Next thing I knew, I was standing in the basement of Frankie Carpo's house in Bensonhurst while a bunch of made guys sat around a big table smoking cigars and Tony Anchovie asked me questions: "Do you know this is a brotherhood? A secret society?" "Yes," I answered. "In this secret society, there's one way in and there's only one way out," he said. "You come in on your feet and you go out in a coffin." I knew that. He asked if I would put the brotherhood before all other loyalties in my life. I said yes, because what else are you going to say in a situation like that? He said: "Would you kill for us?" Sure, I thought. But I said, "Yes." "What finger would you pull the trigger with?" That was a trick question because anybody stupid enough to pull the trigger with like his thumb or his pinkie was too stupid to be fooling around with guns in the first place. It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out the right answer to that question. So I showed him my trigger finger. Then he jabs it with a needle until my blood starts spurting out and somebody hands him a picture of a saint on a card, I think it was Saint Peter. Tony Anchovie smears my blood on the card and then he lights the card with his zippo and hands it to me on fire. It's not the time to say no thanks, so I take the saint and burn the shit outta my hands while Tony explains to me that I'll burn in hell if I ever break the code of the Cosa Nostra. I'm sort of transfixed by the fire and the skin peeling off my hands, but I say yes in all the right places and pretty soon the ceremony is over and I'm a made guy in the Anchovie family and nobody can whack me without permission. I'm a member of the Cosa Nostra -- Our Thing. I bought it all one thousand percent. I was a true believer, everything I looked for in life was in that oath. Life was simple then.

But things got confusing before long. I mean it was ok when Tony was still boss, but a couple years back, John Sharkie started pushing his weight around and he reached out for me and was talking to me about how Tony Anchovie was letting the Family go downhill and that maybe we should whack him. I told John that whacking the boss was against the rules, it was rule number three or four, I think. But John kept talking and he explained how ever since Frankie Pescado had got Tony Anchovie's ear about the concrete business in Piscataway that nothing had been the same. And then when Pescado got hit by a made guy in the Merluzzo family, it reflected badly on Bobby Bacalao who was still not in such good standing with the electricians' union and supposedly had a contract on him put out by the Scallopi family. I couldn't deny what John Sharkie said. He was talkin' up whacking Tony Anchovie and it doesn't take a brain surgeon to see he needed me to keep it from backfiring on him because of the whole Scaleo situation. I came around and started to see it his way. Tony Anchovie had to go down. You see what I'm saying? So we whacked him when he was going into Morte Pesci's for some lobster fra diavlo.