after wives, daughters, or girlfriends. I have never seen the SS Larry. Even the man who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima named the plane after his mother, Enola Gay:
“Hi Mom, I just dropped the A-bomb on Japan and killed eighty thousand people, and I named the plane after you!”
“Oh son, thank you, I can’t wait to call Ida, she’s always bragging about her Sidney.”
And men talk to their cars, just like they’re women—“Come on girl, turn over baby, turn over.” Men treat their cars like women: put a lot of miles on them, and eventually they trade them in for newer models.
Toward the end of Nellie’s life with us, she suffered from post-ignition syndrome or PIS, as Emily Dickinson called it. That meant you would turn off the ignition, and poor Nellie would sputter and spew for a few minutes afterward. It sounded like Nellie was an old woman getting in the last words in an argument:
“No, it’s you. It’s you. Not me. It’s you. It’s you. It’s you. Not me. It’s you. Not me. Not me. It’s you. It’s you. Not me. It’s you. It’s you. It’s you. Not me. It’s you. Not me. Not me. It’s you. Not me. Not me. Fuck you!”
So finally we have the new car, with its intoxicating “new car smell,” which smells exactly like . . . a new car. We took it out for a ride to celebrate at our favorite Chinese restaurant in Long Beach—because it was the only Chinese restaurant in Long Beach—a place on Park Avenue that we loved, a place called Wing Loo.
We were sitting in the front booth, the picture window behind us, and my dad was in a giddy mood. He had a couple of vodka gimlets, which is vodka, with just a splash of gimlet in it. And every time Mr. Loo would go by, Dad would giggle and say, “What’s new, Loo?” And the gray-on-gray Plymouth Belvedere was outside, gleaming under the streetlight, as best a gray-on-gray Plymouth Belvedere can. We were having the time of our lives. In other words, a perfect time for something to go wrong.
Big John Ormento was one of the local Mafiosos in Long Beach. There were a number of reputed gangsters living there. In fact in the book of The Godfather, Vito Corleone and family lived in Long Beach. Big John was scary, our Luca Brasi. While we were eating our egg rolls, and drinking our drinks with the little umbrellas in them, we had no idea that Big John Ormento was drunk driving his new car, a 1957, anti-Semitic Lincoln Continental. And he came roaring up Park Avenue, swerved and slammed into the back of the Belvedere, which then slammed into the back of the car in front of it, reducing our new car to a 1957 gray-on-gray Plymouth Belv! The crash was tremendous. We turned around so fast lo mein flew out of our mouths hitting and sticking to the window.
Big John staggered out of his car, surveyed the damage, shook his head a few times and started to laugh.
“Oh my God, it’s Big John,” Mom gasped.
“I’m going out there,” said Dad as he started to push his way out of the black leather booth.
“Don’t, Jack, what if he has a gun?” Dad ordered another gimlet.
Ormento ran to his car and took off.
Ten minutes later, Officer Miller was questioning my father. “Did you see who did this, Mr. Crystal?”
Dad never hesitated. “No, we heard the crash, and by the time we got out here, they were gone.”
Mom looked at Dad, confused a bit, but knowing he probably did the right thing. Joel and Rip and I were dying to tell, but “dying” being the operative word here, we said nothing.
“Some people,” the cop muttered. “Must have been some kid going too fast.”
“Yeah,” said Pop. “These kids today . . .”
It was a Sunday night, and Dad’s service station, “Stan’s,” was closing early. Stan told Dad he didn’t have any room for the car in the shop, but he would tow it to our house and pick it up in the morning.
The twisted piece of metal sat in front of our house, at 549 East Park in Long Beach, Long Island. A sleepy beach town of approximately ten thousand people, which nodded off in the winter and woke up in July to three times as many enjoying a beautiful summer at the sea, Long Beach was surrounded by water. The bay (Reynold’s Channel) on one side of