Bookie

Like a lot of writers of a particular persuasion, Jilly Napolitano had done time. A couple months in the county lockup for wreckless pronoun usage when he was just a kid and didn't know any better, then a longer stint in Watertown for willful marginalizing when he should have known better, and then—and it was a stunner, a warning to the whole writing community—a whopping seventeen years up at Shawangunk for cultural appropriation when he self-published a first-person point of view novella set in an Indian pueblo on Black Mesa, Arizona. The narrator was a proud Hopi warrior at one with his people, the Great Spirit, and the vast, calico expanse of unspoiled land spread out around him. Jilly Napolitano was a fat Italian son-of-a-bitch who'd never laid eyes on a Hopi warrior, proud or otherwise. He got all the exercise of a dog tied to a post, would've smoked a chimney if he could've gotten his mouth around it, and wished mightily the Great Spirit would do something about the ulcer that smoldered in his belly night and day like banked coals in a grate. He had faced down plenty of adversaries in his day—schoolyard bullies, street toughs, rival syndicate bosses, cops, judges, even the federal government—but nothing compared to the savage on the warpath in his gut. He had cut back on the booze and fried food, swilled Mylanta by the hogshead, but nothing helped, hadn't for years. Prilosec, Zantac, Tagamet, Nexium, Pepcid. Two M&M's three times a day would've done as much good.

At the trial, the boys were crammed cheek to jowl across the back row of the gallery, and if not for the coats and ties and wingtips and pinky rings they could've been any bunch of working Joes in the bleachers at Shea, shelling peanuts and razzing the umps. The truth was, they were worried. The Napolitano family had been at the center of the literature racket for more than a century when Jilly's grandfather, Leopold—at the age of eight, no less—set up his first underground copyeditor's operation just after the Cognitive Interdiction Amendment went into effect.

Most of the thinkers of the day thought that while it might be a noble idea to try to purge anything potentially offensive from biblio-Americanus, they were agreed that the law was all but uninforceable. Tolerance and sensitivity was one thing, outright censorship was quite another, a tactic often hastily attempted and just as hastily abandoned when the great unwashed came to town all a'bristle and waving that pesky Bill of Rights.

But the thinkers had been wrong. The newly created Office of Acceptable Ideology enjoyed the support of half-a-dozen special interest groups and several influential senators, not to mention the President, herself. The raids began almost immediately, thick-necked OAI agents tracking down and rooting out novelists, columnists, feature writers, beat reporters—anyone susptected of straying from the OAI's published guidelines. Publishing houses were shuttered, newspapers sanitized. Street-corner newsstands were hacked into splinters in broad daylight, paperboys knocked off their bicycles and sent squalling home in a swirl of shredded newsprint. People went to jail, some for a very, very long time. The country hadn't seen such high-minded resolve since Eliot Ness made life a living hell for every bootlegger and boozehound in the City of the Big Shoulders.

But just as the Eighteenth Amendment's assault on the nation's alcohol supply created a concomitant demand, the growing antiseptic condition of the American written word left the reading public craving something meatier than clumsy euphemisms and gender-neutral job titles. Fortunately for them, the Napolitanos had been busy, themselves. While grandfather Leopold greased key palms in local courts and law enforcement, his sons—Frank, Dana, Joseph, and Aldo, Jilly's father—bribed, blackmailed and otherwise strong-armed every hack in town who could grind out sixty pages a week.

It wasn't long before Mr. and Mrs. America were huddled under lamps behind locked doors, devouring racy paperbacks chock full of the sort of sexism, prejudice and cultural stereotypes that made America the greatest nation on the face of the earth. Speakeasies were back in vogue, serving up live readings, discussion-group space and potboilers for rent. BYOB—Bring Your Own Book—parties were all the rage among upper class who welcomed the opportunity to ease the monotony of their law-abiding, civic-minded lives.

By the time Jilly was old enough to participate in the family business, the organization had extended its reach from sea to shining sea. And aside from the odd half-hearted raid for appearance's sake, the law left his people alone. Until Claudia Balzer-Tharp took over as head of the OAI.

Claudia Balzer-Tharp didn't seem so much born for her job as she seemed "assembled" for it, as cold and efficient as a lethal injection delivery system. She was handpicked by the President, who had been her college roommate back when both women shared an obesession with all things unfair and for four interminable years didn't allow the campus a moment's respite. And if the President had moderated her passion a bit over the years for the benefit of the voting public, Claudia had become even more committed, Carrie Nation reborn, five feet eleven inches of righteous wrath missing only the black petticoats and bourbon-soaked hatchet to complete the picture.

She kept mugshots of the OAI's most wanted pinned to a bulletin board on the wall behind her desk, and when she got a conviction, she burned the offender's photo and flushed the ashes down the women's toilet. From the day of her appointment, there was one face she longed to flush above all others: Jilly Napolitano's. In fact, when the day came—and it would come, as surely as the [ ]—she thought she might alter her little ritual, skip the burning, maybe treat herself to a couple cups of coffee before she headed to the toilet.

The man deserved no less. He was a sexist pig of the first stripe.

Jilly had felt the first twinges of the ulcer when he first made the acquaintance of Claudia Balzer-Tharp. She'd walked into Jilly's shop all alone like she might be on her lunchbreak.


Jilly sat next to his excuse for a lawyer and gobbled Tums while the prosecutor held court and shook his head and shed a tear and droned on and on about the almost "incomprehensible breadth" of Mr. Napolitano's insensitivity, the "galactic magnitude" of his arrogance. Did the ladies and gentlemen of the jury have any idea how callous, how self-absorbed a person would have to be in order to produce the sort of vitriol Mr. Napolitano had heaped upon the Hopi? Did they truly understand that it was exactly this sort of infiltrator—this cultural appropriator—who perpetuated the stereotypes and subjected his victims to a life of torment and despair?

The jury deliberated for all of fifteen minutes. And when they filed back in, the foreman got up out of his chair, gave Jilly a look to wither crabgrass and said that the jury's only regret was that the death penalty did not apply in this case. When they led Jilly out of the courtroom, the boys shouted words of encouragement, said that this wasn't the end of it, wasn't the end by a longshot. It was something to say, you know, but they all knew better.

The prison staff removed the Gideon Bible from his cell, the prison library was off-limits. All letters, newspapers, and magazines addressed to J. Napolitano were confiscated by the guards before the mailbags hit the floor. Somebody up the chain of command had the foresight to house Jilly with an illiterate hillbilly who thought the lines of obscene graffiti scratched into the cellblock wall were the original Ten Commandments, etched there by the finger of God.

Seventeen years Jilly Napolitano rotted in that place. Seventeen winters with all the color and warmth of a lead pipe, seventeen summers of sweltering, bleached-out days and bottomless nights that lingered and spread out until Jilly thought he would go mad from the sameness of it. And the only words he saw in all that time were on the tags on his standard-issue BVD's and the truncated instructions on the shampoo bottle in the shower: Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

The day Jilly was released back into society, it was raining and only a handful of the boys were there to give him the glad hand—Vito Capelli, Joey "Blueline" Diglio, "Pica" Gersky and Angelo "the Hack" Annunziatto. The rest of the boys had either passed on or gone to live out their days in the retirement villages in Florida.

"Tony," Jilly said, coming at me with his arms out. "Tony Doumani." And if he'd been big when he went in seventeen years ago, he was gigantic now, a man with his own gravitational pull.

In I went, like I was being sucked into a black hole—or a "hole of color," as the thought cops would have me put it. The other boys took their medicine and then we were in the car heading for the diner.

After seventeen years without so much as encountering his own name, the billboards, road signs, marquees and what you were too much for Jilly. It overwhelmed him, brought him to tears.


Jilly was assigned a parole editor from the state pool and cautioned to stay away from fiction for a period of five years. Work for hire only. If he published so much as a knock-knock joke it would be back to the clink and he would be writing cutlines for the prison newsletter until he was a little old mafioso.

And for a year-and-a-half he managed to keep his nose clean, high on the straight and narrow way of life. It was liberating, living inside the lines, leaving the big decisions to the authorities. And then one gloomy day in October he ducked into a drugstore to get out of the rain. And there amidst the paperbacks on the carousel rack was his book, the Hopi warrior astride his horse. How the book had escaped the incinerator, Jilly would never know, but it reignited something inside him, a flicker of what was and what might have been. Might still be. And why not? Life was short, and here some puffed up little man with a hubris problem of his own had taken half of Jilly's life away from him. It was a crime, is what it was.

Heaven knows he tried to resist, doggedly taking one deadening assignment after another: Quality Digest, Onion World, Plastic Packaging Monthly. But it was no use, each new job was like another epitaph on his headstone. Meanwhile, the Freschetti organization was putting out one controversial bestseller after another, and the law looking the other way. And then one Sunday afternoon Nicky the Swift dropped by and told Jilly that word on the street was that Four-Ply Landini's Fish Food --- currently number 2 on Amazon.com --- was actually the work of a hack in the Vargas publishing cartel in Colombia. Word was they were smuggling books out of the country in sacks of sugar. Jilly'd had enough. That night he started a new book.

And now it was done. Jilly lay in bed and fought to keep his eyes open and on the red numbers of the alarm clock. It was a struggle. The house dark, Bunny sawing logs on her side. He wasn't a young man anymore. What with the amitriptiline , the [ ] and the gallons of Milk of Magnesia Bunny poured down him like she was making a cast for posterity, he was lucky to make it through the 10 o'clock news. But he wasn't taking any chances. Two o'clock. Not a minute sooner. Then he would slide out of bed as quietly as a man the size of an adolescent sea lion could, slip his pants on over his pajama bottoms, retrieve the manila envelope from behind the clothes dryer and head for the rendezvous point. He saw the clock change from 1:56 to 1:57, and the next thing he knew, the thing was honking to beat the band.