Glaring at her in the dark, I heard something. “Good night, Lisa,” she said in the same faux-sweet, singsong voice perfected by Nellie Oleson in Little House on the Prairie after the show jumped the shark. I ignored her and scowled at her even harder. “Good night, Lisa,” she repeated, this time with more bite and an audible edge. When again she was met with my stony silence, she upped her ante.
“I. Love. You!!” she said, biting off every syllable, each word dripping with sarcasm.
I stuck to my resolve. I wouldn’t say “good night” and I certainly wouldn’t tell that bitch I loved her. She had to be fucking kidding! I haven’t said that back to men who were fondling my ass at the time—I definitely wasn’t telling it to her.
The next thing I heard can only be described as shrieking as she forced the manufactured crocodile tears down her pudgy, pouty little face. “Mmmmooooommmmyyyyy! I told Lisa I loved her and she wouldn’t say it back!” What is this, our honeymoon? I’m trying to sleep, bitch!
My mom stormed into the room and—you guessed it—that bought me another sore bottom and some heavy-duty banister polishing (and I don’t mean that in the biblical sense).
While my sister craved my mother’s approval and sought it in the typical oldest-child ways—excelling and trying hard in school, asking her advice, and generally being a mirror image of her—as I got older, I devised other ways. I learned early on that if I wanted to outshine my sister, I had to do it in a big way. Now, when you’re a kid, any attention is good attention, so I went to town. Since my sister was already an expert eater, I pretended to like food that no one else would eat—just to heighten my parents’ awareness that I was an individual. (This wasn’t the last time I put things in my mouth that no one else would for love and attention.)
I asked my mother to buy limes and lemons, and when she brought them home each Saturday morning with the week’s shopping, I would peel them and eat them whole. I reveled in the interest I was paid as I choked down the sour fruit, stopping only to look up to make sure people were watching. I did the same with sticks of butter, bowls of grated cheese, and entire cans of black olives. Eating to get attention is a behavior that I continued into my high school days. Feeling ignored in comparison to beautiful girls in class like the Sophia Loren of our school, Donna Rago, I would eat entire Swiss Rolls (the enormous version of Yodels) in one bite, an action that got me lots of laughs but very few gentleman callers. Oral wasn’t as popular back then as it is now.
If my sister was the queen mother of us kids and I was the jester, from the moment my brother, Len, was born, he was the king. His nickname from birth was even “King of the Hill,” and we just loved him. In short, Leonard was adorable—blond, giggly, chubby—and my sister and I couldn’t spoil him enough. And why shouldn’t we have? He was cuter than us, and he added a huge sense of fun to the family. One of my earliest memories of my brother was when he was six and insisted my mother play the 45 of “Cecilia” by Simon and Garfunkel over and over. It probably would have been even cuter if he hadn’t been dry-humping my Raggedy Ann doll on the couch at the time, but still…
Of course, we all loved the song—we had a cousin and a great-aunt named Cecilia, so the tune was beloved by everyone, especially my mother. You can’t imagine her look of shock when my brother—just a mere first-grader—belted out the words “making love in the afternoon” in front of company.
Of course, my brother had no idea what he was saying but loved the fact that my mother turned bright red, my father squirmed uncomfortably, and my sister and I erupted in peals of laughter. My brother proved long before I did that the Lampanellis don’t work clean.
My brother wasn’t the only one who loved to get laughs. As early as I can remember, I relished being the comic relief of the family. For some reason, I could make my mother laugh in times of tension—and sometimes the things I said or did to get laughs would have gotten my brother or sister in heaps of trouble. But since my role in the family seemed to be the funny one, I got away with it unscathed.
The first laugh I remember getting came with a valuable lesson in when to stop. My family was having dinner at the home of my father’s favorite aunt, Aunt Rose, and her husband, Uncle Dom, who was also our oil deliveryman. Just a quick aside: Going to an Italian family function is like pulling up to Home Depot. Everybody there knows someone who can fix your car, paint your house, or unclog your drain. We Italians may not have many doctors in our families, but we do have a lot of plumbers—probably due to our huge amount of body hair.
Anyway, I was about eight at the time, and it was around Thanksgiving. As we ate, I said that someday I would love to go to the famous parade at Macy’s and Bamberger’s. (That was what the store was called before Macy’s dropped the second name, presumably in an attempt to make the store sound less Jew-y.)
Now, remember, at the time I was a mere tot. So I unwittingly said, “I want to go to the parade at Macy’s and Ham- burger’s.” Well, that’s all it took for the table to explode in what can only be described as guffaws. And believe me, from the second I heard that laughter, I was hooked. I can honestly say that was the exact moment I decided to become a comedian, even though it took me the next twenty-two years to summon up the guts to try.
However, being the attention hound I am and an extremist by nature, one laugh wasn’t enough. As the laughter at the table died down, ol’ Shecky Lampanelli went for a twofer: “Yeah, Macy’s and Hamburger’s!” I repeated. As if in slow motion, each family member turned to me and stared, their smiles gone. Note to self: Never try to milk the joke—even when you’re eight. Coincidentally, years later, my famous “Macy’s and Hamburger’s” line is Carrot Top’s big closer.
Being Italian meant that meals were, of course, the thing around which our family’s life revolved. Relatives were always coming over for a big dinner, or we were always eating over at relatives’ homes. As is common knowledge, eating is the most important thing in any Italian’s life. We Italians learn from a very early age to eat until you’re sick. If you don’t, you’re dishonoring the memory of somebody back in Italy who died of starvation three generations ago.
As a result, Italian families are huge—literally and figuratively. Everybody is named after one another so there’s a Big Mike and a Little Mike, even though they both weigh over three hundred pounds. Italians are also fat because everyone’s nonna, or grandmother, makes the best sauce, and our family was no different: The family sauce appeared at every gathering, even on Thanksgiving. Our menu: turkey and lasagna. In fact, in our house, by the time we got to the sixth—and main—course (the turkey, stuffing, and vegetables), no one was hungry anymore, and the bird went untouched. Untouched, that is, except for the pile of turkey skin I consumed to get some attention. By the way, even then I preferred the dark meat.
But food was the only thing my family overindulged in. We all may have been fat, but there wasn’t a drug addict or so much as a drunk in the bunch. That’s because my mom scared us straight. Growing up in the seventies, we had no shortage of antidrug programs, a direct result of the sixties’ free love and pot boom. However, being children of the forties and fifties, my parents had never consumed anything stronger than Communion wine, and my mother was going to see to it that we didn’t either.
I remember early on my mother telling us not to “smoke anything that is grass or looks like it,” and, to our horror, she told us she’d read that anyone who “drank acid” (her version of “took acid”) would go so insane that they would take nail files, stick them behind their eyes, and pop their eyeballs out onto the table. Of course, she could have scared us more with the real dangers of drugs, the biggest of which was that you might someday become a sixty-year-old hippie. Parents, if you want your kids to say no to drugs, just have them hang out with a stinky middle-aged woman who’s bartering organic herbs for a massage.
However, as a child, bloody eyeballs on a table is a pretty scary image, and I don’t know about my brother and sister, but it worked for me. I
have never tried anything stronger than pot, and the few times I did, I became even more intensely paranoid than I am when I’m straight. Even drinking held little charm for me. I’m not sure if it’s how uncomfortable I am with being out of control or the fact that I have the world’s worst hangovers, but whichever it is, my only drug of choice has been food—and, of course, men. And in recent years, both happened to be chocolate.
My mother’s scary stories weren’t just about the dangers of drugs and alcohol. She was fiercely determined we not talk to strangers, ’cause you know where that can lead. When either my sister or I was in a public bathroom, my mother would be hovering directly outside the stall, watching like a hawk to make sure nobody so much as asked us for a square of toilet paper. My brother, on the other hand, presented a different problem. He was a boy and needed to pee in the men’s room, and my mom certainly wasn’t going in there with him.
One day, I saw my brother race into the men’s room and beat it right back to the car in what can only be described as a flash. When I asked him why he was in such a hurry, he told me that my mother had told him she’d read a story in the paper about a man who had accosted a young boy in a public restroom and cut his wee-wee off. I couldn’t get that visual out of my head. When I asked my mother what the boy was left with, she said matter-of-factly, “A hole,” and continued her reading. Today, moms use the same story, only they usually show Andy Dick’s mugshot when they’re telling it.
Now, I don’t know if that “news story” was real or simply my mom’s attempt at a scare tactic, but I can tell you that it worked. I’m assuming my brother still has all his genitalia (he has six children, so you do the math), and none of us has ever been kidnapped or molested. I like to think that’s because of my mom’s protectiveness and not because we weren’t attractive or desirable enough.
Obviously, Gloria’s been a colorful mom, to say the least, but we always had room in our hearts for my dad, Len. Off to work he went every day to a job that was too complicated or boring for me to even now know what it was, and whenever he disappeared for a few days on a business trip, he came back loaded with gifts. My first pair of bell-bottom pants was from a trip he took to L.A., and I still have the matchbooks and other little trinkets he took from the Hiltons and Marriotts where Sikorsky Aircraft had him stay. I love the towels, pillows, and iron to this day. And the hangers with actual hooks on them! Priceless!
While my dad’s gifts were fun and at the time seemed exotic, it was my mother who bought me my most memorable gift of all. One year, she presented us all with cemetery plots so that we could be buried together as a family. She knew what a hassle it would be for us to scramble to buy her and my father plots if they should meet an untimely demise, so she grabbed two for them and, while she was at it, had the cemetery guy throw in six for us kids and our potential spouses. If I never get married, I get to use the extra plot to bury my shoes…or my guilt.
As I finish writing this, I’m about to check out of the sumptuous Peabody hotel in Memphis, and I’m inspecting the room for stuff my folks might like. My dad never has enough shoehorns, so I take that. My mom needs travel shampoo for going up to their house at Cape Cod. Lastly, I grab them both ivory-colored Peabody pens since whenever I call the house it takes them about three hours to find something to write with. I know I’ll take these things to them in Connecticut, and they’ll make a fuss over them as if they’re real gifts.
And, unlike funeral plots, they can use them while they’re still alive.
CHAPTER SIX
Sit, Kneel, Stand
In any twelve-step program—Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Eating Disorders Anonymous, all the way down the food chain to Rageaholics Anonymous—there is a saying you hear at least once at each and every gathering: “Ninety meetings in ninety days.” Apparently, that’s the number of meetings someone in early sobriety needs to attend for the twelve-stepping to really kick in and for him to surrender to his Higher Power.
Well, if you grew up in the Lampanelli house in 1972, there was a slightly different version of “Ninety in ninety.” It was “Forty in forty,” as in “Forty Masses in forty days,” or as I used to call it, “Priest-a-Palooza.”
Those forty days make up the most dreaded time period in any Catholic’s year: Lent. While other children my age were thrilled to usher out the winter months and dive straight into spring, I looked at the approach of the new season with a mixture of anxiety, trepidation, and near terror. For the forty days of Lent, which began with Ash Wednesday (a day so evil it ends Mardi Gras), we would be attending Mass every single day until Jesus moved the stone out of the way and pulled his Houdini act. Forty freakin’ Masses in forty days! Frankly, I’d get burned out going to forty movies in forty days, and movie theaters have cushioned seats and better snacks. But it was 1972, I was only eleven, and at that time, my mother, Gloria, was my Higher Power.
Growing up Catholic isn’t easy. I’m sure there are tougher religions out there that require stricter adherence to tradition and, from what I understand, involve things like fasting (great idea, Jews! Celebrate by getting together and starving!) or the stoning of whores, which, by the way, means killing them, not what Led Zeppelin used to do backstage. Sadly, I cannot report on these other religions because I am content to stay ignorant about other cultures and peoples. My logic has always been: What I don’t know can’t hurt me—unless it involves a terror threat or a rash on someone’s nut sack. But me? I grew up Catholic—not “go to Mass on Easter and Christmas to show off our new clothes” Catholic, but real hard-core, “one step away from making a movie about the crucifixion, then getting drunk and badmouthing the Jews in Hollywood” Catholic.
As early as I can remember, my mom went to church a lot. Not just every Sunday like my father and the rest of us. No! Gloria went to Mass every day, which, quite honestly, put a lot of pressure on the priest to keep coming up with new shit. I remember her leaving the house at 7:55 A.M. before work each morning—apparently the first Mass of the day was half-price, just like L.A. movie theaters—or at 4:55 P.M. (sometimes both, depending how insane we drove her) to catch eight o’clock or five o’clock Mass at Trumbull’s horrendously named Most Precious Blood Church, which stood horrendously close to our house. I remember wondering why she was so into church. All that praying didn’t really seem to do much good—she and my dad were stuck in the same argument-filled marriage; my brother, sister, and I engaged in behavior that ranged from downright awful to barely squeaking by; and they made the same money, lived in the same house, and still drove a Valiant and an LTD. You’d figure that amount of praying would have at least gotten us a second phone extension and a time-share in Boca. Then again, thank God she went to church a lot. If she needed that much prayer to stay just inside the bounds of sanity, imagine if she didn’t pray at all. I wouldn’t have made it past the age of eight.
All in all, my mom going to church that much didn’t bother me. It bought us an extra hour each day to gang up on my sister, and to make prank phone calls (this was in the days before caller ID ruined this hilarious activity). But it wasn’t all wine and roses. All that time my mom was away in the evenings meant a lot more half-assed dinners. As a kid, I ate more weenies than a gay prostitute.
As a good Catholic, my mother loved Lent, and she often spoke about it in our house with reverence. For those of you who aren’t Catholic, I will explain. Lent starts on Ash Wednesday, which is a day you can’t wear a nice outfit because you have to go to church and have the priest put ashes on your head, your clothes, and inside your car. Its only purpose is to mark you so people know you’re not a Jew in case there’s a hostage situation. The ashes are ground up and kept in a bowl. So if a Catholic man ever tries to put his cigarette out on your forehead, he’s not a priest. He’s just being a dick.
All during Lent, you’re supposed to give up something you love as a sacrifice to God. I guess Catholics figured if Jesus could come down to earth, hang with us mortals for thirty-three years, and then
die for our sins, the least we could do is give up chocolate. (To this day, I still feel guilty banging black guys during the month of April.) And that’s what most of us did—we gave up something—but as most religious people do, we had ulterior motives. I remember one year giving up dessert (of course, this was in early puberty and I thought forty days without cake would help me lose a good ten pounds off my newly expanding figure), and one year, I gave up lunch altogether. The fact that I more than made up for the skipped meal at dinner was something between me and my maker. Looking back, I don’t know who I was trying to impress—God, Jenny Craig, or the cute guy who sat behind me in science class.
I always found it somewhat odd that people “sacrificed” their asses off when it came to food all throughout Lent, and then when Easter finally got here, we gorged on chocolate bunnies and Cadbury eggs. But, as all good Catholics know, nothing says “Thank you for dying for our sins” like a Snickers bar shaped like an crucifix. Looking back, I guess it’s easy to see why Muslims hate us. They have jihads and suicide bombers. We have a guy dressed up like a rabbit and hide colored eggs.
But in our house, Lent wasn’t just a time to forfeit pleasure—it was “the cure.” Every chance she got, my mother reminded us that one year early in their marriage, my father had given up smoking for Lent and had never picked up a cigarette again. This inspired my mom, and every Lent she gave up one of her vices—food, food, or food—and encouraged us to do the same. It all felt harmless enough—what’s the worst that could happen? We drop a few pounds and God loves us more. To me, that was win-win. Each Lent, we gave up something we liked (I was never committed enough to giving up something I loved—c’mon, I’m not a fanatic), we logged in our hour a week in church every Sunday, and my daily-Mass mom left us a blissful, stress-free hour each day.
Chocolate, Please Page 8
