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    Saraceno
    Saraceno
    Saraceno
    Ebook133 pages3 hours

    Saraceno

    By Brent Robison

    5/5

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    About this ebook

    Billy Salviati just wants to be a good soldier, to follow orders and live under the radar. It's all going well until he meets Hettie Warshaw one night on a dark street in Hell's Kitchen. Then his life unravels. Saraceno is the story of a hit man whose good looks are equalled only by his gift for friendship. He survives the vicissitudes of good looks, but his gift for friendship puts him in the crosshairs of friends and enemies.

    Not many writers about the Mafia listened to the notorious Frank Costello, Vito Genovese, and Joey Adonis drinking marsala and chatting in a kitchen, but Djelloul Marbrook did and celebrates it with a poet’s ear in this haunting tale of redemption.

    Saraceno is an electric tone poem straight from a world we only think we know. An heir to George V. Higgins, Marbrook writes dialogue that not only entertains with an intoxicating clickety-clack, but also packs a truth about low-life mob culture The Sopranos only hints at.
    —Dan Baum, author of Gun Guys: A Road Trip, Nine Lives: Mystery, Magic, Death & Life in New Orleans, and Smoke & Mirrors: The War on Drugs & the Politics of Failure.

    ... a good ear for crackling dialogue ... I love Marbrook's crude, raw music of the streets. The notes are authentic and on target ...
    —Sam Coale, The Providence (RI) Journal

    Strongly recommended as a remarkably crafted tale.
    —Midwest Book Review

    This lyrical and violent, funny and sad, hot and cool novella haunts us. Try it.
    —Ann LaFarge, Taconic Weekend

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecital Publishing
    Release dateOct 8, 2010
    ISBN9780971890862
    Saraceno
    Author

    Brent Robison

    I live in the Catskill Mountains of New York. My writing has appeared in a dozen print and online literary journals, as well as hundreds of corporate training and marketing publications. My stories have won the Literal Latte Short Short Award, the Chronogram Short Fiction Contest, a Fiction Fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts, and a Pushcart Prize nomination. I am also the publisher and editor of the Hudson Valley regional literary annual, Prima Materia.THE PRINCIPLE OF ULTIMATE INDIVISIBILITY, A Web of Stories, is available in trade paperback edition from booksellers everywhere. It is enhanced by more than a dozen cool abstract drawings by Wendy Drolma.REVIEWSSee this recent review: https://dactylreview.com/2019/06/25/the-principle-of-ultimate-indivisibility-a-web-of-stories-by-brent-robison/Other links are on my blog at http://ultimate-indivisibility.comMoonbeam Award winning author Ned White says: "Brent Robison's superbly crafted collection of short stories doesn't shy away from its central thesis - that we are all crosswired with each other in ways both obvious and finely nuanced.... Buddhists, Jungians, and even quantum theorists would have a field day with the output of Robison's imagination."In the October Chronogram Magazine, Anne Pyburn manages to capture the essence of my book in three paragraphs that are so eloquent I'm hard-pressed to choose the best blurb... how about "a feast of food for thought, a richly imagined reality that looks much like our own world if we could really see it."Online at POD People, Cheryl Anne Gardner gives a really thoughtful, in-depth examination of the themes (and their alternates) that she sees at work in the stories and the book as a whole. I'm immensely grateful for this kind of close reading and generous analysis, made even better by the fact that hers is all volunteer labor. Again, so difficult to choose a few words from so many insightful comments; here's one: "...the collection really begged the question: Hope? Is it really genuine or is it something we invent as a way to justify our acceptance..."At the website Self-Publishing Review, whose mission is to help bring self-published literature to a more respected position in the minds of readers and the industry, editor Henry Baum closes his review with this: "Overall, it’s a collection of very strong writing - thoughtful, full of vivid imagery, sorrowful at times, but never self-pitying. The Lost Symbol it is not, but it’s subtle and moving in a way that Dan Brown dreams of being." (Sorry, Dan!)The Fearless Reviews website takes just two paragraphs to give a strong impression of the content and themes in my stories, and sums it up with this: "This is a beautifully written, thoughtful collection well worth reading."In my local paper, the Woodstock Times (scroll down to Storytellers), I was flattered to be reviewed along with one of my writing heroes, James Lasdun. Reviewer Paul Smart says "...the use of a fractured story structure, where characters, actions and similar reactions come together over time, lend the overall work the tragic air of great epics, with people doing all they can to escape fate's plans for them; and yet also the bittersweet quality we recognize in the best comedies, where folks keep pressing on, no matter what pushes them back."

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      Book preview

      Saraceno - Brent Robison

      ~1~

      Luck has bad breath.

      That’s what the Schwartzbear said, before they carried him out feet first. Billy was still on his feet the day he got out. He’d done hard time and more solitary than most and had no luck. Why think about it now? But he did. He thought about luck and the panther he’d been dreaming about.

      He stood squinting outside Dannemora. Billy’s out, he told the panther patrolling his mind, Billy’s out. Too late, he heard poor Schwartzbear say. Get it? Schwartzbear asked. Now he got it—the panther is blind.

      He no more knew why he stood there menacing a blind figment than he knew about luck. It just felt okay on a day better than most.

      Then he slipped between pale June blocs of Franklin County light and was gone.

      Big deal. No sweat. He was out of something more impregnable than Dannemora: the bestiary of childhood, and now he walked clean out of that rabid zoo towards the southern lights, a twisted communicant of roaches.

      Maybe it was his dolphin’s humor that did it—ask the merchant seamen who play their boom boxes for them to tell you how dolphins look and smile, hold your eye, show their tricks.

      Sure Billy thought of animals, he’d been one, tanked with insects, cetaceans, raptors, reptiles, bottom feeders and alien species. One of them, the estimable black man Franklin Jones, had parked a conundrum in his head. Lookitum, he’d said, an’mal crackers, know what I’m sayin’?

      Ya gonna tell me, arncha?

      People be like an’mals, only dey an’mal crackers.

      Crazy?

      Yeah, but dey crazy like differn’ an’mals.

      He had on his mind something more vivid. A dream. A recurring dream. He kept changing. He was a panther, then he was watching the panther. He could smell this panther, share its hunger, its rage and frustration. And one other thing, he couldn’t remember when he awoke that he saw anything when he was a panther.

      I’m tellin’ ya, Franklin, this panther is blind.

      What differns it make, Billy Boy? When this panther smell you, he be eatin’ you. You not gonna care he be blind. Panther, all he know you be food.

      Billy read the library out of panthers. He charmed the librarian into luring panthera pardus from the county library.

      It became his meditation. As the yogi banks his eyes up in his head in his quest for samadhi, Billy contemplated his dream, and finally he saw the panther pacing, twitching its tail, behind the barred eye of his mother Frankie and the barred eyes of all his other keepers, and at that moment he could no longer be counted among the nations of predators licking their chops in their childhood zoos. He’d figured out there’s no difference to them between food and keeper, between food and you. The most perfect animal shits. Despite our beautiful faces and elegant minds, we shit and die.

      Billy once had a dolphin’s spirit, the spirit of amusement, before it was beaten and cowed, but by the time he was eleven he had the sardonic eye of an elephant, dour, fixed.

      In Dannemora—Billy’s file called him a violent psychotic—a psychiatrist gave him a metaphor for his predicament.

      Think of your childhood, in fact think of everything up to now as a burning, smoke-filled movie house. What do you do? Figure out where the exits are, right?

      Dannemora certainly convinced him only the observant survive. One thing more, the shrink told him, imagine yourself as if you were nine or ten. You have to get that kid out of the burning building, that’s your job. Understand?

      What’s playing? Billy asked.

      What can I say to any of these guys that will make a difference? Herschel Schwartz thought. He was by the time he met Billy sick of the question and the questioner. Maybe he’d have stuck around if he’d known the next thing he would say would make a difference. But by the time it did Herschel Schwartz had blown the roof of his head off.

      It’s your question.

      Dumbo, Billy said.

      It’s your life, asshole, not mine! Think! See if you can think for the first time in your life.

      Frankenstein?

      Come over here to the window. Yes, I think I may see the light of an intelligence in your eyes. You think you’re wising off, but let me tell you something, Mister Wisenheimer, you just put your money where your mouth is, d’you realize that?

      This tired old Schwartzbear interested Billy. What the hell was he talking about?

      Horror shows. You got it, smart ass. Horror shows. So ask yourself who showed you these horror shows. Whuh, you just naturally like to see people tortured? Or maybe somebody taught you how to like to see people tortured? Including maybe yourself. Got it? No? Well, think about it. You got lotsa time.

      The stinking panther lodged in Billy’s brain long before Frankie began her autoerotic visits. What a crock she was he knew but suppressed until one day in the fifth year of his confinement as he walked back to his cell block he heard a mocking in his brain.

      Are you awright, Mom? I’m gonna take care of you when I get out, don’t worry.

      That’s what he said, but what he heard in the choir stalls of the damned was please love me, Mom. Please!

      Please what? the guard said.

      Please shit!

      So the next time Frankie came and said she couldn’t stay long because Larry-What’s-His-Face was waiting outside, Billy looked. And he looked. And the words came to him. Panther shit. And he laughed and looked some more until it seemed to him it was the first time he had ever looked, and he saw that it wasn’t his cage he was looking through, it was hers. He saw the panther, the stinking panther pacing behind the bars in her eye. He heard her talk—she didn’t hear him talk. Ever. It was her soap opera. And while she looked over her shoulder into the tarmac distance where Tom, Dick or Larry stood, Billy picked the lock of his childhood bestiary, the door swung open and he was free.

      Right there in Dannemora.

      Get outta my face!

      Hey, izzat any way to talk to yer mudder? the guard said.

      You wanner, you kin’ have ‘er, Billy said. Cheap.

      Too bad Billy didn’t see the guard quash a conspiratorial grin.

      This is the first chapter in the main body of the text. You can change the text, rename the chapter, add new chapters, and add new parts.

      ~2~

      If anybody cared they might have said what made Billy dangerous by the time he checked into Arnie Besele’s flophouse on Ninth Avenue was that he could do four hundred pushups a day or that he had taught himself a lot about electricity, but what made Billy dangerous was that he knew the only thing a panther knows is maul and eat. All your words, all your deeds, your care and willingness to love is nothing but meat and slop. The panther prowls the space between telephone calls, letters, obsessions, broken promises. You’re fast food. Walk out. Some mother built that cage long ago of her inability to love. Once her little panther is your obsession you’re its crank. Your sane moments merely threaten it with cold turkey. This is what Billy knew. Thank you, Frankie, thank you, Tom, Dick, Larry.

      All in all, Dannemora straightened him out. He owed the poor dead Schwartzbear, Franklin Jones and the other fascinating basilisks, griffins, trolls, centaurs, Minotaurs, harpies, satyrs and rocs in their skulks, swarms, poufs, coveys, nests, pods, gams, nyes and gaggles, a big debt.

      What he didn’t owe them were his powers of concentration.

      Dolphins look, elephants look, panthers gauge, but on the first free morning of his adult life, after seven years buffeted in the roaring night surf, Billy looked up from his nest of cockroaches to the fuming sun thrashing down Forty-Third Street and became the morning’s namesake beast, a tiger. As to the difference between tigers and panthers, ask any game warden who has seen a tiger’s immense solar face in his windshield.

      God knows what some paid priest will prate over Billy’s grave, but of all his deeds and misdeeds this signal accomplishment will go unsung. In the land of Mom, Old Glory and apple pie we don’t hang people for kissing off rotten parents, but we don’t hang medals on them either. Mostly, with any luck at all, we whomp up enough money for a shrink to tell us we’re panther shit.

      Drink plenty of water, take long walks, move to the other side of the country. Or the world. Otherwise, you, the one man in the world who can rescue her, will find yourself hand over hand in Rapunzel’s tresses, and the next thing you know you’re staring a ravening panther in the face. More seductive than all the sirens are the human beasties roving your childhood pleading with you to let them out: Rapunzels and panthers, sleeping beauties and frog princes, fairy godmothers and kingly brothers. All of you waiting for your fetid ships to come in, consider how many shrinks and shrunk have committed suicide trying to rescue you!

      Herbie Goldberg was a trickster, a joker, a squat Clark Gable, altogether decent. A week after he hired Matt Pieto to the night shift at the three Goldberg brothers’ cigar store at Forty-Fifth and Eighth Avenue he said to him, So Matt, what’re you, slummin’?

      Nah, I’m comin’ up in the world, Herbie. With a straight face, a sincere look even, he said it.

      Disarmed, Herbie schlepped around

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