Beyond Nostalgia (21 page)

For about ten minutes I tried to tough it out. I shook and shivered from the cold and inactivity. Soon it became too much and I had to say, "Dad … I think we better get a room. I'm freezin' my ass off."

"Nahhh. Don't worry about it, you'll get warm."

Then, in a teasing tone, I threatened him, “I'd-hate-to-have-to-tell-Maaa." 

A few more wordless moments passed as I laid there waiting for his response, shaking harder, hearing only the call of a lone night bird and the breaking waves on the beach. Then, finally, some grunts and groans came from the front seat. Its springs started squeaking as Dad wrestled himself up. After considerable effort he sat up, slid behind the wheel, and cranked the engine over. He was as relieved as I was. I know because when I climbed up front, although it was dark, I could see him unsuccessfully fighting back that sly smile of his, a smile I didn't see very often, a smile pulled so wide it exposed his missing eyetooth on that one side. This was one of those rare, brief moments when he seemed more like a pal than a father, one of those memorable times when, for just awhile, he transcended that wall that so all too often separates father and son.                

Per the captain's orders, I punched out my cigarette as the jet circled over the heavy clouds shrouding Kennedy Airport. Closer to it now, I thought of my father's lifeless body laying somewhere down there, so alone, inside a cold morgue. Tears came to my eyes and then another isolated instance when he had gone out of his way for me played out in my mind's screen, the time he took Donny and me to Yankee Stadium when we were about twelve. At that time you could sit in the bleachers for only eighty cents. I remember the price because all through batting practice, and the first inning too, Dad pitched and bitched about how expensive it was. But despite all his bellyaching that warm sunny day, we still had a super time. In the flesh, we saw Mickey, Yogi, Roger and company wearing their pinstripes out there on that impossibly green Bronx pasture. From our vantage point, the batters appeared as nothing more than white specks but, being so close to 'the Mick' each time he trotted out to centerfield, made me feel as though I had a cheap seat in heaven.

But the real highlight of the game was even bigger than seeing all that. It came late in the game when the Tiger's Jake Wood bounced a ground-rule double into the bleachers. I shagged after that ball as if my life depended on it. When I got close, I dove past three empty seats, just beating about a dozen black kids to it. Sprawled out on the concrete, feeling that ball in my hands, was like a dream come true. I was holding solid gold. But it wasn't mine yet!   

The gang of kids must have figured since I was such a skinny little kid they could easily tear my prize away. Before I could get up from the cement, every one of them was on top of me, kids of all shapes and sizes reaching, yanking at my arms and the ball. But I squeezed that stitched-leather-sphere so tight that a grown man, heck even number 7 'The Mick' himself (if he wasn't such a nice guy), couldn't have wrestled it away. When finally Dad and a couple of other men, also in white undershirts, cleared the pile on top of me, I still had the ball. In my small world, at that point in time, getting that ball was bigger than anything imaginable. I wouldn't have traded it for a year of free egg creams.

For the next three years I fought off a nagging urge to play with that ball. It wasn't easy. A few times I came real close. But I didn't use it. The ball remained on my dresser, perched atop the cardboard 'Yankees' megaphone that held the popcorn Dad had bought me at the Stadium that afternoon in 1961. But eventually, just before my fifteenth birthday, I weakened. It was on a bright Easter Sunday afternoon, across the avenue in the schoolyard, that I put a bat to that once sacred ball. It only took about fifteen minutes of me and the guys whacking it around on the asphalt to trash it. In that time, most of the seams had split and the leather had gotten all chewed up. The scuffed cover was literally hanging off. I put the wood to it one last time and knocked it off completely. As the ball of string rolled down the painted left field line, we turned to split. Jimmy or Donny, I'm not sure, had spotted Susan Dibenedetto and a few of her girlfriends strolling the sidewalk licking ice cream cones on the other side of the chain-link fence. As we took off after them, a little Puerto Rican kid called out to me. He wanted to know if I wanted what was left of the ball, he'd probably wrap it up in friction tape, give it a new life. We were on the other side of the fence when I hollered to him, "Go `head! It's yours!" Then me and the guys turned our eyes back to the girls up ahead, to their swaying, bouncing behinds. Somehow they didn't look the same as they had the summer before. There was now something strangely different about them, something very fascinating.

Though the turnout at Dad's wake was small, anybody who meant anything to my family was there, except the one I loved most in the world. My father's friends from The Holy Name Society showed up, my friends, and the few relatives from Mom's side that still talked to her, the very few she hadn't estranged since her first breakdown. The only two remaining family members on Dad's side of the family - Grandma Cassidy and his sister, Aunt Delores - had flown up from Florida, too. 

Of course, Father Bianchi came every evening, staying until the funeral home closed. As always, he was there for my family to lean on, there for Ma, me, Sylvester, and Dad. I still remember Father's exact words as we knelt together alongside the open casket. He said, "Dee Cee, look how relaxed your father's face is. He's at peace. He's in a better place now."  Though I wasn't so sure about the last part of what Father had said Dad's face was relaxed, like I'd never seen it before. When he was alive, it was always stressed, troubled by my mother's illness, by money problems, often by both. I remember how terribly upset he became every month when the car insurance came due, how every time he worried about "where the dough is coming from" to pay it. 

Like most working beasts, then and now, my father had no estate. He'd worked hard, sold cheap the best years of his adult life, just so his family could subsist. All he had at the time of his death was the Falcon and its payments. His only other possessions were his wedding band, which he took to his grave, a Timex watch (water resistant but not waterproof) with a badly-scratched face, and a fourth-rate stamp collection that was the closest thing to a hobby he'd ever had. 

But although he didn't have many 'things', he did leave me something priceless, a way out of the U.S. Army, a way to derail my inevitable jungle tour in South-East Asia. At the wake I found out from Father Bianchi that I just might qualify for what the military calls a 'hardship discharge'. He told me to call my mother's shrink and ask for a letter explaining her mental condition. I had that letter folded in my wallet along with a photostat of Dad's death certificate when I flew back to Quantico. The day I returned, I brought this documentation to the base commander's office. They advised me that, yes, I was a candidate for a hardship discharge. But after a week had passed with no further word, I got antsy. Never being good at waiting, I decided my best course of action was to go the crazy route, just to increase my odds. 

It was a gamble. They could have thrown me into the brig when I told them I could no longer go on with my infantry training, that my only thoughts were of my sick mother and my dead father, that concentrating on the training was no longer possible. To really convince them that I was emotionally distraught, and this was the riskiest part, I told the commander on my follow-up visit, "Sir, you obviously can do whatever you feel is necessary with me, the brig, whatever. But … but I can't do this anymore." I figured this to be the ultimate bluff. Just the mention of jail surely would convince him that my desperation was heartfelt. After I made my pitch, I did like any good salesman or hustler would, I shut up. I waited for him to say something next.

Lucky for me, this brigadier-general turned out to be a pretty cool head, for a lifer. He told me he'd recommend discharge proceedings and that he'd personally expedite them also. The only negative thing about the meeting was at the end when he told me to get a haircut.                 

Damn, I thought, my hair is just starting to cheat over my ears a little. I wanted a head start on growing it before I got discharged. I told him I was sorry but, really, I was tapped out, spent every last dime on the emergency trip home. I couldn't believe my eyes when that general pulled out his own wallet and handed me a buck. At that moment, despite the fact I'd have to get a haircut and my inherent disdain for the military and all authority figures, I could have kissed that general right on his rising forehead.

Six days later I was out of the army, an honorably discharged veteran after only four months of active duty. Of course, my release was bitter-sweet since it came as a result of my father's death. At the same time, I was thrilled beyond words, and devastated. Well, maybe not exactly devastated because it still felt as if he was alive; out of town maybe, on a trip, or in some hospital, but not dead. The reality of his death took months, no, a couple of years to truly sink in. And the deeper it did, the more I realized how precarious my own existence was. No longer did I enjoy that false sense of security, that luxury, that sense of immortality one enjoys while both your parents are alive.     

After mustering out of Quantico, I returned to Flushing and immediately began questioning anyone and everyone who knew Theresa. Nobody had a clue as to where she might have gone. 

As much as I hated to do it, I even telephoned her closest girlfriends. I knew it was pretty much a waste of time, that had they known Theresa's whereabouts they probably wouldn't have told me anyway. Nevertheless, each time one of them told me they didn't know anything, I was fairly certain it was the truth. Though I pretty much figured this before I began my fruitless inquest, futile as it seemed, the phone calls were necessary for my piece of mind. 

All of Theresa's friends, including Regina, had been cold, stand-offish at best. Except for one, a good-looking Irish blonde named Deirdre Collonics. A friend of Theresa's, I'd always had suspicions about. You guys know the type, the one who suddenly becomes much friendlier every time your sweetheart is out of sight or earshot, always smiling at you at parties, sitting next to you far too often for it to be coincidence,  moving extra close, a hip or a thigh pressing tight against yours every time your girl goes to powder her nose or whatever. Well, that was Deirdre. But her come-on was much more direct when I talked to her on the phone this time. I turned her down gently, giving her some kind of vague maybe-down-the-road comeback. 

After exhausting every lead, I was certain that Mrs. Wayman must have again gotten some ill-perceived bad vibes from a black person or persons, that she didn't want anyone to know, friends or not, where her and Theresa were headed. Maybe she didn't even tell Theresa where they were going. Maybe she did tell her. Possibly Theresa was starting to buy her ridiculous theory. Maybe that's why she had never contacted any of her New York friends. Maybe! Maybe! Maybe! The bottom line was that I had come up with zippo, zero – zilch, that I'd have to go on traipsing through life with only half a heart.

Chapter 18

The next five-year chunk of my life is the haziest of my adult memories. All that remains are some random fragmental recollections, mostly places and incidents. That and a handful of blurry visions of a few of the many nameless women I spent time with. I really freaked out, grew my hair to my shoulders along with a rather sinister-looking Fu Manchu. I partied hard and slept around plenty. With lots of help from Anheiser Busch and more than a few pot-pushers I met along the way, I was sometimes able to anesthetize my pain. Sometimes I even managed to have a reasonably good time, but they never lasted. Any such relationship was always short-lived. To be straight about it, none of those wild nights did a thing for the emptiness I felt inside. Not come sun-up anyway. Not over the long haul.   

That what you might call 'semi-time warp' began right after my discharge when, on a lark, Jimmy Curten and I split to Colorado for the summer. We drove out there in a hundred-and-thirty-five dollar Plymouth I'd picked up. We quickly found a small place to rent in Aurora, just one block east of the Denver city line. With the help of the state employment office, we found work just as easily. They placed Jimmy and me with Burlington Northern Railroad. Both of us were issued a yellow hard hat and before we knew it we were gandy dancers. Along with about fifty other young dudes from all over the country, we laid tracks through the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. 

Denver was a swinging town and we had one wild time out there. From day one until we split in September, it was a non-stop beer-drinking, pot and hash smoking, sexed-up marathon. Although most of my remembrances of 'The Mile High City' are shattered and scattered, two remain clear as crystal.