CHAPTER ONE

“ Have yourself a

merry little Christmas.

Let your heart be light.

From now on our troubles

will be out of sight.

Have yourself a

merry little Christmas.

Make the yuletide gay.

From now on our troubles

will be miles away…”

-Ralph Blane/Hugh Martin

FOUR WEEKS BEFORE CHRISTMAS

Neither one of them had gone to a Black Friday event in over two decades. But this time Trina and Gemma were determined to get their hands on as many of those Black Ice dolls as they could possibly take out of the store. They wanted them for their boutiques, as window displays to entice more customers to frequent their stores, but they refused to pay the premium price the manufacturer was demanding. The big box stores, who purchased in far more bulk than they ever could, had gotten those same dolls for half the price and were selling them to their customers for a steal: but only on Black Friday. As a matter of principle, Trina and Gemma refused to let the manufacturer rob them blind and wanted in on the steal.

Besides, they used to love going to Black Fridays before they married into the Gabrini family. They used to go back in the day when the stores opened their doors at midnight early Friday morning rather than the more reasonable six a.m. It was a trip down memory lane for them. They also managed to cajole their two young sons, Trina’s Carmine and Gemma’s Lucky, to tag along with them and see what their privileged asses were missing. But also as more hands to grab more dolls!

They were at the front of the huge crowd: Trina, Gemma, their two sons, and their two bodyguards their husbands insisted tag along too. Everybody, including the two guards, were ordered to grab as many of those dolls as they humanly could.

Salvatore Luciano Gabrini, Junior, called Lucky, was game. He liked a good challenge. His body had bulked up enough that he felt he could play a tackler on his school’s football team, not just the quarterback, and he could tackle anybody coming for those Black Ice dolls so easily that he could do it, as he put it, with his eyes closed.

But Carmine Gabrini, his cousin, found the entire premise absurd. The idea that people would stand in the freezing cold to run into a store at six a.m. to pick up some doll babies baffled his genius mind. “ Who does this ?” he asked rhetorically when they got there way earlier than six a.m.

But as the crowd began to swell, he saw that more people than he realized did this. But that didn’t stop his complaints. “They call them black ice dolls,” he said as he rubbed his gloves together to help keep himself warm, “but there’s no black ice features to them at all. They are so white they look like albinos. They have no melanin whatsoever. Nor any sleek features as are common to ice. What is the sense of calling them something that they clearly are not? And who would name a baby doll black ice anyway? Do they not realize the dangerousness of black ice? Who does this ?”

Lucky laughed. Trina and Gemma looked at each other and shook their heads. “I told you to leave him home,” said Gemma. “Didn’t I tell you? But would you listen to me?”

“Alright already,” Trina said. “He’s here now. And if he shuts his trap, he could be a very good asset to us. He could get his hands on a lot of those dolls. He’s little, but he’s got some big-ass hands.” Then she looked at her youngest son. “If he could only shut his trap.”

“Carmine isn’t the only one talking,” said Lucky. “My daddy said the exact same thing.” His father, Sal Gabrini, was the second most powerful mob boss in the world, second only to their uncle Mick Sinatra. But unlike Mick the Tick, Sal could outtalk even Carmine. “Daddy said where’s the black and where’s the ice, just like Carmine said, when I showed those dolls to him on the internet. Then he said why don’t we just buy up all the dolls on Amazon and call it a day.”

“You tell your daddy it’s because Amazon has a limit of one doll per account because they’re just that popular,” said Trina. “And when I asked everybody in the family to order one, they said they already did for their child or neighbor or whomever. These dolls are all the rave right now. That’s what Sal doesn’t realize.”

“What did Reno say about it?” asked Gemma. “Because I’m sure Reno, the mouth of the Vegas south , had lots to say.”

“You know it girl,” said Trina. “He started with the dolls.”

“What he said about them?”

“‘Those some ugly-ass dolls. What you wanna put them in your store window for? Better not bring them to my PaLargio.’” Reno Gabrini owned the largest hotel and casino on the Vegas Strip and had been named, more times than anybody could count, the King of Vegas. “But then he got off the dolls and lit into me.”

“He lit into you? For what? What was his complaint about you?”

“He thought I was nuts when I told him where I was going.”

Gemma smiled. “What did he say?”

“He had the nerve to ask me what my bougie ass going to Target on Black Friday for. I said boy bye! Who you calling bougie? There is absolutely nothing bougie about my black ass,” Trina added as she tightened her Russian sable pure-fur coat round her slender body and gripped even tighter her thirty-thousand-dollar Birkin bag.

“I know that’s right,” added Gemma, as she wrapped her pure-mink shawl tighter around her neck.

Carmine and Lucky looked at their beyond-bougie mothers, and then looked at the poor-to-working-class people standing in line behind them. Then they looked at each other and shook their heads.

But before they could say a word to their delusional mothers, six a.m. struck, the doors were opened, and everybody ran through so fast, and all at once, that there was no hope for most of them.

Wigs and eyeglasses were the first to go flying through the air as people were tripping over each other and falling to the floor. Trina tripped and fell. Gemma tripped and fell. And a pile of other less-agile people tripped and fell on top of them. This part of Black Friday they had forgotten. They also realized they were twenty years younger the last time they participated in such an extravaganza. Even Lucky and their bodyguards had tripped and fell.

But Carmine, who had already sized up the crowd behind them and did not run in straight ahead the way everybody else did, but he took an angular approach and was one of the first to get into the store. He kept his footing and kept running. His mother had already schooled him on where the dolls were going to be displayed, so he grabbed a shopping cart and ran in that direction. He was the first to get to the dolls too.

By the time Trina, Gemma, their bodyguards and Lucky had peeled themselves off of the floor and began running to the display, Carmine had already filled his shopping cart with more than half of the Black Ice dolls on display and was seated inside the cart waiting on his family. More than a few men and ladies had tried to reach into the cart and grab a doll or two, but he swatted them away with his powerful karate chops. One lady he chopped across the nose and gave her a nosebleed. Another man he chopped so hard that it gave him a swollen eye. One man tried to push the cart away with Carmine in it, but Carmine held onto the display case with one hand, to prevent the roll away, and balled up his other hand into a fist and punched him in the face. It stung so badly that the man, like the others before him, hurried away from Carmine and that cart.

A young man around Carmine’s age came up to the cart laughing and pointing at him. “Look at the boy with the babydolls. You like little dolls, do you? You gay,” he said laughingly. Carmine headbutted him so hard that the boy fell on his butt. Then the laughing boy started crying, got up, and ran to his mama.

When shoppers realized the boy in the cart filled with dolls wasn’t just the cutest young man on earth that they’d ever seen, but that he had some serious craziness going on there too, they kept it moving. Which was exactly what Carmine’s serious facial expression told them to do. He didn’t brave that cold and early morning hour to be outmaneuvered by anyone. He sat in that cart filled with dolls like a prison guard on duty and waited impatiently for his clumsy family to show up.

While Gemma and Lucky and their bodyguard decided to go for the big screen TVs, mainly because it just made more sense to them than those dolls Trina was so hung up on, Trina and her bodyguard hurried to the display that was now completely empty of dolls. Which broke Trina’s heart.

But when she saw that Carmine had filled the cart with dolls, she could not believe it. “You filled it already?”

“Of course I did.”

“I knew you’d come through for me! I knew it,” she added and hugged her precocious son. Carmine smiled. He adored his mother. He loved making her happy.

“Let’s get out of here,” the bodyguard suggested, and Carmine got out of the cart.

But as soon as Carmine got out of that cart, a huge group of ladies who hadn’t witnessed his craziness, and who came to Black Friday specifically to get those dolls for themselves, made a mad dash for that cart. They tried to steal some of those dolls, and the battle ensued.

But while the bodyguard, Carmine and Trina were trying to keep those women at bay, one pesky man grabbed two dolls out of the cart as if they belonged to him. But Trina, being Trina, grabbed them right back from the man, prompting the now-angry man to push her against the empty display case where she fell to the ground. The man lost his balance, too, but he caught his fall and fell on one knee.

But why did he touch Trina? Because as soon as Carmine saw that man push his mother and cause her to fall, he suddenly saw red and hurried to that man. And before the man could get off of his knees Carmine began hitting him with such velocity and ferociousness that it felt as if a heavyweight champion was plummeting him.

The bodyguard tried to grab Carmine off of the man with one hand while holding the cart with his other hand, but Carmine kept raining blows on that man so hard and so fast that even the bodyguard couldn’t budge him. Every muscle in Carmine’s body was being utilized as he kept hitting the man in one spot on the side of his face until the man was bleeding. And he kept on hitting him.

It took Lucky rushing over and bear hugging his cousin to get him off of the man before Carmine stopped his assault. And Carmine’s rage was still palpable. “Don’t you ever lay a hand on my mother ever again!” he yelled at the bleeding man, and then stomped on him. The bodyguard was then able to pull Carmine all the way away from the downed man.

Gemma and her bodyguard ran over, too, after having no luck getting a big screen, and they both were stunned by the beat down the man had endured. Gemma looked at Trina, who had gotten back on her feet. “What did he do?” she asked her best friend and business partner.

“He pushed me,” Trina said.

Gemma couldn’t believe it. “All that for a push?”

“All that for a push girl,” Trina said as she looked at her still heavily-breathing son as he and Lucky high-fived.

But Trina would have none of it. She slapped Carmine upside his head. “Get your black ass out of this store before the cops come,” she said. “Reno’s gonna kick your ass.”

She said it, as any seriously concerned mother would, but even she could tell Carmine knew better than that. Given their family dynamics, Reno, like Lucky, was going to high-five him too.