To Die For (6 page)

L
ARRY AND ME GOT
to be friends in third grade. He was my neighbor across the street. We hung out. Rode bikes, tossed a ball around, the usual. That guy was good at every sport he tried. Junior high, I started playing bass and Larry picked up the drums. I think he mostly figured it was a way to meet girls. He never was that good. But we had a lot of fun hanging out in his parents’ basement fooling around. Us and these two other guys, one on lead guitar and one on rhythm, and there were always a couple of girls hanging around, wanting to shake a tambourine or sing. We called ourselves The Suckers.

Besides the band I couldn’t say he had any special interests. I mean, the guy liked to party, liked to go off-roading when he had the chance. He might light up a toke, but nothing major. He was just what you’d call a fun guy. Easygoing. Always ready for a good time. Loved his folks. Loved dogs.

Sure he dated. The guy wasn’t queer. But no one serious in high school. He was just having a good time.

After we graduated, Larry started working full time at his folks’ restaurant and I got kind of serious with my band. Playing clubs over at Little Paradise Beach, even in the city sometimes. I guess you’d call us your basic metal band. Man, you want chicks? Let me tell you. Get a guitar.

He saw Suzanne at the mall one day, handing out perfume samples, and he said that was it, love at first sight. He still wore his hair long back then. She was real cute, that blond hair and all, although it always kind of freaked me out the way you’d be talking to her and you could see right up her nostrils. They started going out pretty steady right off.

I remember this New Year’s Eve party they were at, just a couple weeks after he met her. She had this video camera with her, and she was going around asking people their New Year’s resolutions, like it was going to be on the news. Everybody was loaded, basically. Guys were saying stuff like, “Ball a lot of girls,” or, “Get laid in a convertible.” You get the idea. But Larry, his resolution was, “Find someone really special and settle down.” I remember because everybody laughed when he said that. It was such a weird thing for a guy to say, and especially Larry, who always seemed like such a party guy. And he kept going on about all this other stuff, how when he found the right girl, he’d buy her the biggest diamond and a sports car and he’d take her out dancing every Friday night. “I want to make Mrs. Larry Maretto the happiest woman in America,” he said. “Maybe the universe.” Poor jerk meant it too.

And like I said, a lot of people laughed hearing him talk that way to the camera. Maybe Suzanne did too, I don’t know. But I figure he made enough of an impression, because who do I see the very next weekend, dancing over at Shooters? Suzanne and Larry. And he’s looking at her like he’s hypnotized. Which I guess he was.

After a month or so, I guess she told him they were getting too serious, she still wanted to date other people. I’d run into Larry at the gym, and he’d be by himself, just mooning around. This was a guy that was ready to party seven days a week, and now he’s talking about saving up to make a down payment on a condo. He tells me, “Sooner or later, Chuck, you got to grow up and think about your future.” And it’s looking like his future is Suzanne, he says.

He buys her a dog—a puppy, don’t ask me what kind. Alls I know is, the goddam mutt never shuts up. She names it Walter, after Walter Cronkite. She had a thing about anchormen she told me. Get this: anchormen and heavy metal stars. “One thing I know,” he says. “If Peter Jennings or David Lee Roth ever called up Suzanne and asked her to meet them at their hotel or someplace, she’d be out of here.” Well, my girlfriend’s pretty crazy about Axl Rose. But I don’t know. You like to think you can count on a person. To hang around.

Anyways. Come April, maybe, Jeannie and me cook up this plan of driving down to Florida. Don’t laugh, but Jeannie wants to see Disney World. Larry hears about it and says how about if him and Suzanne come along, they both got vacations coming. So the four of us take off for Orlando, drive all night, make the trip in two days, that’s how crazy we were.

Most of that trip we took to Florida is kind of a blur. We worked our way through a lot of six-packs on that trip. All except Larry, actually. Who was never that big of a drinker.

Suzanne on the other hand. She was a real maniac on the trip. I’d never seen her like that before—and never did again, I can tell you. From the minute we left town and hit the highway, it was like she was let out of jail. She wanted to play this Aerosmith tape over and over, super loud. Every other word out of her mouth was fuck. Fucking drivers, fucking traffic, fucking New York Thruway. In the middle of the night one time, somewhere in Pennsylvania, she actually mooned a toll booth operator. You wondered if she was on drugs only she wasn’t. Larry hated that stuff. Even grass.

He was so much in love with Suzanne though, I don’t think he cared how dumb she was acting. He just kept trying to kiss her, make out with her. We took turns but mostly they sat in the front seat on account of he was in the best shape for driving. One time she actually had her face in his lap, if you know what I mean, while he was in real bad traffic. You could tell he was embarrassed. “Not now, Susie,” he’d say to her. “Wait till the motel.” She just laughed. Come to think of it, that trip was about the only time I ever heard her laugh.

Once we get there, we do the whole bit. Ride those little boats where they keep singing “It’s a Small World.” The teacups, the pirate ships, this 3D Michael Jackson movie they got. Suzanne gets her picture taken with Mickey Mouse. Larry buys one of these Goofy hats with the ears flopping down. Suzanne kids him about it, but you can also tell she doesn’t like it. She keeps trying to get him to take off the damn hat. He doesn’t want to. “You look stupid,” she says. “You look like a nerd.” He takes off the hat. But right then I remember thinking it was like we’re back in third grade and he’s this little boy again.

We stayed at this nice hotel, the four of us. Larry was making real good money at the restaurant at this point, so he said, It’s on me. Room service, Jacuzzi, cable in the room. The works. Sirloin steak for dinner. Banana daiquiris like they’re going out of style. I mean, we were going strictly first class.

Our last night in Orlando, Larry buys Suzanne these two stuffed dogs, and they’re hugging each other. Like one is him, and the other one’s her. Then we go see the fireworks over at Epcot Center, and Larry and Suzanne are making out pretty good while these fireworks are exploding all over the place. I guess you’d have to say the whole thing was about as romantic as it gets. Must of been, because after, when the four of us were heading back out on the monorail, Larry holds up Suzanne’s hand, and she’s got this big diamond on her finger. “What do you think of this?” he says. The whole thing makes me a little tense, you might say, on account of Jeannie’s right there, and I know she’s thinking, OK, where’s my ring?

But we took their picture, the two of them, with the stuffed dogs. I’ve still got the picture, if you want to see it. That’s more the way I remember Larry, before he got all serious and cut his hair. Grinning like he always was back in those days.

But the thing that got me—well now, of course, looking back, it seems more important than it did at the time—was the way she only held his hand while Jeannie was taking the picture. The minute the flash went off, she let go.

I
DON’T GET IT.
I keep trying to figure out what went wrong. Because at every step along the way, things just looked so good. And now this.

Angela and I went steady right through high school. I never looked at another girl. That’s God’s truth. She was all I wanted.

I wasn’t looking to set the world on fire. She didn’t need to find herself or any of that. What we wanted was to take over my uncle’s lunch counter, get a nice home, have healthy kids, raise them right. Someday sit in the den and watch our grandchildren open their Christmas presents, knowing we’d done a good job. Does that sound like too much to ask?

We did it by the book. No fooling around before we were married. First two years we were married, we lived with her folks, so we could save up for the down payment. We moved into this house the day Kennedy was shot. Our daughter Janice came along nine months later to the day. And Larry two years after that. So we had our boy and our girl. Angela stayed home with the kids, like mothers did in those days, and I worked like a dog at the restaurant. Nights, weekends, I didn’t complain. I had two healthy kids and a lovely wife. They were worth it.

Angela was just great with those kids, you ask anyone. Home-cooked meals every night, you could eat off the floor. Janice wanted skating lessons, Angela drove her an hour each way to the rink. Same thing with Larry’s Little League games, and then those drums. By this time the restaurant was doing real good, we got our liquor license, put in the bar. Running a restaurant in this part of town, big Italian clientele, I’m not saying we didn’t have one or two fellows among our customers that may have been on the wrong side of the law on occasion, but we kept our noses clean. We always ran an honest, family-type establishment. A lot of the time I’d be working, but Angie never missed one of the kids’ events at school. And always had the right thing to say if Janice didn’t get invited to a dance or maybe Larry struck out or fumbled a ball in the field. Larry may not have been a natural athlete, but you never saw a bigger heart in a player, or a kid that tried harder.

I’m not pretending the teenage years were a picnic. Janice had her skating to keep her out of trouble, but Larry was always such a friendly guy, always going someplace, he had some friends that maybe wouldn’t have been Angela’s and my choice. Long hair, guitars, drums, the whole bit. Larry’s only problem was, he trusted everybody else to be as decent as he was. But I trusted him too. I knew he had his head screwed on right, and sooner or later he’d buckle down and get on with his life. Which he did.

Angela and I had always planned on Larry going to college, but when he graduated high school, he said that was it. What are you going to do? He starts tending bar down at the restaurant. We tell ourselves now’s just not his time yet. His time will come.

Then he met Suzanne, and it seemed like that was going to do it for him. That little blonde had enough ambition for the two of them. “You know, Dad,” he said to me, not too long after he met her, “Suzanne’s going to go far in the world.

“You wait and see,” he says. “One of these nights you’ll turn on the news in the den and it’ll be Suzanne up there on Channel 7. And she’ll be coming home to me.”

He said being around her gave him a reason to make good himself. He was always telling us things Suzanne told him, how you’ve got to have a goal in life. Whatever it is you want, you can attain it, if you try hard enough and believe in yourself. You have to think positive. Don’t ever doubt yourself, and don’t get distracted looking over your shoulder at the other guy. Just be the best you can be, or be all that you can be. Go for it. Now I’m probably getting it confused with some commercial. But you get the idea. And I’m telling you, it all sounded pretty good to Angela and me. It seemed to us like Suzanne was giving Larry just the kick in the pants he’d always needed, to get somewhere.

Six, maybe eight months after he’d met her, Larry comes up to me real serious one night, says he needs to have a talk with me, man to man. He’s been thinking about his future, and he’s set his priorities. A person can’t get anywhere just having fun all the time. He wants to make something of himself, and not just party the rest of his life. All the things I used to tell him, only now he’s telling them back to me.

The bottom line was, he’d cut his hair and signed up for a night course in accounting. Told me he wanted to learn the restaurant business properly, so he could take over the place one day and make me proud. “I think I got a future in this line of work, Dad,” he tells me. Well, I could have told him that. A person would come into the bar just to be around that boy. You trusted him. He listened to what you said. He’d make you feel he cared, which he did.

“OK, son,” I tell him. “Show me you mean business and I’ll make you weekend manager come fall. I won’t treat you no different than if you were somebody else’s boy, though. No special favors. Business is business.”

You should’ve seen how serious he was about the whole thing, right from day one. Sold his drums. Went out and bought a briefcase, and a diamond for Suzanne. Handed out our matchbooks every time he walked in a door. People were telling me they’d run into Larry somewhere and before they could even spit it out to say, “How do you like those Red Sox?” he’d be asking them, “You give any thought yet to where you’re holding your company Christmas party this year? You tried my mother’s lasagna recently?” He’s hiring bands, got a comedy night once a month, ladies night at the bar. And so forth.

Next thing I know, my son’s close to doubled our business, Saturday and Sunday nights. No college degree, but the guy’s golden. He takes the bonus I give him and puts a down payment on a condo. The place on Butternut Drive.

All this time, Suzanne and Larry were engaged, although what with his night hours and her job at the mall, sometimes days went by he didn’t see her. Angela used to say she couldn’t understand it how two young people in love could be apart that way. My wife’s more what you might call the romantic type. But by my way of thinking, those two kids were just being sensible. Before a couple starts their life together, they need to have their ducks in a row.

He gave her the Datsun for Christmas. Nothing was too good for that girl, as far as my son was concerned.

They were married in July, and she gets this new job at a cable TV station. He kept his nose to the grindstone. They lived just around the corner from us, but we didn’t see that much of them to tell the truth. He worked long hours, and she was always out with her girlfriends or taking some workshop on how to improve your vocabulary or get ahead in the career world or some such thing. One time I remember Angela called her up and she couldn’t talk because she had this wardrobe consultant there, looking over her clothes, to tell her what she should wear. “I just found out I’m a summer, and all my clothes are winters,” she told Angela. “I beg your pardon?” says Angela. She called it getting her colors done. Said it would help her in her career. All I know is, finding out she was a summer cost my son a couple hundred bucks, and that was before she even went out to buy all those new outfits. She told us on television, everything’s got to be perfect. “The camera never lies,” she said. Well I don’t know about that.