Won't You Love Me?

CHAPTER SIX

Name: Dean Martin

Year: 1936

Age: 19

As I head slowly up the porch to the front door, feet aching something awful, an indistinguishable din of voices and laughs makes my heart sink. Damn it. After a whole long day of dealing, of course everyone has to be here for dinner.

After taking a deep breath and squaring my shoulders, I open the door to everyone bustling throughout the living room, every adult with a wine glass in hand, and then some. I cross the room with my head slightly down, taking long, but relaxed strides. I hope no one notices me. I just want to go to bed.

"Dino!" Damn it.

"Hey, Dino! Where've ya been?!" I turn around, a smile plastered on my face, to the warm embraces of aunts and uncles.

"Workin'." I say shortly, abruptly aware of the fact that my working at the Rex won't be too well received.

"Oh, really? Where?"

"The Rex." Muttered epithets in Italian and English alike, and disapproving glances follow, and I want to go upstairs. Not that I care too much what they think, I'm just tired, and don't want to deal with family. Mom's talking behind me with some of her sisters, who say, "Your son's gonna be a gangster. He's gonna die in the electric chair." I remember talking to mom and dad just the other day, explaining to them I don't gamble, and just work. I tried to explain it using The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo—"Remember the guy with the stick? He wore the nice suit, the tie. He didn't gamble, he just worked. Well, that's me."

Finally I hear mom's response: "You're crazy. My son's gonna be a star." I smile to myself. I knew mom believed in me. She always has. She's the only one.

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Name: Dino Crocetti

Year: 1940

Age: 23

Dino, why are you a singer? Why don't you just work at the steel mills? That's a dependable job, you can support a family that way. The questions harass me. They won't leave me alone. It seems I hear it from everyone I know.

My answer is always the same: "I dunno, I just like to sing." But that one sunny afternoon coming home from school always leaps to the front of my mind. I don't know how old I was, probably ten or eleven, and I was leaping up the front steps to the house when footsteps echoed throughout the air. I turned around, curious, and saw dozens of men trudging through the streets, coming back from the steel mills.

I remember watching as they came closer, expressionless faces dark with soot and grease, lunch pails swinging from tired, tired arms. Their only dignity was the suit jacket each worker wore—despite how dirty and ragged it had become. Nowadays it seemed like even the homeless were dressed nicely. But the worst part as they marched past me wasn't the dirt, wasn't the clothing, wasn't even their slow, labored steps and hunched over backs. It was their eyes.

Seemingly without exception they would gaze at me for a second with heavy-lidded, unseeing eyes haunted by something unspeakable, tired beyond their years—eyes in which the spark of life- the spark of dreams- has been extinguished.

I'm never going to work there, I vowed to myself that day. I won't let them take away my life. That's not living. That's surviving—barely.