'74 & Sunny (3 page)

“I'm playing in this game, Piga,” I said, with the red brick firmly in my right hand. “I'm playing every day. If you don't like it, my father said to tell your father to go see him. And he'll bust his skull wide-open.”

Jimmy Piga, whose red eyes bulged with confusion and stymied anger, never told his father. And I never missed a game of Rumbles ever again.

When I told my father what had happened, the next night over one of his late dinners, he lit up like a firefly.

“You see what I told you? See what I told you? That's great. That is so great! This is the way you settle matters. We gotta have the good Scotch tonight.”

He leaned over and kissed me hard on the mouth. I didn't even mind that his lips tasted of pasta con
sarde
—sardines.

•   •   •

A
lthough I was only a kid, I was deeply dug into the front lines of the war my father was fighting with the world around him. His foes included everything from ageism to organized religion, feminism, dope in the school yard, the social politics of Pop Warner football, alcoholism, the anticipated journey of his golden years, and a curious and painful skin condition that had every dermatologist within a fifty-mile radius completely baffled. It was a war fought on too many fronts and against too many inexhaustible enemies. But as the loyal son of Alfredo Benza (and, as fate had it, the last Benza boy to carry on his Sicilian bloodline), I fought alongside him. And when I wasn't fighting, I sat at his feet and absorbed everything he had to say.

My father was the last of a dying breed, a man who stayed true to the very essence of himself. He gave me an appetite for truth and the desire to do something worthwhile, so that one day I'd have as many stories told about me as the million or so everyone told about him. Like the movie star legends he urged me to watch when he wasn't around—Garfield, Mitchum, Cagney, or McQueen—I wanted to stand up for myself, stand up for something, even if it didn't end happily.

“People are going to ask you to eat shit,” he would say. “Just don't develop a taste for it.”

He never said as much out loud, but I believe my father was hell-bent on making sure I could navigate my way toward
manhood, even without his being around very often. He was a salesman in his fifties, with too many younger men getting too close for comfort when it came time to make commissions. He would often scoff at the thought of a day off, and too many times I can remember him working seven days a week. Or maybe it was on account of the sea of women he left me with every day as he went off to work. Of course, there was my saint of a mother, who worked as a lunch lady at my elementary school across the street—complete with the horrifying hairnet and the white rubber-soled shoes worn by cafeteria employees and Nurse Ratched. And when school was out, I got to run home across the street to see my aunt Mary, my father's eldest sister—who never married but traveled to Hawaii
thirty-one
times
over the years to visit her “friend” and hula instructor, Emilani. Whenever Aunt Mary wasn't playing Don Ho records, she was usually sunning her sixty-four-year-old body in a leopard-print two-piece on the deck of our aboveground redwood pool. And Aunt Mary, God rest her soul, was no Helen Mirren. That made having friends over a mortifying experience.

Sure, my father had a great
Playboy
collection lying around, but listening to “Tiny Bubbles” or watching Aunt Mary slowly swim laps destroyed the mood for any one-handed alone time I was actively trying to carve out for my then obsession, Miss May 1974, Marilyn Lange. It would take months to seal that deal.

My father's sister-in-law Mae (recently widowed from
his brother Philly) and my hot sixteen-year-old cousin, Arlene, lived two houses away and came over every chance they got. Aunt Mae to gossip over Entenmann's crumb cake, and Arlene to hang out in my sister Lorraine's room and listen to 45s of Chicago, the Guess Who, Donovan, and the like. Sometimes they would read passages from a hidden copy of
Our Bodies, Ourselves
, write imaginary love letters to Jimi Hendrix, make collages of Twiggy's magazine layouts, and sneak drags of Eve cigarettes by the open screened window. Sometimes they would play Carole King's
Tapestry
so loud, I would army-crawl into her room—my face practically tasting the shag rug—and listen to them talk about stuff like hickeys and periods and discharge. When those conversations started, I would stand up like a shot—scaring the shit out of both of them—and interrogate them like a prosecuting attorney until they disclosed what each term meant. And, little by little, they would tell me. Learning about hickeys and menstrual cycles was priceless, but they stood firm at discharge. Somehow they knew that was crossing the line for a twelve-year-old smart-ass. They got all serious on me and spoke in hushed tones before finally assuring me that the “discharge” they were referring to only meant my cousin Ray—Arlene's brother—was getting sent home from Vietnam on account of Uncle Philly dropping dead after his fifth heart attack.

“We said discharge because he was
discharged
from the army!”

Deep down I knew it meant something else, but I let it go.

Our house
really came to life when my sister Rosalie would bolt through the kitchen screen door and surprise everyone with what was usually an unbelievable story after her shift ended as a teller at the Bank of Babylon. If she wasn't finding and caring for a box of abandoned kittens or cursing my father for sneaking his .38 caliber handgun in her pocketbook while she was at the bank, then it was usually a story involving her infamous battles on supermarket checkout lines. My sister never started a fight, but she finished them all.

“I'm at King Kullen tonight, and this woman behind me, I can see, is counting my items because I'm on the express line. Ten or less. I had eleven because I forgot I needed a chunk of provolone for Sunday.” Rosalie is saying this, out of breath and holding a rescued kitten in each hand. “Under her friggin' breath, I hear this woman say, ‘Go ahead, let the guinea get her cheese.' ”

Gasps all around the table.

“What did you do?”

“Please don't tell your father.”

“Can I go back to the store without being embarrassed?”

Rosalie went on. “Well, I turned around and I grabbed her head with both hands and I said, ‘Who. The. Fuck. Are. You. Calling. A. Guinea, you Irish bastard?' Just like that. And the cashier is screaming, ‘Please girls, stop.' But it's too late. The manager comes over all worried, saying, ‘Ladies, what's
going on? What's the problem?' I say, ‘Nothing.' The Irish girl can't even talk, she's so shocked. And . . . I walk out with my eleven items.”

“Oh, Rosalie . . .” my mother tried.

“Ma, I gotta hear her call me a guinea? Since when?”

“Oh, Christ, they're all like their father, except my Lorraine,” my mother said.

I always managed to run to the table and hear the tail end of my sister's battles. “Why doesn't this happen when you go shopping with me? I wanna fight someone at King Kullen,” I'd say.

“I'm not even going to tell your father, because he'll go to the supermarket and wait for the manager to come out and there'll be a real shit storm,” my mother would say. “This is between us. Don't tell your father!”

“That's not even why I'm here,” Ro said. “Get Lorraine and Arlene. I wanna put Tiger Lilly in a doll's dress and find a little black top hat for Lorenzo [our cats] and film a wedding ceremony tonight.”

Before you knew it, we were digging through bags in the garage and retrieving tiny doll clothes for the cats to wear for their shotgun wedding—all caught on our Super 8 mm camera. Within an hour of Rosalie's dropping in, we were all planning a ridiculous feline wedding, and that clip still exists to this day—almost forty years later. And it gets the same laughter time and again. That's one of the reasons why you had to be around the magical aura of my sister Rosalie whenever she
walked into a room. You had to turn your chair in her direction. She made you look.

When the house finally turned quiet, when Rosalie took her show home, Aunt Mary dozed off on the downstairs couch in front of the TV that I would secretly turn to the X-rated Escapade channel), Aunt Mae and Arlene walked home, and Lorraine fell fast asleep within minutes of her lights turning off, that was usually when I'd be under my covers and hear the ice clinking in the tumbler of my father's third Scotch. That was the one he took past my bedroom and brought into his own before collapsing into his king-size bed. I'd listen to my mom carefully pleading with him to calm his anger when he'd discuss the corporate bosses or loopy customers who dropped by the store with stupid requests or silly demands. I could hear her undressing him and dropping his head on the pillow.

“Oh, Manoola.” That was the nickname he gave her. Nobody knew why. “I wish you could see the shit I have to go through every day with these crooked kikes. They all have mistresses, and they would sell their own mothers down the river to turn a dollar profit.”

“All right, Al, I know. It won't always be this way,” my mom would promise him as he passed out. He would begin snoring immediately, and she would finally be able to light a cigarette and pop a Librium to adjust her high blood pressure and calm her down.

Sometimes she would walk into my room and sit on my bed, smiling and laughing nervously to reassure me. “Oh boy!
Well, your father was in rare form tonight,” she'd say, whistling through her teeth and rubbing my chest. “He was feeling a little bit stewed. Don't worry, honey. If you hear him yelling, always remember Daddy's under a lot of pressure at work. He works hard for us.”

“I know, Ma. I know what Daddy goes through,” I'd whisper, closing my eyes. “I listen.”

The call that changed my life that summer was, while unexpected, not out of the ordinary. For reasons unknown to me, our family's upstairs telephone line was not in my parents' master bedroom. Instead, the big, white rotary machine sat on a tiny glass-topped, wrought-iron stand right outside my bedroom, down the hall from my parents' door. This unfortunate placement gave me horrifying access to the sudden and sometimes gory details of the deaths of almost all my aunts, uncles, cousins, and some really close acquaintances. By the time I was four years old, I had already lost both sets of grandparents. By the time I was twelve, I had grown accustomed to the phone ringing at ungodly hours, hearing my mother trying to slip on her Dearfoam slippers as she raced down the hall and stopped at my door to receive what was undoubtedly a death call. Maybe there are some families out there who wait for the breakfast hour, at least, before delivering the bad news. My family delivered it as it came, even at two in the morning.

It usually took my mother five or six rings to even get to the phone, but when she did, I would already be wide-awake
and sitting up in my NFL sheets, staring at the posters of Farrah Fawcett and the Fonz on the opposite wall.

“Josie died! Oh, Al, my sister Josie died,” my mother would yell down the hall. “Ahhh . . . poor thing. She suffered enough. At least she's out of pain now.”

Or:

“Millie's dead? When? How?” And then the details would be relayed to my father right outside my door. “She was throwing up blood for two days. Her lungs were just shot. They had tubes in her throat and in her side trying to clear her chest, but she went tonight. Ah, shit, and now my brother Louie has chest pains and a numb left arm! Jesus Christ, Louie, have them check you out. You're
there
now
!”

And:

“Yeah, Mae! What's wrong? Eileen was killed in a car accident? Oh my God! Thirty years old. Somebody ran a light on Sunrise Highway and plowed right into her. She died in Gregory's arms. Oh, Mae . . . what can we do?”

Calls like those would prompt my father to wake up the entire family, sober up immediately, and invite the grief-stricken family over for coffee and his famous
verdura
omelets. It wasn't unusual for relatives of ours to drive from Brooklyn to our home in West Islip, Long Island, some fifty miles away, and go over the funeral and wake details right at our kitchen table.

On those days, my father would forbid me to go to school. He wanted me to see the grief and be there to lift the spirits of my cousins whenever I could.

“Listen to your father,” he'd say to me, kneeling down. “This is more important than anything you're gonna learn in school today. You be here for your family.”

This particular late-night phone call, however, the one that changed my life that summer, made me sit up in bed and pay closer attention, because this time no one had died or was facing a terrible illness. This call had a different tone. My mother passed the phone to my father almost as soon as she picked up. It was dead quiet in the hallway, and that meant I could hear every syllable that was coming out of the receiver, as well as my father's calming words.

It was the sobbing voice of my father's older brother, Larry. Uncle Larry was a doctor who lived in New Jersey and had a very successful medical practice. Through the years, Uncle Larry had been there for us many times when my father's salary was not enough; he'd graciously send a check along to make sure our monthly nut was covered. He had three daughters, Geneva, Susan, and Robin, and two sons, Larry Jr. and ten-year-old Gino. By the time the summer of 1974 came and went, it was no surprise—but a hell of a shock to my macho uncle Larry—that his oldest son, Larry, was looking forward to leaving home and starting a somewhat mysterious new life in San Francisco.

Although he was a well-respected doctor, Uncle Larry couldn't bring himself to refer to his son as a homosexual. He, along with a lot of other professionals, preferred the term “brain damaged.”

So when the phone rang outside my door that summer night in June 1974, I heard my uncle coming to grips with the fact that his youngest boy, Gino, was going the way of his older brother.