An Act of Mischief
I was sitting at the bottom of our stairs, deflecting sunbeams off a small hand mirror of my mother’s. I was nine at this time, maybe ten. I remember that it was a hot cloudless summer morning. Across the street, the windows of the houses were glazed in sheens of bright light. Even where a window was open and the curtains drawn, someone could have been standing right there and you wouldn’t have known it. I would angle the mirror, watching as beams from the glass struggled through the darkness, roving over the walls and ceilings, lighting up paintings, illuminating plants, chandeliers, photographs, cupboards, bookcases, and other interior details hidden in plain sight. Once, a face flashed directly behind the windowpane, but it was only Joaquim Botelho’s mother, and, laughing, she raised a hand to shield her eyes and with the other waved at me to point the mirror away.
Even though it was a nice summer day, no one was out yet and I was killing time. Tony Zucco was the first to appear. Most days he was the first one out. Tony was adventurous and brave, catching bees and wasps in a jar and going after birds and squirrels with his slingshot. We met when we were five. One afternoon I was downstairs playing in our neighbour’s front yard when Tony came thundering by in a red Fire Chief pedal car. I’d never seen anything like it and I ran out to get a better look. He showed me how it worked and let me have a spin without my asking. After that we were best friends.
Seeing me from his yard, Tony came over and sat down next to me. He grabbed my mirror and aimed it at a running squirrel across the street. He followed it as it raced up the tree near the synagogue. Handing me back the mirror, he asked what we were doing today. I said I didn’t know, I hadn’t seen anyone yet. He suggested we play Battling Tops and I said it wasn’t so much fun just the two of us, but we went up to my place, leaving the front door open in case anyone else came out. I returned the mirror to the vanity in my parents’ bedroom and got the game from the closet in the double room. Then I went and closed the kitchen door. My parents were at work, but my uncle was sleeping in the back room. He worked at night and didn’t get up till the afternoon.
In the double room, Tony had set up the game on the floor, and as we started to play, he complained about Jimmy Gatakis. Like everyone, Tony called him Dimitraki. Though Jimmy wanted to be known as Jimmy, all the kids on the street, following the lead of the Greek kids, called him by the Greek diminutive his parents used. Often, when addressing him directly, they would coo the name in a high coddling voice in parody of his mother. You usually only ever saw Jimmy up on his balcony. His parents thought it was too dangerous to let him play on the street. St. Urbain was full of traffic and speeding cars. Every summer two or three kids would get hit.
I myself had nothing against Jimmy. Now and then, his parents would come to our place and we would play together, and when my parents visited the Gatakises, I had to go with them. My parents had some sense of how the other kids treated Jimmy and I was under strict orders to be nice to him. I did my best, but Jimmy and I couldn’t be friends because he was two years younger. Tony hated Jimmy. He saw more of him than the rest of us did. Their houses were next to each other and shared the back courtyard. Jimmy lived on the top floor of a triplex, his balcony overlooking Tony’s backyard. On the ground floor of Jimmy’s triplex lived a French family who often quarreled with the Gatakises, mostly because of Jimmy, who was always throwing things into their yard. He also threw things into Tony’s yard and at Tony. He once landed a water balloon on Tony’s head. And whenever he saw Tony, he would chant, “Tony baloney pizza and macaroni, Tony baloney pizza and macaroni.” Sometimes he would chant the line over and over until Tony escaped into the house.
“There’s something wrong with that kid,” Tony said as we wound our tops.
“It’s his parents’ fault cause they never let him out,” I reasoned.
“Lucky for him. Cause if they did, he’d get the shit beat out of him.” The previous afternoon, Tony said he’d had to leave his yard because Jimmy kept pelting grapes at him. “I swear, I wanted to go up there and smash his face in.”
After some rounds of Battling Tops, Tony wanted to do something else.
“I got an idea,” I said, though I didn’t really. I’d had the sudden impulse for an act of mischief.
We put the game back in the box and I returned it to the closet. Then I went over to my desk in the double room, and as I started searching through the drawers, Tony crouched before my father’s Telefunken stereo console and fiddled with the knobs and buttons. Turning on the receiver, he moved the needle back and forth until he found CKGM. It was playing “ABC” by the Jackson Five. He came over by my desk to see what I was doing.
I showed him the envelope in my hand. “I thought we’d send Dimitraki a mystery package,” I explained.
“What’s a mystery package?”
I held open the envelope, which so far contained three thumbtacks, a broken transparent Bic pen, and an old American penny with the profile of Abraham Lincoln on the front. Tony became excited. I was pleased to see him get into the spirit of the project.
“Oh!” he said, punching my arm. “I got the perfect thing. Wait here.”
“Where you going?”
“I gotta go to my place, but I’ll be right back,” he said as he ran out the front door.
I went into the kitchen to look for more things. When Tony got back, I was on the couch in the double room. He shut the front door, and then the vestibule door as well, and came into the double room. “You sure your uncle’s asleep?” he asked, looking around.
“We’d hear him if he was up.”
From the pocket of his shorts, he pulled out a small cardboard package and flipped open the top flap. Inside was a deck of miniature playing cards with photos of topless women.
“Holy shit!” I said. “Where d’you get these?”
He explained that he’d snagged the pack two days earlier in the claw vending machine at the corner store. “Second try!” he boasted.
I examined the cards one by one while Tony picked up the envelope from the coffee table and looked inside. To the thumb tacks, the pen, and the penny, I added a popsicle stick, a couple of cellophane-wrapped candies, some dry lima beans, a wooden match, and a red plastic comb. Tony took out the penny and examined it.
“You know this could be worth something,” he said, pointing out the 1952 on the front.
“You want it?” I replied. I wasn’t into coins.
“You mind?”
“Keep it,” I said, getting up and going to my parents’ bedroom, where I got a penny from the bowl of coins on the bureau. This one was Canadian and fairly recent, from 1969. I didn’t know why I felt I needed to get another penny, but once I’d put the first one in, it felt necessary. I sat back down beside Tony and dropped the replacement penny in the envelope.
“I’m putting these,” Tony said, showing me three of the naked cards before tossing them in the envelope.
Already I was squirming and giggling with delight. What a brilliant idea this was turning out to be! I loved the sheer randomness and stupidity of it. I had a penchant for the absurd and took enormous pleasure in the nonsensical.
As I examined the contents of the envelope one more time, Tony said, “We should write something.”
“Yes!” I said excitedly and ran back to my desk. “Great idea!”
I came back with a pen and notepad. Without consulting Tony, I bent over the coffee table and printed out in large upright letters:
To Jimmy Gatakis,
We know what you’re doing and we’re watching you. You have been a bad boy. So you better watch out. And you better not cry!
I showed what I’d written to Tony and he grinned gleefully. “But you should write it to Dimitraki, not Jimmy Gatakis.”
I looked at him. “Then he’ll know it’s us,” I said. I was disappointed in him. Tony thought about what I’d said, and the change in his expression seemed to suggest he was picking up on the drift of what we were up to.
I looked again at what I’d written and had another idea. I bent over the coffee table, and beneath the sentences I’d already written, I added the word Signed, and then below that, The Jews.
Tony looked at what I’d written and slapped his knee. “That’s perfect,” he said, picking up the notepad.
“Should we put anything else inside the envelope?” I asked.
“No. Let’s go.” He tore the sheet from the notepad and handed it to me. “Just put it in and let’s go put it in his door.”
“Who’s gonna do it?” I said after I’d sealed the envelope. I wrote Jimmy Gatakis on the front. “I think only one of us should go so we don’t draw attention.”
“I’ll do it,” Tony replied right away.
We went back out and sat on my stairs and cased the street. Up toward Fausto Grassi’s place, the Mendoza sisters and Rosa Grassi were skipping rope, but otherwise the street was quiet.
