In other contexts, where you might risk sideways glances after presumptuously saying ciao to the wrong person, you cannot go wrong saying Salve (hi or bye) or ArrivederLa. But you save the Arrivederci, or the sweeter Ci vediamo dopo (we’ll see each other later), for more familiar contexts.
It might indicate something profound, or at least comforting, that ciao means both hi and bye. Something about the fluidity and mutability of time and social circumstance, which the Italians know all too much about. Or maybe it’s simpler: it’s such a universal, perfectly supple mouth- and ear-pleasing word.
•
Italians love their automobiles; Fiats seem to outnumber pedestrians on the thoroughfares of Rome, where I was once struck by one—another story. During the World Cup every Italian is certifiably pazzo for soccer, but racecar driving is right up there, too, in the fanatical national consciousness. Ferrari and Lamborghini and Bugatti and Maserati and Alfa Romeo—these are iconic, stunning, jaw-dropping vehicles and hundred-mile-per-hour works of art.
For as long as I can remember, I yearned for an Italian car of my own. It’s awkward to own up to such an adolescent fantasy, but there it is, and it isn’t my sole adolescent fantasy, as was transparent to my exes if not yet to you. In any case, much later in life, I realized I might be able to make this fantasy come to life.
Now, the hedonic research indicates that happiness proceeds not so much from possessing things as from enjoying experiences. I got that. But driving a certain kind of Italian car would be an experience disguised as a thing. So perhaps one day I could get lucky, could swing a deal for a used one. And it would be all-right-just-give-me-my-speeding-ticket-already flame red. Ideally it would not merely be fast, but gorgeous.
According to his estate, my father had bequeathed me his newish upscale Japanese car and some cash. (Long before he passed, I had seized the keys and his driver’s license, and parked the car at my home, where he couldn’t gain access to it; his doc determined that in his impaired state he was a danger to himself and others behind the wheel.) His Lexus was a very sound car, and practically in mint condition, except for the series of door dings and scratches accumulated in his bumper-car senescence. Unexpectedly, I had to process complicated emotions. I didn’t want to keep his car; it wasn’t my kind of car. No disrespect, as New Yorkers offer before being disrespectful. But was I being disloyal to his automotive memory? And to my mother’s? The personalized license plate did read CAZA, which was her nickname, short for Cashmera.
I wasn’t sure, but two years after he died I decided to go for it. Parlaying the trade-in with the inherited small cash windfall, I had enough to buy an Italian beauty, and it was fast, too. Onlookers thought it was a babe magnet, and it sort of was, but it was maybe more of a teenage boy magnet.
Fathers and sons, men and boys, and their cars: this whole book might be a footnote in a study of the subject.
I took possession of the dream about a month before a buddy’s father passed. Billy’s big Irish family counted as a kind of second home to me in high school, and I always liked his folks and his brothers and sisters. In fact, three of Billy’s sisters sometimes babysat Mario when he was a little fellow, and all of us guys cultivated chaste crushes on these adorable colleens. The last time I had seen his now-deceased dad was at the funeral for his mom, a couple of years before. Bill Senior may have been in the advanced stages of dementia, but when I approached him to express my condolences, before I could get out more than a word or two, he said, with a wry smile and question mark, “Joe Di Prisco?” We shook hands and that was the entire, moving exchange. Billy couldn’t believe his dad’s memory had kicked in for a moment.
The family was holding an Irish wake in a Catholic church across town on a Friday night. Italians and the Irish, Irish and the Italians: both susceptible to ethnic stereotypes. Irish invented talking, Italians invented never shutting the fuck up. Poets and brawlers, both. Both cops and mobsters, sometimes simultaneously. Stereotypes may come in handy, as each contains a germ of truth. Therefore it takes a fool to subscribe. Italians and Irish. They are exactly the same, only completely different. Though only one has a cuisine. But I wouldn’t dare say as much in that gathering.
It was a dark and stormy February 6. This meant a memorable anniversary for me: the date on which my beloved brother Eddie died in 2002 in New York City, and also the date on which my beloved dog, also named Eddie and also now dead, was whelped in 1998. The most direct route to the services for me was over the hills, Wildcat Canyon Road through Tilden, the beautiful regional park. It might be unwise driving in such tempestuous weather, but the car had such fabulous traction, perfect for blustery conditions, and I could not resist. I could also rationalize it needed to be run out—there were few miles on the odometer.
Once on my way, true to form, the car was handling like a thoroughbred, with assurance and command on the twisty two-lane roads devoid of all other traffic. Huge winds were gusting and rain was pouring down, a catinelle, as the Italians idiomatically put it, in buckets. It may have been crazy, driving up here in a gale, but it was exhilarating as a roller coaster ride.
I made the wide turn, coming around a blind, as I approached Inspiration Point, and…
Have you ever watched a hundred-foot-tall pine tree crashing down in your direction? Me, either, till that night. It was a surreal vision. I slammed the world-class brakes and came to a stop a mere couple of feet in front of the tree. Funny thing about the flood of adrenaline—it doesn’t jack you up, it slows everything down, and you become preternaturally calm. It was the next day that reality slammed home and I sought out the Valium.
What if I had been driving five miles faster? No doubt about it: one second, maybe a half second, away from a formerly pristine and now scrap-heaped Italian car, and its crushed Italian American driver.
If things had turned out differently, I could imagine the eulogies delivered by my wiseass friends. Talk about luck of the Irish. What kind of mook gets permanently pancaked on the way to a funeral? Leave it up to a crazy Catholic, giving up the ghost on the way to honor the deceased. And after all his close calls and risky moves throughout his life, it was a tree that took out the guy. A fucking tree. What a sad, sad waste—of such a gorgeous car.
New York State Appellate Division
RECORDS AND BRIEFS
Q. That statement was untrue?
A. Actually it was untrue.
Q. And you were under oath, weren’t you, you know what I’m getting at now?
A. I was under oath.
Q. You made a false statement under oath?
A. I did.
Q. Now, you remember Ficalora, don’t you?
A. No, sir.
Q. You don’t remember him very well?
A. Only met him—met him and seen him a few times.
Q. How many times did you see him?
A. I seen him in the presence of John Tartarian.
Q. When and where?
A. Just passing in the car when I—in Queens.
Q. You what?
A. Just passing in a car.
Q. And you winked?
A. No, I said I seen him passing in the car with Tartarian.
Pope jitterbugging in the Atlantic, WWII.
More Alive Than Ever
I was late to the memoir party with Subway to California, but then again, the better parties always start late and then hold out the promise or threat never to stop. My poet friends blanched. “How’s your Me Moir going?” they’d ask, nyuck nyuck elbow to the ribs, implying I should be doing something more worthwhile, like writing poems. As if poets weren’t as self-involved as anybody, come on, as if. My novelist friends pitied me; I was pathetic, talking about myself, advertising myself and my precious little sensibilities. My female book-loving friends totally in jest wanted to know what possessed me to dare encroaching onto their territory.
My son we
ighed in indirectly, as is his style. Well, he did explicitly say two things. First, he didn’t figure me for a chemical dependency. (That made two of us.) Second, for him, in the book I was kinder on the subject of his mother than he expected. But he is not always the forthcoming type, and he is extremely diplomatic, which is to be expected of the only child of an unstable couple such as his mom and I were. I am used to reading between his lines, and sometimes I get it right, and besides, I emotionally leak enough for any room full of people.
I also overheard, at my mother’s funeral, an exchange between him and a cousin, when she asked him if he was worried his dad was writing a memoir. “Worried?” Mario said. “I don’t know, but it seems like there are two kinds of memoirs. One where you land a plane on the Hudson. And the other, which involves hookers and blow in Las Vegas. As far as I know, my dad never landed a plane on the Hudson.”
I dedicated the book to him anyway.
•
I traveled deep into the farthest hinterlands of Memoiristan, and I read around as I typically do, promiscuously, randomly, idiosyncratically. In my uninformed opinion, which I would defend to the death, there exists roughly about the same percentage of great memoirs as the percentage of great books period—that is, not high. There are obviously first-rate autobiographical reads out there: accounts of religious conversion, of drug and alcohol dependency, of combat, of teaching, of sex, of dying, of childhood trauma, of entrepreneurial vision, of leadership, of crime, of the life of a writer, of cultural crossing, of insane family, family, and more family still—lots of books about the family, which probably makes sense, given that our first conception of ourselves begins in that hurly-burly, knockdown drag-out melee called home. First conception of ourselves? Maybe I mean instead that’s when we begin to mythologize ourselves, or resist the temptation to do so and tell the truth about the messy lives we actually led and lead. As a very devout little Catholic boy I had a beautiful stained-glass window onto the mythologization of my soul, my passage through this temporal vale of tears on the way to eternal life. Amen. To be candid, I still like that view, though the scenery has radically altered since childhood.
One objective of Subway was to gain a handle on the story of my father’s life, not easy to do when Sphinxes are more forthcoming than the old man, and I know that sounds suspect if not bizarre given his apparent and strategic forthcomingness in court. It was not so long ago that I had less information then than I have now, and if I sometimes wonder what it would be like to present some of my findings to him, now that he’s gone, I realize probably that wouldn’t have gotten me too far. As a young boy I always wanted more of him, and never got it, though my mother always insisted I was “the apple of his eye,” something I by and large missed during his lifetime.
Now that he’s dead, my father seems more alive than ever; he seems immortal.
New York State Appellate Division
RECORDS AND BRIEFS
Q. Well, were you gambling at that time?
A. Yes, I was on unemployment.
Q. And were you using that money?
A. Well, sometimes I’d use it.
Q. Well, let me ask you this, did you make any loans with anybody?
A. Yes.
Q. And how much money was loaned to you?
A. Well, I owed about $1,500, “shylock” money.
Q. How much money would you say you were in debt for now?
A. About $3,000.
Q. And this money that you were in debt for, where did the money go?
A. Gambling.
Q. You mean playing the horses?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Dice games, and the like?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Did you ever discuss your personal financial problems with Celentano?
A. Yes, sir, he knew I was strapped, he knew I was in debt.
Q. How did he know you were strapped?
A. Well, I used to tell him I owed money to “shylocks,” and things.
Q. Let me ask you this, prior to the scoring of Jerry, and Dereda, did you play with them?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Lay bets with them?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. And after Dereda was scored, did you play with him?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Well, why?
A. Well, this way they wouldn’t be suspicious of anything.
Q. That you fingered them?
A. That’s right.
Between He and I
The Subway to California published in 2014 was not the first book I wrote using that title. What I mean is, my book was in preproduction, had an ISBN number, and was scheduled for 2012. The manuscript was line-edited, the book jacket art was ready (featuring a grainy noirish photo of me in a Verona train station), the catalogue printed with the synopsis couched in that typically twee book-marketing prose that can often be tinctured beyond purple, more like eggplant: melanzane. Incidentally, although I have Italian blood flowing in my veins, I don’t love eggplant—or capers, now that I think about it.
Jack Pendarvis wrote a fictitious “Spring Catalogue” in the service of imaginary books to be published by a fictitious company. Catalogue copy for So Twines the Grape goes like this: “Greeves-Dunn uses the tractor of her talent to plow the fallow Southern fields of genius, uncovering the cracked bones of truth and planting the seeds of a fiery enema for the soul.” Hello, book clubs everywhere. Who wouldn’t wish to buy that book, besides nobody? My synopsis sounded a little bit more promising, not that we field-tested it; you’ll have to take my word for it.
Then my publishing house, and Pendarvis’s, MacAdam/Cage of San Francisco, hit the skids. It had published my first three novels, enjoyed an extended and occasionally spectacular run as a darling of independent publishing, producing a few big bestsellers (not to be confused with my works) turned into major motion pictures. There is a sad and convoluted and instructive tale somebody should tell one day about MacAdam/Cage and the charismatic David Poindexter who founded and owned the house—but it won’t be told by me. David had flaws, and some of them were doozies, and he cultivated his share of enemies, but nobody was smarter, or slicker, than he—and I guess I intend slicker to work at least two ways, one of them not being the good sort, and the other meaning dazzling. He was a legendary publisher who communicated passionate support of a writer, at least he did so for me, including when I sniffed the wafture of his bullshit in the air. Yes, writers can be the neediest of sorts. Sometimes a beautiful illusion will suffice. David could talk books without cease and was a fabulous drinking companion, funny, smart, generous, perhaps overgenerous. But all of a sudden—actually not so all of a sudden, which is why this is a story that might be told someday—he couldn’t pay his bills, and after years of struggling the house was destined for Chapter 11. This was around the time he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and it wasn’t long before charming David died. His loss is a huge one for books, his friends and family, and for me personally. I miss him. Not that there weren’t issues left unresolved at his death, but here is not the place to discuss them.
My first novel was one of the first few books published by MacAdam/Cage, and my third was one of the very last. The house was set to publish Subway to California, but that list of books never saw the light of day, and I am relieved, not that I felt that at the time, because at that juncture I was crestfallen. Here is why.
Some may call this madness, but I had composed ur-Subway half in first-person narrative and half in third-person narrative. You should read back that last sentence, because it may be unbelievable but it’s true. That is, pages were printed in clearly demarcated, visually distinct sections: “I” and “me” in the italicized parts alternated with “Joe” and “he” and “him” in standard font. The book should have included a cigarette-pack-like black-death warning: “Reading blocks and blocks of italicized text may induce migraine upon t
he unsuspecting.” You cannot imagine how difficult it proved to manage the pronoun antecedents, but that was just for openers. I somehow persuaded everybody—my agent, my editor, my publisher, all of whom had been initially skeptical.
I know. Brilliant, high-concept stuff, right? Writers have to spend too many hours arguing into their mirrors. I don’t know if any memoir has ever been published using such a device, but there is at least one renowned memoir written in the third person, The Education of Henry Adams, a great book published in 1918, and it’s an autobiography, but it’s in the third person, which is the point I am belaboring. Sadly, his book is not much read these days, which others might be better positioned to explain. I have another story to tell, and the Adamses and Cabot Lodges and the Harvards in his memoir, while riveting and vividly rendered, had little in common with the Di Priscos and the Greenpoints in mine.
Here’s how my ur-book came to be composed, if I may employ the passive voice. One day I wearied of the pestering I, all insistent upon myself, thinking it was all about me, which it was, but still. And then I performed an experiment. I started writing about him, who was of course me, and for reasons I cannot explain the sentences flowed and memory awakened, and pages generated themselves. It was as if by reducing the apparent level of self-consciousness in the prose styling, I could become freer to write my own story. I could almost believe I was being more objective and fearless. So far so good.
After MacAdam/Cage’s sad demise, I had a new publisher. We were moving fast toward publication. My assigned editor was astute. He had edited two previous novels of mine, and knew his way around a manuscript. I largely trusted his judgment, gave in when I thought I should, stood my ground other times. For one thing, he was promoting a subtitle that I thought was his idea of a bad joke: “A Cautionary Tale to Live By.” I said, Umm, get out, no way. The book was the hybrid third and first and my editor indicated that he was, well, onboard with that. But then he asked a question—I cannot recall the exact question, but I recall the tone. Never trust editors who don the velvet glove; they’re hiding brass knuckles. The question was framed too gently for me not to be suspicious he was conveying a doubt, and more than that a misgiving that my book was trying too hard. He didn’t use the word, but gimmick is what I heard.
The Pope of Brooklyn Page 12
