This is one of my most personal stories, and my favorite Joey C story. It introduces a new recurring character, dives deep into ‘80s nostalgia, and my time working at the docks. Let me know what you think in the comments.
S.L.U.G.
A Joey Cucuzza Conundrum
by Thomas Pluck
Stately, slender Joey Cucuzza was out in the dockyard for a broken container seal when he got the call. He let his phone ring in his pocket to piss off everyone involved. The yard foreman. The security manager.
Usually these visits were perfunctory, bullshit to satisfy management. Seals were tracked like registered mail. Everyone who touched the container was in the system. If someone broke a seal to rifle a container, they’d gotten the nod from bigger fish upstream.
But not this time.
“You gonna answer that?” Chimento said, examining the cut plastic ring like he was Sherlock with a flat top.
Chimento was the security manager for the company that operated the terminal on these piers. Joey was the union hiring manager, assistant to the dock boss. No union labor got hired without his approval. Which meant he had a lot of people kissing his ass.
And also that he dealt with a lot of bullshit when one of his workers did something stupid, like cut a seal and leave it hanging from an open shipping container door like a runny nose.
Joey took his phone from the pocket of his camel hair coat. The autumn wind coming off Newark Bay ruffled his styled, salt and pepper hair. The screen said “Ma.”
Maddone, was more like it.
He sent her to voice mail. Bring bread from Vitiello’s on Sunday, I’m making cavateel and broccoli. That, or somebody died, like your sixth cousin from over in Big Tree, which didn’t have a tree no more, but a bus depot, and the buses parked too long by the corner and could you do something about it, mister big shot at the port?
Vaffanculo to that.
Joey snapped his fingers at the yard foreman, who was playing on his own phone. They had the area coned, but ninety-foot-tall straddle carriers—moving gantries that stacked and moved shipping containers like Lego blocks—rolled past them at speed. Step out of the yellow lines, and they’d cut you in half.
“Frankie. What’s missing from the box?”
Frank Fournier put his phone down. “We’re waiting on the bill of lading. And DHS. They got their fingers up our ass.”
Homeland Security had a shack with mirrored windows at the exit. You could never tell when they were there or not. Most of the time they were playing video games, but they liked to hassle the foreign national sailors on the ships. The sailors loved going to the local outlet mall and spending money, but DHS acted like they were all terrorists, even though they had to pass through Customs to step off the ships.
“Scusi, Chim.” Joey stepped around the barrel-chested security man to peek inside the container.
“What, you think the citrullo left their Waterfront card?”
Joey pulled on a pair of Solo Classe kidskin gloves, and gave him the Italian salute.
There was a gaping hole in the stacks where boxes were moved. Usually if something was stolen, it was smuggling. A pallet marked on the bill of lading as linens that were actually counterfeit Gucci purses—tourists in Chinatown still ate that shit up—with maybe heroin or banned Chinese phones stuffed inside. A smuggler operating without his boss Aldo’s say-so was not to be tolerated.
Joey pushed a loose box aside. “Minghia.”
The thief had left something.
A dark, dainty, pedicured foot dangled between two boxes. Joey had seen his share of bodies, but even a refrigerated container—which this was not—would have stunk like a butcher’s shop if there was a body in it, living or dead, for the overseas voyage.
No stink. This croaker was fresh.
And blue.
Body paint? The foot was small, but not definitely female. Joey’s own tootsies were pedicured inside his bespoke Italian loafers.
A murder investigation would shut things down. Bad for management, but good for overtime. It would also bring scrutiny, at a time when Aldo was in a vulnerable position, as New York applied pressure on the smaller New Jersey family for control of the docks.
Chimento was on his phone now, distracted.
Joey nudged the box, and the blue foot fell out of sight.
He conferred with Frank the yard foreman, who had paid Joey a year’s salary for the position, and taken a street loan from Aldo to cover it. It was an investment, and the overtime had already paid off.
“There’s a body in there, Frankie.”
An eyebrow raised on his hangdog face, the low winter sun gleaming off his shaved and waxed mahogany skull.
“Get rid of it. I’ll take care of the bill of lading.” Joey found micromanaging offensive. He refused to depend on people with no imagination. Frankie would find a way. The vig on his loan would make sure of it.
“You got it, Mr. Cee.”
Chimento came back over. “My I.T. guys are getting the records and the camera feeds.”
Joey nodded. “Call me when you know twat's twat.”
Joey drove his electric blue Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio off the yard, dodging straddle carriers. His phone buzzed again.
Ma.
He gave the car pedal and shot between a carrier’s immense wheels, rocketing to a stack of empty containers where he could talk in peace. The straddle driver honked the air horn. They hated when he did that.
“I need you to get your computer from the attic,” Ma said, breathing heavy, which meant she had tried to climb up herself first.
“Ma, that thing’s thirty years old. It’s probably full of spiders and shit.”
“Your niece likes computers. She’s all excited, and I want you to have it down when she comes over.”
“When’s that?”
“Lunch. I made cavatelli. Pick up a loaf from Vitiello’s.”
Minghia.
Joey skipped the line at Vitiello’s because he could. A fat Nutley fuck gave him the stink-eye, but that only made it sweeter.
His Ma’s place was in Avondale, the ghetto for Italians fresh off the boat a century ago. Other parts of town held columned mansions and classy, working-class homes, but Avondale houses were so close together you could borrow a cup of sugar by reaching across the alley and knocking on your neighbor’s kitchen window.
The one-way streets were like bowling lanes. He parked on the sidewalk in front of the green aluminum sided house, and waved to her neighbor, an old man pushing a manual lawnmower, wearing black loafers, knee-high black socks, and a guinea tee foxed with sweat at the armpits.
The screen door slammed behind him. Ma wouldn’t let him send a guy to fix it. “I want to hear if someone comes to slit my throat,” was her reasoning.
His mother stirred a pot on the stove in her housecoat, and Joey Ramone slouched at the Formica-topped kitchen table, thumbing a phone.
“Hey, Unc.”
His niece Nicolina had grown like a weed.
To be fair, he couldn’t remember when he’d last seen her. Which was a disgrace on his part. He was her godfather. He sent cash for every occasion, but after she hit double digits in age, he’d been scarce. Kids were a pain in the ass once they stopped thinking the sun shined out of yours.
“Hey yourself,” he said.
“Hay is for horses,” Nicky said. “That’s what you used to tell me.” She neighed, then snorted at herself. She wore black Chuck Taylors, jeans shredded at the knees—and not bought that way—and a black tee-shirt emblazoned with some internet thing. And her hair was pure Joey Ramone. Her face was a mystery behind the mop.
“I did, didn’t I?”
The Ramones. He hadn’t listened to them since he was her age. The songs all came back. Catchy as fuck, funny and weird. When you listened to the Ramones, you were a Ramone. Inducted into their black leather, denim, and white tee-shirt bizarro army of street commandos who just wanted something to do, to sniff some glue, to be sedated, and who didn’t want to hang around with you or to go down in the basement.
He grinned, despite himself.
There was a computer connection. It tickled at the back of his brain. Airplane glue and amyls had killed the cells that harbored that memory. Gay clubs in the ‘80s were a superfund site of nose chemicals.
Ma set out a serving bowl of cavatelli pasta and broccoli florets swimming in broth with whole cloves of garlic. He tore the heel off the Vitiello’s loaf and dunked it right in the juice.
They ate in silence and mopped their plates with the bread. It was so good that the kid even put down her phone.
The attic was a crypt.
Nicky crawled up first, like a denim-leather walking stick. “This is like a museum. Or House of the Rock.”
Joey had undressed to his undershirt and a pair of his old man’s sweatpants that remained in his dresser, with the rest of his clothes, twenty years after his death. They had been washed recently. Ma didn’t miss the old bastard any more than Joey did, but she hewed to routine.
The kid was right. There were clothes and decor from the ‘70s crammed up here. A vintage store owner would cream their capris.
“She doesn’t throw out anything,” Joey said, hunching beneath the pitched ceiling, avoiding the exposed nails. “Which is good for us black sheep, right?”
Nicky smiled. “She offered to patch my jeans.”
“She used to sew band patches on my stolen motorcycle jacket, back in the day. It’s probably up here somewhere.”
Her eyes lit up. “Really?”
“Let’s find the computer first.”
Rooting through his past was both nostalgic and depressing. Like shoveling your own shit. But the kid raised his spirits, asking what the “hecc” was up with his dad’s platform ankle boots, and oohing at the fondue pot.
Joey’s own uncle, mother’s side, had run gay bars in Manhattan for the Jewish mob. He’d bought the fondue set off the back of a truck, because his Ma wanted to try some recipes from a magazine. Except instead of the Scandinavian cheeses, she used aged provolone and mozzarella from the deli. The whole house smelled like feet. But they ate it in silence, spearing toasted pieces of Vitiello’s bread on the skewers.
“Next time,” his uncle said, “Instead of fondue, let’s fon-don’t.”
Joey laughed to himself.
“What’s so funny? This stuff is amazing.”
“Just memories. Here we go. The Atari.” He pulled out a dusty cardboard box with pictures of a smiling white family, all staring at a little television screen connected to a black and white keyboard. The screen was painted with a space nebula, from which numbers, space ships, footballs, and letters flowed out. Not the white on blue screen with the block cursor—blinking for you to make shit happen—that you would actually see.
That blue screen held infinite possibilities, when he was a Nicky’s age. Even if the world didn’t.
Nicky brushed off the dust. “So cool!”
Downstairs, they went through the contents. Joey held up the converter that once connected it to his old 11-inch portable TV. “You’re gonna need to find an antique shop to play this thing.”
“No biggie, the instructions are all the internet.”
Joey’s phone buzzed. He walked into the tiny, chain-link-fenced yard to talk. He walked a circle around the stone bird bath.
“Mister Cee, you’re not gonna believe this,” Frankie said, over the wind. “I sent photos.”
Joey flipped through his roll. The naked body was spread out like it was making an asphalt snow angel. A vibrant, dark blue, like those paintings by Klein. The only hair was a white Tina Turner wig.
Disgraciata.
“It’s a sex doll,” Frankie laughed. “The uh, detail is amazing.”
“I hope you wore gloves.”
“Yeah, it’s nasty. Someone had a good time with Lady Blue and didn’t even throw her a wash rag.”
“Blue? Why is she fucking blue?”
“She’s gotta be cold.”
“Stick her in storage, for now. This gets out, I’m going on the warpath.” Men were worse than the old Italian women of this neighborhood with the gossip.
“Okay, Mister Cee. I gotta go. DHS is sniffing around. Someone put a bug up their ass.”
Sfachim. DHS were tits on a bull, a useless show agency created after 9/11. Joey had watched the Towers fall from atop a crane, and he grew up with them in his skyline, but the amount of useless security enacted in their name gave him agita. They put in radiation scanners at the port, which only went off when a container full of cat litter or bananas went through.
They set them off, for whatever reason, and DHS was never there to catch it.
When Joey turned 45, his doc told him to get a nuclear stress test. They shot him up with radioactive dye and made him run uphill on a treadmill, trying to wear him out. He was in good shape, his legs would have given out before his heart.
Aldo got a kick out of it, called him the Hulk and made him flex. And Joey set off the radiation scanners for two weeks straight.
DHS didn’t stop him once. Not even to fuck with him.
Tits on a bull.
Inside, he found Nicky sitting on the lumpy green carpet in the parlor with his Atari in her lap, in front of Ma’s wooden console television. The one with the broken knob you turned with pliers. The flat screen he gave her sat on top of it, tuned to Turner Classic Movies. Sidney Poitier and some British kids.
He poked through the box while she opened the Atari with a pocket multitool, revealing the green circuit board. She began touching connections with a voltage tester. She had a fanny pack full of tools, and was good with them.
The box held cartridges for Atari BASIC programming, Pitfall, a few other games. A floppy drive the size of a bread box, floppies labeled in blue ink, in his middle school penmanship.
And magazines.
Joey Ramone’s tinted glasses looked back at him from a one cover.
He rolled it up and put it in his slacks pocket.
“It looks like the video output is damaged.”
“Yeah, it blew up on me.” He ruffled her Ramone mop. “I gotta get back to the port. There’s a situation.”
Nicky touched bits of solder with the tester. “Come on, Unc. I need parts. There’s a place in Jersey City. And I haven’t seen you in so long!”
The kid was good with the guilt, too.
Joey took Heller Parkway through the swamp to Jersey City, fast.
“This car is disgusting,” Nicky laughed, from the passenger seat. “Every time you start it, a polar bear dies.”
He talked to his phone. “Play the Ramones.”
After a moment, “Blitzkrieg Bop” began to play. Good driving music.
He didn’t want the blue broad thing to get legs. Once it got out, work would grind to a standstill as the men came up with gags and pranks and betting pools on whose goo was in Lady Blue.
“Polar bears would eat your face for dinner.”
“They’re smart enough to cover their noses when they hunt people,” Nicky said.
Joey didn’t know that. It was the kind of stuff he loved learning as a kid, when he was programming the Atari.
The Joey Ramone article had you program a song that never made it onto an album. You had to type the whole thing in, and it supposedly played a never-released Ramones song while a little blob bounced over the lyrics, so you could sing along.
What the hell was it? Some monster movie shit. He’d typed it all in and the damn thing broke before he could run the program.
She took his phone and played “Cretin Hop” next.
Gabba gabba we accept you, one of us. He’d rented Freaks from Curry Home Video once he heard that was where the Ramones chant originated. Watched it with his uncle. They always watched the Sunday monster movie, like the Mushroom People, or some shit with a giant lizard having a conniption.
“How’d you get into the Ramones?”
“Nonna gave me your records, duh. The Dayglo Abortions? Pretty gross, Unc.”
Minghia. He remembered that one.
“‘Dogfarts’ is pretty funny. Before you ask, I fixed your old turntable. The belt snapped. You replaced it with a rubber band and wore out the gears.”
Sharp kid. He let her talk.
“Oh my God, Unc! Clear your browser history!” She looked at his phone like it was a clown dick. “Who’s the hottie?”
He grabbed it from her, swerving into the debris-littered shoulder. “That’s port business.”
“I was gonna say. Mom said you liked dudes.”
“I do, thank you very much. It’s a doll. We got some sickos there. They sit in trailers all day looking at porn.” He slipped the phone into his pocket and wiggled his hand. “Apparently, Rosie Palm and the Five Fingers isn’t enough for some of them.”
“Gross.”
He double parked in front of Gizmo’s, the maker shop she had plugged into the GPS. “We gotta be quick. I need to find out who dumped Smurfette in a container. We thought it was a body.”
“That happens?”
“Sometimes.”
The inside of the shop was crammed with shelves of 3-D printers, trays full of parts, kits, and gadgets. The owner was a little geek with a beard and no chin, wearing a tee-shirt over a long-sleeve tee like he walked out of the ‘90s.
Nicky introduced herself with a different name, and they talked like old friends. They must have known each other from online. Joey remembered dialing up Bulletin Board Systems on the 300 baud modem attached to the Atari. Downloading porno photos took all night. But he wasn’t hiding muscle mags under the bed where his old man could find them. On a floppy disk, they might as well have been in Fort Knox.
The geek pointed Nicky toward a shelf and she dug into the junk with glee.
The shop was in Aldo’s territory, under their capo, Heck Costa. Joey walked up to the counter.
“She’s a friend of Aldo’s.”
The geek gave a cartoonish wink. “She’s a friend of mine, too. On the maker forums.”
Joey took a business card from the register. “Keep the trolls off her. You have any problems, tell Heck to call Joe Cucuzza.”
The geek’s eyes were his tell. Joey’s name had weight, even with citizens. “Thank you.”
“So, what’s on my niece’s wish list?”
He left cash and told the geek to deliver the 3-D printer on her birthday.
Nicky came back with a basket of parts. “Some spares. Just in case.”
Joey’s phone buzzed. He left cash, and he took the call outside.
Traffic had built up behind his car. People swore as they cut around it.
“I wanted to give you heads up, Mister Cee. They hit a whale.”
“They what?”
“The incoming ship, from Maersk? They hit a humpback whale. The Coast Guard’s coming to clean up.”
That meant a work backup while they waited for the ship to dock. Men loitering around, too much time on their hands.
“Where’s Smurfette?”
“That’s why I’m calling. I put her in an empty, but ‘cause the ship’s not in, they put the yard on location detail, and they moved it.”
“You lost Lady Blue?”
“I know where she is, I just can’t get her.”
“Call Del in Locations.”
“He’s still pissed he lost to me in fantasy football. He won’t answer.”
Joey sighed. “I’ll call him. Text me the box number.”
He called Del and got no answer. That meant he was up in a crane. An empty that got moved around with a rubber sex doll inside would make noise, and someone would open it. Then the gossip would start.
Nicky came out to the car with a bag. “Thanks, Unc.”
He looked at his Tag Heuer Monaco. “You got somewhere to be? Wanna come to the port with me a while?”
“Okay. I guess.” The kid had a good poker face, but Joey saw the curl of her lip, the little shine on the peach fuzz. She liked her uncle.
He killed a few polar bears getting on the Turnpike. Weird Tales of the Ramones kicked in, the newest collection. The Atari song was on the tip of his tongue. The Bluetooth interrupted.
“Frankie. I’ll get there when I get there.”
“You two-timing me, babe?” Aldo said. The dock boss.
And his boyfriend of ten years.
Nicky snickered.
Joey pinched her cheek. “Ow!”
“No, babe,” he said. “Just dealing with that broken seal. They found a blue fuh, uh sex doll in there, but nothing stolen. It’s gotta be some sort of play.”
“The DHS is in an uproar. I don’t need this right now.”
“I’ll take care of it, babe.”
“You better, or tonight—” Joey cut the connection.
Nicky bit her lip and snorted.
“Not a word.”
“I was thinking, Unc. Whoever’s doll that is must be into World of Warcraft.”
“And why’s that?” He didn’t ask what World of Warcraft was. He could Google it later.
“Because hottie is a dark elf.” She held up her phone. A bunch of blue people with white hair and pointy ears. Except these had dainty outfits on. One of the guys was kind of hot.
He exited the pike and zoomed around the outlet mall and onto the piers. They passed a Himalaya of road salt being readied for the upcoming winter, and lots full of cars fresh off the ships.
“Is that like Dungeons & Dragons?”
“Kinda. Whoa, you’re into D&D?”
“Back in the day.” All the outcasts were.
“It’s cool, you get to be whatever you want to be.”
Funny, that’s what he thought the kids growing up these days had. At least in comparison to growing up in the ‘80s. If a girl dressed like Joey Ramone back in Nutley High School, she would have been called a diesel dyke.
Joey’s tell was a double blink.
Jesus, sometimes he was capa dosta. A hard head. How could he not see it?
If his niece wasn’t a baby gay, he’d munch Lady Blue’s buciacca.
But whatever Nicky was, he was in her corner. And she needed to know that. Joey’s Uncle had been on his side no matter what. And that had held him together through the worst.
“You can’t be what you wanna be? Who says?”
She shrugged.
He pulled into the container terminal and waved at the security shack. They drove past the mirror-windowed hut for the DHS goons. He didn’t set off the radiation scanner anymore, but he drove around the security gate just to give them the finger. He cut across the yard, flashers on.
“First of all, you’re you. And you are fantastic. Anyone tells you what to be, you tell ‘em vaffanculo.” He gave a conspiratorial lean. “Except your parents, them you just nod and let it go in one ear and out the other.
“And secondly, you’re Joey Cucuzza’s niece. That carries weight, even out in Morris County.” He pulled into a safe spot by the pier, where the gray chop of Newark Bay spread like a hammered pewter landscape out to the horizon. “Don’t you drop my name, but gimme that phone.”
She handed hers over. He dialed his number on it.
“Now you got my number. Text me whenever. For uncle shit.”
She grinned. “What’s uncle shit?”
“Whatever you want it to be.”
He got out of the car. The wind flapped his suit jacket. Out on the water, the Coast Guard had a tugboat pushing the whale carcass out of the shipping lane. He scoped it with the set of binoculars he kept in the glove box. One sailor was a woman with her hair tied back, arms tattooed in sleeves, as muscled as the men.
Nicky stood next to him. He handed her the field glasses.
“Whoa.”
Sailors walked the deck with flensing knives, huge hooks on poles. The whale had been carved up by a propeller, and it looked pretty bad. It was good for kids to see the blood and guts of the world, with a loving hand on their shoulder. As if to say, it’s bad out there, but I got you.
“What happened to the whale?”
“A ship hit it.”
“That sucks.”
“That’s the price of global shipping. Those parts you needed, they were made in China. Nonna’s cavatelli? We ship the wheat to Italy, they make the pasta, then ship it back. And it sells for two bucks at the Shop-Rite.”
“That’s crazy.”
“That’s the world. Until you kids change it.” He gave her shoulder a squeeze. She wasn’t as jacked as Sailor Sue up on the tug, but he had a feeling she hit the weight room at her school.
“You swole, girl.”
She laughed. “Don’t ever say that again.”
“I was being ironic. I’m Gen X. We invented that shit. Or at least perfected it.”
“So where’s the uh, dark elf?”
“That’s the question of the hour. Let’s go find out.”
He drove to the Locations shack. Gilly was on shift in front of a nicotine-stained keyboard. He had a head like a brick, and complexion to match.
“I need a box found and moved.” He gave him the number.
Joey had given him the job. Not out of the goodness of his heart, of which there was none, but for the seventy gee purchase price. So Gilly would play.
“It’s not in the system.” He tilted the screen to show his work.
“Then I need the team on it.” Locations found missing containers. The union had fought the installation of GPS trackers on boxes as a “security threat,” but mostly because every terminal had a Locations department in charge of finding boxes that weren’t where they were supposed to be. With trackers, they’d be out of jobs, and everyone else would lose hours spent waiting for them to find them. It was only a matter of time before they were mandated.
“Del’s got the team. Nothing I can do. DHS says it’s MARSEC one.”
“And nobody called me?”
He went outside to call Frankie. “Nicky, stay near the car. Don’t go out of the yellow lines, or you’ll be a Joey Ramone-shaped pancake.”
Nicky sat on the hood and played on her phone. He grimaced at what her Levi’s would do the paint.
His phone rang before he could dial Frankie.
“What’s this MARSEC one bullshit?” Aldo said. “They brought the Port Authority, and I had to wing it.”
When Aldo got nervous he ate. Then he got angry at himself and took it out on Joey, saying he didn’t love his old fat ass anymore. It would be a long night.
“Babe, I got this. Don’t you trust me?”
Of course he did. If Aldo didn’t trust him, he’d be in pieces in the Meadowlands, with all the other people who’d lost his trust.
“Go hit the sauna, turn off your business phone. I’ll let you know what’s up.”
Aldo rang off. His babe had a temper.
Frankie answered like he knew his ass was in the meat grinder.
“I was with the cops, or I would have called. They stuck something in that box when we were gone, Mister Cee. Lady Blue was a ringer.”
“What the fuck did they stick on us?”
“A crate of Kalashnikovs. No way that was in there when we scoped it.”
“This stinks like shit on ice.” Guns came in all the time. Customs snagged them. These were probably taken from the Customs shack. “They lost your box. Lady Blue probably took a swim.”
“Del ain’t lost squat. I saw the box on top of a stack. Someone has her for safe keeping.”
“Gimme the row.”
Joey flagged down a straddle carrier, the three-story rolling cranes that stacked and moved containers six high. He couldn’t see who was in the bubble up top, but if they stopped, they either owed him something, or wanted him to owe them something.
“Nicky, show me how strong those jacked shoulders are. You wanna ride this thing with me?”
“Hecc, yeah!”
She climbed the ninety-foot ladder to the top, with him close behind. The ladder had a cage on it, so you could catch yourself if you slipped. Her Chuck Taylors handled the rungs better than his loafers. She was huffing at the top, but smiling, showing off for her uncle.
A driver named Imaya was driving the crane. She didn’t have a vig with Aldo, but she knew the game. To be a woman in the Stevedore’s union, you had to.
“What’s this, bring your daughter to work day?” She was pure Newark, tough and proud. And ballsy enough to make fun with the mobbed up gay hiring manager.
“Leave the jokes to Wanda Sykes. Nicky’s my niece, I wanna show her that you broads can do anything the swinging dicks can.”
“You damn right, we do twice as much for thirty percent less.”
He told her where the container was, and where to put it.
She navigated the rows with care, since her move wasn’t in the system. Nicky gawked out the hazy plastic bubble of the control room, sitting in one of the harsh metal seats. “This is wild!”
Imaya rolled the straddle carrier over the row, and they felt the counterweight shift as the crane locked into the container and lifted it up. As they rolled out with the box, a DHS squad car came into the yard, lights flashing.
The squad parked diagonally in the lane to block their exit.
Imaya gave him a look.
“Keep going,” he told her.
She sounded the horn and stood to get a better view. They passed over the car with a foot to spare at each corner.
“Star Wars-ed ‘em,” Imaya said.
Joey knew how scary it was to be in the squad car’s position. Aldo had him pranked right after he made dock boss, to test his nerves. The guy probably pissed his pants.
Nicky missed it, looking out the window with the binoculars.
“I got a better place to drop this box,” Joey said.
Imaya laughed when he told her. “You better keep my name out of this.”
“Today’s roster won’t have your name on it, but you’ll get paid for OT all next week.”
She had to take a roundabout route to exit the yard without tearing down phone lines, but she knew the way. They rolled next to the DHS trailer and dropped the container in their squad car parking space.
Down on the asphalt, he showed Nicky how to open a container. This one was rusty, and the locks squealed as they cracked it open.
Lady Blue’s lapis lazuli ass mocked them from the rusty corrugated floor.
The DHS shack door wasn’t even a deadbolt. “And this is how you pop a door with a credit card. You need one of the good metal ones.”
It took a few tries but he popped it, and sure enough, the shack was empty of agents. He put Lady Blue in an office chair, facing the computer screens with the DHS shield as the screensaver, and snapped a few photos with his phone.
Then he turned off the breaker to the computer closet, and locked the door when he left. The terminal I.T. department would get an alarm, and find Lady Blue. From his experience, they would have photos on the internet before dinner. And if they didn’t, he’d get Nicky to show him how to post them anonymously.
The guns would be forgotten. The Port Authority would get a photo op. It was immigrants and drugs the government cared about.
It kept them working. Like keeping GPS out of the containers. A bullshit excuse to log more hours.
He got a security guard to drive them back to his car, and told Aldo the deal. He was predictably pissed that he would have to talk to the cops, but laughed his ass off at the diversion.
“Relax, babe. I’m bringing home my momootza’s cavatelli.”
“And Vitiello’s bread?”
“Of course.”
He told Frankie the play while he raced his niece back to his mother’s house to the Ramones.
“I don’t need to tell you that this is all between us,” he said.
“Duh.”
“Thank you for the skinny on the dark elf.” She hadn’t solved anything, but helped him get his head around things.
“Those dolls cost like five thousand dollars.”
Something clicked. No one bought that on a government salary. He’d have to take a close look at Frankie and Chimento when he got back to the docks.
A song kicked up with a carnival organ sound to it. Unlike any other Ramones tune, it almost sounded like the tinny speakers on the Atari. Joey Ramone broke into a short sweet repetitive verse about a cursed romance with a monster slug girl.
The words all came back.
“You know this one? It’s a rare demo,” Nicky said, singing along with him.
Joey took the magazine out of his pocket and dropped it in her lap. “When you get my Atari working, you gotta type all that in. I gotta hear this out of those shitty speakers.”
“Aw, Unc. It’s probably on YouTube.”
“Do it for your uncle. I’ve got a surprise for you.”
They stopped at a hot dog truck parked outside of a cemetery in Lyndhurst. On the Christian side, Joey’s father and his uncle shared a plot with space left for Joey and his mother.
Joey and Nicky took their dogs and cans of Chocolate Cow to a tombstone on the Jewish side that was covered in memorial pebbles and guitar picks.
The grave of Jeff Hyman.
May 19, 1951 - April 15, 2001
Loving Son and Brother
A. K. A. Joey Ramone
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
Nicky stared in silent reverence. She held her hot dog over her heart, and her right hand high, showing the horns.
Joey took a bite of his dog, then did the same.
“Gabba gabba, we accept you,” Joey said, and Nicky tilted to rest her head against his shoulder.
“One of us.”
—
©2021 Thomas Pluck, all rights reserved.
You can read more about the Joey Ramone program for the Atari, and read the entire issue of K-Power, at “Joey Ramone on my Atari!”
So many things I love about this, but it's the uncle/niece relationship that really shines for me in this one.
love it!