'74 & Sunny (4 page)

I cracked my door open a slit to see the action.

“Al,” said Uncle Larry. “I'm fucked. I'm fucked, I'm afraid, and I don't know how to handle this. I'm afraid my Gino is brain damaged too. I don't know what to do, Al. I don't know what to do.”

If it weren't so sad, it would have had all the high drama of Johnny Fontane crying to Vito Corleone.

“What the fuck are the odds? How do you know?”

“Alfred. A father just . . . knows.”

I heard Uncle Larry stop to light a cigarette, exhale the smoke, and take a swig from a glass of whiskey. The clink of the ice cubes, sounded like three of them, came across the wire crystal clear.

My father covered the phone and motioned to my mother. “Larry thinks Gino is brain damaged like Larry Jr.”

“What?” she gasped.

Then, my father, using an old, Italian euphemism for gay men, pulled on his ear lobe and whispered, “
Ricchione.”

I had heard it used before, when my father saw certain people on TV whom he perceived to be gay. “David Bowie . . .
ricchione
!” “Liberace . . .
ricchione
!” Why tugging on an earlobe and using a word derived from the Italian translation for “ear” was meant for straight men to warn others that a homosexual
was approaching, I have no idea. All I can think of is that gay men were the first to wear earrings aside from women.

“Oh, Jesus Christ on the cross,” my mother said, lighting a cigarette.

“Al, I need you to help me here,” Uncle Larry slurred. “Maybe a summer with you and A.J. and Jack and Frankie and the fishing and the sports can snap him out of it. Is that something we can do? I'm
FUCKED
!
”

My father didn't hesitate.

“
Aspetta, aspetta
(wait, wait). What's today? Thursday. Come by this weekend, stay with us a couple nights, and then leave him here until school starts in September. We'll take care of everything. Don't worry about nothing.”

“Oh, Alfred, I love you. I feel like a goddamned fool calling on my youngest brother for help.”

“Larry, stop the histrionics. Chin up. Put down the vodka. You took care of my Rosalie for her first eighteen months while I was overseas. This is the least I can do. Larry, we love you and we all love little Gino. We're Benzas. We'll get through this.”

By the time they had hung up, Lorraine, Aunt Mary, and I had all made our way out of our beds and were standing in the hallway.

“Your uncle Larry needs help with Gino,” my father stated. “And that's what we're gonna do. It's gonna be a different summer for all of us, but this is what you do for
la famiglia.”

We returned to our bedrooms more or less shell-shocked, none of us able to sleep. I could hear my mother and father talking in their bed as they settled back in.

“Jesus,” my mother said. “What are the chances of having two queer sons? Poor Larry. I know the Lord works in mysterious ways, but—”

My father cut her off at the jump.

“Lilly, forget that horseshit about the Lord's
mysterious
ways,” he said, dripping with the sarcasm of a determined atheist. “Let me tell you something: if your
boss
was that
mysterious
, you'd quit your fuckin' job.”

3

SIDESHOW

I
've had my dependency on various drugs over the years, but the biggest monkey I ever had to flip off my back was, undoubtedly, my sad reliance on Tums. Yes, Tums. The perfect little cylinder with the tightly wrapped foil paper that protected the smooth, chalky, white antinausea tablets neatly inside. From the time I was ten years old, I had them stashed in every room of the house. It was like I was getting ready for some apocalyptic agita. Eventually it got to the point I would never leave home without stuffing a roll in the right pocket of my pants.

Some might say my anxiety started on account of my mother having me in her late forties and, as a result, my grandparents and various aunts and uncles were dropping like
flies. I quickly grew accustomed to death. I went to all their wakes. Most were open-casket affairs held at Scarpaci Funeral Home in Brooklyn. And my absolute first visceral memory as a child (I was two!) was sitting atop my father's shoulders as he walked us down a short, carpeted staircase and entered a room where I saw his mother laid out in a half-open box with big, gaudy sprays of flowers that Italians love to send. The bigger the mum, the deeper the grief. The room was empty except for him and me. I remember he told me how much my grandma Rosalia loved me—especially when I strummed my plastic guitar and sang to her “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on the stoop of our Bensonhurst walkup. Then he bent his upper body over the casket and told me to “kiss Nonna good-bye.” And I still remember the feeling of my lips on her hard, lifeless cheek and the sight of the pancake makeup she went out with. And, no, she didn't look “beautiful” or even remotely “peaceful” as everyone loves to say. She looked like she knew she was missing out on things.

I was two years old and I can recall huge chunks of that day. Even the smell is still jammed into the deep recesses of my nose. I personally don't think that fucked me up, but I can see a shrink having a field day with my early years.

If you ask me, it all started with being miserable with my fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Kubissa. She was a close talker, and whenever she got eye level to reprimand me (which was a daily occurrence), I would almost gag on account of her cigarette, onion bagel, and coffee breath. I would be fine all morning,
not a care in the world, eyeing all the pretty girls, but as soon as I saw her coming anywhere near my desk, I began fishing for my Tums like a tweaker digging for his glass pipe.

But then there was the day they weren't there.

I begged Mrs. Kubissa to let me go home—“It's across the
damn
street,” I told her. “You can watch me the whole time.”

She stood me up. “Does your mother put up with that language?”

“I'm telling you, Teach, in my house we say whatever the hell we need to say.”

To her credit, she let me go. I popped four Tums, and the anxiety subsided. But in the weeks to come, I was granted a transfer to Mr. Gaggin's class across the hall. I simply couldn't live with that woman disciplining me while seeing the freedom of my home right outside the classroom window. Gaggin's room faced the back of the school, and he didn't smoke or drink coffee. In fact, he chewed Dentyne just like my father. And that's when I finally kicked the habit.

But, oddly enough, several hours after my father put down the receiver on the old rotary phone that strange night, I started turning the medicine cabinets upside down in search of some Tums. Never mind a whole roll. I would've settled for a few loosies that morning. But why the sudden change after being clean for two years? And then it hit me like a bull's-eye kick to the balls. I had heard both my father and my uncle plainly using the term “brain damaged” over the phone. And I was scared shitless. A few years earlier, my
older cousin Terry grew so despondent over her husband leaving her, she took their beautiful little daughter, Maria, and stepped off the curb directly into oncoming traffic, hoping to take their lives. After a couple of cars ran them over, cousin Terry escaped a little banged up, but little Maria was left with several skull fractures. As usual, my father and mother offered to take care of Maria while her mother got counseling. All I remember of
that
summer was seeing Maria's pretty face topped off with tight white bandages and a turban of gauze. She was four years old; I was six, but I protected her like a piece of fine china. I even watched her as she slept.

Looking back, it's no wonder my demons came back again and demanded Tums, what with yet another damaged brain coming to stay with me.

After I had found an old roll in a winter jacket in the closet, I popped four of the chalky pills and paced around the kitchen in the general vicinity of my mother.

“What the hell are you eating?” she said. “Your lips are all white. Are you popping those friggin' Tums again? What's bothering you now?”

“What's bothering me?” I said. “I wanna know what it means that Gino might be brain damaged. I heard you and Daddy outside my room last night. Jesus, I could even hear Uncle Larry crystal clear coming through the receiver. He said, ‘I'm afraid Gino is brain damaged like Larry Jr.' ”

“Your ass!”

“No, Ma. I heard all of it. I even heard you lose your breath a little, and when I cracked open my door, I saw you make the sign of the cross. So what the hell was that about?”

She started laughing nervously, and whenever my mother went that way, I knew I had her dead to rights. “Tell me about Gino's brain, Ma. I deserve to know. I'm gonna be spending the summer with him. Is this brain damage gonna kill him? Is it catching? I wanna know.”

“Rosalie!” my mother yelled for reinforcements. “Would you tell your brother why Uncle Larry is so concerned with Gino?”

“No,” I said. “Why is he concerned with his
brain
? Is he retarded or something? What is going on? If there's any chance of me catching this brain damage, don't expect me to sleep with him or swim with him. I'm telling you right now.”

I popped three more Tums.

“Will you stop with those fuckin'
Toms
,”
my mother said, staying true to her habit of mispronouncing the simplest of words.

“They're called
Tums
.”
I laughed.

“Whatever the hell. Just stop. They can't be good for you.”

Oh . . . but exposure to brain damage
is
?”

“Rosalie, Lorraine, . . . please come in and help me here. This kid is raising my blood pressure through the roof; I gotta take a goddamn Librium, have a cigarette, and put my feet up in my chair.”

Rosalie was headed out to the Italian specialty store to pick up food, so she was rushed. Lorraine, sweetly oblivious as she remains to this day, never saw any difference between Gino or even his older brother and other boys their ages. “I love Larry Jr.,” Lorraine obliviously said. “I hope Gino turns out just like him.”

That was enough for Rosalie to step in with some calculated force.

“A.J.,” she said, “forget you ever heard the term ‘brain damaged.' No one is brain damaged. It's not an illness. It's just . . . how can I put this . . . Jesus, Ma, why are you putting me through this?”

“Just tell me
something
,” I begged her, looking around the room for anyone to chime in.

“It's just Gino is a different kind of boy than you are.”

“We've always been a little different from each other,” I said. “But now they're calling it brain damage, Ro. That sounds scary to me. And serious.”

“No, no,” she said. “It's just that right now Gino is not as rough a boy as you are. He's not as tough as you are, ya know? Don't forget, Uncle Larry went to work all day and Gino was left home most of the time with Larry, three sisters, and his mother.”

That got me thinking. “So what? I get left home with you and NuNu, Aunt Mary, Aunt Mae, Arlene, and Mommy. So am I gonna come down with this brain damage too?”

At that point, my father dropped what he was doing to
swoop in and put an end to the discussion, which was his specialty. “Let's put this horseshit to an end,” he said. “Your cousin Gino is going through a phase. He'll get over it.”

“What's gonna stop me from going through a phase like that?” I asked my father.

“Me,” he said. And that was that.

“Now make your mother happy and stop with the Tums already.”

I still wasn't sure what they had on Gino, and to be honest, I knew they weren't telling me everything on the brain-damage front. So I stayed on my toes and decided to wait and see how he acted and interacted.

It didn't take long for me to start doing some summer math. Gino's arrival was gonna happen quickly, and his stay was gonna go on for roughly sixty-five days. And this was the terrifying summer before my neighborhood friends and I were all entering junior high school, and suddenly it wasn't solely going to belong to us anymore. Somehow—whether it was a tackle football game, a spontaneous fishing trip, flirting with the pretty girls next door or just some somber moments alone—I was going to have to work Gino into all those things. It wasn't like my cousin and I were strangers or didn't get along or anything like that. But there was no denying that as our wonder years went on, Gino was kind of peeling off in another direction. I didn't have a name for it. I just knew it was different. And over the hundred times or so we'd seen each other throughout the years, at weddings, funerals, and
birthday parties—as well as the arduous, traffic-ridden trips my family took to spend some weekends at Uncle Larry's big house in beautiful, sunny Succasunna—about the most common thing we shared was having the same last name.

Jesus, those car rides to Jersey were hell. My father never raised his hands to me in his life, but those car rides amounted to the closest thing to child abuse that I can ever recall suffering. I wish I was lucky or tormented enough to block them out, but I never saw a shrink for help on this matter. But imagine me sitting on the hump seat in the back of a '64 Mustang (with no seat belts, mind you) and barely surviving the two-hour journey, as my parents chain-smoked Winstons with the windows
up
and the AM radio dial tuned to an oldies' station. To this day, if I hear even the opening of “Winchester Cathedral,” I throw up in my mouth a little bit.

“Ma . . . can you and Daddy crack your windows when you smoke?” Lorraine would beg, above the eight-track stylings of Sinatra. “I swear, we're gonna die back here, and we're all about to throw up.
Please!
”

My father would visually clock us by adjusting his rearview mirror. “I'll roll them down a little bit, but you're gonna all freeze your asses off back there. Remember, the heater is shot and we can't afford to see Sal at the Sunoco station for another month or so.”

“Fine, fine. We don't care.”

I knew then what secondhand smoke was. Had I died, it would have been premeditated second-degree murder.

“Are we almost there yet?”

“Jesus Christ, A.J.” My father would exhale. “We haven't even seen a sign for the GW Bridge yet. We got plenty of time to go. And that's if we don't hit traffic on the turnpike, which we will, because Jersey's highways are all laid out like your sister's ass.” That was not a slight on Rosalie's or Lorraine's asses, it was just my father's interesting way of playing with words. Smushing fun in the face of good sense.

This was about as encouraging as it got, until those moments when my father would swing his right arm off the wheel and dig his strong fingers into our knees, hip bones, shoulders, stomachs, or whatever torturous, ticklish spot he could find while keeping his eyes on the road. Of course, all of us would be laughing and screaming for our lives, sometimes until the point of pissing ourselves. It was a reminder of how my father was equal parts tough and tender. He liked to break the boredom by busting balls.

The last Saturday in June of 1974 came at me like a shot. I was where I always was during the late morning hours—­sitting three feet from the TV screen, drinking a giant grape soda, and eating a big bag of taco-flavored Doritos, while being engrossed in the
Soul Train
experience. I sat really close, not on account of bad eyesight but because at any moment—when my father would swing by the living room unannounced and see even a glimpse of Don Cornelius or the
Soul Train
line or word scramble—he'd convince me to change the channel in his own way.

“Look at you! Can't understand a fuckin' word they're saying, can you? But yet, you're watching this jungle-boogie bullshit.”

“Dad, they're good. They sing better, they dance better—”

“
Who
dances better? None of those
coloreds
could hold Gene Kelly's shoes.”

“It's different, Dad,” I'd say. “They got a different way of doing things.”