Notes on a Banana

by David Leite

  DEDICATION

  FOR ALAN, THE ONE.

  You are my balm, my net, my heart.

  FOR MY PARENTS.

  I’m still here because, thankfully,

  the banana didn’t fall far from the tree.

  EPIGRAPH

  DOROTHY: Oh, will you help me? Can you help me?

  GLINDA: You don’t need to be helped any longer. You’ve always had the power . . .

  DOROTHY: I have?

  SCARECROW: Then why didn’t you tell her before?

  GLINDA: Because she wouldn’t have believed me. She had to learn it for herself.

  —THE WIZARD OF OZ

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This is a work of memory, and like memory, it’s imperfect. I’ve done my best to write the truth as I experienced it. When my memory fell short in places, I leaned on the memory of others; family lore, legend, and stories; photographs and journals; medical, psychiatric, and school records; and newspaper articles to help connect the dots in my head. For small, inconsequential details that defied recollection—the interior design of a restaurant, someone’s clothing, a cereal’s name, you get the idea—I relied upon habits, research, and, sometimes, a hunch.

  In certain cases, I’ve changed names. When needed, I also freely altered details to blur identities and protect certain individuals’ privacy. There are no composite characters in my story, but I did conflate some experiences and bent time in one instance to avoid redundancies and confusion. Unless I had a record, dialogue is reconstructed.

  Last, although I’ve read mountains of books, studied manic depression for more than twenty years, and worked with too many doctors, I’ve chosen to write from the heart, from the inside, out. This is not a medical treatise. So for God’s sake, don’t do what I did and diagnose yourself by reading a freaking book. See a competent doctor.

  ABOUT PROTUGUESE NAMES

  I’ve dispensed with the correct spelling and pronunciation of many Portuguese names and phrases, choosing instead to spell phonetically the words of our family’s particularly butchered patois. So:

  Grandfather, usually spelled avô, is spelled Vu, sometimes Vuvu.

  Grandmother, usually spelled avó, is spelled Vo, sometimes Vovo.

  Godfather, usually spelled padrinho, is spelled Paneen.

  Godmother, usually spelled madrinha, is spelled Dina.

  When greeting relatives, it’s customary to kiss them and ask for a blessing, such as “Pai, sua bênção” or “Māe, sua bênção,” which here has been bastardized as “Dad banse” or “Ma banse.”

  So kill me.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  About Protuguese Names

  Part I: Early Onset 1. The Armpit of Massachusetts

  2. Sisters of the Spatula

  3. What Becomes a Legend Most

  4. I’m not Going to be Ignored

  5. Moving on Up

  6. Santa Claus is a Heavy Breather

  7. Tread Lightly, Mr. Goode

  8. I’m Melting

  Part II: Rapid Cycling 9. If you Don’t Stop it, you’ll go Blind

  10. Driven to Distraction

  11. Happiness Backward

  12. Shrink Wrapped

  13. Watermelon-Flavored Delight

  14. David Leite Superstar

  15. Blonde Ambition

  16. I’ve Been to the Mountaintop

  17. My Man Plan

  18. The Best-Laid Schemes

  19. Mise En Place

  20. The Walking Dead

  21. I Heart NY

  22. Opposites Don’t Attract

  23. Quarter-Mile-High Club

  24. A Beautiful Corpse

  25. A Coterie of Penises

  26. Gay White Male Seeks Balance

  27. Love Food

  28. Therein Lies the Lie

  29. When I fall in Love

  30. Proust wasn’t Delusional

  31. The Old One-Two Punch

  32. Bad Chemistry

  33. Diagnosis: Mental Lite

  Part III: Prophylaxis 34. Shits and Giggles Inc

  35. Cope is a Four-Letter Word

  36. Meet the Leites

  37. Two Thousand Pink Pills Later

  38. I am Here

  39. An Asylum to Call My Own

  40. The Last Supper

  Epilogue

  Resources

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by David Leite

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PART I

  EARLY ONSET

  A CLINICAL TERM USED FOR WHEN MANIC-DEPRESSIVE DISORDER FIRST APPEARS EARLY IN LIFE. FOR A LONG TIME, DOCTORS BELIEVED CHILDREN COULDN’T SUFFER FROM THE MOOD SWINGS OF THE ILLNESS. DUMB-ASSES.

  1

  THE ARMPIT OF MASSACHUSETTS

  It was one of the first jokes I learned. My hunch is I picked it up from my wiseass cousin, Barry, when I was about five. I’d walk up to people while they were having dinner around our green Formica kitchen table, the one flecked with glitter, and demand, “Ask me where I live.” They’d glance at my parents, then, curious, bend over and oblige.

  “And where do you live, David?”

  I’d lift my left arm like a bodybuilder—bicep flexed, fist curled—in the shape of Cape Cod.

  “Here,” I’d say, pointing to my armpit. Yelps of laughter followed from those who hadn’t heard it before. Oh, that kid of yours, Ellie, they’d say to my mother. She’d just flash her what-can-I-say smile and pass bowls of Portuguese rice and platters of fat links of chouriço, garlicky pork sausage, with an enormous fork jabbed menacingly into them. With the show over, I’d wriggle back onto my seat or open the door and scream for Paneen, my godfather, to come upstairs and carry me to their apartment so I could watch TV with Barry.

  If you looked at a map, my hometown of Fall River, Massachusetts, was pretty much in the geographic armpit of the state. Mount Hope Bay divided the South Coast: To the east, Fall River and the tougher city of New Bedford, both swollen with newly arrived Portuguese immigrants; to the west, the more bucolic towns of Somerset and Swansea. And beyond: rarefied Newport, Rhode Island, with its mansions, yachts, and Kennedy history. At the time, I found the joke hilarious, because anything with butt cracks and burps and armpits was funny. It would be a few more years before it took on a different meaning.

  I grew up in a sliver of the city called Mechanicsville, which was so inconsequential it was swallowed up by the sprawling and far more regal-sounding North End. On our block of Brownell Street, we kids were indistinguishable. We could end up at each other’s houses for supper, and our mothers would look at us for a second, confusion creasing their foreheads, and set more plates, as if they’d suddenly forgotten how many children they had. Our parents were just as interchangeable. Act up in someone else’s yard, and you could be sure some father would crack you across the ass and think nothing of it. But if a kid from another block began whaling on one of us, all our mothers would fly from their porches, haul off the intruder, and shout down his mother until she and her kid slunk away. It was understood: We were children of the neighborhood. And playing in our slice of the city, which bled into the rocky Taunton River, we didn’t know people spat out words like Portagee and greenhorn as a way of insulting our parents and making them feel small. Hell, we didn’t even know there was anything other than Portuguese, which meant we didn’t know how to be ashamed.

  Television showed us that.

  I don’t remember a time without TV. I was allowed to watch pretty much nonstop while my mother cooked, made beds, rearranged closets, hung laundry, a
nd babysat my cousin Barry and me. But at some point, I noticed there were no families on TV speaking the soft sandpaper shushing of Portuguese words. Houses weren’t crammed with eight or ten people. No kid was ever forced to eat salt cod or octopus stew that seemed to take on pulsating purple life in the bowl. Fathers weren’t carpenters, and mothers certainly weren’t fat. TV people had maids who were plump, but it was always the mothers who pirouetted out of swinging kitchen doors, their dresses fanning open like morning glories, carrying anything made with Velveeta. We didn’t even have a door to our kitchen.

  What we did have was whole apartments filled with the aroma of pungent garlic and sweet onions slowly melting in big pans. “Refogado”—my maternal grandmother, Vovo Costa, would tell me its name, urging me to repeat it. Refogado. Meat so smoky I could hold my fingers to my nose hours later and still smell it. My mother’s singing, soft and trilling, as she swayed to the radio while cooking in our narrow kitchen. And after dinner, all eight of us draped over the furniture in my godparents’ parlor. On the wall, watery flickers of Abbott and Costello running from Frankenstein, as my grandfather, Vu Costa, hauled out his wheezing projector and played his favorite movie for us, yet again.

  The closest thing to my family I ever saw on TV was The Honeymooners, because my father had been a bus driver back in the Old Country, where he met my mother while she was on vacation from Fall River, where she was born. He never screamed at her like Ralph Kramden or threatened to send her to the moon. But we did have a family friend, Pesky, who wore T-shirts and vests just like Ed Norton.

  While TV shows made it clear we weren’t like others, commercials taught me how we could be. Sitting in front of our flickering black-and-white television set with its screen that always reminded me of my Etch A Sketch, I felt relieved knowing that no matter what kind of kid I was—fat, skinny, the kind who climbed on rocks, tough, sissy, even if I had chicken pox—I’d be accepted because all kids loved Armour hot dogs. My parents had quizzed me repeatedly about what to do if a strange man ever opened the door to his car or basement and asked me to get in, but they never told me what would happen. Commercials explained it all to me. The reason old men with doughy faces weren’t to be trusted was because they’d eat my Cracker Jack. TV even taught me everything there was to know about my greatest obsession: proper hair care. Run Brylcreem through my crew cut—“a little dab’ll do ya,” I was told—and it’d shine like our toaster. The Beautiful Crissy doll showed me that if I pulled a girl’s hair hard enough, I could make it grow. And if my mother ever decided to color her hair with Miss Clairol, she’d leave us all wondering, because only her hairdresser would know for sure.

  In time, I wanted to be blond and blue-eyed and have a last name like Stevens or Nelson. I wanted a one-story house for just my parents and me, with a sunken living room and brick fireplaces and famous paintings hanging over the mantels. And I desperately wanted that swinging kitchen door, the kind with a round window like they have on ships. I wanted so much.

  Instead, my parents, grandparents, godparents, cousin Barry, and I lived on top of one another in a brown tenement my grandfather had bought in the 1940s, in one of the largest communities of Portuguese immigrants in the country. Now, it’s not what you’re thinking. To just about everyone back then in Fall River, a tenement was a sizable working-class house made up of three apartments, oftentimes filled, like ours, with different generations of the same family. Sadly, no one calls them tenements nowadays. All those PBS documentaries about Lower East Side squalor ruined it for us.

  A long yard ran down one side of the house, most of it shaded by our cherry tree, which had a canopy so big it hung over two neighbors’ fences, giving them all the fruit they could eat in summer. My father’s garden tucked in behind the house, where he had a few rows of fat, heavy tomatoes and a big strawberry patch, whose leaves looked as if they were clapping when a breeze blew. Lying in the dirt beneath billowing bedsheets that my godmother, Dina, had set out to dry, I’d shove a strawberry on the end of each finger. Holding them up—ten wriggling, brilliant red hearts against a spotless sky—I’d hum to myself as I plucked them off one by one and popped them in my mouth.

  Our apartment, with its lightbulbs, telephone, and gas stove, was a first magical glimpse of America for a parade of relatives, men with nubby teeth that looked like barely popped kernels of corn, and women in secondhand polyester dresses Vu had sent to them in huge wooden crates he nailed together in our cellar. Just some of the huddled masses who had emigrated from the Azores in the early sixties. Nine tiny islands strewn like green marbles on the blue felt of the Atlantic, the Azores are where my family is from.

  As lush and achingly beautiful as the islands were, many people there suffered from malnutrition and bone-crushing poverty; at least my family did. When my father immigrated in 1959, the stone house he grew up in—four tiny windows, a dirt floor, and a sleeping loft for all five kids until they married—still had no electricity, telephone, or heating. What little heat they had came from the wall oven where Vo Leite, my father’s mother, cooked everything.

  But for all its space and sunlight and shiny surfaces, our second-floor apartment felt bruised. My grandfather had grown tired of renting to strangers, so it had stood empty for years until my mother brought my father to America three months after they married. The patterns on the wallpaper had faded in great diagonal swaths. The seams had darkened to the color of honey. I used to put my nose against the wall and inhale. It smelled comforting, like old books.

  Looking against the low morning light while playing with my Lincoln Logs, I could see the traffic jams of dimples in the linoleum, the vestige of countless high heels over the decades. The edges had been nibbled away by hungry vacuum cleaners. Sometimes a tongue of linoleum would get sucked up by the Hoover and stutter against the beater.

  “Sonofa—” I’d hear my mother mumble, as she smacked the machine off as if it had suddenly insulted her, and I’d watch as she pinned the overturned behemoth with one knee, trying to coax out the linoleum without ripping it. Inevitably, she’d toss up her hands and drop them on her enormous tree-trunk thighs. “Why do I even bother?” she’d ask, waving a pizza-slice shape of flooring at me.

  We didn’t have a bathtub, just a sink and toilet. It was the same with my grandparents’ apartment, a modest addition Vu had built onto the back of the house before I was born. We all took turns bathing in my godparents’ pink-and-black bathroom—the only full bath in the house—with its trio of ceramic skunks on the wall, all three sporting blond bobs, just like those women in the Alberto VO5 hairspray commercials.

  Now, my parents’ bedroom—that was a proper room: big and square, with two large windows. It must have faced south, because it was the brightest spot in the house. It was where I’d loll on Saturday afternoons coloring and where I’d help my mother pull in the laundry from the clothesline. And it was where we recuperated from the mumps, my mother moaning beside me, her face a chipmunk’s at acorn time.

  The week before, all of us had gathered around my godparents’ kitchen table after dinner. The adults were talking, sliding beer bottles back and forth, making small wet circles on the blue Formica table. Dina and Paneen pulled on their Lucky Strikes, screwing up their faces to blow the smoke sidewise, away from my parents and me. Now and then, rolls of warm, caramel laughter rose up and tumbled over themselves in the corners of the ceiling. I was intent on putting back together Barry’s wooden Humpty Dumpty toy when the lights sputtered out. Everyone went silent. A match flared, and Paneen followed Dina as she rummaged in the white metal drawers for candles. We sat for several hours in the flickering light, Dina making coffee and occasionally banging a small glass ashtray against the bin to empty it. When the lights finally snapped on, my mother screamed, “What’s the matter with you?” They all gawked. I reached out my arms and ran to my father. From what they tell me, my face looked like a helium balloon. In the dark of what was later heralded as the Great Northeast Blackout of 1965, I’d come down
with the mumps. A day or two later, so had my mother.

  We lay together, I on my belly at the foot of their bed, watching the TV my father had wheeled in from the parlor; she, leaning back on a bunch of pillows, doing some sort of word puzzle. She ran the sickbed like she ran our lives: with precision and rigor. Why waste time watching afternoon television when she could challenge herself with a puzzle? “Good for the noggin,” she said, tapping her temple with a pen. Never a pencil; my mother was always assured. “Won’t go cuckoo doing these.” And when the doctor prescribed complete bed rest for me, she took it literally. No feet on the floor were her orders. Meals were brought to me; so were toys. When I needed to pee, she held up a glass quart milk bottle, which delighted me no end, and turned her head. When I took longer than she expected, she remarked, “Banana, what are you, a camel?” Do you have any idea how hard it is to pee into a bottle with a five-year-old’s equipment when you’re convulsing with laughter?

  Banana.

  It’s one of the nicknames she has for me, and it’s my favorite. My mother slaps nicknames on everyone, whether they want one or not. You can see her sizing up someone at a first meeting, rooting through their speech and behavior to find the nickname they should have, as if she’s finally correcting the misdeeds of inattentive parents, oblivious spouses, bastard bullies. And when she bestows that name, which is always done with a whiff of ceremony, she forever owns that version of the person. They are her creations now—with her expectations, dreams, and rules of conduct laid out for them.

  She says “Banana” came from my yanking on her dress and pleading for “peabot and blanas,” my toddler way of saying peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches. She’s also partial to “Banana Head,” “Tarouco” (essentially Portuguese slang for “Banana Head”), and “kiddo.” My father, for whom English was still exotic and mysterious, has always called me just “Son.”