Zinger’s Place

By Victor Greto

Zinger was a barber who was actually a bookie, although he may have been a bookie who was actually a barber.

Nick had no idea about what kind of operation Zinger ran there; he only vaguely knew Zinger’s operation was out of his father’s league. Zinger was a squat, hairy man, with nut-brown skin and a face that looked like a freshly-squeezed orange. In his shop, Zinger was always on the phone while alternately cutting whatever hair was in reach, then furiously scratching figures and calculations on a notepad. Zinger had only two hands, but he juggled his two passions, barbering and gambling, with expert diligence.

Nick had no idea where Zinger got his name, but he matched it with Zinger’s face, that squat, vise-abused face, and thought of the name in acid-like terms; that is, he heard Zinger’s language as bitter, taunted, filled with zingers that shut people up. Nick knew no Italian, but zingaro means gypsy, and Zinger had the look of the stereotypical gypsy. The dark and oily skin, the pitch-dark curly hair, and those slitted, shifty eyes. Actually, that described a lot of Nick’s relatives, even a brother or two, but there was something more sinister, mythical, more open to stereotypes about Zinger, in the way he carried himself, in the way he winked with a grimace that seemed to pucker his entire squat body.

Nick had just been told by his mother that his old man had been at Zinger’s Place, the barbershop, and had been there for more than a day. She had pulled Henry out of school and told him to get his old man.

He suddenly felt how small he was, how alone in his car he was, how silly even that this was his car and he could drive it and go out and do things that yesterday he wouldn’t have dared. He looked in the rear-view mirror for a sign from his eyes, a mark that might distinguish him as ready for the job: he only saw the brown, then the black pupil, then the white, and then his face, acne, the shades of whiskers, and his irregular teeth as he grimaced. He shook his head as he put the car into drive, afraid to turn toward the back door where he just left his mother; he knew she was watching him from the window of the kitchen, holding her coffee, not smiling, looking.

Yet, as soon as he was out of the driveway, the swelling returned to his chest and he drove past the front of the house toward Chester Pike, the road that led to Eddystone.

Nick tenaciously convinced himself that by grasping the steering wheel as he did now with both hands, by looking ahead and knowing where he was going with both eyes wide open, he knew what he was about and what lay ahead: independence, a woman, some kind of a career. It was the feeling or thought that boldly revealed something important about him. It was the words in his mind, not on the page; the feelings in his heart, not how they were manifested to others; the preparation, never the execution.

As Nick drove down the Pike, he could see the deterioration of the streets, the bus stops (that is, the benches, some overturned, others looking as though they were made never to be sat upon), the traffic lights hooded in black.

Eddystone was in economic decline; its great claim to fame was its role in World War II as a place where munitions were made; it also had been the home of a major railroad. The war ended, though, as did the reign of the railroad, and so went the town of Eddystone, weakly giving way to suburbs.

Yet, Eddystone was an echo of a pretty town: its side streets were lined with stony singles; it was tough to make these types of light-stone-colored houses look dilapidated, although many residents tried. In a way, it was frustrating to walk down the streets of Eddystone because it was so beautiful and tried to be so ugly: the stone houses smacked against decrepit businesses, open fields of rampant weeds propped next to graffiti-laden fences that hid even older houses from the outside world. But, given a selected sunny day in the good old summer time, perhaps a Fourth of July parade blaring its way down the street and men and women peopling the sidewalks and edges of the black streets, you suddenly had a nice town in the old-America style.

But it was not to be. Nick never remembered the sun ever shining on Eddystone. The sky froze into a solid block of dirty gray ice whenever he approached its invisible walls, and the streets lay deserted. Yet the atmosphere of Eddystone facilitated his determination and the sudden power he felt within himself. Eddystone was not a community to him, but a place to penetrate, a region to enter and extract his old man.

Once, years ago, he and Anthony were conned into going to Zinger’s for a haircut. Nick’s grandfather had bought the both of them a watermelon. Nick and Anthony loved watermelon, and they both ate so much of it their stomachs hurt. Then the squat old man told them they were both going for a ride with him. He took them to Zinger’s, on Seville Avenue. Zinger gave them both crew cuts. Anthony cried, and Nick couldn’t help but look at his grandfather and the squinting joy in his eyes as he watched the tears roll down Anthony’s face.

It was an adult, alien world: his grandfather, Zinger, all those uncles and aunts he could never understand; the duplicity, the resentment, the unbridled joy at others’ tears. He hated it. It angered him. Yet he had curiously wanted to be a part of it. He loathed being a child, then a kid, now a teenager. To be young was to be ignored. He noticed their eyes scanning him, sizing him up in a split-second, then rejecting anything he could possibly offer. He wasn’t fully human yet; as if he were just something to play with, to molest, to tease, and then toss aside.

Zinger was smart enough to jump on the name Barber of Seville. It was an old white square building that squatted next to a field of weeds.

Nick never thought much about Zinger until Zinger was caught by the police. It became a joke at home. The local paper printed the headline: Local Barber Clipped. His father laughed for days. Zinger wasn’t in jail very long. He opened up business as soon as he got out. Nick’s father said he had more customers than before.

Nick parked across the street from the barbershop. All the things he saw, from the street to the sidewalk to the storefront to the sky to the weedy field were shades of grainy, celluloid, gray.

Nick felt his own footsteps as he walked across the street; he even touched his body, the sides of his torso, and saw himself, in his mind’s eye, crossing the street. He should have been wearing a suit, a fedora, his eyes narrowed with purpose, determined, his pockets bulging. Instead he wore cheap white sneakers, jeans, a white polo shirt that two older brothers had worn before him.

Doorknob, hand, cracked, dry skin, the tinkle of the bell, and he was in. His eyes were flooded with color.

First came the light, very bright and yellow, like the sun’s light, only more naked, merciless. He could see hairline cracks and wrinkles in the white and yellowed speckled linoleum floor, in the quarter-moon strands of hair that lay about in spots, lonely and fetal, aborted and forgotten. The tinkle of the bell still in his ear, he looked up and saw Zinger standing – squatting, actually, for when Zinger stood he squatted erect, his body a squint fighting the light – in front of a massy mirror that framed the wall panel of a barber vanity. He had three of these vanities. All three were loaded with assorted bottles of hair oil, aftershave, shampoo, electric razors, clippers, combs and brushes.

Zinger stood at the middle one, in front of the mirror and on the phone, scribbling on a pad and pencil. An old man sat in the barber chair: thinning gray and white hair, wet with something Zinger had put on it.

The old man saw Nick first, via the mirror, and he simply stared at Nick, his eyes moving up and down his body; he remained expressionless, poker-faced, his eyes like marbles. Nick had to think about why he was in the shop.

Nick shoved his hands in his pockets and turned away from the gaze`. He collided with Zinger’s eyes, also via the mirror. Zinger wore a squashed grin, and his mashed expression scrutinized Nick more actively than the old man. Nick could tell Zinger couldn’t remember who he was.

It seemed to take an awful long time to be placed, but this was because Zinger was alternately viewing Nick and the point in space where the telephone conversation occurred. Even during this ping-pong exchange of Zinger’s eyes, Nick felt the old man’s stare on him, like fish eyes. He forced himself to look outside.

Gray. Weeds.

Finally, Zinger hung up the phone, shoved the bit of pencil behind his ear, and laughed heartily. “Nick!” he shouted. “Nick Verti!” It seemed a triumph of recognition for Zinger, and Nick nodded obligingly in response.

“Who?” the old man breathed out, still gazing suspiciously; he mercifully turned to Zinger, who stuck his stubby fingers back in the old man’s hair.

“Nick Verti,” Zinger grimaced, massaging the scalp: “Marc’s kid.”

“Ah,” the old man said, and his entire expression relaxed. Nick lowered his hunched shoulders and leaned back against the door.

“He’s here for his haircut,” Zinger went on absently, looking at the old man’s reflection.

“Actually,” Nick began, but Zinger shook his head and stopped him. Zinger started smacking the gum Nick just noticed was in his mouth, and wobbled his head No, both kindly and matter-of-factly.

Zinger laughed. Nick leaned back and felt his hair. It was long, down to his shoulders, and it curled above his forehead and over his ears. But now Zinger was ignoring him, concentrating on whatever he was putting in the old man’s hair.

This was like everything else: with a nod of the head and a facial expression, his old man’s family said things others picked up on and that he did not understand. Like this was supposed to mean he had to shut up and wait for another mysterious signal from Zinger; perhaps a slight nod, yet another wink, a shake of the head. It was the price of being a kid, being in the dark.

Nick leaned against the door and waited.

It was a fairly large-sized single room with the barber chairs taking up the left wall as you entered. On the right wall hung a multitude of black and white pictures, of members of the family, and an occasional locally-famous person Zinger had clipped. Above the pictures protruded an old air conditioner with red, white and green streamers hanging limply. The streamers never stood erect, but made a great show of it in the summer when the machine ran both steadily and shrilly.

A large push broom leaned in the corner of the right wall, near a partition that blocked a small back area where a trapdoor was. Next to the broom was a trash can with a swinging lid and a dustpan. From the ceiling swirled two fans; the ceiling itself was made of small speckled white tiles.

I mention the trapdoor in passing because Nick, even with his eyes half-closed, was thinking about it and the room below. He knew that’s where his father was playing cards. It was an old, woody, smoke-filled room with a pool table and round tables appropriate for playing poker or pinochle and bemoaning the state of the world. Large naked bulbs hung near the corners and over the tables.

Nick had been there only once before, and then with his older brother, Vincent; they also had gone to retrieve their father, but Nick had remained behind the façade of Vincent. His brother had done all the talking, had blocked the smoke, obliterated the light, shielded him from the language. Kind of. For Nick held vivid memories of the light, smoke, language and action – he just didn’t have to do anything about it or with it. It was just a year or so ago, but Nick now thought of himself then as a kid. He recalled seeing Father O’Hara, the pastor of the church his family attended, sitting with the others, playing pinochle in one of the corners of the room. Even with Vincent in front of him, Nick could not help but wince each time he heard a curse. He heard plenty of them when Eddie Boma had told Johnny Skooch to settle down, to watch his language, that the Father was here. “What the fuck do I care that the Father’s here?” the Skooch had said. “If he’s here he chose to be here. Fuck him and fuck you and fuck every damn wop and mick here.” Most of them had laughed, and Nick saw, out of the corner of his eye, Father O’Hara, apparently oblivious, concentrating on his cards.

In what seemed a million years ago, it had been Father O’Hara who had listened impatiently to one of Nick’s elementary school confessions, in the darkened musty curtained closeness of the confessional, and the Father had asked him a question about one of the great sins – it was either cursing or lying or disobeying his parents (because, before he ever entered the confessional, Nick always reviewed in his mind what numbers to place before the triad of sins: Did I curse thirty-five times? Lie forty-eight times? Disobey my parents four times?). He couldn’t remember which ones, and he did not answer the man, but his hands, held together in prayer, felt clammy and drooped downward as he looked around the woody and leathered darkness, and he saw, out of the corner of his shamed eye, the shadowy face of O’Hara looking at him, turning his profile, looking at him, turning his profile, then saying: “Come on. Are you stupid?” He could not answer, just stayed there, kneeling, until O’Hara slammed the sliding door shut.

The doorknob hit him on the tailbone and he jumped forward, startled.

A tall, thin blond-haired woman sauntered in, brushed Nick with a sidelong glance, her head tilted, her mouth pursed and pouting and eyes slowly moving. She had no ass.

“Zinger honey,” she murmured eyes half-closed in the mirror. Zinger remained concentrated on the man’s hair, although he had long finished putting whatever he was putting into it.

“What’s up, Barb?” he said, his eyes finally meeting her reflection.

She refused to answer him and kissed the back of his neck. Nick even saw the flick of a red tongue and he blushed.

“What’s up, Barb?” Zinger repeated.

“Grocery money,” she lilted.

It was comic the way Zinger then shifted his hips toward her as though showing his ass to the rear of the shop. She reached into his left pants pocket. Nick saw her hand fondle his balls; he then looked quickly up to Zinger who seemed impassive. She pulled out a few bills. Nick couldn’t see what they were.

She again kissed the back of his neck, then slid a bony finger across Zinger’s still-extended pants-tightened ass as she traipsed back toward the door. Nick stepped aside and tried to concentrate solely on her eyes, but they seemed as glassy as Zinger’s mirror, and he only saw himself, distended and oblong.

After the erratic tinkle of the bell stilled, Zinger said quietly, “She’s had more dicks stuck in her than pins in a pincushion.”

The old man laughed uncontrollably; his nose snorted through wispy salted pepper hairs. Nick turned away.

“Whore,” the man suddenly spat. “Fucking whores.”

Nick looked to the outside and the grayness. He knew that was Zinger’s wife, and it was strange, Zinger’s sudden impassive expression in the mirror after the old man’s exclamation. Nick hated the old man. But so what? For when Nick turned back to their reflections with his own grim expression, the old man dug at his eyes for approbation, nodding, smiling and winking simultaneously, a glance more starkly seductive than Zinger’s wife had offered him. So Nick held out his mind’s hand and smiled with the old man, even bowing his head a bit. But after that, just after that, he saw Zinger’s plain and curtained face and blushed even more, closing his eyes.

The light of the shop reddened beneath his eyelids, but like a man half-awake, he could not quite get his mouth to open to say anything. He finally forced his eyelids: nothing had changed. Zinger was looking at him closely, and Nick saw his expression and his eyes, marred only by a few specks in the mirror.

“He’s downstairs,” Zinger said. “You can get him if you want.”

After the words, Nick felt like his old self, or, rather, his new self, the determined self who had just left its mother. But he still said nothing, and walked past Zinger and his chair and the old man to the partition. In the corner of his eye he saw his reflection walk past the three vanities. Zinger had already forgotten him and proceeded to take the towel from the old man’s neck. Nick felt relieved.

Nick lifted the ring to the trapdoor and instinctively turned his head to avoid the brunt of the smoke that rose in relief.

Nick descended the woody steps into the dank and animated atmosphere of the room. He stifled an imminent coughing fit by closing his eyes, but breathed obstinately through his nose to accustom himself to the pervasive smoke; he clamped his eyelids tight until they hurt, so his eyes might water before they mingled with the smoke and smell.

When he finally opened his eyes and turned at the bottom of the stairs, he saw nothing but voices, muffled and near; they were wooden, like the walls and tables. He also saw sickly red, the color, somehow, that was produced in the mix of yellow light from the naked bulbs, the mahogany tables and dark-yellowish walls. But as the voices separated from the colors of the room, they became a distant babble, background noise, stupid and relentless.

He could smell a hundred things at once, from greasy sandwiches to stale cigars to farts to the odor of men without women, gray, dusty and oniony.

He walked in the direction of the noises. He passed by a couple of round tables, a pool table and some chairs. He saw them in the corner of the room, way back and to the left. Because of the smoke and the light, the table and the men seemed to float, suspended like the smoke, hanging without a thread, a magician’s trick that really worked.

He stopped – he’d been spotted.

Old Tony Guzzi saw him.

“Hey,” the old man grumbled. “Marc. One of your cum-stains is here.

Marc’s cum-stain walked closer to the table; it looked at Guzzi (to whom the stain had never spoken in its life) with hatred. Guzzi’s one eye laughed at him.

Nick felt on the verge of tears.

Nick’s father had his back to him; he saw the back of his father’s small head atop the massive, rounded shoulders, the baseball-basketball-football shoulders, the six-sons shoulders, the whole-world-in-his-hands shoulders, the shrugging-shamefaced shoulders. Nick’s father’s head bobbed up from the smoke and Nick heard, “Nick. You found me.”

A noise arose, obscenely alluring and familiar to him. A clamor of twisted camaraderie, a siren-song of we’re-all-in-this-together belches, scratches, murmurs and blustery winks.

Still, the interlocking voices wove a complex fabric that Nick would never truly know – although he felt its comforting allure as sure as he felt the fraternally twinned Scylla and Charybdis of anger and hatred. Sing a song of sameness.

Several years later when he visits Italy, Nick will write in his journal: “These people all look like they’re related, olive-dark skin, curly black hair, sharp and attractive features, and very friendly, almost like they would catch you if you started to fall, then brush you off before they went about their business.” It was that unthinking pat on the cheek Nick longed for the most, the invitation to join their song of sameness. He might stare impassively if bitterly at these floating men, and take pride in both his impassivity and loneliness. But it secretly ate away at him and he longed to bury his head and his heart anywhere among them, even within the sweaty embrace of a Guzzi.

The play of smoke and light made these men dance as they sat, but they were as surely anchored to their seats as the continents to the globe. All of them had large, bloated bodies. There were five of them surrounding the table, each shielded by his own hand of playing cards. It seemed cartoonish, the puny screen of cards and their massive physical bodies.

With his back to his son, Nick’s father’s head looked small, his hair pure white. His arms, jutting out of a deep-blue polyester pullover shirt, were fleshy but strong; he still could see the ripples of muscles just beneath the skin. His hands, of course, were the hands Nick had always known, whether they were resting on a pew or suspended just over the couch and slightly curled. The rims of flesh surrounding both his father’s thumbs were frayed with white callused skin. Nick’s father always nervously chewed the fat that surrounded his thumbs, whenever a cigarette was not in his mouth. But it was his father’s back that caught Nick’s attention now: it seemed strangely rounded and blue, like some rock that had been slowly and inexorably eroded by rushing water.

There was a cloudy-green glass ashtray next to him, with a smoking cigarette curling into the room. It was only after his father’s hand reached for the burning stub and inhaled it deeply that Nick noticed his father’s back straighten. But on the slow and luxuriant exhale, the back once again rounded itself, complacent and vulnerable.

The others’ bodies were as rounded as Nick’s father’s shoulders. Heads, shoulders and torsos a series of oblong curves held together from habit. Nick had to look at the floor, and it was all he expected it to be, old and woody, a bare foot’s nightmare, dirt and grime and splinters, chewing tobacco, cigarette butts and dried spit, matches and gnawed toothpicks.

Perversely, he wished suddenly to roll himself into a ball and become a part of that floor.

This feeling was strange, especially after the victories he now imagined he had won with Zinger’s restless eyes. He was now among men, and he could stand by his father if he wanted – after all, it was only attitude, and he knew that – and ignore the cum-stain remark and spit figuratively back into Guzzi’s one good eye. His posture and gait might have ruled the room if he had only walked up to his father’s side and gazed silently but powerfully (that is, wearing that elusive face of reticence, pregnant with a million mysteries of maturity, knowledge and experience) – but he hadn’t the courage, or the patience, or the attitude, or the maturity. He stood behind his old man.

Was he making excuses? Was all this worth the trouble? Did he not realize what he was, what he had been and what he was going to become? Outside, away from this suffocating world, he would bloom, somehow, some way. Why play the game with these old, foolish and disgusting men? Who were they, anyway?

Next to his dad sat his father’s father. A hill of flesh and white shirt and polyester gray pants (why always gray?), with a large rococo nose that flared fleshy, like the hand of an elaborately carved wooden rocking chair.

His eyes shone black and small, almost lost in the overhanging flesh and wrinkles. His hair streaked back over a tiny oval head, salt and pepper, slick and straight. His eyes rapidly shifted as though in compensation for the stolidity of his body. His thin lips waved with the motions or mumbles of the words he pronounced, more like the sinuous up-and-down motion of a quickly-moving fish. He gave you the impression of a great and unmoving statue, full of profundity and wisdom, like an old Persian king upon his throne.

Yet the king seemed in a surly mood, mouthing thoughts only he was privy to. The gaze had brushed Nick’s anxious look, but had gone on to bigger and better things, to the fanned hand in front of him. His eyes stroked the cards, rounding them, following them along their rigid, well-defined edges and shapes till his eyes knew all the possibilities, had received and digested all the information and attempted all the possible maneuvers.

He belched, and the lips, in their turn, shifted like a great wave to release the pent-up gas within his stomach. What remained was released from his ass.

It was only several moments (that Nick did not measure, for he was busy anxiously attempting to suppress a hard cough-ball of laughter) when those present began a turgid muttering, which resembled an organized or expertly arranged series of belches, but that were really words – English and Italian – noting disapproval. Actually, the curious mumblings resembled a choral chant, triggered organically, well-rehearsed, artificial only in its note of disapproval, true only in assent, or, rather (and actually), in the sense of communal feeling.

It would be difficult to anatomize a fart in this context; that, in some unspoken sense, the fart’s sensual essence helped solidify the bond of the room in which the men sat. It was, perhaps, the olfactory equivalent to prodding a close friend’s side with a knowing elbow. There was no contempt or anger in the fart; it was more like a tip of the hat.

To Nick, it just plain stunk. But, then again, Nick was not part of this deck of cards, was not one with these men. Nick might have contemptuously breathed – outward, thank you very much – a “Thank God” at this, but then he missed the point of the true essence of a communal fart.

Not only does Nick know nothing of his father’s father, he does not want to know. It was almost as if his father’s father lived in another reality, a reality like an old black and white movie where men wore gray suits, hats, loosened ties, and chain-smoked cigarettes.

He had no interest because it represented everything from which he longed to escape: that insular Italian-American world peopled with the petty dreams and fears of the blobs of flesh and smoke that cluttered the table, here at Zinger’s, and everywhere else in the old neighborhood. Nick’s family had left the neighborhood, had been forced out because of road building; okay, fine: perhaps it was a gift, although a double-edged, lonely one. It booted the seven-year-old boy out of an Italian neighborhood into an isolated house only a couple of miles away, surrounded by businesses and fronting a busy street with cars and trains. Isolation amid chaos. His old man’s incessant madness also was a gift Nick didn’t recognize; it pushed him away from the stifling history of working class bitterness, an old-boy fatalism that he never ceased to hate. If hatred and anger coursed through Nick the way blood courses through others, it was of the stuff that drove him toward an affinity for the outsider. In school, he gravitated toward the silent guy, the weird-looking, the weaker one. He’d befriend them by acknowledging them. Some blew him off, but most didn’t. It was a loose-leaf sort of acquaintanceship that pleased Nick because it left him independent and feeling good about himself.

The man sitting to the left of Nick’s grandfather was his father’s brother Gene. He also was round, but his skin, instead of folding and refolding itself, was smooth and shiny. Nick couldn’t see a wrinkle on his face, although Gene must have been close to forty. The head itself was fat, with a short and tightly curled patch of hair on top. His teeth were straight and white, and his whole body smelled like a freshly spilled bottle of Old Spice.

Gene was an insurance salesman and a real estate agent – at different times, sometimes together, sometimes neither. Nick and his brothers always had considered Gene the biggest phony in the world. In reality, though, Nick knew as much about Gene as he did his grandfather – and didn’t care to know anything else.

Gene was loud and obnoxious, no doubt masking insecurities beneath a thick voice, shrouding self-doubt in booming rhetorical assurances. It was of course just this loudness that rubbed Nick and his brothers the wrong way; if Gene was a master showman, he was one without a gullible audience, at least as far as Nick was concerned. It was for Nick – as with nearly everything else in his life – more his father’s vulnerability that was at stake and which, to Nick, Gene seemed to prod relentlessly with his loudness.

Why was his father here with Gene and the others? Why weren’t he and his mother and his brothers enough for his father? Why did he seem to need or even want to be among these people, why was he suckered so willingly into this whirlpool?

Nick was his father’s protector, and he was doing a lousy job. He could do nothing physically to prevent his father from doing what he did, thinking what he thought, saying what he said – he could only watch impotently and mumble under his breath, “We have to go, mom says so.”

If Gene showed his insecurities through his incessant loudness, Nick showed his through bitter hatred. Here, Nick had a focus for his intangible hatred. He had convinced himself long ago that Gene’s personality was a symbol of everything that was wrong with a world that rocked him: phoniness, hollowness – all wrapped suffocatingly within loudness. He forever hated loudness, disorder, artifice – and those who cannot rest without becoming the acknowledged center of attention.

But he also couldn’t shut Gene out. He tried. He snapped his eyes closed to shut him and it out.

But he couldn’t do it. Gene’s sudden cry of “Hen-ree!” forced his eyes open, and again he saw Gene’s easy smile, the big face that somehow expressed that seeing Nick was the most wonderful experience of his day. The cry remained on Gene’s face, even after the sound died and it seemed obvious to both Nick and Gene that it was false. So, Nick had to smile at him, and wonder if his own eyes sparkled like the ones into which he stared.

Why did the universe teeter with each look Nick decided or felt forced to give another person?

Gene had recently taken to visiting Nick’s family a great deal. His last visit was defining, for Gene had come to show off a new gold watch he’d bought. His name, Gene Verti, was etched delicately in gold on the bottom right of the watch’s face. Gene had stuck his thick and hairy arm in front of Nick’s face; Nick heard his father’s congested chuckle in the background, stared at the gilded name, and then couldn’t help but stare at the arm. He barely heard the words, “How about this, Nick?” which his father spoke.

Nick suddenly felt he could never tell the truth about anything or anyone ever again.

Adolescence is a lot like political revolutions; both tend to polarize feelings and eschew compromise. The explosion or realization of revolution had not yet come for Nick, but all its preconditions existed. Why Nick’s universe teetered: He felt strongly that his continuous submission to phoniness through his involuntary smiles and looks and unwillingness to say what he truly felt chipped away at a self slowly deteriorating from neglect beneath a clutter of shit.

But if Nick was really serious, why hadn’t the revolution happened, why hadn’t the universe already crashed demoralizingly around him?

Nick’s glorious romanticism, his knack for rationalization, and the simple fact that he liked being alive, all conspired to save him. In spite of the gnawing evidence of his compromises, he had convinced himself that the compromises did not take place within himself, but outside himself. He was polite, he reasoned. Within the prison of his mind, his integrity held as tight as sinewy steel. Not like his father when he was sick. Not like his older brothers did just a few years ago, teasing relentlessly around the most innocuous thing, a game, a piece of food, a television show. Christ, even a look, a superior, contemptuous look that sucked out whatever feeling of pride you’d had, from whatever you had done, from whatever compliment you had received that day.

There seemed to be so much at stake with Gene, as if Gene represented all that was evil about people. That was bad enough, but Nick felt something truly evil beneath what Gene represented, and it made him gag.

The boy standing with his hands in his pockets and staring at Gene’s eyes was not Nick Verti. How could he be? He became what others expected.

Nick was saved by another situation: Nick’s uncle Joe, another brother of his father.

“Nick,” Joe said, and then: “Nick, my real buddy,” and he turned his heavy face toward Nick.

Joe’s eyes, on the surface, seemed easier to wrestle with: they were large, round and wet, as though on the verge of tears. But they hid a private world that Nick – as with Gene and his grandfather – had no interest in knowing. Joe was always an object of pity to Nick; he knew vaguely that Joe had been to Vietnam, and even recalled an image of him in uniform when Nick couldn’t have been more than seven. Joe had a fat face, large cheeks and an even larger nose, which beaked obscenely under those eyes. He had curly hair like Gene’s, but much more of it, coarser and dirtier. Like his brothers, Joe breathed his words through silk, and they sounded pregnant with meaning. But they were really shadows of words, refractions of others’ reflections; and although empty, they seemed obscene, if only because they passed through Joe’s sensually red lips.

To Nick, Joe was a cliché with no substance or integrity of his own, and this was the greatest personal defect Nick could conceive. If Nick believed there was, somehow, evil beneath Gene’s personality, beneath Joe he saw almost nothing, perhaps a dash of sexual perversion, a pinch of insanity.

This is what Nick will be digging away at as his marriage unspools nearly fifteen years later: his self, and the belief that there had to be something there beneath all the layers of affectation and shit and circumstance. Gene’s core was nothingness; Joe’s was at most a baby’s unthinking wail.

So, he felt sorry for Joe. In fact, as soon as he heard his name come so incongruously from Joe’s lips, he felt pity. Honestly, though, it was a pity wrapped tightly within a sense of superiority – but it was pity nonetheless. Nick felt the way one might feel if one, by accident, stepped on an ant carrying a piece of food many times its weight back to the hill. But then what? Nothing.

Joe had been made fun of, insulted, never encouraged, shown the downside of life, the wrong lesson to be learned in every possible situation by the example of his father and his brothers. He had been told he was nothing every day of his life and in so many different ways. He was ugly for one thing, with that large beak of a nose, those large jowls, those black eyes. Every time he looked at himself in the mirror, he thought something like this, but, more importantly, Joe’s mind had fused each negative remark that had been doled out to him, and he lived with himself that way, every day, no questions asked.

Some people can overcome the intensive beating-down that Joe experienced, if only through stubbornness or ignorance. But is it a crime not to have the strength or stubbornness or ignorance to beat off the incessant pummeling of insults and invective?

Nick thought so at the time. It showed, he insisted, a weakness in character. Something that he, of course, would never show or even admit occurred within himself constantly.

All this pummeling that Joe experienced, Nick knew on a different level through the oppression of his brothers and uncles. It was, however, more the distance and weakness of his father that hurt Nick even more. If it were his brothers who severely, if unwittingly, undercut his self-esteem through a constant barrage of insults and slights, it was the more concrete reality of his father’s illness which made this undercutting all the more vital and omnipresent. It made it all – the teasing, the tears and hurt he felt – so meaningless, arbitrary, unthinking.

If there was any weakness of character here, Nick would decide finally, it was among those who unloaded the barrage of insults. And it would refer to him much later, on that Colorado porch, as he inflicted “cunt” on the person he loved most. He had no idea if it was isolated to his family, or to his extended family, or to the society itself, or even if it was human nature asserting itself.

But it does exist. I can attest to it. Maybe he simply mirrored all the shit within him. Maybe it’s confined to large families, where one must fight for recognition. Regardless, the point was to get out of it. Should we then give Nick credit for seeing these men who surrounded the table as something fundamentally different from himself?

This is the crux of the matter to Nick: What does Nick have or think he has that indelibly separates him from these men of the same culture and environment? Perhaps it only is his adolescent, self-indulgent pride, the feeling that he is frankly too special to get sucked into that relentless cycle of depression, sickness and recovery. Was he born with it? Did he acquire it through something outside the culture that, to him, seemed far nobler and worth living for?

Then there was Tony Guzzi. To Nick, it seemed like Guzzi had continually trained his one cardboard cutout eye on him while he observed his father, grandfather and two uncles. Guzzi had one eye the way everyone else had two; he was born that way. Where his right eye should have been stretched a webbed film of skin, like a closed shutter made of darkened leather. His teeth were rotted like burnt popcorn. He never ate anything that required chewing. He always carried with him a little camouflage-green knapsack of different colored mashed foods in small Tupperware containers.

But he commanded respect. Whether it was a nickel-ante card game, funeral, wedding, Guzzi was invited. He showed up, pulling himself as he walked. It hurt to watch him; you could feel every joint in your own body ache as he moved and winced. Nick had the lousy reaction of showing his feelings when he saw any physical defect: missing fingers, one leg, it didn’t matter, he mechanically jerked himself away. With Guzzi’s one eye, though, Nick was fascinated. He absurdly thought Guzzi could actually see out of that web of skin, like it was a sensor of some kind, a veiled compound eye.

For whatever reason, Guzzi always glared or snarled his thin lips at Nick.

Nick assumed Guzzi was once a big man, decades ago, had done favors for the right people – something. He never asked. In this case, though, and as opposed to his feelings about his uncles and grandfather, he was curious. But he knew it was a sick curiosity, the worst about himself, the curiosity that both intrigued and horrified him, that drives some to weird pornography, to pushing another’s buttons till he or she is about to break; titillating in its sense of power, deflating once it was over – like competition for its own sake, a twisted sense of power that Nick felt briefly, madly, and which gave him another reason to close his eyes to the world and the worst that was inside himself.

Yet, he was his father’s son, his mother’s son. He was part of them, somehow, and he feared, sometimes, that he didn’t have a chance. It was fate, genes: this, he thought and perhaps knew, someday, would be his idea of a good time. This holding court, this being a part of another’s court, paying homage or fealty to someone like his grandfather, or Guzzi, or anyone. It didn’t matter, as long as he performed the tasks necessary to feel safe and at home – anything for the pat on the cheek.

Nick coughed. He turned his head to spit, but stopped himself. He moved, shifting his body to the left, and heard the elastic suck of his sneakers as they unglued themselves from the floor, and became re-glued to another spot.

“Buddy,” he heard Joe’s voice say. Joe rose, smiling, his red lips like a woman’s, curved and pouting. Joe was losing. He was always losing. He always would be losing.

He walked toward Nick. “You have any change on you, buddy?” he softly tapped Nick’s shoulder.

Nick drew instinctively away. Joe’s hand stayed suspended above his shoulder, and Nick saw that it was fat and soft, with barely any lines, a couple of thick gold rings, dirty fingernails.

“No,” Nick said. “I ain’t got nothing.”

Joe nodded and looked back at the table, both sauntering and spinning his body a couple of times around before he returned to his seat. He might have done an arabesque and no one would have said anything. In fact, he almost did just before he sat down. His ass nearly missed the chair.

Joe’s dance was all about luck, things you did to make the cards go your way. Most would make more inconspicuous movements, a knock on the table, touching an ear, nose and throat in succession. But Joe’s movements were consistently elaborate. Even during the rare times he joined them in a whiffle ball game in the backyard, he would twirl and tap something for luck, right in the middle of an at-bat, drawing curses from the other team.

Nick looked at his father, was about to touch his shoulder, but his old man’s back stiffened. Everyone now ignored him. Their eyes focused on Guzzi.

Guzzi shuffled the cards. His hands were gnarled and his knuckles jutted out obscenely. Like a rising chain of mountains, they climbed from the little to the index finger on both hands. Guzzi’s hands moved swiftly, seamlessly performing different shuffles Nick hadn’t seen before. When he looked at his face, though, Nick saw only a stream of tics and grimaces, as though each of Guzzi’s fingers were attached to a nerve in his face; or, better yet, that the movement in his face was actually orchestrating his hand movements, like a puppeteer pulling strings. Everyone waited patiently until Nick’s grandfather wrapped his knuckles on the table. Guzzi placed the deck next to his grandfather, who cut the deck without looking at it. Then, Guzzi started dealing.

To deal, Guzzi maneuvered his body to the left; his head followed, and he squinted his eye and breathed heavily. The cards slid from his fingers easily as they pitched from man to man. The men slapped their hands on their cards when they came to them.

They played seven-card stud. Two cards were dealt down.

“Nothing wild?” his father asked, the shadow or a smile.

Guzzi made an indescribable sound; it started in the back of his throat, gurgled near his lips, then pushed out ineffectually through his nose. “A man’s game,” he finally said, closing his eye for a moment, refusing to look at the man who asked.

The men had to deal with the cards they received, accept without question their lot in life, see if the strength of their characters were up to the games the other men played around them. Still, they could bluff their way through if they had the nerve, if they had the hope of pulling a card they longed for with everything in them, a longing they rarely felt anywhere else. If they pulled nothing, they could retire from it early, take a chance on the next raw deal; or, they could masochistically keep putting their nickels and dimes in, anticipating the victory of another, more stronger hand, then sit back and think about luck, about how this hand said everything about who they were, confirmed what they had suspected all along. They might actually receive the best cards from the deck; but if so, they were forced to suppress the swelling in their chests, keep their mouths and spines in a straight line that led away from whatever truth the cards hid from the others. How this became life, too, how you had always hidden your happiness within a suffocating vulnerability to which no one was allowed access.

Nick’s father pulled a pair of deuces in the hole, a five of diamonds up.

The smoke that filled Nick’s lungs, the smells of the men, the naked light bulb above, lulled him until he became only aware of the card partly covered by his father’s hand, its 5 and diamond peeking out between his middle third finger with a wink.

It was Joe DiMaggio’s number, of course. It augured well, his old man’s hero winking at them both. Back in the 1940s, late, his old man said, he had driven to New York City with a friend to see DiMaggio play, and, yes, he had hit a double and his body glided to the bag, and, in the outfield, he made every play look easy, gliding until he was underneath it, like he was back in San Francisco and was playing catch with one of his brothers and his whole life was ahead of him and no one knew how great he was.

That was the greater moment, really: not in the doing, the completion, but in the anticipation, the prefatory wink of the card that hinted at what was to come, the potential of greatness. Because in watching DiMaggio there at Yankee Stadium his old man really was watching himself, Nick knew, and everything that he could be. It was, once, in the cards.

Nick listened more carefully. The others muttered. He could hear the floor creaking under him. Nick looked at his father when Guzzi threw him a two of hearts up. His old man’s back arched a hair. Nick’s eyes quickly shot up at the men around the table. Only Gene looked at Nick, who returned a black stare. Gene smiled bleakly, his eyes darting to his cards.

On the fourth card up, the eight of hearts, Nick felt himself start to sweat. He looked down at his father’s hands: they were still, thick. How many times had Nick stared at them when they touched lightly the pew in front of them, his mother dressed in a white, round hat and veil, his old man in a dress jacket, hands jutting out, thick and touching the wood. There were now only a few coins near them.

Nick reached into his pocket and pulled out two dollar bills; he dropped them to the floor, softly said, “Shit,” and bent to pick them up. Rising, he slipped them into his dad’s pants pocket. His old man didn’t move.

His dad had an eight of hearts, jack of spades, five of diamonds and the other deuce on top. Nick coughed from the smoke, then saw his father’s back quiver, the way it did when he got the deuce on top.

Nick’s father put the last card, dealt down, at the top of his two in the hole. He opened the three cards slowly, like a fan. A two appeared, another two, and then the five of spades.

The men began betting fifty cents at a time. His father reached into his pocket and threw out one of Nick’s dollars into the pile. He’d raised his own father.

His father raised back, and Nick’s father threw the remaining dollar in the pile. The dollars looked silly, the only paper money in the pile, crumpled and greasy.

Nick waited. His old man laid his cards down.

“Three bags and Joe D.,” his father said.

Muttering, petulant looks, turning away.

“Come to papa,” Nick’s papa said, and with both hands cupped on their sides, pulled the money to him.

There were about ten dollars. Nick’s dad laughed again. He nudged Nick in the stomach with his elbow. “Nick’s my good luck charm,” he said.

“Yeah,” Guzzi muttered. “Take his long-haired ass out of here.”

No one disagreed. Just a chorus of Italian curses and muttering.

Nick looked at his father. The back of his head nodded. “I guess that means me, too.” He rose, stuffing the money in his pockets. “Come on, Nick.”

Nick passed out with him, going up the wooden steps, trying not to look back. His dad looked back and shouted, “See you all Friday night!”

There was only a wave of muttering, Italian curses. His father laughed again.

There was light again when Nick pushed open the trapdoor, lots of it, and Nick had to partially close his eyes to get used to it. Smoke lightly billowed and then swirled around his feet. His father groaned as he climbed the steps himself. He was still chuckling.

Zinger was on the phone when they got to the barbershop. He was sitting on one of the barber chairs, his feet up on the mirrored counter. Nick’s father stood and waited. It seemed like forever to Nick, until Zinger saw both of them via the mirror and winked.

Zinger hung up. He tried to look back at both of them, stretching his neck, but he gave up and settled for the reflections. He gave them a squat, knowing smile.

“How’d it go, Marco?” he said.

Nick’s father pulled out all the change and dollar bills from his pockets and said, “I’d like a haircut, Zing.”

“And a shave,” Zinger said.

Nick’s father felt his face and nodded. “And a shave,” he said. “Why the hell not.”

His father walked over to a chair, sat in it, and waited. When Zinger started cutting, the phone rang. He pulled out the pencil and pad from his shirt pocket and began scribbling.

Nick’s father, looking at Nick through the mirror, nodded and winked.

Nick walked over toward the door, looking out at the gray sky, the overgrown field.

There was nothing else to look at, and nothing else he could do, not one confounded thing.

© 2026 Victor Greto