'74 & Sunny

by A. J. Benza

A few minutes later, at the dinner table, my mother picked up on a difference between us—maybe it was posture or attitude, who knows? But she had no qualms letting us know she was hip to something being off between my cousin and me. “What the hell’s wrong with you two?” she said. “You both look like who did it and why.”

  “Nothing,” I said, ignoring her intuitive probe. “What did you make for food?”

  “Tacos,” she said, with a hefty confidence.

  “What the hell are tacos?” I said, as Gino and Lorraine laughed into their hands. “Thursdays are usually meat loaf. What happened?”

  “It’s the same thing. Chop meat is chop meat and I decided to try tacos,” she told us.

  “Oh Jesus.” I huffed.

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothing, Ma. Just . . . don’t know why you wanna surprise us out of nowhere. Why do people want to surprise people?” I said. “I just really look forward to eating meat loaf.”

  “Well, talk to your sister,” she said. “Lorraine said she’s getting sick of it.”

  I sat down next to my smirking sister and whispered, “Whatever happens is your damn fault.”

  As my mother pulled the hot taco shells from the oven and laid out the ingredients on the table—spicy chopped meat, diced tomatoes, sliced bits of cheddar cheese, tiny strings of lettuce, sour cream, and salsa—she began telling us in which order the fixings were to be applied.

  We began to all get exasperated. It felt more like an art project than dinner. The taco shells were breaking in our hands, salsa was running down our chins, and Lorraine and I had some pointed advice for our mother’s failed attempt at Mexican cuisine. “I don’t know how to say this,” Lorraine said, “but the lettuce is too cold. Does that make sense?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “And the meat is too hot. And the sour cream is too runny. It’s too many different temperatures at once, Ma.”

  Gino broke his shells apart and just ate the meat with his fork.

  “You too?” my mother said to Gino.

  “I’m sorry, Aunt Lilly. It’s not something I’ve ever eaten.”

  “And it’s something she’s never made,” I said. “So don’t feel too bad. Does Daddy know you made Mexican food?”

  “Ah . . . go shit in your hat,” my mother told all of us. “I’ll worry about your father. There’s cereal in the cabinet if you’re hungry.” She walked away to put her feet up in her chair and watch the news.

  Later that night, we kind of kept to ourselves. Gino visited the Rossitto girls and played some sort of a séance game, and I stayed at home and made some lead fishing weights in the garage with Jack and Frankie. I could hear the whole lot of them laughing in the backyard, but it just felt better being with the men for a change.

  I hit the sack pretty early afterward, with me falling asleep before Gino even got home from next door. I think the pressure of the day, and the fact that I still hadn’t cracked the code, had gotten the best of me. As I awoke the next morning, the sun was shining bright again, and I immediately began hoping for an Indian summer. I hadn’t even yet thought of what had earlier occurred in my bedroom between two cousins and four Playboy magazines. I was still in those precious first few seconds of being awake before the events of the prior day have a chance to sneak up behind me and slam into the back of my head. Just then, I could make out the soft sounds of Gino singing in the shower. It wouldn’t have bugged me except for the fact that I had heard him sing this particular song nearly all summer long. And on that day, I had just had enough.

  I got out of bed and crept to the bathroom door, and as I got closer I could make out the words to a song that I’d always felt was nothing short of a real downer. I mean, there wasn’t any way I could apply the words to my life. I found it confounding why Gino was so attached to it. It made me want to scream.

  Once again, I pressed the tip of my fingernail into the lock, sneaked into the bathroom, and just knelt down against the wall and listened to the sounds of shower water gently pelting the plastic curtain, the squish and overpowering smell of the Herbal Essences shampoo, the squeaky feet on the tub, and, of course, Gino’s high-pitched singing. But try as I might, as I heard Gino sing several minutes of Maureen McGovern’s sad song about a luxury liner getting hit by a tsunami on its final voyage from New York City to Greece on New Year’s Eve, I couldn’t hold myself back from reacting like a madman.

  I hollered over the water, “Jesus Christ, Gino, why are you always singing ‘The Poseidon Adventure’?”

  After he let out a bit of a shriek, he calmly answered me. “It’s called ‘The Morning After.’ ”

  “Same fuckin’ thing.”

  It wasn’t like he even knew the whole song. I hated Maureen McGovern as much as I hated the miserable song and its morbid message. But at least I knew every word. Gino would just sing the beginning with all his heart, before humming the rest: “There’s got to be a morning after, if we can hold on through the night. We have a chance to find the sunshine. Let’s keep on looking for the light. Humm, hmm hmm hmm hummm hmm hmm, hmm, hummm.”

  If I heard it once that summer, I heard it a thousand times.

  “What is it with you and that song?” I demanded. “What is it about that one song that you’re always either singing it or humming it whenever you’re all alone?”

  Gino shut off the water, pulled a towel from the rod, and asked me to give him a couple of minutes. And, honestly, after the summer he’d been through, he’d at least earned that. I shut my mouth and slid back down the wall until I was squatting on the floor in the foggy bathroom as I let him compose himself. Then Gino laid down some heavy shit for a ten-year-old.

  “Can I put on some underwear and shorts first?” he asked me.

  “Yeah,” I said, exhausted. “Just do whatever you gotta do. But just . . . enough bullshit. Tell me what’s up.”

  Gino leaned against the sink, crossed his arms, and let go. Once again, his eyes began to tear. But this wasn’t about any allergies he might have suffered from.

  “Okay. There is a part of me that hates being a kid and always feeling nervous about things,” he said. “I can’t explain it, A.J., but there’s something in that song that makes me feel good. That maybe someday things will be easier for me.”

  “Just try and tell me why you feel like you’re on a sinking ship,” I begged. “I saw the movie. People died. People were saved. It was crazy. I’m sick of the song, but what does it do for you?”

  “Well, I guess it’s the part about being saved,” he said. “I hear the song and I just think somebody will understand how I feel someday.” At this point he was flat out crying.

  “Do you think everyone thinks you don’t fit in . . . something like that?” I said.

  He coughed out a laugh. “I don’t fit in. Even I know that,” Gino said. “I’m not sure if I ever will. I’ve felt this way for a while.”

  “Okay, look,” I said. “I’m sorry I barged in again. Listen . . . we’re cousins and we love each other. I don’t understand everything, but I see how this ‘fitting in’ thing is killing you. So . . . I’m gonna back off, okay?”

  “Okay,” Gino said, wiping off.

  “You cried when you first got here,” I said. “But I don’t want you bawling on the way out.”

  “Trust me,” Gino said. “I don’t wanna sing that song all the time, it just makes me feel good, is all.”

  I got up off the floor and wrapped my arms around Gino’s wet head. “I gotta ask you one question though,” I said.

  “Okay . . .”

  “Who would you rather be on that boat, Gene Hackman or Shelley Winters?”

  “Oh,” he said. “Shelley Winters. But then, I always want to be Shelley Winters!”

  16

  WHATCHA SEE IS WHATCHA GET

  By the time September had rolled in, my father had finally acquiesced and
allowed me to play Pop Warner football. Ever since kindergarten I could remember that almost every kid in the neighborhood was playing some sort of sport—mainly Little League baseball and, to a lesser extent, basketball. But football was religion in my little town—with practices running so late that fruit bats would make dives at our white helmets after dark. The coaches acted like they didn’t see anything, and none of the parents ever complained, as far as I can remember.

  Since that summer was my first year at playing any kind of organized sport, I had some problems fitting in. It’s not that I wasn’t any good. Hell, I could outrun almost everyone on the Golden Bears, Marauders, Pirates, and Red Raiders. The problem was, I hadn’t been doing the drills, hitting the dummies on the fields, and attending the pizza parties with the same group of kids and coaches for the last seven years, so I didn’t become part of the in-crowd. And that was something my father alluded to when I first asked about joining. My father had been a football and track star in high school, but he didn’t grow up with any sort of league. In his day, you played in the streets until you were ready for the school yard. He never told me as much, but I’d always felt that with his working late six days a week—and also being a good twenty-five years older than the other fathers and coaches on the field and in the bleachers—the politics of it all would end up biting me in the ass. And there’d be little he could do to protect my ego.

  But with Jack in his ear, constantly begging him to get me into football before I entered junior high school—“Pop, listen to me, we gotta get him on their radar”—he began to weaken his stance. That change was hard on all of us. Jack and Ro would end up dropping me off and picking me up from practices, and every Sunday my father would put off fishing to come see my games—which were jam-packed with half-drunk dads and flirty moms—much to the shame of a lot of the kids who were out there playing in pads. But my father was right. The teams were filled with cliques of kids and coaches and ass-kissing parents all around. But we stuck it out. I was never the best on the team, but in time I figured out how to be accepted and admired and get my ass into the game. Most important, I never embarrassed myself. Even to the extent that I was the first kid to accept a dare from my coach and former marine, Mr. John Nicholson, who wouldn’t answer to anything but Special Sergeant. He was something else, that guy. He made us sing the marine hymn to and from games and at the end of every practice. One Sunday, we had a special road game planned against a team way out in East Orange, New Jersey, in which we were going to sleep over at the houses of the players we were pitted against. Coach Nicholson demanded to know if any of us boys had the balls to pee on their lawns at night and, further, gain entry into the opposing player’s mom and dad’s bedroom and smack a USMC sticker beneath the mom’s pillow.

  “This mission will not be an easy one,” Nicholson said, smoking a cigarette and chewing gum. “Life is gonna put obstacles in your path. You’re job is to evaluate and overcome. But if you can do this, you can do anything life throws at you.”

  I shot my hand up first. “I’ll do it,” I said. “Just gimme the sticker and it’s done.”

  And that’s just what I did a couple of nights later, when I excused myself from a game of Scrabble with the wonderful and accommodating Pacifico family, and sneaked into their master bedroom and stuck the decal on the bottom of a pillow and calmly walked back to the board game. I told Nicholson my mission was accomplished on the morning of the game. He leaned over and kissed my helmet, then started me at right end.

  “That’s one helluva boy you got there, Al,” he shouted to my dad during kickoff.

  My father seemed proudest of that moment.

  It was understandable why Gino never really wanted to go watch me practice as his stay with us was coming to an end. We played at the Beach Fields, which was a nice little park built about two hundred yards in from the beaches of the Great South Bay. Most practices went for three hours in ninety-degree heat, with as many mosquitoes running rampant as there were hormones raging. Every huddle had an argument, every play from scrimmage featured a coach grabbing us by our face masks and disciplining us in some ways that would undoubtedly make the nightly news nowadays. Not to mention, when we did get one of our two “mandatory” water breaks, we all lined up and sucked from the same filthy garden hose.

  The one saving grace was knowing that my sister Rosalie would be there to pick me up in her yellow Chevy Nova. Of course, when it came to Ro, there was always a small price to pay for her patiently waiting for practice to end. She always worked an angle. Especially on Wednesday nights, since Thursday morning was when the sanitation workers were scheduled to haul away people’s trash. Not stinky kitchen garbage, mind you. Trash. Trash had value. Trash meant other people’s treasure, like furniture, televisions, bicycles, picnic tables, et cetera. And since we could get a jump on what some folks were going to leave at the curb on Wednesday nights, Rosalie was all-in on the action. Problem was, I wasn’t. It didn’t matter to me that my sister was one of the original Dumpster divers, and on many occasions she’d surface with something of value. What mattered was that we were sometimes pulling up to houses of my classmates, who had no trouble spotting me in the passenger seat, while my sister rummaged through their junk.

  “Ro, can we just go straight home tonight, please?” I begged, sweating like a pig and still wearing full pads.

  “I just have to drive down Duck Lane,” she said. “I’m gonna need your help with what I think was a beautiful, wrought-iron standing lamp.”

  “Oh Jesus, no.”

  And it never ended with Duck Lane. Once she had me in the car, there was no telling what wealthy neighborhoods she’d drive through. And I’d have to suffer the indignity of maybe seeing a cute girl I liked, while my sister had me help her cram rattan chairs, stained-glass windows, or television sets that looked to be fine. And for the really big scores that we couldn’t stuff inside the car, she always carried rope so that we could tie another man’s trash to the roof of her car and leave the scene without any dignity intact at all. That’s a big reason why I believed Renee Schneider never went on a movie date with me. One Wednesday night she saw me in full football gear, tying a fish tank stand to the roof of the car. First impressions are everything.

  Once we had our car literally stuffed with other men’s junk, my embarrassment subsided and I had to cut Ro in on the conversations and altercations I had been having with Gino. “Take the long way home,” I told her. “I gotta talk to you about Gino.”

  Rosalie stared straight ahead at the road but patted my thigh and kind of smirked. “I know you do,” she said. “You have questions you want to ask me, right?”

  “You ain’t kiddin’,” I said.

  If she wasn’t so good spotting a bargain in a trash heap, my sister could’ve had a long career as a prosecuting attorney. Like most problems or family squabbles that came her way, she was always ready and had the answers prior to your questions even being asked.

  “Do you remember the day Gino was coming to see us and you were driving Mommy crazy with all your talk about ‘brain damage’?” she said.

  “Those weren’t my words, Ro. That’s what Uncle Larry, Daddy, and Mommy said.”

  “I know, I know,” she said, wiping my sweaty head. “They put those stupid words in your head.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But the first thing I told you, ‘Gino isn’t as rough a boy as you are. Wasn’t as tough a boy as you are.’ Do you remember that?”

  “Kinda,” I said, searching in my cluttered brain. “But there was so much shit going on that day, I don’t know what I remember anymore.”

  “Well, that’s what I told you. I don’t forget what I say. And I don’t lie to you.”

  “Pull over,” I asked her. “We’re almost home and I’m not done yet with something.”

  She pulled the car to the side, as the junk inside the car and on the top slid forward a little.

>   “Ro,” I began. “The other day we were looking at Playboys and Gino told me he liked looking at the men more than the girls. It was an Old Spice ad and he just flat out said that he knew the girl was pretty, but it was the man he liked looking at more.”

  “Okaaay . . .”

  “And I always catch him sobbing and singing that Poseidon Adventure song in the shower. The last morning I finally walked into the bathroom and had to find out what is it about that song that he’s always singing it, ya know?”

  “Yeah. Oh, how I hate that depressing song,” she said.

  “That’s what I’m saying, Ro. We all hate that song, but he said it makes him feel like one day things will be different for him and easier or—and these are his exact words—like he’ll be saved.”

  “Aww, that’s sad,” she said. “Did you get mad at him?”

  “No,” I said. “I just calmed him down and promised him I wouldn’t bring it up anymore.”

  “You’re a good cousin, A.J.,” she told me. “A lot of boys would’ve had a hard time with that.”

  There were a few seconds of silence in the car as Rosalie let all the emotional dust settle.

  “What do you think Gino is trying to tell you? What do you think is so hard for him to talk about in his life?” Ro said.

  “That he doesn’t like girls.”

  Rosalie then asked me if that, at all, bothered me.

  “Nah,” I said. “But it seems really tough on him.”

  Rosalie started up the car again and slowly merged back onto the road. “I know this is hard for you to understand now. It’s hard for a lot of people to understand, especially Gino,” she said. “Daddy and Uncle Larry are from a different generation. Trust me, Gino will have an easier time of it as the years go by, just like his brother, Larry, did.”

  “I hope so,” I said. “I wish they’d stop calling it ‘brain damage.’ Because it ain’t.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “Sometimes people mean well but say the wrong things.”