'74 & Sunny (9 page)

He had nothing important to do in the garage, except allow for his absence to make a point.

I knew I hadn't done anything wrong, so I grabbed Gino by the back of his shirt, practically waking him from a coma, and took him into the living room to watch some TV. My sisters and I had a silly thing we did—I don't want to say a tradition, but we did it almost every Sunday night. We would turn on Mutual of Omaha's
Wild Kingdom
, starring its old host, Marlin Perkins, and make fun of all the corny stuff he said about zebras, tigers, and bears. One thing that drove us crazy was how the producers would do their sneaky segues, tying the commercials to the subject of the show. The producers would have Perkins saying something like “Just as the polar bear protects her cubs, you can protect
your
children with an insurance policy from Mutual of Omaha. . . .” Oh, it drove us nuts.

So we had our own version of doing it. We'd lower the sound during the commercials and volley funny bits across the room. “The owl can turn its head almost 360 degrees, but it can't puke pea soup like that crazy bitch Regan MacNeil in
The Exorcist
!”

My sisters would laugh and laugh. “Stop it. . . .”

I'd go on, looking over my shoulder for my mother. “In our next episode, the owl's mother sucks cocks in hell.”

This got a rise out of Gino. It was a language and a type of laughter I don't think he'd heard too much before. I saw
The Exorcist
when I was eleven years old, simply because I asked my father. He took me with him to see it one night but told me we'd leave the minute I covered my eyes. So I made sure to keep my eyes glued to the screen and my hands by my side. Gino, on the other hand, had never heard of the classic horror film.

“Wait.” He laughed. “Who pukes pea soup? What are you guys laughing about?”

My mother spoke up from the hallway. “Never mind that movie, Gino,” she said. “My son is full of shit. He's been chewing Tums ever since he saw that friggin' film!”

“That's a lie, Ma! She's lying, Gino, I swear.”

When my father came out of the garage an hour later, we were all expecting the worst. But in the midst of his liberal parenting, there were nights and times that demanded certain disciplines and structure. Sunday nights, for my sisters and me, had always been about watching our father collapse into his recliner and our giving him a head-to-toe rubdown to get ready for the workweek. This night, as it turned out, was no different. But the stakes were a bit higher because we were working with somebody new.

“Your poppa needs a rubdown,” he said to the heap of human laughter we all were at that moment. “But not just any rubdown. I need one for the ages,” he said as he walked into the living room and took off his tank top. And then, as he did often since the release of
The Godfather
two years prior, he put some cotton in his cheeks, messed his hair, and did his best impersonation of Brando crying to the film's mortician Bonasera. “I need you to use all your skills and powers—”

“Daddy, stop,” NuNu said. “You look too weird.”

And then he was upon us, standing above the chair, wearing just his terry cloth shorts. He looked down, rubbed his belly, and yelled, “My body! Look how they massacred my body!”

He would fall into his chair and pretend to be passed out while we went and gathered the different lotions and oils to spread all over his body. Over the years, we used perfumed lotions and all sorts of body moisturizers. But in the last year or so—with my father complaining that parts of his body ended up unexpectedly itching him like crazy, we had to experiment with different oils and elixirs. What he said felt best was the tiniest bit of extra-virgin olive oil and a little elbow grease applied by the bunch of us. He would happily moan and groan like a big old giant in that chair. We would delicately apply it to his face and go all the way down to between his toes—two of which no longer had the ability to bend anymore.

“Dad,” I said, “how can you not remember when your toes stopped bending?”

“I can't. I have no idea,” he said. “Besides, toes are overrated. They serve no purpose.”

“They keep our balance,” Gino said. “If we didn't have toes, we'd fall forward.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That makes sense. They keep us from falling on our face.”

My father just smirked, put his hands up to momentarily stop the massage, and threw his logic on the fire.

“There are no toes on our heels,” he said. “So why don't we fall on our asses every day?”

5

SPIDERS AND SNAKES

M
ondays in the summertime held all the excitement of a wake. With a noisy, wonderful weekend behind us, it was always dreadful thinking I'd have to wait another five whole days before it could all begin again. Even though it was summer vacation and, at a whistle's notice, there could be twenty friends at my front door, I still woke up with a heavy heart. Mondays always seemed cruel to me, as so much of my family had to return to work their 9-to-5s. I would have absolutely no pep in my step. And that particular Monday morning, the first with Gino in our house, I was in those precious moments of the previous night's deep sleep slowly becoming the reality of a new day. I turned over to see Gino passed out in his cot next to my bed, some slobber running from his lips, his mouth wide open.

I stared at his face for some time, even squinting to give him the benefit of the doubt. But the verdict was in: he didn't even really,
truly
look like a Benza. And that puzzled me. We were a dark-skinned bunch. We didn't burn red from too much sun. We got brown. We weren't pudgy in any way like Gino was. We were more lean and mean. We had thick, straight, dark hair. We were lanky, despite the fact that we ate whether we were sitting down for dinner, lying down on the couch, or standing at the kitchen sink. We had long arms, tight stomachs, and legs that slightly bowed a bit. When I stared at Gino, he was shorter, softer, and a different shade of pale. And then the reality of what lay ahead hit me with the reality and speed of a Scorsese smash cut. I took it all in for a moment: I had finally noticed there was a pile of luggage in my small room. There were different clothes laid out on my chair. A toothbrush and a comb and deodorant that weren't mine. My room even smelled differently. Not bad or vile. Just the way your room smells when someone else has been breathing, yawning, farting, and coughing in it all night long. But instead of pulling my hair out in aggravation, I decided to have some fun. I put my bare feet within inches of Gino's nose for a few seconds, wiggling them wildly in the hopes I'd spring loose some horrible odor. Maybe a tiny bit of the bay was buried deep inside a toenail or two. When that didn't work, I balled up tiny bits of tissue and tossed them at his face, trying to get one in his mouth.

“And now Clyde Frazier works the ball up court, with the New
York Knickerbockers trailing by one to the Los Angeles Lakers,”
I whispered to myself.
“Six seconds on the clock in
game seven as Frazier glides by Jerry West at midcourt and finds Earl ‘the Pearl' Monroe coming off a high screen from Willis Reed. Monroe, moving left, lets loose a double pump, fadeaway from fifteen feet out. And he . . . sinks it. The Knicks have done it again. And
the Garden floor is covered with New Yorkers. The Knicks are champions. And my ears can't believe what my eyes just saw!”

After I had played out a few more far-flung fantasies and it didn't wake him up, I could hear the rumblings of my mother and father getting ready to go downstairs for coffee, so I cut to the quick. I got within an inch or so of his face.

“You
up
?”

“Wha-wha . . . ?”

“You look shot, man. You look like
you
drank all the wine last night,” I said.

“I don't know.” He yawned. “I guess the whole weekend caught up with me.”

“Well, now it's fuckin' Monday. And I hate them.”

Gino sat up in his cot. “What goes on around here during the week?”

Before I could even get a word out, my father burst into the room, rattling a wooden spoon inside a pasta pot.
“Drop your cocks and grab your socks!
We got work to do on the lower deck, sailors.”

I had been a part of this staged, early-morning mayhem for years, so I was accustomed to watching my bedroom door
fly open with various commands shouted from my father. I know for a fact, after spending some weekend mornings at my uncle's house in Jersey, that that little bit of my father's Monday-­morning madness was more than I ever saw at my uncle's house. And that's no knock on my uncle or how he raised his family. It's just, as much as my father and uncle were basically the same men when they were together, they steered their families in different directions and at varying speeds when they were apart. I mean, if there was a volume knob on our houses, Uncle Larry's was on low. While our house had all its speakers blown out.

My father disappeared as quickly as he came in, but he continued to bang the spoon in the pot all the way down the stairs, singing reveille.

I can't get 'em up; I can't get 'em up; I can't get 'em up this morning.

I can't get 'em up; I can't get 'em up; I can't get 'em up at all!

The corporal's worse than the privates; the sergeant's worse than the corporals.

Lieutenant's worse than the sergeants, and the captain's worst of all!

My father always told me from his cherished days in the service that reveille was often followed by a canon shot. Since there was no canon on our front lawn, my father usually sub
stituted that with a ferocious fart at the foot of the stairs. He could do them on queue.

Gino sat at the edge of the cot looking like an innocent man facing a sit-down with Old Sparky. “I don't think I can do this.”

“Just get rid of that little hard-on, pull up some shorts, and follow me downstairs,” I said. “You'll live.”

Gino giggled like a girl. He half covered his lower self with a sheet. “What are you talking about?”

“Knock down that teepee,” I said. “I
can see it
. Just hurry up and let's go. He don't like waiting.”

“But I really should pee.”

“Just hold it. Jesus, how much could that little pud hold? Come on.”

Before we even got to the head of the stairwell, I was high off my father's scent of Winstons, Dentyne, and Old Spice cologne that still hung in my room. That was always enough to scurry down to the carpeted thirteen steps and meet him in the foyer. Gino arrived behind me, a bit disheveled, some fifteen seconds later. Two troops ready for duty.

My father stood at attention and tried with a straight face to apologize for the fart fog we were standing in. “I think your aunt Lilly snuck a little too much ricotta into the sauce last night and as a result, here we are. It'll pass.”

He handed us each a
scola
pasta
to head into the garden and pull from its bounty. Even though it was early in the morning, there was already a thick humidity outside, as we
walked through the giant tomato plants and the zucchini and eggplant vines that were higher than our shoulders. My father would shout out into the thickness, “A.J., show Gino what to pick. I see an
abundanza
(abundance) in there.”

I had to take Gino's glasses off his face before we got any further and clear the fog off them. “Okay, you can't work like this. So here's what we do,” I said. “Pick any red tomato off the vine. But also grab any small ones that fell to the ground that aren't too dirty. Those are good for tonight's salad.”

“I'm not really a lover of salad,” Gino said.

“Lover of salad? Listen, that doesn't mean shit out here,” I whispered. “Look . . . I ain't crazy about zucchini, but I still pick it. I just make the old man happy.”

“Okay, okay.”

“All right,” I said. “Next thing you do is pluck any green pepper that's a little longer than your hand.”

“Got it,” he said, his eyes wandering like he fell down the rabbit hole with Alice. “What about these beautiful yellow flowers?”

“Hell yeah. Throw 'em in the pot. Those are zucchini flowers, and my mother fries them up in a batter and people go crazy for 'em. They're like some delicacy or something.”

“Ahhh, they're so beautiful. Can't we just let them grow?”

Gino was in awe of being lost in all that vegetation. It looked like he felt more himself with not being seen or something.

“Uncle Al,” he cried out. “Can't we just let the zucchini flowers grow and not eat them? They look so beautiful.”

“I'm gonna make believe I didn't hear that,” he said.

“Believe me, they look just as pretty frying in the pan.”

“I don't know if I can do it,” he said.

“This isn't up for debate, Gino,” I said. “First you couldn't grab the clams and now you don't wanna pick the flowers? We
only
grow them so that we can pick them and eat them. End of story.”

My father shouted into the garden. “Let's go. I got five minutes before I gotta go to work. I still see a lot more stuff—basil, mint, scallions. Come on, double-time it.”

“All right, fuck it,” I said. “I'll pick the goddamn zucchini flowers. But you better make sure you nail every tomato and pepper and eggplant.”

Gino seemed somewhat content with that arrangement.

“But watch where you step,” I said. “A strawberry patch is one thing. A pile of dog shit can change your whole day.”

Lucky for me, there was a family of five girls and one boy living right next door to us. And on most mornings—with my father shouting instructions—it was almost a guarantee that my thirteen-year-old neighbor, Debbie Rossitto, would be at her bedroom screen window and overlooking everything we did. Whatever I said, or whatever I did, I always felt her presence peering down on me. And Debbie was far advanced for her age, at least physically and mentally. We shared a birthday—June 2—and she'd already told me she wanted me to be the one to take her virginity next summer. So, you can imagine, every move I made—every command I shouted
out—I did so under the pretense that Debbie was listening and watching everything.

That would've been too much of a load for Gino to carry, so Debbie and I kept our flirting under control until those nights when we graduated to flashlight tag.

Like most days in the garden, on this particular morning, I saw Debbie move her curtain aside and watch us work. Seeing her pretty face while she slowly combed her hair and imagining her promise made gardening almost impossible. It's hard to look gorgeous through a screen window. The only girl I ever saw do that was Faye Dunaway in
Bonnie and Clyde
.

“A.J., what are you doing?” my father said, snapping me back. “There are at least six or seven tomatoes you walked right by. Come on, now, let's get this done. I gotta go sell carpet.”

Somehow, I cleared my head and went back to grab the fruit. The
scolapasta
would be full, and that would make my father happy and send him off to work feeling good and whistling. With me not riding Gino's ass so hard, I could tell my cousin was feeling a little better about himself, and that allowed me to let my mind wander back to Debbie, my very own Bonnie Parker.

But there was one more thing my father had on his agenda: we had bugs, slugs, and worms to deal with. After giving us those detailed instructions, we followed him to his car, along with my mother right by our side. He hopped into his convertible instead of opening the door.

“Is that all you got for us today, Dad?”

“No. Three more things,” he said, lighting a cigarette. “Be loud. Be boys. And break your mother's balls.”

He screeched out of the driveway, drowning out my mother's reply, “
Up yours, Al Benza!
”

Beep. Beep
.

And that was the last we'd see of him until around 10:00 p.m.

“Don't worry, Aunt Lilly,” Gino said. “I'm not going to do that.”

“Thank you, sweetheart.”

“Do what?” I said. “Do what?”

“You know . . .” Gino replied. “What Uncle Al told us to do. At the end there.”

My mother didn't like where this was going. It was mostly innocent, but I think she could see a little bit of the instigator I obviously inherited from my father. “Come on,” she said. “Go back by the pool.”

“No, not yet. I wanna hear Gino say what Daddy said.”

“But . . . A.J.,” Gino said, sheepishly looking up at my mom.

“Just say it. It ain't no big deal. Say, ‘Break Aunt Lilly's balls.' ”

“A.J., stop it,” she said, now with a little force in her voice. “It's a figure of speech.
He
was breaking balls.”

“See! You can say it, and Gino can't. Just say it and I won't bother you anymore about it.”

Gino was silent for a few moments, I thought because he was forming the words. “Why are you throwing a conniption fit over this?” he said.

“Yeah, he's right,” my mother warned. “Now knock it off before I crack a wooden spoon over your head.”

“It's just a funny thing to say,” I said, turning away for the backyard. “That's the way we talk around here, Gino. You better get used to it.”

My mother messed Gino's hair and lightly pinched his cheek. “Don't get all worked up, honey. Sometimes he's too much like his father—who's the biggest ball-breaker of them all.”