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Maybe this dude would be my knight in shining armor and come to my rescue, which would be more than I expected anyway. Maybe he’d get me out of this town and protect me from the Bonettis. I had all kinds of fanciful thoughts, and no one in their right mind would or could help me once they learned of my story and how I came to be in possession of stolen money that I no longer had.
Once I thought all I had to do was return the money I’d taken, because I was on the run and whoever had left the few bars and coins didn’t know they were there. They didn’t need it. I did. No one would notice if you had a lot of something.
It wasn’t that they had a lot of something. The Bonettis had plenty of everything. It wasn’t like they had a shortage of food, but it was money, and I didn’t have any so I took it. To my surprise someone did notice. I’d planned on giving back the money, but it wasn’t that easy. I was broke.
I’d just escaped with my life, and since I was on the run, I had to live until I got out of my mess. My first thought was to go to Las Vegas and try gambling to get the money I needed to run, and stay away until the Bonettis died or went to Rykers for the rest of their lives. And in their business, that was a sure bet.
Chapter 12
Romeo
When I first got into trouble with Nico Bonetti, it had nothing to do with money at first. That came later. It was because he saw what he wanted and took it, as he was known to do by everyone except me. No, it wasn’t anything serious between me and the Bonettis, except I fell in love with his brother, Dante, and not Nico.
When I first met Nico and accepted his offer, I was a marked man. An offer a young man with no prospects for the future, a few years of college, a few years of living in my father’s basement at the grace of a mother’s begging to keep a roof over my head, and a few years of fucking up with friends and anyone I’d met had sealed my fate, and I didn’t have the good sense to know what I’d gotten myself into.
When my mother’s good graces had dried up, and she couldn’t take the neighbors looking out of their windows to see the police bringing me home, I guessed that was too much for even her. Neighbors had such an influence on mothers and mine was no exception.
The racing through the neighborhood early in the morning didn’t do it. The giving the next door neighbors the middle finger didn’t do it, as well as giving him a blowjob, but the moment I got a ticket for an expired learner’s license, all hell broke loose, and my father said, “It’s time for this kid to go.” And my mother agreed with him, so she shoved a lifetime of her savings from a cookie jar or her bank under her mattress into my pocket, and sent me on my way, and I never looked back until now.
Meeting Nico Bonetti in a club didn’t help, especially since I’d been in Manhattan for a month, and I’d gone through all my resources, and had to find a job and I meant quick. What the fuck could I do? I searched my database for likely jobs and it came up empty.
The positions that paid anything in New York, you needed either a union card, or a degree, and I had neither. Everything else I had plenty of competition for, including homelessness, and it didn’t look like I’d find anything in the next few days, and I’d have to settle for the job of being a homeless person holding a cup on the sidewalk, or if I had been a businessperson I could clean car windows and make a few bucks to make my homelessness more acceptable given my circumstances.
The only thing I could think about was I would be homeless, and take my last bit of money and get a few drinks to forget about my situation. That was how I found myself sitting at a local bar at twenty-two years old around the corner from my rented room with a mattress that looked as if the bedbugs had generations of feeding on unsuspected humans. Even at that hotel, I was asked to leave the premises and leave the bedbugs behind.
The clerk said, “You know, Romeo, you owe two weeks rent, and I can’t let you go another week.” I leaned on the counter and reached into my pockets and placed everything in them on the counter. There lay pieces of a dollar, a soiled ten, and half of a twenty-dollar bill. If I looked hard enough I’d probably find the other half in the other pocket. Yet that wasn’t enough in a city like New York. It wasn’t enough anywhere in this country or any other.
Where could I go? I wondered, staring up at Jim who didn’t have any answers either.
“This is all I have, Jim.”
He glanced at the money, and then took a hard look at me. “We have nothing here for ten dollars.” I raised my eyebrow. “Where’s the other half of that twenty?” he questioned.
“That’s all I got.”
“Sorry, but you’re short...” He sucked his teeth. “...by a lot. Why don’t you go home?” I ignored him because that wasn’t an option.
“How short?” I had the nerve to ask a question like that. But when you were desperate you would ask all kinds of stupid questions.
“About two hundred,” Jim said, glaring at me. “And that’s for one night.”
“Do you have anything smaller? Maybe I can get the money up for tonight.” I could call my mother and beg her, but she’d just tell me to come home. So that was out of the question.
“Maybe you have something smaller, a closet with a large cat. Maybe one rat instead of a family of them. I’m easy. I don’t require much. I’d take a small closet.”
“Look, boy, I don’t have time for jokes.” It wasn’t a joke. “Either you have the money tonight or your clothes will be sitting in the lobby, and you know what that means.”
Yes, I did know what that meant. I’d be not only homeless, I wouldn’t have anything to wear. There’s nothing like being homeless and wearing the same socks and dirty underwear. I could come out of anything, but the thought of not having clean underwear drove me crazy. Some people would get upset when they were hungry, but with me it was clean underwear. And that was why I blamed my mother for always doing my laundry.
“I hear there’s an opening for a bartender around the corner, can you do that?”
“Yes. I can do that.” A huge lie. But I had a lead for a job, and I said to Jim, “I’m going to go and get that job. Don’t move my things until tomorrow. Can you do that for me?”
“As a favor to you, kid. I like to pay back, because I came to this city years ago and no one gave me a hand up. Can you imagine where I’d be if someone had.”
Not working in this broken-down hotel and waiting for someone to leave their things and rummaging through the pile of cheap possessions people left behind.
Jim thought I didn’t see him, but I did and now I had an inkling of my future if I didn’t do something quick, or if my luck had run out and my city life had run its course, and my next stop was to beg my father to give me a second chance, and knowing he wouldn’t, because he came from the old school of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps.”
