The Mafia Hit Man's Daughter by Linda Scarpa Page B

Nicole, Teresa and I didn’t want anything to do with each other, Annie wasn’t giving up. For some reason, she wanted me to make friends with them. So she planned this date for us to meet. She set it up so I would have to go to their house.
    The minute I got there, I was miserable. We were in their room and they were playing with makeup. One of their friends was there and they were putting makeup on her. I felt like I was in hell.
    Then they decided to put makeup on me. I tried to get out of it, but it didn’t work. They started doing my makeup. They told me I had really nice eyes and the makeup looked pretty. I started thinking maybe they weren’t so bad, after all. That’s when we started to become friends. We used to joke about how we were forced to become friends.
    We actually became best friends. We started out hating each other and ended up loving each other. In my entire life they were probably the only friends that I ever really considered my best friends.
    One day their mother let me drive her car because I had a license and they only had learner’s permits. I wound up smashing the car on one side. Their mother was really pissed, and she wanted to know who was going to pay to get it fixed.
    One of my father’s friends owned a body shop. So I brought the car there and told him he had to fix it. He wanted to know who was going to pay for it. I told him nobody, but he’d better fix that car. The guy fixed the car—and I didn’t get in any trouble when my father found out.
    Like me, most of the kids I knew had nice cars—Cadillacs, Lincolns, Grand Prix and Monte Carlos. I drove a Mercedes. Everybody had done-up cars. They had spokes on the wheels and radios in their cars with big speakers, along with the fuzzy dice and air fresheners hanging from the rearview mirrors. In the summer everybody was always getting their cars washed and waxed.
    A big thing about Brooklyn when I was growing up was Eighty-Sixth Street—the main east-west street in Bensonhurst. It was mobbed with guys and girls hanging out in the street, sitting next to their cars on lounge chairs or on the trunks or the hoods of their cars, listening to their radios. It was like the beach on the street. The street was so long that it took us two hours to get from one end to the other because we stopped here and there to talk to various guys. It was insane.
    If you had a convertible, which I had at one point, you drove around with the top down even in the middle of the winter. It didn’t matter. People even got dressed up to go to Eighty-Sixth Street and hang out. In the summer the girls wore heels and they all had these poufy hairdos and long nails. The guys wore wife-beater T-shirts and gold chains with the horns and crosses on them around their necks. The boys grew their hair kind of long, and most of them styled it in a DA, which stood for “duck’s ass.”
    That was Brooklyn in the ’80s—showing off your car, driving in your car, hanging out in your car. That was a big deal.
    I was seventeen when I started going to clubs—younger than I should have been. There were clubs for kids around seventeen or a little older everywhere in Brooklyn when I was growing up, and these were all owned by Mob guys.
    Nicole, Teresa and I went out every night. We had a routine for every day of the week. Wednesdays was Pastels; Strings was Thursdays. On Friday night we went to the Bay Club. Every night it was a different hot spot. We’d get dressed up and go out and have a good time. I still did okay in school, so everything was fine with my parents.
    There were a lot of after-hours clubs, but I never went to those because there was always trouble, and my father never wanted me in them. My after-hours hangout was the Vegas Diner. My friends and I would go out to Pastels or wherever; and then at 4 or 4:30 A.M. when they shut the doors, we’d be at the diner. It was always jam-packed. That was a