When I was twenty-one I finally concluded that I was a freak of the most terrible type, designed not to be displayed and celebrated but to be hidden in the darkness, an ugly, stinking waste of flesh. If college was supposed to be the best time of my life, I couldn’t imagine how awful it must get afterward. It sure didn’t seem like the sort of thing worth sticking around for. I wondered how it had taken me so long to realize that I was broken beyond repair, and that I didn’t belong on this planet with all of the real humans. I imagined my future as one of dependence, fear, and disability. I would always be a burden on the saner individuals charged with my care. I would always be different, in a bad way. I might kill myself, if only I could summon the courage to choose death. Instead, I chose to do nothing but wallow in the rising swamp of my own shame. I hid in my bedroom, with garbage piling around me, rocking back and forth in bed, singing an old, half-remembered hymn as I prayed for sleep to come and blot it all out.
Of course there had been warning signs—plenty of them, over the years. Maybe I was too young or naive to recognize them, too afraid to speak up and admit that I needed more help. My brain sent up one big, giant, flaming-red signal flare when I was eighteen, the week after the beautiful boy from summer camp killed himself. But everybody around me found ways to explain it away. It was heat exhaustion; it was fatigue; it was homesickness. After all, no one goes crazy on vacation.
Chapter Two
Sicily on Five Freakouts a Day
The story of American immigration goes like this: impoverished, oppressed peasants flee their respective filthy countries and struggle until they achieve the American dream of working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. And as they toil in the fields and factories of this great nation, they say to themselves, “The Old Country was a terrible place. Here in America, I live in luxury!” They smile and shed a tear, partly from emotion and partly from the industrial airborne carcinogens that will eventually kill them.
A few upwardly mobile, American-born generations later, one of their descendants gets a bright idea.
“Hey!” someone says. “We ought to visit the Old Country. We can smile at the adorable native people and eat the adorable native food and consume the adorable native alcoholic beverage of choice. Then we can vomit on the nearest historical landmark. If we’re lucky, we can buy a T-shirt at the site of the mass grave where Great-great-grandma was killed by opposition troops! Perhaps the charming locals will show us a bit of their famous hospitality rather than stab us on sight.”
Thus did I end up in Sicily, the Alabama of Italy. It is a fact that my grandmother, whose people were from southern Italy but not Sicily, used to refer to my grandfather’s Sicilian-American mistress as “that black bitch.” There is also a charming saying that ancient racists of mainland Italian descent enjoy repeating: “Sicily ain’t southern Italy. It’s northern Africa!” This is generally followed either by a knowing cackle or a disgusted wave of the hand. It is a unique pleasure to come to understand as a child that your elderly relative is not using the Italian word for eggplant in a complimentary fashion when describing citizens of Sicily or, more often, Harlem.
Since many humans have never actually heard of Sicily, it is perhaps instructive to do a quick tour through this large island’s colorful history. It doesn’t sound like the sort of place where one would willingly send one’s buxom virgin1 eighteen-year-old daughter on an “educational trip” (at least not a trip from which one hoped she would return), but the real Sicily actually has more to it than pasta and automatic weapons.
In terms of conquest, Sicily is the geographic equivalent of the drum-circle bong—everyone’s hit it at least once. The Phoenicians and Carthaginians had it, as did the Greeks and Romans (who brought Jewish slaves). Then came the Vandals and Goths (not to be confused with the influential punk band and sad-eyed Hot Topic kids), followed by the Byzantines. After that, the Arab Muslims showed up. A few more Jews arrived and behaved nicely without bothering anybody, which has generally been an unsuccessful course of action for them throughout their history. Then the Normans staked their claim. Through marriage, Sicily passed to the Swabians, who are noted for having the goofiest-sounding name in history. Then the French took over—which didn’t turn out so well.
On Easter Monday in 1282, the Sicilians (whatever the hell that meant by then) decided to kill all the new French residents. The island was independent for, oh, six seconds, at which point the Kingdom of Aragon (not Aragorn, the foxiest dude in The Lord of the Rings) kindly stepped in. Aragon and Spain joined forces, and Sicily became Spanish property. In the fourteenth century, the Black Death made its legendary European debut in Sicily. The plague killed a bunch of people, which made the Spaniards feel competitive. Bloodthirsty, mass-murdering Queen Isabella and her kill-happy hubby Ferdinand implemented their own extermination method, loosely titled “Get Out of Here, You Fucking Jew (Or I’ll Stab You).”
After a couple centuries of earthquakes and pirates, Sicily went to the Austrians (or, presumably, the Austrians went to it). Then the Spanish showed up again, but there were no Jews left to banish or kill, so their heart wasn’t in it. Sicily was independent for another brief moment, after which the mainland Italians popped in and took over. The economy collapsed, the Mafia rose to prominence, a fuck-ton of immigrants bounced and went to the United States, and you probably know the rest from your favorite Francis Ford Coppola educational filmstrips.
In short, Sicily is no stranger to illness, drama, or evil female overlords. My own trip would incorporate all three.
Surprisingly, my journey to Sicily was not a punishment but a reward. I’d actually asked for the trip as a pre-graduation present. My school was cosponsoring a journey to the Regione Autonoma Siciliana with an outside tour company, a business devoted to turning culturally illiterate young American rubes into sophisticated international travelers. Via bus, train, and ferry, we would take in the faded glory of the most violent segment of a majestically corrupt nation.
It was my first trip abroad, unless you counted the time we’d visited the Canadian branch of my family when I was eight. And while I’d long grown accustomed to the swirl of fear and nausea that always arose on car rides to Manhattan and bus rides to Philly and plane rides to Florida, it did not occur to me that a European vacation might magnify my usual troubles with travel. In fact, I rather thought it might diminish them. After all, those other trips had involved my tall redheaded Irish-American dad and short dark-haired Sicilian-American mother, who commenced vacations only after marinating in a highly acidic vat of tension for a solid seventy-two hours. This trip would put more than four thousand miles between my parents and me. It would be like a marinara-flavored preview of college, where all my homebred quirks would disappear. The thought gave me comfort.
A week before the trip came the news that Kevin, the heartbreakingly beautiful boy I’d met the previous summer, had doused himself in gasoline and died via self-immolation. I cried until my stomach ached and my eyes burned. As a good Catholic, I had been taught that suicide was the only unforgivable sin a human could commit.
“Do you have your passport case and your money belt?” my father asked. “Jesus, I can’t believe you haven’t packed yet.”
“You really need to check what time your bus leaves for the airport,” my mother said.
“I don’t think I want to go,” I said.
“Oh,” they said. “You’re going.”
Whether or not Kevin was bound for Hell, I was certainly bound for Sicily.
The plane ride wasn’t bad. I slept most of the time, relying on an extra-heavy dose of Dramamine, my drug of choice. I’d never smoked pot or been drunk, but I’d ingested impressive amounts of anti-nausea medication since I was very small. This was acceptable, because over-the-counter medications have been rubber-stamped by a completely scrupulous and unbiased government authority, while marijuana is typically stolen from the desiccated corpses of South American toddlers/drug mules, all of whom have been strangled to deat
h and then ritually fucked by men with large vans and candy.
Dramamine wasn’t the only drug swirling through my system on that trip. I’d been taking a prescription anti-depressant/anti-anxiety medication for two years. The pediatrician had written me a scrip when I was sixteen to treat my occasional bouts of intense depression and my more-than-occasional panic attacks. The irrational fear and crippling sadness kept coming, and the pediatrician kept increasing the dose. I didn’t know that other drugs might help me. I was convinced that I was taking the only drug in the world designed to treat my weird problems, and that if the drug couldn’t fix me, nothing could. But most of my friends didn’t know I was taking it, and I certainly hadn’t informed the other students on the plane. I kept the bottle hidden in my backpack, next to my carefully concealed stuffed giraffe, Mary.
When we finally landed, I rose unsteadily to my feet and trudged in a daze behind the other passengers. It wasn’t until I’d passed through immigration and assembled with my schoolmates that I happened to catch a glimpse of the horizon through an airport window. As I watched intently, it wobbled. I caught a split-second glimpse of something menacing hovering just beneath the sun.
“I don’t think I’m okay,” I said to Mr. D’Angelo, the guidance counselor who’d volunteered to chaperone our trip.
“What, you got agita?”2 he asked. “You want some Imodium AD?”
I thanked him politely and accepted his offer. I hadn’t eaten in several hours and didn’t have anything sitting in my stomach or bowels, but I was raised to put complete faith in the power of name-brand OTC medications.
As we waited for the bus and I chewed slowly on the anti-diarrheal tablets, I took stock of my fellow travelers. It was not a particularly promising crew. The crowd was made up mostly of students from the junior class, one year behind me. Some seemed lovely and some seemed dull, but I didn’t know most of them particularly well. There was some loud kid so scarred by acne his face looked like a pizzelle iron. There was a cute boy from the lacrosse team. And then there was one small, tightly wound knot of females with whom I was all too familiar.
Every school has it, that group of Madisons and Michelles and Jennifers and Jessicas and Adrianas and Ariannas and Taylors and Tiffanys. I supposed the reincarnated souls of Spanish inquisitors, Nazi commandants, and medieval Chinese proto-waterboarders had to end up somewhere. Our particular trip was enlivened by the presence of a foursome of bitchtastic bottle blondes from the girls’ tennis team. This cuntsquare of future real estate agents and PR associates was led by junior class homecoming princess Amber Luciano. That she shared some DNA with the man who split New York into five crime families and ordered countless murders of his rivals—well, that was no surprise, once you got to know her.
I was generally liked in my own grade (I cracked jokes in class and wrote funny editorials about the cafeteria for the school newspaper) but had few friends on the trip to Italy. And I was certainly not loved by Amber, who seemed particularly irritated by people who liked clowning around for laughs. She disliked them even more than she disliked people who made art on their own time, people who wore vintage clothing, people who listened to non–Top 40 music, and people who read books. And Amber really hated people who read books. I once heard her say in an English elective, “I have a boyfriend. I don’t have time to waste on a fuckin’ book.”
If I’d been accompanied by my own tight-knit coterie of friends, I would have taken delight in mocking Amber in whispers from across the bus. But I was alone, and my power as an outgoing senior was limited. Amber and her lieutenants knew a lame duck when they saw one.
We boarded the bus, and Amber immediately staked her claim in a set of seats far enough back to be cool, but far enough up to be away from any bathroom stink. I eyed her warily as I chose my own seat. When I struggled to put my bag in the overhead compartment, I heard a sudden burst of laughter from the bitch contingent. Foolishly, I turned my head to look. They were covering their mouths and giggling to each other while staring straight at me.
“Oh my God, shut up, she saw,” one of them whispered loudly.
Great. Fucking great. I’d finally gotten a hearty laugh out of Amber Luciano. At least my bottle of crazy meds hadn’t popped out.
I sank into the seat and thought of Kevin, who would undoubtedly have been in these girls’ social circle if he’d gone to my high school. He might even have dated one of them—Amber, obviously. It was true that aside from their superficial assets, they had little in common—he was genuinely kind, and she had the soul of a troll. But the most attractive people in any school always had to pair off. It was like an unwritten law.
Mr. D’Angelo boarded the bus last. He was a guidance counselor at the school, a position generally awarded to football coaches and other paragons of emotional intelligence in order to justify their higher-than-average salaries. He had probably taken one requisite psychology course in college back in the 70s, in order to complete the requirements for his General Studies major with a Human Health minor. I assume some sort of nominal further training was required, like a half-hour workshop at the local Board of Education offices one random Sunday afternoon. If he had any legitimate expertise in dealing with the unpredictable twists and turns of adolescent development, he did an excellent job of hiding it.
“A-right, a-right everybody,” he boomed in his thick South Jersey accent. “Listen up. We got eight days together. That means we got 192 hours to accomplish the following goals: (A) learn something; (B) demonstrate respect for this ancient local culture; (C) have . . . A GOOD TIME, AMIRIGHT?” He smiled broadly at the last part, like it was a rabbit he’d pulled out of a hat. A smattering of applause emerged from the passel of ungrateful teenagers seated before him.
“And when do we go to the beach?” Amber demanded.
Mr. D’Angelo smiled and chuckled. He was the type of man who found the questions and “problems” of teenage girls to be infinitely amusing. This is certainly a wonderful quality for a high school guidance counselor to possess, since he is unlikely to encounter any troubled adolescent females in his chosen line of work.
“Well, Amber,” he said. “We go to the beach on Wednesday.”
It was Sunday morning. Amber and her coven let out a burst of disappointed groans.
“Not ’til Wednesday?”
“I didn’t go to the tanning booth, ’cause I thought I’d get a full week at the beach here! Oh my God, I’m gonna be pasty by Wednesday.”
“This is bullshit.”
No one has ever really figured out why white people from New Jersey are so obsessed with staying tan. When MTV’s investigative journalism documentary series Jersey Shore became a hit, I fielded countless inquiries from friends, acquaintances, and even press, who wanted to hear an Italian-American female comic explain the mystery of tanning culture.
“Fucked if I know,” I told one reporter, who woke me up from my cherished pre-gig nap. “Most of the guidos I grew up with were racist idiots. They didn’t even talk to brown people, so I don’t know why they’d wanna look like them.” He chose not to run that quote in his newspaper.
“Hey hey, watch your mouth!” Mr. D’Angelo said sharply to one of the girls. “On this bus we say bullcrap, not that thing you just said. Or else we say garbage.”
“Fine,” the girl said. “Bullcrap. It’s friggin’ bullcrap that we can’t go to the beach ’til Wednesday. This whole place is an island, right?”
I’ve always over-identified with authority figures. Maybe it’s because I desperately seek their approval. It is a fact that when I was getting laid off from a radio station, I spent half the meeting assuring my boss that he’d done a really wonderful job and that I totally understood why my show was being canceled. I added that he was handling the layoff quite nicely and that I was sure the New York State Department of Labor would provide helpful answers about unemployment insurance. And even though he’d decided to shit-can me, I genuinely liked the guy.
I didn’t particularly like M
r. D’Angelo, but he was in charge and I’d long ago developed a disdain for students who flouted rules of hierarchy and procedure. I played by the rules because rules were the only thing that kept everything from descending into anarchy and chaos and violence. Why couldn’t everybody else understand this? Amber’s open defiance was so frustrating.
That’s probably why, when one of Amber’s friends opened her mouth to complain again, I found myself saying aloud, “Jesus, if you wanted a tan you could’ve gone to friggin’ Florida. We’re in Europe, for Chrissakes. Just enjoy it for what it is.” I heard a sharp intake of breath around the bus. Even Mr. D’Angelo looked surprised.
I rarely use the terms friggin’ or for Chrissakes in my adult life (unless I’m drunk or hanging out for an extended length of time with my family in our native homeland). However, at the moment, I was immersed in the curious pidgin jibber-jabber of New Jersey, and was not averse to occasionally groaning, “Madonna mia!” in public when irked. I didn’t get that far, though, because I was stopped by the icy-cold stare of hatred that shot from Amber’s eyes to my face like frigid poison. I had committed the highly unusual transgression of crossing a popular girl in public. This would have been normal for a person who genuinely didn’t give a flying fuck what people thought of her. I, on the other hand, gave a desperate, needy flying fuck.
“Well, maybe if you could fit in a bikini you’d want to go to the beach, too,” Amber shot back. Her friends giggled uproariously. In retrospect, I think Amber’s primal instinct was simply to call any adversary fat, regardless of actual size. At the time, though, it was like a flaming-hot arrow had struck deep in my chest. I worked very hard to hide my pudgy little belly under my clothes, and was extremely self-conscious about the fact that I weighed nearly (gasp!) 120 pounds. Many years and several pounds later, I’d like to smack my younger self in the face, immediately after kicking Amber in the teeth.
Agorafabulous! Page 2
