'74 & Sunny

by A. J. Benza

  My father told me, “Look out the back window. You see those tall buildings?”

  “Yeah,” I said, seeing parts of the Manhattan skyline through the cracked plastic back window of his convertible.

  “That’s the place,” he said.

  Danny wasn’t the only lost soul we let in after dark.

  There was also a very sexy, raven-haired, sad sack of a woman named Maureen, who our door was always open to after we had witnessed a married man throw her out of his slow-moving car right in front of our house one night. “Don’t you understand?” he hollered. “It’s over, you bitch! You come by my home? Where I live with my wife and kids? I’ll make sure you disappear!” Before my father could get the guy’s license plate, Maureen ran up our driveway, crying her eyes out and screaming suicide. I remember her mascara running down her face and under her chin. We took her in. Gino was astonished while my mother poured her coffee, lent her an ear and comfort, and insisted she sleep in our guest room for that night until she had a clearer head in the morning. She was screwing a married man, and he was trying to break it off. Even I could figure that out. But, at one point, when she was sobbing and looking like she’d been through hell and back, Gino went to the bathroom and came back with a hairbrush.

  “I’m going to brush her hair for her,” he told me softly.

  “Yeah?”

  He walked over to Maureen as she was relaying her story of love, lies, and deceit and held up the brush to her.

  “Can I . . . do you want me to . . . should I brush your hair for you?”

  “Oh my Gawd.” Maureen sobbed in her Long Island accent. “How sweet of you. Good luck, doll. I’m a fuckin’ mess.”

  “This is my nephew Gino,” my mother said.

  “Oh, he’s so goddamned precious. Please stay this sweet,” she said. “Don’t become a prick like all the rest.” She had a way of stretching syllables.

  Gino looked mesmerized as he brushed her crazy hair straight while she laid out her story for all of us around the table that night.

  And then there was my father’s “connected” friend “Big” Freddy Muserella—who had worked as a bone breaker for the Anastasia brothers’ crime syndicate. He loved coming by, all three hundred pounds of him, because my father was the only guy he let bust his balls. Freddy would stammer through a horrifying story of street justice, and my father would get a kick out of interrupting him.

  “And when . . . Storio Longo,” my father said over espresso and anisette. “You tell me stories about snuffing out gangsters for the Anastasias, but you’re scared shitless of a little duck in Rosalie’s backyard. What kind of a hit man are you?”

  This ruffled Freddy’s feathers.

  “That’s no ordinary duck! The thing flies three inches off the ground and comes right at me, nipping at my shoes,” Freddy said. “I’m gonna put a contract on that fuckin’ duck.”

  On nights when Freddy felt like confessing, he’d tell Gino and me about how bad guys had to be “handled.” He’d pull us in real close and explain his signature move—one which Gino listened to, though it definitely made him queasy. “So . . . for the guys who couldn’t keep their traps shut,” Freddy said, “I’d lay the guy on the street, with his mout open and his front teeth biting the curb. And then, you know, I’d just step on his head. Boom. No more teeth.”

  “That’s so badass,” I said.

  “Oh my God,” Gino said. “That poor man.”

  “Well,” Freddy would reason, “you can’t do too much talking with no more teeth in your head.”

  But one of my father’s friends who was a bit calmer was a younger man named Nolan. At first, I didn’t exactly know what he did for a living, but I remember my father initially having a hard time telling me what Nolan’s occupation was.

  “Dad, what does Nolan do for money?”

  “Sales.”

  “What kind of sales?”

  “He sells stuff that falls off the truck,” he’d say.

  “What stuff is that?”

  “You know . . . hot stuff.”

  “I still don’t get it, Dad.”

  “All right . . . then no more questions, A.J.”

  It didn’t take too many visits to figure it out, especially when he dropped by on my father’s birthday very late at night with a dozen or so five-gallon cans of Gino’s Italian Ices sitting in his backseat, covered with a bedsheet. He had them in every flavor, even in blue—whatever flavor that was—and all the kids at the party came running to the driveway.

  “Only the best for the Benzas,” Nolan shouted up the driveway to my approving father. “Gino’s!”

  “Now I’ve seen everything, you crazy bastard—hot cold ices.” My father laughed.

  “Who, me?” Nolan said. “Nah, I got a guy who knows a guy. . . .”

  We were all happy to see Nolan, though there was always some sort of calm to him. Whatever it was, it made the women, as well as the men, love to laugh with him. His stories were a bit on the softer side, and he knew to always stay even with my father in terms of his place at the table, but never to pull ahead.

  Nolan was always good to me, but that summer he was especially sweet and understanding to Gino.

  “I can’t stay long,” he said to my father. “But I’ll see you Thursday night. Let’s get in the boat and catch some crabs. The gas is on me.”

  Nolan was like that. He came and went.

  “He seems nice,” Gino told me as he left.

  “Yeah . . . he’s cool.”

  “Do you think he’ll really come back Thursday?” Gino asked.

  “Yeah, if he says so.”

  Sure enough, on Thursday night—about two hours before we could even catch crabs at nightfall, Nolan showed up to get ready for our excursion.

  “You’re early,” my father said. “Have some wine while we get the boat ready.”

  I was standing with Gino at the edge of the shallow end of the pool, trying to teach him to not be afraid of diving into the pool. Gino stood there shaking in his shorts, while I stood behind him and held on to the waistband of his shorts and begged him to lean over and dive.

  “Just put your toes on the edge, Gino. It’s four feet; you know you can’t drown,” I said. “What the hell are you so scared of?”

  Gino stood there on the edge and gently pushed his toes to the end of the coping. “I can’t do it. I just can’t,” he said. “Let’s try tomorrow. I swear I’ll do it tomorrow.”

  “You’ve been saying that for a month,” I yelled.

  Nolan laughed to himself as he walked over and stood on the other side of the pool.

  “Gino!”

  “Hey, Nolan.” Gino smiled.

  “Gino, listen,” Nolan started. “Bend your knees a little, and bend at the waist a little . . .”

  “I know how to teach him,” I said. “I been diving since I was six.” Then I whispered in Gino’s ear. “You can do this for yourself. I’m holding on to your shorts, I won’t let go. Just put your toes on the edge, bend your knees a little, squeeze your ears with your arms, okay?”

  He got in better position and began to lean a few more pounds of himself over the edge of the pool this time. “Don’t let go,” he hollered.

  “I got ya; I got ya,” I said, “Come on, bend over, squeeze your ears, and point your head toward the water. You got this!”

  Just as his shaking almost overtook his whole body, Gino did everything I had asked. The checklist was complete. All he had to do was fall forward and wait for me to let go of his shorts. “I’m ready . . .” he screamed. “Here I go!”

  He leaned his whole body forward and was in perfect position to beautifully slide into a dive. I let go at the perfect second, only to watch Gino’s arms pull away from his ears, point his chin to the sky and smack his body hard on the surface of the water. Splat!

 
He came up from under the water a second later. “Did I do it? I think I did it,” he screamed.

  “Does your belly hurt?” I said.

  “Yes, it’s killing me. Does it always hurt when you dive?”

  “No, Gino,” I said. “It only hurts when you don’t dive and you do a belly flop!”

  “Oh . . . I’m sorry. I thought I had it.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “We’ll get it right.”

  While he was watching us and drinking from a jelly glass, Nolan opened up a shopping bag filled with brand-new Topps baseball cards. The ones that came with the dusty wafer of bubble gum in the pack.

  “Look at this,” he said to Gino and me, as he dumped the goods on the backyard patio. “Baseball cards. You gotta look though. There might be a Lou Piniella in there!”

  “Oh, this is so cool!” I said, as I ripped through the bounty.

  Gino went searching but didn’t quite know what he was looking for. Nolan picked up on that and began to help him. “Let’s see what you got in this pack,” Nolan said. “Nah. Nah. Nah. Yeah . . . Bobby Murcer. You hold on to that card. He’ll be a Hall of Famer.”

  “Who’s Bobby Murcer?” Gino said.

  “Don’t worry,” I interrupted, while shuffling through my deck of cards, with a mouth full of bubble gum. “I’ll tell him.”

  By the time we pushed the boat off the dock and headed down the crooked canals toward the bay, Nolan and Gino had bonded to the degree that Gino was actively listening to Nolan telling him how to scoop up crabs. My father was at the wheel, while Jack and Frankie manned the most important spots—on the bow, with the long nets and their giant handheld flashlights plugged into a car battery on the floor of the boat. I stuck to the back of the boat, my mission being to catch any crabs that escaped Jack and Frankie’s angle. Gino and Nolan worked the other side of the boat, but I could tell my father wasn’t expecting too much out of them. In the middle of the boat there stood a garbage can. It worked this way: crabs like to swim near the surface at nightfall. If you were good with the flashlights, you could spot some fifteen yards away and direct my father as he was slowly meandering in and out of the bridge’s concrete pillars, which was no easy task.

  “Pop! Pop!” Jack would say. “Ten feet to the right . . . ten yards ahead, I got my eyes on three right on top of the water.”

  “Okay, okay,” my father would say, through a cigarette in his lips. “Here we go. . . .”

  And that’s the way in went all night. Whatever Jack couldn’t reach, Frankie scooped. And vice versa. Maybe every ten minutes or so, I’d hear the guys tell me about a crab they missed. “A.J. . . . coming your way,” they’d yell. “Port side, two feet deep, a big muthafucka. Don’t screw it up!”

  And I’d get ready, with my smaller flashlight and longer crab net, as my father backed up the boat in tiny spaces while forty or fifty other boats were doing the same thing. It was maddening at times. I’d barely catch any at the stern because a crab would usually dart down to the bottom of the bay within a second if you reached and whiffed on it.

  “Damn it,” Jack would say. “He was right there.”

  “Sorry.”

  “All right,” my father would assure me. “Let’s get the next one.”

  Meanwhile, on the starboard side of the boat, Nolan was teaching Gino how to hold a flashlight and a net. And it was Nolan—amid our maddening desire to fill the trash can with blue claws—who helped Gino scoop up a couple of crabs that might’ve gotten away. It was Nolan who taught Gino, on the spot, how to tell a male crab from a female crab. And it was Nolan who explained the oddity of catching a soft-shell crab. It was all stuff Gino would’ve learned back at the house, but Nolan’s soft-natured coaching slid Gino into a different groove. To what extent, it wasn’t yet apparent.

  11

  SPILL THE WINE

  There came points during summer vacation where I didn’t want to spend every single second outside, where every game or far-flung idea was a way of measuring our skill at sports or neighborhood mischief. It wasn’t as if I was tired of the competition or scared of the challenges that my friends and I would put before one another. It was, plain and simple, a much better way to let Gino have me to himself. And in so doing, I felt like I could make his vacation much more memorable and less harrowing. Whenever I thought back to that teary phone call Uncle Larry placed to my house or the excursion to the sporting goods store or any one of the times my father shot me that look that said, Take care of your cousin, it just seemed like the thing to do. It was only right. If I expected Gino to be front and center for all the crazy things my family, my friends, and I did or said and, more, figured him to just soldier on as if he were one of the guys, then I was going to have to do some of the activities he’d been asking me to take part in for weeks on end.

  “Hey, what time does that show on PBS Hodgepodge Lodge come on,” I asked him out of the blue.

  “What? Why?” he said, barely containing himself.

  “You want me to watch it, right? It’s your favorite show.”

  “And . . . you’re saying you want to watch it. With me?”

  “Well, I ain’t watching it all alone,” I said.

  He was acting like a caged puppy when they see you walking toward them with food.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let me put on channel thirteen right now and see. It’s always on. I’m sure it’s on. What if it’s not on? Are you saying you only want to watch it with me right now, or whenever it’s on . . . ?”

  “Calm down, calm down, calm down,” I said, laughing. “Just switch the dial to thirteen.”

  And sure enough it was on. And before me was the sight of a woman, the host of the show, which always made me flip the dial really quickly whenever I was making a pass and checking to see if the more-mature program Zoom was airing.

  “There’s Miss Jean,” Gino shrieked. “It’s on. It’s on.”

  “All right now,” I said. “What am I watching? What happens on this show?”

  Those simple questions, or more precisely, my interest in his interests was to Gino what an intense game of stickball was to me.

  Gino went on to breathlessly explain that Miss Jean would let everyone in on the wonders of nature. As we sat there and watched one episode and then another and then, to his insane delight, one more episode, I got the gist of what she was doing. This Miss Jean—as dowdy and masculine as a lesbian in Timberlands—would spend thirty minutes opening up a pinecone and exploring its depths in the hopes of seeing a beetle or worm. Or she would examine the habitat of a hedgehog or a red fox. She was always gentle in her approach to nature and, looking back, might have even been one of the leaders of our modern conservationist movement. But, boy, was she boring as fuck!

  “Isn’t she interesting?” Gino said. “I think she’s beautiful.”

  “You think that’s a beautiful woman?”

  “Well, if not beautiful, then very pretty.”

  “All right, okay,” I said. “We been sitting here in this room—which is as hot as my balls—for ninety minutes. Can I show you who I think is beautiful?”

  “You mean Debbie next door, right?”

  “How do you know what I feel about Debbie?” I said.

  Gino smiled a bit. “When we play flashlight tag, you and her disappear for, like, a half hour,” he said. “And I just figured you were sitting someplace real dark and talking and stuff.”

  “And stuff?”

  “Well”—he squirmed—“you know . . .”

  “Yeah, sure, I get it,” I said. “Look, I think Debbie is hot, but she’s young, ya know? I’m talking about showing you a beautiful woman. I wanna see if what I show you does the same thing to you as it does to me. I wanna see what happens.”

  “Well, what’s gonna happen?” Gino said.

  “Just wait.”

  We went upstairs and I la
id chest down on the rug and fished out a Playboy from way back beneath my bed. I don’t even know why I hid the things. My father always had Playboys strategically placed around the house—in his master bathroom, next to his living room recliner, in the trunk of his car, et cetera. He made no bones about me opening one up. In fact, I think he wanted me to.

  But there I was on the floor, moving aside an old pair of roller skates, an erector set, and a chemistry kit until I laid my hands on the box containing the board game Candy Land.

  That was where I kept my stash.

  “What is that?” Gino said nervously. “Is that a naked-lady magazine?”

  “Yep. The best kind. Playboy. And it’s a good one.”

  I put it on the floor and started flipping the pages.

  “It’s hot in here,” Gino tried. “You wanna go in the pool for a while?”

  “Soon,” I said. “I want you to see this girl—”

  “What about Aunt Lilly?”

  “She’s cooking. Besides, we can hear her coming a mile away. It takes her ten minutes to climb those thirteen steps. Relax.”

  I flipped the pages slowly, passing a couple of pictorials before I kept it cracked open to the centerfold, which featured Miss July 1973, Martha Smith. (A few years later, Smith was in Animal House and appeared in a scene with her shirt getting ripped off to reveal her white bra. I remember she had her hair up and wore long, white, cotton gloves. That’s what first got me hooked on her. Not my type at all—a little on the short side, blond, and a real WASP. But who has control over their first movie crush?)

  “What do you think?” I said.

  I watched Gino take it all in. He was actually amused, not shy at all, which surprised me.

  “Let me flip through this for a second,” he said, giggling.

  “Have a ball,” I told him, as I put the mag on his lap and I shuffled through the box for another issue. I carefully watched as Gino turned from the very first page all the way to the end, where they kept the naughty comic strip Little Annie Fanny. Then I watched him go through it from back to front, as he stopped on some things and breezed past others. It was in those little moments, when we each had a Playboy in our hands, that I cheated to see where Gino’s eyes stopped. I saw he stayed on pages longer that featured handsome men selling Pierre Cardin cologne or Barbasol shave cream or YSL sports coats. We were reading the same magazine, whose very purpose touted a “lifestyle for men.” In those moments, it was now obvious that Gino and I might be headed for two very different lifestyles. At least in our heads and lustful hearts, anyhow.