The first thing my cousin Mikey does after high school is he takes his graduation money from the family and runs off to California. The money was for him to fly back and see the old country, maybe get in touch with his roots or some such thing. Those would be in Reggio, Calabria, but Mikey goes the other direction, all the way to Hollywood. This was in 1972. He was eighteen and skinny, with one of those hippie shag haircuts, and—you gotta love this—he thinks he’s got musical talent. He took his guitar.
I’m only two years older than Mikey, but I’m the one had to get him back to Little Italy. He was crashing in Hollywood with a guy he used to jam with in school. The guy’s family is tight with us LiDeccas. So it’s no secret where he was. Mikey never got basic stuff like that, like how to do a thing without the whole world knowing about it. It was like he was born with part of his brain missing.
“You made a mistake,” I explained to him in the terminal at LAX. “You have responsibilities, Mikey. Who do you think you are?” I couldn’t pay full attention to him with all those L.A. women around. Blondes. Miniskirts. I miss the seventies.
Mikey nodded and looked like some dog you’d kick just because he expected it. “I was looking for something to say.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“But I don’t know what it is yet.”
“Me, neither. So, you do what you have to do, Mikey—Jesus.”
In New York we got back to business, which was LiDecca Brothers Food. Just so you know, it was founded in 1921. It was fish and seafood at first, then we got into produce and dairy. And whatever else needed doing. Me and Mikey’s job was servicing the vending machines. We had them in five boroughs and parts of Jersey. Mostly they were candy, snacks, and sodas, but some were hot coffee and tea, which meant cups to reload and unsold product to dump and creamer going bad.
Mikey was a perfectionist, a time-waster. By the end of the day I wanted to kick one of those hot beverage machines to pieces. I had a woman friend out in the Bronx I’d see while Mikey fussed around, making sure everything was shiny and clean, and she made the job more than tolerable.
Some days after work we’d go to Mikey’s house on Grand. It was an older place, with a piano in the family room and always beer in the fridge. Mikey’s little sisters, they were the skinniest, loudest girls you could imagine, but they were kinda funny, too, and they’d bring us the beers. Christina, his mom, liked me, and I could never figure why. She played the piano. She made the best cannoli I ever ate. But she had her rules. One was, if you talked about the mob or made guys, she’d smack you hard on the cheek and send you out. June, the year before, I said something about Joseph Colombo getting what he deserved, and that’s exactly what she did to me. Kinda hurt, but it mostly made me feel small and mad.
One day Mikey closed the doors of the family room on all of them and pulled a big roll of cash out of his pocket. “I’m going to California for a year. I’m gonna play music and get famous.”
“Where’d you get the money?” I asked.
“Pop. We had a talk about me taking off with the graduation money for Italy. I’m gonna pay it all back. But then Pop surprised me. Told me he understands dreams because of the single-A ball he played for Philly. He only lasted a year because he couldn’t adjust to the off-speed stuff.”
“Yeah, yeah, we know all that.”
“But the point is he took a year to play the game and try to make it happen. He knows I have this dream to play music and be famous, so he’s giving me a year off to do it. At the end of that time, maybe I’ve made it big. And if I haven’t, I’ll be able to come back to LiDecca Brothers, work my way up. And this money is to get me started in music.”
I felt some anger, I’ll admit it. I always liked my Uncle Jimmy—Mikey’s dad. My own pop would never do that. Never. We don’t have dreams in our line of the family. We have responsibilities. “Well, lucky you, Mikey.”
“You come out and visit anytime you want.”
“I’ll stay here and do my job. And I’ll be moving up in the business while you’re out in California goofin’ off.”