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Chapter One

“Few sons, indeed, are like their fathers. Generally they are worse; but just a few better.” --- Home, Odyssey (9th C.B.C.), 2, TR. E.V. RIEU

STEUBENVILLE, OHIO

How many communities in America can claim that they are located exactly 3.4 miles from Mingo Junction, Ohio and Follansbee, West Virginia? Well, Steubenville, Ohio can. Talk about the increasingly irrelevant Rust Belt! Not only is Steubenville close to decaying towns in Ohio and West Virginia, it’s a rotten tomato’s throw away from communities in Pennsylvania too.

Seymour’s therapist and bestselling author on his murders would make a big deal out of his Rust Belt upbringing. The book would lay out this fact as a perfect analogy for Seymour’s personal decay, as well as become a manifesto on split personalities. No one really knew why. Irving and Constance thought it was because the American people had been waiting for a novel like this to come out. They just didn’t know it until it was published.  Irving Hanhart’s Al-Anon group would have put it like this: “although we can’t change the direction of the wind which blew us here, we can adjust the sails.”  Constance Powers would have liked for the city of Steubenville to receive an enema from the Almighty.  Constance’s idea of enemas was the type that introduced liquids into one’s rectum and colon via the asshole.

 And the buildings which the murals sit on did not show any decay whatsoever. Imagine murals in other cities lasting a long time without being abused by human hands, bird droppings, and pollution or zoning laws. New York, New York. Boston, Massachusetts. Chicago, Illinois. Los Angeles, California? Forget it. The murals would have been defaced in what is known as a New York minute in any of the aforementioned cities. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Cleveland, Ohio. And Detroit, Michigan? It would be another minute before the pigeon droppings and acid rain destroyed the same for these cities. Carmel, California. Las Vegas, Nevada, and any town in Vermont? The zoning boards would ban the murals. But not in Steubenville, Ohio. Here the murals are part of the city’s legacy. People who live in this city like them and people who are just passing through do too. What’s wrong with that?

There are 25 murals in Steubenville. Baron Frederic Wilhelm Augustus Steuben would never have imagined that. Baron Frederic Wilhelm Augustus Steuben is who Steubenville is named for. He was a German mercenary who fought with the good guys - the colonialists, and left a good impression on one of his soldiers, who, after the Revolutionary War ended, became a captain. His claim to fame as a soldier was to evict people from the lands the government claimed was not legally theirs.

While on a 6th grade field trip to Fort Steuben, Seymour learned that the government had all the Indians killed, after initially trying to be nice by legal interventions.

The students had just heard a lecture from the tour guide explaining the history of the fort. Like 95% of the people who go on these tours, they believed verbatim everything that the tour guide said.

 “They should have killed ‘em all,” Seymour’s only friend, Frankie Cafaro, spat out. “Then, like my dad says they should have finished off the niggers and the spics.” he added. 

The joke in the town was that Mr. Cafaro was an equal opportunity bigot. Jews were kikes. Irish were micks. Germans were Nazi’s. French were fags. Anyone from Eastern Europe was a Commie. All people from the Far East were gooks or slant-eyes. Anybody south of the Mason-Dixon Line to the tip of Cape Horn who, wasn’t white, was a spic. Mr. Cafaro was very bad in geography.

As an adult, and Seymour was not sick, or reminiscing about his  childhood to his few friends in his new home town of New York City, he used to tell everyone that “Mr. Cafaro wasn’t prejudiced…he hated everyone.” Everyone laughed.

Seymour was always welcomed at the Cafaro house, the home of his only close friend Frankie. Even better, Mrs. Cafaro was the best cook in the city.

Seymour’s therapist wrote that friends would have made a difference on Seymour’s psyche. Irving Hanhart would have countered with his own philosophy that young children ignored by other children are victims of a vast conspiracy. Constance Powers would want to see the offending children receive an enema as given by the Almighty.

 “She makes the best pasta fagoli and baked ziti in the world,” everyone in town would say of Mrs. Cafaro’s home cooked specialties.

Seymour noticed that whenever anyone in Steubenville was talking about someone’s home cooked food they always added to the end of the statement “…in the world” or they would say “I know it’s the best baked ziti in the world, because I have been all over the world.”  Seymour always found out that the person saying they had been all over the world had rarely gone outside of Northeast Ohio, let alone Steubenville.

The tour guide went on to explain that the name of the captain who built and named Fort Steuben was named John Francis Hamtramck.

Seymour Petrillo asked his father why Captain Hamtramck didn’t name the Fort after himself?  Thus, Steubenville would have been called Hamtramckville.

 “Wouldn’t have been as funny when Dean and Jerry used it as a running joke in their routine. Steubenville is funny, Hamtramckville, not,” he said

Like that made a difference, Seymour thought; careful not to give off any indication he was making fun of Dean. Seymour’s father was in love with him.

Long before Steubenville became the birthplace of one Dino Paul Crocetti, it was a bustling hub of commerce with steel mills, coal mines and other manufacturing companies bursting at the seams to turn profits for all. Blessed with the abundant natural resources of the Ohio River and millions of tons of coal underneath its surroundings, the people of Steubenville, like the rest of Northeast Ohio, Western Pennsylvania, and Western West Virginia were poised for a great run of economic prosperity.

When he was a boy, Seymour would walk around the city of his birth.  He would hear all the stories about the once great city. The various plants churning out 100% American made products. His maternal grandfather, Carmen Antonucci, would tell him the stories.

His grandfather would point to a building and ask Seymour ”What do you see when you look at this?”

“A vacant building Papa,” Seymour would say. He was very concrete in his thinking for a 6th grader.

“No,” his grandfather would answer in broken English, “It’s a tomb.”  Most young people had a hard time understanding Mr. Antonucci, as well as the other older ethnic Italians and Germans who made up the bulk of Steubenville’s population. But Seymour did not. He loved his grandparents, in particular Papa Antonucci. Seymour had spent countless hours with him, since birth. They could understand each other.

Seymour’s therapist and best selling author believed Carmen Antonucci’s death had a devastating affect on Seymour’s life. The Al-anon group told Irving Hanhart that if you take away someone else’s love our earth becomes their tomb.  Constance Powers wanted the Almighty to give a huge enema as only the Almighty could, to death and its taking of loved ones.

Besides, Seymour rationalized. Think how hard it must be for our grandparents to understand us? Our culture has to be so bizarre to them by their standards.

When so called Americans  made fun of the way the older Italians spoke, Seymour’s father would tell him how young Dino Paul Crocetti spoke such bad English in school, how it helped motivate him to leave school by age 16.

Seymour always responded to his dad’s anecdote of Dino Paul by talking back to him. He would say:

“I speak English bad, and I can’t get out.”

“Who the heck would name a boy Dino after the Flintstone’s dog?”

“I wish I could get out of school at age 12. Then I could hang on the streets.”

Mr. Petrillo was trying to use Dino Paul Crocetti as an example of what a hard working boy who spoke broken English could do if he worked hard at becoming Dean Martin. It was his way of saying not to make fun of the way older people, especially older Italians, talk.

Seymour didn’t care. To him, Dean Martin wasn’t a celebrity. He was an old dead dude in a tux, who couldn’t hold his booze and didn’t swear when he sang. Movie star?  The only new movie he had seen him
in was a real turkey of a sequel, where he played a priest in the oldie moldy decade of the 80’s.  He really didn’t care, because Seymour thought that Dean also hated Steubenville.

Seymour loved going on walks with his Papa Antonucci. His grandfather was full of history lessons. Not only about Steubenville, but Seymour’s Italian heritage as well.

Seymour’s father, Anthony Petrillo, focused on Steubenville only as it related to Dean Martin. It was never Steubenville, Ohio to him; it was Dean Martin’s Steubenville.

“If Dean didn’t think certain parts of Steubenville were hip, my father didn’t either,” Seymour told a colleague in New York. “I always wondered if my father would have renounced his Italian heritage if Dean did.”

But Dean did renounce his Italian heritage, didn’t he? By changing his name from Dino Paul Crocetti to Dean Martini and then dropping the i at the end in order to sound like a WASP was a form of renouncing his heritage was always a point Seymour wanted to tell his father.

“Not as bad as having the nose job,” his Papa Antonucci replied. “But then again he needed it fixed after all the punches he took,” Seymour‘s grandfather said.

“Dean Martin was a fighter?” How come my dad never told me?” Seymour asked.

“Probably because Dean Martin’s way of fighting was punching his nose into his opponent’s fist. He wasn’t very good,” Papa Antonucci said.

“What was his fighting name Papa?”

“Kid Crochet.”

“As in crochet like Nana does?”

Carmen Antonucci stopped walking. He grabbed his grandson’s face and held it in his big hands.

 “Seymour, I never thought of that. All these years, I thought it was a clever play on his last name. Boy is you smart,” Mr. Antonucci said, not believing a word of what Seymour was saying. He was just trying to build the boy’s self-esteem.

 “Papa, I get my fill of Dean from my dad. I want to know more about why you said the factory was a tomb,” said Seymour in his best student to teacher type voice he could.

Seymour’s therapist had written that at an early age he was a great listener. Wise beyond his years. Irving learned the hard way that you
never graduate from recovery. Constance always thought that people who didn’t listen deserved an enema from the Almighty.

Papa Antonucci took Seymour’s hand in his own and began walking down Seventh Street, past St. Anthony’s Church and on to South Street.

Despite being located in a neighborhood turning from ghetto to blight to
abandoned, St. Anthony’s was still an excellent Parish. The amount of people who frequented the church for mass, weddings or school functions, was still strong. It helped that the church and all its buildings were on grounds that the ghetto bad guys knew if they touched then they as the bad guys would be hunted down and dealt with.  As a matter of fact, all the Catholic churches and other places of worship were off limits to these types of ghetto bad guys. Despite the city being a neglected dump, all the remaining churches were in terrific shape. Now, if a Church, no matter what the denomination, was abandoned, then the bad guys could strip it bare, burn it, write graffiti all over it, break up the windows, urinate around it, smoke crack in it and basically do to it what the church had tried to undo to tortured souls for years.

Papa Antonucci took this stroll every day. He had read that taking a brisk walk was good for one’s health. He tried walking inside the shopping malls around Steubenville, but he felt too silly walking in a mall without shopping.

 “I mean, the walkers come to use the facility, but don’t buy anything. It’s not like they come downtown to shop either,” he told his wife after he
lasted all of 20 seconds walking inside that mall. Seymour inherited his practicality from Carmen.

 “But Papa, there is no place to shop downtown,” answered his wife. There was no malice in her voice. She loved Steubenville, because she always remembered the way it was, the way it should have remained.

 “You and a million others in a lot of cities,” Papa would say to his wife when she started living in the past.

Mama Antonucci only wanted to remember the glorious past of Steubenville. It made her smile, whether it was a part in a play one of her children had performed in at the Grant School or a beautiful building on Market Street. She wasn’t totally a slave to the past, and thus in a constant state of denial.  She did use the past as a crutch to lean on.

 “My Grandmother was very nostalgic,” Seymour would say. He’d tell his few friends who happened to be co-workers at the animal hospital in New York City when he had long ago left Steubenville.

Mr. Antonucci and Seymour walked down South Street. They crossed the street to get away from the building that was caddy-corner to St. Anthony’s Parish.

The way in which Papa Antonucci crossed the street and the strength in which he squeezed Seymour’s hand, made Seymour wonder what his
grandfather feared. He looked around; hoping to catch a glimpse of what evil was out there. But Seymour’s big, round dark eyes (like
marbles, his mother always said), saw nothing. So, he did what all children do when facing similar situations. He asked a question.

 “Why are we in such a hurry, Papa?”

 “I saw something I didn’t like,” his Papa quickly answered.

Seymour stopped to look at the building that he knew his grandfather was referring to so suddenly that his grandfather was jerked backwards just like a dog on a chain that has stretched it to the limit. It was not to figure out which building it was. It was the only one in eye-sight that was see through: as in the fact that there was nobody or nothing inside to prevent someone from seeing straight through the structure.

To say that the seven unit apartment building had seen its better days was an understatement. Except for the four walls and a portion of the roof, everything else was gutted, broken, missing, destroyed, falling apart, falling down, falling sideways, and open. That is how Papa Antonucci saw something in the building. You didn’t need a ladder to climb or go through a missing window to enter. All you had to do was walk in the missing back, side or front door.

Things were so bad in Steubenville that even the building and housing code department couldn’t afford to board up the house to protect it from the jerks who liked to go in to death traps like this. The thieves had already stripped the place of its valuable copper pipes, stained glass windows, porcelain fixtures and anything else they could scrap at the junk yards. It drove Mr. Antonucci nuts that the authorities didn’t catch the house thieves.

“Why don’t you put an undercover man down at the junk yard and catch the son-of-a-bitches?” he once asked the Chief of Police Victor Zambino.

“Can’t,” replied the chief. “No money.”

“But, think of the money you would save from the investigation man-hours that must be going into this? And you would catch them. It’s not legitimate people selling stuff to the junk yards,” said Papa.

“Mr. Antonucci, there is no investigation going on,” the chief pointed out.

“You’re kidding me. No wonder we look like a shit-hole,” said Papa.

Sighing, Police Chief Zambino then went into his spiel about how short-handed he was. There were more important issues to tackle, to take it up with the Mayor and of course….

“No money,” said Papa Antonucci as he anticipated the Chief saying this as he hung up on the Chief.

The Chief looked into the mouthpiece, puzzled. He hadn’t expected the old man on the other end to hang up on him. The Chief tilted back in his chair and swung his legs up onto his desk which was cluttered with mountains of paperwork. He took a bite out of a doughnut.
 
  “Cops. Only around when they want to write you a ticket for speeding, because that’s safe and easy work,” Papa muttered under his breathe, and Seymour walked farther away from the building.

Seymour noticed something else that stood out in his mind about the vacant building. The graffiti on it was so bad; it looked like it was the glue holding up the walls which was keeping the entire building together. He also saw a for sale sign on the building and to call a number that was below the sign. Only, there was no number in the slot dedicated to where a number should be. Seymour pointed that out to his grandfather.

 
 “If you owned that piece of garbage, would you put your number on it?” Papa asked his son.  He made a mental note to ask the Father of Saint Anthony’s to do something about the building. Papa hoped that the Priest would do something about it. After all, he was always using the  pulpit to preach about being proactive in the community.  He couldn’t understand why the big shots he knew in the Church hadn’t done it yet.

 
Seymour’s therapist never found out about his youthful education in being a citizen activist. Irving would have loved the fact that Papa Antonucci was a little guy who wanted to call on his connections because he was being pooh-poohed by the cops, who didn’t think that Antonucci was anybody. Constance would have already put an order in for the building’s enema.

He didn’t know why he would waste his time, but he had to try. He knew that if he had been a known big shot, then the Chief of Police would have done something about the vandals and the vacant buildings. He also knew that the Priest would nod his head a few times, pat him on the back and complain about lack of money. They knew that the big shots that belonged to the Church didn’t see the building when they drove to Mass, even though it was right in front of their noses. That was because they didn’t see it or either choose not to. Because they lived outside the city, they didn’t care what was happening or happened unless it affected Saint Anthony’s itself. And, even then it had to be something like a new boiler or roof for the Church.  He knew those big shots would see it when their eyes were opened. And, he knew he had to be the opener.

Because Carmen Antonucci cared, that made him a dangerous man. Someone that the big shots had to listen and follow up with. A caring
man with too much time on his hands can be a big pain in the ass to Police Chiefs, Priests and big shots.

Carmen was being punished, but not by God. He was being punished because he made the mistake of not moving out of the city that God had obviously tuned his back on.

 “My grandfather always did the right thing,” Seymour told some acquaintances in New York City after he had moved out.  “I believe it’s why he lived to be so sound of mind and body,” he added.

More likely, it was the long brisk walks that Mr. Antonucci took each day, no matter what the weather. Although, it has been said that by doing the right thing all the time, your stress level would be at a bare minimum. And less stress meant a long and healthy life.

Papa Antonucci loved taking these walks. Walking around and through the once thriving downtown of Steubenville he couldn’t take his eyes off the cliffs across the river on the West Virginia side.

No matter where you walked in the downtown area of Steubenville, you could see those cliffs. Layers and layers of mother’s earth sediment piled one on top of another.

“The green slime cliffs of West Virginia,” Papa Antonucci called them. He hated West Virginia and the white trash and hillbillies that came over all the time to Steubenville looking for a new area to wreck. The hillbillies
had been kept in check for years by the local gangsters. Sure, they allowed them to cross over The Veterans Memorial Bridge to spend
money in mob controlled bars and gambling dens and whore houses. They could spend but they could not live in town. The gangsters had traveled to many places in West Virginia. They had seen hillbillies and white trash up close.

They wouldn’t - no, they couldn’t allow that element in their beloved home town.

After the mobsters’ reign ended, the hillbillies and white trash were beaten to the housing stock in and around downtown Steubenville by the blacks.

“They are like cockroaches,” Frankie Cafaro’s father said one day when talking about what happened to the first boyhood home of Dino Paul Crocetti. Mr. Cafaro and Seymour’s dad had just returned from 319 South Sixth Street. They had gone to take a new picture to hang in Mr. Petrillo’s house. Now that the Petrillo’s were legally divorced, he was now living in his apartment above The Spot Bar on South 4th Street. She had kept the old picture of the house that Dean Martin had grown up in and wouldn’t relinquish it to her ex-husband. It was a messy divorce.

Seymour’s therapist wrote that the divorce played a huge part in his split personality. Irving thought that people who blamed divorce for a myriad of problems were part of a vast conspiracy. Constance thought
that the concept of divorce needed an enema administered by the Almighty.

 “Don’t insult cockroaches like that,” Anthony Petrillo barked back. “Cockroaches don’t spoil their own nests. For Christ’s sake, did you see how those niggers lived?” he asked.

“And, the neighborhood too. Can you believe that not long ago it was all Italian? For crying out loud, Dean Martin used to cut through the yards and walk the streets,” yelled Cafaro.

“The damn neighborhood is so black and criminal, even Sammy Davis Junior wouldn’t feel safe in it,” Petrillo joked.

“Isn’t that an oxymoron?” Cafaro asked.

 “Sammy Davis Junior?”

“No, black and criminal,” replied Cafaro.

Seymour let his grandfather lead him from the sidewalk through a big hole in the fence that used to stand erect and guard the grounds of Supplier’s of Steubenville. They ducked in and walked a few yards, and then Papa Antonucci stopped walking and stood his ground in front of what used to be the main entrance to the plant.

 “What do you see Seymour?” asked his grandfather.

“A big mess,” replied Seymour. For years, Seymour and everyone else in town called the building and its former tenant “the save our shit corporation.”  He said it knowing that it would have bothered his grandfather if he knew he was saying it. Seymour made sure that he never said that when his grandfather was around.

“Okay wise guy, how many times have I told you to look past the obvious?” his grandfather scolded him. He spoke in a loving tone of a teaching statement, not a punishing statement.

“I see something here that is like the building by Saint Anthony’s,” Seymour said. It was the best he could do, and his grandfather knew it.

“That’s true kid. The ghetto is growing. If it’s not stopped when it first begins, it will keep on growing. It will be up the hill and affecting the rich communities if it’s not stopped at the beginning,” said his grandfather.

Seymour always remembered his grandfather’s lecture about the growing cancer of blight and the ghettoization of a community that has been forgotten.

“It starts with a broken window on a building not getting repaired and it just escalates from there,” Seymour liked telling his co-workers in New York City when they took the subway rides to explore the city.

“You can tell which neighborhoods are next and which are not,” he added. He prided himself in knowing this. There was no way he was going to live in any community that was going to turn into Steubenville, Ohio.

“Seymour I see a lot more. I told you it reminded me of a tomb. It reminds me of the tomb of the Battleship Arizona,” said his grandfather.

Seymour didn’t say anything. He knew for the millionth time he was now going to hear about the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. He couldn’t believe his grandfather was using this crummy building and today’s walk to bring that up again. It wasn’t even close to December 7th.

That was months away. He loved walking with his grandfather and getting educated on many things, but like his father’s obsession with Dean Martin, his grandfather could get a little out of hand telling his very dated war stories.

What Seymour and all the other non-veterans would never understand is that all combat veterans have a right to have an audience. No matter how many repeats are involved.

“You see Seymour”, Papa Antonucci started. “Even though this giant factory looks like it was a victim of a terrorist attack, it was full of life. Love, work ethic, and commerce - all were here. Many years after I saw nothing but the ghosts of all the workers embarrassed at how their blood and sweat ended up. That’s why it reminds me of the Arizona, all those great men trapped in the hull for eternity. But, fittingly, when people walk over the Arizona’s tomb, they cry. Here they laugh,” he said.
Seymour just nodded. His grandfather was on a roll.

Seymour’s therapist wrote that he was too good of a listener.
At Al-Anon Irving learned to keep his ears open and his mouth shut.
To Constance that was a cliché worthy of an enema.

Like a Pavlov’s dog, the mere mention of the Arizona had Carmen Antonucci’s mind foaming at telling his greatest personal achievement during WWII. Like Seymour on Christmas day, he dove into it.

“I was in the kitchen in the barracks. I was low man on the totem pole because I was the youngest in the company. Sunday morning was homemade jelly doughnut day. Because I was the youngest and Italian, the WASPS who made up the NCOs thought I must have been a baker and put me in charge of making the jelly doughnuts for the company. That’s the way the army worked back then, and probably still does today. Anyway, making the doughnuts was messy, but fun. The cooks had already made the doughnuts. All we had to do was bore a hole in each donut by hand with a special spoon and then fill it up with jelly, sprinkle it with sugar and the result was one tasty doughnut.  The only drawback was wearing this stupid hat. It was white and looked like a stove-pipe hat without the brim. I hated that hat.  We had just got done making what had to have been 500 doughnuts when the first bombs fell from the Japanese planes. I had the misfortune of wheeling the freshly baked and filled red-raspberry doughnuts when all hell broke loose. Plates, pots and pans went flying through the air. Pictures cracked and fell off the walls. Glass was everywhere from the exploding windows.  And all the red-raspberry doughnuts had come crashing down on me. I was covered with red. It looked like I had been one of the victims at the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre. Everyone was screaming and just when I didn’t think anyone was in control, in came the officer of the day. He barked out orders for the other three guys who were making doughnuts to get their
rifles and get down to the beach to get ready for the invasion. Then he pointed at me and screamed for me to follow him,” Carmen said.

“And he did that all in one breath,” Seymour used to tell those co-workers whenever December 7th rolled around and someone brought up the anniversary of the Japanese surprise attack.   Now, Seymour was passing the story on to others, but it wasn’t as good as his grandfather’s eye-witness account. 

Carmen went on. “As he handed me the machine gun bullet belts and pulled me up the stairs to the roof, all in one motion, it occurred to him that there was something wrong with me.”

“Are you hit? What’s with the fucking hat?” the OD asked.

“No, I am not hit,” replied Carmen.  “And what hat?” he said. Even though he knew what hat the OD was referring to, he had accepted the silly thing by ignoring it. One of his bunkmates had explained it was the only way to deal with the abuse of army life from the NCOs. It sounded stupid, but it worked.

“That’s the way of the army,” Papa lectured Seymour whenever he told the story.

Suddenly, Carmen grabbed his grandson’s arm real tight. Just like when they were walking away from the vacant building caddy-corner to Saint Anthony’s. He saw some shadows in the tomb of a factory, but he went on with the story.

“We ran up the stairs, or I should say I was dragged up the stairs and up onto the roof. At least three other sergeants with machine gun bullet belt carrying knuckleheads in tow were doing the same thing. We were knuckleheads because we were easy targets up on the roof. The air was full of Japanese planes, smoke, bullets and destruction. We started firing at anything in the sky. Sometimes it looked like we couldn’t miss, but we did. At other times we were hugging the roof, fingers digging into the gravel, hoping that those planes didn’t catch us. One Japanese plane came so close I could see the face of the pilot. The son-of-a-bitch was shaking his fist at me. I jumped up grabbed the machine gun from the NCO and started firing. I actually hit it and it went down. Everyone up on the roof started cheering like I just scored the winning touchdown.  But later that day we learned the real score and it wasn’t such a good score,” Carmen’s voice tailed off.
   Seymour squeezed his grandfather’s hand. Carmen appreciated that.

“After being congratulated up and down, I was again asked if I was hit, and what was with the fucking hat,” Carmen said. “The OD plucked the
hat off my head. It had a perfect hole the size of a grapefruit right in the center.  Then we ran down to our company. We were out of bullets and the air was still full of Zeros. We dug in waiting for an invasion that never came.” he said. His eyes filled up with mist.

Then, he grabbed Seymour’s arm again and confidently, but concerned walked towards the building to see what those damn shadows were. Maybe they were ghosts, he thought.

It was worse than ghosts. It was the neighborhood toughs; at least they acted very tough. Seymour could attest to that. He had, like many others, fallen victim to their prey. Extortion for milk money. Constant teasing about his name and his build. His father’s obsession with Dean Martin. His parents’ divorce, his crazy grandfather. Seymour was high on their list of abuse.

Seymour’s therapist wrote that this is where his personality slowly started to take the next turn after his parents’ bitter divorce. Irving would have thought that it was too bad this little guy didn’t have the connections. Constance would have given all gangs the Almighty sized enema.

The gang members were all Italian. Seymour couldn’t understand why they picked on other Italians. They’re plenty of others to make fun of.

“These guys are all tough when it’s a pack of wolves against one sheep,” Papa Antonucci had told Seymour after yet another day of hearing that Seymour had been a sheep. “It’s the one thing that hasn’t changed in Steubenville,” he added. He sighed with deep regret.

“What’s that Papa?” Seymour asked.

“Who would ever think that our own Italian brotherhood would prey on each other for a lousy buck? We Italians used to have a total commitment to family, honesty, fidelity, community, respect. We were as
good to each other as a people. A Jewish fellow I met in the war told me that he thought Italians were the best ethnic group on earth, because they were always so happy. And Seymour, the Italian community was the happiest as a group right here in Steubenville until the curse of greed came. It all started, very simple. A few guys started opening up after the bars legally closed so they could illegally sell alcohol to those who decided that staying out late at night was more important then getting back at a decent hour to their family and other responsibilities,” Papa Antonucci spoke with a hint of anger in his voice.
   “It was all down hill after that, right?” Seymour asked.

“You have learned well. You listen. That is a quality I don’t see in a lot of adults, or young boys. I love you Seymour,” said Carmen to his grandson.
 
 “I love you too Papa,” Seymour said. “Please tell me more,” he added.

“Once the authorities looked the other way or got their hands greased with some bribe money, the guys who were doing the after hours selling and bribing realized the money they were making, so they bought another bar and did the same thing.  When they wanted to purchase yet another bar, and the owner wouldn’t sell, the authorities that were getting bribed shut the bar down and the owner was forced to sell real cheap. Well, you can only make so much money with after
hour’s beer and sandwiches, so the boys started a little gambling too.  That led to more money and more authorities needing their palms greased and more joints to control. Yeah, they were making money hand over fist, but it was coming from the very people who they sat next to at Church and whose children their own kids brought over for dinner”. Carmen Antonucci said. The last with vengeance in his voice. He knew what the vices had done not only to his community but to America as well. You didn’t have to be from Steubenville to have seen it coming.
 
“Or corrupt,” as his wife would say.

“Or corrupt,” as Carmen Antonucci totally agreed with his wife. It was the corruption that allowed the whole underworld to flourish, whether it is Steubenville, Youngstown or New York.

“Papa, why would someone rob from one of their friends? I don’t understand,” Seymour said.

“Money,” Carmen Antonucci said. He spat the word out. He didn’t go into any details how after the gambling came the prostitutes and then the drugs. He thought that Seymour would have to learn about that part of the mobster revenue streams when he got older.

“Why didn’t anyone stop them?” Seymour asked.

“Money,” replied Carmen. Again he spat out the word.

“Okay, with all the money, what happened to Steubenville?” Seymour asked. He was a bright boy. He listened very well and asked all the right questions.

“All good things must come to an end…even for the bad guys,” Carmen Antonucci said with glee. “The Italians with some money moved up the hill. It wasn’t other Italians who moved in, but the coloreds and others who played by a different set of rules. Plus, the FBI started busting up the mobsters because even they realized that a lot of money wasn’t getting taxed and that many people were suffering. The money just dried
up until the mobsters invented their newest and probably greatest idea,” said Carmen.

“Which was?” asked Seymour.

“The dagocrats,” said Papa Antonucci. Seymour noticed that his grandfather said “dagocrats” with the same disgust in his voice as when he had said “money”.

“When the bad guys couldn’t make money on illegal booze and gambling, they turned to politics,” said Papa.

“Politics?” Seymour repeated.

“Once the state of Ohio took control of the booze and the lottery, the bad guys had to look at something else to sink their greedy hands into. It became politics. This gives them their endless revenue streams of taxes, jobs for their lazy family members and government contracts that they are not held accountable for. They took over the Democratic Party with the help of the Unions. The stupid idiots known as the public continues to vote for the dagocrats in north east Ohio, and the results were horrible for the people but very rewarding for the dagocrats.”  “Politics, booze, cigarettes, drugs, gambling, it’s why they call it the rackets. Promise me you will get out of here, kid,” added Seymour’s very loving and principled grandfather.

They thought they were a gang. The punks had a street name. They called themselves the Steubenville Scorpions. Like most modern day non African-American street gangs located in the mid-west, their name was a lot tougher than the members.

As soon as Seymour and his grandfather tip-toed into the vacant building’s main room it seemed like there were a dozen voices yelling at
them. The emptiness of the building gave the voices an eerie hollowish sound which Papa Antonucci would have mistaken for ghosts if he didn’t know there was no such things as ghosts.

“Seymour butts,” came one voice from the left, bouncing off the ceiling and echoing through both their ears.

 “Seymour dickmore,” came a second sound. That one radiated off the walls.

“Seymour or less,” the third voice shouted.

 “Brillo Petrillo,” the fourth voice cried out.

Seymour did nothing but look down. He was embarrassed. Not because of what was being said about him, because he had heard it many times before. He was mortified that his tormentors had caught him with his grandfather. Now the teasing would only escalate.

“Like any kid wants to be seen in a situation like that with their parents, especially their grandparents.” Seymour later said.

“I wouldn’t have wanted to be seen with my grandparents in public anywhere, anytime or anyplace,” replied one of Seymour’s acquaintances.

Another one of Seymour’s New York buddies explained how he used to walk at least 3 feet in front of his parents when they were shopping at the mall.

“And my Papa was such a great guy,” Seymour said with a shrug. “He deserved better then what happened,” he added.

Carmen Antonucci shielded Seymour from the Steubenville Scorpions and their juvenile taunting.

 “I wish I was 20 years younger,” the old man yelled at the gang members.

They all made the universal sign for being crazy by taking their index fingers and circling it around one or both of their ears and then pointing at Seymour’s grandfather.  Carmen got pissed. Seymour was humiliated.

Mr. Antonucci grabbed his grandson and made for the nearest exit. They heard the taunting get fainter as they speed-walked away. That they knew how to do better than anyone.

Carmen wasn’t going to get any madder. He was going to get back and scream just as loud at those little bastards as they had yelled at his grandson. Yelling he could still do. He had a great pair of lungs. Old lungs, but strong lungs. He wasn’t going to let Seymour see his grandfather lower himself to the creep’s level, but he intended to get there himself. First he had to drop his grandson off at his ex-son-in-law’s apartment above The Spot Bar on 4th Street.

It was Anthony Petrillo’s weekend to watch his son. He was waiting patiently in the doorway of the bar. He leaned up against the doorway like he owned the place, and it was up to him if you were allowed to enter
the place or not. He rented the apartment above the bar, because it was the only place left in Steubenville still functioning as a bar that Dean Martin sung in years ago. Anthony Petrillo even fantasized that Dino Paul banged a few broads and won some dice games in the two bedroom apartment that he was now renting above the bar.  Anthony Petrillo wanted to rent the back of Gertrude Lee Candy’s store off Dunbar in the Hollywood Plaza, which was the last residence of Dean Martin’s parents. The owner wanted a lot of money. He had heard through the grapevine that Dean Martin’s children were going to purchase the place and turn it into an official site to be honored during the Dean Martin Festival in June. When the unit at The Spot opened up, Anthony had jumped at it.

Seymour wasn’t looking forward to spending the weekend with his father. His father’s friends bothered him - especially his newest best friend, Brian. Also, there was a Martin and Lewis film festival on and Seymour knew his father would make him watch it. He had no choice, but that’s the way it was with young children in a divorce. Anthony was still his father, and his mother and his grandparents didn’t live that far away if things got bad. The closeness of Steubenville’s neighborhoods was attractive to those families who wanted to be close to one another.
 
He kissed his grandfather good bye and Carmen gave him the loving pinch on the cheek that he always gave to children when he said goodbye.

“Who shakes hands with kids?” Mr. Antonucci would say to his grandson when Seymour cautioned him about pinching to hard. “The kids are so cute, I can’t help myself,” he would add. Since the kids that were on the receiving end of his pinches all liked Papa Antonucci, they put up with this.

“I miss those pinches,” Seymour would always reminisce when thinking about his grandfather.

When he arrived at the building, it was empty. Not even the Steubenville Scorpions were there. Just the mess of broken beer bottles and junk food wrappers that they had scattered all over the place.

“Beer and fast food. Yuck,” Mr. Antonucci said. Just the thought made his body shiver.

He spotted a barrel in the corner. It was one of those 50 gallon drums that were used from everything for storing oil and dead mobsters’ bodies in. He could see that the bottom was rusted out and didn’t move it to the mess. Why he decided to clean up a mess like that in a mess of a building no one will ever know. When he bent over to the get his first hands full of trash to take over to the makeshift garbage can, he never saw the rotted beam and roof materials that fell from above and killed him instantly.

What the Japanese at Pearl Harbor couldn’t do, decay was able to.

Excerpted from The Organ Grinder and the Monkey © Copyright 2012 by Sam Moffie. Reprinted with permission by Uel Enterprises. All rights reserved.

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