One of the great pleasures of growing up in North Jersey was of having lower middle class friends like Dave DiGeronimo Junior. We’d sit in the kitchen. His mother, Angel, would watch me eat her cooking.

"Marone, look a dis kid eat. God bless. He eats like he has two assholes."

I couldn’t recall my mother using such colorful metaphors.

"Hannity, what does your family eat for Thanksgiving?"

"The usual stuff," I told her. "Turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, gravy, turnips, all different pies."

"Yea, yea, we have all that, too," she replied with a smile of superiority, " PLUS manna-gots, zitis, some nice eggplant rollatinis, treep-a, brajole…"

"No wonder you’re such a fat turd," I replied, using our favored mocking tone, a lilted falsetto thrown through clenched teeth

"Why you assey little fuck. And in my kitchen. I outta smack the living shit outta you."

"Ha ha, yer a turd, Ma," lilted Dave. "How ya gonna smack him when you’re too lazy ta get up off your fat ass? Ha ha."

His father, Dave Senior, was always exhausted from his day in the quarry. He’d darken the parlor and lay on the sofa, watching TV. When we laughed or talked too loudly he’d yell for us to shut up out there. Occasionally, he’d amble out to the refrigerator or bathroom, and was fond of grabbing and jiggling his crotch.

"Hung like a baby steer," he announced to those present in the kitchen on more than one occasion.

"I’m Baby Steer Junior!" Dave responded on one of those occasions, jumping up and down with mock excitement while grabbing and jiggling his crotch, causing a chuckle-suppressing Angel to whack him hard with a rolled up tabloid.

"Han-ni-tee. You know what the curse of the Irish is?" Dave Senior asked me loudly. "Small dick. You medagons may live longer, but who wants ta live long with no dick?"

Long penis or longevity, interesting choice.

"I’m only part Irish," I protested, certain my genitalia was at least average in size. "I’m mostly Scottish."

"Irish, Scottish, same shit."

"Scottish is to Irish like Sicilian is to Italian," I told him, knowing he considered Sicilians, especially himself, to be a tougher, ornerier,
better hung cousin of Italian.

"Still a medagon," he said.

Senior’s sunbeat skin was the color and deeply creased consistency of a well-worn catcher’s mitt. During the summer, he’d darken even more.

"Dave, there’s a nigger in your house!" our friend Joe once exclaimed after seeing Dave Senior, a red baseball cap with a bulldozer logo hiding his slicked back, prematurely white hair, pass the doorway to Dave’s bedroom.

"Ain’t no moolie here," Senior chuckled, leaning alpha on the doorjamb. "Just a purebred Siciliano who’s gonna shove his boot so far up your ass that you’re gonna taste the steel toe."

That is an expression that, having been overused in every variation by all popular medias, has lost its power. But I’d never heard it before and back about the bicentennial it was a powerful and frightening concept.

Senior would dispense sage advice on all manner of subjects.

On women: "If it smells like provolone, leave it alone."

On dancing: "You don’t have to be brown to get down."

On personal responsibility: "Excuses are like assholes, everybody’s got one."

And whenever Dave’s behavior displeased either parent, he or she would refer to a belief system holding that, as they were responsible for his creation, they reserved the right to terminate said creation.

"Listen you little fucker," Angel was fond of saying, "I brought you into this world, and I’ll take you out of it."

"Don’t forget, you come from the tip of my dick," Dave Senior would say, reminding Dave Junior of his baby-steer-like origins.

Angel ran a weekly poker game. Every Tuesday night, the door to her apartment and the door to Louise’s apartment across the hall were propped open to create a good sized venue. Louise’s kitchen held trays of food and an institutional-sized coffee pot. Angel’s kitchen was dedicated solely to the game.

"We’re gamblers," Angel bragged as she shuffled and presided from behind the kitchen table, her thinning home-dyed helmet and drug store make-up garish under the circular flourescent ceiling fixture. "On our last trip to Vegas, we dropped over five hunnerd on the slots before we even got outta the airport."

"Dat ain’t nuttin’," one-upped Louise with an unfiltered rasp.

I’d never seen Louise in street clothes. She always wore a sleeveless housedress, treating one and all to an expansive panorama of liver-spotted stretch marks, especially when searching for a fallen strap or retrieving an errant breast.

"Me an’ Frank was up over nine grand our last day there. We was in the cab on the way ta the airport and said f-u-u-u-ck it. We made the driver go back an’ wait for us at Showboat an’ we went right up ta da roulette and put the whole ting on my grandniece’s birtday."

"Da friggin’ Shoe," Angel said after Louise crossed back into her apartment to pull something from the oven, "She’s so fulla shit."

"Why do they call you The Shoe?" I asked Louise later.

"Aaahhh, they’re corny," she waved me off, exposing the stubbled topography of an armpit.

"So how come you call her Da Shoe?" I asked Angel.

Angel looked towards the doorway for signs of Louise. "Don’t tell nobody," she said, her warning emphasized by an acrylic-tipped smoke-trailing finger pointed threateningly at my chest.

She took an inhale, tilted her head back and expelled a gray plume into the circular fixture, momentarily softening its bare flourescent harshness. She leaned forward on meaty elbows and dropped her voice with great solemnity, like she was telling a ghost story at a campfire.

"We’re playin’ one night. Everybody’s here. There’s hundreds on the table."

She took a smoky, dramatic pause.

"We don’t know it yet, but somebody dropped a fidolla bill on the floor. Louise musta spotted it though, so she says she gotta go check on sumtin in her apartment, and when she gets up and walks over we catch her draggin’ the bill under her foot, all sneaky-like."

Angel got up to demonstrate a sneaky-like, straight-legged, bill-dragging shuffle.

"Ever since then… Da Shoe!"
They’d let Dave and me sit in while they warmed up and waited for the remaining players. Once, I won two hands in a row.

"I smell shit," Angel said, looking right at me.

"What? Wadda ya mean?"

"You. Whadid you, step in shit?"

"Huh?"

I finally figured out that the seriously superstitious Angel believed an accidental incursion into dog shit would bestow good luck and, therefore, anytime I won a hand I was suspected of having so incursed.

And Angel turned superstition into strategy. Any hand she won was to vanish from recorded history as she quickly dealt the next without any mention of anybody stepping in anything. But any time I won a hand, it spawned a great epic, a tale of misplaced footsteps into great steaming piles, footsteps that heaped the blessings of Fortuna upon the dual-rectumed medagon.
She’d spend most of the time talking about me winning while she mostly won.

"Marone, this kid’s assey. You bringin’ cards wit chu from home?"

"Hannity, your family don’t get cold cuts like this," she boasted, displaying a tray of unfamiliar sliced meats. "We got gabba-goul, sooppa-sod, prho-zhut, mortah-dellah, some nice saus-eech-adah…." Every bite was an adventure. One might yield the painfully explosive crunch of a peppercorn, another a gooey glob of high-octane adipose, another a stringy spice-coated rind that stuck painfully between your teeth. But each mouthful packed more flavor than the entire deli department of the local Shop Rite.

"Hannity, what kinda food does Scottish people eat?" Angel’s inquiring mind wanted to know.

"Mostly haggis," I told her. It was the only Scottish dish I knew of.

"What’s that?"

"Ya know, you take a sheep stomach and stuff it with oatmeal and offals and stuff."

"What’s offals?"

"Hearts and organs and stuff."

"Aaahhh, you’re fulla shit. God forbid even a medagon should eat something that nasty."

I made a copy of the haggis recipe I found in the library and presented it to Angel upon my next visit. She carefully read it, her lips moving slowly along.

The Dreaded Haggis
1 sheep’s stomach
1 sheep heart
1 sheep liver
1&Mac218;2 lb. Suet, fresh (kidney lean fat preferred)
3&Mac218;4 c oatmeal
1 ts salt
1&Mac218;2 ts pepper
1&Mac218;4 ts cayenne
1&Mac218;2 ts nutmeg
3&Mac218;4 c stock
Wash stomach, rub with salt, and rinse. Remove membranes and fat. Soak in cold salted water several hours. Turn stomach inside out for stuffing. Cover heart and liver with cold water, bring to a boil, reduce heat, cover and simmer for 30 minutes. Chop heart and coarsely grate liver. Toast oatmeal in skillet on top of stove, stirring frequently until golden brown.

Combine all ingredients and mix well. Loosely pack mix into stomach, about 3&Mac218;4 full, remember oatmeal expands in cooking. Press any air out of stomach and truss securely. Put into boiling water to cover. Simmer for three hours uncovered, adding more water as needed to
maintain water level. Prick stomach several times with a sharp needle when it begins to swell: this keeps the bag from bursting. Place on a hot platter, removing trussing strings. Serve with a spoon.

She glanced up at me, disgusted, then back at the page, further disgusted, then back at me, even more disgusted, as if she could barely tolerate my presence, me having eaten stomach and offal and stuff.

"And oatmeal. That’s really sick," she said, her nostril muscles lifting the central quadrant of her upper lip and scrunching her nose.
More ladies arrived and the room filled with smoke and beady-eyed fervor as they shooed us from the room and spent the rest of the night trying to take each other’s money.

Since we weren’t yet man enough to play poker with the girls, we created for ourselves an equally, if not even more, high stakes, cutthroat version of the game. We played after school when we had the apartment to ourselves.

The pot would consist of one item of foodstuff, a shot of soy sauce, for example, or perhaps a strip of raw bacon, to be consumed by the holder of the weak hand, but consuming the pot did not in itself constitute losing. In order to lose you had to balk, grimace, gag, choke or in any way express revulsion with the substance at hand. Refuse to consume the pot and you forfeited the entire day’s play. Bonus points were scored for feigning relish, savoring the bouquet, and upbeat narration.

"Ahh, an enjoyable tartness," Dave exclaimed upon downing his shot of red wine vinegar.

"Effervescent and refreshing," I did declare, feigning delight as the Alka Seltzer tablet foamed in my mouth and down my chin, globlets of white froth dripping onto the speckled linoleum tabletop.

"The brisk refreshment," he lip smacked, trying to swallow the impossibly sweet, dry as sand, heaped tablespoon of powdered iced tea drink mix.

"Helps prevent tartar buildup on your pet," I noisily crunched my Milk Bone dog biscuit.

The winner of the hand would leisurely sip from a cup of water, benevolently offering it, at his option, to the loser.

We became most proficient. Half a lemon—peel, seeds and all—not a problem. A quarter stick of butter, easy. But lurking in the back recesses of the middle shelf of Angel’s refrigerator was an item we both truly feared. The day’s play would end if this item was placed in the pot, as the loser of the hand would refuse to eat it, thus forfeiting the game.

It resided within a jar of indeterminate age. Dave’s family had lived here for five years, but Dave swore on his grandmother’s eyes that he remembered it having had been brought along in the move from their former Ironbound section of Newark residence. "Assorted pickled vegetables" read the label. A murky, green-brown brine, further clouded by suspended particles that seemed to move by their own volition, filled three-quarters of the jar and marked its level with a pencil-point-thin green-brown ring. Sunken at the bottom were what looked thru the glass to be a small number of miniature trees, presumably brine-soused cauliflower florets.

Several years ago, perhaps at the Ironbound address, human fingers, the area beneath the nails embedded with work site debris, had dipped into the jar, thereby extracting the more toothsome pickled delectables - the tiny tomatoes taken, the peppers plucked, the cross-cut carrots consumed. Bacteria traveling on these tiny shards of construction debris, along with those teeming within microscopic droplets of the skin’s oily residue, had multiplied and metamorphosized over the years, adapting to the cold and hostile environment, evolving into a mutant extremophile strain not unlike the organisms that live in Antarctic permafrost or around hydrothermal vent
s in ocean trenches, and finally colonizing into a putrid, bustling biofilm that thrived in the brine’s acidity as if it were the finest agar, all the while sitting in the cold, dark recesses of the back of the middle shelf of Angel’s refrigerator.