by A. J. Benza
Gino was hooked immediately. “Wow, I love his accent,” he said. “What else does he sing, Uncle Al?”
“Gino, dear, let Uncle Al eat,” Aunt Geneva said.
“Forget it, Geneva,” my mother countered. “He won’t eat on Sundays until he finds the right music.”
“Hey, Pop,” Jack shouted, seeing that the room’s usual stench of machismo was being compromised. “How about some Rolling Stones?”
“Aspetta, aspetta. This is more important.”
Jack and Frankie both knew their place, and they were respectful to a fault. They quietly laughed across the table, seeing that there was an obvious shift taking place.
“Here, I found a beauty,” my father said. “I can sit down and eat now.”
The stereo played “Everything Old Is New Again,” and as Gino listened, he developed a quiet ease about him. I knew my father always played with everyone’s mind on a subliminal level, but it was more apparent than ever to me that the seeds he had planted a couple of months ago were finally giving way to a little sapling that was just beginning to get the right nourishment and light.
After dinner, Gino and I headed back into the pool to take another crack at finally teaching him to dive headfirst.
“Shouldn’t you boys wait a half hour after you’ve digested dinner before you go back in the pool?” Aunt Geneva said.
“That’s horseshit,” my father told her. “Let them play. They’re young boys. No one’s gonna drown.”
My mother and Aunt Geneva were seated across from each other at the kitchen table, having some coffee before my aunt headed back to Jersey. I was sitting in a giant black inner tube, and Gino, after a few more painful belly flops, had drifted off to sleep in an even bigger raft. He was one of those kids who could nod off anywhere, but drifting lazily in the shallow end of the pool was his favorite spot. He was like a cat that’d found a sun spot on the kitchen floor. And right about then the ladies got loud.
“Lil, I don’t know how to say this, so I’m just going to say it,” Aunt Geneva started.
“Say what, Geneva?” my mother said, at the same time motioning for Aunt Mary to leave the kitchen and head to the TV room.
“Well, I’m very thankful for you and Al being there for us. And allowing me time to recuperate. But, Lilly, I’m not sure I would’ve sent Gino here if I had known what he was getting into.”
My father walked out the kitchen door, passed the pool, and headed to see Jack and Ro. “Let them go at it,” he told me. “It’s overdue.”
My mother grabbed her heart, pulling at her own shirt. “What the hell do you think he ‘got into’ over here?”
“I don’t know where to start. . . .”
“Why don’t you start with Larry’s phone call, Geneva?” my mother said. “Your husband cried to us. He cried and you know why he cried. My heart still breaks from that night. But all we’ve done is given Gino support. So tell me what we’re doing wrong.”
“Oh, Lil,” Aunt Geneva started. “The cursing, playing guns in the pool, and don’t think I haven’t seen the Playboy magazines in the bathroom. I just don’t know what else to say. Isn’t that enough? Forget about my son. . . . Aren’t you worried about your son?”
“No, Geneva. I’m not worried about my son whatsoever,” my mother said. “And the more you talk, the more hypocritical you sound. He was brought to us for a reason. Something, whatever it is, he wasn’t getting. But he seems very, very happy this summer.”
I quietly slid out of the pool, ran through the gate that separated our backyards, and poked my head in Rosalie’s kitchen door. “Dad, it’s getting bad in there. You guys gotta go break it up.”
As I slid back into the pool, I heard the last few minutes before my father, Rosalie, and Jack entered the kitchen.
My mother was standing, her hands shaking too much to light her own cigarette. “Maybe we didn’t do what you had been doing. We didn’t diagnose him. We just showed him love. He doesn’t need medicine or a psychiatrist. This boy is wonderful.”
My father didn’t say a word—a first!—and let the women air it out.
“I’m sorry,” my mother said. “I don’t mean to say you and Larry don’t show him love. I know you adore him.”
“I know you didn’t, Lil. I’m afraid I know exactly what you mean,” she said.
“For chrissakes, Geneva, we’re doing it the only way we’ve ever done it. Have you asked him how he feels about being here?”
“I know he loves his aunt Lil and uncle Al and everyone else,” she said, tearing up. “It’s hard on all of us. Please, let’s not fight.”
As Rosalie went to hug and kiss Aunt Geneva, my father put down the velvet hammer on it all. “Look, my brother called on me and we answered that call the best way we knew how. And here we are how many weeks later? Everybody is still alive, our kids are laughing, and life goes on.”
As my mother and aunt embraced, I splashed Gino awake. “Hey, I think you’re mom’s getting ready to beat the traffic back home.”
“How long was I asleep?” Gino asked.
“You didn’t miss anything,” I told him.
Before he climbed up the steps to kiss his mother good-bye, he turned away from me for a second. “This is gonna sound weird. But why am I still here, if my mother is healthy enough to be on her own at home?”
It’s an answer I couldn’t give him, other than to say we might as well finish out the summer together. “You got something better to do?”
“Umm . . . no, not really,” he said.
That’s when I laughed and pushed him back into the pool. “So quit worrying!”
15
ONE OF THESE NIGHTS
Now that both sets of our parents had gotten overemotional, at various times during the summer, the curiosity and intrigue had already filtered through my sisters and their partners and was now precisely dripping down on the foreheads of Gino and me. It was similar to the way we’d play Chinese water torture on a friend—hold them down on the ground and see how long they could take a single drop of water every five seconds or so. What starts out as fun and adventurous becomes maddening. I don’t want to get overdramatic, but with Gino’s stay coming to a close, there were some things I had to flush out and investigate for myself. And I was starting to feel fairly certain Gino was close to wanting to explain some things to me on his own.
The Playboy magazines I’d ended up getting my hands on were usually two or three months old. They arrived in the mail in my father’s name, and my mother had no qualms handing him his new issue a few moments after he came home from work that particular night.
“Your Playboy came today,” she would tell my father. And he would eat his dinner, down his liquor, and take my mother, the dogs, and the magazine upstairs to bed. And for the rest of the month, the Playboy would remain in his bathroom, alongside National Geographic, Reader’s Digest, and The Long Island Fisherman, a flimsy newsprint guide that let anglers know where the fish were biting. Whenever the new Playboy arrived, the ritual would begin again, only at that point, I’d find him leaving the older Playboys downstairs in different parts of the house. It was as if he wanted me to find them. And whenever five or six weeks had passed, I’d slip the Playboy upstairs to my room and stash it under my bed. It was a long-running ritual my father and I had. He’d never ask if anybody had seen last month’s issue of Playboy, and I’d never take one out of his room before he’d brought it downstairs himself. There was a trust there. I’d also never do anything to mess with the magazine from its original state. No folding corners. Never getting the pages stuck together. Nothing like that. I stared and stared and stared at my favorite centerfolds, took care of my business, and expertly folded them back up and placed them beneath my mattress. They were like collectibles to me.
So you can imagine why I got a bit nuts when I reached for one, flipped the pages to my favorite
face, and found a page torn out. The weird thing was, it wasn’t even in the section of the magazine that featured naked women. It was a page way, way upfront, in the middle of the advertising section—the area that really frustrated young guys like me—and there was nothing on the preceding page that gave me any clue as to what sort of content was torn away.
Things were going nice and steady with Gino and me. We were in a good place, after his mom’s visit had kind of figuratively whacked the wasps out of the hive. I came up on him one shitty, rainy afternoon—the kind of day that pounds you in the head and reminds you that beautiful, sunny Long Island summers sometimes come to an end very quickly in September.
He was lying in my bedroom, watching Zoom and singing along to its signature sing-off song:
Watch Zoom . . . Z, double O, M; Box three-five-oh; Boston, Mass. Oh-two-one-three-four. Send it to Zoom!
I opened the door to see him singing. “Oh . . . you missed a great episode,” he told me.
“Yeah, I bet I did.”
“That black girl you like, Zerena, was on a lot, like five times in three different segments,” he said.
I shut off the TV and sat on the bed next to him. “You know what else I’m missing?” I asked.
“No.”
“Here, let me show you,” I said, reaching under the bed and grabbing the Playboy with the missing page. “I’m missing a page in this magazine. Do you know what happened to it?”
Gino began to act sheepishly, and his eyes wandered around the room, searching for an excuse.
“I know you know, cuz,” I said. “No one else touched it. My father doesn’t rip out pages in Playboy. Just tell me what you ripped out and why you did it.”
“Well, don’t get mad at me,” he said.
“I ain’t gonna get mad at you,” I assured him. “Outside of me storming into the bathroom on you, has anyone in this house ever gotten mad at you?”
“No,” he said softly.
“So, I just want to know why you ripped out the page. It’s simple.”
“Okay . . .”
“Just tell me, and I’ll never ask you why again,” I said.
“Well . . . it was a perfume ad, I think,” Gino said.
“Perfume like my mother wears, or cologne like my father wears?” I said.
“No. Yes. It was a cologne picture.”
I didn’t like to see my cousin squirm, and because that moment seemed to be especially hard for him, I sort of let him off the hook. “I like some cologne ads too,” I said. “Was it Canoe or Old Spice or one of those?”
Gino mustered up the bravery to reach under a pile of clothes and pull out the page. It was a dark-haired, blue-eyed man in an Old Spice ad. He was bare-chested, with a pretty blond girl draped behind him, erotically twisting around his body to smell his neck. The ad looked as though the couple either just had sex or were certainly about to. The guy was Mediterranean-handsome. The girl was a luscious-lipped blonde. The print read “Very convincing.” Frankly, we both found an excuse to stare at the page, but for very different reasons.
Maybe it was all those episodes of Columbo I watched, I don’t know, but I began to pull the truth out of Gino in a way that was more compassionate than coarse.
“It’s cool,” I said. “I can see why you like it.”
“It is, right?” Gino said, opening up a bit.
“My father wears Old Spice, like, almost every day,” I said. “Have you ever seen the TV commercials?”
“Yeah,” Gino said, somewhat enthused. “But the guy in the magazine is different than the guy in the TV commercial. The guy on TV jumps off a boat and throws bottles of cologne at people wherever he goes. I think he’s a sailor. And he’s older than this guy.”
“I know. The commercial has a guy in a navy peacoat,” I said. “And the announcer says, ‘Come on . . . wake up to the freshness of the open sea with Old Spice.’ ”
“Yeah, yeah.” Gino laughed. “But all I know is, after this summer, the ‘freshness of the open sea’ smells like fish guts.”
“And it also says . . . ‘Feel the spray at your face and the wind at your back.’ ”
“Exactly,” Gino said, thoroughly enjoying our bonding over the ad. My enthusiasm made him feel like he had done nothing wrong but rip out a page from an advertisement we both enjoyed.
But then my methodical interrogation began.
“So,” I began, “did you look at the whole entire Playboy magazine before you ripped this page out?”
“Pretty much,” he said.
“And you got past the girl in the middle, the centerfold, and everything . . . ?”
“Um, yeah,” he said, somewhat surprised. “Because I remember the one centerfold said she wanted to be a veterinarian.”
“Oh,” I said, surprised. “You actually read the centerfold after you looked at it?”
“Well, yeah,” he said.
“But you decided the pages of the naked girls should stay inside the magazine and the guy in the Old Spice ad needed to be ripped out?”
“Um . . . I guess, yeah.”
“Are you pulling your pud to that guy?”
“What?” Gino said quizzically. “What are you even talking about?”
It was time for the good cop and bad cop in me to become one top cop.
I reached under the bed and pulled out several Playboy magazines. “Something ain’t adding up,” I said.
I laid out the magazines on the shag rug like a bounty. I opened up an iconic Playboy spread of Miss May 1974, Marilyn Lange, kneeling next to a kitten on top of a wicker chair. A page later she was actually pulling tufts of her pubic hair! Then I laid open Miss June 1974, Sandy Johnson, who stood there holding a Louisville Slugger fully nude except for a backward baseball cap, black cleats and knee-high athletic socks.
“What are you doing?” Gino said.
“Just, hold on,” I said.
I reached deeper under my bed, behind the Candy Land box, and found dusty issues of Miss December 1973, Christine Maddox, a gorgeous California brunette who worked in a factory “putting little silver things on top of little plastic things,” the article said. And, last but not least, I laid out a real collectible, Miss April 1973, the sexy, little black girl Julie Woodson.
“Just look at the pictures of all these girls,” I said, a bit out of breath. “I don’t understand why you would pull out a picture of the Old Spice guy and not one of these girls.”
We got down on our knees and began to scan the layouts. Gino tried to pipe up ten seconds in. But I shut him up.
“Nope. Stop. Just look,” I said. “Really look at the girls and tell me what happens to you.”
After what seemed like five minutes of me turning pages in each magazine and even reading some copy from each of the centerfolds, I offered Gino the floor to speak.
“What do you want me to say?” he said.
“Do any of these naked girls have any effect on you?” I said. “Do they, at least, make your dick hard?”
“No,” he said. “That doesn’t . . . oh my God . . . I just . . . no.” He kind of rolled his eyeballs.
“How the hell could that be?” I said. “Just look.”
“I am.”
“No. Look longer,” I said.
“I have,” Gino said. “I am.”
“No. Look at Miss June’s big tits,” I said, tapping the magazine quite hard. “Look at how hot Miss May looks touching her beaver hair.”
“I’m looking.”
“Look. Julie Woodson,” I pleaded. “Have you ever seen a naked, black girl?”
“No, I haven’t,” he said softly. “But I don’t care.”
I sat there next to him on the rug, flustered and emotionally exhausted. I had nowhere else to go.
“Then what is it? What? Is it because you’re just
ten years old?” I offered. “Gimme something to work with here.”
“No. I don’t know,” he started. “I know . . . I see the girls are all beautiful. It just . . . doesn’t matter to me.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m not gonna get mad. Just try and tell me why.”
Gino got up and sank facedown into the bed. He acted like he had just finished a prizefight. “It’s because I’m different,” he said. “I don’t understand it, and I know you can’t understand it—and my parents don’t understand it—but I’d rather look at the men in the magazine.”
While Gino spoke facedown, and his words bounced off the wall he was facing, I was lying on the carpet, flat on my back amid all the girls—the very artillery I assumed would render him weak and able to see things my way. But I whiffed. It all went to shit. My greatest plan, which I had been plotting for some time, was rendered useless within minutes.
After a long pause, and a lot of reflective thought on my part, I quietly asked Gino a serious question. “Is that why you liked having Nolan around? On the boat and in the movie theater?”
“Pretty much,” Gino said. “He was always a grown-up who just listened to me and, you know, didn’t think I was weird or anything.”
“So, you had a crush on him or something?”
Gino waited a few seconds to answer. “Remember, you said you wouldn’t get mad at me whatever I told you. . . .”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “I ain’t mad.”
“So . . . well, yeah, I guess I did have a crush on him or something,” he said, sitting up in the bed. “He listened to me and was sweet and gentle. There wasn’t anything wrong with it. He was just a nice guy.”
My mother called up from the foot of the stairs, telling us dinner was on the table, kind of shocking me back to reality.
“You’re right,” I said, carefully scooping up the Playboys and sliding them back beneath my bed. “I don’t understand, man. I’m trying. But I really don’t completely understand.”
