Romantic Violence

by Christian Picciolini

  And so I watched from behind the left field fence, sitting on my little red bike, the fingers of my right hand curled through the chain-link diamonds, tiny plastic mitt on my left hand ready to catch any home run ball that soared over the wall, imagining it smacking right into my glove. I’d roll as I caught it, hold my hand up triumphantly, showing I had the ball, and with barely any effort I’d pull my arm back and rifle it like a laser beam all the way to home plate.

  The coach’s jaw would drop at the sight of my magnificent arm. “Who’s that kid?” he’d ask, spitting onto the first base line.

  He’d find out. Call my parents. Insist they let me play. “Hell,” he’d say, “I’ll drive him the ten miles back to Oak Forest myself after games. Pick him up from school, even. We gotta have him.”

  How could my parents say no?

  I’d punch the palm of my little plastic glove with my right hand. “C’mon, baby,” I’d whisper, “Right here. Put that ball right here.”

  But the ball never made it over the fence and day after day, weekend after weekend, I’d climb back on my little red bike and ride home, wishing with all my heart that somebody—anybody—would pedal up next to me and say, “Wanna race?”

  Christian and Buddy, 1983

  3

  HAIL VICTORY

  By the time I was in sixth grade, I could no longer bear the stigma of being an outcast at St. Damian. I loathed it so much I actually stooped to praying every day around lunchtime. The other kids bought hot meals from the school lunch lady or had colorful tin lunch boxes full of homemade cookies and ham and cheese sandwiches prepared by their moms. My mother was often rushed to get to work in the mornings, so she’d show up during lunch period with something she sped to buy through a fast food window between doing a hairstyle and rolling a perm.

  Shortly before the bell rang for lunch every day, I’d close my eyes and pray—turning to the false hope the nuns gave us that God watched out for us if we humbled ourselves to ask for help.

  “Dear God, if you’re really out there, just this once please pay attention. I know there are probably a whole lot of other sinners down here, but I’d appreciate it if you’d ignore all of them but me this afternoon. Hear my prayer, oh Lord, and you can take the rest of the day off. I’m not asking for anything huge like a new Sony Walkman or world peace or that another gust of wind will fly under Miss MacGowan’s dress and blow it way up to her neck again. I only want one simple thing.”

  I paused for a minute to give the Big Guy a chance to realize how little I was asking for. “Please, God, I beg you, don’t let my mother show up with another McDonald’s Happy Meal at lunchtime today.”

  But these words apparently never had enough time to travel from my mouth to His ears because every day, like clockwork, when the bell rang and my class streamed into the lunchroom to eat, there my mom would be, stationed at the door, hurrying toward me, her long leather jacket looking stylish to nobody but herself and her blonde hair sticking out at odd angles because she’d rushed out of the beauty shop in the middle of a self-dye job. Her high-heeled boots would hit the polished linoleum floor with sharp staccato notes, tapping out impending doom.

  This particular day was no different. Jake Reilly tripped me as we lined up for the cafeteria. “What’s for lunch, Lick-my-weenie?” he sneered. “Your mommy bringing you another little baby Happy Meal today?”

  When the bell rang I prayed she wouldn’t be in the hall, but there she was. She broke into a wide grin, her arms outstretched toward me, the grease from the fries already seeping through the box and onto her black Isotoner gloves.

  “Shit,” I said, loud enough for Kathleen O’Hara to hear. She’d tell on me for sure for swearing. “Goddamnit,” I added, for good measure. If prayers didn’t work, maybe curses would. Maybe God would strike me dead.

  But no such luck. My mother was upon me, yanking my hand out of my pocket and thrusting the sad, soggy box into it.

  I wished I was like Jake Reilly. I imagined his prayers were heard. He had everything he wanted the second it entered his head. He probably spoke to God in monosyllables and even got to skip the “Dear” part the nuns insisted start every prayer.

  Maybe my prayers needed to be more specific. Maybe I should have said, “Dear God, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, and all the holy saints: don’t let my mother or father or anybody they know who owes them any favor or who works in their beauty shop or who came from Italy or who even knows somebody from Italy or has dark hair for that matter or speaks in a funny accent come anywhere near me carrying any food for my lunch. I’m not that hungry and anyway Dickie Cooper owes me his chocolate pudding because I forged his father’s name on the test he failed last week. Amen.”

  “Kreestyan,” my mother trilled, her heavily-accented voice nasal from perpetually inhaling various hair-coloring products, “Did you think I forgot your lunch today? What kind of mamma would do that? I came all this way to give it to you, but now I have to hurry back to the shop and get Mrs. Foster out from the dryer or her hair will dry and fall out and that’s not good to have an unhappy customer.”

  Behind me I could sense Goliath snarling, strands of dangling drool beginning to form puddles at his feet. Like smelling salts, the Chicken McNugget aroma had awakened the beast.

  At the same moment every day, I wished I didn’t have a mother. Who needed one? Or a father, for that matter. All they did was make me a laughingstock whenever they decided to show up. I wished they’d go back to Italy and let me fend for myself. Or that they’d let me move in with my grandparents. At least then I could go to school in Blue Island instead of at St. Damian with the spoiled rich kids who lived in boring Oak Forest.

  I couldn’t understand why they wanted so badly to fit in with these people. We weren’t like them. We didn’t have money like they did. Besides, they worked such long hours every day, it wasn’t like they even had the time to enjoy it if they wanted to.

  Thankfully, as soon as the bell rang at three o’clock I could leave them all behind. The bratty kids and snobby parents. My own parents. The priests. The nuns. The prayers. The God who would send me to hell if I ate meat on Friday.

  Come three o’clock, I’d be out the door and in a car headed to paradise.

  When the final school bell rang later that afternoon, I hung back and daydreamed about what the weekend had in store. As anxious as I was to get to my grandparents’ house, I had learned to bide my time. My parents were always the last ones to show up at the end of the school day, and even though other parents had stopped asking me if I needed a ride or if I was sure somebody was coming to get me, I still hated the disgrace of being the last one picked up.

  “You still here, Pick-my-weenie?” Jake Reilly jeered, breaking my reverie, as his mother pulled up in their station wagon.

  My body stiffened up and my blood ran cold, but there wasn’t a thing I could do. I was one of the smaller boys in my class. He was bigger. Mean. The school bully. Goliath. And the most popular kid in the sixth grade. The same as he was in fifth grade and fourth grade and third and second and first and probably even kindergarten and pre-school—and the baby corral in the hospital where he was born.

  As I’d been the odd, different, scrawny kid every single one of those years.

  The shy foreign boy who went over to Blue Island, that poor, far-off Italian neighborhood, after school every day and every summer. The kid with the strange mother and father who both styled women’s hair for a living. The dork with the fancy bowl haircut whose mom delivered him soggy fast food for lunch every day instead of sending him to school with a crustless, triangle-cut peanut butter and jelly sandwich in a bright Dukes of Hazzard lunch box. The outcast with the unpronounceable name.

  Eventually I saw my dad’s silver Corvette pull up. Another trinket we could neither afford nor sustain, but my dad had to have it. It was the cherry atop his slice of the American pie.

  His arm shot out as he shoved the passenger door open from the inside.
“Hurry up, let’s go, I have to get back to the shop,” he said, even though I was already half in the car, pulling the door shut behind me.

  We didn’t usually greet each other. What was the point? My father’s thoughts were always somewhere else, and if I had said anything, Frankie Valli or Elvis Presley blaring on the Corvette’s tape deck would have drowned my words out. Once, with me in the car, he drove through a flashing railroad crossing gate because he was so distracted. The oncoming commuter train missed us by a hundred feet. We didn’t talk about that either.

  When I’d told my mother about our narrow escape later that night, my parents got into an argument over it. To vent his frustration, my dad turned on me, yelling and smacking me in the back of the head, his preferred method of communication. My dad wasn’t a very imposing guy physically—he was rather short in stature with a round belly and prone to wearing heavy gold jewelry—and his slaps were never hard enough to really hurt me, but having him poke away at my head like that was insulting, infuriating, humiliating.

  We drove to Blue Island without speaking, my dad stout and listless in his red leather bucket seat. I occupied my time imagining myself at the helm of a fast spy car watching the earth peel away behind me. Rows of storefronts and industrial buildings, miles of oil-stained highway pavement and cracked concrete, stoplights, and road signs swinging in the breeze zipped by in a blur as my father rushed to deliver me to someone else’s care. A burden unloaded.

  I didn’t try to prolong his agony. Before he came in for a crash landing, I’d flung the door open and one foot was already stretching for the curb.

  We didn’t exchange goodbyes. Didn’t make plans for any definite pickup time. Didn’t discuss dinner or homework or even when we’d meet again. It didn’t bother me that neither he nor my mother ever asked about my day at school or what I was learning. I didn’t even know that other kids’ parents pestered them about their homework, their grades, whether they’d eaten their fruit at lunch, or how they’d done on a science project.

  Like a silver bullet, I watched my dad’s Corvette disappear. His pride and joy. Maybe some people thought it was cool, but I didn’t. It was just another thing that stood between me and the Blue Island kids. Just some “rich” kid from another neighborhood where nobody rented out basement apartments in their houses and maybe even had two cars.

  With a sigh of resignation, I scuttled up the sidewalk to the back door of my grandparents’ house. The wind cut through me as I turned the doorknob and let myself into the kitchen.

  “Is that you, Christian?” my grandmother called out in Italian.

  “Yep, Nonna. I’m home,” I yelled back in English.

  It was still too early for dinner when I got there, so I grabbed a spoon and the Fiat-sized jar of Nutella from the cupboard and nestled myself into the coat sanctuary for a sweet snack.

  Not more than a few minutes later, I overheard my grandmother say something to my grandfather so unusual that I opened the closet door a crack so I could decipher their thick Italian accent better. “Anna made a mistake moving so far away. It’s hard enough with one boy, let alone with another child on the way. They don’t have the money for that. What is she thinking?”

  I leaned back against the wall, cushioned by a sizable collection of Alitalia carry-on bags.

  Another child? My mother was having a baby?

  Mixed emotions flooded through me. Would I have to babysit? I hoped not. Then I couldn’t ride my bike. I thought of the other kids in the neighborhood. Every one of them had younger brothers and sisters. I thought now I would be more like them and hopefully they’d let me hang around. Maybe it wouldn’t be too bad.

  I heard Nonna’s footsteps in the hall. Raising her voice, she shouted, “Christian, time for dinner. Wash your hands first, like a good boy.”

  When my brother or sister got there, I’d race them to the kitchen. If there really was going to be a baby.

  My brother’s birth on August 8th, 1983, changed my life, although it would be many years until that became clear to me.

  Having virtually no experience with babies, I didn’t have the slightest notion of how small a newborn would be. I hadn’t spent a great deal of time thinking about little Alex but I certainly expected someone larger than the tiny infant my mother held out to me the day he was born. In the back of my mind, I knew newborns didn’t walk, but I’d pictured more of a toddler. Diapers, yes. A bottle? Sure, babies drank from them. But a tiny, blanket-wrapped blue bundle with a sleeping baby all curled up into a ball snuggled so deep inside it I could only make out a crinkly face and the top of a dark furry head? That image hadn’t even been close to the one in my mind.

  But it didn’t matter. When my mother came home from the hospital with Alex, and leaned down and pulled the blanket back so I could get a look, my heart swelled with pride. It was as if I’d known him my entire ten-year-old life. He was a part of me, and I was a part of him. He yawned and opened his shining brown eyes. I reached out and touched his cheek, soft as the puffy ski vests I’d floated under during my frequent daydreams in the coat closet. Our eyes met in an admiration so pure that nothing existed for a few endless moments but the two of us.

  I accepted this person with all my heart, but I was still a kid, and knowing I wasn’t going to be able to have fun with my brother for a while, I asked, “When can I go out and ride my bike?”

  “Tomorrow,” my mother said. “Tonight we’ll all go home to Oak Forest to be together.”

  I did want to poke at him and look him over.

  Having a brother, I discovered, had many benefits. For one thing, my mother had taken time off from the beauty shop, so things were pretty calm in Oak Forest the remainder of the summer. When school started again, I still spent weekends with my grandparents in Blue Island and had time to ride my bike, but it was easy to get accustomed to staying in one place all week long.

  When Alex heard me coming up the steps, he’d scamper to the front door and throw his pudgy little arms around my knees. His crooked little bucktooth grin was contagious. We’d wrestle and roughhouse, my mother telling me to take it easy, feisty Alex begging for more. He wanted to do everything I did, so I tried to teach him how to play catch and hit baseballs before he was out of diapers. I sang him songs and drew funny pictures and made up stories about the characters, narrating in playful voices. When he was two, I gave him a My Buddy doll for Christmas. It looked like him, with his straight brown hair, faint freckles on his nose, and a chubby little body that could be twisted any direction without complaint. Always with a smile on his face. And so from that day forward we exclusively called each other “Buddy.”

  My parents were more attentive to him than they had been with me, perhaps because they were older or because they weren’t so preoccupied about making good in a new country. But as they became more aware of his needs, it’s fair to say they did the same for mine, to some degree.

  And so I never resented having a little brother. We were pals, comfortable with each other, safe together. We shared a bond neither of us ever doubted would last until the end of time. Buddy filled a huge void in my life. I felt I actually had a family member who wanted to spend time with me.

  No matter how comfortable I became in Oak Forest, my heart, and therefore my real home, was still in Blue Island.

  Since Blue Island had been my second home from the time before I could crawl, I already knew a lot about the kids in the neighborhood. Most of the families had come from the same region in Italy, which meant our families talked about each other all the time.

  I’d been watching the older kids for a while. I’d seen them playing Wiffle ball in the St. Donatus parking lot, Nerf football up and down High Street, and strikeout baseball across the way against the brick wall at Sanders School.

  They were known around the neighborhood as the High Street Boys because they all lived on the same block. And it was high time I became one of them, no matter that I lived a street over and was a full grade
younger.

  The hardest one to win over, I figured, would be Dane Scully. Mr. Popular. He was athletic and cool and the first person I’d ever seen do tricks on a skateboard. All the girls loved him. But he didn’t pay all that much attention to them, even though they showed up to his Little League games just to watch him play. I thought he might see we were alike because neither of us had brothers or sisters close to our age, although in his case, he was the much younger sibling instead of the much older one like me.

  There were two cousins on High Street who acted like big shots—Little Tony Gianelli and Big Tony Gianelli. Little Tony was good at sports and was the unofficial leader of the High Street crew. Unlike Little Tony, Big Tony was tall and lanky and usually one of the last ones picked for a team because he had about as much athletic ability as a lawn chair. Not only were they related, sharing the same first and last names, they were born the same year and lived right across the street from each other. Neither had a reputation of being particularly agreeable, so I wasn’t sure they’d want me around.

  There was Jimmy Callahan. He was Scully’s best friend since birth. As skinny as a piece of licorice, he had fiery red hair and a face covered with freckles to match. He lived with his single mother and older sister. Everybody was intrigued by tales of his estranged older brother, a cowboy living someplace out West with his dad. I hoped that I’d find out more about the cowboy stuff if we got to be friends.

  Chuck Zanecki was tall and skinny like Callahan. He lived across the street from Little Tony and I felt sad for him when I learned his father had died in a horrible work accident at the local oil refinery. A constant jokester, Chuck was quick to play tricks on people—switch gloves in the dugout, put shaving cream in people’s hats, that type of thing—but had a good heart. Of all the kids on the block, he was the only one I thought might possibly—maybe—want to be my best friend.