'74 & Sunny

by A. J. Benza

“There they are . . . the Benza boys!” Peter hollered. “What are we doing today?”

  Gino looked at me, a bit overwhelmed with his warm greeting. “I don’t know,” I said. “What do you guys wanna do?”

  “Well, I sure as hell don’t think Gino wants to play kickball, do you, Gino?” Richie deadpanned.

  “Yeah, um, no thanks.” Gino nervously laughed.

  When the Rossitto family ran out of their house, looking to join in the fun, I felt it was necessary to tell everyone about Gino’s sudden exit plan.

  “This is Gino’s last night,” I said out loud. “He leaves tomorrow morning. For good.”

  “For good, like forever for good?” Pete said.

  “No, man. Just for this summer. He starts school next week like we do,” I said.

  Pete and Richie hopped off their boards and began throwing shadow punches at Gino’s midsection. “Well, that sucks,” Pete said. “I was just getting used to you always being around.”

  “Yeah, and I was starting to think maybe not everyone from New Jersey is a douche bag.” Richie laughed as he mocked pulling his junk out of his zipper. “You’re cool with me, WEE-no.”

  “It’s Gi-NO, Richie TIT ler,” Gino said.

  As the bunch of us laughed, Richie quickly folded up Gino’s body and playfully pinned him to the grass. Maybe my cousin didn’t know it at the time, but I remember thinking that’s as close as he’s ever going to get to those guys showing their love and respect toward him. However awkward and trying the past two and a half months had been, it was all melting away under the early-evening sun on my front yard.

  Before the group of us could put together any kind of organized plans for a fun-filled last night, my father’s car raced down the block and turned into the driveway as all us kids scattered to different parts of the porch.

  “Hey, it’s Uncle Al the kiddie’s pal,” Richie shouted.

  My father rolled out of his Mustang while tucking a conspicuous shopping bag under his left arm. He then called for Pete to pass him the basketball before tossing a one-handed hook shot right through the net from thirty feet away on the lawn.

  “Up your ass from the grass,” he said, while marching into the house and kissing my mother in the foyer. A few seconds later, she appeared before the screen door and told Gino and me to get ready to wash up and have dinner with the family.

  I said good-bye to the gang before turning to Gino. “Some friggin’ dinner,” I said.

  After we were done washing up, Gino and I went back to our room, where I gave him a little hand putting things away in his luggage. He was kind of quiet, even when I joked that I wanted to stash a Playboy magazine in his bag. But I did manage to tell him how happy I was to see him finally turn over a new leaf. “Yeah, I guess I did,” he said. “I know I tried to.”

  He wasn’t lying. When Gino’s departure started to become a reality, he seemed to want to get involved with everything around the house—he was happy helping my mother and sisters shop for food, giving my father a hand making pizza, helping me make more free throws, and even baiting his own fish hook with live bloodworms. He had come a long way from those earlier moments of the summer when he would rather veg out in front of the TV, hit the sack early, push food around his plate, or suffer long crying jags alone on the cold bathroom floor.

  “Did you make all those changes because you realized you were gonna miss us once you left?” I asked.

  Gino sat on the bed and took a breath. “I was definitely afraid to come here,” he admitted. “You always seemed comfortable with yourself. You’re into sports, you’re funny, and you’re smart. I’ve always felt like a pudgy, awkward kid around you. But not toward the end of this summer.”

  Gino’s intelligence and sensitivity for a ten-year old amazed me at times. I felt like he was ready to be fucked with, so I said: “Sounds like you got the hots for me, cuz.”

  “Oh God, no!” he screamed, and his laugh had never been more genuine.

  We walked downstairs, I had Gino walk a glass of Scotch over to my father and we found our seats at the dining room table, along with Aunt Mary, Rosalie, Jack, NuNu, and Frankie. Little Jackie sat in a highchair between his mom and dad. We began bullshitting about this and that when my mother walked out of the kitchen carrying loaves of hot Italian bread and a giant bowl of tuna fish with mayonnaise and chopped hard-boiled eggs. I put up a little protest before I ripped off a piece of bread and begrudgingly dumped a forkful of tuna on my plate. I took a bite and grimaced. My disgust was obvious to Lorraine, who couldn’t help but hide a little laugh behind her hand.

  “Stop it, A.J.,” my mother hissed. “Just eat.”

  Despite Gino kicking my foot under the chair, I just couldn’t keep my mouth shut.

  “Am I the only one who’s pissed off we’re eating tuna fish?” I announced.

  My father wasn’t much for scolding me, so he didn’t say anything after I popped off. But I couldn’t help but notice he was deep in thought, taking delicate, little bites of tuna off his fork.

  “Lilly, let me ask you a question,” he slowly began. “You know my favorite brand, and the only brand I ever want on this table is Bumble Bee, right?”

  “Of course,” my mother proudly said, almost standing up in indignation when she added. “Why, what are you trying to say?”

  The family began to look a bit uncomfortable in their chairs. “I’m saying this ain’t Bumble Bee.”

  “Your ass, it isn’t Bumble Bee,” my mother hollered. “I know what tuna fish to buy.”

  Now my father was almost standing up. “Lower your voice,” he warned her. “Don’t let me go to the garbage can and find something else.”

  My mother leaned back in her chair very confidently and kept on eating. “You can do whatever the hell you want.”

  An eerie silence fell upon the room as my father dropped his fork, spit out his food, pushed his plate aside, and walked over to the kitchen garbage.

  Rosalie and Lorraine looked white as ghosts. “Ma, are you sure you bought the right tuna?” Rosalie whispered.

  “I’m tired of his bullshit,” she said. “Let him go shopping if he thinks he can do a better job.”

  I remember feeling weirdly vindicated over this crappy choice of supper, but that was immediately followed by how worried I was that this damn tuna fish dinner was about to seriously fracture our family. And on Gino’s last night, no less.

  At this point Gino was shitting a brick and I was bracing myself for the kind of dinner fight I’d seen before—where my father would no doubt flip over the table. We listened to him fishing through the pail before we heard the unmistakable sound of tin cans in his hands.“StarKist! ” he yelled. “She bought fuckin’ StarKist. Was it an accident or out of spite?”

  My father kicked the garbage can over and began to march upstairs to their bedroom, despite a constant plea from Rosalie: “Daddy, please, don’t do this.”

  What made this fight so much scarier than the others is that several seconds after he trudged up the steps—which had always been a clear warning for all of us to stay away—my mother followed right behind him. That was a first. And that scared us all.

  “Can you believe this?” Lorraine said, as the footsteps and the sound of moving furniture above our heads grew louder. “Now what?”

  “Just everybody be quiet,” I pleaded, with my stomach in a knot. “If we go up there it’s only gonna get worse.”

  Everyone’s appetite was shot, so Gino and I began to walk the dishes into the kitchen to be washed. No sooner had I turned on the hot water, I heard a needle scratch an album on the dining room stereo and the low rumblings of a recording filled the house.

  I ran into the dining room to see Rosalie hunched over the hi-fi. “Rosalie, what the hell are you doing?”

  Gino was right behind me, “Please, Ro, I’m scared. This can’t be a good idea.�
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  A few seconds later, I heard the familiar first few notes of “Cabaret” bouncing off the walls.

  What good is sitting all alone in your room . . .

  “This is crazy,” I said.

  “This is Liza!” Gino screamed.

  “Ro,” I continued. “What are you doing? Daddy’s gonna go apeshit!”

  Just then we saw my father marching down the stairs wearing eyeliner, white pancake makeup on his face, and bright red lipstick. He was jingling a bunch of loose change in his pocket and was singing à la Joel Grey from the movie. We’d been had. My father had set it all up, buying the Cabaret album and hiding it from us as soon as he got home. He used all the women as accomplices. Just when it couldn’t get any crazier, Rosalie and my mother put sequined headbands on Gino and me and, with the help of Lorraine, began to apply the proper Minnelli stage makeup to our faces. Right down to a Sally Bowles sequined beauty mark on her left cheek. Amid shrieks of laughter and mild protests (mainly on my part) we got up and sang most of the whole album with my father and the rest of my family. Not surprisingly, Gino knew almost all the words—from “Cabaret” to “Willkommen” to “Mein Herr.”

  At one point between songs, Gino grabbed my father’s arm. “Uncle Al, when did you get this album?”

  “I snuck it home today,” he said. “You think I forgot how much you told us you love Liza?”

  My mother, who’d done a masterful job in the con, sat at the table smiling at everything going on around her. She grabbed Gino in a hug. “Tell the truth, Gino. Were you scared?”

  “Scared shitless!” Gino laughed. “But I’m so happy you pulled it off.”

  After an hour or so of songs and stories that wrapped up the summer in a nice, tight bundle, we all hugged and kissed good night and made our way to our bedrooms. Gino fell asleep with makeup on and the sequined headband still on his head. I didn’t think it right to disturb him.

  When Uncle Larry showed up the next morning to take Gino home, he met a new person. Gino wasn’t the macho, street-fighting lothario Uncle Larry might have hoped he’d find, but now his boy beamed with a quiet confidence, resolve, and inner freedom. Uncle Larry was touched when he listened to the story of the Cabaret shenanigans the night before. He took my father aside and the two shared the warm and knowing embraces only brothers can muster.

  My father sent him off with the hard advice he’d been seeking for years.

  “You have a wonderful son, Larry. He may not carry on your name, but he’s going to carry on your warmth, your sensitivity, your humor, and your love. What more can a father ask?”

  Uncle Larry teared up and squeezed my father as he got in his car. “How can I ever thank you, Al?”

  “Just love your son as he is, Larry. He’s a Benza. He’s ours.”

  EPILOGUE

  SHAMBALA

  After that sweet summer of 1974, it seemed as though my life had turned into one of those old black-and-white Hollywood films, where stacks of screaming newspaper headlines would roll off a truck and the pages on a wall calendar would fly off and spin wildly at the screen. Confidence-breaking and earth-shattering things were happening at a clip that was too surreal to believe.

  I became sexually active at thirteen. I threw myself headlong into basketball, despite butting heads with the legendary coach, Mr. Smith, and found myself cut from the team every year until my junior season. I surrounded myself with a bunch of wild boys who got their kicks breaking into schools, stealing clamming boats, and doing anything the local Mafiosi asked of us.

  But it wasn’t long before I walked away from college to spend my days and nights to watch my father slowly and undeniably dying. His old pal God wasn’t going to stage his exit too hastily. With all the drinking and temper tantrums, you’d think my father would’ve wrapped himself around a telephone pole or had himself a massive coronary. No. Not my father. God took his time with him. It was a final suffering act that got progressively worse and harder to deal with for eleven long years.

  He was dealt an incurable form of cancer called mycosis fungoides. In the terms of a bitter layman and dismayed son, it’s basically a disease in which lymphocytes (a type of white blood cell) become malignant and affect the skin. First, patches of the skin start to itch terribly. In due time, the damaged skin magically turns into burn marks and takes on a higher level of pain. Finally, the affected areas turn as brittle as an old rose petal and disintegrate in your hands. After a couple of years and dozens of home remedies (including coating him with extra-virgin olive oil and wrapping him up in Saran wrap), we forced him to take further steps by seeing numerous oncologists, who all meant well but did no more than use my father as a guinea pig for their next big medical paper.

  It quickly became apparent that we had to see better doctors in bigger hospitals. I accompanied my father on drives to NewYork-Presbyterian in Washington Heights or Mount Sinai Hospital in the Bronx, where he would undergo treatments that ranged from ultraviolet A rays directed toward his skin to a cocktail of drugs taken orally as a chaser. In another type of photodynamic therapy, called extracorporeal photo-chemotherapy, my father was fed drugs before some blood cells were taken from his body, put under a special ultraviolet A light, and slammed back into him. Every doctor told him he needed to stay out of the sun for these therapies to have a chance of offering any kind of remission. But as soon as I drove his big silver Cadillac back from the city and into our driveway, he would stumble into the backyard, hop in the pool, and get to work on his garden. He was gonna go out doing things his way.

  Finally, when things got really bad, we went to Manhattan’s Memorial Sloan Kettering so the big dogs could take a look at him. This, in my opinion, is what expedited his slow, agonizing, and inevitable death.

  The docs at Sloan brought out their big radiation guns, which used high-energy X-rays to kill cancer cells or to keep them from growing. When that didn’t work, they used internal radiation therapy, in which radioactive substances sealed in needles and wires, and sometimes catheters, were placed directly into or near the cancer. But since mycosis fungoides is a cancer that affects all organs, and our skin is the largest organ, it was futile to even attack his insides, since his outward appearance was starting to resemble that of victims of the new dreaded disease: AIDS.

  And thus began my father’s years on the “AIDS floors,” where all the victims of “the gay cancer” were put up. The sad thing was, whenever we’d take my father for slow, agonizing walks around a hospital’s hallways, we would pass rooms and beds and wheelchairs of sick men, much younger than my father, who possessed the same look of impending death. I spent more time with grieving gay men in hospital hallways during my teenage years than I did with all the pretty girls in high school.

  In the last summer of my father’s life, Uncle Larry got in touch with a Swiss doctor who got his hands on a “wonder drug” not yet approved by the FDA that was supposed to restore my father’s skin and other organs, getting him at last to a peaceful remission and on his feet again. The man’s name was Dr. Willie Kreist (ironically pronounced Christ). Hardly where the help would come from, considering my father’s staunch atheism. Unfortunately, the drug wasn’t covered by any insurance company, and the price per injection was through the roof, especially since it would be one injection every day for God knows how long. Uncle Larry footed the bill for months without so much as blinking one of his gorgeous green eyes, until the day my father’s adhesions healed and the holes behind his knees magically filled up. Though the hair on his head never came back, his trademark mustache grew back thick as ever. He was able to sit up and walk on his own. Before long he was dancing in his hospital room with his big, black nurse Roberta while she sang, “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” We were over the moon.

  Now he could go to the beach with his grandchildren. He could clam again with the family.

  He would sit on the porch with my mother, the two of
them rolling out his hospital bills like a scroll and laughing like hounds. “They could build a fuckin’ casino with this money,” he said.

  But the wonder drug lasted only so long.

  I’ll spare you the rest of the gory details. Before my father entered his final resting place, North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, he was administered various kinds of oral, injected, and topical chemotherapies. The most debilitating by far was the nitrogen mustard. It turned his skin so dark, he made Gandhi look like a white boy.

  In the winter of 1985, after seven months of watching him fade away in a sea of blue and white sheets, we sent all the doctors away and I became more like a sentry than a son. Enough with the needles; enough with the tests; enough with the scans. Put the morphine drip on high and let the man go.

  And that’s what we did.

  He was gone in March. My wonderful, sweet mother died on Christmas morning five years later.

  “Don’t worry about me,” she’d told me one morning, lying in her hospice bed. “I had a wonderful life. All my children lived next to me, and my grandchildren come through my kitchen door every morning before school. I had it all. Now . . . I just miss your father too, too much.”

  What do you say to that?

  In the ten years that followed, I married and divorced my high school sweetheart before selling my house and moving to Greenwich Village to work as a gossip columnist for the New York Daily News. Gino and I kept in touch as much as we could once we found we could practically throw rocks at each other from our Greenwich Village apartments—mine on Horatio Street, his on West Tenth Street. But, because we were busy making names for ourselves in the big city, we never did spend that much extended time with each other. By this time, my little cousin was busy getting his master’s degree in social work from NYU and began working as a psychotherapist. Whenever we did find time to grab drinks at the local watering holes, we would talk about our dating nightmares and the fact that we couldn’t believe we were both lucky enough to be doing the things we loved the most. Those get-togethers lasted well into the 1990s before Gino settled down with a great guy and I was off to Los Angeles to work in TV. With both our lives at warp speed, it seemed we were unfortunately headed toward rarely seeing each other except for at weddings and funerals. But whenever those occasions came about, we picked up our conversations as if not a single day had passed. And we always cherished the times when we effortlessly managed to bring up the minutia of that one summer long ago. We still laughed about my mother’s feeble attempt at tacos. We shuddered at the mere mention of wooden dolls with busted teeth. We reminisced about that magic fishing hole. And we both couldn’t forget the color of Julia Thorne’s haunting, pale blue eyes.