Born to Steal When the Mafia Hi Gary R. Weiss

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.They argued every morning, every night.My father was sort of like me.He used to like to go out and not come back.Couldn’t sit still.Had ants in his pants.I don’t think if there was no child involved they would have got married because they were always fighting.My aunt says they were fighting when they were dating.My father would wander off.It’s just like the same traits as me because that’s the way I am.That’s the way I was with my marriage, or even dating Stefanie.I was always lying to her about something.… My mother always used to say that.‘You’re just like your fucking father!’“Something would always happen.The bus was stuck.Cab crashed.He fell in the Hudson River, he had to swim home.Some stupid shit.So he would leave on a Friday, say he was working late, not go home until, like, Sunday.So he would say he was coming home at five o’clock from work and he’d be home at nine o’clock.”NICK: “I was never home, working fourteen, sixteen hours a day.After work when I got the time I would get the chance to maybe hang out with the guys, something like that.So either way I was coming home late, whether I got done early at work or I got done late at work.Then I would go basically straight home.If I was done early I would go out with the salespeople, we go have a couple drinks, dinner, just hang out, then go home.Never got home early enough.The kids were just asleep.That went on for years.“There was always tension and a lot of arguing with his mother.You drink, you do this.Drugs, this, that, whatever.That went on a majority of many years.Arguments and stuff like that.So I would figure not to come home the next day.[Laughing.] If you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t—when I do I don’t want to be damned.That’s what made me want to hang out.During the week, I’ll be honest with you, I never looked to go home.”Louis emerged from the pressure cooker of the Pasciuto household as what might be known today as a “difficult child.” But on Staten Island in those days he was known as a “brat”—at least, outside of the Pasciuto household.He was also known as a “monster.”Louis would not dispute those characterizations.No matter what Nick and Fran wanted, Louis was not going to do it.They disagreed with each other on just about everything.So why should he be any different?LOUIS: “I didn’t listen because I had my own opinion about things.My dad used to tell me you could go out from five o’clock at night and you have to be back at twelve.I used to say, ‘Dad, that’s seven hours.What’s the difference if I leave at eleven and come back at six in the morning? It’s still the same seven hours!’ I used to try to make them believe it.I used to sell him into fucking believing that.Or I’ll even come home at four, so I’m only going to be out five hours.I’m out two hours less.You got two hours on me, I used to tell him.What’s better than that? It didn’t work.But I would leave anyway.”Nick tried hard not to be like his own father, who had been a stern taskmaster before leaving the family when Nick was ten.He tried to be Louis’s friend even as Louis got worse and worse, more and more defiant.The family car stolen and wrecked when he was seventeen and not even licensed.He got a beating for that but it was no big deal.Boys will be boys.Besides, times were changing.Kids showed no respect.Nick’s father had demanded respect.“Lots of times he’d smack you around just in case you did something wrong,” said Nick.“That means, if I do something wrong, he already hit me for it.I didn’t want to be that way with Louis.” Nick tried not to hit.It was tough.NICK: “Having no respect for authority.That’s basically what it turned out to be.There was no rules but Louis’s rules.I had rules too.‘But those are your rules, Dad.This is what I do.’ Okay.That’s it.But I can tell you one thing, when you do it your way, those rules—they’re not going to work.It’s going to come back and bite you in the ass.He comes back with, I’m old, I’m this.I’m a man.Okay.Very nice.[Laughing.] It was so many years of not being like my father did with me, where I had like no opinion.I gave you the chance to give your opinion and I gave my opinion and you shit on it.So you know what? I’m not going to waste my breath on it.Just don’t break my balls, don’t break your mother’s balls.Go kill yourself.”Since Louis was a rebellious kid, Nick and Fran were glad that they didn’t live in Bensonhurst.In Staten Island, they could keep an eye on him and keep him off the streets, and away from the people nobody liked to talk about.Everybody knew them.They were in the family.They were cousins and uncles.Friends.People down the block.Nick used to shine shoes at the Club 62 on Fort Hamilton Parkway, where the men in the tailored suits would give him $30 tips—at a time when his father took home $50 a week.It was hard to grow up in Bensonhurst and not know Guys.Fran and Nick had friends, relatives, in that life.They weren’t proud of them, didn’t boast about them.They were just there.Friends like Gerard and Butchie.Relatives like Fran’s Uncle Joe.And it wasn’t an Italian phenomenon, really.Jewish people of the over-sixty generation have similar memories—of Uncle Morris the bookie, of gangsters on street corners of neighborhoods like Brownsville.But the old working-class, second-generation Eastern European Jewish neighborhoods were dying or gone by the 1960s, while Italian neighborhoods, and their Guys, were growing and thriving through the twenty-first century.Plenty of street kids were still hoping to become Guys.The glamour, the perks, the advantages of being a Guy have never gone away in places like Bensonhurst.Guys broke the law and got away with it.That was a powerful thing in Brooklyn in the 1960s.It appealed to a lot of neighborhood kids who didn’t have much else to admire [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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