The Domino Effect
Authors: Andrew Cotto
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Genre Fiction, #Coming of Age, #Teen & Young Adult
T
HE
D
OMINO
E
FFECT
A NOVEL BY
A
NDREW
C
OTTO
Published by
B
ROWNSTONE
E
DITIONS
, LLC
Brooklyn, NY
©2011 by Andrew Cotto. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
Cover art, design, and layout by John Passineau
ISBN-10: 0-61547-967-7
ISBN-13: 978-0-61547-967-5
eBook ISBN: 978-1-61914-405-7
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
PUBLISHER'S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Contents
T
hanks to all of the wonderful authors who have helped me over the years. Special thanks to my agent Jennifer Carlson for her belief in the story and assistance in shaping the narrative. My dear friend Kevin Mangini has tirelessly pushed me towards independence as an artist and spearheaded the book's promotional efforts with amazing ideas and energy. My father, beyond his paternal grace, brought the technical expertise and entrepreneurial vision to his son’s reluctant DIY efforts. Finally, my beautiful wife Pam has been unwavering in her support of my dreams for over a decade. Every spouse should be so lucky.
To my Mother
A
famous writer once said that anybody who survives childhood has enough stories to tell for the rest of their lives. I survived, barely, and high school was the hardest part. Especially the last year. And to tell the story of my last year of high school, I have to start with the first year. Then the second. And the third. These first three parts will be quick and painful. I promise.
I
had a lot of things going for me before high school started. I had friends, kids I’d grown up with, kids who met every morning on the sidewalk in front of my place. Every day, I’d take the lead by doing something nuts, like grabbing a watermelon from the fruit stand so the owner would chase me down the block. Or I’d have a seat at the sidewalk cafe and make like the big guys drinking little cups of coffee with their pinkies in the air. Once in awhile, out of nowhere, I’d drop a pack of firecrackers in the gutter and let the morning explode for a minute. Stuff like that. Harmless stuff. But good stuff, anyway, and the guys always laughed and followed me to the schoolyard, where they didn’t mind when I picked the worst guy first.
We’d play all morning with just a ball and a bat and a strike zone spray painted against the wall. The same wall that held our names. Up top, higher than the rest, was my name: Domino. Everybody called me that even though my real name was Danny. Danny Rorro. I’d lived in that Queens neighborhood my whole life. My mother grew up there, too. She’d come from Sicily with her parents when she was 8 years old. Same house that we lived in. My father was from an Italian background, too, but from all over New York. His mother died when he was a kid, from tuberculosis or something, and he spent his childhood being shipped off to different relatives and foster homes. He was into music, mostly drums, and at 18 he joined the service and spent the next four years touring the world with the Air Force band. After he got out, he met my mother at the Roseland Ballroom in Manhattan, and she brought him home to Queens.
Everyone liked my father. He was funny and smart and what people around called a stand-up guy. He always talked to me about doing the right thing. About looking out for other people and helping them whenever I could. He talked a lot about his heroes, like Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. I listened. I always listened because Pop was
my
hero. And I wanted to be like him, talk like him, act like him and everything. So that’s why they called me Domino. Because my father’s name was Dominick and, in Italian, ‘ino’ kind of means little, so “Little Dom” translated into Dom-ino. Everybody called me Domino, except my mother who called me Daniel, and my father who called me Pal.
And by the time Pop called me home for dinner, the summer before high school started, I’d been out on my own for most of the day with my friends. After playing ball all morning, we’d go to the pizza parlor and get slices with the money in our pockets, and afterward we’d go back to the school yard or maybe, if it was real hot, we’d go down to the shade of Spaghetti Park and watch the old-timers play bocce, or maybe we’d kick around the Italian Ice stand, under the awning, licking ices and talking a million ways around what was going on with our bodies, our muscles growing and our veins pumping with this crazy energy that led to the kind of things we knew next-to-nothing about but wanted more than anything in the whole world.
And even after my father called me home, and I had dinner with my parents, I kept thinking about those things me and my friends talked about under the awning of the Icey stand, and that taste of watermelon stayed with me through dinner. And the best part, the best part of the whole summer, was that after dinner I got to walk down to Genie Martini’s house.
Genie Martini was the cutest girl in my grade. She was short and brown-eyed and had what people around called a great set of lungs. Her father was a plumber and into the races, so he’d be out most nights at the track. Her mother wasn’t around at all, so Genie’s grandmother came downstairs most nights, and Genie and I would share a love seat in the front parlor while Nona watched her programs in the next room. Under the blare of the television and the switching of the scenes, Genie and I would whisper in the fake light and touch each other best we could until her father came whistling up the stairs. I felt kind of invincible back then, untouchable, like the superheroes in the comic books I collected.
But all summer long there had been signs that something was coming. Darker kids with darker hair started to appear on their bikes, riding through the neighborhood in the middle of the day. And this was a problem because this was our neighborhood, and our neighborhood was supposed to be all Italian, so strangers weren’t welcome. When they rode past the schoolyard, someone would yell “Spic!” and we’d drop our bat, let it clatter off the asphalt, as we chased those dark strangers back under the bridge.
The elevated trains ran through our part of Queens, and our neighborhood was separated from the next neighborhood by an overpass that, every couple of minutes, rattled over our heads. This was the border, and I, in all my life, had never set foot on the other side of that bridge. Stupid stuff, I knew even then, but the bridge was kind of sacred. So much so that all my guys supported this great idea I had to spray paint an Italian flag on the other face of the bridge, just so those from that side would know not to pass over into our side.
With a spray can in each back pocket, and one in my hand, I skipped Genie Martini’s house one night and, before it got too dark, I climbed the stairs to the train station, slipped under the turnstile and sized up the practically empty platform. Down at the far end, with no trains in sight and no one looking, I jumped down to the track, high-stepped over the rails, and crossed to the other side. I ran down to the bridge, listening and looking for an oncoming train. I could see all the rooftops, and the clothes hanging between the buildings, and the skyline of Manhattan in the distance. My heart pounded and the sooty air stung my eyes and burned my lungs as I leaned over the railing and, as quickly as I could, sprayed, wide as I could, a red rectangle, a white rectangle, and a green one, too. I was so desperate to finish that I wasn’t even sure if I got the order of the colors correct.
I dropped the cans and ran fast, fast as I could, down and across the tracks. It was hard to breathe after getting up onto the platform, but I kept running all the way home. Pop was waiting for me on the stoop. “Genie called, Pal,” he said. “Wondering where you been.” He looked at my hands and forearms dusted with fresh paint and my shirt lined with filth. Now he was wondering where I’d been, too. I told Pop everything back then, so I told him about the flag and the bridge and the kids we called “Spics.” And he kept me in the house for the rest of the summer.
Pop taught music at a high school in Brooklyn, and he spent his vacations listening to the radio and reading books, tending to the fig tree that filled our patch of a backyard. Sometimes, one of his musician friends would come over and they’d play songs together. He cooked dinner most nights, too, because my mother had been going to college at night, summers, too, for the past couple of years. She liked it so much that when finished, she started up again, this time for a degree in law, which made sense because she could argue with the best of them.
Pop wasn’t much for arguing. He stayed calm and listened when other people spoke, and he spoke nice and slow when he had something to say in return. He had plenty to say to me after that deal with the bridge. Not too nice and not too slow, either. I’d never seen him so mad. He spent the rest of the summer hammering me about the stupidity of my stunt and the stupidity of what he called ”bigotry.” He talked about history and the danger of us vs. them. He talked about Kennedy and King, those guys he liked so much. He said, over and over, people were people no matter what we looked like, and that he’d been all around the city and all around the world and knew this to be true, and that it was our responsibility to look out for each other no matter what we looked like and where we came from. No matter what. This went on for weeks, pretty much the same speech, over and over, so I was happy for school to finally start and to get out of the house.