Read Online Take the Cannoli by Sarah Vowell - Free Book Online Page B

as seen through the prism of fandom and hometown pride. Shirak twice ran for mayor of Hoboken and lost. How can you not vote for a guy who, when he worked in New York in his twenties, would tell people, “I’m from Hoboken, home of Frank Sinatra”?
    Shirak’s narrative swerves from his family’s history in Hoboken to that of the Sinatras, from Shirak’s political campaigns to his desperateattempts to present Frank Sinatra with the tribute song he wrote with his friends. The song, “A Time That Was,” tells the story of Frank’s Hoboken youth. A tape comes free when you purchase Our Way at Lepore’s Home Made Chocolates.
    A time that was? Was what? According to the saccharine lyrics, the past was simpler, full of flags, parades, and familial love. Once upon a time, an ambitious lad walked among them. The remarkable thing about “A Time That Was” isn’t so much the lyrics (“He walked the streets in a young boy’s dream, trying to make it on his own”) or the old-fashioned melody, which begs for string accompaniment. What’s striking is Shirak’s need for Sinatra to hear it. Shirak’s mantra is a phrase he overheard once: “Nobody gets to Sinatra, nobody.” There have been a few touching near misses, duly recorded in the book. Shirak and Lepore go to a Sinatra concert at the Sands in Atlantic City, serendipitously finding themselves in the restaurant where Frank is having his preshow meal. Of course, when Shirak approaches his idol, bodyguards whisk Sinatra away. The two Hobokenites still love the show, but it must hurt a little when their hometown hero closes with—what else?—“New York, New York.”
    Sinatra eventually hears the song. But with Shirak’s luck, it’s only after his book has gone to press. Which is why the book’s denouement is Shirak’s introduction to his cassette: He reads aloud the letter he received from Sinatra that says, “What a nice tribute.”
    The most stunning item in Shirak’s pages is a photograph he found in his parents’ basement. It is such a perfectly symbolic image, youcan hardly believe it exists as a physical object. It pictures a young, frail Frank Sinatra sitting cross-legged on the boardwalk in Hoboken, looking across the Hudson at Manhattan. The boy’s gaunt face wears a mask of resolve. He leans forward, but just slightly, as if he is on the verge of standing up, as if his gangly arms and legs are willing themselves to that place where his heart already is. It is difficult, after you see that haunting portrait, to imagine the young Frank Sinatra as anything other than Gatsby staring at the green light at the end of the pier.
    You forget that there are still folks in this town who knew Sinatra as a young man (a very well-dressed young man, of course, but still resolutely one of them). Leo DiTerlizzo, of Leo’s Grandevous, is such a person. Walking into his bar at Second and Grand on a Saturday night is like stepping into a fan letter. The walls of this comfortable, broken-in room are covered with dozens of framed images of Frank, including an especially aw-shucks shot of the singer holding a puppy, and an unintentionally grotesque green painting of him which lords over a jukebox dominated by his CDs. Leo is the owner, the bartender, and a boyhood friend of Frank’s. He tells me that the man himself has sat at this bar on two occasions, that he has visited Leo’s home upstairs, and that Leo just spoke to him by telephone two weeks earlier and that Frank’s feeling fine. Leo is a lovely, soft-spoken man who never stops moving behind the bar, filling drinks and joking with the waitresses, shuffling around to his old friend’s voice.
    Unfortunately, Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville” was on when I came inside, but a few quarters later I got my faves, like “That’s Life” and “I Get a Kick out of You”