There was a knocking at the front door of my grandmother's Long Beach house. When my mother answered it, it sprung open and a body flew through it, did a paratrooper combat roll and a man sprung to his feet, threw open arms and with a big smile and an exaggerated wink shouted:
"Hi! I'm Louie!"
Louis Sarantopolis, or as my father called him, in the tradition of gritty, street wise New Yorkers:
"Louie the Greek."
One summer long ago, my dad met Louie at Long Beach. Louie got sent down from Connecticut to live with his uncle, play and help out a little, enjoy the summer, and stay out of trouble. Louie's uncle ran a little snack bar down by the beach on the board walk. The trouble part mostly didn't work.
My father's family spent the summers at Long Beach, then a destination for New York's privileged, which his mother was with her three story beach house. She was married to a man who some called "The Priest", but not to his face, a street wise, gritty Irish kid. He and grandma were an unlikely couple, united by a nearly fanatical devotion to the Holy Roman Catholic Church and the public school children of the city of New York.
"Father Joe down at St. Mary's of the Isle taught your dad how to box, Marques of Queensberry rules", Louie like do say, with a smile and a wink.
"Jimmy, your dad and I fought like cats and dogs all summer long."
"I was Orthodox Greek and never knew who the hell the Marques of Queensberry was and cared less."
The smile bigger and the wink harder, as he leaned his head closer to mine for emphasis.
Louie joined the Nassau County police force and my dad became a lawyer and with my mother started a small travel agency. The travel business was a struggle, but after years of fighting the airlines for the privilege of making them richer, mom and dad were finally making money. Then one night catastrophe stuck. The big office building on Hempstead Turnpike in Levittown burned down where they had the travel agency. My father was frantic. He raced over to the the building and forced his way pasted the police and climbed into the burned out hulk. The safe where they stored hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of airlines tickets and the ticket validator were gone. This meant total bankruptcy and maybe worse.
My father's frantic attempts to locate the safe went for naught. At his wits end he called up the Nassau County police chief, an acquaintance from his Long Beach days.
"Sorry, Jim, there's nothing we can do. That safe's at the bottom of the Great South Bay by now."
My father turned to Louie, who was now a detective.
"Please, Louie, I'm really desperate. Find the janitor."
"Ok, Jimmy, I'll do what I can."
A day later Louie called.
"Meet me down at this bar in Hempstead [the Long Island ghetto].
When my father arrive Louie was outside.
"Wait here, Jimmy. I'll be back in a second."
And it wasn't long before he was.
"Ok, come with me tomorrow. I have an address where we can pick up the safe at 10 am."
The next day there was the safe exactly where it was promised, unopened, tickets intact, just a little bit worse for wear.
