Bobby DiGiacomo
Elsmere, Delaware had
a population of maybe six or seven thousand in the early-to-mid-1950s, and
maybe half or more of them were of Neapolitan origins or parentage. It was a
fairly urban small town, being located flush up against Wilmington’s southwest
city limits.
When I was in the
fourth grade at Oak Grove School in Elsmere, a kid named Bobby DiGiacomo
(pronounced Duh-JOCK-omo — what a rock & roll name! It has such a rock
rhythm to it.) had achieved a level of local legendhood as the toughest kid in
the seventh grade. By the time I got to seventh grade myself, DiGiacomo was still the toughest kid in the seventh
grade.
As I remember, he
wore his hair in the classic rock & roll waterfall and had a serious shiny
black leather jacket with an absurdly large number of shiny chromium zippers.
His friend, who was a D’Antonio (I can’t remember his first name), wore a
serious gold leather jacket with the
same absurdly large number of shiny chromium zippers. They both wore a kind of
heavy black shoe with a snap front called Flagg Flyers.
I already had serious
Elvis fever. I desperately wanted a serious shiny black leather motorcycle
jacket with 18 dozen useless chromium zippers, too, but my mother, who listened
to Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney on WDEL, rather than Elvis and Bill Haley
and Sanford Clark on WAMS, got me a sensible thick dull-black leather jacket
with a thick, quilted red lining (good quality!) and no useless chromium
zippers at all, which I just about never wore. It was heavy and stiff and hard
to move around in, as well as aesthetically and socially just not there.
In a way, Bobby
DiGiacomo adopted me when I got to the seventh grade with him, despite my
sartorial inadequacy and me being years younger than he was. Maybe he thought
my jokes were funny. Maybe my daddy had done something medically his family was
grateful for. I don’t know. But I didn’t have to fight. I was under the
protection, the aegis, if you’ll
forgive the Greek, of the feared DiGiacomo.
I remember one time
after school a couple of the local bullies, sad creatures from hardass
families, probably, accosted me with menace. Completely not of that world in
real life, I just stood there like an 11 or 12 year old statue for a moment
before DiGiacomo appeared with a loud, “What the fuck you doin’,” or something
similar, and then they weren’t there. His reputation wasn’t just reputation,
either. I went a few times after school to watch him fight kids who challenged
his alpha status. I don’t remember him losing.
Once, during a snap
locker inspection, I was among those DiGiacomo invited into the Boys room to
help finish off the pint bottle of Thunderbird wine he’d removed from his
locker in the nick of time. I’m not sure, but I think a reefer was smoked then,
too, although I didn’t take part in that.
The last I heard, Bobby
and his older brother (“Muh big bruddah Tony”) were involved in some way with
the criminal justice system. The world can be cruel.
Freddie Phillipsen
My best friend when I
was 13 and 14 was Freddie Phillipsen, a tall, skinny blonde kid with a flattop,
a narrow face, and a wide, toothy smile. Freddie’d just moved to the
subdivision north of Wilmington where I’d lived since I was 12, called Green
Acres. His family lived in one of Green Acres’ new, less plush places with
aluminum siding, on the street that backed up to the railroad tracks. Freddie’s
step-father owned Grady’s Fairfax Bowling Center, and Grady and Freddie’s mom
were gone most of the time running it. I hung out with Freddie often for a year or two there, mostly at
his house, and I don’t recall ever meeting Grady. Which is, of course, why it
was cool to hang out at Freddie’s — the lack of adult supervision.
Freddie liked
gambling. He accumulated gambling paraphernalia. He even ran the odd gambling
casino in Grady’s basement rec room. Sometimes lots of kids would come over to
gamble. I remember one time in Freddie’s basement when we had a roulette wheel
going and a craps table and a couple of poker games — there were maybe a dozen
kids there — and my brother punched a kid named Andy Minnich for making some
anti-semitic remark. Freddie made money those evenings. Freddie was voluptuous
in his passion for capitalism, and more specifically for, as he put it, “PRAAH-fit!”
Freddie also had a
catch-phrase that he used often, and that I find useful to this day: “It isn’t
lawful, but is it leegal?”
He also had access to
Grady’s antique gun collection. We used to fuck around, to employ the language
we used, with Grady’s old guns all the time. One day in the autumn of maybe
1960 or ’61 we’d been into his mother’s dandelion wine, I believe, and had gone
out into his back yard to throw a ball around or something. Then a group of
ass-holes, maybe a bit older than us, who were walking along the railroad tracks,
started taking pot-shots at us with the BB guns they were fucking around with.
Maybe they’d been shooting at squirrels. Anyway, they hit Freddie a couple of
times on his calf, raising welts, before we twigged to what was going on. And
it pissed Freddie off seriously.
We retreated down to
the basement rec room, where Freddie got a flintlock blunderbuss out of Grady’s
gun case. The ass-holes — laughing and gloating — were still up on the tracks,
which were up a maybe nine-metre (30-foot) bank a discreet distance back from
the back yards. Freddie got some powder and loaded the flintlock with
everything but shot, and we stuck that fucken thing out one of the roll-up
basement windows, and Freddie fired off a round that sounded like a cannon and
sent off a flare that looked like a
rocket taking off. We quickly reloaded, but the ass-holes already were coming
down the grade from the tracks with their hands in the air. It was wonderful.
By the time we were
15 or so Freddie had launched himself seriously into golf as a vehicle for his
gambling mania — he started calling himself “Fairway Phillipsen” — and we
gradually drifted apart. Somewhere along the line he transferred away from Mt.
Pleasant High School — I think to a private school — and I hardly noticed. I haven’t
been able to locate him on the internet.
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