Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family Read Free Page B

over the dashboard, determined that the twelve-year-old would be driving cars at the end of the day. It actually took four days, but by the end of the week, Henry was tentatively edging the cabs and limousines between the water hose and the gas pumps. After six months Henry Hill was backing limos with inch-clearing accuracy and tire-squealing aplomb around the lot while his schoolmates watched in awe and envy from behind the battered wooden fence. Once Henry spotted his father, who had never learned to drive, spying on him from behind the fence. That night Henry waited for his father to mention his skill in driving, but the senior Hill ate dinner in silence. Henry of course knew better than to bring up the subject. The less said about his job at the cabstand the better.

    “I was the luckiest kid in the world. People like my father couldn’t understand, but I was part of something. I belonged. I was treated like I was a grown-up. I was living a fantasy. Wiseguys would pull up and toss me their keys and let me park their Caddies. I couldn’t see over the steering wheel and I’m parking Caddies. ”

    At twelve Henry Hill was making more money than he could spend. At first he would treat his classmates to galloping horse rides along the bridle paths of the Canarsie marshes. Sometimes he would pay for their day at Steeplechase Amusement Park, topping off the treat with a 260-foot parachute drop. In time, though, Henry grew bored with his schoolmates and tired of his own largesse. He soon learned that there were no heady rides on sweaty horses and no amusement parks he had ever seen that could match the adventures he encountered at the cabstand.

    “My father was the kind of guy who worked hard his whole life and was never there for the payday. When I was a kid he used to say he was a ‘subwayman,’ and it made me want to cry. He helped organize the electrical workers’ union, Local Three, and got Bowers for his funeral. He worked on skyscrapers in Manhattan and housing projects in Queens, and we could never move out of our crummy three-bedroom house jammed with seven kids, one of them stuck in his bed with a bum spine. We had money to eat, but we never had extras. And every day I saw everyone else, not just the wiseguys, making a buck. My old man’s life wasn’t going to be my life. No matter how much he yelled at me, no matter how many beatings I took, I wouldn’t listen to what he said. I don’t think I even heard him. I was too busy learning about paydays. I was learning how to earn.

    “And every day I was learning something. Every day I was making a dollar here and a dollar there. I’d listen to schemes and I watched guys score. It was natural. I was in the middle of the cabstand every day. Swag came in and out of that place all day long. There’d be a crate of stolen toasters to be fenced, hot cashmeres right off a truck, cartons of untaxed cigarettes hijacked off some cowboy truckers, who couldn’t even complain to the cops. Pretty soon I was delivering policy slips to apartments and houses all over the neighborhood, where the Varios had guys with adding machines counting up the day’s take. People used to rent a room in their apartment to the Varios for $150 a week and a free phone. It was a good deal. The wiseguys took only two or three hours in the late afternoon to add up the policy bets on the adding machine tape and circle all the winners. Lots of times the places Paulie and the numbers guys rented belonged to the parents of the kids I went to school with. At first they were surprised to see me coming in with a shopping bag full of slips. They thought I was coming to play with their kids. But pretty soon they knew who I was. They could see I was growing up different.

    “After I got my first few bucks and the nerve to go shopping without my mother, I went to Benny Field’s on Pitkin Avenue. That’s where the wiseguys bought their clothes. I came out wearing a dark-blue pinstriped, double-breasted