'74 & Sunny

by A. J. Benza

  “Your ass!”

  “No, Ma. I heard all of it. I even heard you lose your breath a little, and when I cracked open my door, I saw you make the sign of the cross. So what the hell was that about?”

  She started laughing nervously, and whenever my mother went that way, I knew I had her dead to rights. “Tell me about Gino’s brain, Ma. I deserve to know. I’m gonna be spending the summer with him. Is this brain damage gonna kill him? Is it catching? I wanna know.”

  “Rosalie!” my mother yelled for reinforcements. “Would you tell your brother why Uncle Larry is so concerned with Gino?”

  “No,” I said. “Why is he concerned with his brain? Is he retarded or something? What is going on? If there’s any chance of me catching this brain damage, don’t expect me to sleep with him or swim with him. I’m telling you right now.”

  I popped three more Tums.

  “Will you stop with those fuckin’ Toms,” my mother said, staying true to her habit of mispronouncing the simplest of words.

  “They’re called Tums.” I laughed.

  “Whatever the hell. Just stop. They can’t be good for you.”

  Oh . . . but exposure to brain damage is?”

  “Rosalie, Lorraine, . . . please come in and help me here. This kid is raising my blood pressure through the roof; I gotta take a goddamn Librium, have a cigarette, and put my feet up in my chair.”

  Rosalie was headed out to the Italian specialty store to pick up food, so she was rushed. Lorraine, sweetly oblivious as she remains to this day, never saw any difference between Gino or even his older brother and other boys their ages. “I love Larry Jr.,” Lorraine obliviously said. “I hope Gino turns out just like him.”

  That was enough for Rosalie to step in with some calculated force.

  “A.J.,” she said, “forget you ever heard the term ‘brain damaged.’ No one is brain damaged. It’s not an illness. It’s just . . . how can I put this . . . Jesus, Ma, why are you putting me through this?”

  “Just tell me something,” I begged her, looking around the room for anyone to chime in.

  “It’s just Gino is a different kind of boy than you are.”

  “We’ve always been a little different from each other,” I said. “But now they’re calling it brain damage, Ro. That sounds scary to me. And serious.”

  “No, no,” she said. “It’s just that right now Gino is not as rough a boy as you are. He’s not as tough as you are, ya know? Don’t forget, Uncle Larry went to work all day and Gino was left home most of the time with Larry, three sisters, and his mother.”

  That got me thinking. “So what? I get left home with you and NuNu, Aunt Mary, Aunt Mae, Arlene, and Mommy. So am I gonna come down with this brain damage too?”

  At that point, my father dropped what he was doing to swoop in and put an end to the discussion, which was his specialty. “Let’s put this horseshit to an end,” he said. “Your cousin Gino is going through a phase. He’ll get over it.”

  “What’s gonna stop me from going through a phase like that?” I asked my father.

  “Me,” he said. And that was that.

  “Now make your mother happy and stop with the Tums already.”

  I still wasn’t sure what they had on Gino, and to be honest, I knew they weren’t telling me everything on the brain-damage front. So I stayed on my toes and decided to wait and see how he acted and interacted.

  It didn’t take long for me to start doing some summer math. Gino’s arrival was gonna happen quickly, and his stay was gonna go on for roughly sixty-five days. And this was the terrifying summer before my neighborhood friends and I were all entering junior high school, and suddenly it wasn’t solely going to belong to us anymore. Somehow—whether it was a tackle football game, a spontaneous fishing trip, flirting with the pretty girls next door or just some somber moments alone—I was going to have to work Gino into all those things. It wasn’t like my cousin and I were strangers or didn’t get along or anything like that. But there was no denying that as our wonder years went on, Gino was kind of peeling off in another direction. I didn’t have a name for it. I just knew it was different. And over the hundred times or so we’d seen each other throughout the years, at weddings, funerals, and birthday parties—as well as the arduous, traffic-ridden trips my family took to spend some weekends at Uncle Larry’s big house in beautiful, sunny Succasunna—about the most common thing we shared was having the same last name.

  Jesus, those car rides to Jersey were hell. My father never raised his hands to me in his life, but those car rides amounted to the closest thing to child abuse that I can ever recall suffering. I wish I was lucky or tormented enough to block them out, but I never saw a shrink for help on this matter. But imagine me sitting on the hump seat in the back of a ’64 Mustang (with no seat belts, mind you) and barely surviving the two-hour journey, as my parents chain-smoked Winstons with the windows up and the AM radio dial tuned to an oldies’ station. To this day, if I hear even the opening of “Winchester Cathedral,” I throw up in my mouth a little bit.

  “Ma . . . can you and Daddy crack your windows when you smoke?” Lorraine would beg, above the eight-track stylings of Sinatra. “I swear, we’re gonna die back here, and we’re all about to throw up. Please!”

  My father would visually clock us by adjusting his rearview mirror. “I’ll roll them down a little bit, but you’re gonna all freeze your asses off back there. Remember, the heater is shot and we can’t afford to see Sal at the Sunoco station for another month or so.”

  “Fine, fine. We don’t care.”

  I knew then what secondhand smoke was. Had I died, it would have been premeditated second-degree murder.

  “Are we almost there yet?”

  “Jesus Christ, A.J.” My father would exhale. “We haven’t even seen a sign for the GW Bridge yet. We got plenty of time to go. And that’s if we don’t hit traffic on the turnpike, which we will, because Jersey’s highways are all laid out like your sister’s ass.” That was not a slight on Rosalie’s or Lorraine’s asses, it was just my father’s interesting way of playing with words. Smushing fun in the face of good sense.

  This was about as encouraging as it got, until those moments when my father would swing his right arm off the wheel and dig his strong fingers into our knees, hip bones, shoulders, stomachs, or whatever torturous, ticklish spot he could find while keeping his eyes on the road. Of course, all of us would be laughing and screaming for our lives, sometimes until the point of pissing ourselves. It was a reminder of how my father was equal parts tough and tender. He liked to break the boredom by busting balls.

  The last Saturday in June of 1974 came at me like a shot. I was where I always was during the late morning hours—­sitting three feet from the TV screen, drinking a giant grape soda, and eating a big bag of taco-flavored Doritos, while being engrossed in the Soul Train experience. I sat really close, not on account of bad eyesight but because at any moment—when my father would swing by the living room unannounced and see even a glimpse of Don Cornelius or the Soul Train line or word scramble—he’d convince me to change the channel in his own way.

  “Look at you! Can’t understand a fuckin’ word they’re saying, can you? But yet, you’re watching this jungle-boogie bullshit.”

  “Dad, they’re good. They sing better, they dance better—”

  “Who dances better? None of those coloreds could hold Gene Kelly’s shoes.”

  “It’s different, Dad,” I’d say. “They got a different way of doing things.”

  “Yeah. You know what else is different? Mowing the lawn is different. Go mow the lawn. I want us all to be out front when Uncle Larry and Gino get here, anyway.”

  My father wouldn’t even have been home had it not been for his brother’s arrival. He worked every damn Saturday of his life. So it’s safe to say that every Saturday of my life, I was glued to Soul Train. It wa
s church. Grape soda. Doritos. And becoming more and more enamored with black culture.

  On the day of Uncle Larry and Gino’s arrival, I eventually went outside and was rebounding and retrieving my brother-in-law Jack’s free throws on our front yard basketball hoop when I spotted Uncle Larry’s forest-green convertible Alfa Romeo speeding up the block and about to turn into our driveway. As usual, Uncle Larry had his leather racing gloves on and it was a toss-up as to what shined more brightly—his perfectly round, bald head or those bright, pesto-green, laughing eyes of his. In his youth, the pictures show that he would’ve given Paul Newman a run for his money. As he aged he was more a Yul Brynner type. Poor, clueless Uncle Larry was honking the horn and shouting for my father to come outside, and already—seconds into their stay—Jack had to lay down a simple rule we lived by without even thinking about it twice.

  “Hey . . . Uncle Larry!”

  “Hiya, Jack. You look great. How are you?”

  “Listen,” Jack announced. “You can’t park here. You’re on our basketball court. Can’t play basketball with your car on the basketball court.”

  To Jack’s credit, he was an elementary school gym teacher in Tuckahoe, New York, and—at various times in his tenure—had also coached the high school’s varsity football, basketball, baseball, and soccer teams to winning seasons as well as county and state championships. He was also the high school’s athletic director. Jack was a serious jock. I almost never saw him without a clipboard and a whistle.

  Uncle Larry looked utterly confused. “We’re just gonna get Gino’s bags and I’ll come back and move the car in a minute.”

  “Can’t do it. We’re shooting free throws. We shoot five hundred free throws every Saturday,” Jack said. “You’re breaking our rhythm.”

  “You’re not kidding,” Uncle Larry said.

  “Hey. No.”

  “Boy, oh boy . . . good luck, Gino,” Uncle Larry said.

  When Uncle Larry moved his car to the curb and they approached the house, as my family spilled out to greet them, Jack shouted to Gino, who was carrying a couple of pieces of luggage.

  “Hey, Gino . . . think fast,” Jack said, as he tossed him the red-white-and-blue ABA basketball. “You’re wide-open! Five seconds left. Knicks are down by one. Hit the shot. All you!”

  Gino dropped his bags just in time to luckily catch the bounce pass. His pressing smile was as hard to look at as his lack of any idea of how to shoot a ball into a hoop twenty feet away. The ball looked like it weighed thirty pounds in his hands.

  “Shoot it,” Jack shouted. “Four . . . three . . . two . . . shoot it!”

  With all his might, Gino sent up a shot that went over the backboard, bounced on the roof a few times, landed in the side yard, and came to rest in a small pile of dog shit courtesy of one of our mutts, Sonny or Pippen.

  Jack broke the silence with a sharp sigh. “Hey . . . Knicks lose. Gonna be a long summer.”

  As all the members of our family were hugging and kissing Uncle Larry and Gino, I was so obsessed with my ABA basketball that I went and retrieved it from the pile, washed it off with the garden hose, and disappeared into the laundry room to get a towel and shine it as best as I could. But the ball had miles on it. It had been through epic, last-second moments between me and hundreds of imaginary opponents. When I wasn’t trying to perfect a finger roll like Dr. J, I was performing the straight-up, climb-the-ladder jumper of his New Jersey Nets teammate, “Super” John Williamson. There were some nights, way past dinner, when the winter wind was whipping so hard that the zipper on my ski jacket made it sound like the metal collar and tags on the neck of Greg Lavazoli’s vicious Doberman when it was loose and fast approaching. But I stayed with the play, and time and again, either Walt Frazier or Earl “the Pearl” Monroe helped me pull out a buzzer-beater before I bolted to the front door to actually see if it was my zipper that was scaring the piss out of me, or, in fact, Lavazoli’s bloodthirsty dog. This was when Dobermans and German shepherds were the scariest things on four legs. Nobody had pit bulls yet.

  Uncle Larry had taken the long route from Jersey that day and had cut through Manhattan’s Lower East Side—where he and my father were raised—so he could get the best bagels and lox and even a handful of knishes at Yonah Schimmel on East Houston Street. (That was the only non-Italian food my father allowed in the house.) Meanwhile, my mother had matched him by putting together an incredible cold antipasto plate of salami, hard-boiled eggs, anchovies, olives, and roasted peppers, with fresh garlic, basil, and lemon zest spread all over it. And then there were mussels that we had picked several days earlier on a trip to a local marsh. They were steamed with the perfect amount of garlic, butter, and white wine. We ate them quickly as if they were potato chips. We only slowed down whenever one of us bit down on a small, dark pearl.

  (And fuck Rachael Ray. None of these meals could be prepared in a flash. That would’ve been an insult to our family and guests. Some of these meals took two days to plan: my father had to harvest the mussels and my mother had to scrape off the barnacles, pull off the moss, and begin slaving over a hot, summer stove, flavoring them and watching over them until they were perfect and not too rubbery. Thirty-minute meal, my ass.)

  When everyone finished their fair share of the mini Saturday feast, my father returned from Jack and Ro’s backyard bulkhead—where he was proudly getting our boat ready for a fishing trip—he proudly told the men and boys that it was gassed up and ready for us to go out and bring home some fish.

  “Larry,” my father said. “Weakfish don’t bite too often, but they’re biting this week. And it’s high tide. Let’s get in the boat and go.”

  But Uncle Larry had other ideas. He wanted to make sure Gino had all the athletic equipment necessary to compete anytime a game broke out in the school yard.

  “Alfred,” my uncle said. “Lemme take A.J. and Gino to the sporting-goods store and buy a few things.”

  With the boat’s engine running, and the high tide coming in quickly, that was the last thing my father wanted to hear. “Larry, Larry . . . not now. You’re talking to a sailor. We’ll miss the fish.”

  “Al, let me just do this,” he said. “A.J., hop in the back of the car and tell me what I need to buy.”

  “Dad,” I screamed over the boat’s engine, “we’re only going to Babylon. We’ll be right back.”

  The inside of Babylon Sporting Goods on Main Street was something I had seen only through the back window of my father’s car as we raced past it to see a movie at the RKO or buy some booze at the liquor store down the block from a man my father named Storio Longo because of the long stories he spun. We never stopped at the sports shop. We never had the money to buy me new equipment. My sports equipment was the stuff Jack would sneak home from his school’s supply closet from time to time. It was weathered and used and all read PROPERTY OF TUCKAHOE HIGH SCHOOL. I never knew the smell of a new baseball glove or the perfectly tight seams of a Clincher softball. But when Uncle Larry parked in front of the place that Saturday in June and held the door open for Gino and me, you could’ve told me I had just landed on the moon.

  I walked in the store and brushed my hand against everything. Even things I would never, ever own, like soccer nets or tetherball sets. Uncle Larry’s green eyes lit up, while Gino’s enthusiasm shrunk a bit. It was obvious he didn’t know sports stores.

  “A.J.,” Uncle Larry said, “what does Gino need to have this summer to play with the rest of the boys?”

  Talk about a loaded question.

  The sales clerk stepped in and offered his help. But Uncle Larry declined, saying his nephew was going to choose what equipment he was going to buy. And then I heard a phrase, or the formation of words, that I had never heard in my life.

  “Money is no object,” Uncle Larry told the clerk, as I grabbed basketballs, footballs, baseball bats and mitts, and even some lacrosse sticks, even though
I had never played the game.

  Because we had always struggled financially throughout my childhood, I was used to hearing my mother yell into the phone at bill collectors, “If I write you a check it’ll bounce from here to the moon.” Or, even better, in her private moments when she was balancing our family’s checkbook in the middle of the sun-splashed kitchen table, using her ninth-grade education and no calculator: “Well, if a trip around the world cost a nickel, we wouldn’t be able to get off the friggin’ block.”

  Now here I was with my uncle’s open checkbook, bouncing out of the store and squeezing all the new merch into the back of his sports car.

  “Thanks a lot, Uncle Larry,” I said.

  “No problem,” he said. “As long as you have fun all summer. You hear me, Gino?”

  Gino’s head and soul were not quite aligned yet, as he fiddled with the radio and protected his hair from the wind whipping around the drop-top.

  “Hey, Gino, what grade is for ten-year-olds in New Jersey?” I asked.

  “I just finished fourth grade,” he said.

  “Yech! Fractions,” I said.

  “Yeah, they’re not too bad,” Gino said. “It’s mostly adding fractions with unlike denominators when it gets tricky.”

  “Well, I’d rather go fishing than do fractions any day of the week,” I said. “You ready to fish, Uncle Larry?”

  “Your father is the fisherman in the family,” he said. “But he’ll teach me.”

  Right then and there I knew my uncle and Gino were in for trouble. When it came to people fishing on his boat, my father had the patience of a time bomb. He had a habit of telling you how to do things once before sending you off on your own. If you didn’t catch on, he’d steal glimpses of you in moments of complete incompetence and just shake his head, take a long drag on his cigarette, and mutter to himself. Not tossing the anchor overboard correctly, or squeamishly baiting a hook, or leaving the clamming sacks back home were practically capital offenses.

  By the time we got back and headed for the dock, my father was already waiting at the wheel with Lorraine’s fiancé, Frankie, and Jack. We shoved off and meandered down the canals of my youth and into the slapping tides of the Great South Bay. The bay had been good to us for years. In the summer of 1974, the water was still clear enough that you could see straight to the bottom, fishing twelve feet deep or so. Maybe more. There were times when we were fishing for blowfish or flounder that we could actually see where the bigger fish were and we’d drop our lines right on top of them. It was almost unfair. There were days when we’d fill a garbage pail full of fish in a couple of hours and we’d have to turn home because there was no more room to keep them on board. And sometimes we’d come home with so much that my mother would curse us.