In my family, sex lectures started early. Over coffee percolating, I listened to my mother’s stories about poor girls in Italy who would sooner drown themselves in a well then bring disgrace upon their families. Like Maxwell House Coffee, my mom was chock-full of contradictions: one minute expounding on the virtue of virginity, and the next gossiping about her in-laws, or telling gleeful tales about disreputable women.
Mom would also often allude to a dirty secret about my grandma that was best left at the bottom of the pot with the stale coffee grounds. According to her, if Grandma had abided by the rules that seem to apply only to girls, none of us would be here today—two generations of Italian Americans flushed down a well.
According to Mom, when Grandma was sixteen she got knocked up by Grandpa while he was engaged to her older sister. To save the family from disgrace, a double shotgun wedding was quickly arranged. Grandpa married Grandma and her older sister was pawned off on Grandpa’s older brother. Then both newlywed couples were shipped off to America before any evidence of my grandma’s sin appeared. How my mother learned this story, or if it was even true, I’ll never know.
By high school I started looking at boys whose last names ended in vowels. Auggie Matterazzo or Auggie-Doggy or Auggie Mattress, as the kids called him, was tall for a fourteen-year-old freshman and had the added advantage of being a great dancer. With him, I won all the CYO (Catholic Youth Organization) dance contests. Auggie could do a mean mashed potatoes but he would always complain of a back ache when he had to bend over to reach me for a slow dance. For our first Christmas together I hand-knitted Auggie the first complete sweater I ever made. On New Year’s Eve I asked him why he never wore the crew neck pullover.
“My mother left it under the tree and the dog ate it.” With that Auggie/Doggy got his walking papers.
Not long after, I took up with another gangster in training named Dominic Avitabale. Dom and I had perfect chemistry and he was the right height for slow dancing. On one occasion in the church basement while Mass was in session we almost went all the way. Dom was at second base when from overhead we heard the Choir’s singing ‘Kyrie-e-lei-son’. He stopped abruptly.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“It’s bad enough we’re missing Mass, but if we go all the way, you know what will happen to us!” he said.
“They’re both mortal sins, we might as well get some fun out of it if we’re going to burn in Hell for all eternity,” I said.
Although Dom was into gambling and even ate meat on Fridays, he had been a good altar boy and he believed it was in his own best interest to preserve the prize for our wedding night. He quickly zipped up his fly and tucked his white button-down-collar shirt into his pants and led me back upstairs to catch the end of mass.
Even my dad accepted Dom as his future son-in-law. It gave Dad a good argument for not paying for college.
“It’s a waste of money for a girl,” Dad said. “Once you get married your husband will support you.” Where he got that idea, I don’t know, since my mother was still waiting tables after eighteen years of marriage.
After three and a half years of dates at the bowling alley ending with heavy make-out sessions in the bucket seats of his 1963 hard-top convertible Thunderbird, I began to get restless. Slowly I began to realize the limitations of a future with Dom. According to the Church and my parents, any choice other than the nunnery or marriage to Dom and living in an aluminum-sided two-story house within walking distance from my parents’ was the wrong one. But I broke up with him anyway. I just wanted something more than a small-town boy could offer.
5. JOBS
My parents had strong work ethics and when I turned fourteen they insisted I give up freeloading and my lucrative allowance of fifty cents a week and get a part-time, minimum-wage job.
The Children and Young Persons Act had set fourteen as the minimum age at which children could work, and the minimum wage was $1.15 an hour.
At my first job I assembled catalogues and brochures for mail-order packets that were remotely related to fashion at a collating factory. Every Saturday morning I stood in front of a long row of twenty small wooden slates that resembled a conveyor belt. This conveyor belt was unlike the ones I had seen on I Love Lucy when Lucy and Ethel worked at the candy factory. The belt stood still while I did all the work.
That summer I was hired as a dishwasher/bus girl at Boscarino’s Italian Bistro, a charming ma-and-pa Italian neighborhood eatery. When it got busy, I got to help Ma Boscarino carry food out to the customers and bus tables. It was a relief to leave the kitchen, where I was stuck at the sink. It wouldn’t have been so bad except that whenever I was up to my elbows in dirty, greasy tomato dish water, my boss, old Pa Boscarino, would leave the pasta boiling and come up from behind, put his slimy paws on my boobs, and push his hard-on against my ass. I probably would have endured this abuse and held onto the job if it hadn’t been for the swinging door between the kitchen and dining room. It swung in both directions and the glass window was too high for me to see if anyone was coming in from the other side. On a day when I was carrying a tray of food out to the dining room, I accidently pushed the swinging door open into Ma Boscarino while she was carrying a tray of dirty dishes back into the kitchen. Glass and pasta flew all over the joint. I don’t know if Ma ever knew that Pa had been trying to stuff his noodle up my behind, but she fired me on the spot—but still made me clean up the mess. With employment opportunities like this, I was learning that the dirtiest of all the four-letter words was ‘work’.
After the Ma and Pa spaghetti fiasco, I learned to press men’s dress shirts and pants at a neighborhood dry cleaner where I was fired because I couldn’t keep the seams straight on the men’s trousers. I also inspected winter coats for threads and loose buttons at a small factory owned by my sister’s boyfriend’s grandparents.
I also worked at the same Woolworth’s where my mother worked as a snack bar waitress. Luckily, I was placed way at the very back of the store in hardware, where no one I knew from school would see me. I got so bored that I’d punch holes in the plastic-packaged tools just to alleviate my anxiety. I found a way to increase my minimum wage when I realized that if a customer gave me the exact amount for their purchase, I could avoid ringing up the sale and pocket the cash. I got so brazen that I often pushed the customers to come up with the exact change. Over the span of my junior and senior high school years, I had had more bad jobs than runs in my stockings.
For my next experiment in low-class living, I tried my hand at meat wrapping.
At a small neighborhood market in Clifton, New Jersey, I shared the market basement with my co-meat wrapper Gloria Zappo, a high school dropout who was dumber than mice, and two of the most horrible specimens of the male sex in New Jersey. These two butchers—Neil, a lanky, sandy thin-haired, hen-pecked married man, and Dick, a short, fat greaseball—were the X-rated version of Abbot and Costello. Once Gloria and I wrapped the steaks, roasts, and poultry in plastic, we would take turns carrying them upstairs to fill the meat cases. Back in the 1960s, most of the customers were female. If the customer needed a special cut of meat, she would have to call down on the intercom system and ask the butcher. Each day we heard, “Oh butcher, oh butcher, can you trim the fat off this T-bone for me,” or, “Butcher, butcher can you please grind this piece of sirloin?”
To which Neal would reply, after switching off the intercom and grabbing his crotch, “Grind this!”
And then Dick would touch himself and chime in, “I got your tube steak right here.” It was a doo-wop medley of trim this and grind that, all the day long. It was bad enough that these two pervs sexually harassed me and Gloria, but what they did to the poor lady customers was even worse. Dick, the more grotesque of the two, would send me up to fetch the special piece of meat and then, once I brought it back downstairs, he’d put it into the grinder—but before he’d hand it back to me for re-sealing, he spit into it. It took me many years before I could enjoy a burger or a meatball
again.
After six months of that bloody hell, my dad used his position as produce manager at the Shoprite to get me a coveted union job in the illustrious meat-wrapping industry. The only complaint I had with Shoprite besides working so close to my dad was the unflattering butcher’s smock and hairnet I had to wear, and the mustached middle-aged co-wrappers who worked beside me. On days when I accidentally on purpose forgot my hair net, Mary, the one with the thickest mustache and telltale beard, would always loan me her spare. Whenever the tedium got the best of me, I’d dress up a chicken in my hairnet and talk to it to amuse myself and annoy my co-workers.
6. LUST
My male cousins had free rein to sow their wild oats, but when it came to the girls, fuggedaboutit’! If my parents wanted to keep me a virgin, they should have named me Virginia, the other name for Mary, the virgin, like my good sister.
The summer after high school graduation, while working at the Shoprite, I met Johnnie, the box boy, a dead ringer for Frankie Avalon. Johnnie took pride in his slicked-back pompadour and was a man of few words. He had only one obvious flaw: he was married. The wedding to his high school sweetheart happened so fast after graduation that her bridesmaids wore their prom dresses.
Behind my father’s back, right there in the stock room, hidden between the rows of crated canned peaches and boxes of baked macaroni and cheese, I let Johnnie get to second base. I said yes to his advances, knowing all too well that a married man, like all men, as my mother told me, “wanted one thing only.” I was hell-bent on giving it to him. Despite Mom’s warnings about men who won’t buy the cow if you give the milk for free, or her other classic, “If you let him buy you a hot dog, he’ll try to squeeze it out of you,” I had no resistance to a free hot dog.
Johnnie breathed heavily into my ear and whispered, “Hey babe, how about I swing by your place later and take ya for a burger.” A meat wrapper unwrapped by a box boy was my inevitable destiny. It was so These Are the Days of Our Lives in New Jersey.
Sitting on the curb outside my house, I wondered about what it would feel like when my cherry popped. When Johnnie pulled up and I jumped in to his ’63 Ford Fairlane convertible, he barely came to a full stop. He laid rubber as he peeled off and told me there was no time for a stop at the White Castle. He had just gotten word that his wife had gone into early labor. Yeah, right, about five months early, but that didn’t stop Johnnie from keeping his date with me. Without even as much as a cherry coke, he drove directly to the parking spot and got right to it. After all of my mother’s bloody stories about first-time sex, I wasn’t expecting a good time, but what followed was a shock. After less than five minutes of heavy petting, he put his penis in me. With no pain, no blood, no feeling whatsoever, and after just three thrusts, he ejaculated and it was over. I was so startled by the brevity of the act and lack of drama that I laughed out loud.
“Is that it?” I was still dazed and confused when Johnnie dropped me at the curb outside my house moments later, but I was grateful the deed was done.
7. DATE RAPE
For the next chapter of my young adult life, I learned the theme song “I’m Jist a Girl Who Cain’t Say No” from the film version of Oklahoma.
For my eighteenth birthday, Dom’s sister, Angela, took me to see my first Off-Broadway musical, The Fantasticks. The character El Guyio, a handsome, seductive gypsy, was played by a young Jerry Orbach. In the play, El Guyio is hired by the parents of a young couple to stage a mock rape in order to dissuade the ingénue from going too far out into the real world. It’s all done to music and makes rape look like a walk in the park. It wasn’t the first lie the wonderful world of entertainment ever told me.
My friend Lucille’s parents were Italian immigrants who were far stricter than mine, and wouldn’t let her date even after graduation. Because I felt sorry for her, I let her use me as a cover to get out of the house. Lu would show up at my house early to rat her hair and apply pink lipstick and heavy black eyeliner and slip into a tight mini. On one too many occasions I had let Lucille talk me into going with her on blind dates. Growing more brazen in her pursuit of freedom, Lu planned for us to travel up to West Point where we were to meet up with her new boyfriend and his buddy, both military men, who had promised a picnic lunch and tour of The Point.
We told my folks that we were taking a drive upstate to see the leaves turn colors. I drove my first car, a yellow 1959 Fiat Convertible that I bought with my meat-wrapping money. My cousin Frankie warned me that Fiats were not reliable, and said that F.I.A.T. stood for Fix It Again, Tony, but I didn’t care because my car looked as cool as an XKE Jaguar. Because I’m so short, I couldn’t drive it until my dad rigged the clutch and brake pedals with wooden blocks so that my feet could reach the floor. Within a week I burnt out the clutch. But none of that mattered now, I was on the highway headed north with the wind in my hair, and I felt free—until we reached our destination and I met my blind date.
How Lucille found these characters, I’ll never know, but I will never forget that afternoon. As I got into the back seat of her boyfriend’s car, my date—blond, tall, red-faced and red-necked—shimmied over to my side of the car, put his arm around me, and in the most charming southern accent said, “Hi, my name is Big Bob and I’m from Mississippi, where we drown niggers in the river.” It was 1963 and he wanted this little northern girl to know where he stood on the Civil Rights issue. I kept my mouth shut and refrained from mentioning that my favorite folk song was, “We Shall Overcome.”
As Lu’s date drove us around the Point giving us a tour, I realized that these two good old boys were not officers or gentlemen as I had imagined they would be. They were enlisted men with deep-seated resentments against the privileged officers in training at the Academy. Lu’s date bragged about how they had free reign of the entire base, since they were in fact the Military Police.
Our host drove off the road into a thick wood that was well hidden from the main road. The car came to a stop and out we piled. The boys marched around to the trunk to get the picnic lunch they had promised and came back with several six-packs of beer. It wasn’t long before Lucille disappeared with her beau behind a colorful bush and left me alone with the boozy booby prize.
I drank a whole beer on an empty stomach and without any further conversation, Big Bob started to make out with me. Now, if I was on my turf in the city and he wasn’t packing a weapon, I might have said something like, “Excuse me but I don’t make out with bigots.” There was no ladies’ room to run off to powder my nose, and I couldn’t think of another excuse or escape.
Within moments we were on a large flat rock and Big Bob had pulled down my panties and then his own skivvies to reveal his business. Big Bob had earned his name. Oh my god, the thing was scary. Granted, I had only seen two other penises, but this appendage held little resemblance to those. Big Bob was a freak show. I didn’t have a ruler on me, but I’d say it was no less than a foot long and very, very fat. Big Bob did his best to get some of it inside of me and all I felt was pain. Luckily it was over as fast as it all began and when he got off of me, I noticed the blood I had been promised. I could clearly see that what Johnnie had not accomplished, Big Bob had. There it was, the skin of my hymen, stuck to my thigh and mixed with the fallen leaves on the flat rock beneath me.
I don’t recall what happened after that, but somehow I was back on the road popping the clutch and grinding the gears of my Fiat. That was the last time I would ever let Lucille take advantage of my easy-going nature.
8. FREE BIRD
Out from under my father’s roof, I lay on the earth with only a sleeping bag beneath me and the stars above, sipping a taste of freedom. It was 1965, and I was at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island. With the music and lyrics of Judy Collins, Richie Havens, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan swirling in my brain, I caught a vision of a life beyond New Jersey. There was promise of revolution in the air and I sucked up each breath the way I had when I was a kid pretending to smoke candy cigarettes. I inhal
ed dreams deeply into my lungs, and exhaled a decision to leave home for good.
That same summer I got to see Dylan two more times, first at Forest Hills Country Club, and then at Madison Square Garden, and by that fall I was almost ready to break away from my family. Since I had graduated High School, the highlight of my social life had been going to Greenwich Village. At least there I could bump up against others like myself, but I would always have to end the night by heading back home via the bridge or tunnel. I went back to the Italian Provincial furniture of my twin-bed set in the room that I still shared with my sister, and back to the boring day job in a cold meat locker where I still worked under the nose of my father. If working in a freezer and wearing a hair net wasn’t a strong enough motivator for change, I had an even more urgent reason to leave. Dating danger and living a lie, I knew if my father ever caught me doing what I did behind his back, he might kill me.
Once I would no longer allow my friend Lucille to use me as her cover, she took her revenge by telling my sister’s best friend about me and a black boy I had dated a few times in the Village. The day I found out Ginny knew about him, I was sitting in bed on my messy side of our room, reading Go Tell It on the Mountain, by James Baldwin, while Ginny tidied up her neat side of our room. Joan Baez was on the stereo and Ginny was singing along to “Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair,” one of my favorite tracks. Ginny inched over to my side as she sang even louder and stood at the edge of my bed. Suddenly she snatched my book out of my hands and we were eye to eye as she sang louder still. With an intent glare she changed the final word to the lyrics, “BLACK, BLACK, BLACK is the color of my true love’s FACE.”
“What’s going to happen if daddy finds out?” she asked.
My friendship with Dom’s sister Angela had been my only safe haven in Paterson. Even though I had broken her brother’s heart, Angela remained my friend. Angela was an intelligent, fair-haired Italian American beauty. She was three inches taller and three years older, and we shared the burden of large bosoms. If it hadn’t been for Angela’s influence throughout high school, Beowulf, a medieval novel I was forced to read in freshman English, might have been the first and last book I ever read. Angela was my incentive to turn off the television and start reading. She took me to my first Off-Broadway show and created my first suggested book list: Camus, Voltaire, Ayn Rand, Gore Vidal, Huxley, Salinger, Herman Hesse, Philip Roth, Eldridge Cleaver, Dostoyevsky, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, Steinbeck, and James Baldwin were but a few of the influences that began to shape me.
My Life, a Four Letter Word Page 3
