Rats and Retribution

(NOTE: The original title of this piece was "The Nigger," after the main subject's nickname. I changed it after a lot of stubborn consideration. I liked "Rats and Retribution" a whole lot better than "The Nigger" anyway. I wanted to be controversial, but decided I shouldn't be THAT controversial. This is NOT a racist story; I should say that up front. Read on, and you'll plainly see that.)



Revenge has been on my mind a lot lately. I don't know why. I'm not pissed at anyone, don’t have any old scores to settle, not looking for blood. In fact, I'm mellow yellow these days. Oh, I didn't used to be. I have the scars and the arrest record to prove it. But I think I'm at peace with the world now that I'm older and away from the family. It took a big bust to get me out of that life. I never would have gave it up otherwise. I loved it. The money, the women, the danger, the romance, the power, the respect...if it wasn't for that rat Joey Hill, I’d probably be in the same boat I was in back in the 80s.
Thanks, Joey, really. They killed him for what he did. Revenge. There was a lot of it in the world I lived in back then. Sometimes it was over business, but other times it was personal…and senseless as fuck. Guys killed other guys for just glancing at them wrong. A lot of hardcore motherfuckers wouldn’t let so much as a spilled drink go without a murder. It scares me (now) to know there're people like that out there. That might make me sound like a pussy, but it's true. They were monsters, in the purest sense, Neanderthals, ape-men, brutes, whatever.
But, back then, I was one of them.
Well, I was never as bad as some guys. Don't get me wrong, I was a real hard case in my day, but I was never that savage. I wasn't walking around with a hard-on looking to kill or maim you. I did what I had to do. Put it that way. Yeah, I whacked a few guys out, but only for business or in self-defense.
I remember this one hit back in '85, guy named Tommy was stealing family money. He was really just a kid, sixteen or so. The look on his face when I walked up to his car with my .44...I have nightmares about
it. I’m sorry. Really. God, I wish I never did any of that. I wish I never met Dino Murini that night back in '78. I wish I had stayed away from that damn club. If I could only turn back time.
But the past is set in stone, and I can't do anything about it. I can't change who I was or what I did, and I doubt I can even make most people believe I’m sincere.
But I've come to terms with that. Like I said, I made my peace. It was a long, hard road, but I did it. I was driving down the street when my journey
started and those red-and-blue lights flashed in my rearview. I held out for weeks. I didn’t say a word, just sat in my cell like a good boy. But after a while I got sick and tired of it, and I sure as hell didn't want the thirty year sentence I was looking at, so I cracked, I snitched. A rat will do anything to save his own life, the guys in the family used to say. Well, squeak-squeak, baby.
Rats. Another thing that's been bugging me. Not the human kind, the rat kind. You mighta heard, New York's crawling with them, the big, mean, ugly kind that live down in the sewers. You rarely ever saw them, just...darting from one trashcan to another in a dark alley. Yeah, I heard stories around them sneaking into houses and eating babies
in their cribs and shit, but rats never bothered me...until after that night in January '88. Now I can't stand the little fuckers. Gimme snakes, gimme spiders, gimme feds, but hold the rats, Pancho. I can't even handle little field mice. I live in the sticks these days, and have my house gassed every three months. One time I heard them in the walls and got so panicked I had to go to a motel until I had them bumped off. Rats and retribution. They go hand-in-hand for me. Vermin as agents of cosmic justice.
Yeah. They looked like they came straight from hell. Wouldn't surprise me if they did. I think Satan sent them to get The Nigger.
And why wouldn't he? If there was ever a guy who deserved it, it was The Nigger. He was...remember when I was talking about human monsters? Yeah, this guy was the one they feared. He was a short little dark-skinned Puerto Rican (which is why we called him The Nigger) with lank, greasy hair and wild eyes. The air around him crackled with voilence, and dark vibes wafted off him like stink off a pig. He was one of those unpredictable sorts. One minute everything's fine, the next he’s going apeshit, snarling and glaring. One time he whipped out a gun and blew away this kid we had serving drinks during a poker game "just for target practice." Blew two holes in his chest. He was also into voodoo. He'd go into these trances and speak some weird language. He also wore a necklace with human bones on it sometimes, and he'd draw
pentagrams with salt all over the place. Put simply, he was a scary motherfucker. I forget his real name. We never used it. Just called him Nig, and he accepted it with open arms and a sinister little grin.
I first met him not long after I started working with the family. Dino brought me down to this lounge some guys over in the Gezippi crew ran, a real nice place in Queens. It was a Monday night, and the place was pretty much deserted except for a few guys, one Little Jimmy Vario and another Tony DeSimone. Down at the end of the bar, there was this short fella leaned over his drink like a heartbroken character from one of those cheesy old country songs. When Tony loudly greeted Dino (standing up and throwing his arms out, you know
how us Italians are), he glanced over his shoulder, and I got a good look at his face. It was narrow and dark, the eyes reptilian slits and the small, mustache topped mouth cruel.
“Who the fuck is that?” I asked Dino after we slid into a booth near the bathrooms.
“Who?” Dino asked.
“That weird lookin motherfucker,” I whispered.
“Oh, that’s The Nigger.”
“What?” I asked. For a minute I thought I misunderstood him.
“Yeah, The Nigger. Really a spic. He’s riendly with Tony Bagels and does a little work on the side. You gotta watch him.
He's a crazy motherfucker.”
“Oh, yeah?" I asked, looking at The Nigger's back and already disliking him. I knew the type.
"Oh, yeah. Nasty son of a bitch. He’ll kill you just for shits and giggles."
A waitress came over and took our order. I tried not to watch The Nigger while we
waited and Dino prattled on about some job he had planned with some guys from the Caramaza Family, but he kept drawing me like a magnet. Once he glanced over, and I looked away real quick, but I’m sure he knew I was staring at him.
It was about six months or so before I started hanging around the lounge more often. The Nigger was always in. You'd think the son of a bitch lived there. He sat at the bar for hours, drinking and giving people the evil eye. The atmosphere around him was always dark and tense, kinda like a storm was brewing.
And there was, and it broke from time to time. Once, some guy was down at the end of the bar getting hammered and being loud. It was Saturday and the place was about as crowded as it ever got. I was sitting next to Dino, who was sitting next to Tony Bagels, who was sitting next to The Nigger, so I didn’t hear too much of what preluded the fight, but the guy was poking fun at The Nigger, talking about the long scar down his cheek and his cheap jacket. I was just getting high, you know, drinking some rum and Coke, and was pretty lit. I was talking to this sexy little blond when suddenly, below the sounds from the jukebox, a loud crash rang out. I whipped around, and The Nigger was on top of the guy, slashing him with a broken beer bottle. Tony Bagles and Little Jimmy had to drag him off. They were both strong guys, but it took all their strengh.
The whole thing couldn't have lasted two minutes, but the damage was done. The drunk’s face was a sopping wet piece of raw hamburger, his neck was gushing blood and he spat out bits of shattered teeth every time he coughed.
“Goddamn it!” Vinnie Gezippi, the capo, roared from behind the bar. He had been in the back, probably with a prostitute, when the fight started, and ran out as quick as his three-hundred-fifty pounds would allow, his shirt untucked and his forehead glistening with sweat. The whole place went silent, and all eyes were on him. “What the fuck is all
this?”
“This asshole was messin with me,”The Nigger said in his low, husky tone, “so I taught him some respect.”
Vinnie bent over the bar, and went white. “Jesus Christ! Look at him! Blood everywhere!”
“Now, now, now, now,” Tony Bagels stepped in, holding up a hand,
“He provoked him. He got what he had comin.”
Vinnie turned his hard gaze to Tony. “I don’t give a fuck! I don’t want this kinda thing goin on in my place!”
"Vinnie! Calm down, it was just a little fight, that's all. These things happen."
"You call this little?" Vinnie
shouted, motioning to the drunk. "Look at him!"
By now people were getting scared and starting to leave, murmuring and looking cautiously back as they went out the door.
“He started it,” The Nigger said.
“I don’t give a fuck who started it! I don’t what this shit happening
here! Look at him! Johnny, go call a fucking ambulance.”
I perked up hearing my name. “Huh?”
“Go call an ambulance. What are you, deaf?”
“Okay. Okay. Sorry” I stood up, and nearly fell over. My head was light and my feet heavy. The only phone Vinnie had in the place was a
payphone in the back. I kept my eyes averted as I passed the moaning form on the floor and almost slipped on his blood.
Behind me, Vinnie was still shouting and The Nigger was still replying in his even, breathy tone. Poor Tony Bagels stood in the middle trying to mediate.
“I don’t want your creepy ass back here. You got that? Hit the fuckin road.”
“But Vinnie,” Tony Bagels moaned.
“You too!” Vinnie thundered. “Take a hike! Both of you!”
I dropped a dime in the coin slot and called an ambulance. When I came back to stool, Tony and The Nigger were gone. Vinnie was muttering curses under his breath as Jimmy, Tony D., and a guy named Shorty stood awkwardly around. From the floor, the drunk made weak, wet sounds of agony.
“The guy did this ran out the door,” Jimmy spoke up after Vinnie had left out the back, not wanting to be around for any heat, “he was a mick with two missin teeth.”
We all grumbled our agreement. I drowned another drink.
About half an hour later, the paramedics finally decided to show up and take the guy away. I never heard
about him again. To this day I wonder if he survived.
Anyway, that isn't even half of what The Nigger did. I saw a lot of it. While he was banished from Vinnie’s club, and all Gezippi owned property, he was still allowed to hang around with the other crews. We all went back and forth to this bar and that, this club and that, you know, so we were all always around one another. I can’t remember most of it, thank God, but few things stick out in my mind, like how he carried this straight razor and every time a waitress came around in a short skirt he’d slash at them. He used to get hookers all the time and take them to this little hotel Johnny Carlone ran near the airport. He'd be in there with them for hours, and sitting down at the desk you could hear all kinds of screaming and moaning and crying, and not the good kind either, if you know what I mean. A lot of those girls came out with black eyes, broken jaws and noses, chewed up titties, bloody backs crisscrossed with cuts, and sore asses. And some of them didn't come out at all.
Oh, and he used to torture animals, too. It must have been about…1981 or ‘2, me, him, Tony Bagels, Little Jimmy, Tony D. and maybe a few others were walking down the street at night after going to a show. This alley cat came out of an overturned trashcan, and like grease lightning The Nigger had it by the scruff of its neck.
“Leave that goddamn thing alone,” Tony D. snapped.
“Yeah, don’t hurt it,” Tony Bagels echoed.
“Fuck you,”The Nigger said, and slit its throat right there.
Then there was this other time we were walking around, me, him, and, I think, a dude named Bobby, and The Nigger spotted some old guy with a cane crossing the street. “Hey, motherfucker!” he yelled, and when the old guy turned he shot him like four times in the chest. Now this was in broad daylight in the heart of Queens. The crazy bastard killed the guy in front of like ten people. Bloodthirsty.
That’s what he was, fucking bloodthirsty. I could sit here all day and tell you awful things. He was inhuman.
I did a job with him once, a hit. See this was…1987, I think, just as crack was getting big, and some small time street dealer was hustling on our turf. The family didn’t like drugs. Some guys used and some guys sold under the table, but officially that kinda shit wasn’t allowed. The don, Mr. Laraza, hated a junkie, and when he found out some spook was slinging rock to kids in one of our neighborhoods, he flipped his top.
Not many guys in the family met directly with him. Two who had the privilege were Little Jimmy and Tony D. One day I was down at the lounge drinking (I don’t wanna admit it, but for a long time I was a raging alcoholic), when they came in together. One sat on one side of me, and
one on the other. My heart started pounding. I thought I was gonna get whacked.
“Hey, how you doin’?” Tony asked me, squeezing my shoulder.
Shit. I swallowed my drink and steeled myself. “Fine,” I finally replied.
“We got a job for you.”
Whew!
“Oh, alright. What is it?”
“A hit.”
“Who?”
“Guy named Jackson. He’s been dealing around here, and Mr. Laraza wants him taken care of.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but before I could a voice came from the shadows at the end of the bar, startling all of us: “Let me do it. I wanna burn him.”
Obscured in the gloom, The Nigger sat hunched over, a drink
before him. I swear to God the place was empty when I walked in, and no one came through the door without me looking over my shoulder. It’s like he just…materialized.
“No,”
Tony said, “this is family business.”
The Nigger fumed. You could feel it. “I been around here longer
than him. I am family.” Tony was starting to get pissed. “Look, you goddamn beaner…”
“I ain't a fuckin Mexican…”
“…I told you…”
Little Jimmy jumped in. “Take it easy, guys, will you? Damn. Johnny, you wanna take him along? We’ll pay you both.”
Tony scowled. “I’m payin Johnny. You pay the wetback.”
“Fine. Fine. Now everyone shut the fuck up.” Jimmy looked at me. “We want this done today.” He reached into his coat and brought out an envelope. “His address.”
I took it and stood. “The sooner the better, I guess,” I sighed.
“Come on, Nig.”
I drove and he sat in the passenger seat. We stopped at a corner store for a case of beer and a bottle of Jack Daniels, which we split evenly, and then went on our merry little way. I was already buzzed, and by the time we reached the project where the dealer lived, I was roaring. I parked along a brick wall under an elevated and killed the engine.
“How the hell we gonna do this?” I asked. Usually I would have balked at shooting someone in a gang-infested complex in broad daylight,
but, like I said, I was pretty toasted.
“I go to the door like I want somethin, then I kill him. You stay here.”
I shrugged. “Okay, fine.”
The Nigger left me in the car and walked across the weed-choked parking lot.
I think he was gone for about three hours. I’m not too sure. It felt like forever. I sat there in the dry heat listening to the radio and guzzling. At one point I crawled out of the car and puked in the bushes. I can’t remember how the hell I even got back in, but I was stretched out in the back, my head throbbing and spinning, when The Nigger slid into the driver seat.
“Get him?” I asked, sitting up, the words sending bolts of agony through my skull.
“Yeah,” he said flatly.
“Cool.”
I passed out during the ride, and didn’t wake up until like one in the morning. The car was parked behind the lounge near the dumpster under a leafy tree.
I got out and hopped into the driver seat…only to find the leather steering wheel was covered with something sticky. I looked at my hands in the spill of a streetlamp. They were red
At the time I was still messed up, so I didn’t really care about anything but getting home and into bed. The next morning, I found that the seat, the inside and outside door handle, the rearview mirror, the seat itself, the wheel, and the carpet were all stained with blood. I mean the fucking shit was everywhere. The crazy son of a bitch must have been drenched with it when he got in. I couldn’t believe he actually drove around like that. He could have gotten us pinched.
I was kinda pissed, but I didn’t really think any more of it until later. I was about ready to go out for a few drinks when the 6’o’clock news came on. The lead story was “the brutal slaying of a local drug dealer.” Jackson was found hanging in his shower, or at least his torso was hanging. His head, limbs, guts, blood was in the tub, three inches deep. His hooker girlfriend had been stuffed into the stove like a cannibal roast. She had been raped and sodomized, and a kitchen knife was shoved down her throat. She was four months pregnant. The fetus was in the freezer, its skull laid open. Her other kid, a little two-year-old boy, was in a neighboring apartment that had been empty six months. The Nigger lopped his little penis off, gouged his eyes out, and then threw him in
a scolding hot bath. His skin was…God, man, just never mind.
Oh, boy, I was terrified. I hid in my house for like two days, just waiting for someone to storm in and whack me out. The mob really doesn’t like it when an innocent member of someone’s family gets killed. They’ll accept an adult causality, but not a child, never a child. The shit The Nigger did…man, that was like begging to be iced.
Finally, on Monday afternoon, Tony D. came over. I didn’t wanna answer the door, but I had
to.
“Here’s your money,” he said, handing me another envelope.
I took it. “Look, you know I didn’t…”
He nodded. “It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.”
And that was that. I thought for a while they were gonna whack The Nigger, but they didn’t.
Well, they could have been planning something, I don't know. It wasn't even seven or eight months later before The Nigger was dead on his own.
He got his in the end. Yes he did.
It was January’88. Vinnie was dead since ‘85, and Tony D. and Little Jimmy owned the lounge, so Tony Bagels and The Nigger were allowed back. It was snowing outside. The biggest blizzard in fifty years was moving across the northeast and New England, dumping nearly fifteen feet of snow in some places. We were all drinking heavy, dozens of us, having a little “Storm of the Century” party.
By nine or ten we were all blitzed out of our minds, and most of us were ready to go. The Nigger was drunker than I’d ever seen him before, which surprised me; he always seemed like stone, no matter how much he drank. He had this goofy
grin plastered to his face and giggled like a schoolgirl if you so much as said hello to him. He sucked down one beer after another after another, some nasty Spanish brand no one else wanted. He must have had at least thirty of the suckers, no shit.
At around ten-thirty, he was one of the last guys to go, staggering and swaying like a sailor on a pitching deck. He ran into Tony’s shoulder, and surprised us all by hugging him.
“Lu ya, man.”
“Get offa me,” Tony said, pushing him away. He reeled back in slow motion, almost balanced himself, and then fell onto a table, breaking it and the glasses left on it.
For a moment nothing happened, he just sat there like a kid in a sandbox, and then he burst out laughing, great, roaring peals.
“Now look what you did!” Tony
yelled, pulling The Nigger up and dragging him to the back door.
“I broke your shit, man!” The Nigger laughed.
“And you’re payin for it, too,” Tony snapped and opened the door. A snowy gust of wind nearly ripped it from his hand. “Now fuck off,” he said, shoving The Nigger out into the storm and slamming the door.
“You think he can make it home?” Jimmy asked Benny Castell, the don’s nephew, who was sitting between me and Tony D.’s nephew.
Benny shrugged. “Who cares?”
We all laughed.
“Hope the nasty fuck freezes,” Tony said.
And it looked like he was gonna get his wish. Not ten minutes later, Danny Davis, a friend of the family, came back in and said The Nigger was passed out on the sidewalk up the block.
“Good,” Tony D. said. “Let him freeze.”
“Come on, I can’t just leave him. Someone help me
get him back here.”
“I don’t want that dick sleeping in my place,” Tony objected.
“Fine, I’ll take him to my place then, but I need some help. Anyone gonna help?” No one answered.
“I will,” I slurred, getting unsteadily to my feet. Even then I wanted to let the son of
a bitch freeze; I don’t know why I volunteered.
“Alright, c’mon.”
I took my coat and hat from the rack by the door and followed Danny into the frigid night. The snow fell around us in a dirty white vortex. “Goddamn,” I panted, the howling wind slamming the door behind me. It was like walking into deep freeze.
“It’s supposed to be too cold to snow,” Danny said.
Danny led me down the sidewalk; or at least what I thought was the sidewalk. The snow covered everything.
“How far down is he?” I chattered.
“Right up here,” Danny replied,
“there…”
Danny froze so suddenly I ran into his back.
“Oh my God!”
“What…?”I stopped, seeing it.
The Nigger sat slumped against the brick wall of an abandoned tenement, his head lolling forward and his body covered in dark red blood.
“Shit!” I cried.
I don’t know if it was my voice or not, but something stirred The Nigger. His head flopped back as if to tip an acknowledging nod, and his face…it wasn’t there. It had been chewed up. Part of his eye was showing through his cheek, and his teeth were bared, the lips ripped away. He looked like something from a stupid Romero film.
And in his lap where six of the biggest rats I’ve ever seen. Large, coal black, lean, ugly. More swarmed unseen in the shadows, chattering and squeaking. Danny moved forward like he was gonna shoo them, and one leapt out of the darkness, hissing like a huge feral cat. I swear to God, that thing wasn’t natural. It just couldn’t have been. Thinking about it now, I kinda wanna say it looked…dead, like something dragged up outta the dirt by a hungry cat. I dunno. But I do know I’ve never been as scared in my life as I was then. Hell, it might as well have been an ape with a machine gun, the way we ran screaming back up the street. I looked back once and didn’t see anything…but
over the shrieking wind I heard The Nigger crying.
It took us two, three minutes to get back to The Suite. Both of us tripped a few times in our little flight, and we were covered in snow. Must have looked like two Yetis or something. When Tony opened the door he fixed us with a furrowed brow and a bemused little grin. “The fuck’s wrong with you guys?”
We babbled our story to him and Jimmy. Of course they didn’t believe us. After about ten minutes they grudgingly put on their coats and followed us back to the scene. The rats were gone, and The Nigger was beyond help. They’d clawed his eyes out, ate his flesh, bit his nose off. It was awful. I can’t even describe his face. It looked like…he looked like a dead body that just spent six months in a coffin rotting.
But the worst part was he was still alive. He moaned, and at the sound of Danny’s voice, tried to reach out to us.
“Hey, lookit him,” Jimmy laughed, “he looks like my ex-wife!”
Jimmy and Tony laughed and laughed and laughed.