Our Roots Are Deep with Passion

by Lee Gutkind

  As far as George and I were concerned, Uncle Sergio was pure joy. He had all the advantages of an adult—including a gold pocket watch and a Kodak Instammatic camera—and none of the drawbacks (including a sense of responsibility and shame). He wasted no time teaching us every Italian parolacci (swear word), including some we didn’t already know. The three of us never stopped giggling. Sergio was sixty-seven years old.

  Everything about Italy thrilled us. The little cars that looked like dachshunds on toy wheels; the coffee called cappuccino with a fun layer of foam on top; the ice cream called gelato that was so much better than American ice cream (especially nocciola—hazelnut). Chinotto was brown and bubbly and looked like Coke or Pepsi, but George and I found it superior; we found everything in Italy superior. Water was served in tall green bottles with filigreed labels and carbonation, and beat hell out of American water. The trains, the trees, even the birds, all seemed somehow better. So did the clay tile rooftops, and the old shutters in all the old windows, and the sounds the church bells made, heavenly enough to make even a ten-year-old atheist want to fall to his knees and pray, almost. Every place you looked there were spewing fountains and naked statues, paintings, sculptures, and cortiles—courtyards with cloudy willow trees like the ones that ran up our driveway, painted on stucco walls.

  From June to September we took in all the major cities and sights, as far north as Bergamot on the Swiss border, then back to Naples to catch the ship home, with two Italian bicycles we’d nagged our mother for stowed in the cargo hold: George’s cherry red, mine lime green. As the Queen Anna Maria pulled away from the dock my brother and I cried, something we hadn’t done when we sailed out of New York harbor.

  When we uncrated those bicycles we were the envy of the neighborhood, the first Italian ten-speeds ever to grace the streets and sidewalks of Bethel. Legnano, said the decals on the frames. Campagniola, said the S-shaped appendages called derailleurs. The neighborhood kids, they couldn’t get over all those gears. “What are they all for?” they wondered, scratching their heads, but didn’t need much convincing to be persuaded that ten gears were better than three.

  The bicycles were too big for us; we had to wait a year to reach the pedals. During that time appreciation turned to envy, and envy to resentment, and resentment to malice and mischief. Fool that I was, I let Wesley Conklin “hop on” my bicycle for “just a sec,” only to have him pump away down Wooster Street with me in hot pursuit. I chased him all the way into town, past Mulhaney’s variety store, past the Doughboy and the town hall, through the middle school parking lot, past the ruins of hat factories. As dusk settled I sat on the front steps of Wesley’s house, waiting with sore legs and burning tears for him and my Legnano. Finding me there, Wesley’s parents took pity on me and invited me in for “supper”: Campbell’s split pea soup and a salad of iceberg lettuce and cucumbers. With Wishbone dressing.

  A few days later it happened again. This time Sean Deifendorf took off with my bike. I called up his parents to lodge a complaint. The next day at school Sean and his older brother Keith cornered me in the lavatory and beat me blue.

  By the time George and I started high school each of us had had our bikes stolen no less than a dozen times. Finally we gave up and bought cheap Schwinn replacements, with chintzy chrome chain guards and saddles with fat springs under them, bikes no one would bother to steal. The Legnanos went into the garage to gather cobwebs and dust.

  As I pedaled my piece-of-shit Schwinn around I felt the eyes of the whole town upon me, watching me, laughing at me the way those kids on the bus had laughed at my father on his rusty Raleigh. For the first time I tasted the alienation that would hound me for years: the sense that I didn’t and would never fit in, that I was both too good and not good enough, unique, but also somehow inferior, incongruous. If there was prejudice at work here it cut both ways. I convinced myself that my ostracism was the product of envy, and took it as a back-handed compliment. Yes, I was bitter, bitter and scornful and full of false pride, riding high on my mental Legnano, my scorn a substitute for dignity.

  Still, I refused to surrender, to get down off my ten-speed attitude. Instead I clung to what I defined as my “uniqueness.” Since I liked to draw and was good at it, and since artists were known to be alienated, I declared myself an artist: a label which, in my own mind, trumped all other labels. I went to art school, wrote novels and plays, and scraped by as an illustrator. When I could afford to, I traveled to Italy, where I pretended to feel at home, something I’d never felt, really, in my own country. I married a woman of Sicilian descent, who shares my love of anchovies and vino rosso, and who’s an artist like me. And I considered myself reasonably happy. I still do.

  Still, there is that familiar sense of displacement that follows me everywhere I go, along with an ache of loneliness, the kind that most people probably feel when they stand at the edge of a pier looking out to sea. I can’t even say that I mind it, really. Or maybe I’ve just grown used to it. Maybe I’ll never achieve what the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa called that “distinction of spirit that makes isolation seem a haven of peace free from all anguish.” Perhaps the only country this Dago from Mayberry will ever feel at home in is the country of Solitude, that uncharted island halfway between Italy and the United States of America, a country the size of a hyphen.

  But I am not an Italian American any more than I am an American, or an Italian. I am the American-born son of parents born in Italy, rife with their eccentric, egocentric, displaced genes. Maybe others see me as an Italian American, but I don’t. I see what I see in just about everyone: an amalgam of where we’ve come from, who we are, and—maybe most important of all—what we choose, or refuse, to be.

  PETER SELGIN’s work has appeared in Glimmer Train, Missouri Review, the Literary Review, Bellevue Literary Review, the Sun, Northwest Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Ratta-pallax, Salon.com, the Chicago Sun-Times, and Newsday. His novel, Life Goes to the Movies, was a finalist for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, and his story collection, Bodies of Water, was short listed for the Iowa Fiction Award. He lives in New York City.

  I Heard You the First Time, Daddy

  . . . . . . .

  RITA CIRESI

  My father was a man of fruit and vegetables. From four A.M. to four P.M. he trucked wooden crates of produce out of my uncle’s distribution warehouse in downtown New Haven, Connecticut. He came home smelling like all the green and brown and red things pulled up from the earth and plucked from vines and trees, whose American names I did not know until I set off for college: escarole, rape, carciofi, radicchio, and fiori di zucca. Like the famous portrait of “Summer” painted by Giuseppe Archimboldo, my father seemed to have a cucumber for a nose, apples for cheeks, cherries for eyes. His teeth, which he rarely brushed, were indeed an open pea pod, and his sweaty work clothes gave off the odors of grapes and melons, figs and mushrooms, chestnuts and corn cobs, plums and pomegranates.

  I knew that the cheerful heads of cabbage and bags of gnarled Yukon Golds he delivered to the Yale University cafeterias eventually became cole slaw and potato salad; I also knew that the spinach and tomatoes and mushrooms he trucked up to the back door of New Haven’s pizzerie became toppings for the delicious apizza for which the city had become famous.

  But just about everything else about my father seemed a mystery to me. For instance, I did not learn his given name until after I had swilled my first alcoholic drink (a concoction of Smirnoff vodka and strawberry Kool-Aid that my boldest sister dared me to drink) and after I had smoked my first nauseating cigar (a fat green Dutch Masters that this same sister commanded me to puff all the way down to the nub).

  My father’s first name always had been a source of confusion to me. My mother, a former Army nurse, referred to my father strictly in the third person. “Here comes The Dad,” she said, with tight, grim lips when my father’s truck lumbered up our steep, crumbling driveway. “The Dad is here” was indeed a dire announcement. It meant we four Cir
esi girls had to glance up from the fuzzy black-and-white television set—where we were glued to reruns of Dark Shadows and Gomer Pyle—to actually acknowledge our father’s grunt of hello. It also meant that for the rest of the long Connecticut winter evening, my mother would holler in my father’s half-deaf ear, “The Dad! You want some ravioli? The Dad! You want some ice cream? The Dad! You want to snore all night on that couch or you want to go upstairs and snore in your own bed?”

  For a long time I operated under the mistaken impression—as did every telephone solicitor who called—that my father’s name was Gooey-Peppie. Our electric bills (and phone bills and gas bills) still came addressed to my grandfather Giuseppe, who had died years before I was even born.

  I also went through a phase where I thought my father’s first name was the same as his last name. “CIRESI, CIRESI!” loud male voices bellowed into the phone when I dared to answer it. Sometimes the caller would add, “YOUR FATHER!” I knew this rough command was not as rude as the shouts of the boys on the playground at school: “Your mother!” “No, your sister!” “No, your twin sister and all your girl cousins and your bitch of a dog, too!” Still, I often wondered why these guys who so curtly demanded the ear of my father never spoke with the sort of gentility I heard on my oldest sister’s ALM Method language-instruction tapes. In the segments that dealt with proper telephone manners, one heard civilized Italians—real Italians—clearly enunciating vowel-rich dialogue such as: “Pronto! Chi parla? Vorrei parlare con il direttore, per favore.” Translation: “Hello, who’s calling? I’d like to speak with the manager, if you please.”

  The Italian American men who called for my father said neither please nor thank you when I hollered back at them, “AH-SHPETT-AH—HOLD ON!” I loathed rousing The Dad from his deep snoring slumber on the couch. Somebody’s on the phone—to my father—meant Somebody was calling to tell us somebody else was dead. I always felt just as relieved as my dad did—no wake to attend, no need to suit up for a funeral—when the voice of one of his cronies came through on the other end of the line to cheerfully holler, “Yo, Ciresi!”

  “Yo!” my father hollered back. “Cheech! Hezzadeech, Sawzeech!” (Translated into somewhat purer Italian: Ciccio, che si dice, mia salsiccia? and into coarser English: Hey, Fat Frankie, what’s going on, ya sausage-head?)

  There were, of course, variations on this Francisco-Salsiccia theme: “Yo, Rosso-Red!” “Yo, Tony Boy!” “Yo, the Great Michele!” “Yo, Ugly!” The Dad didn’t seem to know anyone who had a normal American name, like Tom or Bill or Dick. Every single fourth cousin or we-go-way-back buddy of his had a nickname that got rung like a stuck doorbell. For instance, when we visited the Long Wharf Food Terminal, where my Uncle Augustino (better known as Zio Augie Doggie) operated his produce business, we found my father wheeling wooden crates of cauliflower and Boston lettuce over to the massive trucks idling along the loading docks. My father stood on the metal platform and shouted down at the beef man and the cheese man and the banana man and all the other man-men who worked at the terminal: “Yo, Shorty! Yo, Lucky! Yo, Moo Cow! Yo, Pecorino! Yo, The Cat!”

  On weekends my father met his buddies at a downtown lunch counter for coffee and an English muffin slathered in butter. These cronies were The Judge (who as far as I could tell had never worn a black robe), The Doc (who probably had never delivered a baby), and the Rabbi from Napoli (a big question mark here). My father knew brothers called Itch and Scratch, and Twins named Tony Boots and Tony Shoes, neither of whom owned a Thom McAn store, but who were a barber and a keychain salesman respectively. From his days in Panama—where he sweated out all of World War II playing poker and smoking cigars and guarding the canal—my dad had Army buddies known as Three-Finger Tony, Bulldog, and Pirate. Among his cousins, my father counted a Carlo who was a Chaz and two Stefanos who were known as Hey, Big Steve! and Hey, Little Steve! when they weren’t known as Stevie Hot Dogs and Stevie Bananas. The guy who painted our house every three years—driving a Sherwin-Williams—splattered woody station wagon with seven rickety ladders sticking out of the back—had the smooth cheeks of a baby’s butt, which earned him the ridiculous name of Coolie Face Mac.

  We only found out the real names of these men when they died and my mother carefully clipped their obituaries from the newspaper using her fanciest pinking shears (which imparted a festive air to death). So Fazool-and-Beans went down into history as a Bruno, Windy the Fart as a Massimo, Booger a Placido, and 2 × 4 a Cosmo.

  Sometimes people close to my dad called him “Tah-dee.” Frightened that my father would have to die before I knew if he spelled this name “T-o-d-d-y” or “T-o-d-d-i-e”—I took it upon myself to ask my vodka-swilling, cigar-smoking sister, “How do you spell Daddy’s name?” “S-a-l,” she said, “v-a-t-o-r-e.”

  “Whuh?” I asked.

  “His name is Salvatore.”

  “So how come nobody calls him Sal?”

  “What are you, stoonod?” my sister asked. “Then people would know.”

  “Know what?”

  She leaned forward, snapped her Juicyfruit gum between her crooked teeth, and conspiratorially whispered, “Know that he was Sicilian.”

  For a long time I thought my off-the-boat father—and all his off-the-boat friends—had nicknamed each other in an effort to seem more American. But then I realized they were just putting their own spin onto the age-old Italian practice of using diminutives like -ino and -etto and fatten-me-up endings like -one and -accio. My dad’s Giuseppes (who would be Peppes and Beppinos) became instead Spaghettis and Toothpicks. His Rosarios became Fat-Froggys and Big Cheeses.

  One of my dad’s most famous renamed characters was Curly the Paper Boy. Curly delivered the New Haven Register around four-thirty P.M. every evening. The problem was, he started his delivery route on the south side of Fourth Street. We lived on the north. Which meant my father walked up and down in front of the lace-curtained living-room windows, jingling his change and reporting on Curly’s very slow progress. “There goes Curly,” he said. “Curly’s at the Barones’ house. Curly’s at Esposito’s. Curly’s at Casa Scalese. Curly is … Curly is … Curly is on our side of the street now.” Until finally we saw Curly’s tight black Sicilian curls appear directly in front of Casa Ciresi and my father hollered, “Curly’s here! Yo, Curly! Che si dice, Curly, howzzit goin’!” Curly hurled a rolled copy of the Register at the front door. After my father had retrieved the paper, he turned around and told us—just in case we had missed all the excitement—“That was Curly.”

  My father’s urge to repeat the names of his friends and relatives not once, not twice, but so many molte-volte that we wanted to stick our big toes in our ears, became known in our family as “The Shecky Greene Syndrome.” The official terminology for my dad’s say-it-again-Shecky-ism dated back to an infamous Saturday in 1973 when my father—who loved to “go to the horses”—tuned our flickering black-and-white Zenith TV to WTNH, Channel 8.

  “Hey, Reet!” my father called out to me, although I sat right at his slippered feet. “C’mere, Reet!”

  “I’m right here, Daddy,” I said. “I heard you the first time, Daddy.”

  “Lookee here! It’s the Kentucky Derby!”

  I had inherited my dad’s love of the races. I thrilled to the glamorous characters found at every track: the midget jockeys in their United Nations-colored silks, the elegant thoroughbreds with high tails and brushed manes and snorting nostrils, and the society ladies in wide-brimmed hats and flowered dresses and locked jaws who perched in the boxes holding their opera glasses in their white-gloved hands. I wanted to be such a lady some day. But alas, I also wanted to be one of the horses. And one of the midget jockeys. Yet I knew I could not be any of them unless I were reincarnated (a no-no for us Catholics).

  So I was sitting right there, watching my father tightening the tin foil on the rabbit ears so the TV would get better reception, when The Dad pointed to one of the horses being corralled into the starting gate. “Hey,” he said, �
��there’s a horse here named Shecky Greene. Shecky Greene, remember Shecky Greene the comedian on the Ed Sullivan Show?”

  I remembered. And so I squinted at the fuzzy TV screen, half-expecting to see a short Jewish horse dressed in a tuxedo and cummerbund. Holding a microphone. Curling back his lips just like the famous talking horse on television—Mister Ed—to say, “But seriously, folks!” Tonight, appearing live, from his famous act at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas, Shecky Greene the horse would disparage his mother-in-law. Poke fun at the other faggoty geldings with their long hippy hair. Drive his car into the fountain of Caesar’s Palace casino and say, “No spray wax, please!”

  My father decided this equine phenomenon was not to be missed. So he began summoning my older sisters. Unfortunately I had three. So sisters A, B, and C all got summoned individually. “Yo, Anna Marie! There’s a horse here named Shecky Greene! Yo, Rose Mary! Come see the Shecky Greene! Yo, Jo-Jo-Jo! It’s Shecky!” Getting my mother into the living room involved a few more sheckies. “Marie. Marie. MARIE, whattareyadeaf or what? Come on in here. There’s a horse here named Shecky Greene!”

  By now we all had more than gotten the point. Right here in our crowded living room—crammed tight with a player piano with the rolls removed from its guts, a sagging avocado green three-cushion couch, a ripped maroon vinyl recliner taped with black duct tape, a flame orange armchair, a mustard yellow wing chair, a wooden rocking chair that looked like it belonged to Ma Kettle’s grandmother—right there in our flea-market living room was a certain member of the equine genus named after a famous Vegas comedian, SHECKY GREENE.