Evan Hunter: Streets of Gold

There is in America the persistent suspicion that if a person changes his name, he is most certainly a wanted desperado. And nowhere is there greater suspicion of, or outright animosity for, the name-changers than among those who steadfastly refuse to change their names. Meet a Lipschitz or a Mangiacavallo, a Schliephake or a Trzebiatowski who have stood by those hot ancestral guns, and they will immediately consider the name-changer a deserter at best or a traitor at worst. I say fuck you, Mr. Trzebiatowski. Better you should change it to Trevor. Or better you should mind your own business.

For reasons I can never fathom, the fact that I’ve changed my name is of more fascination to anyone who’s ever interviewed me (I am too modest to call myself famous, but whenever I play someplace, it’s a matter of at least some interest, and if you don’t know who I am, what can I tell you?) — a subject more infinitely fascinating than the fact that I’m a blind man who happens to be the best jazz pianist who ever lived, he said modestly and self-effacingly, and not without a touch of shabby dignity. No one ever asks me how it feels to be blind. I would be happy to tell them. I am an expert on being blind. But always, without fail, The Name.

“How did you happen upon the name Dwight Jamison?”

“Well, actually, I wanted to use another name, but someone already had it.”

“Ah, yes? What was the other name?”

“Groucho Marx.”

The faint uncertain smile (I can sense it, but not see it), the moment where the interviewer considers the possibility that this wop entertainer — talented, yes, but only a wop, and only an entertainer — may somehow be blessed with a sense of humor. But is it possible he really considered calling himself Groucho Marx?

“No, seriously, Ike, tell me” — the voice confidential now — “ why did you decide on Dwight Jamison?”

“It had good texture. Like an augmented eleventh.”

“Oh. I see, I see. And what is your real name?”

“My real name has been Dwight Jamison since 1955. That’s a long, long time.”

“Yes, yes, of course, but what is your real name?” (Never “was,” notice. In America, you can never lose your real name. It “is” always your real name.) “What is your real name? The name you were born with?”

“Friend,” I say, “I was born with yellow hair and blue eyes that cannot see. Why is it of any interest to you that my real name was Ignazio Silvio Di Palermo?”

“Ah, yes, yes. Would you spell that for me, please?”

I changed my name because I no longer wished to belong to that great brotherhood of compaesani whose sole occupation seemed to be searching out names ending in vowels. (Old Bronx joke: What did Washington say when he was crossing the Delaware? “ Fá ’no cazzo di freddo qui!” And what did his boatman reply? “ Pure tu sei italiano?” Translated freely, Washington purportedly said, “Fucking-A cold around here,” and his boatman replied, “ You’re Italian, too?”) My mother always told me I was a Yankee, her definition of Yankee being a third-generation American, her arithmetic bolstered by the undeniable fact that her mother (but not her father) was born here, and she herself was born here, and I was certainly born here, ergo Ignazio Silvio Di Palermo, third-generation Yankee Doodle Dandy. My mother was always quick to remind me that she was American. “I’m American, don’t forget.” How could I forget, Mama darling, when you told me three and four times a day? “I’m American, don’t forget.”

In Sicily, where I went to find my brother’s grave, your first son’s grave, Mom, the cab driver told me how good things were in Italy these days, and then he said to me, “America is here now.”

Maybe it is there.

One thing I’m sure of.

It isn’t here .

And maybe it never was.

The way my grandfather told it, Pietro Bardoni was always a braggart, a self-styled man of the world, a loudmouth, uno sbruffone . He had grown up with Bardoni, of course, and he knew him well; in a town with one main street and sixty-four houses built of stone and whitewashed stucco, it was virtually impossible not to have known everyone as soon as you were old enough to walk the cobbled streets. During the day, you worked in the vineyard. In the evening in the summer, you sat outside the town’s only bar, sat at round metal tables painted red and yellow and blue, the men smoking guinea stinkers (My grandfather always smoked those foul-smelling twisted little Italian cigars. When I was young, I used to ask him why he smoked those guinea stinkers all the time. He would reply, and I record his fractured English as best I can, “Attsa no guin’a stink, Ignazio. Attsa good see-gah.”) — smoking their good cigars in the awninged dusk and drinking grappa, a foul-tasting liqueur that is supposed to be good for the liver and also for removing paint from furniture, sat and smoked and talked about the grape and about the coming fall harvest.

Italy in those days — this was in the late 1880s before the grape blight — was the leading wine merchant to the world. It was only later, when the plant parasite phylloxera ( “la fillossera,” my grandfather called it, and invariaby spat immediately afterward) destroyed most of the vineyards in southern Italy, that the French took virtual possession of the industry, and Bordeaux replaced Chianti as the most popular wine in Europe and abroad. La fillossera destroyed the crops and destroyed the economy as well; the land was the grape and the grape was the economy. But in the fall, when times were still good, the men would come home from the harvest and, without bathing first — there was no running water in Fiormonte, and the men bathed in well-drawn water in wooden tubs in the kitchens of their homes, and this was done in privacy, in the dark, Italian farmers unlike Scottish miners being very modest about such things as showing their privates to other members of the family, unless incest is their intent — without bathing first, the men would go to the bar, and sit outside under the blue-striped awning and talk about how good things were, and how blessed they were, and then caution each other about speaking of their good fortune aloud lest someone, God alone knew who, would put the Evil Eye on them.

When I was born blind, Mary the Barber ventured the opinion that the Evil Eye had been put on my mother when she was pregnant with me. Filomena the Midwife clucked her tongue and said No, it was my mother’s experience with the Chinaman thirteen years ago that had been the cause of the tragedy attending my birth. It was my Uncle Luke who first told me about the Chinaman, but my grandfather was the one who later related the story to me in detail. My grandfather told me everything. To my knowledge, he never lied to me. I loved my grandfather very much.

He would sit with the men of the town in the good days — oh, he was perhaps fourteen or fifteen at the time; he did not come to America until 1901, when things became really unbearable — and he would watch the girls go by in their long cotton dresses, and with the younger men of the town he would exchange secret desires, always careful never to impugn the reputation of anyone’s sister, because in southern Italy, that was — and is — ample reason for murder. And yet the talk was there, the talk always rendered harmless by distance; the girls they wanted to fuck lived in Rome or Venice or Milan, but never in Fiormonte — though the girls of Fiormonte paraded with eyes downcast like nuns, contradictorily ripe asses twitching provocatively. My grandfather was a very handsome man, to hear him tell it, with black hair and dark brown eyes and a nose he said had Sienese influence (I knew the shape of his nose, I explored its contours with my fingers many, many times; it was not unlike my own, hawklike and thin; it could very well have had its origin in Siena — there goes my Milanese cloth merchant theory), and tall in comparison to the other men of the village, five feet eight inches. His father and his grandfather before him had worked in the vineyards, and had he stayed in Italy, I would probably be working the vineyards now, though God knows what Fiormonte is like today. It may be bustling with machinery and factories, for all I know. It was not that way in 1970, when I went back to find my grandfather, and to find my roots.