THIS AN EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER
PEACE BE WITH YOU by RAIMONDO SALOMONE
The slaps became whacks and soon they became punches. Vinny learned to fend off most of them because as he grew older, his father only had the guts to hit him when he was drunk and that gave Vinny enough of an advantage to ward off most of the blows. Nevertheless, occasionally, one would sneak in, like the night of his senior prom when Pete Croce came home roaring drunk, having lost his meager paycheck that afternoon at the racetrack. The punch wasn’t the usual right cross that Vinny was so adept at slipping. On prom night, Pete decided to throw a left hook, and Vinny was caught off guard. His eye swelled up immediately but the purple ring managed to stay down until the next morning, long after Vinny was done verbally abusing his date because she wouldn’t have sex with him. He even thought about hitting her but something stopped him and he never figured out what it was.
A sanitation truck turned down the corner on his block. Vinny knew the three a.m. routine well because he was almost always awake for it. If he had managed to fall asleep, the screeching of the truck’s brakes would violently awaken him. Grandpa Augie claimed that he never heard the trucks and Vinny just wrote that off as more Grandpa Augie bullshit. The noise was tolerable until they made it to the middle of the block, then the grinding of the compactor made it almost impossible to even think clearly. Sleep was still at least thirty minutes away.
With the truck gone on to the block between First and York Avenues, the Hungarian section, Vinny settled down and said the same prayer he’d been reciting in his head for more than three years. He prayed for his father’s mental and physical safety because Vinny had heard that jail punishes the mind even more than the body. He prayed for his mother who he didn’t remember. He knew her name was Angela and that a man in the neighborhood told him once that she was beautiful. Pete Croce had managed to burn all the photos of her, even their wedding picture from 1970.
Then he prayed for Frank Miller who would’ve turned forty this year if Vinny hadn’t run him down. He asked Frank for forgiveness and Father Matthew at St. Catherine’s said if you ask for forgiveness you’ll receive it. That seemed too easy for Vinny. Run a man down in the prime of his life. Orphan his kid and make a widow of his wife. Then just put your hands together, look up and pray and you get to be forgiven.
Where’s the smack down, the beating, the retribution? How about the vengeance? Even the mind numbing guilt was slowly going away, with Vinny having decided to buy into his father’s plan that what comes around, goes around and Pete Croce would take the blame, freeing Vinny to get on with his life. In a traditional sense, Vinny hadn’t kept his end of the bargain. He promised his father that he’d use his new lease on life to make something of it. He told him he’d go back to college, find a good, stable job and stay sober. The sober part stuck, but nothing else had, unless mopping up vomit five nights a week counted. Every night, staring at the ceiling before the garbage truck barreled down the block, caused Vinny to look inside himself. It was when he did his best thinking.