by A. J. Benza
On some days, my father would leave the house shirtless, wearing just a swimsuit and a shoulder holster carrying a huge knife. He was barefoot, and a large shark’s tooth necklace hung from his neck. In his hands, he carried an empty potato sack, a folded lawn chair, a fishing pole, and a small tackle box of assorted hooks, weights, bobbins, knives, and line. These days, that getup would probably have a neighbor dial 911. Or at least 311. But back in the late sixties and early seventies, he got away with it. He still cut a great physique while looking handsome and menacing at the same time. Looking back, he had Robert De Niro’s vibe before De Niro was old enough to have it himself.
That afternoon, he had pulled my mother aside and told her of his plan to take Gino and me to the water. This was another way of getting a bead on Gino, who was too young to possess a poker face. But there were times, nonetheless, when he was virtually unreadable.
“Give me some time with the boys,” he told her.
“What are you gonna do?”
“I’m gonna do whatever the hell I gotta do. You got any better ideas?”
“No,” she said, “I wish I had an easy answer. I wish I could help somehow.”
“Lilly, you wanna help? Just cook,” he said.
“All right, all right. Maybe you want a nice marinara sauce for later?”
“Nah, let’s go with a meat sauce. You got any veal?”
“Veal? Veal,” my mother said. “Who’s got money for veal this week?”
“Oh, for chrissakes,” he said. “Just keep it beef and pork then. Bust my balls over veal, now?”
“Just go enjoy the water. What are you gonna bring home?
“I dunno. I never done this before. Hopefully a changed boy.”
They kissed and my father whistled for Gino and me to follow him down the street, where in less than half a mile, the road eventually gave way to a beach, and the beach presented the Great South Bay before us. For Gino, who was coming from a nicely established upper-middle-class neighborhood in Succasunna, New Jersey, this little walk—peppered with dirt hills, interesting pieces of driftwood, and dried beds of seaweed—must’ve felt like being dumped into a trip to Castle Rock in Lord of the Flies.
My father was always first in the water, without so much as testing its temperature with a toe. He’d been doing this for years and knew exactly where to bring us. I had taken this walk with my father a hundred times before. We did this more often than tossing a football, hitting a baseball, or kicking a soccer ball. I guess he felt Jack and Frankie would pick up that slack, while nobody could teach me the wonders of water better than he could. So, for us, that walk to the bay was like church. When he felt he found the right spot—which usually meant he felt lots of clams stuck in the sand beneath his feet—he beckoned us in. I made sure I stuck real close to Gino, for fear he’d bolt back up the beach and give up on getting involved. Gradually we got deeper in the water until we were about waist-high. We walked the crystal clear flats of the bay floor, our little legs dragging through sea grass a foot high—which held a fear of the unknown like nothing else I knew. Gino, to my amazement, was keeping step with me—both of us holding one hand on our chests and the other guarding our nuts. We gently stepped down our bare feet on unknown hard knots of sea life and, worst of all, crabs of every variety—blue claws, spider crabs, and sometimes the prehistoric horseshoe crab. Two summers earlier, my father had instituted the “no socks” rule, denying the safety provided by a simple tube sock. He demanded I go in barefoot, insisting the tiny cushion of cloth on my sole would deny me the instant clue that I was undeniably stepping on a clam. I had gotten somewhat used to it, but now Gino had to abide by it as we trudged on, inch by inch, to get right next to my father. I couldn’t keep count of the sea creatures—small fluke, lazy eels, schools of silverfish, and various kinds of sea cucumber we unexpectedly awoke from slumber until we reached him.
In those few seconds when my father would duck underwater for a clam or two, I could see Gino taking in the expanse of the bay and the little fish that were eerily breaking water all around us. When we were finally standing next to him, my father would make this wondrous face that gave way to a sentence I had heard many times over the years with him. “I got a triple header here,” he said. “I have two under my right foot and one under my left.”
“But Dad, the grass is really high . . .”
“Stop with the grass already. Stop. Listen to me,” he said. “A.J., you hold on to the belt loop on the right side of my shorts. Gino you grab a hold of a loop on the left side.”
We were both stationed to go but petrified at what we’d uncover under his feet. After all, those lumps weren’t always clams. “On the count of three,” he said. “I want you boys to exhale and use my legs as pillars until you reach directly under my feet and come up with the clams, capiche?”
“What if there’s a crab down there?” I said.
“A.J., if I’m not stepping on a crab, you aren’t going to step on a crab.”
“Wait!” Gino said. “What’s a pillar?”
“He just means use his legs like they are long poles that we climb down,” I said.
It was more than just the threat of grabbing a crab, once I got down to my father’s feet. It was the baitfish swimming between my legs, the snappers darting to our left and right, and the piles of sargasso-like seaweed my father would part as if it were his own little Red Sea. The bay was teeming with so much life to the point where it scared the life out of me.
I gave it one more shot. “Dad, the grass is really thick and high here,” I said. “Maybe we should find another spot.”
“Yeah . . .” Gino said. “I’m with A.J.”
“You two gotta stop,” he said. “If you’re stepping on grass, that’s good. It means no one has been there before. There’s probably a lot more than three clams around here. Try three dozen.”
My father hated to stand on a clam too long. It was as if he believed all the other clams nearby would suddenly get unstuck and disappear from the area. And so the clock in his head meant more than the one on his wristwatch. “Come on, boys,” he said. “I’m not trying to keep you here all day. Let’s just get a few dozen clams, maybe a dozen blue-claw crabs with the fishnet and head home.”
Gino and I were set to go under on the count of three. At one, we started laughing. At two, we took deep breaths. At three, I was the only one of us who went under and swam down the murky sight of my father’s leg until I grabbed a hold of his heel. I took a blurry peek at where Gino was standing, but I could see that he was nowhere to be found on the left leg, so I went to work. I had forgotten to exhale, so my ass was floating up to the surface like a bobbin, and I felt my father slam my body down into the water. Before I knew it, I was lying on all that mysterious sea grass, but I had loosened two of the clams. One was a small cherrystone, the other a monster chowder clam, which was really dug in deep. I could hear my father above the water, shouting instructions to me. “To the right, to the right!” Before I lost all my air, I finally pulled the big clam free from the muck and came up begging for a gulp of fresh air.
“Here.” I coughed. “Here’s two. That second one was so deep.”
I was breathing like I had just swam in the Olympics.
“Calma, calma (calm down),” my father said. “You were underwater eight seconds for chrissakes.”
“You didn’t go,” I said to Gino.
“I can’t do it. I’ll never do it. I’m sorry,” Gino said, to my surprise.
Though my father was visibly disappointed at Gino, his biggest concern at the moment was the clam under his left foot. “Come on,” he said. “This clam I got here isn’t gonna swim up to the top and jump in the sack, A.J. Do it again.”
And that’s the way it went that Sunday afternoon. My father stomping on clams and basically doing a movement similar to the Twist to loosen the grip on the sea’s bottom, and me
swimming down his legs to dig them out and toss them in the sack. We had three dozen in no time. Gino was getting more and more distant with each minute we spent out there and more and more insecure at my success and enthusiasm.
“I’m sorry you didn’t try harder, Gino,” my father said. “I thought you’d get the hang of this fast and start doing it better than my A.J.” It was a lie he knew he had to tell.
“I never even went swimming in a bay before, let alone clamming,” Gino said. “I’m getting a little tired anyway, Uncle Al.”
“That’s okay. You’ll do it next time. We got enough clams. Let’s take a little walk by the grassy areas and see if we can’t grab a few crabs.”
Grabbing crabs in the flats was easier than clamming, but you had to be really fast with the net. That’s why my father counted on our eyesight, while he would be the one doing the actual catching.
We placed our bag of clams on the beach and then set out to search for crabs that liked to crawl in the really shallow, grassy waters once the tide went out. We did this for an hour or so, with the sun beating down on our backs and the mosquitoes and deerflies biting our legs from time to time, but it was worth it. The crabs weren’t too big in early summer—you had to wait until September to catch the real monsters—but every so often you’d find a “big mutha,” as my father called them. And on the good days, they were too slow to escape his skills with the net.
Gino didn’t want too much of this either, but he trudged on long enough until we had our haul in place. Three dozen clams and one dozen crabs in a little over an hour.
“Not bad, boys,” my father said. “We stuck it out and now we have ourselves a couple nice appetizers to go along with your mother’s sauce.”
“Uncle Al, your fingers are bleeding,” Gino said.
“That happens. It ain’t like these crabs wanna go in a bucket. Sometimes you gotta rip them off the net and get them in.”
My father let me hold the sack of clams over my back the whole way home. Gino carried the bucket of crabs, which were alive and moving and a bit challenging for a first-timer. And it scared the hell out of him with each step.
“You can do it, Gino,” my father said. “Uncle Al has faith in you.”
“Yeah, come on, cuz,” I teased. “They only crawl out of the pail and onto your arm once in a while.”
“Please,” Gino shrieked. “I’ll drop them right now!”
Before we got home, as we walked past the weeded hills of plots of land that would one day be houses, my father told us to drop everything and follow him. “I see some great stuff behind that little hill,” he said. He pulled a folding knife out of his tackle box and got right to work on the vegetation that was growing wild. Most everyone else would’ve walked right past this stuff, but not my father. Here it was, modern-day Long Island, and I’m watching my father living off the land like a pioneer. Obviously, it wasn’t just the bay he gratefully took from. He could scan the foliage in the many lots near our home with his sharp, knowing eyes and recognize the shape and veins of a leaf, the color of a berry, the gentle slope of a stem crowned with flowers. He cut dandelion leaves and wild pansies. He knew what mushrooms were okay to pick and put in the pan. He took in every life-form around us and it was all one giant salad to him.
By the time we got home and dumped the haul onto the pavement in the backyard, the sun had dried us off already. We jumped in the pool to get the salt water off our bodies and watched my father arrange the clams by size. He handed a bundle of greens to my mother, who had been busy whipping up blended whiskey sours and arranging a plate of cheese and dried sausage for him. And later on he dumped the crabs into a huge pot of water with seasonings and placed it on the hot barbecue grill.
Gino swore he could hear the live crabs make noises as they boiled.
“It sounds like they’re screaming for their lives,” he said to me, standing by the heat of the grill.
At this point I was a little upset with Gino’s lack of getting involved. “Crabs don’t talk,” I said. “Quit worrying about them.”
“Well,” Gino muttered, “they don’t sound happy, anyways.”
The lazy Sunday ended with a family feast of linguini with clam sauce, chicken scarpariello, steamed broccoli rabe with garlic and oil, and that salad my father picked on the way home from the bay. Jack and Frankie ripped apart the crabs in addition to the dinner before us.
“Mangia, mangia (eat, eat),” my father said to everyone.
“Yeah,” my mother countered. “There’s plenty of food. There’s too much food.”
“No such thing, Lilly,” my father said. “Whatever we don’t finish, we’ll give to the neighbors.”
Jack peeped up. “Ahhh, Pop, we’ll finish it. Don’t worry at all. Delicious. Perfect. None of this is going anywhere but staying here.”
But Gino pushed his food around, not eating much. I watched as he had a couple of swirls of pasta but basically mushed his clams into a bunch of bits and disguised them inside the salad. The chicken was untouched. My father had to explain how hard my mother worked in the kitchen before Gino finally nibbled a little on some bread dipped in red sauce.
“There are kids starving in Europe,” my father said. “There should be nothing left on these plates except your forks.”
Being “brain damaged” was one thing. Pushing my mother’s food away was a completely different story. My father took his last gulp of wine and trudged off away from the head of the table.
“I’ll be in the garage, Lilly.”
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?”