Makeup to Breakup (2 page)

I
entered the world on December 20, 1945, feet first, ass backward,
a breech baby. They didn’t have C-sections in those days so they had to take me out with a forceps, like you would use for salad. My mom, Loretta, said the whole process was so painful that she didn’t want any more kids after me. Of course, she had four more.

I was also impatient, exiting my mother’s womb two months prematurely, a tiny little thing with long black hair down my neck. The nurses would dote over me; they had never seen a baby with that much hair. The cool thing is that I was a love child. My mom got pregnant, and then she and my dad got married a few months after. But my dad, Joe, wasn’t really ready to settle down. He was a handsome young Italian guy who loved ballroom dancing. My mother told one of my sisters that my father left for three years when I was young and then came back to the family. But I was never told that.

What a family. I was named Peter after my father’s father. He and his wife, Nancy, moved to the U.S. from Naples and settled in Hartford, Connecticut, where they had a farm. Besides their own kids, they adopted a bunch, so there were something like twenty kids in the family. My dad was born on the farm, but eventually his dad bought a six-family tenement building in Brooklyn, where he got a job as a mason. He was a real Italian who spoke only Italian, so one of the guys on the job, to bust his balls, would teach him English phrases like “Fuck you.
Kiss my ass. I’d like some pussy.” He didn’t understand what it meant. One day he came home from work and my grandmother was cooking and he said, “Hey, fuck you, eat my dick.” My grandmother flipped out and my father had to tell him that wasn’t nice stuff to say, so the old man got furious and the next day he went to work and kicked the shit out of his coworker.

I loved to visit my grandfather. In his backyard he grew grapes, eggplants, and tomatoes. I’d sit on his lap in the yard and he was like the Godfather. He’d have the big hat, the big pants with the belt, and the big sweater with the holes in it. He was tall, about six foot one, a really good-looking man. He kept pigeons in the back, and in the cellar he had all these rabbits in cages that I used to play with. My mother told me that one day she was eating his pasta sauce and she said, “That’s delicious, Pa. A little greasy, but tasty.” Then she found out it was made with rabbit, and she never ate the sauce again.

He was a tough man. He didn’t believe in doctors. He used to pull his own teeth with pliers. He was a religious Catholic until one day he went to church and caught a priest screwing a nun, and that was it. He gave up his religion after he got a real dose of reality. I really loved him, and I was proud to be named after him. Vincent Price” admitted.

But I disliked his wife, Nancy. She used to beat the shit out of me. My mother told me that when I was really young, she yanked me up upside down by my feet and I started hemorrhaging and literally bled from my penis. I got my revenge eventually. My grandmother moved in with us toward her last days. She’d sit in the kitchen bitching, complaining, her feet always soaking in warm Epsom salt water. She always wanted things, and she’d curse me in Italian. One day my friend Vinnie came over to play cowboys and she was all pissed because we were having fun, so we went to the back end of the railroad flat, got naked, and ran around the house, taunting her. She couldn’t do a thing about it because she was in her wheelchair. Finally my father came home and she mumbled something to him. He came over to us. “What! You got naked in front of your grandmother?”

“Why would I do that, Dad?” I said, all innocent. “I came home to drop off my books. We had lunch and we left. She’s seeing things.” She
was getting a bit senile, so he bought it and she was furious. I got even for all those years she abused me as a baby.

Growing up, I never really knew my mother’s dad, my grandfather George, whom I was also named after. He was a real gigolo who left my grandmother when my mother and her brother were really young. Her brother, my uncle George, never forgave his father for deserting them. The old man rarely showed up in New York, but he used to send me things from all over the world: cowboy boots, trinkets. He was globe-trotting because he kept getting married to different rich women. After a few years he’d divorce the first one and then marry another one. He was a real smart guy. He’d read the dictionary for fun. When he moved to San Francisco in his seventies, he wound up smoking weed with all the professors in Berkeley and they gave him an honorary degree to put on his wall.

When I was living in Canarsie with my first wife, he came to visit us with this really rich woman from Amarillo. She was an art collector. She had bought him a saloon. Then he dumped her and he got another rich one to buy him a restaurant in Albany. When he was staying with us, he’d get up in the morning, put on a white shirt and a tie, and place a rose on my wife’s side of the table. “Good morning, darling. How are you feeling today?” He knew the magic words.

I visited him years later in San Francisco when he was much older and he had met a nice woman and they were living in an RV. We took a shower together in the trailer park facility and when he turned around, the guy was hung like a horse. He didn’t have a dick, he had a baby’s arm! My grandfather saw the surprise on my face and he said, “This is why I do so well in life. I’m a cocksman.” I had never heard that word before. “That’s a man who knows how to use his dick. I haven’t worked a day in my life, because once a woman gets some of this thing, it’s all over,” he explained.

My grandmother Clara never seemed to get over his desertion. She was from a large Irish family of major drinkers. Her family would come over to my grandma’s joint, get her drunk as a skunk, and then leave. By the time my granddad got home from work, they were gone and my grandma was passed out cold. Her drinking got so bad that my mom and her brother started missing school, and when my mother was ten, the state took them away and put them in a home. My mother hated it there.
She never really got into it with me, but certain things would set her off. For the rest of her life, if she so much as smelled marmalade, she’d go off. “Don’t ever bring that shit around. They served me that every day better than ” ayl of my life when I was a little girl.” My mother never forgave her mother’s sisters and brothers for not stepping up and helping them out before the state took her and her brother away. They had a very hard life, and when they were finally reunited with their mother, Clara had stopped drinking heavily, and they tried to resume a normal family life.

So this was the crazy world that Peter George John Criscuola was thrust into. I just made it crazier. I was a sickly child, and I put my mother through living hell. I caught everything—measles, mumps, whooping cough, a swollen testicle, chicken pox, ear infections, the works. I even caught ringworm from my grandma’s cat. When I started school, I was so anemic I’d go every week for a transfusion of fresh blood and vitamins. I was a mess. I must have weighed all of sixty pounds, a skinny kid with a big head and big baggy eyes and big ears. Thankfully, the priest at my school paid for the doctor visits. We couldn’t afford them.

When I wasn’t getting sick, I was getting hurt. When I was seven, my mom went to visit a friend. They were having coffee and somehow I wandered away from her and went into the backyard. There was a little dog out there. The dog was eating, and I poked my face into what was going on and the dog figured I was going to take its food so it ripped at my mouth and tore my top lip half off. My mother heard the screaming and she saw I was bleeding profusely and rushed me to the hospital. My parents didn’t have money or insurance, so it was off to the emergency room, my second home in my younger years.

I must have had an angel looking over me because there was a major plastic surgeon from Germany who was there to give a seminar. He saw me in the hallway bleeding to death and he immediately said, “Bring this kid in.” They didn’t even put me out. They just strapped my legs and my hands down and went to work on my face. It felt like a million bees stinging me in the face. I was hallucinating, the pain was so intense.

I was bandaged for months, eating through a straw. My father and my grandmother both blamed my mother for me getting fucked up. They thought I would be disfigured for life. Finally it was time to take the
bandages off. We went back to the hospital, the doctors and nurses surrounded me, and my mother was biting her nails as she always did. They removed the last bandage and I remember everybody staring at me—either in amazement that I was so ugly or because the lip looked so good, I didn’t know. My mom started crying, and I looked in the mirror and could kind of notice the gash in my lip, but it didn’t look horrendous, and over time it went away completely. But from that day on, I wouldn’t go into a house if there was a dog.

My mother kept me close to her after that. I was always in the bed with her; she was always holding my hand. We were inseparable. My dad was another story. He was either working or trying to find work, or he’d be upstairs on the roof with his pigeons. He seemed not to want to get involved in other people’s lives. He was into his own world and he was very childlike, a trait I inherited from him. As tough an Italian street kid as he was, I think he was scared most of the time. He had no education. He had dropped out of school after the third grade so he was illiterate. He worked a succession of odd jobs when he did work. And eventually he had five kids to raise, so he had an enormous amount of pressure on him. He was just a very conservative, uptight guy. He would not allow bad language in the house at all. Except for my mother, who cursed like a sailor.

At times I think my father should never have been married or had kids. He never seemed to be happy. I think he wanted more for himself in this world and pills.

His job situation was never stable. He worked in a factory for a while making car parts. He fixed cars at a garage. But the best job he ever had was buffing the floors at the UN building. He got paid a lot of money under the table, working the night shift, and he loved it. My mom was afraid to be home alone, so I’d get in bed with her and she would keep me up all night watching the late show and then the late, late show and even the late, late, late show. I had huge black circles under my eyes from not sleeping. Christmastime, my dad would take me to see the big Christmas display at the UN and I’d think, “Wow, my dad’s the shit. He works at the UN.” Little did I know he was a floor buffer.

Among the few times my dad and I would bond would be over his pigeons. I remember many summer days when the sun was going down, I’d go and sit with him up on the roof and we’d share an apple and he’d point out the different types of birds and tell me about the races he would enter.

My dad didn’t dig sports; he liked staying home. But my mother’s brother, my uncle George, was always available for me. He was an ex-marine who was childless then because my aunt Rosie had had two miscarriages, so my Unc, as I called him, became my surrogate father. I really loved him. We’d go fishing or go to ball games or to Sunnyside Gardens to see the wrestlers. Sometimes on a Sunday he’d take me crabbing and we’d bring back all these blue claws. My mom would cook up a big batch and I’d grab a Pepsi and sit outside for hours, eating crabs and daydreaming. Life seemed so easy then.

For such a loner, my father depended on my mother for everything. My mother paid the bills, did the shopping, fixed things around the house. When they were first married they went to a movie occasionally, or maybe a Chinese restaurant, and my grandmother would babysit me. But that didn’t last. Once he had four more kids his leisure time was shot, and it seemed that once he came back from work to that apartment, he never left. His joy for life seemed to be fading, and he didn’t give a fuck about going anywhere.

I don’t want to make it sound like there was no love between them, though. I know they loved each other deeply, but they just didn’t know how to show it. My father wasn’t a kissy-huggy guy. Even my mom didn’t like to be touched. I was the opposite of them. I was very emotional, and I’d hug everyone I got near. But when I grabbed my mother and went to give her a big kiss, she’d kind of shy away and say, “Come on, Georgie.” I never did get those hugs and kisses that I wanted from my mom and dad. They protected me and did all they could, but they just weren’t emotionally available. They both had hard lives, but they loved me to death. Even though I was the oldest child, they called me “the baby,” or sometimes “Bubba.”

I’d have to say that I grew up poor, but it didn’t seem like that at the time. We lived in a tenement building, six families per house. We had a
four-room railroad flat. There was a belly stove in the parlor and a coal stove in the kitchen. I remember my dad and I would go scrounging for wood in the middle of the winter, going down into people’s basements and breaking their bins up and stealing the wood so we could bring it home and throw it into the fire to keep warm. If you wanted to take a bath, the tub was in the kitchen, so you’d heat a pot of water and throw i a little uncomfortable.H when t into the tub and jump in.

We didn’t really go hungry, but we didn’t eat like kings either. On the way to school, I’d have a spartan breakfast. My mother would make a cup of coffee for me and then she’d put a fork into a slice of white bread, put it over the fire on the gas stove—when we finally got gas—and she’d toast it and butter it and that was breakfast.

When I was young, we had to share a bathroom with the family next door. They were an Irish family and they were clean but they were as poor as we were. Sometimes you’d go into the bathroom and there was no toilet paper, just a newspaper cut into slices. Trust me, wiping your ass with the funnies is a painful situation. The only upside was that the family next door had a couple of hot teenage girls. I used to go out on the fire escape and look in through the bathroom window and watch them pee. Growing up with these privations was just the way life was to us. If you were poor, so were the people upstairs, and the people downstairs were even poorer. So everybody helped everyone else out. It was always “Have some milk” or “Can I borrow a potato?” or “Take some butter.” There was a potpourri of nationalities in Williamsburg, a true melting pot of Irish and Italians and Polish and Jewish, and everyone got along fine.