A Dream of Joe Peschi and Kenny Eto
A bullet handloaded with old gunpowder
zipped around Kenny Eto’s head between
skin and skull like a tiny Matchbox Trans-am.
He walked from the ER with two band-aids,
front and back, then testified just like they thought
he would even though he wasn’t going to at first.
Kenny Eto left Chicago with two little pock marks
and died peacefully in Japan under another name, leaving
me with the detritus for a dream about Joe Pesci.
The Siamese triplets I saw were simply three Joe Peschis
together in one sharkskin suit with six lapels. The jacket
looked cheap and they all looked a little too thin, too tall.
The silent movie makeup of mobster scowls differentiated the
three heads but they were really him. He wanted to know
where to stand and who had the old lady candies he liked.
He was the real one who, way back, managed that New Jersey
restaurant when he got the call for Raging Bull and thought it
a prank and the guys were fucking with him for his aspirations.
Hi ex-wife got killed by her stuntman second husband as reported
on Dateline but his divorce was amicable. He got killed slow in
the cornfield, but in the basement the plastic was already laid out.
And he remembered seven kinds of fish every Christmas Eve
in grandma’s basement with the older cousins too big to play
and the uncles who hid in the garage until the food was done.
All of it was fried and they would smell like burnt oil and baccala
for days. He remembered his two aunts who surgically picked
all the cashews from the holiday nut trays with sharp nails.
They were really him, peaceful on set beneath all the make-up and
each happy with the miracle of having brothers to watch the uncles
sneaking into the Tupperware of pigs’ ears before dinner,
washing down jelly and flesh with homemade wine. They could
witness, with disgust and admiration, the forbidden acts in which
adults find pleasure. And he would have known more then.
Zak Mucha, LCSW, is a psychoanalyst and president of the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis. He spent seven years working as the supervisor of an Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) program, providing 24/7 services to persons suffering from severe psychosis, substance abuse issues, and homelessness. He is the author of Swimming to the Horizon: Crack, Psychosis, and Street-Corner Social Work as well as two collections of poetry.
