Paolo Pagano, Jr. aspires to be louder. It runs in the family. Little Paulie, as he’s known, is the loudest. Loudness is to this family what college is to others. It’s their pride, and it’s what they’re good at.
Jennie Watson is almost as loud.
Paulie Pagano and Jennie Watson live approximately 100 yards apart, separated by one building, one alley, a universe, and you.
The stabbing couple, two porches down, is close behind, but that’s a story for later.
Jennie lives in the new condo across the street, a warehouse rehabbed into a unique urban loft-style experience. Paulie lives next door in a single-family home with his mother, who has, in her small parcel of land, an impressive vegetable garden. You won’t be invited anytime soon, them not really knowing who you are, but you guess that a meal with the Paganos would be both interesting and delicious. You have never seen Paulie’s mother smile, and suspect that it’s been a long time. When she talks to the neighbors (a group with a surprising number of tenants and who show some indications of being one family, although after several years of observation, you’re still not sure), they connect by complaining over the fence. My back, Paulie’s mother will say in her thick Italian accent. The weather. My son. The neighbors nod solemnly. They know about backs and weather and sons. Your tomatoes are gorgeous, they will say. These are people who traded in their grass for cement. Too much trouble, they had told Paulie’s mother, who nodded solemnly. Miscellaneous other people are also in apparent residence at the Paganos. These might include his sister, a girl who looks like his sister, and a heavyset guy who might be a cousin, but they’re all frequently seen in the adjacent yard, so you can’t be sure what sister belongs to which house. The girls who might be his sisters are also given toward loudness, although they aren’t as ubiquitous and therefore appear somewhat less invested in their loudness than their possible brother. The girls who might be his sisters look just like Paulie, except they wear their hair in tight, shiny ponytails. These ponytails look like they could only hurt.
Jennie, in any case, likely has no such aspirations of loudness. She just is. Little Paulie is twenty-three years old. When you moved in, he was seventeen and already bald. Upon hearing the news of his being a teenager, you spent some time examining him from your porch window whenever possible, trying to process this information, trying to understand how a seventeen-year-old anywhere could pass for forty, trying to understand what in seventeen years adds up to bald and forty-looking. You will come to know that possibilities include a dead dad and a close association with a bunch of local gangbangers, also loud, and who have no interest whatsoever in Paulie’s front door, or any parts on or adjacent to it that might ring in a pleasant way, a way that only its occupants might hear. When they want to see Paulie, they come through the alley, and they yell Paul-ee. Paul-ee! Paulie never comes on the first eight or nine Paulies. Usually his mother will intervene with a few more Paulies, a final loud Paolo! and some words in Italian. She is a small, square woman, but you sense that she can and has and will again hit him and it will hurt. Little Paulie has one expression. It’s a scowl.
Jennie, blonde, is twenty-six, a size four, and owns a clothing business and her condo, directly across from your front window. How you know this is she spends a good deal of time on her balcony (actually what this is is more or less a railing in front of a set of sliding doors, with a plank just wide enough for one Jennie-sized person to stand on) talking on the phone and telling people these things. Jennie used to be a size two, but then she started working out. So she didn’t like, gain weight or anything, her body just totally changed which is a total bummer because I had like four pairs of Chip and Peppers and now I can’t wear them at all. Chip and Peppers are jeans that cost two hundred dollars. How you know this is she told the person she was talking to, who didn’t know either. Jennie has several expressions, but they’re all in the ballpark of overstimulated.
Paulie’s interests include sitting on the roof of his garage, cars from the late seventies/early eighties, motorcycles, dogs, tattoos, rap, weed, and the sound of his own name. Sometimes these interests are combined in various ways to produce greater loudness. You suppose he wishes his dog were louder, but he’s not much of a barker. Once he even tried to lick your hand, but Paulie yanked him back, clearly disappointed with the friendliness of his pit bull. Sometimes an afternoon will include a combination of rap, played from the car, parked in the alley but running, weed, and some of the guys on the roof of his garage. On these days you stay off the porch. Paulie could pass you the joint from there. It would be uncomfortable.
Jennie’s interests include Jennie. Or talking about Jennie. Boys and fashion, occasionally, but only as they pertain to Jennie. She’s the kind of girl who will stop you in the middle of a story and say that reminds me and tell you a story about herself that has nothing to do with your story in any way you can discern. Your story could be about your sick aunt which will remind her of her aunt which will remind her of something about herself and your sick aunt will be no part of it.
When you first moved in, you could tell it was summer when the scent of night-blooming jasmine filled the air and the neighborhood kids started shooting. The storage warehouse across the street was largely quiet except on nights when the neighborhood kids hung around, sometimes with babies in tow, fighting about who’d been in the neighborhood longer, interesting in no small part due to the fact that the people fighting about this topic were barely fourteen. You’d moved in that week and you’d been there longer. In spite of her own short time there, Jennie has her own proprietary feelings about her corner of the street. She will talk to anyone who is moving in, looking in, and it seems, merely walking by, and tell them that she was the first one to move in. You have the sense that in a certain way she believes she’s pioneered the very concept of moving. What interests you here is that every word uttered by Jennie is distinctly audible but never can you hear the person she’s talking to. Or, at. You have the sense that Jennie thinks of herself and her living here as edgy. Whatever this means, though, she isn’t. You aren’t even edgy, and you were here before the condos came. You live here because it’s cheap, but it’s worth noting that you feel at ease here in a way you never do on the Gold Coast. On the Gold Coast you feel like an impostor.
The summer Jennie moves in is also the summer of the motorcycle. Little Paulie gets a bike and rides it often but always comes back within ten minutes. You are fairly sure that Paulie removed the muffler upon purchase, and that he comes back quickly because he will not go farther than can be heard in his own hood. That there would be no point if his loudness were heard only by strangers. Kind of like if a tree falls in the forest, if the tree cares whether or not the forest hears it make a sound. You believe that if for some reason his license were revoked, that Paulie would be just as happy to gun the bike in back of his house. You have seen him ride from the alley to the corner deli, which might be twenty paces from his front door. But as you know, Paulie does not use the front door in any capacity, answering, entering, or exiting, and perhaps Paulie is thinking that someone will think he came from somewhere else.
Jennie walks to the deli, but prefers to hold her fights in the street. For a while, she has a boyfriend. He has highlights in his flat-ironed hair. This isn’t what they fight about. This is what they have in common. What they fight about is him not paying enough attention to her feelings. How could you not know that my ex best friend wore that horrible perfume and that it would bring back terrible feelings? Jennie has her arms spread wide and her head forward. If she weren’t a size four it might be a threatening posture. What it seems like coming from Jennie is something she saw someone do on that Laguna Beach show. It was a gift! I can’t read your fucking mind! he shouts. And I’m sick of fucking trying. I never asked you to! Jennie yells. I told you what I wanted! Okay, he says, then I’m sick of you. And I’m gone. Whatever! she shouts, turning back to her apartment. You sense that she can and has and will again, if he comes back, hit him. Fights like this tend to take place after you’ve gone to bed but are worth getting up for. Sometimes you even go watch the show with your downstairs neighbor. He’s always up late. Later, you will find out that Jennie and her boyfriend have broken up five times already since they met three months prior. I’m so sure he’ll be back, she says, having wasted no time getting on the phone. You’re so sure that if he does, she will hit him. But it won’t hurt, which will only make him look like more of a wuss.
Rumors have gone around about Paolo Pagano, Senior, that he was a small time mob guy, that he was rubbed out or whacked or whatever they say, but that Little Paulie didn’t show a lot of promise in the area of Mafia, and so was overlooked when time came to promote. Paulie compensates for this by going to jail anyway. You will never know why for sure, you will only know that this is the quietest summer ever on your block. You know only that one day when you hear a gunshot, you look out the front window, nothing, you look out the back window, nothing, you look out the side window into the alley and there are six police cars, Paulie in handcuffs, and Paulie’s dead pit bull in a pile of blood. Later there will be a large tattoo of the dog’s head on Paulie’s left bicep, R.I.P. Damien II. For a time there will be a shrine, prayer candles and flowers and a big rawhide bone, until the city puts a speed bump in the alley.
You were kind of getting used to the gunfire, but you hadn’t yet seen it end with blood. It seemed to you like the gangbangers tended just to shoot, and that whether or not they hit anything wasn’t the point. The cops, in this incident anyway, hit their target.
When Little Paulie comes back the following summer, he looks even older, if that’s possible, and there’s a new girl in the house who looks different enough from Paulie and his possible sisters to guess she’s a girlfriend, confirmed a few months later with the birth of Little Little Paulie. When Paulie the third begins walking and talking, there is a spike in utterances of the name Paulie, which no doubt pleases the elder Little Paulie.
The summer Paulie comes back there’s another new condo going up next to his house. The construction is on a loudness level comparable with Paulie and/or his transportation, and you can imagine that the loudness of construction vs. the loudness of one guy, if that were your source of pride, would be a drag. It displeases Paulie, and it displeases you too, both because you could do without more Jennies and because it’s also the summer you get burglarized and you suspect no one notices at least partly because of the noise. But it pleases Jennie. My property value has already doubled, practically! Someone down the hall sold their unit for twice what I paid! You are sure the person she’s talking to on the street is a casual acquaintance at best, if not a total stranger. You feel mildly uncomfortable thinking of an apartment as a unit. You tend not to think of your home as a unit. You are fairly sure that Paulie does not think about things like units and property value. You are fairly sure that Paulie was born in that house and will die in that house. Or near it. You are fairly sure you will leave when it’s no longer cheap, which will be soon, and that more Jennies will follow. You don’t know if this is good or bad.
You and Paulie acknowledge that you have seen one another on more than one occasion with nods, the kind where your head goes up and back, where you lead with your chin. Once, he held your door when you found a sweet chair in the alley. After the burglary, you ask a few neighbors, including Paulie, if they happened to see anything. Paulie says no, but to let him know if you see anything again. I know some people, he says. You have a lot of thoughts about what this means. You secretly enjoy the idea that you know someone who knows some people who might do something very very bad on your behalf, even though you’d never ask. You are sure that Paulie does know some people. When something happens in the hood, Paulie is on the scene. You have seen him at the site of more than one car accident, looking on. You have even seen him on the local news, at the site of a car accident. You have seen him when the deli burned down and when the stabbing couple got taken away.
You try to avoid Jennie’s side of the street, but she’s seen you in the deli and you meet up in the cheese section at Whole Foods. You’re carrying a handbasket containing a box of crackers and a wedge of Brie to bring to a potluck. Jennie has a cartful of everything and anything and when she sees you she greets you like an old friend and says Can you believe these prices OMG I’m totally going to max out my card hey I’m having a sample sale you should totally come here’s a flyer. You enjoy the idea of discount designer clothes, but feel no more comfortable about having Jennie on your side than you do about Paulie.
Little Little Paulie, about three when you finally move, shows early signs of carrying on the Pagano family legacy of loudness. He drives his Playskool car with one hand on the top of the wheel and the other hanging out of the window. He looks worried, serious, almost exactly like his dad, except cute. But so far, you haven’t heard him make a sound.