Joey Gallo's Lament

 

I was always the fastest in the Seventh Grade. Well not as fast as Connie Carrruba who started tongue kissing in the third grade and had a set of knockers like Gina Lollabrigida when she was twelve. You see I could run and it was what I loved to do.

That and eat panele sandwiches.

My buddies and I would burst out of Sacred Hearts in the Sixties at lunch time and run off to eat. In those days there wasn’t all this bullshit where they worried that every kid would get kidnapped if they walked by themselves. When lunch hour hit you would split to get something to eat and to get away from the eagle eyed nuns who were just looking for an excuse to feed you an eraser.

We went to Tony’s Candy store on Strong Place for a potato and sauce hero for a quarter. Or be a finoche with a brown bag and peanut butter and jelly. Or you went to where the good food was. Union St off Columbia. You had the best pizza in the neighborhood at the House of Pizza. They had deep fried calzones with creamy ricotta and a ham slice that was like a piece of heaven.

But the best of all was the panele store. They had all the Sicilian specialties. Vashted which was  sliced lung meat. Polpie which was grilled octopus. And paneles. A pancake made from chick pea flower that was deep fried and put in a crusty roll with ricotta and shaved sharp provolone. Man that was some good shit.

The joint was in the same family and cooked their best for the longshoreman and neighborhood mooks. And of course the gangsters.

The neighborhood was under the control of the Gallo brothers. Larry, Joe and Kid Blast. They had a social club and a brownstone down President St. You seldom saw them until the late afternoon because they were sacked out after a night of debauchery.

So when we all burst in the door of the panele store we all stopped short and piled up like a Three Stooges cartoon. Joey Gallo was in one of the front tables with his back against the wall. He looked like death. Smelled like three day old cigarettes and Johnnie Walker with a dash of cocaine. When we came in he looked up quickly like we had startled him.

“What the fuck. Shut-da-fuck you little pricks. I got a fucking headache.”

We were in deep shit.