Tali’s

Posted on February 5, 2017 by John Biscello
   It was a thing. Every Tuesday night at around 7 or 8, the black Cadillac Sedan would pull up in front of Tali’s bar, and the driver would hustle around to the other side of the car, open the door, and out would step the esteemed passenger. John Gotti.
   In the 90s John Gotti was king in our neighborhood. Most of the boys wanted to grow up to be like him. The expensive cars, the three-piece suits, the swagger and moxie, the awe and reverence he inspired. We felt lesser than and we wanted to feel better than and John Gotti was a symbolic bench-mark for high esteem.
   On Tuesday nights Gotti would come collect money from Tali’s, a bar in which he was invested. Tali’s was located right up the block from where I lived. I never went in, and you couldn’t see inside because the front door was solid and the windows were darkened. Actually, I did go inside once, I don’t remember why, maybe my father or one of my uncles was in there, and I remember seeing a bunch of old men smoking and playing cards at tables directly across from the bar.
   Outside Tali’s you’d often see Italian men, of all ages, loitering, smoking, bullshitting. The front of Tali’s was a Little Italy unto itself.
   I could never tell which men were real gangsters and which were wanna-be gangsters. They all looked and acted like gangsters, conducted themselves with a belligerent sense of self-importance and bombastic speech, but I knew, from my father, that many were playing at being a gangster, or hoped to be regarded as such through their shoulder-brush association with the real gangsters.
   I have no idea where my father stood in the gangster scheme of things. I knew that he received Teamster magazines, and that he had worked private sanitation for a while (which everyone knew was a mafia-run operation), and he definitely knew a lot of people, but I was never certain if he was on the periphery, on the outside looking in, or close to the center.
   Once when I asked him about mafia, he snapped—John, when are you gonna grow up, there’s no such thing as mafia.
   Mafia, it seemed, was a fiction on par with Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, an illusion that required puncturing as a rite of passage.
   Regular people went to Tali’s too. I knew because my uncle Anthony, who was definitely not a gangster, would sometimes go there to hang out. When I asked him what it was like inside there, what went on, he said—Nothing really goes on. The usual bar stuff. People  drink, hang out, play cards, shoot darts, that kind of thing.
   His banal description of Tali’s dulled the luster of the mystique I had built up in my mind. I imagined there was a back-room where people were sometimes killed. And that the ghosts of those people continued to haunt Tali’s. That big and important deals, determining the fates of various lives, were brokered in a hush-hush manner.
   Maybe these things happened, maybe not. By time I was old enough to legally drink Tali’s had closed down and was replaced by an Italian restaurant. Which, as it turned out, was a place where I waited tables for a summer when I was in my thirties. If the ghosts of the brutally slain were still milling about, I never heard a thing.
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Seeker

Posted on February 4, 2017 by John Biscello
   Ready or not, here I come.
   I can still hear my voice, calling out, a bright echo in an archival loop.
   Hide and seek was a game we used to play all the time.
   At my house. Her house. On the block. In the park. Wherever.
   She—whose name has gone from me, though I have superimposed many names over the absence throughout the years—always insisted on being the hider. She refused to seek.
   You seek and I’ll hide, she’d always suggest with a vigor that implied novelty.
   Okay, I’d always agree, as if for the first time.
   I liked seeking. It suited my personality. The way, I imagine, hiding suited hers.
   In that respect, there was profound ease and harmony between us.
   Yet playing hide and seek with her was not like playing normal hide and seek. What I mean is, the length of time she’d remain hidden grew exponentially with each new game, and it became harder and harder for me to find her. And it didn’t matter where we played. Even if it took place in my house, where I knew every possible place in which she might be hiding, I still couldn’t find her. It got to the point where it always ended the same way, me calling out—I give up I give up I give up (for some reason I had to say it three times)—and then she’d suddenly appear, behind me, or to the side of me, as if out of thin air.
   Where were you, I’d ask, and her pat response—A good magician never reveals her secrets—underscored by a mischievous smile.
   It was when her hiding grew to impossible lengths, that our game became an altogether different beast.
   Hours became days and days became months, and I would be absolved of fear and panic and rage and despair only when she revealed herself.
   It has now been twenty-seven years since she last hid and never came out.
   I have mostly gone on with my life, but a part of me has always remained behind, seeking her, as if the day she went missing froze us both in time.
   My wife has told me that I sometimes cry out in my sleep—I give up I give up I give up—and she asks me what it was I was dreaming. I tell I cannot remember, and I think she believes me.
   What would she think, I often wonder, if I told her that I used to play hide and seek with a girl who once hid and never came out again? Would her sympathies lay more with the hider or the seeker?
   Even though my wife and I have been married for almost ten years, I don’t know the answer to that question, how she would feel, how it might affect her.
   What I do know, or rather have come to learn through the interminable length of haunting, is that a game is not truly over until both parties confirm that it is done.

 

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Miss Roach

Posted on February 4, 2017 by John Biscello
    Kenny named her Miss Roach. He named her that because of the stiletto heels she always wore.
   Look at them—he’d always point at the heels first, as if she were an extension of the heels and not the other way around—those things are fucking cockroach killers.
   Her real name was Kathleen. She was married to a mustached bulldog of a man, Tommy, who sported tattoos and thick gold chains. His muscular arms were usually on display as he often wore white tank-tops, even in winter.
   Kathleen and Tommy had two children, Tommy, Jr., and Janine, ages eight and four, respectively. My mother and father were friends with Kathleen and Tommy, who lived several houses down from us, and the four of them would often hang out on our stoop or theirs, shooting the shit and smoking cigarettes.
  I was twelve and hadn’t really thought of Kathleen in sexual terms until Kenny christened her Miss Roach. Then I began to see and feel her through Kenny’s hormonally empowered eyes.
   Here’s a snapshot illustrating Miss Roach’s trademark look: asphyxiatingly tight denim jeans, Aqua-Net-petrified tower of teased-up platinum hair, oversized gold hoop earrings, a kaleidoscopic blitz of make-up, sequin-studded blouse, and stiletto heels.
   Tracking Miss Roach became a thing, a kind of peripheral past-time among me and my friends. Sometimes we’d see her sitting on the stoop, smoking menthol cigarettes. True was her brand. She smoked nervously, rapidly, like a bird pecking at savory air.
   If Kenny were there, he would usually spin a colorful narrative as to what he wanted to do to her, and have her do to him.
   Other times she’d take off for the avenue to shop, and we’d watch her heel-totter along the sidewalk, with a sort of palsied seductiveness, her denim-puckered ass as the magnetic satellite to which our eyes were drawn.
   When it came to the world of sex, Kenny was light years ahead of us, his friends. He had fingered several girls, received a number of handjobs and blowjobs, and had had sex with at least one real girl, perhaps two. Plus, he was the proud owner of an expansive porn collection.
   Kenny had been watching porn since he was nine. He was one of those early bloomers of degeneracy.
   Porn-viewing at nine, smoking at ten fingering girls by time he was twelve. The rest of us had, at the most, made out with girls, and I hadn’t even done that. It was my secret, burning shame. Demonstrating courage when playing war with my friends was one thing, intimately probing a girl’s mouth with my tongue required a bravery which I seemed to lack.
   Anyway, Kenny’s porn collection became the neighborhood lending library for wayward boys. Kenny loved dispending porn to peers in need. I think it made him feel like a mentor or sage, a deprived Obi-Wan-Kenobi to our Jedi-vices.
   Through Kenny’s porn I learned about French-fucking, fist-fucking, double penetration, rim-jobs, cum-shots, and more. While I wasn’t able to apply any of this knowledge to my twelve-year-old life, I filed it away for future reference.
   The privilege I possessed that none of the other boys possessed—actual contact with Miss Roach. Sometimes she and Tommy would go out in the evening and I would babysit Tommy, Jr. and Janine.
   Do you realize that you’re the luckiest motherfucker in the universe, Kenny told me. You get to hang out in Miss Roach’s house. Do you understand what that means?
   The blank look Kenny must have read on my face, caused him to squint his eyes and tilt his head, and spoke as if enlightening a mental defective—It means panties, man. Dirty panties. You have access to Miss Roach’s dirty panties.
  There he paused, rubbed at the edge of his mouth which had been claimed by a twitch, and his voice grew low and serious when requested—I need you to do me a favor, man.
   I knew what the favor was and wasn’t sure I could do it. Kenny, sensing my reluctance, launched, with a great sense of urgency, into a narrative. About how he jerked off to Miss Roach just about every night, and sometimes, in his fantasies, Tommy was tied up and gagged and forced to watch his wife get railed in the ass by a thirteen-year-old. There Kenny stopped, expectancy lighting up his eyes.
   And what does that have to do with dirty panties, I asked him.
   Kenny scrunched his features together, and again struck the tone reserved for retard edification—Dude, dirty panties could take my masturbation fantasies to a whole other level, get it? I’d have the smell of Miss Roach, the taste . . . I’d be that much closer to the experience of actually fucking her.
   The hungry look in Kenny’s eyes and in his voice made me realize that Miss Roach was who and what he wanted more than anything else. His desperate plea for help, for my help, gave me a sense of power.  As an avid reader of comic books, with Spider-Man being my idol, I thought of his mantra—With great power comes great responsibility.
   It was my ethical obligation to steal Miss Roach’s dirty panties for Kenny.
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Tracy

Posted on February 3, 2017 by John Biscello
   I won’t say Tracy was the first girl I ever fell in love with, but she was definitely my first obsession. I was sixteen at the time, she was fifteen.
   She was a friend of my friend, Camille, and when I met her I was immediately drawn to her. She had a lion’s mane of brown hair, a slight gap between her front teeth, a mildly raspy voice, and rich brown eyes.
   She came across as slightly ditzy, which was dramatically pronounced when she was drunk. she couldn’t handle alcohol at all. A few swigs from a 40 and she was gone. A liquid-goggly look came into her eyes, a glaze indicating a disconnect, and she became a creature of touchy-feely amorousness.
   I suppose that’s how we first hooked up, I don’t remember. After we hooked up, which at that time meant “making out,” I figured we were together and that her amorousness would exclusively extend to me. It didn’t work out that way.
   Sober, she was sweet and attentive, she was “there,” but drunk she was “gone,” another version of herself took over and that version would casually slip into the arms of another boy, and her tongue-in-his-mouth would follow.
   The first time it happened (we were hanging out on the street corner with a bunch of friends and she ditched me and went around the corner with another boy, and everyone knew what going-around-the-corner meant) I confronted her the next day when she was sober and she said she had no memory of that happening, and she was sorry. Tracy had this way of lowering her head, this sad downward tilt that tugged on my heart, and I forgave her. A week later it happened again and I cursed her out and broke up with her. I figured that was that but that wasn’t that.
   Tracy’s behavior disturbed and fascinated me. I was drawn to her dramatic swings from being “there” to “not being there.” It’s like the Tracy I knew, the one that I considered the true-Tracy, was eclipsed by the other-Tracy, drunk-Tracy, and I wanted to forgive true-Tracy. It wasn’t her fault. She was innocent. She was at the mercy of the other-Tracy, her evil twin. Or maybe all this splitting of Tracy were lines of bullshit I snorted, and really I just wanted to fuck her.
   Anyway, we got back together. And things went smoothly for about a month. Then, one night, when my mother was away, we hung out in my house and fooled around. It was the first time Tracy had let me take her shirt off and kiss and fondle her bare breasts. I felt as if our relationship was cruising into the next phase. The cruise came to a skidding halt when Tracy, after I was done playtiming her breasts, got this sad look. I knew what it was even before she told me, and when she told me, confessing and apologizing profusely in one fell swoop, the shock of not-again hit me in my stomach. I felt like an idiot. This time I didn’t shout or yell or accuse. I calmly and reasonably told Tracy that it would never be different, and that made me sad, but that’s just the way it was. Whenever she got drunk, she’d cheat. It was who she was. Who she had shown herself to be. Tracy left shortly thereafter, I imagine feeling ashamed. Yet even that wasn’t that between us.
   We would see each other on the street corner, as we hung out with mutual friends. I would either ignore her or say a quick hello. It continued in that manner for three weeks. During that span of time, I noticed that Tracy hadn’t been drinking. One night she came up to me and asked if she could talk to me, in private.
   I said yes and we went around the corner.
   Tracy told me she hadn’t been drinking, that it caused too many problems in her life. She spoke in a soft and yielding voice, the words were definitely coming from true-Tracy, and she went on to say that she was sorry for what she had done when we were dating.
  She talked for a while and I listened. Prompted by the warmth and sincerity of Tracy’s words, I told her that I was still crazy about her, and did she want to get back together? She did. We made out and I was thrilled to be reunited with Tracy. The past didn’t matter. It had nothing to do with John, or Tracy, or John and Tracy as a couple. That was the younger version of us. We were now several months older and wiser.
   Tracy’s next and last betrayal was the worst of them all.
   Me, Tracy and a bunch of our friends had gone to the beach at night to hang out and get fucked up. Tracy was drinking again, and I had never stopped. One of our “friends” was Anthony Parascando. He and Tracy began flirting with each other as we sat around the bonfire we had made. My stomach was the first to tell me what was coming and I knew there was nothing I could do to stop it. It felt like a rotten slab of destiny.
   Tracy and Anthony left the bonfire and walked a short distance to an elevated lifeguard chair. They climbed onto it and sat. They were in full view as they started making out.
   I sat on the sand, ashamed and humiliated and burning inside. What was even worse: all my friends felt bad for me. Even though I didn’t say anything, everyone knew how I felt, and to be exposed in this way was something I couldn’t stand.
   That’s fucked up, Joe Dars said gravely.
   Yea, I agreed, but what can you do? Sometimes people do fucked up shit.
   When Tracy and Anthony rejoined us, Anthony smiling, Joe snapped—That was fucked up, Anthony.
   What, Anthony said.
   His smile had gone away and he seemed genuinely perplexed. Then, as if a light bulb clicked on—Oh, because of John-John. I didn’t know you two were together, honest. Tracy never said anything.
   I looked at Tracy, who was far-gone and wobbly.
   If I would’ve known, Anthony said.
   Just don’t talk to me, I said to Anthony, and we left it at that.
   The next night, hanging out on the street corner, I got really drunk. When Tracy arrived, I lit into her without a moment’s hesitation. I ranted and screamed whatever came into my head and didn’t hold back. I wanted to cut her down until she was in tears, and with a string of hostile put-downs and disparagements I succeeded. Yet even when she was crying I didn’t let up, and finally P.J. stepped in and said, That’s enough John-John. You’ve said enough. Look at the girl. Look what you’ve done to her.
   I didn’t look at her. I didn’t want to see Tracy as a human being, as someone who had been hurt by my attack. I turned away and P.J. walked away with a sobbing Tracy. They walked around the corner and didn’t come back for a while.
   When they did P.J. had his arm around Tracy.
   They lived a young forever for about a week or two.
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Bones & the Blue

Posted on February 3, 2017 by John Biscello
My uncle was a full blown junkie. He was rail-thin, a mongrel with no bite. I liked hanging out with him. He had a sweetness and gentleness to him. He was a soft whisper whereas my father was a volcanic scream. The differences in their personalities matched their drugs of choice: my father, coke, my uncle, heroin. I preferred them high to not high, because when coked up my father was energetic and gregarious, and when smacked out my uncle existed in a state of dreamlike languor.
   My uncle lived with his mother, my grandmother. She was and would remain his caretaker until he kicked (which happened in his early forties). My grandmother’s house was two blocks away from mine and I spent a lot of time there. I was always there on Sundays, as that was the day we had Sunday dinner together: me, my grandmother, uncle, mother, and my sister. It was a family tradition. Pasta, meatballs, sausages, salad, Italian bread, then cookies or cake for dessert.
   I’d usually go over in the morning and my Uncle and I would watch Abbot and Costello, and play games. Usually Hangman or card games: Rummy 500, Go-Fish, Jacks or Better. My uncle frequently nodded off. Amazingly, he always woke up right before the cigarette that precariously dangled from lips fell from his mouth. Well, almost always. There was the time the cigarette fell from his lips, started a small fire, and burned half the couch, as he remained in la-la land. I wasn’t there, but I heard my grandmother telling my mother about it. They often shared stories about their respective men’s strife and mayhem. My uncle and my father were each running their own course to self-destruction. The women, along with me and my sister, were casualties by default.
   My uncle and me would also go to the movies a lot. He’d nod off during the movie, his head either slumped forward or thrown back, mouth gaping, Adam’s apple protruding. If the movie had a sex scene, or a sexually suggestive interaction, I’d masturbate through my jeans. This was when I was 12 or 13, and had become a chronic masturbator. When my grandmother took me to the movies, I was a bit more brazen. Whether she nodded off or not I masturbated through my jeans, and tried to do so covertly. I’m pretty sure she never knew. If she did, she never let on. That was one of my grandmother’s specialties: sweeping things under the rug. She hated confrontation, or dealing with uncomfortable or emotionally complicated situations in a direct manner. She’d sweep everything under the rug. The rugs in her house were swollen humps suggesting a lot of hidden shit. My mother often did the same. It was the family way: keep the dark, diseased, and uncomfortable under rugs, in closets, anywhere except out for others to see. Both my grandmother’s house and my parents’ house were breeding grounds for shame. There are only so many things that can be buried under rugs.
   Suicide attempts. Incest. Addiction. Abuse. Mental and psychic disorders.
   None of it was ever “discussed.” All of it went under the rug.
   I now sing the bones.
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My Unreal Family

Posted on February 3, 2017 by John Biscello
   At times I feel like I invented them, along with the rest of my childhood. Which, in a sense, I suppose I have. They are who they are they are, regardless of my perceptions and analysis, yet  I have, at least partly created who they are in relation  to me.
   There are times when I’ve done everything in my power to erase them as a reality, to distort, deform, and reconfigure them (according to my standards of fiction). If you were to ask me to use one adjective to describe my childhood, my family, I’d say: loud.
   I remember living through a loud and noisy childhood.
   It was the noise of violence, of fighting, arguments, doors slamming, objects thrown; the noise of threats and accusations. Peace, in my house, was a brief tense respite between battles.
   My family was not my family. They were a fiction I had stumbled onto, an invention I couldn’t control. I preferred fictions and inventions that I could control, order, and arrange. My family was fiction-as-reality, and it was a reality predicated on chaos, turmoil and unpredictability. Or rather, predictable unpredictability, the kind you could set your watch to.
   I had my room in which to hide and take refuge. I had my books and comic books and action figures and video games, my customary escape outlets.
   I built different worlds that were my worlds, not the world into which I had been thrust, the world in which I felt trapped, the world in which I was small and powerless.
   If you were to ask me what I most remember about my childhood, how I’d describe it, that would be a term I would use: small and powerless.
   In my house, in my family-reality, I felt small and powerless, in the worlds I created I felt powerful and important. Has not writing been that for me? A secret world, among language and symbols and images, among the flotsam and jetsam of memory and imagination, in which I felt not only important but more profoundly myself. Writing is the place where I go to meet me. Or the many variations thereof.
   In my unreal family my unreal father would sometimes disappear for a couple of days or more, when he was in the throes of a drug-and-booze binge. In the early going I used to pray—please please please God, don’t let him be dead, let him be alive—it was a plea soul-felt and emotionally charged. As time went on my prayers became less emotional and more pragmatically selfish—please please please God, don’t let him be dead, if he’s dead who will drive me to my Little League games, who will take me to Great Adventure? Eventually I stopped praying altogether as I felt nothing at all, just numbness. Even if it wasn’t true on the deepest level I stopped caring whether he was alive or dead, I was tired of the emotional swings, I wanted off the see-saw. Also, if my father was dead, then he, as a ghost could be resurrected through my fiction, and I could feel more for him than I had felt in real life, I would have access to emotions otherwise blocked. The whole thing was an existential mess.
   I have always felt that the only way to reach my father, and myself, was to travel an indirect, and oblique route; I had to “live it slant.” Intimacy, for me, or rather a feel or sense of intimacy, required distance. There had to be a sufficient measure of distance, a space in which the intimacy could grow. I’ve always thought of it as “breathing room.” The distance between reality and imagination allotted the breathing room in which fiction could arise and flourish, in which it could become something real.
   Being separated from my family, in the physical, geographical sense, allows me a different perspective on them, on myself, on what is between us (and what is not between us).
   I have found much that is alive in ghosts; I have found much love, or if not love then a special breed of warm intimacy, in absence.
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Meaning of the Mob

Posted on February 1, 2017 by John Biscello
The Meaning of the Mob.  I say, the Mob, meaning the Definitely Uncertain, Fixed—a liberal form of physics—
or the clotted swarm wallforming brick by brick, a mosaic pattern.      Pick a number, any number, it’s a given.
A given what, you say, a given that, heads together, mindless, will make of a stone’s throw a hard cold pledge—Indivisible, in Mob We Trust.
Meaning the Mob
made of a stone’s throw a lottery-like contest,
one hurl after the next,
snuffing out solitary skull-candles
in the name of making nameless a victim
                                                                        swallowed by sand.
And blood.   And the song sung not unlike syncopated tocks of rockingchair horror-christened,
the chant a band of hands knotted together:
In Mob We Trust . . . In Mob We Trust . . .
circling the victim,
swallowed by sand.   And blood.
And it was black.  It was black and they couldn’t see . . . and the track like that of an animal’s . . . they couldn’t see . . . it was black . . . and they couldn’t see . . . the moon—Mack the Knife, the Fat Pope, the Poet’s Dream—blacked out . . . they couldn’t see . . . so it was only . . . natural.

Continue reading →

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Broken Land

Posted on January 31, 2017 by John Biscello

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Print edition of my first novel, Broken Land, a Brooklyn Tale has been re-released.
ABOUT: A spectral, existential noir set against the aging irons of Coney Island and old guard lions of hip hop and silent film, Broken Land, a Brooklyn Tale tracks the singular odyssey of would-be sleuth and soon-to-be wordsmith, Salvatore Massimo Lunezzi. Prompted by an enigmatic phone call from a writer-friend claiming to be dead, Lunezzi launches an investigation that leads him to Ghostwriters, Inc., a company selling inspiration to struggling writers through the medium of “ghosting.” From Buster Keaton to Arthur Rimbaud, a boozy and brilliant dwarf to an enchanting femme fatale, Lunezzi is drawn deeper and deeper into the soul of story where fiction and reality inevitably converge.
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The Time of the Assassins

Posted on January 25, 2017 by John Biscello
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Review of Henry Miller’s study on Arthur Rimbaud, The Time of the Assassins, appearing in Riot Material.
“Published in 1956, when atomic anxiety and McCarthy-led witch-hunts were all the rage, Miller’s book functions on multiple levels. It is a meditative essay on both the myth and reality of Rimbaud, a hymn to soul-play and self-expression, a whetted scalpel dissecting white-wig morality and ready-made life-wear, and, as always is the case with Miller, a peep-show into the author’s psyche. You could also say that it’s a ticking time-bomb of a spiritual guide, or self-help book with black lung, as Miller summons the verve and electric strain of such prophetic heavies as Blake and Whitman in raising the roof.”
Read the full review here.

 

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Raking the Dust

Posted on January 9, 2017 by John Biscello

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The Kindle edition of my novel Raking the Dust is now available on Amazon.
ABOUT: In this rogue’s tale, full of sound, fury, and erotic surrealism, we meet Alex Fillameno, a writer who has traded in the machine-grind of New York for a bare bones existence in the high desert town of Taos, New Mexico. Recently divorced and jobless, Fillameno has become a regular at The End of the Road, the bar where he first encounters the alluring and enigmatic D.J., a singer and musician. Drawn to her mutable sense of reality, the two begin a romance that starts off relatively normal. When D.J. initiates Alex into the realm of sexual transfiguration, however, their lives turn inside-out, and what follows is an anti-hero’s journey into a nesting doll world of masks and fragments, multiples and parallels, time-locks and trauma; a world in which reality is celluloid and what you see is never what you get.
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