'74 & Sunny

by A. J. Benza

  “Then screw it,” Deb said, before planting an openmouthed kiss flat on my mouth that tasted like candy. “You can handle it.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I said. “What was that all about?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, real coy like, while sliding out of the raft and climbing up the steps. And then she finally let her veil down. “Don’t look at me. I’m just as nervous as you are.” She laughed.

  “Hey,” I said. “Seriously, how can we wait until next summer?”

  “I don’t know. Lemme think about it,” she said, as she climbed the fence. “But you got your hands full right now. And, by the way, the Coogans are still hanging out at the curb. They’re so creepy.” She blew me a kiss with her right hand pressed to her lips. I just let myself sink to the bottom of the pool, and I sat there for a while until my ears hurt from the water pressure and I ran out of breath. When I pushed myself up for air, I saw the unmistakable image of my father, home early from work, with a look on his face that would want to make people change their zip codes.

  “Dry off, lover boy. We got a situation,” he said. While Debbie and I were rolling around on the raft, he’d already come home and changed into cutoff jean shorts and his favorite terry-cloth V-neck shirt. As I hopped out of the pool to dry off, I could tell by the speed and seriousness of things happening in the house—my mother’s anguished face and Gino already standing in the foyer ready to go—this seemed like some sort of perilous mission we were needed on.

  My parents and I met Gino in the foyer, with my mother wringing her hands and my father breathing hard through his nose.

  “What is it, Dad?” I asked, concerned. “Is anyone in trouble?”

  “All I can tell you is we aren’t the ones in trouble,” he said. “I come home early to enjoy the pool and I gotta see this shit on my sidewalk.”

  “What sidewalk? What happened?” I said.

  “Come with me; walk out to the front yard. And when you tell me who did this to our house and to our family, I’m gonna fuckin’ mop the floor with them.”

  Gino and I followed my father to the front white sidewalk outside our lawn, and there they were in blue chalk, the ugly words: GO HOME QUER. The culprits missed a letter, but my father was gonna make sure they didn’t miss the lesson. And with his .45 caliber handgun very visibly stuck inside the back of his shorts, he was hell-bent on finding whoever was responsible for pulling this off, in broad daylight no less.

  “Al,” my mother pleaded. “A gun?”

  “Lilly, go inside.” And she turned back into the house.

  He knelt down to me on the lawn, “These pricks need to learn a lesson, you understand?” Gino was shaking like a leaf. “I think I have to throw up,” he said. “I really think I have to throw up.”

  “Then throw up,” my father said. “Now . . . do you have any idea who might have done this? Before I break somebody’s head, I gotta know—without a doubt—who we’re dealing with here.”

  “Well,” I started, “the Coogan boys were outside the house while I was in the pool. And they can be pricks sometimes, Dad. And they were sitting outside our house earlier. It’s gotta be them. Yeah. The Coogan boys.”

  “Show me their house,” he said, with absolutely no anxiety and, actually, a quiet resolve.

  And with that, Gino and I held each one of my father’s hands and walked six or seven houses down the street, all the while with my father’s .45 in his back waistband and impossible not to see with our peripheral vision. Gino and I looked at each other, and it was a bonding moment. This was something we were all in together. As a family. Gino looked like hell, and I could’ve used a few Tums, if you want to know the truth.

  Our next-door neighbor was Joe D’Ascoli—Pete’s dad—and he was a New York City cop. Maybe he spotted the gun or something, but in the middle of watering his lawn, he piped up, “Anything wrong, Al?”

  “Nah. Nothing to worry about,” my father said.

  Mr. D’Ascoli went back to watering his lawn, and we continued down the street.

  A few seconds later, my father stopped us and asked me a very simple but scary question.

  With a sinister yet comforting smile creasing his face he said, “Which house? Point.”

  We walked down the street for maybe a minute while my father whistled—he whistled—until I stopped walking and pointed at the brand-new colonial-style home that the Coogan family had just moved in to.

  “This is it?” he said. “With the goddamn statue of the niggah lawn jockey holding a lantern? What an asshole.”

  “Yeah, Dad,” I said, startled, embarrassed, and excited at the same time. “This is Danny Coogan’s house.”

  “Uncle Al,” Gino pled. “This is not a big deal. You don’t have to get mad at this family.”

  My father lovingly rubbed Gino’s cheek with his hands. “Gino, do you understand what those pricks wrote on the sidewalk? Listen to Uncle Al. We have to nip this in the bud. Those words are ignorant and wrong. And it’s not gonna happen at my house.”

  “But it doesn’t matter,” Gino said. “Those boys don’t know me.”

  My father shrugged his shoulders, and it looked like he was admiring the beautiful weather around us. He was completely calm when he said, “Well then, let’s get to know each other.”

  I was shaking when we walked up Danny Coogan’s driveway and finally reached his front door.

  “What the hell are you shaking for?” my father asked me. “Did you do anything wrong?”

  “No.”

  “Then stop shaking,” he said.

  Like most of us in the neighborhood, the Coogans had a screen door separating them from the outside world. No one locked their doors in my neighborhood in 1974, so seeing a flimsy screen door was nothing unusual. My father knocked a few times, and I tensed up. Gino was turning gray and was close to shitting his pants.

  Mr. Coogan answered the door. “Can I help you?” he said, with a slight smile on his face.

  “Hiya,” my father began. “We haven’t met. My name is Al Benza. I live a few houses down on Snedecor.”

  “Yes, yes,” Mr. Coogan said. “Nice to meet you. Why the visit?”

  “Well,” my father said. “It goes like this: there are some terrible words written with chalk on the sidewalk in front of my house, and my son says your boys are the ones who did it.”

  Mr. Coogan gave off a quizzical look. “How’s that?”

  “You heard me,” my father said. “Why don’t you get your sons to come to the door and ask them what they did.”

  “I have a great idea,” Mr. Coogan said. “Why don’t you go back home and think about what you’re doing here, blaming my boys for something they didn’t do.”

  “Are you calling my son a liar?” my father said.

  “I’m saying it would be a great idea if you just walked away, and I’ll forget this ever happened.”

  Within a second, my father dropped Gino’s and my hands and punched Mr. Coogan with his right fist in the face, straight through the screen door. And a second later, he was inside their home, standing over a stunned Mr. Coogan, with a gun to his head.

  “You gotta a lot of ‘great ideas,’ ” my father huffed. “But the best thing you’re gonna do now is call your sons downstairs or else I’ll pull this trigger and we’ll see all your ‘great ideas’ on the wall behind you.”

  Gino wasn’t in Hackensack anymore.

  With that, Mr. Coogan—who was understandably out of breath and low on courage—called for his sons to come to the foyer and see him lying there in such a prone position. “Danny, Marty, Tudor . . . come downstairs now,” he said. It sounded like he was moaning and shrieking at the same time.

  When the boys arrived, they had no idea what they were walking into.

  “Dad,” they screamed. “Are you okay?”

  “Never mind that
,” Mr. Coogan piped up. “Did you write something on the Benzas’ sidewalk? And don’t lie to me!”

  Once the boys sheepishly admitted what they had done, my father let Mr. Coogan up, uncocked his pistol, and stuck it back in his waistband. “Okay,” my father said. “See how easy that was? Now, just have the boys come by and wash that shit off my sidewalk and we’ll have no more problems from here on in.”

  The Coogan boys stood there frozen.

  “You heard the man,” Mr. Coogan shouted to his sons. “Go clean up your mess, for God’s sake. And then I’ll deal with you idiots later!”

  “I’m sorry it came to this,” my father told him. “I’m not the type to hold a grudge. So this’ll all be water under the bridge now that your boys are doing what’s right.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Mr. Coogan replied, straightening his shirt and plastering his hair back on his sweaty head. “Of course, of course.”

  As we walked back home, Mr. D’Ascoli—who’d obviously seen the entire confrontation—stopped watering his lawn. “Everything all right, Al?”

  “Yeah, Joe. The guy just fell down in his hallway.”

  “I could’ve sworn I saw him swing at you first, if I’m not mistaken,” Joe said.

  “Could be. It all happened so fast,” my father said. “I got some clams for you in the icebox.”

  “Beautiful,” Joe said. “Some cherrystones would be great.”

  “Yep. No problem.”

  Before we even got home, the three Coogan boys were already scrubbing the ugly words off the sidewalk with a big brush and a big bucket of car wash. And as the sentence disappeared, my father was already offering the boys some barbecue and a dip in the pool.

  “When you boys are done, why don’t you take a dip?”

  “Yeah, no . . . it’s okay, Mr. Benza. We gotta go,” Danny said.

  “Well, take a frankfurter with you for chrissakes. They’re good, like Nedick’s,” my father said, imitating the famous Giants and Knicks broadcaster Marty Glickman.

  Needless to say, the Coogan boys didn’t have much of an appetite. My father had Gino and me stay out on the lawn until the ugly words disappeared and washed away into the street and down into the sewer. When the sidewalk was just about clean and the phrase was gone, the Coogan boys walked away knowing they could never, ever mess with us again. But I’ll tell you this: Danny Coogan and I remained friends for years and our families never had a problem again. No cops were called on that ugly day. It was pure and simple street justice. Gino and I watched them turn the corner.

  “That’s that,” I said. “You know my father did that for you, right?”

  “I think I know,” Gino said, looking down at the sidewalk.

  “Gino, I want you to know something,” my father began, while uncoiling the garden hose. “Sometimes a person can hurt you without putting their hands on you. And sometimes that hurts even worse than a black eye. You understand what I’m saying?”

  “You mean like name-calling and stuff,” Gino said.

  “Name-calling is bad enough,” he said. “But it’s even worse when the names they call you aren’t even true.”

  “Yeah, like queer,” I said.

  “But those kids are your friends,” Gino said.

  “Not anymore,” I said.

  When I said that, Gino’s spirits seemed to lift. He looked toward my father, who was hosing off the last remnants of what had been written on the sidewalk. “Real friends don’t do things like that,” my father said. “And I’m here to make sure they never do anything like that again.”

  “Yeah,” I told him. “Blood is thicker than water.”

  “And it sure as hell doesn’t wash away as easy as chalk.”

  “So,” I said. “You still feel like throwing up?”

  Gino thought about it for a second. “Actually, no. I feel . . . better.”

  That was the moment I think we turned a bigger corner than the Coogan boys did.

  10

  SUNDOWN

  The July Fourth weekend was upon us. We always had a full house, especially on that holiday, since my father’s birthday fell on the fifth. So it was always like a double party—with friends and relatives coming from all parts of Long Island, Jersey, and the five boroughs. My mother, sisters, and Frankie cranked out food like crazy. Forget about chicken wings and six-foot heroes. We made deep trays of lasagna and manicotti and linguini with fresh pesto sauce. Our kitchen was as busy as a crime scene, with Frankie preparing veal marsala and some shrimp francese. Rosalie was prepping a huge fisherman’s platter, with clams that I, and after some practice Gino, had plucked from the bay with our own hands and feet. At the same time, I had my father frying the cardoon—a rhubarb-type stalk—that he would find growing wild on the off-ramps of the highway. My mother would cook for an hour or so at a time before she gave in and stood knee-deep on the third step of the pool to cool off. Then she would head right back into the kitchen. Some of my crazy relatives, like Anthony Coniglione and Phil Mattera, brought in trunkloads of fireworks that we shot off all day long, while escaping the occasional drive-by from Suffolk County cops. We always had a ton of stuff to blow off. We had mats of Black Cat firecrackers that we shot off in a big aluminum garbage can. We had M-80s, Ash Cans, whistling rockets we inexplicably called “niggah chasers,” and tons of bottle rockets that we shot out of a steel pipe hammered into the lawn. And, maybe funniest of all, we had Roman candles that we would light and aim at each other’s asses. I remember Gino laughed like crazy as we aimed our rockets at his ass while he tried to successfully get out of the way. We usually spent the whole day using flimsy punks to light the explosives, but for the big show at nighttime—the one that brought out the relatives and neighbors—we used lengths of slow-burning rope that lasted all night. For years on end, we were always able to finish the night with a beautiful firework called a Silver Jet that would mysteriously knock out the streetlight in front of our house, rendering our part of the block completely black.

  My father would applaud the show the wildest, whistling with both pinkies in his mouth. And then he would beckon several people up to our second-floor outdoor sundeck for the night’s dangerous finale. Most people would peel away, but there were always half a dozen of us or so who would climb the stairs and watch him ceremoniously stand on our sundeck, outside the master bedroom, as he fired off live ammunition up to a mile away into the purple night of the Great South Bay. First he’d use his .22 rifle, and then he’d finish off with the carbine with the cool World War II scope. Didn’t it occur to him that someone might be sitting on their boat somewhere out there, enjoying a beer, and suddenly get picked off by a stray bullet? Didn’t it matter what my mother said or my relatives urged? No. It was ceremony, and it reminded him of the five years he’d served in the European theater. There was no stopping him. So people just sort of held their breath for the twenty-one shots to end.

  Gino and I plugged our ears for the first several shots or so. He spoke up as my father was changing rifles. There was the slightest bit of his being a wiseass when he started uncontrollably laughing and said, “He’s probably killed some people tonight. If tomorrow’s newspaper has a story of a person dying on their boat by a bullet to the head, Uncle Al is the murderer!”

  As the night wore down and the fireworks faded in the black sky, there were always a couple of stragglers who’d show up at our house just to be a part of any part of it. My father had a wonderful habit of collecting people, and Sundays and holidays were the days they usually wandered in. I can remember all sorts of characters dropping by, like my father’s buddy, Danny DiSalvo, a down-on-his luck lounge singer, who always had a $5 bill for me whenever he popped in, smelling of whiskey and trouble.

  A few years earlier, my father had taken my mother, my sister Lorraine, and me to see Danny sing old standards at a dive bar in the Bronx called the Wagon Wheel. There was decidedly nothing We
stern about it, except for the fact that the Bronx was considered the “Wild West” in the seventies, on account of its high crime rate. I remember the place basically being a two-story gin mill—with nothing going on (far as I could tell) on the second floor. The tables were all shaped and fastened like wagon wheels, but the entire joint had indoor/outdoor, wall-to-wall carpeting, and even at my young age, I could tell that didn’t look right, feel good, or smell nice. The fact that my father took me there—on a school night, no less—was something else. And to make matters worse—Danny didn’t start singing until some guy “in charge” of lighting found him with a giant, five-foot spotlight the second he walked out of the kitchen door singing the first bars of “The Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” with all the sad swagger of a washed-up Tony Bennett.

  “Watch, A.J., watch,” my father told me. “Listen to the words. Listen to what the lyricist wrote. It all begins with a writer. No words, no song.”

  And I listened. And that night stayed stuck in my head. A man I barely knew, belting out the first bars of the song by a foggy window beside the swinging door of the kitchen next to a bar.

  I walk along the street of sorrow!

  The boulevard of broken dreams.

  Where Gigolo and Gigolette

  can take a kiss without regret,

  and so forget their broken dreams.

  I was hung up on two things. Where was the “boulevard of broken dreams” and who were Gigolo and Gigolette? But I kept it to myself for a bit. Then, after what seemed like a ten-song set, Danny kissed and hugged us good-bye and we got in the car and headed home. It had to be close to midnight, because my mother kept telling me, “Close your eyes, A.J. Go to sleep. You got school.”

  But I had to speak up.

  “Dad,” I said. “Remember that song about Gigolo and Gigolette?”

  “Of course,” he said, lighting up, peering at me in the rearview. “That’s a classic.”

  “Is the boulevard of broken dreams real?”

  “You bet your ass.”

  “Where is it?”