by A. J. Benza
“We said discharge because he was discharged from the army!”
Deep down I knew it meant something else, but I let it go.
Our house really came to life when my sister Rosalie would bolt through the kitchen screen door and surprise everyone with what was usually an unbelievable story after her shift ended as a teller at the Bank of Babylon. If she wasn’t finding and caring for a box of abandoned kittens or cursing my father for sneaking his .38 caliber handgun in her pocketbook while she was at the bank, then it was usually a story involving her infamous battles on supermarket checkout lines. My sister never started a fight, but she finished them all.
“I’m at King Kullen tonight, and this woman behind me, I can see, is counting my items because I’m on the express line. Ten or less. I had eleven because I forgot I needed a chunk of provolone for Sunday.” Rosalie is saying this, out of breath and holding a rescued kitten in each hand. “Under her friggin’ breath, I hear this woman say, ‘Go ahead, let the guinea get her cheese.’ ”
Gasps all around the table.
“What did you do?”
“Please don’t tell your father.”
“Can I go back to the store without being embarrassed?”
Rosalie went on. “Well, I turned around and I grabbed her head with both hands and I said, ‘Who. The. Fuck. Are. You. Calling. A. Guinea, you Irish bastard?’ Just like that. And the cashier is screaming, ‘Please girls, stop.’ But it’s too late. The manager comes over all worried, saying, ‘Ladies, what’s going on? What’s the problem?’ I say, ‘Nothing.’ The Irish girl can’t even talk, she’s so shocked. And . . . I walk out with my eleven items.”
“Oh, Rosalie . . .” my mother tried.
“Ma, I gotta hear her call me a guinea? Since when?”
“Oh, Christ, they’re all like their father, except my Lorraine,” my mother said.
I always managed to run to the table and hear the tail end of my sister’s battles. “Why doesn’t this happen when you go shopping with me? I wanna fight someone at King Kullen,” I’d say.
“I’m not even going to tell your father, because he’ll go to the supermarket and wait for the manager to come out and there’ll be a real shit storm,” my mother would say. “This is between us. Don’t tell your father!”
“That’s not even why I’m here,” Ro said. “Get Lorraine and Arlene. I wanna put Tiger Lilly in a doll’s dress and find a little black top hat for Lorenzo [our cats] and film a wedding ceremony tonight.”
Before you knew it, we were digging through bags in the garage and retrieving tiny doll clothes for the cats to wear for their shotgun wedding—all caught on our Super 8 mm camera. Within an hour of Rosalie’s dropping in, we were all planning a ridiculous feline wedding, and that clip still exists to this day—almost forty years later. And it gets the same laughter time and again. That’s one of the reasons why you had to be around the magical aura of my sister Rosalie whenever she walked into a room. You had to turn your chair in her direction. She made you look.
When the house finally turned quiet, when Rosalie took her show home, Aunt Mary dozed off on the downstairs couch in front of the TV that I would secretly turn to the X-rated Escapade channel), Aunt Mae and Arlene walked home, and Lorraine fell fast asleep within minutes of her lights turning off, that was usually when I’d be under my covers and hear the ice clinking in the tumbler of my father’s third Scotch. That was the one he took past my bedroom and brought into his own before collapsing into his king-size bed. I’d listen to my mom carefully pleading with him to calm his anger when he’d discuss the corporate bosses or loopy customers who dropped by the store with stupid requests or silly demands. I could hear her undressing him and dropping his head on the pillow.
“Oh, Manoola.” That was the nickname he gave her. Nobody knew why. “I wish you could see the shit I have to go through every day with these crooked kikes. They all have mistresses, and they would sell their own mothers down the river to turn a dollar profit.”
“All right, Al, I know. It won’t always be this way,” my mom would promise him as he passed out. He would begin snoring immediately, and she would finally be able to light a cigarette and pop a Librium to adjust her high blood pressure and calm her down.
Sometimes she would walk into my room and sit on my bed, smiling and laughing nervously to reassure me. “Oh boy! Well, your father was in rare form tonight,” she’d say, whistling through her teeth and rubbing my chest. “He was feeling a little bit stewed. Don’t worry, honey. If you hear him yelling, always remember Daddy’s under a lot of pressure at work. He works hard for us.”
“I know, Ma. I know what Daddy goes through,” I’d whisper, closing my eyes. “I listen.”
The call that changed my life that summer was, while unexpected, not out of the ordinary. For reasons unknown to me, our family’s upstairs telephone line was not in my parents’ master bedroom. Instead, the big, white rotary machine sat on a tiny glass-topped, wrought-iron stand right outside my bedroom, down the hall from my parents’ door. This unfortunate placement gave me horrifying access to the sudden and sometimes gory details of the deaths of almost all my aunts, uncles, cousins, and some really close acquaintances. By the time I was four years old, I had already lost both sets of grandparents. By the time I was twelve, I had grown accustomed to the phone ringing at ungodly hours, hearing my mother trying to slip on her Dearfoam slippers as she raced down the hall and stopped at my door to receive what was undoubtedly a death call. Maybe there are some families out there who wait for the breakfast hour, at least, before delivering the bad news. My family delivered it as it came, even at two in the morning.
It usually took my mother five or six rings to even get to the phone, but when she did, I would already be wide-awake and sitting up in my NFL sheets, staring at the posters of Farrah Fawcett and the Fonz on the opposite wall.
“Josie died! Oh, Al, my sister Josie died,” my mother would yell down the hall. “Ahhh . . . poor thing. She suffered enough. At least she’s out of pain now.”
Or:
“Millie’s dead? When? How?” And then the details would be relayed to my father right outside my door. “She was throwing up blood for two days. Her lungs were just shot. They had tubes in her throat and in her side trying to clear her chest, but she went tonight. Ah, shit, and now my brother Louie has chest pains and a numb left arm! Jesus Christ, Louie, have them check you out. You’re there now!”
And:
“Yeah, Mae! What’s wrong? Eileen was killed in a car accident? Oh my God! Thirty years old. Somebody ran a light on Sunrise Highway and plowed right into her. She died in Gregory’s arms. Oh, Mae . . . what can we do?”
Calls like those would prompt my father to wake up the entire family, sober up immediately, and invite the grief-stricken family over for coffee and his famous verdura omelets. It wasn’t unusual for relatives of ours to drive from Brooklyn to our home in West Islip, Long Island, some fifty miles away, and go over the funeral and wake details right at our kitchen table.
On those days, my father would forbid me to go to school. He wanted me to see the grief and be there to lift the spirits of my cousins whenever I could.
“Listen to your father,” he’d say to me, kneeling down. “This is more important than anything you’re gonna learn in school today. You be here for your family.”
This particular late-night phone call, however, the one that changed my life that summer, made me sit up in bed and pay closer attention, because this time no one had died or was facing a terrible illness. This call had a different tone. My mother passed the phone to my father almost as soon as she picked up. It was dead quiet in the hallway, and that meant I could hear every syllable that was coming out of the receiver, as well as my father’s calming words.
It was the sobbing voice of my father’s older brother, Larry. Uncle Larry was a doctor who lived in New Jersey and had a
very successful medical practice. Through the years, Uncle Larry had been there for us many times when my father’s salary was not enough; he’d graciously send a check along to make sure our monthly nut was covered. He had three daughters, Geneva, Susan, and Robin, and two sons, Larry Jr. and ten-year-old Gino. By the time the summer of 1974 came and went, it was no surprise—but a hell of a shock to my macho uncle Larry—that his oldest son, Larry, was looking forward to leaving home and starting a somewhat mysterious new life in San Francisco.
Although he was a well-respected doctor, Uncle Larry couldn’t bring himself to refer to his son as a homosexual. He, along with a lot of other professionals, preferred the term “brain damaged.”
So when the phone rang outside my door that summer night in June 1974, I heard my uncle coming to grips with the fact that his youngest boy, Gino, was going the way of his older brother.
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.’ ”