around and chase girls. So my day-to-day was spent mostly with some
genial gentlemen from an Italian Fraternal Organization. They helpfully
told me where to buy my meat and poultry and how to meet the folks
who would be supplying my linen, bread, paper goods and so on. I had a
lot of meetings in cars.
"The bread guy is here," I'd be told, and a late-model Buick would pull
up out front. An old guy in a mashed-down golf cap would beckon me
from the driver's seat and then get out of the car. The older guy in the
passenger seat would slide over, indicating he wanted me to get in, sit
next to him and talk. We'd sit there in the idling car, talking cryptically
about bread, before he brought me around to the trunk to examine some
product. It was a strange business.
Yet some things were off-limits. Trash removal, I found, was a
mysteriously pre-arranged division of labor. When I called around for
price quotes, told them who I was calling for, I was repeatedly quoted
prices far exceeding the national debt—until I called the company I'd
obviously been intended to do business with. "Oh yeah, Billy"s!' said the
voice on the phone, "I was waiting for youse to call!" and quoted me a
very reasonable price. I rang up a meat company, inquiring if they'd care
to sell me tens of thousands of dollars of burger patties a year, and they
gave me a flat "No!" They wouldn't even quote me prices. I was confused
by this until years later, when I read a Paul Castellano biography called
Boss of Bosses, and recognized the name of the meat company as a
business operated by another family.
And there was the Chicken Guy, who also met me in a car, and showed
me samples in a trunk. When I introduced him to my boss, the old man
bitched about the price, telling the Chicken Guy, in his blood-smeared
white butcher's coat, that the price was too high, that he could "just fly to
fucking Virginia, buy the stuff direct," and "Do you know who I'm with
any way?!"