Any Place I Hang My Hat Read Free

whatever grown-up movie Chicky would be watching after my bedtime. How did we get such an extravagant TV? I suppose one of Chicky’s high school friends—men I knew as Uncle Denny, Uncle Moose, Uncle Chuy—must have stolen the television for him as a Welcome Back, Chickman! gift.
    “Amy babes,” Chicky would ask every day, “what you want for lunch?” Naturally I was in on the joke, knowing that no matter what I said it would be macaroni and cheese—whatever pasta he’d gotten on sale plus half a can of undiluted Campbell’s Cheddar Cheese Soup. We’d share it, eating from the pot. Sadly, my father was back inside a little more than two years later. Grand larceny again. This time, assault as well.
    He’d committed this crime for me. Chicky had decided I needed a more stable environment. Instead of trying to get a job, not easy with a criminal record, he determined he should be self-employed. So he set himself up as a limo driver with a car that had his name on it. He accomplished that entrepreneurial coup by stealing a 1979 Lincoln Continental. Then he talked his old boss, Frank Silvaggio, into hiring him back. On one of my quarterly visits to the prison, when I was nine, he raised his right hand: “I swear on my mother’s grave, Amy babes. That assault thing? I’m innocent.”
    “Grandma’s still alive,” I pointed out. “I live with her. Remember? They gave her custody again because you had to go away.”
    “Yeah. Sorry, Ame. It stinks for you, it stinks for me. So listen to what really happened.” Chicky explained he’d merely been driving his new Lincoln. Yeah, yeah, it was stolen and he’d been a moron because he’d left the New Jersey plates on overnight thinking, Hey, the guy I’m gonna get nonhot New York plates from wouldn’t want Chicky Lincoln knocking on his door at three in the morning, and also I didn’t wanna leave you at Grandma Lil’s overnight because I knew you hated Raisin Bran. But he swore all he’d done was drive the Lincoln with Frank and Vinny DeCicco, along with some poor schnook of a restaurateur, to a remote section of Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. “It was Frank and Vinny that roughed up the guy. I was, you know, sitting behind the wheel, looking the other way, listening to my Temptations tape. On a stack of Bibles, babes, I was minding my own business.”
    “You call what happened to that restaurant guy ‘roughed up’?” I demanded. “Chicky, he was in the hospital for three weeks.”
    “Yeah? And what did he prove in the end? Huh? He could’ve gotten his tablecloths and aprons and crap from Silvaggio’s Linen Service and not wasted all that time in the hospital.”
    So my upbringing was pretty much left to Grandma Lil, not the brightest bulb on the menorah. However, it was convenient for me to have someone to blame for my preference for schmaltzy movies over exquisite literature, as well as my secret belief that Polyhymnia’s muse-dom should be abrogated in favor of Estée, goddess of makeup. Also, Grandma taught me all the indispensable life lessons she’d garnered from her ladies at Beauté. The best skiing in the world is at Chamonix. The only permissible color for patent leather accessories is black.
    Grandma Lil’s photograph is in a tasteful russet leather frame. Even in my office’s harsh fluorescence, her photo bore no resemblance to me or my father. (God is good.) As a kid, I thought she looked like a relative of the Potato Heads. She had Mrs. P’s Oooh! thick ruby lips, Oh-my-God! eyes, and front-facing ears. Though not Mrs. P’s sweetly dumb demeanor. Grandma could have been the start of a whole new product line, the Supercilious Potato Heads.
    Whenever there was a camera around, Grandma Lil got grander than usual, as though she should be posing for Sargent and photography was a comedown. She’d perform her concerto of sighs, then shrug, acknowledging defeat. After that, she’d spit delicately on her palms and slick down her Dutch