'74 & Sunny

by A. J. Benza

  “I can’t. I have no idea,” he said. “Besides, toes are overrated. They serve no purpose.”

  “They keep our balance,” Gino said. “If we didn’t have toes, we’d fall forward.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That makes sense. They keep us from falling on our face.”

  My father just smirked, put his hands up to momentarily stop the massage, and threw his logic on the fire.

  “There are no toes on our heels,” he said. “So why don’t we fall on our asses every day?”

  5

  SPIDERS AND SNAKES

  Mondays in the summertime held all the excitement of a wake. With a noisy, wonderful weekend behind us, it was always dreadful thinking I’d have to wait another five whole days before it could all begin again. Even though it was summer vacation and, at a whistle’s notice, there could be twenty friends at my front door, I still woke up with a heavy heart. Mondays always seemed cruel to me, as so much of my family had to return to work their 9-to-5s. I would have absolutely no pep in my step. And that particular Monday morning, the first with Gino in our house, I was in those precious moments of the previous night’s deep sleep slowly becoming the reality of a new day. I turned over to see Gino passed out in his cot next to my bed, some slobber running from his lips, his mouth wide open.

  I stared at his face for some time, even squinting to give him the benefit of the doubt. But the verdict was in: he didn’t even really, truly look like a Benza. And that puzzled me. We were a dark-skinned bunch. We didn’t burn red from too much sun. We got brown. We weren’t pudgy in any way like Gino was. We were more lean and mean. We had thick, straight, dark hair. We were lanky, despite the fact that we ate whether we were sitting down for dinner, lying down on the couch, or standing at the kitchen sink. We had long arms, tight stomachs, and legs that slightly bowed a bit. When I stared at Gino, he was shorter, softer, and a different shade of pale. And then the reality of what lay ahead hit me with the reality and speed of a Scorsese smash cut. I took it all in for a moment: I had finally noticed there was a pile of luggage in my small room. There were different clothes laid out on my chair. A toothbrush and a comb and deodorant that weren’t mine. My room even smelled differently. Not bad or vile. Just the way your room smells when someone else has been breathing, yawning, farting, and coughing in it all night long. But instead of pulling my hair out in aggravation, I decided to have some fun. I put my bare feet within inches of Gino’s nose for a few seconds, wiggling them wildly in the hopes I’d spring loose some horrible odor. Maybe a tiny bit of the bay was buried deep inside a toenail or two. When that didn’t work, I balled up tiny bits of tissue and tossed them at his face, trying to get one in his mouth.

  “And now Clyde Frazier works the ball up court, with the New York Knickerbockers trailing by one to the Los Angeles Lakers,” I whispered to myself. “Six seconds on the clock in game seven as Frazier glides by Jerry West at midcourt and finds Earl ‘the Pearl’ Monroe coming off a high screen from Willis Reed. Monroe, moving left, lets loose a double pump, fadeaway from fifteen feet out. And he . . . sinks it. The Knicks have done it again. And the Garden floor is covered with New Yorkers. The Knicks are champions. And my ears can’t believe what my eyes just saw!”

  After I had played out a few more far-flung fantasies and it didn’t wake him up, I could hear the rumblings of my mother and father getting ready to go downstairs for coffee, so I cut to the quick. I got within an inch or so of his face.

  “You up?”

  “Wha-wha . . . ?”

  “You look shot, man. You look like you drank all the wine last night,” I said.

  “I don’t know.” He yawned. “I guess the whole weekend caught up with me.”

  “Well, now it’s fuckin’ Monday. And I hate them.”

  Gino sat up in his cot. “What goes on around here during the week?”

  Before I could even get a word out, my father burst into the room, rattling a wooden spoon inside a pasta pot. “Drop your cocks and grab your socks! We got work to do on the lower deck, sailors.”

  I had been a part of this staged, early-morning mayhem for years, so I was accustomed to watching my bedroom door fly open with various commands shouted from my father. I know for a fact, after spending some weekend mornings at my uncle’s house in Jersey, that that little bit of my father’s Monday-­morning madness was more than I ever saw at my uncle’s house. And that’s no knock on my uncle or how he raised his family. It’s just, as much as my father and uncle were basically the same men when they were together, they steered their families in different directions and at varying speeds when they were apart. I mean, if there was a volume knob on our houses, Uncle Larry’s was on low. While our house had all its speakers blown out.

  My father disappeared as quickly as he came in, but he continued to bang the spoon in the pot all the way down the stairs, singing reveille.

  I can’t get ’em up; I can’t get ’em up; I can’t get ’em up this morning.

  I can’t get ’em up; I can’t get ’em up; I can’t get ’em up at all!

  The corporal’s worse than the privates; the sergeant’s worse than the corporals.

  Lieutenant’s worse than the sergeants, and the captain’s worst of all!

  My father always told me from his cherished days in the service that reveille was often followed by a canon shot. Since there was no canon on our front lawn, my father usually substituted that with a ferocious fart at the foot of the stairs. He could do them on queue.

  Gino sat at the edge of the cot looking like an innocent man facing a sit-down with Old Sparky. “I don’t think I can do this.”

  “Just get rid of that little hard-on, pull up some shorts, and follow me downstairs,” I said. “You’ll live.”

  Gino giggled like a girl. He half covered his lower self with a sheet. “What are you talking about?”

  “Knock down that teepee,” I said. “I can see it. Just hurry up and let’s go. He don’t like waiting.”

  “But I really should pee.”

  “Just hold it. Jesus, how much could that little pud hold? Come on.”

  Before we even got to the head of the stairwell, I was high off my father’s scent of Winstons, Dentyne, and Old Spice cologne that still hung in my room. That was always enough to scurry down to the carpeted thirteen steps and meet him in the foyer. Gino arrived behind me, a bit disheveled, some fifteen seconds later. Two troops ready for duty.

  My father stood at attention and tried with a straight face to apologize for the fart fog we were standing in. “I think your aunt Lilly snuck a little too much ricotta into the sauce last night and as a result, here we are. It’ll pass.”

  He handed us each a scolapasta to head into the garden and pull from its bounty. Even though it was early in the morning, there was already a thick humidity outside, as we walked through the giant tomato plants and the zucchini and eggplant vines that were higher than our shoulders. My father would shout out into the thickness, “A.J., show Gino what to pick. I see an abundanza (abundance) in there.”

  I had to take Gino’s glasses off his face before we got any further and clear the fog off them. “Okay, you can’t work like this. So here’s what we do,” I said. “Pick any red tomato off the vine. But also grab any small ones that fell to the ground that aren’t too dirty. Those are good for tonight’s salad.”

  “I’m not really a lover of salad,” Gino said.

  “Lover of salad? Listen, that doesn’t mean shit out here,” I whispered. “Look . . . I ain’t crazy about zucchini, but I still pick it. I just make the old man happy.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “All right,” I said. “Next thing you do is pluck any green pepper that’s a little longer than your hand.”

  “Got it,” he said, his eyes wandering like he fell down the rabbit hole with Alice. “What about these beautiful yellow flowers?”

 
“Hell yeah. Throw ’em in the pot. Those are zucchini flowers, and my mother fries them up in a batter and people go crazy for ’em. They’re like some delicacy or something.”

  “Ahhh, they’re so beautiful. Can’t we just let them grow?”

  Gino was in awe of being lost in all that vegetation. It looked like he felt more himself with not being seen or something.

  “Uncle Al,” he cried out. “Can’t we just let the zucchini flowers grow and not eat them? They look so beautiful.”

  “I’m gonna make believe I didn’t hear that,” he said.

  “Believe me, they look just as pretty frying in the pan.”

  “I don’t know if I can do it,” he said.

  “This isn’t up for debate, Gino,” I said. “First you couldn’t grab the clams and now you don’t wanna pick the flowers? We only grow them so that we can pick them and eat them. End of story.”

  My father shouted into the garden. “Let’s go. I got five minutes before I gotta go to work. I still see a lot more stuff—basil, mint, scallions. Come on, double-time it.”

  “All right, fuck it,” I said. “I’ll pick the goddamn zucchini flowers. But you better make sure you nail every tomato and pepper and eggplant.”

  Gino seemed somewhat content with that arrangement.

  “But watch where you step,” I said. “A strawberry patch is one thing. A pile of dog shit can change your whole day.”

  Lucky for me, there was a family of five girls and one boy living right next door to us. And on most mornings—with my father shouting instructions—it was almost a guarantee that my thirteen-year-old neighbor, Debbie Rossitto, would be at her bedroom screen window and overlooking everything we did. Whatever I said, or whatever I did, I always felt her presence peering down on me. And Debbie was far advanced for her age, at least physically and mentally. We shared a birthday—June 2—and she’d already told me she wanted me to be the one to take her virginity next summer. So, you can imagine, every move I made—every command I shouted out—I did so under the pretense that Debbie was listening and watching everything.

  That would’ve been too much of a load for Gino to carry, so Debbie and I kept our flirting under control until those nights when we graduated to flashlight tag.

  Like most days in the garden, on this particular morning, I saw Debbie move her curtain aside and watch us work. Seeing her pretty face while she slowly combed her hair and imagining her promise made gardening almost impossible. It’s hard to look gorgeous through a screen window. The only girl I ever saw do that was Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde.

  “A.J., what are you doing?” my father said, snapping me back. “There are at least six or seven tomatoes you walked right by. Come on, now, let’s get this done. I gotta go sell carpet.”

  Somehow, I cleared my head and went back to grab the fruit. The scolapasta would be full, and that would make my father happy and send him off to work feeling good and whistling. With me not riding Gino’s ass so hard, I could tell my cousin was feeling a little better about himself, and that allowed me to let my mind wander back to Debbie, my very own Bonnie Parker.

  But there was one more thing my father had on his agenda: we had bugs, slugs, and worms to deal with. After giving us those detailed instructions, we followed him to his car, along with my mother right by our side. He hopped into his convertible instead of opening the door.

  “Is that all you got for us today, Dad?”

  “No. Three more things,” he said, lighting a cigarette. “Be loud. Be boys. And break your mother’s balls.”

  He screeched out of the driveway, drowning out my mother’s reply, “Up yours, Al Benza!”

  Beep. Beep.

  And that was the last we’d see of him until around 10:00 p.m.

  “Don’t worry, Aunt Lilly,” Gino said. “I’m not going to do that.”

  “Thank you, sweetheart.”

  “Do what?” I said. “Do what?”

  “You know . . .” Gino replied. “What Uncle Al told us to do. At the end there.”

  My mother didn’t like where this was going. It was mostly innocent, but I think she could see a little bit of the instigator I obviously inherited from my father. “Come on,” she said. “Go back by the pool.”

  “No, not yet. I wanna hear Gino say what Daddy said.”

  “But . . . A.J.,” Gino said, sheepishly looking up at my mom.

  “Just say it. It ain’t no big deal. Say, ‘Break Aunt Lilly’s balls.’ ”

  “A.J., stop it,” she said, now with a little force in her voice. “It’s a figure of speech. He was breaking balls.”

  “See! You can say it, and Gino can’t. Just say it and I won’t bother you anymore about it.”

  Gino was silent for a few moments, I thought because he was forming the words. “Why are you throwing a conniption fit over this?” he said.

  “Yeah, he’s right,” my mother warned. “Now knock it off before I crack a wooden spoon over your head.”

  “It’s just a funny thing to say,” I said, turning away for the backyard. “That’s the way we talk around here, Gino. You better get used to it.”

  My mother messed Gino’s hair and lightly pinched his cheek. “Don’t get all worked up, honey. Sometimes he’s too much like his father—who’s the biggest ball-breaker of them all.”

  They laughed and lagged twenty feet behind me, and frankly, the possibility of having any passing friend see my cousin, along with my mother’s horrifying muumuu—which hung from the shoulder with its brilliantly colored floral Polynesian patterns—was too much for me to take.

  “Come on,” I yelled. “You wanna see a conniption? We got slugs to kill!”

  As beautiful as my father’s garden was, there were infiltrators that we had to deal with. And my father didn’t like to use any chemical sprays from the hardware store. He never trusted what that might do to his fruit or vegetables. Instead, he preferred we take matters in our own hands. But that tactic took an eagle eye, a strong stomach, and a memory without consideration for all God’s creatures.

  Finding the dreaded green tomato hornworm was the equivalent of finding Waldo—thirteen years before the game was ever invented. The hornworm worked at night, devouring tomato, eggplant, and pepper plants. You had to wake up really early and look really closely to see them clinging to the underside of a branch near the trunks of the plants. They were almost impossible to spot because of their ability to camouflage so perfectly. And they were ugly and medieval-looking, with a bunch of little legs and a brown horn at one end of their thick three-inch body. Whenever we spotted one, our job was to pull it off the branch with a pair of pliers and drop it into a Maxwell House Coffee can of water and watch it drown. And these tough caterpillars—which, if they weren’t caught, would become the five-spotted hawk moth—put up one hell of a fight.

  I told Gino in no uncertain terms, “I’ll go in there and pluck them. You just hold the coffee can. But if they start crawling out of the can, you gotta take a stick and shove them back in.”

  Why we didn’t step on them and get it over with, I have no idea.

  My father’s instructions to kill garden slugs was even more sinister. We were to find the slimy critters—with or without their shells—and resort to a different type of torture: lightly sprinkle table salt on them and watch as they squirmed and dissolved to death like the Wicked Witch of the West. After our murderous run—with a canister of Morton Salt—Gino had had enough.

  “Why can’t we just step on them or hit them or throw them in the canal?” he said with genuine concern.

  “I think my father wants any other slugs with the same idea to get the message,” I said.

  “It’s like The Godfather in your garden,” Gino said.

  “Goddamn right,” I said. “But it works, don’t it?”

  6

  HOOKED ON A FEELING

&n
bsp; Between the slicing and the dicing and the torturous melting of numerous insects in our garden, I had one more job I had to lay on Gino to see if he could pass some muster. It wasn’t anything too nasty, but it did take place in the dark of night, and that could’ve easily made him mess his pants.

  For as long as I could remember, we always caught our own night crawlers for weekend fishing trips. My father’s reasoning was something on the level of “Whose fuckin’ earth could produce better worms than the ones that crawl in our own backyard?”

  And he was right. But how he was able to gather them was genius to a twelve-year-old. He would steadily bring home small scatter rugs from the store every few nights or so and carefully place them on the grass behind the homemade wooden cabana he had built with Frankie and Jack. Between that and the behemoth of a garden compost (a full forty years ahead of the Green Movement) and a large carob tree, whose pods were the molted remains of hundreds of cicada, it was like a Bermuda Triangle of darkness that nobody wanted to walk through when the sun went down. But with my father’s orders to persistently water that particular area for an hour each night after dinner, what we would uncover was the kind of bounty that could keep a bait shop in business for months. See, by flooding that part of the yard with water and letting the carpet remnants get soaked, my father was mercilessly drawing the night crawlers to the damp, dark, and dank confines beneath the rugs. It didn’t matter that the screaming army of cicadas were falling on the ground all around us. All Gino and I had to do was have one of us lift the rug, while holding a small flashlight in our mouths, while the other dived in with both hands and successfully kept the worms from disappearing back into their holes in a split second. I’d been on the physical end of this practice a hundred times. I wanted Gino to do the handiwork this time out. And that made for a long night.

  It was close to nine, and I really wanted to show my father that I could persuade Gino to get down and dirty with the worms. But it wasn’t looking good. For starters, we heard a frog croaking somewhere nearby, so that made the mood more tense than usual.