'74 & Sunny

by A. J. Benza

  “Oh, Jesus Christ! Who the hell is going to batter and fry all that damn flounder?”

  “You are,” my father said, “with a smile on your face.”

  And she always would. And whatever we couldn’t eat would go to the neighbors up and down the block.

  On this particular day, the water was choppy and Gino and I sat upfront with extra-large Windbreakers on to ward off the waves that were splashing into the bow of the boat. Behind us, beneath the steering column, my father would always keep a huge flask of Scotch on board and traditionally brought it out for the men to “toast” certain things during the journey. Whenever the first white cap was spotted, the flask was passed around to all the men and everyone said, “A salute!” The flask also came out whenever we spotted the first nice pair of tits on someone else’s boat. “A salute!”

  First sighting of seagulls following a school of bluefish? “A salute!”

  First bite on someone’s pole? “A salute!”

  First fish on board? “A salute!”

  I remember Gino got seasick in the first five minutes and Uncle Larry was three sheets to the wind before he dropped his line in the water. We had what we called a “pisswah” on board, which consisted of a blue-capped Clorox bleach bottle with the bottom cut out. This was what the men and boys could pee into before dumping their business overboard into the ocean. Uncle Larry never saw the huge, gaping hole in the bottom, so he promptly unscrewed the cap, stuck his prick into the bottle, and didn’t realize he essentially peed all over the tackle box. Not too long after that display, my father turned the boat back around and headed near home for the flats to do some quick clamming, while his brother and nephew slept it off. Frankie and Jack snickered a bit, telling me I had a long road ahead if I was going to get Gino to toughen up and catch up to our standards.

  “Gonna be tough jerking off to Pop’s Playboys with Gino staying in your room,” Frankie said. “Right, Jack?”

  “Oh boy,” Jack said. “I’ll give him till August before his balls explode in his sleep.”

  “You guys are gross,” I said. “I don’t do that.” I was lying, of course, as the burning cramp in my right forearm would attest.

  Frankie leaned in real close as we headed back down the canal. “Who knows, maybe you’ll be teaching Gino by August. You guys can have circle-jerk parties.”

  “Don’t listen,” I said into Gino’s ear, as he was waking up. “These guys love talking about jizz.”

  “I don’t even know what any of you are talking about,” he said, his face flushed.

  • • •

  When we glided back to the dock, Gino and Uncle Larry had opened their bloodshot, salt-encrusted eyes and couldn’t wait to get on terra firma. They were both sunburned, soaking wet, and traumatized.

  “How was everything?” my mother asked, while admiring the fluke we caught and the clams we grabbed. She and my sisters had been busy blending the whiskey sours and putting out the dried sausage and cheese we always had waiting for us ashore. “What did Larry and Gino catch?”

  “Ugotz.” My father laughed. “Niente.” Nothing.

  She knelt down to be nearer his ear, as he was spreading out the clams, spraying them down with the garden hose, and organizing them by size. The big mothers for his homemade chowder, the littlenecks to be eaten raw, and the cherrystones to be steamed for posillipo sauce. “Al . . . are you gonna let Gino go again tomorrow?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “He’s going again. He’s going with the ones who are staying.” That meant, the next time the men were going to spend a day on the sea, Gino was gonna stay home with the women—the ones who were staying.

  My father got right to work whipping up a fresh clam chowder while Jack and Frankie cut the fluke into fillet strips. Gino and I had the job of burying the fish heads deep into the garden compost.

  “Do you do this after every fishing trip?” Gino asked me, gagging.

  “Yep,” I said. “But I don’t think it does anything more than stink up the backyard.”

  “Oh . . . the expert,” my father shouted through the kitchen window. “Is that what you think? Your father has the best earth in town. You’ll see when I’m dead.” He was feeling a little loaded, so I didn’t answer back.

  For reasons unknown to me, he always felt he made his point stronger by telling us how much more intelligent he’d become in our heads after he died. Come to think of it, maybe it was all his talk about death that made me chew through all those Tums.

  While everything was cooking, my father took me, Uncle Larry, and Gino on a trip through his garden and grape arbor and eventually stopped at a very fertile peach tree that was the eyesore of my youth.

  “Come here, Larry,” my father said. “Look at what I did with this peach tree.” He always presented it with a flourish, as if he were showing off a brand-new Picasso. “My son thinks he should be embarrassed of it.”

  Uncle Larry stood in the shade of the giant tree, which was bursting with too many peaches for us to ever eat, and marveled at it. “Oh, Al . . . Momma and Poppa would’ve loved to see this.”

  What they would have seen was my father’s jerry-rigged invention that had the whole neighborhood slowing down as they drove by the house to sneak a peek at our side yard. My father would search for peach buds the size of almonds, at which point he’d take an empty wine bottle and guide the branch holding the bud all the way to the bottom of the bottle. A piece of duct tape would secure the tree branch inside the neck of the bottle, so that the entire tree branch would heavily droop and nearly rest on the lawn. At any given time during the spring and early summer, there were at least two dozen bottles on the tree, and for rubberneckers driving by it looked like nothing less than a twenty-foot-tall alien with wine bottles for hands and feet. A District 9 for winos. But in the weeks to come, as the small peach buds matured and broke free from the branches and came to rest at the bottles’ bottoms, my father would remove the tape from the tree and take the bottles into his garage where his homemade wine operation was in full swing. Then he’d fill the bottles with the homemade stuff—be it white or red—and let it sit for a while so that the peach could fully ripen and offer itself, giving tremendous, bursting peach flavor with each pour.

  Uncle Larry’s green eyes got all weepy again. And that wouldn’t be the last time the levees behind his eyes wouldn’t hold on this trip. My father scooped up a couple of overripe peaches that had fallen onto the lawn, took his folding knife out of his pocket, and fed a few slices to him. My uncle’s eyes welled up and rolled back into his head.

  “Dottore,” my father said, kissing his brother hard on the cheek, “why you cry?” He gently shoved him off toward our pool. “Go lay on the raft with your son while we finish cooking.”

  A day on the bay always had a way of knocking a man down early. But with the emotional baggage Uncle Larry had carried with him from Jersey—and with the hooch the men had on the boat—it was only a matter of time before each of us would fall off to a nearby lawn chair, pool raft, or couch for a little shut-eye. My father, despite all his aches and pains, was always the last man standing.

  All the while he was cooking his chowder, the women crowded around him for clues as to how the boat trip went. They were asking questions that were out of their usual repertoire.

  “What did the fluke bite on, Daddy?”

  My father was terse with his answers while he taste tested the chow off a wooden spoon. “Squid and killie combo, Ro.”

  “Was it choppy out there?”

  “A little windy, Mary, but we managed.”

  “Any trouble with the outboard? Did the boat conk out at all?”

  “A couple times, NuNu. But your Frankie pull-started her right back up again.”

  My mother chimed in. “Is all the Scotch gone?”

  My father put down the spoon and shut off the range.

  �
�Yeah, baby! And we didn’t spill a fuckin’ drop. How’s that?”

  No one dared a follow-up question, but my father knew what everyone in the room was looking for: a status report on Uncle Larry’s diagnosis of Gino.

  After a few last swirls of the chowder, and another taste test, he turned to the girls. “Okay. The answer to the question all of you are dying to ask is, yes.”

  And with that, the ladies got closer and more quiet, huddling around my father and forming a human shield from the father and son floating on a raft in the shallow end of our pool.

  My father began quietly. “That night on the phone, my brother Larry told me that ‘a father knows.’ He just knows, goddamn it. And now here’s your father telling you the same thing my brother told me, all right? We know our boys more than our wives can ever know.” When he spoke that adamantly, he’d point his finger in a way that was more threatening than a gun. And the thick, gold POPPA bracelet he wore on his wrist shook like thunder.

  With that, the women slinked off to finish their dinner tasks: setting the table, plating the food, and feeding the men and boys seated before them.

  “A father knows,” my father repeated in exasperation to an empty room. “A father knows when his boy is different. Call it brain damage, call it whatever the hell you want. A father just knows. He knows.” And then to put a period on it all, again in Sicilian. “Ido sape.”

  My mother gently scratched him on his back. “Okay, okay . . . we’ll figure it all out. It isn’t the end of the world.”

  “It’s goddamn close,” my father said, before turning to the screen door and whistling for his brother and nephew to come inside. “Larry. Gino. Come. Everything’s on the table.”

  In more ways than one.

  Whenever my father was able to feed his whole family off the riches of the bay, he felt he was cheating the system. And whenever he could bring in vegetables from his garden for my mother to fry, sauté, roast, boil, or broil them, he acted as though he had fooled the world.

  We never held hands and thanked the Lord for our food. My father had his way of saying grace.

  “Larry, look at the table,” he said. “We got the fluke with our hands, the clams with our feet, and the peppers and onions both come from the garden.”

  “Oh, this is just wonderful, Al,” Uncle Larry said.

  “Don’t forget, you’re drinking wine from the grapes we grow on the arbor between our house and Rosalie’s house,” my father said. “And the scallions all grow wild on the side of the yard, next to the garlic and potatoes. Later on, I’ll show you what I did this year on the other side of the house.”

  My uncle just kept repeating, “This is wonderful,” as my father got deeper into his proud dinner speech. As he was doing this, the women were busy making plates of food for the men and boys. It was never that my father demanded they do this, or that he even asked. It was just something my mother and sisters always seemed eager to do. And as the years went by, neither my father, Jack, nor Frankie ever grabbed for food. I could see this was foreign to Uncle Larry, who, at one point, reached for the red pepper flakes to scatter into his chowder.

  “No, no, Larry, stop,” my father said, calmly putting his hand on my uncle’s arm. “NuNu, put some red pepper on your uncle’s clam chowder.”

  “Okay, Daddy,” NuNu said. “Tell me when to stop, Uncle Larry.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” my father went on, “I don’t know why there are so many schmucks who buy all their fruit and vegetables at the store, when you can grow them and tend to it yourself. Not to mention, save a lot of money.”

  “You’re right, Alfred,” Uncle Larry said.

  “Goddamn right I’m right,” my father said, turning to my cousin. “Gino, remind me to show you the melanzane I pulled from the garden yesterday.”

  “Okay,” he said, springing to attention.

  “They’re the most beautiful shade of purple; there’s no name for it,” my father said. “But, I’m also gonna show you some gagootz (zucchini) that are as long as your arm.”

  “That oughta be fun, right, Gino?” Uncle Larry chimed in.

  “Yeah,” Gino said. “I love big gardens.”

  This got my father going. Looking back, it’s simple to see that he thought of himself as the provider, the ultimate disciplinarian, the decision maker, and the symbolic head of the family. Having Gino agree, even moderately, to see his garden works, was like putting on a war chest for my father.

  He pushed his chair out and stood up. “Tomorrow morning,” he stated, “A.J., you’re going to let Gino carry the scolapasta (kitchen colander), and we’ll show him how fertile his uncle’s earth is. Best on the block. Am I right?”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  “Yes . . . what?” he said.

  “Yes. Best earth on the block. You’re right, Daddy.”

  “You’re goddamn right I’m right.”

  With the meal almost over and my father’s homemade wine flowing freely, the mood was good and lively. But it was on these nights where the tumblers in his brain always seemed to dangerously give way and open up the safe to the soul of a hidden man. These were the moments when love was always served with a side order of danger.

  Before everyone retired to their bedrooms, dead tired, my father held court and wouldn’t rather be anywhere else: standing at the head of the table, with his jelly glass of wine, directing his family like Fellini would do with Marcello Mastroianni and the rest.

  “Rosalie . . . tell your father how you saved those three kittens last week from the back of the bank parking lot. And how you fought off three colored girls on your own.”

  Or:

  “NuNu, sing ‘The Impossible Dream’ from Man of La Mancha. But sing it in that fuckin’ hysterical, terrible voice. Larry, listen. Lorraine is the prodigy who has absolutely zero range.”

  And finally:

  “A.J., stand on the table and do your Georgie Jessel impression.”

  By the time all the bits were over and the brothers were bent over in laughter, it was obvious another big day with the family had been wrung dry.

  My father and his brother remained at the table, while Gino and I sat with them and listened to stories of their youth.

  My father said, “Boys, you have no idea how many times your grandfather stood up to make a family speech without realizing his zipper was down. Easter . . . Thanksgiving . . . Christmas Eve, forget about it. And he never wore underwear. So, you can imagine . . .”

  Uncle Larry countered, “I think the old man knew it. He just wanted to piss off Momma!”

  “Hey, Larry, remember when you dared me to hit you on the head with Momma’s cast-iron pan?” My father laughed. “And I did it and knocked you down the stairs!”

  “I still have the lump.” Uncle Larry laughed. “Feel it!”

  Both men traded stories like that for an hour until their sides hurt.

  But just as suddenly, as if the men could no longer deny Gino’s trip in the first place, the mood went somber. The brothers lit up a couple more cigarettes, downed a few more wines, and decided it was time to size up Gino and me.

  Right before they started, my father told me to flip through the records inside the dining room stereo console and “put on some good music from real musicians.” I knew this was a test I had taken many times before, but I knew I had better get it right with my uncle and cousin present. I fingered past my sister’s collection of Chicago, the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles albums before stopping on Benny Goodman. I dropped the needle on “Sing, Sing, Sing” and the brothers delightfully approved. That was my go-to song whenever I wanted to soothe my father. I remember being ten years old and my father telling me I had to know the names of all the men of the Swing Era before he allowed me to know a single, shallow thing about Mick Jagger and those guys. There were nights when he would sit with a Scotch at the head of the
table—while all the women went to bed—and he would test me on each song.

  “Who’s on trumpet?” he’d say.

  “Harry James.”

  “And what do they call him?”

  “The Hawk.”

  “Good. Good boy.”

  “Now, who’s banging them drums?”

  “Oh, that’s easy,” I’d say. “Gene Krupa.”

  “Don’t get cocky. Piano?”

  “Teddy Wilson?”

  “Nice. But you pulled that out of your ass. Dare I ask, who’s going for a ride on the vibes?”

  “That would be . . . Lionel Hampton.”

  “You’re getting good,” he’d say. “Last question: Who’s the bad, bad man on the saxophone?”

  “That’s easy,” I’d say. “The Italian guy . . . Sam Butera!”

  “Good job, buddy boy” he’d say, as I climbed on his lap. “You gotta know who’s who, before you know what’s what.” And then, in a proud whisper, “There are no Rolling Stones without the Benny Goodman Orchestra. You understand what I’m saying? Everybody takes and steals from someone else until they find out who they really are.”

  “Yeah, I get it, Dad. You’re right.”

  With Uncle Larry and Gino present, I lined up Louis Prima and Keely Smith and Frank Sinatra as dutifully as any DJ who truly understands his audience. Mind you, as the brothers are wonderfully singing along, Gino is lost in my display of blind devotion and discipline. It’s obvious to me he’s never heard this music in his life and watching his father come alive is oddly funny to him. I gave him a wink and we share a quick laugh.