'74 & Sunny

by A. J. Benza

  His eyes were welling up a little, so I tried to shake us back to reality. “Ah, come on, Uncle Larry. Ain’t there a tea Chief, here, can make to get us to quit getting so sad?”

  But my uncle Larry would rather live in the moment, however uncomfortably beautiful it was. “Look at me,” he said, running his hand down his torso. “I used to hold my health in an iron fist and say things like, ‘That’s not what I imagined would happen to me.’ Well, the grip has loosened now, so I can let it just be what it is.”

  I looked over at my mother, who was working a tissue like she knew she wouldn’t be seeing her brother-in-law too much longer. “I told Uncle Larry how it sometimes bothers you that we signed a paper for the doctors not to resuscitate your father,” she said. “He wants to say something to you.”

  “Ah, Ma, not that again . . .”

  “No, no, no. Listen to me, A.J.,” Uncle Larry said with a soft smile. “He’s not up there upset that you guys did what you did. He was counting on it. My brother and I talked. And I hope my son does the same thing if it comes to that.”

  “Now you’re talking crazy, Uncle Larry.”

  “No, A.J. You know what’s crazy? Crazy is an Indian chief in your kitchen.”

  2

  TAKIN’ CARE OF BUSINESS

  I thought of my father as old all my life. Not the type of old that would indicate any kind of fragility. The type of old that suggested a lack of patience for things that used to come so easily, like throwing a spiral to his only son, or getting out of his favorite recliner without a boost. The type of old that simmered with the exasperation at the changing of the times, at the world around him and the people who were taking it over. An old that bubbled with anger at the suggestion that his way may no longer be the best way. That his opinion, despite his wisdom and worldliness, no longer held water.

  Not that he ever shied away from making his opinion known. One morning I watched as my father, shirtless, bent over to bury his head deep into the refrigerator (or icebox as he called it), muttering to himself in Sicilian. After a few minutes, he popped his head out and called to my Neapolitan mother, a saint of a woman who always knew how to toss a wet blanket onto his fiery spirit.

  “Lilly, do me a fuckin’ favor, would ya? Don’t buy the tub of Breakstone’s Butter no more. Every fuckin’ time I open it up to spread some on a piece of semolina, I gotta see all the crumbs from whoever the hell used it before me.”

  “All right, all right,” my mother said, dropping whatever she was doing to make it all better. “I’m sorry, Al. There was a sale.”

  “It’s just a thing with me, Lilly. Just don’t do it. Is that so hard?”

  “No, no, you’re right. I’m not even that crazy about it. I’ll throw it out.”

  Of course, that wasn’t really what was eating at him at the time. The butter fight was his outlet for whatever was really on his mind.

  My older sisters and I, sitting in front of the TV, knew what was to follow. After all, this was 1974. The president was in disgrace, and young GIs were suffering in the jungles of Vietnam; gas lines stretched out for miles, New York City was going to shit, and I was struggling with pimples and puberty in a tough-love Sicilian-American household. On top of that, Archie Bunker was dealing with a black neighbor. Maude had had an abortion. And Mary Tyler Moore was going to “make it after all.” All this stuff was happening too quickly for my father, Al Benza.

  “I’m gonna tell you all something before I go to work. The TV Guide says West Side Story is on the television tonight.” He was just getting started. “If I come home and find out any of you watched it, I’m gonna put my foot through the screen and no more TV. Capiche?”

  My middle sister, Lorraine, who was wild for Richard Beymer, spoke up.

  “Oh, Daddy . . . why? I love West Side Story. Why do you hate it?”

  Now he was in the zone. “Because it promotes Puerto Rican gang violence and I’m not gonna have that in this house. It’s enough these spics have invaded New York City with their fuckin’ switchblades and cockroach-killer shoes. I don’t wanna see it in my house.”

  My sister Rosalie, who was twenty-nine, married and lived with her husband Jack and their two-year old son, Jackie, in the house next door, was the only one with the balls to ask the real question. Maybe because Jack was half Puerto Rican.

  “But why is it okay that we went to see The Godfather twice in the same week at the movies? That was more violent than West Side Story, and—”

  He cut her off and bent down to look her in the face. The black eyes they shared were inches apart.

  “Listen to your father. The Godfather is about family, love, and honor,” he said through clenched teeth. “The other one is horseshit. And you know how much I love Jack.”

  “All right, Al, all right,” my mother said. “Don’t drive to work mad. The kids won’t watch the movie.”

  Of course, later that night we all watched West Side Story until we heard his red convertible Mustang glide into the driveway.

  On some school mornings, I remember using the ridiculously massive lion’s head brass door knocker my father had mounted above the knob to their master bedroom. I would come into the smoke-hazed room to a fully naked father shaving in the mirror and my mother in a worn-out muumuu. I often needed ten cents for lunch money. When things were really tight financially my mother used to silently open the top drawer to my father’s magical dresser—the one with the pistols, the lock picks, and the naked-lady playing cards—and fish out a “wheat” dime from my father’s prized-but-pitiful coin collection. “Don’t tell your father,” she’d warn me. I also remember how some teachers, upon seeing the older, out-of-circulation dime, would swiftly pocket it and switch it out with one of their newer-minted coins.

  My father got dressed for work and came downstairs smelling of Winston cigarettes, Old Spice cologne, and Dentyne chewing gum, calling, “Now all you sombitches come give yo poppa a kiss.” He kissed my mother, then pinched her on the breast and gave her a hard smack on the ass.

  “That hurt. You bastard.”

  “I love you too. Go fuck yourself.”

  It went like that between my mother and father.

  • • •

  The year I turned twelve, it became somewhat of a customary job for me to pour my father a tumbler of Scotch the minute he walked in after a fourteen-hour workday. He was never particular about the Scotch he drank. In fact, he often dared anyone to tell the difference between a shot of Johnnie Walker and a bottom-shelf brand, the kind that usually came with a handle on the bottle. I had gotten used to letting my top lip touch the whiskey before I handed him his glass, but he’d often see me shudder as I handed him his poison.

  “You’ll get used to it,” he’d say. “But don’t ever drink it without me knowing about it. Promise your father.”

  “I promise, Daddy. It burns my mouth anyhow.”

  “Wanna know the best thing about Scotch? Never gives you a hangover. Thirty years I’m drinking Scotch, never had a hangover, woke up sick, nothing.”

  “That’s a helluva great thing to tell your son, Al,” my mother would say.

  “Who’s gonna tell him when I’m dead? Thirty years.” He’d wink at me, and I’d watch him down his first glass and ask for a second. That was the one he’d take into the kitchen and enjoy with his ten o’clock supper, as my mother and I sat next to him and listened to him tell us his tales of the day as a carpet and linoleum salesman for Kaufman Carpet.

  Most of the stories were peppered with references to his superiors as kikes or mazo Christos (Christ killers), and to some of the customers as cocksuckers or schmucks because they couldn’t make up their minds and denied him a sale. My mother would listen intently, letting the volcano bubble a little, but always pacifying him before the lava started to roll down the mountain. And I would sit there at the table and tell him about my day.

&n
bsp; One night he came in with a glint in his eye. He handed me a gallon of bottom-shelf Scotch he’d bought and told me to take it to the bar in the TV room.

  “Where’s Fat Ro?” he asked, his inside joke for Rosalie’s near-perfect figure. “Where’s my NuNu?” That was his nickname for Lorraine. “Everyone asleep but you and your mother?”

  “Yep.”

  “Well, that’s too bad.”

  I knew he could tell something was wrong.

  “School was good today?” he asked.

  “Yeah, you know, it was all right.”

  “Well,” he said between bites. “School is school. If it were fun, they’d call it ‘play.’ ”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “What’d they teach you today?”

  I had to be careful. That day’s school lesson was about immigration. And, to my father, the only immigrants who mattered were Italians. The rest were quickly dismissed or easily characterized: The Irish were drunks. Moolies were no good. Jews were cheap bastards. Germans were as cold as ice. Polish were stupid. Hispanics were lazy. The French were fags who couldn’t fight.

  “The teacher was telling us about what the Statue of Liberty means to people from other countries,” I said. “She was saying that it is just as special for immigrants today as it was for people who came over in the 1900s.”

  “You know your grandparents came over from Italy on those ships?”

  “I know,” I said.

  “And the Whore in the Harbor is the last sight I can remember seeing when I got on that ship that took me overseas to fight in World War Two. She’s a very special thing.”

  “Why do you call her that?” I asked. “The Whore in the Harbor.”

  He threw back his last gulp of Scotch. “Because with the amount of nationalities we got coming here now, she might as well have one leg raised over her head.”

  I chuckled a little.

  “Come on,” he said. “That was funny. What happened? You’re not telling your father everything. Who bothered you today?”

  My mother rolled her eyes and bit down on the knuckle of her index finger, as if begging me not to bring up anything that wasn’t going to wash down smooth with his arduous day and his double Scotches.

  “Well . . .” I stammered, as my eyes brimmed with emotion. “We were picking sides for tackle football in the school yard and Jimmy Piga told me I couldn’t play.”

  “Who’s this Jimmy Piga?”

  “He’s, like, a tough kid. He’s a year older. Some of the guys say his father is in the Mafia.”

  My father dropped his utensils and pushed his dish away. He turned to my mother, who was busying herself at the stove or the refrigerator, as far away as she could get from the volcano.

  “Lilly, I want you to come over here and listen to me,” he said. “I’m seeing bloodred right now. I can’t eat.”

  He wiped the corners of his mouth with his mopina (kitchen towel), folded it lengthwise, and snapped it violently over his shoulder. Then he pushed back in the kitchen chair, so he was leaning against the wall with the chair balancing on its rear legs. He spoke with the precision of a surgeon in the OR.

  “Here’s what you’re gonna do. I want you to put a brick in your book bag. And you take it with you to school tomorrow. And when this Jimmy Piga says you can’t play again, I want you to take out the brick and break it over his fuckin’ skull.”

  I was confused but knew I had to nail every detail of his plan to show I fully comprehended his revenge plot. “You mean . . . just throw it at him?”

  “No. Listen to me. Take the brick and break it over his head. And if he has a problem with that, you tell him to bring his fuckin’ father over here and I’ll deal with him. Either you deal with this Piga kid, or you deal with me tomorrow. You understand? I love you too much to have some prick treat you that way. You’re a Benza. You don’t take shit from no one. Now gimme a kiss and hit the rack.”

  “Dad . . . it’s not that big a deal . . .”

  “Nah, nah, nah,” he said, smoothing out the tablecloth. “Whenever someone is doing you wrong, you gotta have the balls to make it right.”

  “Okay, Dad.”

  “Come here . . . have a taste of your mother’s caponata.”

  “No way,” I protested. My mother’s caponata was a dish made from the discards of every vegetable in the house, sautéed with olive oil and fresh garlic from our garden.

  “It’s ABC delicious,” he said. “Okay, whatever you wish. More for me, then.”

  I felt guilty leaving my mother behind to deal with his anger. But I kissed them good night and went to bed, all the while envisioning how I was going to break a brick over Jimmy Piga’s head. Or how I would have to deal with my father if I didn’t. My father had never laid a hand on me in my life, but just disappointing him would have crushed my world.

  I started up the steps and I side-eyed my father motioning to my mother with his fork. “What’d I say? Am I wrong?”

  “No, Al.” My mother sighed. “What am I gonna tell you?”

  The next day, when it came time to choose sides for tackle football—or Rumbles, as we called it—and Jimmy Piga once again told me I couldn’t play, I followed my father’s instructions to the letter. I walked away from the game, sat down by the flagpole, and fished out the red brick from my book bag. And while Piga was scribbling a play in the dirt with his index finger and some small twigs, I calmly walked to the huddle and cracked the brick over the back of his head. By the time it rolled down his back and settled at his feet, I felt a quick rush of adrenaline telling me to grab it again and hold it above my head.

  “What the fuck, are you crazy?” he stammered, while falling to his side. “He just hit me on the head with a brick,” he told a dozen frozen friends. “My fuckin’ ears are ringing!”

  “I’m playing in this game, Piga,” I said, with the red brick firmly in my right hand. “I’m playing every day. If you don’t like it, my father said to tell your father to go see him. And he’ll bust his skull wide-open.”

  Jimmy Piga, whose red eyes bulged with confusion and stymied anger, never told his father. And I never missed a game of Rumbles ever again.

  When I told my father what had happened, the next night over one of his late dinners, he lit up like a firefly.

  “You see what I told you? See what I told you? That’s great. That is so great! This is the way you settle matters. We gotta have the good Scotch tonight.”

  He leaned over and kissed me hard on the mouth. I didn’t even mind that his lips tasted of pasta con sarde—sardines.

  • • •

  Although I was only a kid, I was deeply dug into the front lines of the war my father was fighting with the world around him. His foes included everything from ageism to organized religion, feminism, dope in the school yard, the social politics of Pop Warner football, alcoholism, the anticipated journey of his golden years, and a curious and painful skin condition that had every dermatologist within a fifty-mile radius completely baffled. It was a war fought on too many fronts and against too many inexhaustible enemies. But as the loyal son of Alfredo Benza (and, as fate had it, the last Benza boy to carry on his Sicilian bloodline), I fought alongside him. And when I wasn’t fighting, I sat at his feet and absorbed everything he had to say.

  My father was the last of a dying breed, a man who stayed true to the very essence of himself. He gave me an appetite for truth and the desire to do something worthwhile, so that one day I’d have as many stories told about me as the million or so everyone told about him. Like the movie star legends he urged me to watch when he wasn’t around—Garfield, Mitchum, Cagney, or McQueen—I wanted to stand up for myself, stand up for something, even if it didn’t end happily.

  “People are going to ask you to eat shit,” he would say. “Just don’t develop a taste for it.”

  He never sai
d as much out loud, but I believe my father was hell-bent on making sure I could navigate my way toward manhood, even without his being around very often. He was a salesman in his fifties, with too many younger men getting too close for comfort when it came time to make commissions. He would often scoff at the thought of a day off, and too many times I can remember him working seven days a week. Or maybe it was on account of the sea of women he left me with every day as he went off to work. Of course, there was my saint of a mother, who worked as a lunch lady at my elementary school across the street—complete with the horrifying hairnet and the white rubber-soled shoes worn by cafeteria employees and Nurse Ratched. And when school was out, I got to run home across the street to see my aunt Mary, my father’s eldest sister—who never married but traveled to Hawaii thirty-one times over the years to visit her “friend” and hula instructor, Emilani. Whenever Aunt Mary wasn’t playing Don Ho records, she was usually sunning her sixty-four-year-old body in a leopard-print two-piece on the deck of our aboveground redwood pool. And Aunt Mary, God rest her soul, was no Helen Mirren. That made having friends over a mortifying experience.

  Sure, my father had a great Playboy collection lying around, but listening to “Tiny Bubbles” or watching Aunt Mary slowly swim laps destroyed the mood for any one-handed alone time I was actively trying to carve out for my then obsession, Miss May 1974, Marilyn Lange. It would take months to seal that deal.

  My father’s sister-in-law Mae (recently widowed from his brother Philly) and my hot sixteen-year-old cousin, Arlene, lived two houses away and came over every chance they got. Aunt Mae to gossip over Entenmann’s crumb cake, and Arlene to hang out in my sister Lorraine’s room and listen to 45s of Chicago, the Guess Who, Donovan, and the like. Sometimes they would read passages from a hidden copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves, write imaginary love letters to Jimi Hendrix, make collages of Twiggy’s magazine layouts, and sneak drags of Eve cigarettes by the open screened window. Sometimes they would play Carole King’s Tapestry so loud, I would army-crawl into her room—my face practically tasting the shag rug—and listen to them talk about stuff like hickeys and periods and discharge. When those conversations started, I would stand up like a shot—scaring the shit out of both of them—and interrogate them like a prosecuting attorney until they disclosed what each term meant. And, little by little, they would tell me. Learning about hickeys and menstrual cycles was priceless, but they stood firm at discharge. Somehow they knew that was crossing the line for a twelve-year-old smart-ass. They got all serious on me and spoke in hushed tones before finally assuring me that the “discharge” they were referring to only meant my cousin Ray—Arlene’s brother—was getting sent home from Vietnam on account of Uncle Philly dropping dead after his fifth heart attack.