'74 & Sunny (11 page)

“Okay,” my mother said, trying to mop up the emotions. “A.J., can you put the worms and the dirt back in the can?”

“I got it, Ma.”

My father—most likely trying to turn his brother's desperate phone call into positive results—hugged and kissed me and Gino before elaborating on how important the worms were to helping us put food on our table. “A.J.,
you've
done this before. But, Gino . . . having never done this . . . I gotta say I'm very impressed.”

“Thanks, Uncle Al,” Gino said, picking at his cupcake.

“Were you ever scared at all, with the unknowns of the backyard?”

“No,” I said. “He was great, Dad. He got right in there.”

“Beautiful,” he said. “So, Gino, you had a good time?”

“Yes,” he said. “It was different. It was a little scary. But, I got the hang of it. It was fun.”

“Good,” my father said. “Tomorrow morning I'm gonna make you feel even better at o-seven-hundred hours.”

“Wait, what?” I said. “We did good. Can't we sleep in tomorrow?”

“It's not all about you,” my father said. “This is for Gino. You wanna feel better every day?” he asked Gino.

“Well . . . yeah.”

“Do you trust your uncle Al?”

“Of course.”

“Then I'll see you guys before I go to work in the morning.”

“It can't wait until tomorrow night?” I asked.

“No. And hey . . . do me a favor. Clean the table. There are worms all over the place. Make your mother happy.”

7

RADAR LOVE

M
y mother was nice enough to gently walk into my room and shake Gino and me awake a few minutes before 7:00 a.m. Neither one of us particularly cared that she had made some potato and eggs for us, but if she hadn't woken us up, we would have probably suffered through the indignity of another reveille and canon shot from my father. So we got up, pulled on some shorts, and headed down to the kitchen. My father was seated there, dressed sharply for work and all, reading the paper and grimacing through a cup of what my own mother always admitted was the “worst coffee ever made.”

We sat at the table with the potato and eggs too steaming hot to eat, while we rubbed the sleep from our eyes. Gino and I stared at each other—but didn't dare say anything—as
we readied for this gigantically important moment my dad promised us the night before.

As usual, he was reading the obituary section first. “Let me see here,” he said real low. “Aaron . . . Abelson . . . Addison . . . Allen . . . Aponte . . . a lot of As checked out. Almost all in their sleep. Lucky bastards.”

“Are those all dead people?” Gino asked me.

“Yeah. He reads this section expecting to find his name.”

Gino twisted his face in confusion. “What?”

“Boys, eat,” my mother said. “It's gonna get cold.”

My father went on with the names of the dead. “Baker . . . Battaglia—I think I sold him carpet. Bay . . . Beale . . . Getting closer,” he said. “Behrens . . . Bellini . . . Bent . . . ah, shit, Bittinger. Nope. Not there yet,” he said aloud. “Your
friend
up there passed me by again.”

He folded the paper away and got back to his last gulp of bad coffee.

“Why do you check the death notices, Uncle Al?” Gino asked.

“If I told you, you wouldn't believe me—like the rest of my family,” he said.

Gino mounted up as much courage as he could. “Umm . . . why don't you try me?”

My father checked his wristwatch, knowing he could give Gino only the CliffsNotes version of his weekly nightmare/comedy bit. We had heard it a hundred times already.

It was brand-new territory for Gino.

“Maybe you've seen the funeral parlor down the street,” my father began. “It's called Chapey's. And I have dreams that the owner of the funeral home, Fred Chapey, he tosses rocks at my window to wake me up, see? “

“Let me take it from here, Dad,” I said. I knew it by heart. “And in that shadow hour before dawn, his rocks at the window wake you up and he says real scary-like, ‘Al . . . .we need you. When are you coming up the street? Business is dead.' ”

“That's terrible,” Gino said.

“Did I get it right, Dad? What did I miss?”

My father turned his empty coffee cup and laughed at the pile of bitter grinds at the bottom. “You forgot that he's standing at the foot of the driveway and he's holding a brand-new black suit that I'd be buried in. He's holding a suit because I don't own one.”

“Ew . . . that gives me chills,” Gino said.

My mother, as usual, stepped in to break up the calamity. “Jesus Christ, what are you filling these kids' heads with? Don't make your dreams become their nightmares, Al.”

“You didn't hear the rocks on the window?”

“I couldn't hear a hurricane over your snoring.”

“That's great, Dad,” I said, “but we woke up at seven—and this is my summer vacation—because you had something very important to do with us. Can we get to the point here?”

My father reached into his jacket pocket and fished out a plastic bag of pills. He tossed them on the table toward Gino.

Gino seemed a little alarmed, but not too much because he was very familiar with the pills inside the bag. I guess he was embarrassed a bit because we were all present.

My father spoke up. “Now, I'm no doctor—but I
am
an ex-undercover narc—and it looks to me like there are about one thousand pills, vitamins, and supplements in this here bag,” he said. “Your father told me to make sure you keep up with this regimen while you are here with us. You know about this, right?”

“Yes, Uncle Al,” he said. “Those are the medicines I have always taken every morning that will eventually make me feel better . . . and better.”

“Better and
better
,” my father repeated.

“Yeah, that's the plan,” Gino said, finally eating his potato and eggs.

“What does the term
better and better
mean to you?” my father asked.

Gino put his fork down, twirled his hair with his left hand, and tried to answer the question. “I guess . . . you know . . . that the longer I take the medications, the more I will get better and better.”

“Better and better,” my father said, with little emotion—weighing the bag of pills in his hand. “Is this a phrase you and your father say a lot?”

“Well, yeah,” Gino said. “It's part of the mind-control meetings my father goes to.”

My mother and father exchanged looks like I'd never seen
before. Like they had both just seen a UFO. He pulled her away from the table.

“Take the kids out by the pool,” my father told my mother. “Do something with them. Use your imagination. I gotta call my brother right now.”

I remember my father rushed to the phone like he was on a mission. I don't recall the term
better and better
sounding too weird to me, but when Gino mentioned mind control, my throat got a little tight. Somehow I just knew it was tied to the bumper sticker my uncle Larry always had on the back of his many sports cars. Each time he visited with a new car it always seemed like he would replace the
I'M OK—YOU'RE OK
bumper sticker. I only remember that decal because I can't ever forget my father's disdain and confusion over people who needed to get a message to you through the use of their cars. And I especially remember the uproar that started the day my uncle gushed about the self-help book of the same name a couple of summers earlier. To Uncle Larry, the pioneering work of a brain surgeon in uncovering the neurological basis of memory that could offer complementary insights grounded in reality was something divine. Looking back now, maybe it was something he thought could make sense of what was happening to the boys in his family. To my father, it was all a bunch of nonsense—and I remember him saying it was even worse that so many millions of people were reading the book and buying into it. “But Al,” Uncle Larry said, “it's just a bumper sticker.”

To which my father replied with a snicker. “A bumper sticker isn't a method of solving problems in life, Larry,” he said. “I got a better sticker, Larry. ‘I'm OK, the author is a shithead.' ”

Anyway, my mother, Gino, and I were outside, counting how many yellow jackets were working like crazy inside the grape arbor. We stopped counting at a hundred. But I could see my father through the screen window, talking to my uncle Larry with his hands. Like all Italians I'd been around, his hands filled in the spaces between the words. One shrug could equal a soliloquy. Two palms stuck together, pointing downward and moved up and down could end an opera.

“You wanna tell me about this ‘mind control' shit, Larry?” my father said. “I got your kid here talking to me like he's brainwashed—forget brain
damaged
—and he's telling me this fuckin' bag of pills are going to make him ‘better and better' or whatever the fuck.”

Whatever Uncle Larry said on the phone was supposed to pacify my father. But it was now obvious to me that both of Gino's parents had gone to the ends of the earth to try and make him fit in. To basically try to “cure” him.

Uncle Larry had Gino on a daily cocktail of prescription drugs, vitamins, and supplements that numbered as many as twenty pills a day to reverse the “brain damage.” Each morning he'd been with us, I'd watched Gino gag and almost puke attempting to swallow some of the larger pills.

“How do you do it?” I said to him. “Some of those are friggin' horse pills.”

“It's gonna help in the long run,” he said, holding a huge cup of tap water.

After the phone call between my father and Uncle Larry, a new regimen was prescribed. My father came out with a giant shopping bag filled with Gino's pills and dropped them on the ground by the back garden.

“Gino,” he said. “These are the pills your father left for you to take—with specific instructions and all. For some reason he thinks these pills will make you feel better.”

“I know,” Gino said. “We've been doing it this way as long as I can remember.”

“Well, let me ask you a question, how do you feel now?”

“I'm a little tired, but I feel fine, Uncle Al.”

“If you ask me, Gino, this is all a
fizzeria
.” (
Fizzeria
was my father's word for anything that he considered to be bullshit.) “You understand what I'm saying? Everything you need to live on is in
that
garden or in the bay or in what your aunt Lilly puts on the table for dinner.”

“I'm sure you're right,” Gino said.

“I'm not going to argue with you there.”

“Then what are we going to do with all those pills?” Gino said.

“What do you want to us to do?” I said.

“I don't know what to say,” he said. “It's hard to tell the truth sometimes, Uncle Al and Aunt Lilly.”

“Gino, we're your family,” my mother said. “You can tell your family anything.”

“Well,
this
family is like that,” he said. “That's for sure.”

Gino's eyes filled with tears for a bit. I didn't bother asking him why. He would've blamed it on allergies again, probably.

“I guess I'm sick and tired of almost puking every morning taking these pills. And they really don't make me feel any different.”

“I figured that,” my father said. “That's why I got a second opinion with another doctor who feels the same as you.”

“What doctor?” Gino asked.

“Another Dr. Benza,” he said.

“What are the chances of that?”

“None,” my father said, popping his bubble. “It's me. I'm in control of your medication now.”

Gino laughed a little. “What do we do?”

My father told me to go and fetch the shovel behind the cabana. “Not the flat one,” he said. “Get me the spade. You're gonna dig a hole.”

I brought back the spade and watched my father point to a spot in the ground back by the part of our yard that was nearest the canal. “Dig a nice hole two or three feet deep,” he said. I loved gardening work, so I was done in a minute or so.

“Gino,” my father said. “Lemme see the big bag of bullshit medicine my brother has you taking.”

Gino handed over the bag a bit sheepishly. “Here, Uncle Al.”

“Okay,” my father said. “Now then, you're gonna bury every single pill in this bag and it's my contention you'll feel fine from this day forward.”

Gino tilted the bag and the pills poured out like shrimp from a basket. I pushed the earth over them and the pills disappeared within seconds, like dirt on a dead relative's casket.

“You won't tell my mom or dad, will you, Uncle Al?”

My father shook his head. “You bet your sweet bippy I won't.” They kissed on it. And Gino never took a pill the rest of the summer.