The Murderous Muddle On Murray Hill," --- Chapter 4...

   

   I was sitting on the front porch, babysitting my cousins Bobby, Gracie and Joannie. It was Saturday morning, ten thirty on the Hill and it was already about eight five outside, hotter even inside. Today would be a scorcher. Ma, Aunt Sofia and Nonnie were at the market. They'd bribed me to stay at the house with the promise to bring me a dozen chocolate pizzelles. Probably, the bribe wasn't necessary because without the Pontiac I couldn't go anywhere interesting, anyway. Nonnie and Ma always walked to the market, Nonnie with her old basket over her arm. But, Aunt Sofia had just had foot surgery, got all her nasty old numerous plantar's warts removed. The bottoms of her feet were still sore so she borrowed the car to do some strictly pleasure shopping.

   I was so, so bored I was almost cross-eyed, watching numb, as Gracie was in the middle of a double Dutch jump rope being turned by Pattie Moffat and Hildy Norton. (Most of the kids in the neighborhood were crazy about jumping rope. Sometimes Ma and Nonnie could hardly find a piece of clothesline to use.) 

   They were chanting, --- "Margie had a baby... She named him Tiny Tim... She put him in the bathtub and taught him how to swim... He drank a gallon of water, ate a bar of soap... Next day he died with a bubble in his throat... In walked the doctor, in walked the nurse, in walked the lady with the alligator purse...

'Dead,' said the doctor... 'Dead,' said the nurse...  'Dead,' said the lady with the alligator purse... Margie ate some marmalade... Margie drank some beer... Margie drank some other things that made her feel so queer."

   I thought the rhyme was a bit freaky, but what the hell.  It was just as good as the other one, --- "Alice, where are you going?... Upstairs to take a bath... Alice, with legs like toothpicks and a neck like a giraffe... Alice, slipped in the bath tub... Alice, pulled out the plug... Oh, my body!... Oh, my soul!... There goes Alice, down that hole!... Alice, where are you going?... Gulb-glub-glub."

    At ten and eight Gracie and Joannie were still halfway manageable, but at thirteen Bobby was a total brat, starting to get rebellious about being babysat, the miserable little squirt.  He considered himself to be a "man," he said, because he was, he said, "Italian". Sure, he was Italian, but just being thirteen and Italian will never make a guy a man. Ha, try to tell cranky little Bobby that! Yeah, Bobby was a royal pain in the ass, sitting on the steps, scowling, sharpening his pocketknife. He'd wanted a switch blade, the usual eight incher, but his dad, my Uncle Bob, wouldn't allow it. I knew Bobby would get that switch blade, anyway, somehow, and I had a feeling it wasn't going to end good. Bobby's best friend was Billy Sanno, and everybody knew that over half the huge Sanno family was in the Business. of course, so was half of my family, but my family was more secretive about it, being way smarter than the infamously brutish Sannos. And, besides, many, many of the most loyal of my family were still back in Italy and, mostly in Sicily.

   My girlfriend Yvonne Rossi came driving by, stuck her head out of the window of her dad's old red and rust Ford pickup and said, "Hey, you wanna get together tonight? Dad said I can take the truck to the drive-in."  (The Rossis were one of the first families that settled in Little Italy. They worked as stone carvers and diggers for Lakeview Cemetary, as did many families from Naples.)

   "Great," I said to her. 

   She waved out the window, and the truck moved off, the muffler loud and rattling. "'The Creature From The Black Lagoon,' is showing,

and 'It Came From Beneath The Sea'.

I'll be over at eight," she yelled back. 

   The movies playing didn't matter. It was the kids there at the local passion pit that would be fun, who was dating who, --- ya-ya-ya... (Maybe, there'd be some sharp new guys there.) And, then there was the gorging on the tubs of buttery popcorn. Some of the girls liked to come to drive-ins in their P.J.s, especially if they were at pajama parties. And, the guys always found out that girls from a pajama party were coming to the drive-in, and they adored that. Especially, if the Pajamas the girls wore were cute and very sexy baby dolls, which were actually lingerie. 

   Well, yeah, Yvonne had broken up with her boyfriend Tom Jenkins, not too long ago, so she was probably almost as bored as me. I'd sworn off men, for the summer, at least, since the primo disaster with that schmucky Harry Dobrowsky.  He'd two-timed me for the last time and broke my heart with that rotten over-stuffed slut Beth Papalardo. I got back at Harry by punching him hard as I could in the face and while he was still dizzy, I used my staple gun and stapled the sides of the shirt he was wearing to the floor. I could have done a lot worse to him with a staple gun. Yvonne said she fixed Beth. (I neverf ound out how. She wouldn't tell me.) But, I still wanted to pull every hair out of her bottle-blond head. Ha, no amount of bleach could ever make Beth Papalardo, "Big Banana Nose," look like lovely, sexy Marilyn Monroe!

                                                         

--- Copyright by Antoinette Beard/Sorelle Sucere 2021.