'74 & Sunny (23 page)

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.”

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

A
fter 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.

I know Gino was genuinely happy for me and my good fortune at chasing down all my dreams. But I'm not sure I was able to properly convey just how proud I was watching his career take off in a direction that seems so obvious in hindsight. The fact that he was able to go on and help people whose sense of self and prior life experience had blocked their ability to heal and get what they wanted out of life gave me chills. And the simplistic beauty that his main purpose every day was to help people feel more comfortable in their own skin. Of course that's what he would go on and do!

When Gino's brother, Larry, succumbed to AIDS in 1998, I flew in for the funeral. I can't say I was shocked at all to see Gino being emotionally tended to by a handsome man with an obvious caring nature. But I was a little surprised to see, in the midst of the huddle of human sorrow, my grieving uncle Larry.

I approached the three of them quietly and put my hand on Uncle Larry's frail shoulder. He turned to me and the waterworks started. It was like we were beneath the peach tree all over again.

“Oh, A.J.,” he sobbed. “Larry's at peace. My son is finally at peace now.” And then, extending his arms to Gino and his male friend, he said to me, “This is Gino's wonderful partner, Glen. Glen, this is my brother's son.”

“Your dad was Uncle Al, am I right?” Glen said, giving me a warm hug and a long handshake.

“I take it Gino told you a few stories,” I said.

And then Gino burst out, hugging me. “I told him
every
story.
Everything
we ever did.”

And there we were, the four of us, almost a quarter century removed from the dire phone call Uncle Larry had made to my home that fateful night. What seemed almost impossible to accept that very night was, at this moment, wonderful and sweet and real.

The next time I saw Gino was two years later, at Uncle Larry's funeral, after his consecutive bouts with lung and brain cancer: another Benza boy making a loud exit. This time around Gino and Glen were wearing commitment rings. They told me of their plans to one day make it legal, “if that ever becomes possible.”

“How was it for your pops in the end?” I asked.

“Ugh,” Gino sighed. “He came out of his coma at the very end long enough to tell me how thrilled he was for my happiness. How fond he was of Glen.”

“That's the best you could ask for, I suppose,” I said, genuinely satisfied for my little cousin. And then there was a long, awkward pause.

“I hope I'm not imagining this,” Gino told me. “But I think his last words to me were, ‘I have such a handsome and happy son.' ”

“He was probably loaded,” I joked.

Then, amid the bouts of tears and bursts of laughter that accompany all Italian funerals, Gino and I recalled stories of that glorious summer of 1974.

“The best summer,” he said, his words breezing past us and softly landing somewhere among the big sprays of mums surrounding his father's casket.

He was speaking to his father in the moment when he said, “The best summer of my life.”

And I was speaking to mine when I said, “The best summer of
our lives.
”