“Italo?” I could scarcely believe it was him. Pale, sickly skin and a haunted look in his eyes. Wearing a bright green workout shirt that’s tight around the belly. Flashy sneakers with trailing laces. As a kid, he’d been lean and handsome, with a smirk that proclaimed him to be untouchable.
He nods without really seeming to take me in. Standing on the front steps of his house, THE house that had been HQ for the group of Italian kids I’d run around with growing up. There’s the crooked basketball net over the driveway. The secondhand BMW his father drives. Only we weren’t kids anymore. We were men in our early thirties, and, apart from sporadic trips home to see Mom and Dad, my life was in upstate New York, not LaSalle, the joyless Montreal suburb whose negative pull I’d scrambled to escape from with every ounce of strength I possessed.
“You back?” he asks, almost hopefully.
I shake my head. “Just visiting.”
We’d moved into the neighborhood when I was 7 years old. My parents had gone to open houses for months. Finally, they came upon a modest three-story with a neat little lawn and a brick facade. To the north lay Riverside Park where my younger brother and I could play, and to the south the frothy white rapids of the St. Lawrence River. My mother loved it, and eventually convinced my father.
Here’s what they didn’t know: we’d moved smack dab into the middle of an unspoken, at times bitter cultural war between a group of Italian immigrant families and a much larger community of French Quebecers who didn’t take too kindly to the invasion of noise, accents, and gaudy home renovations. Our little cul-de-sac was dominated by Italians, which meant that, based on proximity alone, they would have to be the ones whose friendship I solicited. Because I didn’t want to dash the hopes of my parents solicit them I did, starting with Italo, the undisputed leader of the other boys. He let me tag along on bike rides. I was allowed to play goalie during street hockey matches. But neither he nor the rest of the rogue’s gallery I called friends back in those days ever let me forget that I was an outsider and would never truly belong. This was how it continued for the better part of four years. And then, on a sunny day in July 1991, the ground shifted beneath our feet.
I was biking down the street towards Italo’s, trying to see who was up and about. In those days kids migrated towards his house like it was the center of the universe. Then I heard a low whistle coming from my left. I turned and saw Italo and the usual suspects gathered about the basement window of a house where the family had recently moved out. They’d left suddenly, in the middle of the night, without a word to anyone. It was a big scandal on a street that had few of them.
I laid my bike down on the grass and went over. “What’s going on?” I asked, but a sharp glance from Italo put further questions to rest.
Anthony, veiny muscles and blank eyes, was busy trying to pry the window open with a sharp stick. He was Italo’s cousin and enforcer. David, whose family owned a prospering construction company, was halfheartedly trying to cover up the view from the street. Dino, a lanky kid who lived a few houses over was nattering on about something or other in a monotone that instantly made you feel sleepy. Witnessing this scene, I wished that I’d simply kept biking but it was too late: once you knew something you were committed. There was no copping out, unless you wanted to wake up to a front porch spattered with egg yolks and assorted bits of trash (which had happened to all of us except Italo on at least one occasion).
Anthony eventually got the window open. As I was the skinniest of the group, Italo “volunteered” me to go through first. It was a tight squeeze, and I scratched my leg on the edges of the window frame, but I knew better than to show it. I landed on a cold cement floor and blinked a few times to adjust to the gloom. There were bits of detritus on the floor, duct tape, flattened cardboard boxes, forgotten toys and leftover home furnishings.
“Go upstairs and open the front door,” Italo said. His eyes flicked to the side of the basement and I saw what all the fuss was about:
The far wall of the basement was completely filled with shoeboxes. And not just any shoeboxes: L.A. Lights, crazy popular at the time because their soles lit up in bright colors. In short order we’d kitted ourselves out with a pair each. Had we left then, it would have been a successful caper. But Italo had a sly look. And Anthony was watching him closely, ready to echo and enforce whatever was suggested.
“Let’s take them,” Italo said.
A moment’s pause. “All of them?” Dino squeaked.
“The Dad was a deadbeat,” Italo said, drawing the words out as though Dino were slow. “He won’t be back for them.”
“How do you know?” Dino asked.
Italo turned his back on Dino, a clear invitation to leave if he wanted to.
But of course Dino didn’t leave. None of us did. Italo was the Pied Piper, playing whatever tune fancied him, and we followed. Because not doing so would mean staying indoors during those hours before dinner, listening to the sounds of kids playing outside, dreading the moment when your father or mother would ask, “Is something wrong?” These were our neighbors. Making enemies of them wasn’t an option. And so we willingly made ourselves prisoners.
Over the course of the next hour, we moved all the boxes from the basement to Italo’s backyard, where a tent would eventually cover them up. His mother brought out snacks for us, and though a few shoeboxes were in plain sight, she didn’t ask about them. Italo’s entire family suffered from a strange kind of blindness when it came to their son, denying anything that contradicted their idea of him as fundamentally decent and destined for great things. My father took the exact opposite approach with me, criticizing near everything until not being criticized became the compliment. When we were done, Italo revealed his big plan: we were going to sell them. Door-to-door. He and David would do the talking. Dino and I would be couriers, going back to the tent for correct sizes. Anthony would handle the money.
The next day we biked enough blocks away so as not to run into neighbors and began. Italo did most of the talking at first, fast and easy patter he must have picked up from a movie. People observed his big smile, glanced behind him at his motley crew, and promptly shut the door in his face. After this had happened several times, David tried to step up. But he was so uninvested in the enterprise that he ended up having agonizingly long conversations with adults that never led to an actual sale. Finally, I couldn’t take another rejection and volunteered to do the talking.
“No one’s gonna buy from a Paki,” Anthony said, looking to Italo for approval. Italo smirked, but his heart wasn’t in it. It was hot outside. Kids were swimming in pools and drinking lemonade. He looked on the verge of calling it off.
Italo pointed towards a pink house further down the street. “Do that one.”
What I remember is in bits and pieces. Walking up the steps to that ridiculous pink brick house. Yellow marigolds on the windowsills. Holding a shoebox in trembling hands. Cold palms. Door opens, a woman holding a young baby asking what I want.
“Your help,” I said and there was a feeling of splitting away from myself and entering a space of freedom unlike anything I’d experienced before. “Our parents, they used to work for LA Lights.” I held up the box, no longer wanting to hide my shaking hands but exploit it. “They all got fired. They don’t know what to do. We…” I tilted my head towards the others, “this was all we could think of to help our parents. Can you help us?”
The story made no sense. But the sheer need in my eyes was overwhelming. In those days, and in some ways for every day afterwards, that howling desire within was something I’d struggle to hide from view, only revealing it to a trusted, loved few.
She opened the door a little wider. The child had fallen asleep against her massive cleavage. Inside the television was on and blaring the Dini Petty Show (a Canadian talk show).
“I don’t have long,” she said. And that became our first sale.
Over the course of that week we settled into a pattern. I became the group’s pitchman, exploiting my very real desire to connect with people into sales: 30, 20, 10 dollars, whatever it took to get a “yes”. After a while I stopped seeing those who answered the door as individuals and started seeing them as marks: the lonely man in his forties with zits on his face just wanted to feel liked. The babysitter in the too-tight jeans wanted to feel cute. I homed in on these things, tailoring my pitch towards soothing their insecurities. They were putty and I was the shaper, bending and twisting as I saw fit. For the first time, I knew what it was like to be Italo.
Questions arose at home too. I saw my father leave for work every morning at sunrise and return so exhausted he needed a nap before conversing with his family. I, on the other hand, spent an hour or two a day faking sob stories and got a shoebox full of cash beneath my bed as recompense. Was that fair? There was a theme to my father’s criticisms: be an upstanding citizen. By any standard he fit the mold. And what did he have to show for it besides migraines caused by mounting bills? What the hell was “integrity” in a world where the bulk of his salary was being put towards covering medical bills for my mother’s schizophrenia that insurance or the government didn’t feel like paying? It was a joke, and late at night, with nothing but my flashlight and the shoebox stuffed with crumpled bills, I promised myself I wouldn’t become a punchline like him.
The end came suddenly. One morning I biked over to pick up where we’d left off and found the tent dismantled, the remaining shoes gone. Italo and Anthony were playing basketball. Dino was fixing the gears on his 10-speed. The night before I’d seen at least 10 boxes remaining, but Italo had disposed of them somehow. Perhaps he’d given them away. Perhaps he’d thrown them in the trash. Whatever the method, the outcome was the same: reminding us who was really in charge. A good-looking kid with an easy smile and his goon of a cousin, who had once run up to Gervais, a mentally challenged French Quebecer who lived nearby, kicked him in the shin, and run back to his friends, laughing.
I joined in the game. And weeks later, after I’d spent the last of the money, I recognized the stupor it had brought on and despised myself for feeling superior to people I didn’t even know. I understood that when you screw people over, you’re just setting the stage to be screwed over yourself. The action is inextricably bound to the result. Italo never got that message.
He sees me looking at the basketball net and attempts a grin. The pale skin makes what was once charming seem ghastly. “Wanna play first to 20?”
He leans down to lace up his shoes. A low grunt escapes his mouth. Even now, he proceeds as though he’d never heard the word “no” in his life.
5 years after the shoe fiasco, when Italo was 16, he was hanging out at David’s house. David went downstairs to help his mother with something. While he was gone, Italo went into the master bedroom and stole jewelry belonging to David’s mother. It was an easy grab, and the chances of being caught were slim: David and Italo had been friends almost since birth and their parents were very close. But Italo couldn’t ignore his conscience. A few days later Italo returned to David’s house and, in full view of his friend, brought out the missing jewelry, placed it on the coffee table, and left. He was completely ostracized as a result.
Italo straightens up. “What do you say?”
“No thanks, buddy.”
This post was written by
Anish Majumdar – who has written 15 posts on DashAmerican.com.
Anish Majumdar is the creator of DashAmerican.com, a site devoted to the cross-cultural experience. He is of Bengali descent, raised in Canada, and currently living with his Irish-German-Lithuanian wife in upstate NY. His work has received Independent Press Association Awards and a Pushcart Prize nomination. Contact him directly with any questions, career opportunities or just to say "howdy" using the "Send an Email" button below!
