I recently read the novel The Price You Pay, by Jim Fusilli. I knew of him through his music writing for The Wall Street Journal but I hadn't read any of the novels he's written since 2001's Closing Time. I've now corrected that with his latest novel.
It tells the story of Mickey Wright Jr., part-time business major at St. Peter's College in Jersey City, N.J., sleep-deprived worker at an Italian bakery and a liquor store, and target of his ill-tempered and violent father, a widower and cop with the Jersey City PD. Early in the book, his father forces Mickey to get a "real job" working at a trucking company in Union City with the Teamsters, starting in the office as a "router-typist."
But Mickey soon learns that the office job is just the start of a position that involves much, much more. The Price You Pay has been described as a coming-of-age story, a thriller, and a crime novel, and it brings all those elements. What made it memorable for me is Fusilli's total grasp of the time and the blue-collar union/mob milieu that's utterly foreign to me. But not to Fusilli; according to Wikipedia, "While in college, Fusilli joined the Teamsters Local 560 as a clerk at Smith Transport, headquartered in Hoboken." And that first-hand experience shines through in the details of work at a transport company, along with descriptions of Jersey City and adjacent towns. He shows the mean streets with no romantic coloring.
Fusilli grabs readers by the elbow and serves as a Hudson County Dante escorting us as Mickey Wright struggles against his seemingly unstoppable descent through the circles of deceit, larceny, political corruption, family violence and murder. He does so with prose that always aims to describe and move the story along, without navel-gazing. This passage about the approach to his new employer, Impact Trucking, captures Fusilli's pitiless eye (and olfactory abilities):
Drawing near on his drive from the Heights, Micky was jostled by potholes, then greeted by the odor of gasoline and motor oil and the sound of grinding gears and barking men. He watched as incoming trucks, their steel-gray bodies sullied by grime, zipped in backwards to their stations while the semis required pinpoint dance-like maneuvers to precisely position them for loading.
The corrupting process started early, with Mickey recruited to lie to wives and others calling about drivers. Here's how it goes:
One late afternoon, Joey Baldessaro Jr., a Jersey City-based driver, pulled Mickey aside. He said, "Listen, if my wife calls, you tell her I ain't in yet."
Baldessaro was in his early 30s; like most of the drivers, he was fit and rough around the edges, but had had a kind of charm and an easy laugh. His father was a driver too; Joey Sr. gave his son his good looks but was taciturn and often abrupt. It was said both men had quick tempers.
"What?" Joey Jr. said.
"I'm not comfortable with that," Mickey told him.
"Yeah, well," Joey Jr. said. "Pretend."
Soon, many of the Jersey City-based drivers counted on him for cover. "He's not in yet, Mrs. Flannery," Mickey said when she called looking for her husband, though Flannery dumped his load three hours ago. He lied to Tommy Malzone's daughter, telling her he wasn't sure where her father was when he knew Malzone was buying rounds and getting sloppy at Rudy's, spending cash he won when he hit the number.
Will Mickey escape the fate of a violent path? Can his toil in a bakery pay off? And what about Debbie Olsen, the young woman he meets in class and goes on a date with at the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Get your hands on The Price to Pay and find out.
