Seven Red

As an addendum to the last post, the mafia nickname. This is also in honor of today’s headline in the Chicago Sun-Times: “Joey ‘The Clown’ Gets Life.” Don’t worry. I won’t do another subject line analysis on that headline suggesting that the neighborhood joker finally had an epiphany (I get it now, said the Joey the Clown, I really, really get it…). But since we were on the mafia, and names, I’ll add this bit about a friend I had. My uncle once gave me some sage advice. He said never to hang out with somebody who had more than two nicknames. Once you hit three, you’re really dealing with aliases. Now my uncle drove half-tracks in the vicinity of Tay Ninh City during the Tet Offensive, so I usually take his life wisdom as fairly definitive, and it’s been born out in practice. So, this is the story of a guy with (at least) three nicknames, Crazy Joe, a.k.a Joey Bats, a.k.a Joey the Lid.

In  junior high school he was Crazy Joe. This is a fairly typical nickname arrived at through unconventional means. Joe was off the wall, for sure, and was best known for lobbing M-80′s and blockbusters into crowds of kids hanging out after school. But I think he really got the nickname Crazy Joe when he was fourteen, and got arrested for train robbery. You heard me right. Joe was arrested for train robbery in New York City in the late 1980′s.  Joe’s dad owned a truck parts business in Long Island City, which was then a very industrial area. So Joe used to hang out there after school,  and he made friends with some other kids from the (hip hop infamous) Queensbridge Projects. So Joe and these kids would break into the freight yards near the Queensborough Plaza stop on the Seven, and they had a field day, boosting sneakers, beepers, and other items right off the trains. One day, Joe and these kids are back at it, and they crack open a freight car looking for some electronics. Instead, they find a car full of cereal. I’m talking General Mills, all brands, loaded on pallets and the whole bit. Now, the savvy criminal would realize that this car was not particularly fruitful, and move on, but Crazy Joe and his boys decided that they were hungry (munchies, most likely), so they parked their asses on the car and started eating straight out of boxes of Fruit Loops. Needless to say, this was the day their scheme was up, and about twenty cops jump out of everywhere, guns drawn and ready for action. Joe and his buddies get trucked down to the 107th Precinct, where the cops all call him Fruit Loops. Train robbery.

Later, when we were in high school, Joe was known as Joey Bats. Now, you might think that he got a name like that because he was proficient with a baseball bat, but Joe wasn’t really a fighter so much as he was a stoner. So “Bats” derives from the giant joints he used to roll, which looked a bit like baseball bats. No, really. They were fucking big. Back then, New York used to have a “pot parade,” which was really just a NORML rally in Washington Square Park, but it was a kind of get-out-of-a-ticket free day, or rather, Washington Square Park became a forgiveness zone for drug possession. Seriously, there would be thousands of people in the park, all smoking pot and drinking openly, and there’d be a lot of cops there, but the cops were just there for crowd control: they didn’t bust you even if you were smoking a blunt right in front of them. This had to be well before Giuliani, because this is precisely the sort of shit that Giuliani couldn’t stand. So one year we were at the pot parade, and we ended up standing near a group of Puerto Rican guys from the Bronx. Joe asked another one of my friends for some rolling paper, and these Bronx guys were all like “Oh, check out white boys with the joints!” They were unimpressed. “White boys,” they said, “You can’t get high on no joints; you gotta smoke the blunts, son” and they pulled out some big blunt, and generally thought they’d stumbled on to some Long Island know-nothings or some such. We all looked at Joey Bats. He just smiled. “Gimme the whole pack of papers,” he said, “and gimme the ounce.” We knew it was definitely on. Joey Bats proceeded  to roll the biggest joint any of us had ever seen – giant, otherworldly, and definitely fitting for the occasion. “Mira,” he said to the Bronx guys, holding it up, and their eyes just about bugged out of their heads. Of course, we shared with them, and we knew their prejudice against joints was definitely relieved when they said “These white boys a’ight.”  It didn’t hurt that we brought the good shit, and not their Gun Hill Road swag. Spread love, son.

It’s my belief that you don’t really have a nickname unless you have a “the” in it. The definite article lends the nickname a certain grandeur, as if you are the only person that can lay claim to that title. There may be many clowns who understand life, but the readers of the Chicago Sun-Times are expected to know precisely who is being referred to when the headline writer invokes the name of Joey the Clown. And so it was for us. Probably my first year of college, while I was away, Joey Bats became Joey the Lid. Now, this nickname eventually morphed into just plain Lid, as in “Hey Lid, shut the fuck up and roll us a joint.” But I was always partial to the full version, as in “The fuckin’ guy was launchin’ blockbusters at us up on 154th street.” “Who?” “Fuckin’ Joe.” “Joe Mastaciola?” “No, dickhead. Joey the Lid.” You’d think that a movie-script perfect mafioso nickname like Joey the Lid would have come about through some fantastic incident. Sadly, no. Lid and his buddy Tommy were driving around doing whippets (Nitrous Oxide), which – and this is life advice – is not a particularly smart thing to do. Joe’s specialty was a four whippet balloon, which means you crack four nitrous canisters into one balloon: it’s not conducive to staying conscious, much less alert, while driving. So Joe – in his infinite wisdom – loads up four whippets into a balloon and hands it over to Tommy, who’s driving, and Tommy sucks it all in and predictably passes out and crashes into a light poll. Joe gets a nice chunk of windshield glass right in the eyelid (which strikes me as lucky, all things considered). Thus Joe Bats ends up with a scarred eyelid that hangs down a little, and fairly instantly becomes Joey the Lid. It could be worse, I guess.

Now I should admit my own nicknames. I’ll do that if I hear others. Confession is a two way street.

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