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ONE
RULES TO GETTING ALONG WITH YOUR NEW BOSS
February 2001
Michael
“Here, you submit your time card. Here, you check your assignments. You do good, I train you to drive the limo, too. Get the tips, eh? Maybe throw you some overtime.”
I followed the owner of Zola Auto and Drive as he gave me the ten-minute tour of the shabby little garage. It was nothing special, almost identical to any other body shop in the Bronx. Except this one came with a dedicated corner for restoring classic muscle cars and two eighties-era limousines that probably made the rounds during prom season in the Bronx.
I took in the details: two lifts bearing cars in different stages of repair, a cluttered office near the entry, and rickety stairs leading to a breakroom where I’d be sleeping for the foreseeable future. This gray box, reeking of motor oil and stale coffee, while a scratched Dean Martin record warbled from the back corner, was my new home.
Maybe “home” was a bit generous. A place to hang my frayed Yankees hat. A garage where I could make a little coin while I figured out what the hell I was going to do with my life now that I’d screwed it up.
Not that I was complaining. The breakroom was already better than most places I’d lived. Hard to beat group homes stuffed with five to a room or a different friend’s couch every few days.
Besides, most kids who got out of Rikers ended up in shelters, if not halfway houses, because they couldn’t find nothing better. At least I had Father Deflorio, my ma’s old priest. He was able to hook me up with a shabby mattress and a part-time job at this shop owned by Mattias Zola, another parishioner. As a newly released parolee, I couldn’t ask for much else. I might as well have been walking around with a neon sign over my head reading “Fuck Up.”
“Key to the room.”
I blinked when a key hooked onto a green rabbit’s foot was dangled in front of my nose. I pocketed it with a grunt. “Thanks, Mr. Zola. I appreciate it.”
Anyone would know Mattias Zola was Italian to the bone even without hearing that thick accent. It was something innate fewer and fewer residents of Belmont had about them. Dude was old school, the type who always wore a hat when he left the house, still danced with his wife to Rosemary Clooney, and spent his summer afternoons playing cards and sipping espresso with his cronies at the sidewalk cafes lining Arthur Avenue.
He seemed bigger than he actually was, with the kind of shoulders, chest, and hands a guy his size would never get without doing physical labor his whole life. His thick neck strained against the open collar of his polo shirt. Around it gleamed a silver crucifix and San Gennaro medallion, glinting under the shop’s fluorescents. His face, with a craggy nose and thick black brows that didn’t match his otherwise steely gray hair, wasn’t rude or anything. But you could tell he wouldn’t put up with your shit.
Zola set a heavy hand on my shoulder. “Call me Mattias. Father Deflorio and me, we’re family. It’s what family does. It’s what we’re about here.”
I looked doubtfully around the shop and its four mechanics. Family. That was a laugh. I didn’t know the meaning of the word, and even if I did, I wasn’t going to find it in a car garage.
“Thanks,” I said again. Then, out of curiosity, “Naples?”
Zola’s dark eyes brightened beneath the brim of his driving cap. “Nineteen fifty-six. Too long ago. You know Napoli?”
I chuckled. “I had a grandpa from there. He came in forty-eight. Lived in Brooklyn, though.”
Zola nodded, like I’d passed some kind of test. I didn’t tell him that I never met my nonno because he also died less than ten years after arriving in New York, thanks to his involvement with the mob. He wasn’t even a made man. Lived just long enough to knock up my grandma before meeting his maker at the bottom of the East River.
Something told me that Zola wouldn’t exactly be impressed. From what I could tell, the guy was clean as a fuckin’ whistle, and I didn’t want to give him any reasons to let me go. He was taking a chance on me as it was.
“We only got the four rules here,” he said as he led me back to his office. He took a seat on the torn leather swivel chair behind the desk full of papers and turned down the stereo. “First, you come in on time. Second, you do your work, no trouble. Third, you don’t steal.”
“And the fourth?” I wondered as I eyed an autographed picture of Frank Sinatra.
Zola—the only man besides me who wasn’t dressed in coveralls—pulled meditatively on his suspenders. “Fourth—and most important—you stay away from my granddaughters.”
I wondered if he was joking. He had to be joking, right? That wasn’t a real rule; it was the kind of thing men said in bad comedies or comic books. You couldn’t go around telling your employees who they could and couldn’t talk to. People didn’t do that.
But when I met Zola’s gaze, I could tell that he meant business. His beefy hand gestured toward two framed photos on his desk. One was a black-and-white portrait of a dark-haired beauty, a dead ringer for Sophia Loren. His wife, probably, considering the fact that the picture was probably taken sometime in the late fifties or early sixties.
Damn. Mattias Zola had some game back in the day.
The other was blurrier and harder to see, considering it had a lot more people in it. From where I stood, it looked like Zola was sitting in the middle of a bunch of kids—at least five or six.
Grandbabies.
I hid a laugh behind one hand. It wouldn’t be the first time someone told me to stay away from their kids (or grandkids, in this case), but not at a job and not with the kind of “fuck around and find out” expression Zola was currently sporting. Did the guy really think I was interested in screwing around with a bunch of little kids?
