SALVATORE PANE / DO I AMUSE YOU?
You probably don’t know this, but there’s a Goodfellas convention every August in Allentown, Pennsylvania. I know because every day this summer I’ve driven thirty minutes to my office to watch Goodfellas. Then I watch it again. Then I research Goodfellas online. Then I drive home and cook a very elaborate meal from Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. When my wife gets off work and asks how my tenure portfolio’s coming along, I tell her great, awesome, bellisimo. She doesn’t know I haven’t even started. She doesn’t even know what Goodfellas is.
§
Let me tell you about my favorite scene. Most fans opt for the Copa shot. Beginning at thirty-one minutes, thirty-one seconds into the film and set against the peppy “Then He Kissed Me” by the Crystals—a minor pop group on Philles Records, a Philadelphia label that only issued twelve full albums between 1962 and ‘72—the Copa shot follows protagonist/mobster Henry Hill and his new girlfriend Karen in an unbroken three minute take as they enter the Copacabana through the backdoor. They weave through the kitchen and back channels of the club, and Henry seemingly knows everyone, slipping bus boys cash and chatting up waiters, and Karen’s reaction is the audience’s reaction: bemused glee over discovering this hidden world where rules are broken and exceptions made, where average men are treated like kings simply because of their secret knowledge. It’s an iconic sequence, and Terry Ratfoy, my colleague in what amounts for our film studies department, teaches it almost every semester, even in classes where, for one reason or another, he doesn’t show Goodfellas.
Rebellious fans who push back against the Copa shot usually select either the introductions scene at the Bamboo Lounge or the sequence at the end of the film when Henry is finally arrested. The former is similar in spirit to the Copa shot. Starting at the sixteen minute and thirty-seven second mark, the introductions scene is yet another unbroken sequence where the camera takes on Henry’s POV as he moves through the Bamboo Lounge. His voiceover introduces us to one gangster after another, and their onscreen counterparts make ironic statements like, “You staying out of trouble?” or “I took care of that thing for you.” On the 25th anniversary Blu-Ray commentary track, director Martin Scorsese says this scene is supposed to inspire nostalgia in the viewer, that the mobsters should appear like gods and that Henry, in retrospect, has now been cast out of paradise. The arrest scene, on the other hand, is a coked-out dose of ‘60s paranoia lifted straight out of Thomas Pynchon. Henry is driving all over town trying to sell guns while simultaneously prepping a drug run to Pittsburgh, making sauce and meatballs for his family, and being chased by a police copter. The scene strives for a dream-like sensibility, and actor Ray Liotta plays the entire piece like a sweaty schizoid scanning the sky for a helicopter that only exists in his mind according to his mistaken friends. It feels like nothing else in the entire movie, and even the soundtrack acknowledges this. Gone are the pop hits of the ’50s and ‘60s, replaced by the lesser known “Jump Into the Fire” by Harry Nilsson off the 1971 RCA Victor classic, Nilsson Schmilsson. Even the album cover perfectly reflects the Watergate-inspired fear and loathing of Liotta’s performance. It’s just Nilsson in a ratty bathrobe in black-and-white, pipe in hand, refrigerator in background, hair sweaty and disheveled, a distant, morose look on his face like he’s spent the last three days strung out while reading overdue conspiracy thrillers from the library. The arrest scene is pretty good is what I’m saying.
But my favorite scene begins fifty-seven minutes and six seconds in. Liotta, De Niro, and Pesci have just killed a made man and retreat to Pesci’s mother’s house. According to the clock we see in the dining room, it’s a quarter after midnight, and yet, Pesci’s mother is awake, played beautifully by Scorsese’s real-life mother—this isn’t the first time Scorsese’s committed his mother to film; she was also the subject of his 1974 documentary Italianamerican and plays yet another good-natured nonna in Casino made five years after Goodfellas—who demands they sit down for a full Italian meal. In a lesser film, this scene might be played purely for laughs. Here is the stereotypical Italian mother serving red sauce and meatballs to her grown son and pals in the middle of the night while meanwhile they have a body stashed in the trunk of Pesci’s 1961 Chevy Impala. And while this scene is funny, there’s something infinitely comforting about the way Catherine Scorsese implores Pesci to settle down with a nice woman while simultaneously pushing all three men to mangia, mangia, mangia. Maybe this sincerity lands because it’s actually Martin Scorsese’s mother, and when Catherine shows De Niro this absurd portrait she’s produced of a row boat with two dogs and an old man, your heart just breaks for her. She doesn’t know that Pesci will soon be executed for the murder he just orchestrated. She doesn’t know that this moment signals the end of her family. It’s beautiful. It’s personally meaningful. And I rewind it again and again and again in the darkness of my office. I rewind it again and again and again until the scene is reflected on my face, the stretched-out fuzzy mask of Catherine Scorsese staring lovingly at her fictional son, her real-life offspring watching from nearby, hidden as always behind the complicated machinery of the camera.
§
It’s the end of August. I know this because suddenly the office is busy again. The English department shares a basement with Theology in ESCH, a rundown building on the southern end of campus. It’s usually empty in the summer minus the Chairs, admin, and me, but now I run into random faculty printing their syllabi while making bold proclamations about how this year will be different, that this year they’ll finish their book, that this year they won’t fall behind on grading within the first month of the semester. None of our offices have windows, so if you turn out the lights and shut the door, it’s really the perfect environment for watching Goodfellas on an otherwise unimpressive laptop. Another perk of watching from my office is that I have unfettered access to JSTOR, the biggest academic database in my field. Did you know that if you search for Goodfellas there are over 500 articles and book chapters on JSTOR? My favorite is “Where Did the Goodfellas Learn to Cook? Gender, Labor, and the Italian American Experience” by Laura E. Ruberto in the summer 2003 issue of Italian Americana—pages 164-176. The essay problematizes the prison scene midway through the film where Liotta and the other captured mobsters make red sauce in prison, including an almost pornographic close-up of Paul Sorvino slicing garlic with a razor blade. I admire this essay, and I admire Ruberto, a tenured professor at Berkeley City College, and I try not to think about the connections between this essay and my own culinary experiments boosted by shortcuts I purchase at the Pasta and Market on 54th street.
The Chair knocks on the door and opens it before I can reply. “Knock, knock,” she says through gritted teeth.
The Chair is Dr. Maya Wu. She does not want to be Chair and has made this very well known. But we’re a small department—only six of us left—and after the previous Chair was struck down by stroke, Wu was tapped because she’s the only one left with tenure. She immediately announced she would go on the job market in retaliation, and I assume she wants to be a Dean somewhere far away from Indiana. “How’s the tenure portfolio coming along?” she asks.
I flash two thumbs up.
“Great. Well, let me know if you want a letter of recommendation for the job market or anything. We probably won’t be applying for the same jobs I hope.”
I stare at Dr. Maya Wu. No one from the English department has earned tenure since I arrived six years ago. One year into the job, Wu staged a vague department rebellion against Business and Education—something about their request to decrease the core maybe; I don’t know, I dozed off during the meeting—and a few months later the Chair of Education became the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and installed the Chair of Business as her Associate Dean. They harbored grudges and made it abundantly clear one of their goals was to turn our university into a technical school with no humanities core classes. That means the English department is redundant. That means I’m fucked no matter how much I publish, no matter how well I teach, that I should be applying to the three open jobs in my field nationwide, located in exciting places like Kentucky, Mississippi, and the Florida swamplands.
“The handbook says I’m supposed to check in and ask if you’re ready to submit your tenure portfolio,” Maya says. “Are you ready to submit your tenure portfolio next week?”
I say yes and wish I could see her face when the department discovers I’ve uploaded absolutely nothing. “Great seeing you,” I say while shutting my door.
I return to my browser and stare longingly at the website for Allentown’s GoodfellasCon, a two-day affair that’s already underway. There’s a panel on “the real story” behind the Lufthansa Heist—the MacGuffin that steers the plot in the film’s final third—and Welker White, the actress who plays Henry’s Pittsburgh drug courier—is scheduled to sign autographs. The only problem is the convention’s in New Jersey, and this is Indianapolis, and no matter how many times I’ve emailed the event staff at the Indiana Convention Center asking them to bring a Goodfellas convention to our humble city, I never get a reply. I decide to write them another email just in case—how can they justify hosting GenCon, an actual board game convention, over something Goodfellas-related—but I’m interrupted halfway through by yet another knock at my door. I say, “Come in,” but have half a mind to tell Maya how I really feel when Dr. Billy S. Witherspoon appears instead. The Chair of Theology has always looked to me like a retirement age Captain America. Chiseled jaw, majestically etched face, slightly graying hair, and—the coup de grâce—an actual leather jacket. I rise to shake his hand, and Dr. Billy has the audacity to ask if I want to accompany him to Nicky Blaine’s Cocktail Lounge, downtown Indianapolis’ finest cigar bar.
“Yes,” I say. “Absolutely. I can’t wait.”
§
I enjoy Nicky Blaine’s Cocktail Lounge because it reminds me of the bars in Goodfellas. You have to descend this long flight of stairs just to enter, and everything is red and smoky, framed portraits of JFK and Lincoln hanging next to each other in back. Something about being underground makes me feel hidden and borderline dangerous, and the leather couches are all tacky and gauche, reminders of my Italian grandmother’s home back in Scranton. Like always, Dr. Billy orders us both an Old Fashioned and a Gurkha Grand Reserve Churchill—a cognac infused cigar I’ve really grown to admire over the past few months. Dr. Billy teaches Lutheran theology to our confused undergraduates hailing from the cornfields of Indiana and, in a previous life, served as military chaplain in a semi-famous marine corp that did something vaguely heroic during the Vietnam War, but I can never remember exactly what. CBS made a TV movie about their exploits in 1993, and Dr. Billy showed it to me during the lone time he invited me and my wife for steaks and potatoes in his home out in the suburbs. I really like Dr. Billy. I know I shouldn’t, that he routinely pens articles against abortion and co-ed students living together and a million other freedoms I vehemently believe in, but Dr. Billy is so winning and charismatic that you can’t help but treat him like the coolest brother you never had. He’s my only friend on campus. He’s the only one who knows about my recent Goodfellas obsession and about my parents.
Dr. Billy lights our cigars, leans back in his leather sofa, and takes a long, relaxing puff. “Ah,” he literally says, “now this is just a tiny bit of fantastic, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Dr. Billy.”
“‘Yes’ is right indeed!”
“Dr. Billy,” I say, “did you know Goodfellas has an unofficial sequel?”
He leans forward, eyebrows arching. “Is that right?”
“Goodfellas is based on Wiseguy, a book by Nicholas Pileggi, who was married to Nora Ephron. Well, Nora wrote the script for My Blue Heaven, released one month prior to Goodfellas, which is based on Henry Hill’s time in the Witness Protection Program. Hill’s name is changed to Vinnie Antonelli in My Blue Heaven so people wouldn’t get confused.”
Dr. Billy considers this for a long time. “Is it any good?”
I shake my head vigorously. “No. It’s supposed to be a comedy. Steve Martin is playing Vinnie, and he’s doing this terrible and vaguely racist impression of an Italian gangster. Rick Moranis stars in it too. Joan Cusack’s the wife.” I reach into my messenger bag. “I actually have the DVD with me if you want to watch it right now. I ordered it from the library. We can watch it on my laptop if you want.”
Dr. Billy taps the ash from his cigar and gives me an extremely mischievous look. “No, I think I’m all right for right now, son. Maybe later though. I actually wanted to talk to you about something.” He unlatches his brief case and retrieves his earmarked Bible before setting it on the table between us. “I was hoping you gave some thought to my offer.”
I pick up the Bible and thumb through it. These bi-weekly bull sessions at Nicky Blaine’s Cocktail Lounge started six months ago after my parents died. Before that, Dr. Billy was cordial to me in the office but never went out of his way to invite me out. After news spread throughout the basement he appeared in my office one snowy afternoon with marked-up copies of my meager publications, lackluster essays attempting to re-orient the work of late 20th century American realists—Carver, Dubus, Mason, Pancake—as postmodern anti-fables through a Deluze and Guattari anti-capitalist lens. My work is derivative and forced—I knew this even in graduate school but was determined to make good and become a scholar—and Dr. Billy suffered through a few questions about my essays during those initial cigars before pivoting into my family background and my parents’ deaths. He assured me again and again that he’d been a military chaplain and knew how to council young men. The truth was I wanted to go into therapy but was ashamed to admit this to my wife. She didn’t believe in it, and, instead, steered me to one of her co-workers at IU Health who put me on 40 milligrams of Propranolol, a remedy for “acute anxiety” that did absolutely nothing. So, that first afternoon smoking cigars with Dr. Billy, I told him everything—about growing up Italian in rundown Scranton, how I escaped my origins to earn a PhD in 20th century literature despite the fact that neither of my parents even went to college, how they died in a car crash on the way to visit us in Indiana because I’d been too cheap, too stupid, too much of a little shit to pay for their flights. I talked and I talked and I talked and, at the end, Dr. Billy asked me if I’d pray with him. I never did—who knew where it might end and if Dr. Billy would force me at gunpoint to become a deacon—but I was tired of disappointing him, my only friend in the whole Midwest.
“Your offer to pray together?” I ask to make sure we’re on the same page.
He winks. “You got it, big fellah.”
I take a long pull from my Old Fashioned.
“It won’t hurt anybody,” he says. “Just one little prayer. I bet it’ll probably make you feel better too. More so than watching Goodfellas, am I right? Har har!”
I say nothing, and Dr. Billy takes this as consent. He puts my hands into his own, bows his head, and closes his eyes. It feels weird to have a grown adult man touch me, and I want to tell him this, but I don’t know how, and I can’t keep my eyes closed, so I stare at the picture of JFK. The assassinated president is petting a very large dog.
“Oh, lord,” Dr. Billy says, “thank you for this wonderful bounty you’ve set up for us today. These fine cigars and two beautiful Old Fashioneds. And thank you for friendship and for putting me on the path to meeting this fine young man right here in good ol’ Nicky Blaine’s. We’d like to pray for the souls of his parents, two charming Italians from Scranton, Pennsylvania.”
I stop listening when he pronounces it eye-talians. I feel very far away and finally decide to close my eyes and try this thing I do when I can’t fall asleep. I play a little movie in my head and attempt to recreate it shot for shot. I see Ray Liotta’s face that could be my father’s or cousin’s or uncle’s, and I hear him say, “For as long as I can remember I wanted to be a gangster,” and I feel something resembling comfort.
§
I’m home by three o’ clock, thank god, because this is just barely enough time to make the sauce and the gnocchi and the meatballs. I open the Marcella Hazan on the dining room table and stream the Goodfellas soundtrack from my phone to the Bluetooth. Making this food, the Italian food I never made growing up, is the closest I come to feeling like I still have family. I start with the sauce. Cut up the onions, sauté them in olive oil, then, when they’re almost translucent, I toss in the garlic and the fresh parsley. I’ve experimented with all kinds of tomatoes—organic Romas from the co-op, ruby red ‘matoes from the farmer’s market, cans of San Marzanos imported straight from Italy—and it’s the latter that works best. I buy them in bulk from the Pasta and Market and dump them in right before the garlic browns, breaking them up with my wooden spoon. I lower the heat, cheat a little with some tomato paste and maybe a slug of red wine depending on what we have on hand, then it’s onto the gnocchi, the boiling of potatoes, the mashing, the whisking off eggs and flour. A little fork to make indentations so the sauce will actually adhere to the gnocchi—nothing is more offensive to me than gnocchi without indentations. I fill up two baking trays, slide them into the refrigerator, and next are the meatballs and their two critical junctures: 1) lay a piece of white bread into the frying pan on low heat with half-a-cup of milk. Cook until it’s absorbed the milk and mash in your mixing bowl with the ground meat and egg and pepper and salt. And 2) after rolling your meatballs, coat them in bread crumbs. This locks in the moisture. I cook and cook and cook and I’m sweating like a triathlete, but for once I’m actually happy. The thing about Italian food is that it’s not about food. The food is a conduit. The food is a time machine. The food brings everyone back albeit momentarily. The food is the gesture of a foolish heart. The food proves that you’re willing to go through the extra trouble of making everything from scratch when you could just buy pre-packaged and jars—sort of what Karen means in Goodfellas when she says, “I was even proud that I had the kind of husband who was willing to go out and risk his neck just to get us the little extras.” I make the sauce and gnocchi and meatballs and feel briefly returned to that warm little kitchen on Sunday afternoons, when I’d come in from baseball around the corner and find my parents happily stirring a pot of sauce, a room that still feels like the center of love in this strange metallic world. I cook and feel righted.
Angelina arrives at seven, like always. She removes her orthopedic sneakers in the doorway, smells the food, and says, “Red sauce again?” And I say nothing because of course it’s red sauce again. Red sauce only smells like red sauce, and we’re both Italian, so she should know. Angelina’s a nurse at IU Health, and we’ve been married for three years. I met her in Pittsburgh when she was a senior and I was a graduate student teaching Seminar in Composition to drowsy freshmen. We had an easy back-and-forth, light, jokey conversations. There was never a good reason for us to break up, so when I was offered the Indy job and Angelina said she’d only move with a man who proposed, it all made a certain kind of sense. Now, I glance out at her from the kitchen and can see there were probably better, alternative paths for both of us. I haven’t told her about Goodfellas, and I haven’t told her about my empty tenure dossier. She knows that if I’m denied tenure, I will lose my job and we will have to move. She knows, and I know, and we do not speak of this. I wonder if she also is imagining a future where we are finally brave enough to admit all our buried truths.
Angelina enters the kitchen in her nurse’s uniform and pushes against me, and I brush the hair from her forehead and kiss the top of her head. I remember Paulie in Goodfellas, when he tells Henry he has to go back to his wife, that he “will straighten this thing out. I know just what to say to her. I’m going to tell her you’re going to go back to her and everything’s going to be just how it was when you were first married. There’s going to be romances, and it’s going to be beautiful.” Henry’s face is completely unbelieving, and I get it, understand it, even though I don’t want to, even though I know how awful I am, the kind of man who would ask his parents to drive ten hours to save a few hundred bucks.
“I made gnocchi,” I say.
“I can see that,” she says.
§
The next morning, I drive to work. I listen to Goodfellas Minute on the way. It’s a podcast where each episode takes an extended look at a single minute in Goodfellas. The episodes are in chorological order and there are 146 episodes in all, one for each minute of the film. Every episode is around forty minutes long, and I’ve made my way through the first ninety-six, landing me in the Christmas party following the Lufthansa Heist, the moment when everything starts to fall apart for our anti-heroes. I’m so enthralled by the episode that, at first, I don’t even realize I’ve missed my exit for the university. By the time I do, I’m in between exits and decide to drive just a little bit more so I can extend my time with this particular episode. What does it matter anyway? No one’s keeping track of my hours at work, and it’s not like I’m actually doing anything. I’m just watching Goodfellas and waiting for Dr. Billy to invite me out for cigars. So, I listen and sail past the next exit, then the next and the next. When the episode ends, I think, ok, big fellah, this is it. Fun romp. But now it’s time to turn around and head to work. But cellphones are a kind of magic and without me even having to do anything, it sucks the next episode out of the sky, and then it’s playing on my stereo. Episode ninety-seven about minute ninety-seven, a continuation of that wonderful Christmas scene. Ok, I think. “Ok,” I say to no one. Another episode and a nice, head-clearing drive out in the country.
But then a funny thing happens when episode ninety-seven ends. I realize I’m on I-70, the same road my parents died on. My father was always an aggressive driver and would routinely terrify me and my mother on the curving two-lane highway that led out of Scranton into the sprawling capitalism of Dickson City. I should have known that removing him from the small and familiar and setting him loose on a cross-country superhighway would end in disaster, but, like always, I was selfish. They died outside South Vienna, Ohio, a tiny town between Dayton and Columbus. I’d never been there before, had refused the pictures, but understood that my dad had been driving in the blind spot of a mac truck for miles, and the driver forgot they were there, merged into the passing lane, and sent my parents’ ancient Oldsmobile careening into the concrete divider where they were killed on impact. I’ve been driving for almost ninety minutes and realize South Vienna is only forty-five minutes away, just enough for episode ninety-eight of Goodfellas Minute! What the hell, I think! Let’s see where my parents died!
So, here comes South Vienna, and it’s just an absolute nothing, nada, zilch. Flat and green like the rest of this particular stretch of the Midwest, and then a McDonald’s rolls into view, and I’m so angry my parents were killed near a McDonald’s that I floor the gas, and now I’m driving 80, 90, 100 miles per hour, and I remember Joe Pesci in the scene where he drunkenly shoots Spider’s foot and yells, “The Oklahoma Kid! That’s me! I’m the Oklahoma Kid, you fucking varmint! Dance! Dance, you motherfucker!” and then I become very loud and shout, “The Oklahoma Kid! That’s me! I’m the Oklahoma Kid, you fucking varmint! Dance! Dance, you motherfucker!” and then I repeat it and repeat it and I keep driving and I don’t stop and I just keep going until I see the flat earth turn into mountains.
§
The Allentown Hilton is smaller than I imagined. All those weeks and months picturing GoodfellasCon, and it’s just a few blocked-off rooms for panels and a large, open space where dealers sell memorabilia. I’m grateful I can buy tickets at the door, and I stupidly tell the guy in the Scorsese t-shit who hands me a con lanyard that I drove all the way from Indiana to be here. “It just happened,” I say through a smile. “I was on my way to work, and then ten hours later here I am!” He looks me up and down and says, “Big whoop. I flew from Alaska.” So I rebound and say, “You’re really funny. You know that? The way you tell the story. The way you talk,” and it’s not a perfect line reading from the film, but he gets it, smiles, and says, “Have a ball, amigo!”
I wander the convention floor and look at Goodfellas action figures and signed scripts and t-shirts and even a briefcase like Dr. Billy’s except this one has Ray Liotta’s cackling face painted on the side. Everyone here looks like they could be my cousin. We’re all Italian and this feels to me like the worst reunion in the world. I do a lap, and I’m about to hightail it back to my Nissan when I recognize something on a vendor’s table. It’s a replica of Catherine Scorsese’s painting in the midnight pasta scene—a rowboat carrying two dogs and a fisherman. I run my hands up and down the cheap frame and ask the vendor how much and he tells me five hundred and I know that’s insane but I reach for my wallet and hand him my credit card. So now I’m carrying this enormous painting like a big dumb idiot and that’s when I see the sign for Welker White, the actress who played Lois. I’d almost forgotten! I follow the signs out of the convention hall and into a tiny blocked-off room with Welker White chatting up her handler behind a table. There’s no line to speak of, and I can barely believe my luck.
In the film, Welker White’s Lois is a bit part. But she appears in the famous arrest scene so she’s well remembered by fans. Now, she’s in her fifties wearing a smart pant suit, her platinum hair cropped short, big earrings bookending her face. In front of her is a tower of glossies, and I can’t believe it but she reminds me of my mother, a woman like Catherine Scorsese who would implore me to mangia, mangia even if it was midnight and I’d just eaten a six-course meal. I’m trembling beneath the weight of this replica of Catherine’s painting, and I approach Welker White, and she says hello, and I say hello, and then I stupidly tell her that Goodfellas is my favorite movie ever.
“Oh, really?” Welker White says. “Why?”
I shift under the weight of the painting. I can barely believe it, but no one has ever asked me this before. At first, I try to intellectualize it and problematize it like Dr. Laura E. Ruberto in “Where Did the Goodfellas Learn to Cook?” or even how I try with Carver or Dubus or Mason or Pancake. I want to say something witty and intelligent about how Goodfellas mythologizes the desire of the common man to stand outside of the regular rules and regulations of society, making it an unwitting Marxist critique of capitalism. But then I decide to be honest with myself. What do I like about it? I stare at Welker White for a very long time, her face transitioning from good-natured cheer to just a whiff of tension, fear that maybe there’s something wrong with me. I reach out to shake her hand, but she just looks at me and repeats her question. Again, I don’t reply, so her middle-aged handler says, “Sir. Sir. Did you hear Ms. White? Are you ok?”
I look at him, then back at Welker White. I smile as wide as I can. I tell them, “I like Goodfellas because it fills the shape of my depression,” and it’s the first honest thing I’ve said a very long time.
Salvatore Pane is the author of two novels and a book of nonfiction. His shorter work has appeared in Indiana Review, American Short Fiction, and many other venues. He is an associate professor of English at the University of St. Thomas and can be reached at www.salvatore-pane.com or @salpane on Twitter.