy and the black kid. Several thousand people showed up—black and white together, and despite the elaborate security measures and mighty show of police, there wasn’t a hint of violence or, for that matter, bad feelings. As a matter of fact, several times during the sermon and eulogies, a number of blacks and whites held hands, em­braced each other, and cried together. An in one ingenious ges­ture, the city had arranged for pall bearers from a white gang (The Monarchs) and a black gang (Satan’s Disciples) to carry the caskets of both dead youths in and out of the church. That’s the scene the national television networks picked up on, and we watched it on both the 6:30 and the 11:00 news, looking for ourselves in the background. Carm’s brother Phil worked hard to convince the Monarchs to participate, and apparently a black cop convinced Sa­tan’s Disciples. Ironically—although this was something we kept to ourselves—Fast Eddie was one of the pall-bearers for Kingston Brown, and rumor was that he pulled the trigger. The other possi­bility was that it was Mike, Cosmo’s brother and Billy’s best friend. Like the others, I didn’t want to know. And it seemed that no one else wanted to know either as the investigation into it and Billy’s death seemed to wane as quickly as the riots quelled.

 

* * * * * * * * * *

The huge line of cars following one another with their lights on split at Dewey and Ridge roads, the whites heading toward Lake Avenue and the older, shady sections of St. Sepulchre’s cemetery and the blacks staying on Dewey heading toward the newer sec­tion with the small flat stones amidst the absence of trees. Even in death, it occurred to me sitting between Danny and Cosmo in the back seat of Johnny Pop’s Plymouth, there was a separating of the races—except in death, blacks went to the suburbs and its newly cleared space, and the whites returned to the older grounds and the shade and solitude of the beautiful, sprawling (however dis­eased) elms.

The morning of Billy’s funeral I got up early—not just to get ready and have my sister Lonnie make a Windsor knot in my tie, as she always did when I had to dress up for something, but espe­cially to talk to my father before he went to work.

Naturally, Billy’s death had an effect on all of us. But as much as we could commiserate with each other, at sixteen death was something you took inside of yourself to try and fathom. The sense of immortality begins to fade at puberty, and by the time a young person’s voice changes, the silence around that voice be­gins to deepen also.

I did not think for a moment, as the priest at St. Phillips, the neighbors, and especially my friends’ mothers had stated, that God had called on Billy to join him in heaven for good cause. I felt, like Mayor Lang I guess, that, simply, a life—two lives that is—had been wasted. It didn’t make any sense, and that’s what both­ered me: the fact that something senseless would affect us more profoundly than any sensible realization we might spend our lives working our asses off to attain. “It isn’t death which is meaningful to us,” my dad told me the morning after Billy was killed, “it’s its alternative.” I remember waiting for an explanation, but he didn’t offer any. Sometimes I’d get angry with him for his seemingly in­finite wisdom and his seemingly limited ability to articulate at all. And this had been one of those times. We were so deeply touched by the loss of a playmate—and I wanted someone to give focus to, or arrange, or provide an insight into the swirling emotions I felt inside. So on the morning of the wake, when I knew I’d hear one piece of bullshit after another from priests and politicians and a few neighbors too dumb to correctly memorize a cliché, I wanted my father to utter a few goddamn intelligent words that might illuminate the meaning of Billy’s death.

“Nothing,” he said, sipping his coffee.

 “What do you mean ‘nothing,’” I exploded, my sisters and my mother suddenly staring at me. “You sit there calmly,” I went on, determined to get him to say more, “and I know you know something—but you sit there as if I’m asking you the ball scores.”

“Rosey, my god you’ve got promise!” interjected my sarcastic sister Judy, “maybe you will graduate at the middle of your class. . . .”

“Shut up four eyes.” I stared at my father.

My mother walked over and put her hands on my shoulders. “Take it easy Rosey, we know you feel bad. . . .”

“I always feel bad,” I exploded once more, this time jumping to my feet and freeing myself from my mother’s limp grasp, “especially when I know there’s more to something, and there’s more to this, I know it. . . .”

“That’s just it Rosey,” said my father, also getting up and walking over to me, grabbing my shoulder firmly but gently until I faced him. “There’s nothing to make of it, life and death are acci­dents—take your sister for instance,” he said, pointing at Lonnie who was looking back surprisingly at him, “she was an accident, a wonderful, delightful one,” he smiled at the old family joke, “but an accident.”

“Sam!” my mother cried out, suddenly red in the face.

My father looked at me, his expression changing. “Do you think this is school, Rosey, some lesson we can all write down and memorize and repeat verbatim the next time? A lesson? What? That we shouldn’t go out when it’s dark? That we shouldn’t, or should, carry a gun with us? That God acts in strange ways? Come on Rosey, those aren’t lessons, they’re fears.”

“Well, what is there then?” asked Lonnie in her sincere, poised manner.

“Very little honey, as far as I know. Billy was a boy blessed with strength, and grace, and physical abilities none of us ever possessed, and it’s a shame we won’t see him do a backflip on the sidewalk in front of the house, no matter how he loved to show off. That was the treat he offered us in life. But his death is, well, just meaningless. We can cry and grieve over his loss—but it won’t enlighten us. For the moment there’s a little peace between our neighborhoods, but that’s more fright than wisdom.

“You’ll never be mayor dad,” said Judy, wittingly.

“That’s for sure,” my mother tried to laugh.

“I guess, Rosey,” my father looked at me, his voice lower now, his sincerity on his sleeve, “if I tried to understand it”—he paused, and seemed to wince, as if the words were painful, difficult to find—“. . . it’s taking the good and the bad together, knowing they don’t exist separately. If it’s a perfect backflip like Billy’s that pleases us one moment, then its absence makes us feel hollow—without it, we wouldn’t miss it. One doesn’t exist without the other. That’s life.”

“A true existentialist, I should have known,” said Judy, picking up her books as a horn sounded in front of the house.

“. . . so we feel bad,” my father went on, oblivious to Judy’s remark even as she kissed him on the cheek as she made her way through the kitchen, “because something made us feel good in the first place. It’s not that we shouldn’t grieve over our losses—if I know you Rosey, your eyes won’t be very dry at the cemetery to­day. It’s just that one person’s death—even mine or yours Rosey, won’t make us much smarter. The statues of Billy and that black kid are the mayor’s down payment on the governorship more than anything else, son. Our image of Billy doing a backflip is much more meaningful.” He put his arms around me and I hugged back. Lonnie left for school and kissed me on the forehead on the way out. My mother went upstairs, and my father filled both our cups with coffee.

“I’m glad, Rosey,” my father said, his voice taking on a confi­dential tone now that we were alone, “that you’re giving thought to these things. I’ve felt for a long time that being curious is more important than understanding—which always seem to allude us after all.”

“You make me curious,” I said. My father laughed, as if he were laughing at himself, a figure to be curious about.

“No, really.” I insisted.

“I’m not surprised,” he laughed again. But then he asked, “What do you mean?”

“Nobody around here thinks the way you do. At Cos’s house conversation is a rehash of the morning sports page. Dutch’s old man spends his time reciting household chores. And Danny’s . . . well, that’s another story.” From my pocket, I took a piece of pa­per I had folded carefully that morning, and I placed it on the ta­ble next to my father’s cup. He just looked at it.

“What is it?” he asked, finally.

“It’s a poem, Dad.”

“A poem?” He picked it up, the paper still folded, but he made no attempt to open it or read it.

“Something you wrote, Rosey?”

“Not exactly dad—I copied it over,” I replied.

“Can I look at it?”

“Sure, go ahead—that’s why I’m showing it to you.”

He read it. He did not look up at me after he recognized that it was his poem, which I’m sure was immediately. Instead, he read on slowly, his lips moving to the sound of the words as he spoke them to himself. He must have looked at the poem for a couple of minutes before looking up at me. When he did, that warm smile of his appeared.

“Good poem, huh?” he laughed.

“Sure is,” I said, feeling a strange sense of relief but not know­ing why. I hadn’t known what to expect—what does a man do when he’s exposed as a poet? Deny it? Confess? Claim it was an accident?

“So you found them huh? Wrote that one for an uncle of mine when he died—though, to tell the truth, I never knew him much, or thought much of him in fact.”

I nodded my head, adding, “Mom showed them to me—said not to say anything until you showed them to me. They’re good dad . . . I mean terrific. . . .”

“I spent some time with them, son—more time, more care than anyone knows, including your mom.”

“Why did you stop?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. Got tired of the privacy mostly. No one would publish them—no one would even look at them really. No big reason, no big deal.”

“Well, they seem special to me, Dad—I’ve read through them all, several times.”

My father laughed his quiet, tender laugh, and leaned forward and ran his hand through my hair, “Good . . . then I wrote them for one good goddamn reason, didn’t I,” he joked.

“I’m gonna read this one at the grave site today, dad—I think it’s appropriate. Is it okay?”

“I never ever read a poem in public. . . .”

“I won’t, Dad, just say the word,” I quickly offered.

“No . . . no,” he said, leaning back and sipping his coffee, and then shaking his head. “No, son—nobody ever asked me, that’s all,” he laughed to himself. “No . . . you go ahead, read it if you want. I’m flattered, really.”

Then he looked at me and winked. “But do me one favor, son—don’t mention that I wrote it.”

“Well, Dad . . . sure, if you say so,” I folded the poem and put it in my pocket. “But who should I say wrote it, Dad?”

“You,” he shot back with that wise, warm manner of his. “Let them think you wrote it Rosey, what the hell.”

 

* * * * * * * * * *

 “. . . at least here there’s some respect for the color of a man’s skin,” I heard one of Billy’s uncles whisper as we made our way to the grave site. People formed a circle around the freshly dug grave; next to it, the mahogany casket glistened—once again, Mr. Salvo, the undertaker, must have successfully equated expense with love; Billy’s family was poorer than most in the neighbor­hood, but with burials and funerals, it never seemed to matter much. Kingston Brown, I had noticed, had a similar casket.

At the center of the circle, directly across from the head of the casket, and right next to Billy’s mom and dad and little brother, was Leona. She seemed lost in the blackness of her dress and long gloves, the dark stockings and the veil that came down across her lovely face. At the wake, I couldn’t bring myself to say anything to her. I don’t know if she had given much thought to the timing of our first kiss and Billy’s death (which, I agonized over, must have occurred within minutes of each other)—perhaps the grief and accompanying pageantry of Italian condolences took her mind away from that matter; but I knew that sometime sooner or later I would appear in her dreamy melodrama of guilt—not a role, of course, I would have chosen for myself.

As the priest began eulogizing Billy for the last time, I couldn’t help think of the significance of the cold wind suddenly blowing in from the lake and the dark clouds rising from the horizon. I watched a rush of leaves twirl in a colorful dance into the open grave. Behind me I heard Cosmo sniffing, trying to keep the tears away. There was a small symphony of moans and cries until Billy’s mother cried out his name and, like a strange dark ap­plause, the whole crowd seemed to groan together. It was then the priest and Mr. Salvo, who’d arranged it for me, looked over and nodded and motioned to me to step forward.

“One of Billy’s playmates . . . ah, friends . . .” the priest caught himself as I walked over and stood next to him. “. . . one of Billy’s friends has composed a poem in remembrance of him, and he will read it for us now.”

I saw a couple of shrugged shoulders among a couple of friends, but otherwise I was too nervous to look at anyone—ex­cept Leona that is, who stood there with her eyes cast downward, her dark veil briefly a flutter in a sudden gust of cold wind. I knew she would not look at me. In her black dress, standing so solemn and serene between her parents and the parents of Billy, the scene looked for a moment like a negative of a bride’s photo­graph.

“Elegy . . .” I began, then, knowing that many of my friends and who knows how many others would be confused by the word, I added, “. . . Burial Poem for Billy.”

I had practiced reading the poem at least a dozen times in the mirror the previous night. Apparently, my dad wrote it for my uncle named Joe—and that’s the part I had to change in copying it over—inserting Billy. I felt my voice tremble as I started. From the corner of my eye, I saw Danny discreetly shaking his fist with his thumb up. I took a deep breath and read my father’s poem—which everyone thought, of course, was mine:

 

We step firmly, but with care

over the soil of this life.

It is the breath we take

that brings everything to the surface,

trees, springs, voices . . .

Under us, within us, roots strengthen

until we move among each other

with grace and respect.

 

You are there, Billy, standing

at the edge of a field,

the sun rising over your shoulder

as we shade our eyes

from the loving light.

 

It is the wind’s strange dance

that brings us together,

seeds blown across continents,

rivers of desire making their way

through dark, darker interiors.

What we end up knowing is so

little, so loving:

that we have had each other’s company,

and that is what we cherish in the world.

 

What can anyone ask for

except a modest acre of sky to

plant his hopes, a simple blossoming

of stars to guide us . . .

You are there, Billy, standing

at the edge of a field,

the sun rising over your shoulder

as we shade our eyes

from the loving light.

 

It wasn’t Billy’s mother’s gush of tears that brought tears to my eyes as I finished, nor was it Leona’s refusal to even glance at me—nor was it, to be honest, the thought of poor Billy himself, a few feet away, cold and motionless in the expensive coffin. I was thinking, strangely enough, of the fact that that was the first time anyone, any group of people, ever heard something that my father had written. And nobody except me knew that it was his even then.

“Lovely poem, lovely,” whispered the priest as he gently guided me back to my friends. “Thank you, son, I’m sure Billy enjoyed it.”

Even if Billy could hear it, which I didn’t believe, I thought to myself, he would have ridiculed it.

Danny shook my hand, and Cos gave me an affectionate punch in the arm. Carm came over in his expensive gray tweed suit:

“Nice, Bright Boy . . . beautiful,” he shook my hand, manly, gentlemanly, “you’re a talented little sonofabitch.”

They lowered the coffin into the ground. Mr. Salvo passed out flowers from the sympathy arrangements and people walked over and threw them onto the casket. Mike, Billy’s closest friend, broke down for a moment, but when we tried to comfort him he pushed us away and said he was fine. Leona lifted her veil and kissed a rose before tossing it into the grave. I had to turn away from that. A few more people, some whom I did not recognize, compli­mented me on the poem—two people even asked if they could get a copy of it. Johnny Pops motioned for us to get going. I picked up a carnation from the ground and walked over and tossed it on Billy’s casket. I forgave him for the push he gave me in front of the ice cream parlor. I pictured him doing his backflip in front of the house—I would have included that, I thought, in any poem I had written for him. “So long, Billy,” I found myself saying, two big tears running down my face.

I took a last look at Leona in black. She was opening the door of her father’s car. I knew that from that time on I didn’t have to compete anymore with a handsome, All-American type for the affections of the girl I loved; instead I had to compete the rest of my life with a goddamn saint!

 

. . . On the way home, in Johnny Pops’ Plymouth, the smell we had noticed earlier and had blamed on both the fumes of the pro­cession and, as Mike said, the proximity of tutsoonies, got worse.

“Jesus,” said Danny, holding his nose, “whoever’s blowin’ it out that bad,” and nodding toward Dutch, “better go see a fuckin’ doctor.”

“Open the window,” gagged Mike, his eyes still red from cry­ing.

“Smells more like a dead animal,” said Johnny, leaning his head out the window as he drove.

He was right, that’s what it smelled like. And at that moment, it struck me: the dead rats Cosmo was carrying in a bag several nights earlier. He never did explain it to me. I looked at him, and he winked. Of course, I didn’t say a word as we drove home—though I knew somewhere in Johnny’s car were stashed a couple of dead, rotting rats.