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And as they talked I began to look at them, and I saw that they looked bad. Some of them were
even disheveled. I saw that they had bad skin. It was obvious that some of them didn't take care of
themselves. I mean, they didn't look very good. A few of them had bad teeth. They had missing
teeth. You would never see mouths like that where I grew up. Also, they weren't very well dressed.
The stuff they wore was unfashionable and cheap. A lot of polyester and double-knit pants suits.
And later, when I got to meet their kids, I was amazed at how much trouble the kids gave them.
Their kids were always in trouble. They were always in fights. They wouldn't go to school. They'd
disappear from home. The women would beat their kids blue with broom handles and leather belts,
but the kids didn't pay any attention. The women all seemed to be on the edge of just making it.
They were all very nervous and tense. Their younger kids looked dirty all the time. It was that thing
some kids have of looking dirty even after their baths. That was the look.
If you listened, you never heard such woe. One of these hostess parties could have kept a soap
opera going for years. The first night I was with them, most of the conversation was about their
friend Carmen. Carmen wasn't there. Carmen was forty and her husband was away doing time. He
was her third husband. She had three sons, one by each of her husbands, and the kids were a
nightmare. To make ends meet Carmen was selling stolen credit cards and swag. Just a week before
the party Carmen's oldest, a teenager, was in a card game with another kid and an argument began
over a ten-dollar bet. Her son got mad, pulled a gun out of his pocket, and it went off. The other kid
died, and Carmen's son was arrested. When Carmen's mother, the kid's grandmother, heard that her
grandson had been arrested for murder, she dropped dead on the spot, leaving Carmen with a
husband and son in jail and a mother in the funeral parlor.
By the time Henry picked me up I was dizzy. When we got home I told him I was upset. He was
calm. He said very few people went to jail. He said there was nothing to worry about. He would talk
about the money and how hundreds of his friends were doing things that might be against the law,
but that they were all making money, and none of them were getting caught. Swag. Gambling.
Cigarettes. Nobody went to jail for things like that. Also, he knew the right lawyers. The courts. The
judges. The bail bondsmen. I wanted to believe him. He made it sound so easy, and I loved the idea
of all that money.
Then one day you read a newspaper story about people you know, and you just can't put the
names you're reading together with the people you know. Those I knew were not individuals you
thought the papers would write about. I saw one story years ago in the Daily News about Frankie
Manzo, Paulie's friend. The newspaper misspelled his name as Francesco Manza and said he was an
organized-crime soldier. The Frankie Manzo I knew dressed and acted like a working man. He had
the Villa Capra restaurant in Cedarhurst, and I had seen him carrying packages of groceries into the
kitchen, moving cars from out front, wiping the crumbs off tables, and working day and night in his
own kitchen.
To me none of these men looked like big shots. None of them had everything together. There was
always something missing. I mean, if they had nice new cars and good clothes, then their houses
were in poor areas or their wives looked hard. Tommy DeSimone always drove around in a brandnew
car and wore expensive clothes, and he and Angela lived in a two-room tenement slum. I
remember thinking, If these are the gangsters they write about in the newspapers, there must be
something wrong. I knew Henry and his friends weren't angels, but if this was the Cosa Nostra, it
sure didn't feel like it.
It was after Henry and I got married the second time that I really became a part of his world. We
had an old-fashioned Italian wedding, except we had a Jewish ceremony and a rabbi. Four of the
Vario brothers were there. So were their wives and their sons. It was the first time I was introduced
to all of them at once. It was crazy. The five Vario brothers had at least two sons each, and for some
unbelievable reason they'd each named two of their sons either Peter or Paul. There had to be a
dozen Peters and Pauls at the wedding. Also, three of the Vario brothers were married to girls
named Marie, and they all had daughters named Marie. By the time Henry finished introducing me
to everyone I thought I was drunk.
Only Paul Vario wasn't at the wedding. I had seen that Paulie was like a father to Henry, much
more than Henry's real father, who he rarely saw and almost never spoke to. Henry was with Paulie
almost every day. When I asked where Paulie was, Henry just said he couldn't make it. Later I