Page 43 of The River Is Waiting

“Yeah, ‘the man’ likes to rewrite history because the truth makes him look so bad. You should read this book if you got Indian blood.”

“Just a couple of drops, though. But yeah, I’ll check it out after you’re done with it.” He says I can take it now—that it makes him so mad, he needs to stop. “Okay, thanks,” I tell him.

He checks out the three books and stamps my pass. “Okay, later, brah,” he says. “You coming to the meeting next Sunday?”

I tell him I hope to.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

October 2017

Days 66–87 of 1,095

Emanuel “Manny” DellaVecchia is Russian-Jewish on his mother’s side and Sicilian on his father’s. Some relative of his mother’s used to be a big-deal Vegas comedian in the late fifties and early sixties, Manny says, but these days he’s parked in a nursing home and pretty much out of it. Manny and his sister, Gloria, have been told they’re in his will and are going to inherit some motel in Jersey that the uncle owns. That’s where Manny’s planning to live when he gets out.

Manny’s Nonna DellaVecchia was a hustler, he tells me. She sold sheet pizzas from her kitchen window in East Harlem every Friday and made extra money running numbers and undoingil mal occhiofor unluckypaesaniwho’d been cursed with the evil eye. “I watched her do the ritual once,” Manny says. “This sad sack comes to the door and tells her he got fired from the shoe factory, walked home early, and found his wife in bed with a traveling scissors grinder. Nonna sits him down at her kitchen table and puts a bowl of water in front of him. Dribbles a few drops of olive oil into the water, and ‘reads’ the results. ‘Yeah, you got it bad,’ she tells the poor slob. She ties a string to the stem of a red pepper, dangles it in front of him, and starts saying this singsong prayer in Italian. The longer it goes on, the louder her voice gets and her eyes start rolling in her headlike pictures in a slot machine. Finally, she stops praying and bangs her fist three times on the tabletop. Tells the guy he’s cured.”

“Spooky,” I say. “Did it work?”

“Don’t know if it worked for him, but it worked for her. She charged him three bucks and told him to pay her ‘cashier,’ which was me. He hands me a two-dollar bill and four quarters. Nonna let me keep two of the quarters, so I walked down to the store and bought myself a can of Hawaiian Punch and ten pieces of Dubble Bubble.”

“There were two-dollar bills?” I ask.

“Yeah. Thomas Jefferson on the front, I think. They must have stopped making them. You never see them anymore.”

I tell him I’ve been reading this book that says Jefferson owned slaves and fathered children by one of them. “And he owned them, too!”

Manny shrugs and turns on the TV. “Dancing with the Starsis coming on and it’s Disney night. I love it when they do that theme.”

“I mean, ‘All men are created equal’ but if the kids you father are half Black, then they’re your property? And Jefferson’s a hero? Gets his face on US currency? How fucked-up is that?”

But as usual, Manny and I are on different wavelengths. “If that show had started ten years earlier, I could havetotallybeen on it. As a professional dancer, I mean, not a celebrity. When I danced for Carnival Cruises, I did a little choreography, too, but my contract wasn’t renewed because I was better than the head choreographer and he was jealous.”

Well, Manny might be unplugged from social justice issues, but as far as cellmates go, I could do worse. In fact, Ihavedone worse when I lived with Pug.Muchworse. In comparison, a cellie who talks too much, acts like my parent sometimes, and “borrows” from me occasionally isn’t so bad. He owns who he is; I respect that. And he’s pretty well-liked around here; he doesn’t get targeted the way some gay inmates do. He hooks up from time to time, but I don’t know the details and don’t want to. Shortly after we became cellmates, he offered to “service” me, but I told him nothanks, I was a do-it-yourselfer. He laughed and backed right off. It’s been a nonissue ever since.

Manny can be funny as hell—especially when he’s telling stories about his checkered job history. In addition to his gig as a cruise ship dancer, he’s been a tuxedoed partner to rich old lady ballroom dancers and a deejay at gay clubs in New York and Connecticut. “The pay was only so-so, but I could make as much as a grand a week dealing coke and molly,” he told me.

When I asked him what molly was, he looked at me in disbelief. “Ecstasy. X. Disco biscuits. For fuck’s sake, Corby, where were you in the eighties?”

“Elementary school,” I said. “I don’t think they covered disco biscuits in the kindergarten curriculum.”

That shut him up. Manny’s touchy about his age, which I know for a fact is fifty-three, not “midforties” like he claims.

This is his second prison bid here at Yates. The first happened as a result of a sting at some rave he was working. “One minute I’m selling blow to these two gorgeous cubs, shirtless and sweaty from dancing. Next thing I know, they’re pulling on their DEA T-shirts and shoving me into the back of an unmarked cruiser.” He got five years because his lawyer was an idiot, he says. “Before I went in, I’d have everyone in the house up and dancing their asses off to Madonna and Whitney and Wham! By the time I made parole, it was all flannel shirts and fucking Nirvana. Fucking Beck. Fucking Radiohead. ‘I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo.’ ‘I’m a loser, baby, so why don’t you kill me?’ How’s anyone supposed to dance tothatshit?”

Luckily, he says, he got his certified nursing assistant license while he was on the inside and, after his release, landed a job at a nursing home, taking temps and BPs and schlepping food trays “until word got out about how fabulous I was. When the recreation director went out on maternity leave, I saw my opportunity and went for it. I organized wheelchair conga and Thursday afternoon karaoke. They made me interim director. And Iwant to tell you, Corby, those old broads loved me and one of the men, too—Leon. He wanted to ‘adopt’ me, which would have put me on easy street, but his family got wind of it and had me fired.” That was when Manny went back to working the clubs and dealing, he says. Got arrested for the same shit as before. “Second offense, ten years this time, suspended after seven.”

Even before we became cellmates, Manny had appointed himself my Yates CI mentor. It’s not like I didn’t need some guidance back then; I was a stranger in a strange land, and my instinct was to stay curled up in a ball on my bunk, not speaking to anybody. Manny saw that I was isolating so he reached out. And I appreciated it, but he was such a fucking know-it-all about everything that it got annoying, especially after we became cellies.

Case in point: after my account finally got funded, I filled out my first commissary request sheet but forgot to order a lock for my storage box. “Never,everleave your stuff unlocked around here,” he lectured me. “I mean, come on, man. Use your head. People in here are crooks. Get yourself a lock ASAP, and until it comes in, put your initials oneverything.” Standing there, getting chewed out like that, I was my nine- or ten-year-old self again, having to listen to my father make me feel stupid for not knowing something.Did I tell you to bring me aPhillipsscrewdriver, Corby? No, I just said “screwdriver,” which means a flathead screwdriver. If I wanted a Phillips screwdriver, I would have said so. You’re probably the only boy your age who doesn’t know the difference between the two.

The day after Manny gives me shit about the lockbox, I come back from my shower and catch him with his hand inside my open bag of M&M’s. “Isn’t that a C.L. on the bag?” I asked him. “It stands for Corby Ledbetter, doesn’t it?”

Without dropping a beat, he said, “Oh, I thought it stood for cock lover, so I assumed it was mine. You can’t get Grindr in here and you have to get the word outsomehow. Did you order M&M’s, too?” He flashes me a guilty smile and gives me back my candy. “I was only eating the green ones,” he says. “I figured you wouldn’t notice.” As restitution, he gives mesix postage stamps and two foil packets of mayonnaise. When I tell him I don’t like mayo, he says he doesn’t either.

After a while, I begin to distance myself from Manny. The problem is that he’s started to act like he owns me. It’s not enough that we share a six-by-nine-foot cell. He also makes sure we sit together in the chow hall and stay in close range out in the yard. I don’t want to hurt the guy’s feelings, but I need to get out from under his wing. I start talking with some of the guys on our tier that he’s warned me against. I pretty much know by now who I should avoid and these guys are fine. Gets me a little breathing space. And maybe it’s homophobic for me to think this, but I don’t want guys making assumptions about the two of us either.

Manny tells me he’s starting to come down with one of his migraines—that he’s getting an aura or something. He climbs up onto his bunk, lies on his back, and closes his eyes. It’s our tier’s day to have time out on the yard. I feel bad about his suffering but grateful for the opportunity to go out there without him for once.

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