Falling Into the Mob

  FALLING

  INTO

  THE

  MOB

  STEVE ZOUSMER

  Copyright © 2017 by Steve Zousmer

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.

  The events and characters in this book are fictitious.

  For information, address:

  The Permanent Press

  4170 Noyac Road

  Sag Harbor, NY 11963

  www.thepermanentpress.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Zousmer, Steve, author.

  Falling into the mob / Steve Zousmer.

  Sag Harbor, NY : The Permanent Press, [2017]

  ISBN: 978-1-57962-436-1

  eISBN: 978-1-57962-517-7

  1. Life change events—Fiction. 2. Organized crime—Fiction. 3. Mafia—Fiction. 4. Black humor (Literature).

  PS3576.O8 F35 2017

  813’.54—dc23

  2016025190

  Printed in the United States of America

  DEDICATION

  Almost ten years ago I met a woman on a train and had the conversation I’ve reproduced in Chapter 1. I never saw her again but she stayed in my thoughts and those thoughts led to this book. I didn’t get her name but I created one for her: Sylvia Sforza.

  I regret that she’ll probably never know that she inspired not only a fictional character but a whole novel, but she did both and that merits a dedication. Sylvia, wherever you are, this one’s for you.

  While Sylvia inspired the book, my agent, Julia Lord, was its tireless supporter through thick and thin, mostly thin. She and her associate Ginger Curwen were invaluable friends along the rocky path to publication. I am very grateful to them.

  CHAPTER 1

  There must be an age when we stop running for trains. A voice within us whispers, “No more of this. It’s undignified, it’s risky (collisions, falls, heart attacks) and you’re too slow anyway. Add running for trains to the growing list of things that are over.”

  I’m fifty-nine and nearing this point. But I’m not there yet. I have at least one more mad dash through a train station in me, and I’m making it now. I’m charging across the great concourse of Grand Central Terminal huffing and snorting like a rhinoceros, darting between clusters of waiting passengers who jump back in alarm as they sense my approach.

  The cleared path is helpful, but I have (I’m guessing here) only forty-five seconds to make the train. It won’t be easy because I’ve had a big meal with a fair amount of alcohol. And I’m wearing a business suit. My necktie is choking me. My briefcase is confusing my balance. My stiff-soled shoes have no bounce or bend and absorb no shock. My steps slap the marble floor in a jangled rhythm that says: this is so reckless, so foolish, so sure to end in painful and deserved embarrassment.

  But I persist. I don’t know why. There is no reason for rushing. Nothing awaits me but an empty house. I could easily nurse a drink at the bar, killing a half hour before the next train to the suburbs, but some desperate imperative lashes me forward. I exit the elegant concourse and enter the shadowy lower level where trains await. I am running downslope on a ramp, knees pumping, gaining speed.

  My brain flashes warning imagery of the fall that awaits me. I can imagine the sound and feel the impact of my forehead hitting the hard terminal floor, scraping on its rough surface before I come to a stop bruised and stunned, my suit smeared with grime. What makes it even worse are the solicitous young commuters who stop to help me up, brushing me off, calling me sir.

  But I keep going. The train is still there, only a few strides away. So many times I’ve had trains pull away with sadistic railroad humor at just this moment. Not this time. I’m going to catch the son of a bitch.

  And I do. But it’s close: I squeeze through the automatic door just as it slides shut. The door-closing whistle sounds but I’m in. My entrance is a whooshing arrival, a hyperventilating explosion contrasting with the settled calmness of the seated passengers who glance up at me over their digital devices.

  I lurch toward an empty aisle seat, whirl, aim, and land. The woman in the window seat next to me actually bounces from the impact. She has every right to scorch me with a glance or snicker but she has the decency to keep her eyes on the book in her lap.

  The conductor, a chunky Hispanic woman, covers her mouth to hide her amusement and pats my shoulder. Congratulations, champ, you made it.

  I sit there gasping. I have made a spectacle of myself and it feels like everyone is looking at me, which is not a good feeling at an age when you don’t want to be looked at closely because you are trying to pass for something you’re not—a person who is obviously not young but not obviously old.

  Is fifty-nine old? Not drastically, but it’s old enough to see what’s coming and develop a Gloomy Gus attitude about aging and its consequences. I know this attitude is socially and politically incorrect and rather sternly frowned upon. I frown upon it myself. I recoil from the thought that I am a baby boomer bitching because the privilege of youth has expired after only 5.9 decades.

  I know I’m supposed to enter the twilight whistling a happy tune. I should be a happy camper who never mentions getting old. (“Oh, don’t even say that,” people scold you when you complain about infirmities or forgetfulness.) I should distract myself from the depressing reality of aging by keeping busy, filling my plate from the approved menu of senior activities.

  No disrespect to the golfers and gardeners and so on but activities don’t work for me. I don’t want to go gently into a future of activities. I want a whole new life to replace the one that’s wearing out. I know this is unrealistic. I’m not asking to be young again; I’m not asking to be exempt from time and its punishments. But I don’t want to spend the rest of my life playing games or doing exercises or taking bus tours overseas. I want to find something that will kick my discontent in its fat ass and carry me to the finish line feeling that I’d finished strong, finally grasping some sort of intensity or richness or bold embrace of life that eluded or intimidated me when I was young.

  But how is this done? I have no idea. No idea whatsoever. A large part of the problem is that I am too free, too unencumbered. My one child, a son, is grown up, a busy twenty-six-year-old graduate student living 1,200 miles away (U. of Minnesota). My former wife is even more distant: Los Angeles. Her solution to aging was to trade up for a more exciting husband, what we used to call a “happening” kind of guy, a doctor with big bucks flowing in, entrepreneurial ventures, a splendid wardrobe, and a glamorous global travel agenda. Who could blame her?

  As for work, I’m hanging on but my once-admired career as a freelance speechwriter for some of America’s foremost CEOs has come down to one last client. And he is retired and getting old too.

  As for money, I probably have enough unless I do something stupid.

  As for health, I am better than average. I row and run at the gym, and I’ve been lucky. After my annual physical this year my doctor told me, “You’ve got the test numbers of a forty-year-old. Too bad you don’t look like a forty-year-old.”

  So nothing is holding me back from any good opportunity. I’m grateful for this. I know that many people would kill to be in my shoes but there is still the matter of having no plan to avoid a lonely, empty, purposeless future.

  Finding a new woman seemed like an obvious solution. I tried it but the process went nowhere. There are plenty of nice available women my age but I had no energy for the chase. There was no spark, no magic, not even any cheap thrills. I had to drink like a fish just to get through an evening. I was glad to give up.

&nbs
p; For a while I thought the solution should make sense. I thought self-examination would reveal the way. I scoured my memory for signals about where I’ve been headed all these years. I slouched down in the video screening room of my mind, reviewing long-past scenes in a quest for illumination.

  Believe me, this was no sentimental journey down memory lane. I assessed myself unsparingly, but the effort got me nowhere and I gave it up, concluding that you don’t find the big answers in life—they find you.

  Or they don’t.

  ON THAT fateful night there were two rounds of laments about aging, one on the train and the other before it over dinner with my old classmate and friend Charlie Benedict. He and I meet regularly and our conversations tend to center on the transition to geezerdom.

  On this night, after recounting recent senior moments, we focused on feeling superfluous, marginalized, pushed to the sidelines. We discussed the latest reminders of the reduced power or presence a senior citizen could exert in any of the more invigorating human activities. We talked about being out of it and living in the past tense, no longer looking forward or believing that tomorrow will be better than today. This last point was relatively new to us and had unexpected bite, causing an unwelcome silence, which we resolved by ordering more drinks.

  With bourbon in him, my old friend seems to turn into the wise and courtly Southern senator he might have become if not for his contempt for Southern politics. He is a good fellow and apparently a fine lawyer. His hair is snow white and he has just the right amount of Tennessee in his sonorous voice. He is an international grand master in the art of the reflective pause. Over the years his pauses have stretched to such length that I’ve speculated on things I could do without missing a word, such as taking a bus to Brooklyn and back.

  Dinners with Charlie have always been occasions for excellent wry humor but in recent years the subtext has become less amusing: he has a serious heart condition but is determined to keep working for a few more years to build a nest egg for his wife, daughters, and a profusion of granddaughters. This aspiration is regarded with a cold eye by his youth-minded law firm which, he believes, is attempting to ease him out. Being thrown into the job market as a sixty-year-old in bad health is a depressing prospect. His line is: “I don’t know whether to write my résumé (long pause) or my obituary.”

  I lingered too long with him but finally said good night and was shocked to look at my watch. It was late but if I rushed I might catch the 11:13 P.M. train to my suburb, Hartsdale, in Westchester County twenty-some miles north of New York City. Somehow this seemed like a train I had to catch.

  AS WE chugged out of Grand Central I opened my briefcase in which I carried a printout of a speech I was writing and a magazine to provide reading material for the forty-one-minute ride. But instead of reading I dozed off. I woke up more than halfway home and found myself listening to a voice from a few rows back, the intrusive voice of a young man of notable callowness, instantly dislikable.

  He was engaged in a remarkably uninhibited cell phone conversation with a young woman named Jenna, tenaciously trying to charm her into picking him up at his train stop. They would go for drinks and then (this was close to explicit) they would have acrobatic sex in her car. The sex would be Jenna’s reward for getting dressed and bundled up at this rather late hour and taking advantage of an offer that might never come again.

  I was inclined to cringe at the shamelessness of the young man’s pitch. Is this how young people do these things now? Yet I kind of admired it: he marketed himself with a brashness I had seldom mustered. He understood at least one of the great lessons of life: those who don’t grab don’t get. I never mastered that lesson. I was a gentlemanly faller-into, not a grabber.

  I next realized that while I was waking up into this mini-drama, everyone else in the car was already tuned in to it. The car’s population had thinned out but the normal isolation between passengers had been breached by the shared pleasure of eavesdropping. Glances, smiles, and whispers were exchanged as if we were the audience to a titillating soap opera. I imagined a deep-voiced announcer reading a tease saying, “Will Jenna take the bait?—or find the pride to say ‘No’? We’ll find out after these messages.”

  Jenna did not say yes or no. She wavered. Perhaps she was tempted; perhaps she was too polite to hang up. The young man’s crassness and urgency mounted as his stop approached. It became increasingly clear that the drinks and sex were only sweeteners to his primary motive of getting a ride home on a cold night. Of course if he could get the ride and the sex he would have a boastworthy tale for weeks to come.

  He tried until the last minute but Jenna dithered and when the train stopped, he gave up abruptly, pocketed his phone, and joined other passengers filing out of the train. I got a glance at him as he passed. He was tall and mildly handsome but he had the look of a spoiled and sullen preppy, and his lightweight blue blazer was not going to keep him warm walking home.

  His departure left a silence. That’s when the woman sitting next to me leaned sideways and whispered, “What an asshole.”

  I laughed. And nodded in agreement.

  She looked at me directly, her big dark eyes making confident eye contact. “This Jenna is hating herself right now. Hating herself. I bet she still lives with her parents and she’s sitting alone in her little pink bedroom and she’s so bored she wants to scream. Because she has no balls. I figure she’s someone he knew in high school but she was below him on the social ladder and he never called her but tonight she got her chance. She could have taken it or rejected it and either would have been fine but she did nothing. It’s the story of her life and she knows it.”

  Probably. But I felt for Jenna. Her offer came from an asshole with shoddy motives but what happens when you get a sudden offer from life? It demands a boldness you don’t ordinarily possess but you want to say yes despite the risk because this is your chance and it might never come again. What do you do?

  That’s what I was thinking, but it’s not what I said.

  “When I was his age if a girl I had no chance with called up and promised to buy me drinks and have sex in return for a ride from the train station, I would have broken the speed limit to get there before she changed her mind.”

  “Of course,” she said, eyes twinkling. “For the man it’s a no-brainer. But it was a decision for her and she blew it. She didn’t have enough self-respect to make a decision.”

  At this point I was thinking that this conversation was pure high school and I was forty years past high school but I was enjoying it. I was also thinking that the last time a young woman started a conversation with me was either in the Pleistocene or Jurassic period but so long ago that scholars no longer give a shit. I’d forgotten how welcome it was. This woman—Italian-looking, strong but plain features, shoulder-length black hair—had a vitality and nerviness that instantly delighted me. I was pleased that she intended to move on from Jenna’s dilemma to other topics.

  “So, did we have a lot to drink tonight?”

  “Jeez, where did that come from?” I said. “Do you have a great sense of smell or are we married?”

  “It wasn’t the smell I’m talking about. It was your crash landing into your seat.”

  “You’re right, I did have some drinks. I had dinner with an old friend. In fact we talked a lot about self-respect. Not quite as light-heartedly as you and I are talking about it, but the same thing.”

  “What is it about self-respect that you were so unlight-heartedly talking about?”

  “We talked about the erosion of self-esteem as you get older.”

  “Why is that? My dad’s older than you and he has no problem with self-esteem.”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear it. But a lot of people my age start to lose the things that create self-respect. Everything starts to diminish: your work, your place in the world. Your memory. You’re only a step away from sitting around a pool in Florida talking about your doctor’s appointment and the early bird special at the new Thai
restaurant. You walk down Fifth Avenue and people look right through you. I bet most people my age know the feeling. You’re so irrelevant you’re invisible.”

  “My dad is seventy-five and he sure isn’t invisible.”

  “I should get your dad’s advice. What would he say to me?”

  “He’d say, ‘Grow the fuck up.’ ”

  I started to be offended but she cut it off with a smile and pat of my elbow.

  I said, “I turn sixty next May.”

  “Condolences. I turn forty in February. But I never would have guessed you’re almost sixty. You’ve got hair, you’re not fat, you don’t have an old-fart voice. You’re not bad looking. I think you’re just playing games with yourself.”

  I laughed again, enjoying the flattery.

  “So you go out with your friend and talk about getting old?” she said. “Isn’t this kind of a downer?”

  “We enjoy commiserating. It’s a good way of dealing with major negative changes in life. You talk about them until they bore you and then you’re okay. What does your dad do?”

  “He still runs his business.”

  “What kind of business?”

  “It’s a family business.”

  “Doing what?”

  “He’s not doing much right now. He’s been sick.”

  “So what do you do?”

  “I tend my flock.”

  “Kids? How many?”

  “No, no kids.”

  “Sheep?”

  “No. No sheep.”

  She smiled gently but turned away. I wondered if I’d said something wrong. She was looking out the window (where she could see nothing but her reflection in the glass). I sneaked a good look at her and gathered these details: she wore no makeup, no wedding ring, and no jewelry, and under her black parka she wore something you don’t see much anymore, I think they call it a dress. Maroon or some other drab reddish/ brownish color. She had a large leather handbag into which she put her book. I caught a glance at its title, something about cancer, which I connected with her sick father.