August 28 2021
Jeff Grant Blog andy thibault , louis colavecchio , louis the coin , ravi shankar
Louis the Coin Ravi Shankar
____________
Decades before a cadre
of Secret Service agents
and New Jersey gaming
troopers surveilled, busted
him in the parking garage
of Caesars Atlantic City
with a Milano red Honda
Civic with a trunk stuffed
full of eight hundred lbs.
of counterfeit casino chips
(plus cash, an unregistered
handgun), you would have
found the late Louis the Coin
toiling at his Italian immigrant
father Benedict’s tool shop,
forging handmade gavels
and engraving corbeled brick
dentils for window lintels.
That’s where he learned not
to make fakes, but authentic
imitations. He would trial
alloys of strip metal stock,
peer under a microscope,
cut shapes with blanking
tools on a roller mill, overlay
surfaces with a vintage electric
plating machine and a Mario
Dimaio coining press
(for nothing beats Italian
pasta nor craftsmanship)
to make molds in his closet
that produced perfect tokens
that allowed him to bilk
the ultimate swindlers,
the casinos, for four years,
before, well, he grew greedy.
Lavish Louis in his loafers,
on a yacht flying one sail:
LLO, ladies love outlaws.
Even in prison, he laughed,
played bocce with the wise
guys, never ratted anyone
out, though he was connected
to the Patriarca crime family
in Providence and had seen
bodies in the back of Buicks
maimed beyond recognition
and knew which Federal Hill
jewelry shops were actually
fronts for laundering money.
When I first met Louis years
later at a benefit for young
writers, he had on his arm
a young woman wearing black
lipstick and all he had left over
from the high life was a taste
for blow and Berluti alligator
leather loafers scuffed around
the heel yet still shiny, supple
as a new glove unwrapped
from tissue paper on Epiphany
Eve in the devoutly Catholic
Colavecchio household.
The last time I saw the Coin
he was living alone in a weary
one bedroom in Pawtucket,
which he had transformed
into an atelier: piles of wood
fiber, animal glue, aluminum
chloride, ultraviolet lights,
melamine formaldehyde resin
in jars stacked like blackberry
jam on a supermarket shelf,
it was like the enchanted inside
of a sorcerer’s workshop
and shifting gingerly around,
not wanting to touch anything,
I could hear the warning
of Goethe’s ballad tolling:
the spirits I have summoned I now cannot rid myself of again… Now standing at his grave
at the sprawling Cranston
St. Ann’s cemetery, I recall
that he still owes me money
and how he had held up
a reproduced and magnified
quarter inch of a C-note
to show me the watermarks,
security threads, color-shifting
ink, microprinting he knew
he could exactly reproduce
with practice in his kitchen.
If suspected, he had an alibi
even: undercover counterfeit
deterrence specialist. 15 more
months in prison was the net
result and I don’t know how
he weathered hypertension,
wardens, dementia, chronic
obstructive pulmonary disease,
correctional officers, chaplains
and loneliness those last months
of his life. Around me, obelisks
and granite monuments and fake
flowers and rosaries and framed
portraits and votive candles
and huge headstones engraved
with anchors, lilies, weeping
willows, phrases that seem flimsy
when carved into stone: loved
by all , into the sunshine , blessed mother, till we meet again, the gates are open, on the wings of angels. Of the deceased, he must be
one of the most colorful,
yet his final resting place
is one of the simplest here,
and there’s some modern
parable in that paradox
which someone else can
puzzle out, for dark clouds
are forming on the horizon
and evening’s growling low.
I will work this poem over
the way he worked the lathes
until it shimmers with enough
of him that becomes genuine
effigy and candid elegy both,
faceted and beveled and 3-D
enough to trick the cosmic
slot machines into paying out
its jackpot in lurid, astonishing,
confounding stories, leaving us
richly barren, forever dreaming
of a time there will be more—
(RIP Louis B. Colavecchio January 1, 1942 – July 6, 2020) DR. RAVI SHANKAR.
Shankar is a Pushcart prize-winning poet, translator and professor who has published 15 books, including the Muse India award-winning translations Andal: The Autobiography of a Goddess and W.W. Norton’s Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond called “a beautiful achievement for world literature” by Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer. He has taught and performed around the world and appeared in print, radio and TV in such venues as The New York Times, NPR, BBC and the PBS Newshour. He has won awards to the Corporation of Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, fellowships from the Rhode Island and Connecticut Counsel on the Arts, founded one of the oldest electronic journals of the arts in the world Drunken Boat, and recently finished his PhD from the University of Sydney. His memoir “Correctional” is forthcoming in 2021 with University of Wisconsin Press. Ravi Shankar can be reached at: https://www.poetravishankar.com/ .
