I wanna ride with Tony

My name’s Michael Wilson. Michael Joseph Wilson.

But I want someone to call me "T."

You know what I'm talking about.

I’m driving the Terwilliger curves, I want the windows down and my elbow hanging out. I want to drive past a butcher’s shop with a big plastic pink pig on top. I want a fat cigar.

I want a toll booth. I want an SUV.

I want a . . . never mind. I don’t want a pinky nugget ring.

I want a therapist. I want to break something in her office.

I’m not married. But I already want a Russian on the side. I want her to get angry so I can say: Here we go with the drama.

You’ve got your little job, your wife, your kids. You got house payments, tuitions. You’ve got a beer gut and back hair.

But something’s changed. You’re not Italian, but geez, that accent, it’s contagious. You breathe real loud through your nose when you’re fired up. You’ve discovered a whole new world of vulgar language, and it’s all one word. But what a word -- a noun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb, sometimes even a punctuation mark.

That strip club you see on the way to pick up the kid at indoor soccer -- you kind of glance over now. Bada Bing.

You don’t own firearms. You’re not into techno-hip-hop fusion bands. But it plays in your head all week, Sunday to Sunday, a new soundtrack to your suburb-to-cubicle commute.

You woke up this morning. Got yourself a gun.

My editor said, "Write an essay for the Arts section. Why do people like ‘The Sopranos’?"

I thought, Here we go with the drama.

I said, "Sure," and went straight to Starbucks for an espresso and The New York Times. They’ll know.

Sure enough, there was the story, under a big picture of Tony and Carmela: "It lives in the juncture where pop culture and high art meet."

What? Gimme a break. I got your juncture -- right here.

It’s a great show because you root for the bad guys. It’s a great show because there’s a little bit of Tony in all us fellas.

Not all the shooting and exploding, no. We’re talking about Tony at rest. Critics speak of the show’s "great writing" and "well-drawn, complex characters" and "the gangster ennui as metaphor for life," their goatees prickling with excitement, their junctures lying in wait for clever and seemingly contradictory concepts.

It’s way simpler than that. "The Sopranos" is about having the kind of friends we all wish we had.

They’ve got their own language. They’ve got vigs and juice and capos and points and rats. They don’t say "Godfather," even when they’re talking about the film. They say "that scene in I," as in One, as in Godfather I, but they just call it "I," or "II." They hardly mention "III."

They have cool jobs. A chef who makes food you can’t pronounce. A strip club owner. A bookie. Raise your hand if waste management looks more fun than your job.

They have excellent hair. Furio’s ponytail, Silvio’s pompadour, Paulie’s two-tone slicked-back.

Look at those great names.

Those big guns.

They’re hilarious when they’re doing absolutely nothing. Think of Silvio’s impersonation of Michael Corleone. Think of the entire episode in Italy. "The Sopranos" is "Seinfeld" with 9 millimeters.

We don’t have friends like that. We have boring friends. We hate to admit it, because it suggests that maybe we’re boring, but it’s true, for guys anyway. We talk about girlfriends and work and girlfriends and the earthquake and girlfriends and the election and girlfriends. Then we marry the girlfriends and buy houses and start families and then that’s all we talk about, if we have time to talk, which we pretty much don’t.

A lot of my friends got married. They don’t talk to each other anymore. They talk to me. About my girlfriend.

Is it so strange, then, to want to blow off work one afternoon and hang out at the Bada Bing with T and Silvio? Have a couple highballs, shoot some pool, try to get "II" going in the stolen DVD player?

And Paulie. Paulie Walnuts -- how many of us have a friend like him? The critics call him loyal, but that bestows too much weight upon a single word. "T, what do you need?" . . . "T, what do you want me to do? . . . You got it, T."

That scene when Paulie consoles Christopher in the hospital -- when he tells Christopher that what he saw in his out-of-body experience after the shooting wasn’t hell at all, but purgatory, because it wasn’t that hot -- stack that up against the great speeches of Western drama. The way his face lights up as he calculates the thousands of years he’ll spend in purgatory -- compared to eternity, that’s nothing. "I can do that standing on my head." And Christopher believes him, and cheers up.

When’s the last time your friend was that excellent?

***

The phone rang one night about a year ago. It was Dad.

He said, "Could you believe it?"

"Believe what? What happened?"

"Big Pussy getting whacked."

My Dad. He said that.

OK -- back up. Dad’s an accountant in Florida. He wears short-sleeve dress shirts to work, and for leisure, T-shirts that say things like, "I’ll Have What the Gentleman on the Floor Is Having." I haven’t a drop of Italian blood in me, as far as I know, but were it genetically possible, I would suggest that Dad has even less. Big Pussy getting whacked -- there are two words in that utterance of his that I can’t recall ever coming out of his mouth before, at least not in that usage. "I was upset and whacked my adding machine" doesn’t count.

Dad was the moral gatekeeper for us, growing up. He was tough. He was Bad Cop. He worked the door at that big bright bar called Sin. He didn’t even like us watching "The Love Boat" or "Fantasy Island." He said the R in movie ratings stood for "rotten."

There was never a pop-culture common denominator. He watched Bills games. I watched "The A-Team." His idea of masculinity and danger was the no-huddle offense, the shotgun formation. I studied the way Sonny Crockett rolled his own smokes on "Miami Vice."

Today, I’ve got James Ellroy or Elmore Leonard on the night stand. He’s got the sports section in the john. I write about robbers and killers and perverts. He forwards e-mail jokes about Jesus and Moses teeing off on the back nine.

One night on the phone he said, "Do you watch that show ’The Sopranos’?"

Are you kidding? I don’t answer the phone for an hour on Sunday nights. I pick apart the subtle touches, the little directorial winks and nudges. When Christopher shoots that bakery kid in the foot? That happened to him in

"Goodfellas." Full circle. Nice. When Tony’s walking down the boardwalk in the finale dream sequence last season, and Silvio’s standing in front of Madame Marie’s? That’s the place Springsteen sang about in "Sandy." Silvio is played by Steven Van Zandt, Springsteen’s guitarist. Excellent.

That I was way into ’The Sopranos’ goes without saying.

But Dad?

***

It was an amazing scene, by the way -- last season, they’re on the boat, about to kill Big Pussy. (Sorry Dad -- whack.) He knows it’s coming. You know it’s coming. The tension is incredible. And the writer stretches it, not with gunplay, not with begging-on-knees, but by letting the men talk: They gather around a bottle of tequila for a quick couple shots, and the condemned tells a fantastic and pathetic story about his nymphomaniac chiropractor.

The way the other guys look at him as they laugh -- man, that must have hurt worse than the bullets.

***

Dad and I talked the other night, after the first two hours of the heralded third season began (or simply "Three"). It couldn’t have come sooner. Dad was running out of patience with HBO. He saw "Random Hearts" -- It was OK," he said. "Not great. Harrison Ford was too obsessed." He saw "Eyes Wide Shut" -- "It was stupid. It was creepy and goofy. It was awful."

Finally, his show was back. I said, "How about the way they mixed the Peter Gunn theme with that Police song?" He had no idea what I was talking about. He was hung up on the feds moving the table in the Soprano basement a few feet when they planted the bug.

"You gotta figure," he said, "Tony’s going to notice that."

***

You’re busing into work beside a girl with Crayola hair, the whole damn 64-pack. You’re sipping a raspberry flavored microbrew at a sidewalk table under a heat lamp, and some kid half your age asks for spare change. You’re in line at Starbucks behind a low-fat caramel double decaf. You spend your work day listening to one side of half-a-million inane phone chats at the old cube farm.

It’s not about junctures. It’s not about high art.

You just want a crew. You want your guys watching your back. You want to hurry up and find Paulie and get him his piece of the sports book so you can get to the Bing to see Tony about that thing.

No, not that thing, the other thing.

Some days, wondering who moved the table in your basement sounds like a pleasant and relaxing diversion.

Some days, you’re not wondering who to whack, you’re wondering when to stop. Take a number, get on the boat, let’s take her out for a spin.

Am I right? Capeesh?

See you at the Bing. Save me a bite of capicola. No idea what it is, but it sure sounds good.

Michael Wilsonhas written about crime and justice issues at the Oregonian since 1999. Prior to that, he worked at two alabama newspapers, beginning his career at the Montgomery Advertiser and moving to the Mobile Register in 1994. He was born and raised in Buffalo, N.Y.