A Matter of Love in da Bronx Read online

  Paul Argentini

  A Matter of

  Love

  in da Bronx

  A Novel

  A 1950's Diary

  A Matter of Love in da Bronx

  Copyright © 2013, by Paul Argentini

  Cover Copyright © 2013 by Sunbury Press, Inc. Cover art by Lawrence von Knorr.

  NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information contact Sunbury Press, Inc., Subsidiary Rights Dept., 50-A West Main St., Mechanicsburg, PA 17055 USA or [email protected].

  For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Sunbury Press, Inc. Wholesale Dept. at (855) 338-8359 or [email protected].

  To request one of our authors for speaking engagements or book signings, please contact Sunbury Press, Inc. Publicity Dept. at [email protected].

  FIRST SUNBURY PRESS EDITION

  Printed in the United States of America

  April 2013

  Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-62006-215-9

  Mobipocket format (Kindle) ISBN: 978-1- 62006-216-6

  ePub format (Nook) ISBN: 978-1-62006-217-3

  Published by:

  Sunbury Press

  Mechanicsburg, PA

  www.sunburypress.com

  Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania USA

  In life's all majesty,

  Supreme is love.

  By this bestselling author:

  Fiction

  A Matter Of Love In Da Bronx

  The Fourth Nail – An Historical Novel

  Jim – A War-torn Love Story

  Non-Fiction

  A Treatise – The Art of Casting A Fly

  Vera C. Argentini – Artist

  Elements of Style for Screenwriters The Essential Manual for Writers of Screenplays

  Random House Bestseller

  MUSICALS! Directing School and Community Theatre

  Robert Boland and Paul Argentini, Scarecrow Press

  Full-length plays

  The Secret of The Sea Island Mansion

  King’s Mate

  Massachusetts Artists Foundation Playwriting Fellowship

  One Act Plays

  No Gas For Nick

  Pearl Seed

  My Pen Name’s Mark Twain

  (written and performed in sixth grade)

  Theatre Odyssey 2011 Ten-minute Play Festival

  The Ordinance – First Prize Winner

  Sarasota, Florida

  - * -

  To Lisa Maria Argentini

  Perspicacious – Tenacious – Loving – Talented - Ineffable

  CHAPTER 1

  HE WAS THERE. Abed. Alone. Nothing different. He knew that before he opened his eyes. The same anchored sleepiness; the same heavyhanging lids; the same thickclogging tobacco spit plastered uglytasting hard in his throat; the same chill of the sheets; the same gelid morning light and air; the same dayold prayer unanswered for nearly two decades: Will this be the day something happens that will change my life? The upholsterer's invocation raised with fervor in the morning, lowered at night with hope. He firmfisted his erect penis and massaged his sack as he strained to stretch himself then kicked vigorously to move out from the covers. At least the usual erotic dream hadn't stolen the pleasure of consciously spurtgushing jism. He stroked himself hard several times rapidly, then slowly, and then let the pleasurable sensations drift like smoke in his veins. Better not. Isn't really that great doing a one-two-three job. It can wait. Besides, it's Wednesday, and that means the movies. Say it. That kind. Fuck flics. Quick meant death just once so he moved rapidly from his horizontal position to one where he hovered over the toilet bowl aiming his now detumescent organ accurately to bank the stream of water silently off the porcelain side in consideration of sleeping parents. By Golly! A remembered midstream thought, there was something different in this day besides a change of underwear! Thirty-five years old. Today. Some celebration. He waited patiently, moronically for the last drops to dribble off without his aid, then two-stepped sideways to appear dimfaced before the medicine cabinet mirror. He pulled the tiny chain for the light to see what he saw. He was thin. He was tall. He was handsome? Yes? He was Sam Scopio. No Tah-rah! No parade. No drumroll. Rather the canyon-gasping flush of toilet. Just Sam Scopio. His eyebrows neat, thread-like streaks above lusterfilled, devilish smiling Latin eyes. He patted hard at his cheeks, as if perhaps they would push inside and disappear. Any facial adornment was an amercement he imposed to honor his Caesar Romero nose. A sharp chin with a deep cleft made his face sharper, and tougher to shave, which he set about to do now that toothpaste had been brushed extensively in a futile effort to revive his mouth into something less cigar and more human. This moment was no exception to all the others when he'd look himself in the mirror and not have his soul darken at what he saw before him. In his innocent youth, he'd stare at the reflection to wonder about his looks. His face? Was it not handsome? Was that not a thing of beauty? Did people find him pleasing to look at? Even girls, maybe? Indeed, as far as he knew, he was attractive; perhaps even an Adonis. More Rudolph Valentino-ish. Then, the moment came, the revelation, somehow, when he realized all kids, universally, found beautiful the image of them in the mirror. It was just natural. Self-made self-ego preservation. For some, immaturity and hence their beauty, was forever; while others, like Sam, youth's misconceptions all too fleeting. Wisdom begat wisdom. He questioned if what he saw of himself he really saw. It took deep, insightful explorations into this question, and a conversation he overheard in a high school toilet that placed him by a group of rulebreaking smokers as the likeliest candidate for residency in the Hollywood Walk of Fame did he see his...differentness; did he learn the beauty of truth nowhere diminished its pain, nowhow set him free from the bondage of overly and self-assumed grotesquerie. Auto-da-fe, a Sam Scopia production. Period. No one need now answer the questions the mirror asked. Besides, it was too late. Self-protection was at work. So reaching inside himself, he did the only thing he was able: He sought refuge outside of refuge and cast away the need to be handsome, to be acceptable, even just presentable--not knowing what else, too, had gone out of him with it. Part of that turned out to be the spark that fired warmth to human warmth. He was suspicious of anyone who showed an interest in a bankrupt being, such as he was. He learned to keep hidden the honest response, buried wishes and desires and found he could live with a sick heart. None of this kept an ache from surfacing, or hastened its resubmergence; nor did he get used to heavyhearted sicksoul feelings. One wound was there always. Luce. That was her name. It meant “light.” His sister. And she was the light of his life. She glowed like a beacon reaching out to be remembered to crash and clambor and pain him deeply making him wince. Like the sunshine and joyousness she was. She had a champagne bubbly laugh at small and happy things. Two years older he was when his sister would hold his hand to walk to school. Then one day he could not go and she went alone and never came back. He could not understand the reason anyone would bury His Sunshine under twisted pine branches in Bronx Park. She was left nude and broken and breathless and bloody. So anxious he was to see her and hold her when he was told that was where they were going and when she appeared cold and gray and painted he fainted and was traumatized they say for a month. He used crutches to hold up the pain so he could try to run out from under the burden. He nearly forgot how to speak. It was long ago but the pain reached as far as his bed every
night when he lay down to go to sleep. She became his secret. He merely adopted the memory as part of his world just as he would if forced to walk with sharpsided pebbles in each shoe. He sought no subterfuge. No avenue to exorcise. Not in raucous behavior, nor being the funnyman, nor the irony of seeking attention. Just the opposite: He pretended he walked invisible, no one could see him, and he tried not to see them; that he could neither speak to nor hear them and offered a response only to whatsoever he wished. He needed only the blindman's cane to complete the trilogy of retreat. With the accretion, nothing got in, nothing got out. Not that it would ever come to his mind, but if he were asked to recollect the last time he shed an emotional tear, he would say he never, ever did any such thing. It was a startling and terrifying first fact for a pre-pubescent boy to confront: There wasn't anyone, anywhere who could give a care no less cry loud, soft or silent over his predicament. So be it. But! Good Lord! So is it always? Was there hope for hope? At least he was aware that just going through the motions of living would bring him to the periphery of social intercourse, but, over the years, he'd become too gun shy, too timid to hazard close to the mainstream. To expose himself flagrantly by going to a dance! Not he. Not to a beach, not to church, not anyplace where he could be picked out of the crowd to take the horrendous risk of catching the look, the snicker, the behind-the-hand remark that would fry his gizzard. Dark places he liked. Movie houses. Bars where he'd disappear into the shadows and savor tobacco and beer. Blackness neutralized visual judgments. Places where pretty girls would wave for him to go to them he would drop to the floor to pretend he was tying his shoelace. Besides the need to earn money, there was one other vital exception to a complete withdrawal, a demanding passion that overwhelmed all else which poked a hole in his black sky, a creative talent he had to satisfy in a kitchen. That was on Friday nights, two days away, he thought as he soaped the lean slopes of his face. He hated to shave. When he looked into the mirror and found his face half-covered with lather he tried to avoid Sam-to-Sam eyeball contact which invariably sent him into a psychological, biographical time warp. Chirpy Donohue. Now! Where in the hell did that name come from? His mind shot back to third grade, Miss Cunningham was his teacher, and red-haired Chirpy Donohue, his girlfriend, who, during recess one day, grabbed him by his fly and said it was time she saw his peanuts. He knew what she meant whatever she called it, but his penis was not going to be put on public display, so there! Up to this moment, he wondered about that decision. First, he learned soon after some other Lothario accommodated Chirpy, and she reciprocated by pulling down her panties and let him have a good long look at her bare underside which he later described in the boys room most unsatisfactorily, "There really wasn't much there..." And, second, to this very day, Sam was never offered any such similar exchange of views.

  --Chirpy, would you like to give me a birthday present? Lord! What ever are you doing, Sam? A wish? A normal desire? Dangerous. Better stick a finger in the hole to stop the leak while feelings are still anesthetized.

  He couldn't leave the bathroom fast enough, tiptoeing swiftly over worn, cold waxed linoleum, back to his bedroom and into his clothes. Letting up the shade, he found mist against the soot-stained pane. Rain? Maybe. Raincap, raincoat, though, and wearing them back into the kitchen for the ritual lunchsandwichmaking. Two slices of bread, Italian, stale. Take the hard outside piece so no one else need have it. Goodboy! Next, salami, two slices. No! Celebrate! Three make it! Okay, four! and by Friday it'll be no more? So what? A little mustard, yes. Now to pack it. He reached into his undecorated sanbenito to retrieve a small paper bag, and a little square of waxed paper which had already seen two-day's use. By Saturday, after the week's work, it was all done into the trash, and Monday he got a brand new piece of waxed paper and bag! Just like he was trained by his mother.

  --Figlio? I make you coffee? She'd come slippering out in her worn robe; her hair, morning style mournfully loose. Smallish-fattish, huge black questioning eyes; big squishy lips, pudgy cheeks. Pretty, once.

  He turned to her, surprised at the unexpected company that brought expectations. He shook his head. After all these years, Ma, no? Why should you make me coffee? How can I let you make me coffee? I shouldn't be here in this house in the first place. I'm a big boy. I should have a place of my own, and I would if you didn't need the salary I bring home week after year. I don't have breakfast here because it's so depressing in this minimal room and then I run less chance of seeing you. And him. How's Pop?

  --Your father... She said something. The sins of the father are borne by the children. No. Incorrect. Singular. The sin of the father is borne by Sam. I fix your sandwich?

  --No, Ma. Come on! For god's sakes. I know you want to show love but don't you see it comes out like pity?

  --You sure?

  --It's in my pocket. All done. Go back to sleep. Go back to his bed.

  --Yes, figlio mio. You be for supper? Any warmth in her words was lost to the stark room.

  --No, Ma. Wednesday. I go bowling with the guys. Internal pinch. Hard to lie to her. Maybe pizza and beer. Maybe. Expect nought, disappoints not.

  --You sure? I leave warm for you the supper anyway...

  --Sam! Walking toward the toilet.

  My father? Up this early? Haven't seen him at this time in years. There's a change for the day. Suppose he could've remembered. Peculiar looking in his long johns, bare feet and bony body; bald; sad face, whiskery. --Morning.

  --This weekend. We wax the floor of the school gym. Still toilet walking.

  --Pop, I work all week... Disappeared. Behind the door. Slam. Did you really forget, Pa, or are you still making me pay? I'm going, Ma. Watch me go, Ma. It's not too late as long as I'm here! Mental telepathy doesn't work. Not me to you, not you to me! You issued me on this, my birthday and you unable to remind yourself? Am I such a zero in your lives except for counting my pay Friday nights? I can understand him not saying anything, but you? How sweet the martyrdom, yet. The instinct to flee, however, was strong and right, he knew that. He couldn't fast enough make it out the door and down the two tenement flights thick with greasy air. Once out on Van Ness Avenue, he allowed himself to notice: She didn't notice. Say again. Sure, maybe the old man didn't remember, but how could she forget what she was doing thirty years ago today? Was I such a disappointment I'd go away if they ignored the day I was born? Maybe a surprise for tonight. Sure. Baloney. Expect nought, disappoints not. Ain't that the truth?

  Water droplets sheeting the dawn like a tent made a spiderweb frazzle of streetlamp and auto light. Walk the ghostly block to Morris Park Avenue, then; decide what to do at six-fifteen ayem. Take the bus? Nay. Shank's mare. Neigh. Save the fare. Yeah! That slight sliver of sun's promise wouldn't betray him? Here in the street, he could sense it could, of course it would, so he'll walk past the benches against the high wall on Morris Park until he got to the station at 180th Street. It will rain! So? So challenge fate. If you want something different this day, start out doing something different. The same place waited for him no matter what the transportation: the Sanitary Upholstery Shop, which ran from the East Farms agora to under the elevated train a spit-and-a-half from the Bronx Zoo. Take the bus and be there a half-hour early so it can be stolen by the coistrel? Okay, he'd walk; he'd take the short cut under the el; he'd be at the deli in thirty-five minutes. This doesn't make a change! You haven't taken the bus more than five times in seventeen years! Do it differently! Take the bus! That's different? A taxi would be different. But hardheeled steps of military-like precision carried him from the thoroughfare to the point of stubborn no-return even with the warning of thick and blackening clouds that delivered like the call of the crapshooter: Come drizzle, come rain, come cloudburst! Pick up you overflowing pot! Beg to report, in case you don't know it, it's a sky douche so set up your pace, Sir, walk the faster in the wet; take faster, longer, deeper strides, yank up your collar, button up, tighten your belt. Don't you see you're supposed to be doing that to your life, too? You're getting
soaked both ways! I would walk in this stuff for thirty days if I could be irretrievably drawn to a distant shore where I'd be seen no more on pauper's door, or do you pronounce it Papa's? Thoughts hand thick turning like a corkscrew in my brain to pop my atman like a cork from a bottle, so whistle a tune, hurry, before the prayers start and deprive me of my aspiration, too. Do, blindly, do. Go the journey.

  In the shop's doorway, he knew, with his cap floating on his head as a dishrag atop rotted seaweed, his raincoat a waterbloated blotting cloth, and his thicksoled shoes tight with squishy-soaked socks, that he was a jerk, a mentally deficient for not taking the bus. What a day to challenge Fate. Pneumonia, too. From deep the pockets he pulled them to see what something palm dry could be, then looked toward the deli, longingly, a block and a half away. He walked to save the fare to buy his breakfast, and if he didn't continue on to there right now, this day's breakfast would be lost to him forever. Every morning, six days a week, he spent the saved bus money for a lemon-filled donut and a bottle of Pepsi which would carry him through--barely--to noon. How would he survive the morning without a thing to eat? He wouldn't. He'd die. He looked again the deli. He closed his eyes and turned away. He couldn't make it, not because he was dreadfully soaked, though physically able, but it would just be too dumb. Instead, he let himself into the mouldysmelling, dampfeeling, bloodraining upholstery shop.

  It was one large highceilinged room. Four walls. One held the front door through which he entered. Its huge dirtscreened windows blocked with an assortment of stuffed furniture waiting to be done. Another, to the left, was crammed with bolts of fabric, some of which bore imprints going back to the first War. The third wall, to the right, held bins of supplies: tacks, staples, twine, thread, springs, cambric, welting cord, cotton batting, burlap, nails, sprays, glues, chalk, webbing, spring edge, frame edge roll, grommets, vents, zippers, buttons, button making dies and cutters, hog rings, pliers, bottles, jugs, jars, with something in boxes, some not. The far wall was taken up with a large fabric cutting work table and a sewing machine. Far back on its right, a door led to a one-car garage-sized room where the reupholstery candidates had to stop in the name of the law to be disinfected, sanitized. Also, it held foam cushions and stuffings. Next to that door, the toilet, an exercise in extravagance compared to a dirt hole: a john, a black scabby, cold water sink, and a browny 25-watt bulb that tried to hide the ugly nakedness of the cubicle with its gasping light. Paper was imported with the patron. In the large room, suspended, fluorescent light fixtures held sooty blueish-gray bulbs which worked flickeringly at best with the one or two that worked most of the time over Sam's work station.