Namecalling
The librarian told him not to call Sicilians that, but to the junk man you were where you came from.
It’s one of those uncommon rainy days when the junk man and his son can’t scrounge the alleys for scrap metal, what with standing water up to your knees around the storm drains and the chance that the International Harvester step van would get stuck in the mud where asphalt gives way to sand and dirt. Even if they spot any goodies to salvage from inside the truck, then what? The junk man is too cheap to buy rain gear they can work in. So they hole up at the McDonalds on Vanderbilt Road and drink coffee, waiting for the weather to break, but eventually, after the junk man finishes reading Long Island Newsday, they give up and go home.
The boy doesn’t change out of his work clothes. He just grabs an umbrella, charges into the downpour, and heads to the library on Commack Road to inhale the book smells and find the answers he needs at the reference desk.
Upon arriving, he yanks the heavy glass entry door open a little too hard. It hits the metal doorstop like a hammer strike. He enters the carpeted interior but forgets to shake off his umbrella. In seconds Mrs. Costello the librarian is scoping him through those stupid old lady glasses with the little chains hanging off the side.
The boy steps back out into the entryway and shakes off the umbrella. He’s relieved to see that the nice reference lady, Mrs. Kowalczyk, is also working today. She’s really beautiful, not just nice. Why can’t he remember how to say her damn name? I mean, after all, he comes from a long line of polacks. He makes a beeline for Mrs. K.
“What do you have for me today?” She catches his eye and smiles. He feels his face getting warm.
“Uh, okay. So, can you find out something for me about wop? I mean the word, you know, wop, where it comes from.
“Sorry, but did you just say wop?”
She hushes her voice, the way his mother does when she says the word sex around him and his brothers. His pulse quickens and he can feel it throbbing in his neck. His eyes drop to the floor.
“Yeah, wop, you know, like an Italian guy from Sicily, like from a village or whatever, but it’s no big deal, it’s just something my father says, so I just wanted to know, like, why they call Italian guys that.”
He shuts up. It’s like what Mr. Petrelli at school always says: when you’re in a hole, put the shovel down.
Mrs. Kowalczyk stares at him, and it’s like he can hear the gears grinding in her head, like she’s figuring out something.
He meets her eyes for a moment but then fixates on the jumbo clock on the wall behind her. It’s hypnotizing, the way the secondhand sweeps smoothly around. He tracks it, and even though only a few seconds pass, the silence feels longer and awkward.
Now he’s short of breath. Is he in trouble? Is she mad at him? For what?
What will he do if she stops helping him with his questions?
Will he have to go to Mrs. Costello instead?
Mother of God, he thinks, not that!—and then its echo, motko bosko, his father’s voice in the old village Polish of his parents. Costello, she’s such a ball buster, the way she gives you a dirty look if you close the card catalog drawers too hard.
Mrs. Kowalczyk opens her mouth to speak. She’s shaking her head the way the guidance counselor at school does every time the boy is sent to his office for wise-assing a teacher or using the F word.
Yeah, it’s over. He’s sure. She hates his guts.
“Kiddo, that’s not a nice word,” Mrs. Kowalczyk says. There is no edge to her voice. “You shouldn’t say it, and Jesus Mary and Joseph don’t say it around Mrs. Costello, because you’ll be sorry.” It’s thrilling to him when she slips out of college-girl proper English and into the Irish brogue of the former Miss Grace O’Malley.
He stares at the floor, like a dog who got yelled at for taking a dump in the house but doesn’t really understand why.
One thing’s for sure: Mrs. Kowalczyk doesn’t get it. You think wop is bad? Oh nice and beautiful Mrs. Kowalczyk, oh nasty old Mrs. Costello, you have no idea. Don’t even ask what else the junk man calls Sicilians.
But not just any Sicilian, like Mr. Petrelli at school, who’s a really nice guy. It’s about one Sicilian in particular who drives a raggedy-ass Ford flatbed truck and competes with the junk man for scrap metal all along the North Shore of Long Island.
Last week, the Sicilian beat them to a pile of goodies at a construction site: aluminum siding, screen doors, all top-dollar stuff. The junk man totally lost his shit.
“That greaseball Guinea sonofabitch. I swear to Christ I’m gonna find out where he lives and crack his skull.”
As he said it, he pulled out a short length of black iron plumbing pipe, which he liked to call The Persuader, from under his seat in the truck and waved it back and forth a few times.
Mrs. Kowalczyk starts up again. “What does your father say about it?”
“What does he say about—?”
“What does he say about what that word means?”
“He says it means without papers. W-O-P.”
“Without what kind of papers?”
Truth is, the boy doesn’t really know. He asked the junk man once but didn’t get an answer. He got The Look, the you-are-an-idiot look and then, “I told you what it means. It means without papers. Are you questioning me?”
Mrs. Kowalczyk is still waiting. He needs to give her an answer or he’s going to look even worse in front of her. Like he’s some kind of moron. Like he’s an asshole. So he makes it up.
“My father says, he says ... that word... it means the papers are missing, the papers from the government you are supposed to have when you come over on the boat, and so if you don’t have them, and if you don’t have the right things stamped on the papers, like my grandparents had when they came over from Poland, or maybe you lose them or spill something on them or, I don’t know, maybe if somebody steals them, then maybe you get in trouble with the cops or whatever.”
It sounds stupid and lame. Like he’s full of shit. Moron. Idiot. And Mrs. Kowalczyk grins, so he holds his breath to get ready for when she laughs in his face. He’s sick to his stomach. She’ll never talk to him again. He knows it now.
“Okay, kiddo, have a seat.”
What’s with the kiddo thing? She’s always calling him that. He’s not a kid. He’s 15 and a half.
Mrs. Kowalczyk steps to the big Britannica bookcase and flips through a few volumes until she finds what she wants. She sticks a bookmark in a specific page and places the volume on the table in front of him. Then she hikes up her skirt a few inches, settles down on a low rolling stool, and glides over to a tall bank of filing cabinets along the wall packed with magazine and newspaper clippings. That’s her other brain.
When she bends forward on the stool to grasp the handle of the first file drawer and pull it out, he can’t stop himself. His eyes lock on her ass, perfectly rounded behind the stretchy fabric of her skirt. She is not just beautiful, she is sexy—even though she’s pretty old, at least 30, maybe older, and has a bunch of kids and is married to some polack. I mean, Kowalczyk, right? Sure, she’s not Farrah Fawcett sexy, but still pretty sexy.
A glow blooms in his lower abdomen and spreads downward, almost like a tickle but nice. Uh, oh. Here we go.
He looks away, dreading the humiliation of being caught checking out her ass. So he side-eyes her while keeping his head pointed at the big windows. His eyes dart away whenever she turns her head, even a little.
She rolls from cabinet to cabinet, plucking magazine articles and newspaper clippings from the pockets of hanging folders, each neatly folded and paper clipped. She lifts each clipping only high enough to read the headline and skim the first paragraph. Then she either drops it back in the folder or fishes it out and places it in a neat pile in her lap. It takes only a few seconds per clipping, like she has the power to read with her hands.
She bends over to place the articles in a neat pile next to the Britannica and then, oh my God, straightens up and pulls her shoulders back to stretch. The top of her blouse parts like flower petals and the boy risks a look at the freckled pale skin between her breasts.
The glow down below has started to become something else. He pulls himself forward on his chair to hide his woody under the table. He would die if she saw it.
“That word, the one you asked about, does not mean without papers, though many people are of that opinion,” she says. “That is inaccurate. Some sources state that it probably comes from the Italian word guappo, which means a tough guy on the street, a man who brags, dresses sharp, talks loudly, and thinks he’s so good looking that girls can’t resist him.”
“Really? It’s not about papers? How can that be?” His father’s been saying it for years. What the hell?
“That’s what the best sources indicate,” the librarian states. “People believe lots of things about words that are not always true.”
She pauses for a moment or two, looks over the tops of her eyeglass frames right into his eyes.
“Listen, Kiddo”—again with the kiddo—“don’t call people names like that. It is derogatory. Do you know what derogatory means?”
“Yeah, like an insult.”
“Yes. Exactly.”
He hopes she’s done with him now. He’s embarrassed and thinks he won’t be able to show his face again, maybe ever. His crotch has gone cold, and now he just wants to get out of there.
But he will still need her help finding out about stuff. Lasers. The humanoid robots called androids they are actually making now, which can talk and everything. Hovercrafts. Plants in the woods you can eat. Why the cast aluminum metal body of a Lawn Boy mower catches fire and sparks white hot as you torch off the metal wheels.
“Sorry if I said the wrong thing.”
“Don’t worry. It’s not really your word, is it?”
As the boy walks home, he flips back and forth between keeping his mouth shut, because he knows what’s good for him, and telling the junkman that Mrs. Kowalczyk says a wop is a well-dressed tough guy, not some dumbass villager with cowshit between his toes.
Back at the basement apartment, the junk man is in the cramped kitchen frying some eggs. It’s only noon, but he’s already in his evening garb: floppy stained cotton boxers and a white t-shirt.
“You hungry?”
“Yeah.”
He scrambles the eggs with fried kielbasa, and they carry their plates into the dim living room and park their asses behind the fold-out TV tables. There’s barely enough light coming in from a single casement window to illuminate the food on their plates.
The junk man is watching a World War 2 documentary but the boy isn’t listening. He’s running sentences in his head: what he will say about the word, if he says anything at all. What the hell, the boy thinks, the worst thing can happen is that he gets The Look.
“Did you know wop actually comes from some Italian word for a well-dressed tough guy, not without papers.”
The junk man watches a string of bombs detonate in a perfect line across a German railroad yard and then turns to the boy. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Wop. The word wop. It comes from some Italian word or something.” He starts to feel the sick rising behind his chest bone. “Shit, I can’t remember the word now.”
“Says who it doesn’t mean without papers?”
“The librarian. Mrs. Kowalczyk. She looked it up in the encyclopedia.”
“Yeah, well fuck her and the horse she rode in on. I told you what it means. She doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about.”
The junk man turns away from him, shaking his head, and then he’s right back into watching the strategic bombing campaign and what not.
He knows how stupid he must have sounded. Moron. Idiot. What an asshole. What did you think he would say?
But maybe Mrs. Kowalczyk doesn’t really know what she’s talking about. Maybe the books are wrong.
And why did she make such a federal case out of it anyway? It’s just a name the junk man calls the Sicilian when he’s mad. What’s the big deal? He wouldn’t call Mr. Petrelli the social studies teacher a wop, right?
Maybe he’s pissed at Italians in general because of fighting Mussolini in the war. Or maybe back in the old neighborhood, where the junk man grew up with a mob of rough immigrant kids, some of the Italian boys beat him up, and he’s still got a hard on for them now, not to mention their parents, the ones he talks about when they stop at McDonalds for coffee: the dumb polacks, the stubborn krauts, the drunken micks, the Russian sonofabitches, the Czech bohunks. To the junk man, you are where you came from.
Funny thing is, how does the junk man know if the guy he calls the wop is even Italian? Just because of the curly hair and the nose with, you know, a curve? He could also be a Greek, right? What are Greeks like? What names do you call them when you’re mad?