Locker Room Talk is a reading Mike DeCapite did from his novel Jacket Weather for the Enclave series at Cake Shop, on October 22, 2016. The video clip of the reading is available on vimeo, courtesy of Liza Béar: https://vimeo.com/188611984
“So . . . I was thinking we heard a lot lately—in the last few weeks—about locker room talk, and what locker room talk is . . . so um, I’m just gonna clear it up for ya, this is—just so ya know it when you hear it, y’know, for those of you who don’t find yourselves in a male locker room. Now you’ll know.” -Mike DeCapite
When I walked in on Monday, Joe was sitting at his locker, still red from the steam. He had three cans of coffee for me, in exchange for the magazines I’d been taking home from work. Every week I took him five copies of People and Entertainment Weekly and he gave them to women on his rounds. I didn’t want anything for them but he was Italian, so he loved transactions. He was at the age when a person starts carrying around bags containing pieces of interest clipped from newspapers and coupons and canned tomatoes. Come to think of it, so was I, with these magazines. This is how it starts.
I thanked him for the coffee and went to my locker.
“Where’d you eat this weekend?” he said from his row. “Where’d you go?”
“Nowhere: I cooked.”
“What’d you make, pasta fazool?”
“No, I made linguine with clams.”
“The red?”
“No, the white.”
“What’d you do?”
I made my way to the end of the row so I could speak in a normal tone of voice. I said “I softened part of an onion in oil with a little butter. I put red pepper flakes.”
“Parsley?” he said.
“Yeah, parsley, then half a cup of white wine, and the juice from the clams.”
“You used the canned? What’d you buy, Snow’s?”
“Cento.”
“Aw, you bought the clam sauce?”
“No, just the chopped clams.”
“I didn’t know they made that. I’ll have to look for that.”
“Yeah. So I put those in about a minute before I drained the pasta, and squeezed some lemon juice.”
Joe frowned, approving. He was applying his facial cream. We were naked this whole time.
I went back to my locker and got into my gear. I said, “What about you? Where’d you go?”
“I cooked.”
“Yeah? What’d you make?”
“Linguine with clams.”
“The white?”
“No, I made the red this time. With the whole baby clams from the can.”
“What kind?”
“Doxey’s,” he said. “What kind of linguine did you buy?”
“Barilla,” I said. “You?”
“DeCecco. That’s good pasta.”
“DeCecco’s great, but it’s two-fifty a box.”
“They got it at Western Beef, a dollar a box.”
*
Philly comes into the locker room, he opens with, “So what’s gonna happen? Where we gonna go, when we die? Do we go to heaven? Do we go to sleep? So many questions, not enough answers. . . . Harold, don’t lose hope. Patsy, Frank Sinatra’s dead. I hate to break it to ya. But he went to heaven, that’s the good news. He’s with Georgie Jessel.”
*
Kevin and Philly were getting dressed, talking from one aisle to the other about doo wop. Philly said he used to sing on the street, growing up in Brooklyn. Joe came in to give me something from the Sunday paper. He was wearing a big black pair of shades. With an irritated wave of the hand, he dismissed the doo wop era as a fleeting trend, a childish excitement. He could let nothing Kevin said go unchallenged, for it was each man’s role to disagree with the other about everything.
Talking to me across their conversation, he said, “I never cared for it, doo wop.”
“No?” I said. “Not even looking back?”
“I rejected the whole thing,” he said. “I never liked the staccato singing. That staccato line. I prefer legato, the long line.”
He demonstrated the difference by singing a verse of some old love song in both styles, first in a choppy style, keeping time with a strict karate-chop gesture, and then by crooning sweetly to me among the lockers and half-naked men, eyebrows raised, conducting a long, fluid line. Meanwhile, Kevin and Philly were talking about Ruby and the Romantics and the Marvelettes.
Pointing back and forth between me and himself, Joe said, “This is like you and me talking about McDonald’s and Burger King.”
“What’s this now?” Kevin said. “What’re you saying, Joey?”
“Like hamburgers,” Joey said. “This is like you wanna talk about hamburgers, but instead of talking about P.J. Clarke’s, you’re talking about Burger King.”
“You’re a thug, Joe. You don’t know what you’re—”
“In the upper echelons of music, these people are never spoken of,” Joey was telling Philly, who was pulling on a pair of yellow pants and trying to stay out of it. “These people are not in the pantheon.”
Kevin said, “If it’s not Sinatra, Jimmy Roselli, or Jerry Vale, you’re not interested. . . .”
Joe turned to him. He said, “This is like you want veal Parmesan, but you want to go to the Olive Garden instead of Il Mulino.”
“Nobody cares about those guys. Jimmy Roselli’s for the birds.”
Our whole end of the locker room went silent.
“Oh, now you said it!” Philly said.
“Don’t ever—” Joe started.
“If his name was Roseliwitz, you wouldn’t give a shit about him.”
Joe was wide-eyed, nearly awed by the man’s recklessness. “Don’t ever let people hear you say that,” he cautioned. “Don’t ever let people who know about music hear you say that. You know why? Because when you leave, they’re gonna say, ‘Ma-don’, this guy—Did you hear what he said? This guy’s pazz’!’”
*
I leave five copies of InStyle for Joe with the doorman. Joe calls to say he picked them up.
“I left you a package at the desk, with René. I left you some prosciut’.”
“You didn’t have to do that, Joe.”
“It’s the Citterio. You know that one?”
“Sure, it’s good.”
“I left two packs of it.”
“Why two? Won’t you eat it?”
“It’s a three-and-a-half-ounce pack, you make one sandwich.”
“Thank you, Joe.”
“Nice and pink. Because the dark red is too dry.”
“I’ll use it tonight.”
“The pink is soft.”
“Maybe I’ll cut it up in the salad.”
“You have to leave it out. Take it out of the fridge, let it get to room temperature, so it’s got the full, y’know. I like to wait till the fat softens up—“
“Yeah, till it gets a little translucent.”
“Riiiiiight, riiiiiiight,” he said. “Usually I have it with mozzarella, but I didn’t have any mozzarella. So I left you a small roll of brie.”
“Joe, it’s great but it’s too much. Thank you. I’ll pick it up now—I’ll be there in a minute.”
“Oh, you’re not home?”
“No, I’m walking from Chelsea Market. I went to buy squid. I’m gonna fry it with garlic and parsley.”
“How much?”
“Ten dollars a pound.”
“Ten dollars a pound! Are you kidding?”
“For the local, from Rhode Island. From Spain it’s sixteen.”
“My mother used to make it all the time, it was pennies. This was a peasant dish, this wasn’t a big deal—“
“Well, this is cleaned, and tenderized, or whatever. And everything’s fancy now, you know that.”
“I used to go the Fulton Fish Market, they had it ten, fifteen cents a pound!”
“When, in 1948?”
“In 19 . . . 77. The summer of Son of Sam. Lou Salica had a stand there. He was a bantamweight champ—world champ. Ever heard of him?”
“No. Lou—?”
“Salica: S-A-L-I-C-A. Look him up. He weighed one-eighteen. He was only about five five, he weighed one-eighteen. Not then. By then he weighed probably one-thirty-five, had a little pot belly. The sweetest guy: couldn’t meet a nicer guy. He used to sell the galama ten cents a pound, maybe two for fifteen, if he was closing up . . .”
*
I’m at my locker getting dressed.
“Here, you’re a big jazz fan,” Joe says: “Read this.”
I’m not a big jazz fan, but he once heard me mention Ornette Coleman, and because Joe tends to place the people he knows at the top of their respective fields, it pleases him to think of me as a “top jazz guy.” I take the clipping, which comes, as these pieces often do, from The Italian-American Herald, a paper in New Jersey. Joe’s a subscriber.
He says, “Jazz was invented by Italians.”
“No kidding!”
“Ever hear of Nick LaRocca?”
“No.”
“Cornet player from New Orleans. He wrote ‘The Tiger Rag.’ Sicilian. Ask him,” he said, indicating Philly on his stool. Philly was pulling on a pair of pants of a color I can’t quite name, somewhere between yellow and pink, sort of a faded whimsy.
“Ask me what?” Philly said. “Ask me anything, I know everything.”
“Ever hear of Nick LaRocca?” I said.
“No.”
“He knows nothing,” Joe said.
“Would a guy who knows nothing wear these pants?” Philly said.
I said “You’re claiming jazz now for the Italians?”
“At one time, there were 500,000 Italians in New Orleans,” he reasoned.
“Sure,” I said, “Look at Cosimo Matassa.”
“That’s right!” he said. “He just died. How about Cosmo Matassa?” he asked Philly.
“I know Cosmo Matassa,” Philly said. “He invented linguine.”
*
Philly’s reading the horoscopes in the Post.
He reads Joe’s: “’You can easily persuade others to give you their support today, simply by using your charm.’ O! Prince Charming! He’s got eighty guys here that hate him.”
“What’s it say about Aries, Philly?”
“You an Aries?” he says, opening the paper back up. “I wouldn’t have guessed that. Aries is a nutty sign, Aries are kooky—“
Joe says, “Marlon Brando was an Aries—“
“Aries are kooky,” Philly says.
“Fearless,” Joe says. “All the explorers, the people who went up in space, all Aries.”
“That’s me. Fearless.”
“I’m not surprised,” Joe says. “You moved to San Francisco, moved to New York—that was fearless! Me, I’d be worried about ‘What am I gonna do there? What if this happens, that happens?’ I stay right in the same place.”
Philly says “Aries are crazy, you seem more grounded to me. It says ‘You will be thrust into the spotlight over the next few days and you should take the opportunity to shine and show what you can do.’ Wear good clothes!” he said, and continued: ‘If you get noticed, someone in a position of power could make you the kind of offer you can’t to refuse.’”
“See? Speaking of Brando.”
*
Joe caught me off guard this morning. I was bitching about this guy Mario, who, contrary to the rules, started out with a locker padlocked overnight for weeks on end and now he’s got four of them tied up with his dry-cleaning and legal files and law books and shampoo and ointments and powders and ramen and who knows what, running some kind of fly-by-night paralegal operation or law office out of the locker room—shows up every morning with another guy who seems a little slow, a big docile guy seems to take orders from Mario, who’s a bantamweight, sort of a Mice and Men situation. Anyway, I groused about it to Joe—“It’s getting to be I can’t find a locker in the morning, with this guy”—and Joe says “Mike, ya gotta realize. These guys are up against it, some of them—what if it was you, living like this? Where’s your rachmanis?”
*
Monday I walked past Joe at his locker.
“I didn’t see you this weekend,” he said. “You were here?”
“I was here yesterday. At night we stayed home.”
“You cooked?”
“Yeah, I made pasta with garlic and oil.”
“What’d you do?”
I made my way down. I said “My friend Tammy give me a truffle slicer: I used it for the garlic. Red pepper flakes.”
“Parsley?” he said.
“Yeah, parsley at the end, with lemon.”
“Romano?”
“I used Parmesan last night. What about you?” I said.
“Same thing. I made pasta with garlic and oil. I ate the whole pound.”
“You ate a pound of linguine?”
“I used the vermicelli.”
“I haven’t had that in a long time. DeCecco?”
“Ronzoni,” he said. “It was on sale, three pounds for two dollars.”
Now Frank was there. He was unwinding his wraps and hanging them in his locker. Yesterday he told us about the Lancellotti Brothers, from South Philly: six brothers, each named after a different pope. All gangsters. Benedict, Clement, Pius—all mob guys.
He says, “You gotta reserve a cup of the pasta water.”
Joe says, “How about linguine fini? You ever use that?”
I said “I made it the other night.”
“Garlic and oil?”
“Yeah. And breadcrumbs, I made.”
This opens a discussion of different techniques for linguine with garlic and oil. Frank, naked from the waist down, says he uses a couple of anchovies. A man drying his balls down the aisle adds a squeeze of lemon. Joe tucks his shirt in and squats to settle into his pants. He doesn’t saute his garlic, he throws it in fresh at the end.
“There’s always something else,” I said. “You’re never done, with pasta.”
“Oh, it’s a continuing fascination,” Joe said. He’s combing his hair in the mirror. “You’re never done.”
*
Joe and I walk out of the locker room together and I wind up sitting on the couch with him for half an hour talking about food while he waits for Father Joe. I tell him I spent six bucks on a container of fresh figs, and he tells me he turned down the strawberries at Union Square because they were twelve dollars a quart. I tell him about Eric’s two-day-a-week-fasting regimen and remark that this accords with the ancient dictum found on the walls of Egyptian tombs that a quarter of what you eat keeps you alive and the other three quarters keeps your doctor alive. I mention the theory that this fasting allows the liver to stop producing a growth hormone that causes cancer, and Joe tells me about the liver at Le Zie, a la Venezia. I tell him I don’t like liver, and he asks what about vestedda (spleen), and this leads to a discussion of a restaurant that used to be on First Avenue that served the dish. An old man comes up the stairs in a ball cap and polo shirt. Joe introduces him to me because he lives at the Vermeer—“a V-man,” as Joe calls him, who fits right into our discussion: he’s 96 years old, never sick a day in his life, and the last time he was in a hospital was in North Africa in 1944, with appendix. He’s wearing a summer-weight shirt and cap and an old belt cinched around a pair of loose old brown suitpants. Joe tells him that what he has in common with other men of his longevity is that he’s slim, and asks about the man’s appetite. The man says, “I don’t eat much. But I never did.” Joe and I exchange meaningful nods. Then father Joe comes and Joe gives him his bagels or the newspaper or whatever he’s been saving for him, and Joe and I walk down the street. On the way, he tells me he’s going to make himself, even though he knows he shouldn’t, a sorpressata sandwich, because he’s got it in the fridge and wants to use it, and anyway who can resist?
