Free Island of Divine Music by John Addiego Page B

off the boat.
    His brother, Paulie, and sister Penny fled when they heard him coming. He was a pest, a raspy adenoidal racket that followed them to the bathroom door. The younger ones, however, wet their diapers for a bark or a Bronx cheer, and his mother, a sad, dour woman with a beautiful face, choked on her Parliaments when he did a line from
Caesar,
when he stormed like Gleason. He realized that the more embarrassing and heartbreaking the material, the bigger were his mother’s coughing fits and his classmates’ groans. Bathroom humor, embarrassing noises attributed to himself and his obese or nervous teachers, the voices and gestures of his cousins from the old country, were part of a repertoire which always featured himself as the most pathetic creature in the script, the recipient of fortune’scruelest tricks. In Angie’s shtick he made himself the weakling who got smacked in the chops or fooled by idiots.
    Imitation was his currency. He lacked the physical grace of his older siblings, the sweetness of his younger siblings, the mathematical mind and tenacity of his father, the compassion of his mother and aunts, the strength and optimism of his extended family. To Angie, most of life seemed a hoax, and somehow it helped to imitate it, helped to pay attention to the serious way people said and did things.
    His father, Joe, wasn’t a big man, but he rocked on the balls of his feet and looked people dead in the eye, ever poised to take on the world. He had an easy stride and a big grin for strangers, a ruggedly handsome face punctuated by a broken nose and skin darker than that of a black man who occasionally caddied for him on the golf course. One Saturday Joe dragged Angelo out of bed to caddy with his brother and cousins Gino and Mario. Joe’s leather bag hung easily from Paulie’s broad shoulders like a quiver of arrows and made him look a bit like Robin Hood in his green baseball cap. Gino and Mario, two muscular guys with rolled-up sleeves, carried their clubs like notebooks. Somehow Angie, who had inherited the worst of both grandfathers, the Irish maternal one’s slight frame with the Italian paternal one’s huge schnoz and lack of grace, was given the biggest bag, Uncle Narciso’s ostentatious spumoni-colored Cadillac with the baroque bangles and the many pockets filled with balls, tees, and bottles of Scotch.
    Joe was a serious golfer, and Uncle Ludovico was serious to thepoint of a heart attack on the greens, but Uncle Narciso was always out in the rough without a care in his heart. He had an elaborate ritual to perform before each shot. He’d stretch his arms, roll his head on his shoulders, then shake his butt like a rumba dancer, rattling the change and keys and nail clippers in his baggy trousers before slowly cocking his arms. His swing was wild, and he occasionally hit the ball squarely, but usually he sliced it into another fairway or chased snakes thirty yards away, and as often as not he swung and missed altogether.
Steeeerike one!
Angie growled. Ciso laughed, and Lu fumed.
    Long drive down the third base line, right between Davenport’s legs!
Angie’s voice, behind his cupped hands, had the timbre of Russ Hodges’s on a transistor radio speaker.
It’ll stay fair if it doesn’t hit that catalpa tree!
    Ciso’s ball hit the tree and bounced onto the fairway, then rolled another fifty yards down the asphalt caddy-cart trail. Joe laughed. Lucky Pants strikes again, he said.
    Angie followed his uncle with the enormous bag, off the fairway, into the eucalyptus trees and the gopher dirt. His little alien voices and radio commentary didn’t faze Ciso a bit, even as balls ricocheted off trees and landed at their feet. Oops, Ciso would say. That was a close one.
    On the green Uncle Lu raged and beat the ground with his putter. Joe was killing them, but what killed Lu most was that Ciso, after twelve strokes out in the forest, would sink a putt from thirty yards right after Lu had missed a