I am not surprised Mikey has found work in TV and movies, he has a central-casting low hairline and a ‘you talking to me?’ posture and gait. He cannot stop smiling. He cannot stop telling stories. He cannot stop talking. I have not been in there half an hour before he tells me a story he has already told. The others all meet my confused gaze and roll their eyes. ‘Good old Mikey, he don’t know when to shut up,’ an old boy whispers to me. I suppose that is why he has failed to make it as a button man or whatever the phrase is. That and the fact that he just seems too, well, too good-natured, too lacking in guile. He is like a great puppy. He tells twice a story about chasing a thief through the neighbourhood, tackling him and punching his lights out before the police arrived, so perhaps I am being a little naïve. He is anxious for me to know that he would only ever show violence to someone ‘nasty’. The thief had stolen a child’s bicycle. ‘And dat,’ he says, ‘youse do not do.’ You will think ‘youse’ is a bit old hat, a bit Damon Runyon, but I promise you that is how he said it.
I sit down on the sofa with Dave, who tells me tales about ‘da old days’. An immensely complex story about cocking up a horse-nobbling takes ten minutes and is filled with the kind of colour and splendour that fiction cannot match. Some time back in the forties, when Dave was young, he had ‘a sure ting’, he had inside knowledge of a horse which would win a race ‘on account of how he had dis drug, dis whatchercallit’.
I am stared at through Dave’s one good eye and nudged quite violently to provide the name of this drug, as if I am an expert. This puzzles me. I had no idea that there was a drug which could guarantee a horse winning a race. ‘Um, a stimulant of some kind maybe …’
‘Dat’s it! Stimu- like you said.’
I get an even sharper dig in the ribs for having solved the mystery of what the drug might have been. I am beginning to revise my opinion of the non-violent nature of these people. Anecdotal Assault may not carry a heavy sentence, may not even be recognised in law as a crime against the person, but by the time I rise from the sofa I am more or less black and blue. Dave told me tales of his days running numbers, laying bets and serving time in prison (only on-track betting, OTB, is legal in America, so all street bookies are liable to arrest). ‘We always ordered dinner from Giovanni’s restaurant to be delivered to our cell. The sergeant would let us make the call so long as we included a linguini for him. It was a good arrangement. Worked well for twenty years till they rebuilt the station house and moved the sergeant to another precinct. What are you gonna do?’ All his stories seemed to feature him in a disastrous situation where, as a small-time bookie’s runner, he lost money for someone, forgot to lay off a bet, got in trouble, ended up in prison. The speed with which he can still shade odds and rattle through the 13–5, 11–4-type ratios made my head spin. He may have liked to present himself as one of nature’s losers, but he was clearly not a fool.
Whenever I press these old boys and use words like ‘Mafia’ or ‘cosa nostra’, they smile and raise their hands in innocent bewilderment. I am beginning to think they are simply charming senior citizens who just happen to have the same accents and ethnicity as Mafiosi.
Then I spot the bullet holes.
You can see one in the group photograph, in the metal door upright, just next to the Star-Spangled Banner. There are more inside.
‘Yeah, that was a drive-by. We was playing cards. A bullet just missed Don’s head. So much.’ Mikey brings his forefinger and thumb very close together.
‘But why?’ I ask.
‘Sheeesh. What are you gonna do?’
Which is no kind of answer.
The guy who really owns and runs the club turns up. A barrel-chested fellow about five foot tall. There is something in his eye which compels me to stop asking questions. He too is friendly, but it is impossible not to notice when the mere presence of someone in a room shuts everyone else up.
He has the extraordinary ability to silence Mikey. I smell power.
John the Cabbie
My guide in New York City has been a cabbie called John. He lives round the corner from the Italian social club and he is the one who effected my introduction. John is of Irish stock; indeed he quite proudly tells me how he had worked hard for Noraid, the ‘charity’ that funded the IRA, back in the days of the Troubles.
As we drive to his yellow-cab garage, which is like a scene out of the seventies sitcom Taxi, I ask him how he feels about the new accord in Northern Irish politics.
‘I fought for thirty years to let Ian Paisley rule?’ he says. ‘How do you think I feel?’
Mm. In a short while I have met deer-hunters, Mafia criminals and a man who raised money for the IRA. And I liked them all. I saw their points of view.
What is happening to me?
KEY FACTS
Abbreviation:
NJ
Nickname:
The Garden State
Capital:
Trenton
Flower:
Common meadow violet
Tree:
Northern red oak
Bird:
American goldfinch
Shell:
Knobbed whelk (honest)
Motto:
Liberty and Prosperity
Well-known residents and natives:
Grover Cleveland (22nd and 24th President), Thomas Alva Edison, Alfred Kinsey, William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Roth, Andrea Dworkin, Martha Stewart, Abbott and Costello, Jerry Lewis, Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, Danny DeVito, Joe Pesci, John Travolta, Ray Liotta, Bruce Willis, Kevin Spacey, David Cassidy, James Gandolfini, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, Bruce Springsteen, Jon Bon Jovi, Whitney Houston, Shaquille O’Neal.
NEW JERSEY
‘And so I find myself driving into hell.’
New Jersey is, let’s be honest, the Essex of America. Jersey girls and Jersey boys will forever be mocked in jokes and songs for their dumbness, illiteracy, vulgarity and sexual availability. The industrial ugliness of much of the state where it borders the Hudson and looks across the river to Manhattan is hard to deny: Jersey City, Newark, Brunswick, Elizabeth and the chemical factories and choking pollution they bring have conferred great prosperity, but also a damningly negative image. It can call itself ‘The Garden State’ as much as it likes but it makes no difference; for all the beauties of Princeton and much of the coastline, Jersey will always, it seems, suffer from being looked on as something of a dump. About as far from Newport, RI as you can get, culturally and demographically.
My