By Dave Esposito

Chapter 1 

He threaded life like a needle…

David E.  bolted upright in bed one morning at 4 am with a slam to the chest and a heavy sock from a dream stuffed down his throat,  struggling for air and bucking like a pony with a hornet under the saddle, convinced that he was having a heart attack or drowning in an unknown ocean. 

His mother and twin sister and first playmate centerfold found on the dirt road behind his house when he was twelve, tumbled through his mind, everything flung about, images and sound, along with names he neither could remember nor pronounce; tossed around like a giant salad with too much dressing.  Then he found himself engulfed in a giant wooly coat floundering and sinking and taking on water like a sinking boat, thrashed by a giant fish tail that was dragging him to the bottom and oblivion beyond until a mountainous wave threw him upside down and his neck cracked on the flat, hard beach and his mouth and eyes and swim shorts too filled with clumps of grit and soggy seaweed. The sand in his mouth tasted like tapioca pudding. The wooly coat vanished and now there were feathers flying around in the sunlight lightly tickling him until the feathers turned into a dog smothering him in slobber and sunlight and swallowing him down to his shoulders while he yelled “Sit Tippy Sit!” An old Kirby vacuum cleaner hoovered everything up, swirling and whirlpooling the snails and the seaweed and even the sucked in earring his mother lost long ago and that he spent a full day searching for and for which he is still blamed for losing. His head broke the surface like a soapy rainbow bubble and he coughed up a mouthful of sandy seawater and then he was awake and alone sitting up in bed, his palms pressing into the mattress, the death-struggle banished. What a long night it had been with the clawing and paralysis and churning fog wrapping around him like a damp sheet, and through which he could see fragments of photos and paintings and filmstrips and welding flashes.

When his head had cleared, he began his usual ponderings and musings of the day on the subject of himself, a one day to be great man and captain of his own destiny, asking himself rhetorically and in a  tragic Shakespearean tone: 

“Who amongst us can fathom their own path to glory, legend, or myth…or alternately, ruin and defeat? Who amongst us hasn’t tasted the honey of romance… or suffered lost love like the sting of a swallowed hornet drunk in an outdoor wedding banquet’s punch cup? Who cannot feel empathy for those born low and useless, while others also born low and useless soar to the eagle’s lair? And who cannot commiserate and rejoice with those  short in height, though not in girth, who race upwards to Olympian heights like Icarus yet keep their heated feathers cool by ducking into a rain cloud now and then? Alas those who have never gasped the rarefied air at the edge of space can hardly heed the call to mingle with the space junk just beyond.” 

These were the baseline features of the universe and David E’s own good self that he was born into and that he took as his inheritance…

It can be said that, “a man does not become a man until he becomes no man and then…… Every Man!”  And David was no exception.  Late in life it was often said of him that he began with the end in mind, and though he kissed many posteriors while navigating his way through the corporate muck of his so-called professional career,  he was never able to kiss his own - and thus always a bridesmaid never a bride which was an eternal cause of vexation, (in retrospect how could it be otherwise?). It was said of him that he lived life with a gusto often compared to binge drinkers and those with eating disorders, though he was high functioning enough to hold down a Second-Shift Slaughterhouse Assistant 2 position at the Hormel Meat Pork and Poultry processing plant in Andover. But let us not digress…

David (shall we simply call him he?) was forever youthful even for his age and at nine months, David had what he later liked to call, his first documented memory.

Close your eyes oh curious reader and let this image accrete to the  back walls of your eyelids…and perchance your curious nostrils as well:

An open window  breathes life into thin linen curtains that flutter like toilet paper hanging above a forced hot air vent. The room is tinged in the greenish sepia glow of an earlier time and place:

Something really stinks…

the infant inchoate

feels rather than thinks. 

The bedroom door opens and the warm cooing  bringer-of-good-things-to-put-in-his-mouth is there. Always… like magic! And just in time to take away the rapidly cooling mushy sensation that somehow he has something to do with. He’s glad about that too. “Make far” is how he would put it if he had words.

 She who giveth the milk and taketh the diapers is above him now, like a giant living planet tipping towards him greeting the new day. The curtain softens her face like a veil and curves the light around it in interesting Einsteinian ways. He pays complete attention gravitating to how she looks; and though he’ll never remember this moment it establishes in him a predilection for religious iconography, but not astrophysics.

With the exception of frequent diaper decorating projects he undertook upon the walls floors furniture and curtains, and which eventually drove his father to drinking and his mother to a halfway house, he had very few memories from his first five years, but those that do remain he extrapolated from old treasured family photos such as the one at the beginning of this memoir. Oh patient reader, look deeply and with empathy and behold this happy bubbling, burbling, button of a boy, a little neighborhood ambassador of goodwill, always ready with a warm handshake, but also prone to gesticulations, babblings, tics, and odd incantations, laced with verbal threats aimed at people, and sometimes objects, that he suspected were looking at him in a threatening manner. 

In these instances, a trip to his father’s basement workshop produced a claw hammer and in one year he pounded four toasters, a pasta maker, a toilet bowl, and his brothers stamp collection into oblivion, but happily no people. His outside hostilities were limited to the vegetable garden, and his mother’s tomatoes and grapevines, which he often got tangled up in and therefore hated such that his parents aided by social workers and academic advisors hoped he could be placed in secure Special Ed classes until  graduating into VoTech or the military.  

Prophetic were the portents to be gleaned from those early snapshots of a heavily diapered David, alone in the backyard of the family’s two bedroom one bathroom Cape Cod, as if a time traveling Amazon delivery person had left a package in the shape of him in his god forsaken backyard next to a tilting dog house with a chain fastened to a stake.

His mouth bubbled and frothed constantly, with the endless delights of entertaining himself and his many imaginary friends, until someone, a mother, a brother a sister, grabbed him by the scruff of his hand me down burgeoning diaper and hauled him up to the big table in the house for lunch. There amongst his many uncontrollable siblings he gnawed, mangled, dropped, masticated, munched, champed, chomped, crunched, bit, nibbled, gnawed, ground, consumed, devoured manducated, triturated, chumbled, choked on, and threw, his smoked beef and banana sandwich at the floor, the ceiling, the walls, his brothers and sisters, his mother, but not his father.

Ah those halcyon days of yore! Free to be left alone neglected and lost track of to invent new worlds to be discovered, conquered, and pillaged like the little conquistador he was. Free to have his cheeks shaken and pinched by his old toothless grandparents who fed him meatballs shakily at the Sunday family dinner, and pasta that he sucked in through his nose as well as his mouth. There were mountains of dirty laundry to climb and oceans of milk to drink that left him mustachioed and piles of leaves in the fall to burrow into and which at times caused him to miss a meal or two when he couldn’t find the exit. It was fortunate his mother who had seven other children did not concern herself with his whereabouts during these absences since diapers like white tailed deer are easy to spot and she figured he’d pop up at one point or another.  

Chapter 2

An Accretion of Cells

Just out of  diapers at the age of five, David encountered a dawning awareness of dissolution and death. 

• One morning: it began with the sensation that some things seemed to be permanent and some not. 

• Permanency: he could walk out of a room and he was still there. 

• Impermanence: If his mother walked out of the room and disappeared she ceased to exist. 

• Consequences: What would become of him?  

• Baseline: He existed, which was his one and only job wasn't it? 

• Reaction: Panic and bloodthirsty screaming until she returned.
  
  

Being a smart little lad and a son of the house, he passed through this dreadful stage of childhood angst within a week. His mother always returned sooner or later, and this fear of abandonment quickly gave way to a desultory yawn, then a nap until his next feeding and diaper change even though he was five and please don’t judge. Upon waking one summer's afternoon, he thought about it a little more, and realized that though she came back this time and she probably would the next, what if she went out of the room, just when he was feeling like he was on solid footing, and didn’t come back?  Ever. His eyes tilted from waking to wide open and his thumb went to his mouth. He ran his thumb and pinky  through his tumultuous curly hair and pondering turned into brooding.

One day the mother next door brought over a basket of orange fuzzy featherless ducklings. It was just past Easter and Mrs. Stackawitz was giving them away. Why she had them or where they came from nobody asked. They weren’t chocolate eggs or jellybeans.  David’s mom decided after the onslaught of wailing children clinging and tearing at her skirt and hanging from her hands so her shoulders sloped, that they could keep one. There was a moment's pause, then another mass-clamoring from her brood who pointed out the  duck would be lonely for other ducks so they needed two. David explained he knew what being a single duck was like having spent so much time in the backyard entertaining himself and his imaginary friends, and it didn’t take long for his mom to give in out of resignation and weariness. David was an odd duck himself she thought, and very young to be an expert in affixing guilt trips to parents.

The kids named the two ducks Dewey and Louie. If they could have kept a third duck they would have named it Huey. “Hooey,” said David, who preferred Samson and Delilah, but Dewey and Louie prevailed. Nobody knew whether they were boys or girls and it didn’t matter because the kids just wanted names that rhymed.  They found a shallow cardboard box and made a little bed for the ducks, decorating it with rocks and twigs and Easter grass from their Easter baskets and an empty Silly Putty egg. After David put a heavy blanket on Dewey and Lewey, nearly smothering them, his mother suggested placing a desk lamp above the cardboard bed so the ducks would stay warm and still be able to move around and breathe. She found an old lamp with a flexible neck and 75 watt incandescent bulb and positioned it on the coffee table above Dewey and Louie and left it there and went back to doing laundry. David put his hand in the light near the fuzzy ducks and it didn’t feel all that warm so he took the lamp off the coffee table with both hands and plopped it down in the middle of the cardboard bed. That definitely warmed things up though he hadn’t factored in that at a distance of less than a foot from the ducks fuzzy heads it might interfere with their ability to sleep.  After a couple of days of Dewey and Louie trying to clamber out of their cardboard box bed turned open-air oven, the romance of having pet ducks had pretty much faded for the children like the easter grass had under the blazing desk lamp and the water dish that constantly cooked off requiring regular refilling. Within forty eight hours of being ushered into the family unit the waterfowl sickened and died. David found them. They were warm but not cooked but dead and stiff with their eyes staring into the appalling light. David and his sisters and brothers squinted at them lying in their bed unmoving and unblinking. The older kids looked sad. The younger kids including David had their thumbs in their mouths and wore expressions similar to when their mother and father fought.  After staring for a while at the implacable stillness of Dewey and Louie, they turned off the desk lamp and slowly drifted away in different directions. The night Dewey and Louie died his mother was peppered with questions at bedtime about the sad end of Dewey and Louie, so she explained to the children the ducks weren’t coming back. That they couldn’t come back because they were dead. 

Dewey and Louie are never coming back?

No.

They’ll never blink or quack or run around  again?

No.

Where do they go?

Nobody knows. They don’t go anywhere. 

Are you going to die mommy?

Yes, someday.

Am I going to die? David whispered.

Yes, someday. But not for a long time.

“Those are the facts.” she said.

Facts. F-A-C-T-S.  David was deeply shaken by these impenetrable and unmovable facts. Facts were facts it seemed, and they were and are and couldn’t be changed like a wish or a fantasy like wanting Bonomo Turkish Taffy for dinner. He remembered thinking when he was a little boy that he wanted to be an airplane but his older brother while punching his leg repeatedly explained he couldn’t grow up to be a big piece of machinery and then die and become junk. “You're a little moron,” his brother explained. “A tree was a tree, a dog was a dog, a car was a car.  A tree could die and there would be new trees but there would never be that tree. A dog could die and there would be more dogs but there would never be that dog. A car could crash but it could be repaired so it didn’t count. You’re going to die too but there will still be other people,” his brother said, and punched his leg mid-thigh one more time in the same place, the pain comforting David as it distracted him from his dark thoughts.

The fear of the dark and bad dreams started that night and lasted for a couple of years. David would go to bed about the time the street lamps came on, and if there was a night breeze the orange halloween light creeped along the curtains like phantasmagoric harlequins with yellow teeth and smeared lipstick shadows, and if the air was still, the cars passing by would beam into the room and arc across up  over and down the ceiling and walls into the scary closed closet. The shadows were sure to turn into monsters, and terrified David knew they would take him away and drag him under a bridge in the dark and do things to him if he didn’t keep his eyes open and watch them to make sure they remained shadows. It was almost impossible to close his eyes and sleep. If he closed his eyes he would die or be taken somewhere awful. Or more waves of shadows  would sneak and creep along the walls elongating and squeezing their way onto the floor and under his bed and up through his mattress and around his neck and suffocate him. Like many other children his age, he needed the bedroom door to be open and the hallway light to be kept on. “Don’t worry David, if you die you’ll go to heaven,” his older sister explained.

The morning after the ducks died the kids held a funeral. David was draped with a cape fashioned by his sisters from an old table cloth so he would look like a priest. They were given a shoebox with a lid by their mother who directed  the older kids to dig a hole in the woods behind their house and bury the box . She placed the dead ducks on an old open diaper in the box side by side, and folded half the diaper across their faces. Her kids gathered along with a number of invited neighborhood dignitaries who were kids too. David’s liturgical vestments kept slipping off his shoulders, so his older brother gathered and cinched them up to his chin and tied it very tightly to his neck with grubby tomato line jute from last year's garden. 

David held  a staff of the prophets made from a branch and a small tuna tin in which a dry punk from a nearby drainage ditch was crumbled and lit with matches producing a reasonable substitute for incense. He carried it carefully so as not to burn the woods down. The dead ducks in their cardboard sarcophagus were borne by the kids, two in the front and two in the back, who rested it on their shoulders like real pallbearers or Egyptian slaves or like they had seen in the Miracle of Marcelino. They walked solemnly from the picnic table staging area to the woods which was just an overgrown field with a few scrubby bushes and small trees. They stopped at the hole which had been dug nice and square late the previous afternoon. One of his sisters hummed organ music and the kids bent some green twigs into the shape of a wreath and wrapped forsythia blooms over and under and around it. They put the box in the hole and made sure the lid was on so no dirt would get on the ducks. The youngest kids looked on quietly with thumbs in their mouths as David blessed the grave and shook the tuna tin with smoking incense up and down and side to side. Then the kids pushed the pile of dirt into the hole and mounded it up and planted a cross they had fashioned from two small saplings lashed together with more jute.  

The kids wandered off and David remained. He loosened the twine around his neck and considered coming back later and digging up the box to make sure the ducks were ok and maybe even gone which would be even better. He never did though, and he stayed away from the sad grave of Dewey and Louie from then on.

Chapter 3

My first wake…

When I was six years old my family moved from Princeton New Jersey to a nearby town called Lawrenceville. There were eight of us living at home including Mom and Dad, and we went from a small two-bedroom Cape Cod with one bathroom to a larger colonial home with an acre of land around it and a field next door, and beyond that a golf course which added to the status of our new place. My brothers and sisters and I missed our friends and schoolmates who seemed so far away it was as if we had left them behind on a one way trip to the New World. It was Fall; the sentimental season to me, though I didn’t have that vocabulary back then, just the sensations and the windy weather and tumbling leaves that heightened our uprootedness and longing for the little Cape Cod at 271 Walnut Lane. 

My mother wanted this new place and my father gave it to her. She wanted it because it was a step up in size and style with a bigger kitchen and a third bedroom and a washer and dryer already installed, and Dad gave it with the pride of a man who wants the status of giving his wife what she wants in the subconscious hope that it becomes known to friends, family, customers, and other men. Like buying jewelry that is flaunted in public but instead of jewelry, a house.  Fortunately, she did not want jewelry anyway, she did not want fancy clothes either, she wanted the nicely proportioned and sited Colonial at 51 Franklin Road, with its circular driveway and large fireplace flanked by knotty pine walls and beautiful cast iron radiators.   She stayed home and took care of us kids, and Dad had a gas station that he ran with brother who stole from him and who was the cause of many fights between him and Mom. Dad was in his early forties, Mom was seven years younger and she was a head-down, overburdened, overstressed, working machine and a devout front-row Catholic. 

The house on Franklin Road was much bigger than our previous Princeton address, but it still had only one bathroom which my three sisters locked themselves in to work on their hair and makeup. Time in the bathroom was practically metered for my brothers and me. This was the late fifties though, and it was common for homes of the blue collar lower middle class to have only one bathroom even though larger families were the norm. People made do. My brothers Joey, Tommy, and I used the woods and farmer’s field next door, which provided enough cover to relieve ourselves without being caught, and so public decency was maintained. 

Lawrenceville was a different world to me compared to Princeton just seven miles north. It was so far away! We only had one car and my dad drove it and since Mother didn’t  drive and we couldn't afford a second car anyway, we kids were stuck within the radius we could bicycle. With the new home came a new school and the challenge of making a whole new set of friends in a suburban neighborhood where the homes were further apart and less connected and you rarely saw anybody outside. I figured they all must have color TV, which was the big new entertainment development of the time, and that's why they kept to themselves, as we would have, if our mother had let us.

Our home had a long gravel driveway which ran a hundred yards or so from the main road then forked to the right up a little grade to the back entrance of the house where a constantly shedding mulberry tree was centered in the driveway circle. Continuing straight at the fork led to the back road behind our house which separated the property lines of our neighbors to the right from a large stand of woods on the left. It ran for a quarter of a mile before reconnecting with Franklin Road. It was a mysterious private little stretch, less like a road and more like a wide path with moss and straggly grass growing and threatening to erase the tire tracks and road bed of the few automobiles that drove back there. Tree limbs connected from either side of the road overhead like giant arms and when I walked or biked down the back road through the seclusion and shady stillness, I traveled quickly and didn’t look back. It reminded me of TV westerns that featured an ancient Indian burial ground, cursed to anyone who entered. It felt like that.

 Even the far back of our property which bordered the back road was worrisome. When we took over the house it was overgrown and full of garter snakes that were scary enough because they lay in wait and you barely had time to jump away when your foot was about to land on one. The grass had grown high enough to hide dangerous chuck holes and divots and it had arranged itself in strange mogul-like tufts that led to me turning an ankle one time when taking a shortcut to the back road. Some of the overgrown areas were beaten down almost flat where small deer herds slept at night. Maybe the divots came from their hooves. I never saw them during the daytime, but it unsettled me to think they were back there and awake when I was a sleepless little six year old too tired to even sleep. I could see their eyes light up and and their heads shift side to side on inky nights when headlights from Franklin Road swept past them. I watched them and they seemed to watch me, and maybe they saw the shadows climbing the bedroom walls too, especially where they ebbed and swooped down into the bedroom closet which I wanted to open and look inside but never could. Until morning.

There was another problem with the overgrown deep grass along the back road. My parents were told by the previous owners, the Richardsons,  that they once kept a pet alligator who lived back there submerged in a small concrete pool. They explained that the alligator had crawled off and disappeared a couple of years back even though there was a wire fence surrounding the pool. The alligator was never found, and Mr and Mrs. Richardson let the backyard turn into a field which swallowed the pool up in a couple of years. They urged us to be forewarned, and not to stumble into it, implying that it was my parents' problem now and which Mom and Dad accepted passively as if it were a natural fact that the Richarson’s dictated all terms of the sale of the house. The next day Mom sent my brothers and me out to find the alligator pool. It took a while walking the lawn back and forth, beating the bush and poking with sticks to find the concrete pool under the overgrowth. We tore away the tufted grass and brambles and some old bottles and cans and swept it out with a whisk broom from my dad’s shed. It was an old, pebbly, greenish brown concrete rectangle with a ramp on one side presumably to let the creature come and go! We never found any sign of the wire fence the Richardson’s had told us was there to protect the neighborhood.

So on sleepy scary nights I now had three things to be anxious about: the flickering shadows in my bedroom, especially where they flowed down and seeped through the crack at the bottom of the closet door, the glowing shifty eyes of the silent deer in the backyard that appeared to be staring right at me, and the abandoned home of the alligator who crawled off and was  never found except in my deepest fears and anxieties.

My mom made extra money by babysitting and sewing for other moms in the neighborhood. Lori B. was a little five year old girl who lived two houses up the street from us and who my mother babysat. Lori lived with her grandparents Randall and Edna because her mother had abandoned her along with a wrecked marriage she had entered into years before. They were in their eighties when they took Lori on, and they soon learned they could not handle the fury this discarded little girl held within her. The neighborhood had a pretty good grapevine where news and views were exchanged, and Mom, having learned of the situation, spoke to Randall and Edna and offered to watch Lori five days a week effective  immediately. It took Lori and Mom a half an hour to lock horns. She ran everywhere and screamed a lot even in the middle of normal sentences.  She threw things. She tore up my younger brother’s thousand piece puzzles. She had chapped red lips from compulsive licking that extended a half an inch into the surrounding skin. She misbehaved repeatedly. She collided with mother hourly: 

Mother: “Lori please stop stamping your feet.”

Lori: “I won’t, I won’t!”  

Mother: “You will, you will!’ 

Lori: “I won’t, I won’t!”

Mother: ‘You will, you will!’

And so on… 

Mom asked us to be nice to Lori because she had no mom and dad of her own. Her red chapped lips looked painful to me and I felt sorry for her and I could never fight with her, even when for no reason,  she would run past me,  digging me in my arm with her bony elbow. Though I didn’t have words I knew she was special and kind of magnificent the way my mother was on her good days. Lori was high strung. Lori was difficult. But I liked the fact that Lori wasn’t afraid of anything. She was defiant. But slowly Mom tamed her; no, gentled her down,  and sat with her and read books to her and let her help her in the kitchen. I think they fell in love with each other and I say that because Lori B. was a major part of my moms life from then on and was at her deathbed fifty five years later holding her hand with both of hers.

One afternoon I was taken to the dentist by my father. Mom came along too because there was something they needed to do after my checkup. My father wore his dark suit, and his hands were perfectly scrubbed clean from his gas station work. He wore a white shirt  requiring cufflinks, and I could smell the Old Spice aftershave he reserved for Mass on Sunday mornings. My mother wore a black dress and pearl necklace with matching earrings. A black lace mantilla covered her head. We drove to the dentist and my parents waited where Dr. Mancer found a small cavity and drilled away with a belt driven machine that clattered around in my mouth. After completing his work and switching off the stunningly bright light that blinded me and gave me a headache, Mom and Dad took me to the car and informed me they were going to the town’s funeral home to attend a wake.  

What’s a wake? I asked, my lower lip rubbery and numb.

It’s something you go to when someone dies.

To bury them? Like Dewey and Louie?

No, not exactly

Well what then?

To view the body and say how sorry you are to the dead person’s family. 

View the body?

The dead person is put in a box and people go up and kneel down and say goodbye to it.

Can I come in too?

No, you should wait in the car. 

Why can’t I come in?

You’ll be scared David, you’re too young. You stay here now, we should be about twenty minutes. Here’s a coloring book…

I protested some more but Mom and Dad said no. They walked down towards the funeral home leaving me watching them. I became excited and curious. This was my chance! A real dead person! I’ve got to see this. I’m not scared; I’ve seen dead ducks before, so he’s dead… like a duck! Doesn't scare me! My mind was on fire and I couldn’t think of anything but that this fascinating darkness was so close and that I wanted to know all about it. After ten minutes of wanting to go into the funeral home but not wanting to make Mom and Dad mad, I gave up trying to be obedient  and got out of the car and walked down the sidewalk and up the steps to the funeral home. I told the man at the door my Mom and Dad were inside and I wanted to talk to them. Amazingly he let me in. I walked down a quiet darkened hallway where big people were shoulder to shoulder and talking to each other in low voices. They didn’t seem to notice me. Then I turned left into an arched entrance and a large room with sorrowful purple drapes that blocked all the sunlight and a row of chairs where an old lady and some other younger people were sitting. The room reeked of flowers, and was heavy with the dull hum of murmuring people. A line of people stood and talked to the ones who were seated, and then moved along so other people could speak with them too. The people in line were serious and  intent and spoke to the old lady while holding her hands in theirs. The old lady mostly just nodded. There were no kids in the room. 

I didn’t see Mom and Dad anywhere. I look at the other end of the room and there it was. I was barely noticed as I walked towards the unmistakable dead person displayed only from the waist up in a dark earthy colored wood box. The lid of the box was covered with rich looking fabric and ringed with flowers.  I swallowed and felt like the room was spinning,  and that I was being drawn forward as if I was a paperclip and the man in the box was magnetized. What little light there was in the room was absorbed by the brighter light above the box, as if the light itself was magnetized too. It shone on an old dead man with the whitest, coldest face I had ever seen as if he had been dusted with flour and put in a refrigerator. He had thin purple penciled lips. His hands were holding a rosary and he had long marble-like veins that stood up like snowy bluish far off mountain ranges. He was absolutely still and suddenly I felt like I was looking at myself looking at him from a great distance. 

My mother shook me out of my trance:

“David!” She was on one knee at my side. 

“Hi Mom.”

“I told you to stay in the car. Are you OK? Are you

scared?”

“I’m fine, I’m not scared Mommy,” I said as my 

thumb moved to my lips and my hand clutched her

arm.”

“Are you sure you are OK?” She asked.

“I’m not scared at all. I’m fine. It’s just a dead

old man. He’s dead.”

“Ok David, let go of my arm,” she said detaching my 

fingers from the sleeve of her dress, “and let’s go 

home.”

“OK Mommy but I’m fine”, as in wouldn’t it be fun 

to drop in on the second wake being held in the next 

room over. 

I took one more long look at the dead man whose name was Mr McCauslin. Coffin and McCauslin sounded alike and I started repeating “coffin” and “McCauslin” “coffin” and “McCauslin” over and over. We walked out of the funeral home. The skies were beginning to darken and it felt like rain. Mommy and Daddy walked on either side of me on the way back to the car.  

For the rest of the afternoon I waited for the novocaine and my rubbery lip to wear off. At dinner my brothers and sisters asked me all about the dead man in the box, and I cheerfully explained how white and dead he was, even deader than Dewey and Louie, and how  sunken he looked and how comfortable the coffin looked with the pillows and tufts he was laying on, and the gleaming wood and brass of the box and the handles and mostly how seeing the dead man in the box didn’t scare me at all. 

At 7:00 we were allowed to watch an episode of “Super Circus” with Claude Kirschner and Clownie in black and white. Then at 7:30 I was told I was first for bath night and was sent upstairs to undress and get in the tub. My mother finished drawing the water, and as I was stepping into the tub it began to lightning and thunder outside. It was a warm night and the curtains blew in as the storm swept upon us. Then a brilliant flash of lightning bleached the room white and I saw Mr McCauslin’s dead face in the towel hanging up in front of me just as an enormous thunderclap sounded. I launched out of the tub, grabbed the towel with the dead man’s face and ran down the second floor stairs trailing water behind me and crying all the way. “I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die”,  I wailed convulsively over and over. My mother tried to comfort me and I sobbed and sobbed and my body shook and I told her I didn’t want to go to bed alone and I wanted to have the lights left on and my sister, once again offered her assessment that if I died I would go to heaven.

My sleeping and night fears grew worse over the following few weeks. I did everything but wet my bed. The door to the bedroom had to be left open and the light left on in the hallway. The closet door had to be kept open, and I checked inside and under the bed to make sure nothing was lurking before pulling the covers up to my neck for protection even though I wasn’t cold. My mother’s bedroom door had to be kept open in case I was being attacked by dead people. I indulged every horror that could befall a young boy like myself until finally, and mysteriously, I fell asleep and then instantly awoke six hours later as if no time had passed. I woke up intact, alive, and not in some dead person’s coffin. Just to be sure everything was OK, I checked the closet and under the bed…

Lori was becoming part of the family. In addition to the weekdays that Mom babysat, she would walk across the neighbor’s lawn on weekends to spend time with us and, mainly to be around mother. Mom would serve her tea and a cookie and Lori would chatter incessantly but without the screaming. Mom would sit and listen and and smile and sigh and shake her head and give Lori a little advice every now and then.  The rest of us left them alone with their tea because we knew that this was just between them. It also enabled us to go outside and to get away with a lot more than usual. 

I asked Mom, after Lori went home on the Saturday after my visit to the funeral parlor, why her lips were so red and sore looking. Mom said some kids bite their nails and others suck their thumbs and Lori licks her lips all the time until they dried out and became chapped. “She’s doing it less though,” Mom added. “But is she scared of the dark and monsters?” I asked. “I don’t think Lori is afraid of anything,” Mom said. “She’s just angry at not having a mother.” 

I thought about that some.  So the next time she came over I asked her if she was scared of monsters at bedtime. She didn’t have a lot of time to talk, because she was tearing around from one project to another person to another project in the yard, and this activity usually was part of a roundtrip that began and ended with Mom, to whom Lori would give a summary update of what she had been doing for the last ninety seconds. She didn’t say anything the first time I asked if she was scared of monsters, so I got ready to ask again after she turned around at the mulberry tree and headed back in my direction. I thought she was going to run right past me but she stopped short and practically screamed, ‘No I’m not scared of monsters! They had better be scared of me!” She ran off punching her hands in the air and running over to my mom and hugging her leg.  

I was stunned. I was shocked. I felt like a switch had been thrown. I just needed to think like her, like Lori. Lori had it all figured out. Lori didn’t take any crap from anyone or anything, living or dead! All of the sudden I felt proud and important. I felt lifted up. I felt like the man of the house, or of my bedroom at least. I vowed that the next time there was lightning and thunder I would take a leisurely bath. Perhaps reading my brother’s Mad Magazine while chewing on a Twizzler. I would go to bed with no lights on and I would close my eyes and not open them till morning. If some monster in the closet woke me and I had to get out of bed,  it was going to be very, VERY sorry. I started asking around about how to kill an alligator with your bare hands and make a suitcase out of it. The next morning I asked my mom to let me know when they were going to their next wake. I would go and I would look at that dead body and I would laugh. In the meantime I would be playing in the back road all day and keeping an eye out for any alligators - there might be a family of them by now, and I looked forward to battling them. I was done with fear, I was stepping into a new day, I had won a battle with the help of a little chapped-lipped girl who lived two houses down with her grandparents…

Chapter 4

Mom and her troubles

Angelina Ranieri, my Italian mother,  was the oldest of four sisters. All the sisters’ names ended with ‘ina’: Pasqualina, Adelina, Philomina, and Angelina, and they were all raised in Princeton New Jersey, which is where I was raised too. 

Angelina was born in 1916. Her father, Sigismundo, and her mother, Pasqualina, were first generation Italians who passed through Ellis Island sometime around 1900. They spoke no English when they arrived in America and that never really changed much though they lived another sixty years in this country. They stuck with their Italian relatives and friends in a neighborhood where Italians predominated and they cooked a lot of pasta. 

Grandpa and grandma dressed simply, lived simply, and spoke simply. Even if you didn’t understand Italian, you knew what they were saying. Grandpa almost always wore a dark black suit with a matching vest and pants and a dark brown fedora. He wore this whether he was working as a gardener at the Governor's Mansion in Princeton or whether he was sitting down for Sunday dinner. Grandma wore large baggy dresses that she sewed herself, and a kerchief on her head at church. 

As kids, all we ever heard in reference to ourselves was, “bellissimo”, or “como bella” or “como esta”, (which we pronounced, “gumasta.”). They treated all the grandchildren with the utmost kindness and patience, never yelling at us no matter how much we were acting like little monsters - we entertained them and they smiled at us. That was the deal.

I only screwed up once with them. Him actually. Grandpa. We were driving somewhere and grandma and grandpa were in the car. Grandpa was sitting in the backseat by the window on the  passenger side of the car. The car was my dad’s pride and joy: a veritable living room on wheels,  a 63 Chrysler 300, white with a red leather interior.  I was 11 years old or so, and had recently gotten back from Camp Columbus, the Catholic summer camp I had been shipped off to, and where, notwithstanding the Catholicism, I was exposed to my first serving, (a dollop really), of dirty language, none of which I understood, but which served as a solid basis for certain thoughts that came later. “Your mother pulls pork”, was one, which I thought referred to barbecue,  and which was repeated constantly by the other boys. It served as a greeting, a question, a retort, an explanation, a critique, and a goodbye. “Your mother pulls pork" was never explained, nonetheless, all the boys kept saying it over and over. 

The other thing we learned at camp was how to spit. We learned to spit constantly and for no productive reason. It was a particular style of spitting which might have been called, the “line drive” technique. It was initiated by forcing saliva under extreme pressure between the two front teeth, and ejecting a thin jet of spit which made a sharp “tccchhhhhhhh” report. By the time I left that camp I was spitting every ten seconds or so, thrusting my face forward, aiming to the side and down. This was the method the older kids used and it looked the coolest to me, and so that’s how I did it. I started spitting all the time, my cabin mates were spitting all the time, everybody was spitting all the time to the extent that the camp literally became a mass movement united by this strange tic; you didn’t even think about it, it just happened every ten seconds like an intermittent windshield wiper cycling on and off.

Anyway, I was sitting in the front passenger seat looking out the side window of the Chrysler, with Grandpa sitting right behind me. All the windows in the car were down. I guess I wasn't thinking, (an understatement oft repeated throughout my life!), as it would have been contrary to the free will I would have exercised had I been given the opportunity to not choose what I was about to do, which was to stretch my mouth into a joker’s grimace, and, forcing my tongue against my two front teeth, eject a non-productive, though substantial, stream of saliva out the window. Just as I had learned at camp. Except it never made it out the window as we were traveling at 67 miles an hour, and the ejecta, far from clearing the car and descending to the roadbed below, encountered the car’s slipstream and was blown back on myself and on the grandpa behind me. “Goddamnasunnafabitch!” I heard grandpa exclaim. I looked back and he had taken off his glasses and was mopping up his vest and spectacles with the handkerchief he always carried. Then he looked at me and glared, “Daaaviee,” shaking his head. I was shaken and stirred by this reaction and vowed to never spit again without a solid reason to do so. Grandpa never ratted me out to mom or dad, and so this secret, like the Kennedy mortuary photos sealed for the last sixty years, has to this day never emerged into the public record.

My mother would go crazy about twice a week from the time of my earliest memories, through high school, and carried on after I left for college, or so I’m told by the younger siblings I left behind. You could tell when there were clouds brewing. She would be peeling potatoes or snapping beans at the kitchen sink with her head down and cocked a little to one side. She was quiet as a grave. We could see her grim expression in the kitchen window reflection while she worked at the sink. We called it, “the look of the seven dolors”. She could always be angry about something or somebody, but mostly it was my dad she liked to chew on because he didn’t control us properly in church, or because we were late for church and she had to march us all up the central aisle like a family of ducks, even if the mass had started, so that she could maintain her front-row-holier-than-thou Catholic bonafides. Dad got blamed because he spent too much time putting on his favorite cufflinks on the one day of the week he was able to stay clean from the gas station and dress up for a change, and that’s why, according to mom,  we were late getting in the car and driving to church. Poor bastard.

Complaining about the meals she served up for her six kids could also trigger a meltdown. We tried to keep our opinions to ourselves and shut up, but what on earth could you say about the stench of kidney stew, or liver and onions? We didn’t have a kitchen fan in the house and in the winter, the smell got into the pillowcases and you inhaled the reek all night. You couldn’t not smell it! The house would smell like we were living in an armpit. You avoided the kitchen at all costs for 24 hours after she cooked up one of those goddamn messes!

Then there were the salads; “big enough to feed an army”, she used to say, full of tomatoes and lettuce and cucumbers, and olives, and onions, but so dosed with vinegar that we suffered constant canker sores for years on end. Your jaws literally snapped together upon encountering it in that first forkfull, and one eye would bug out and the other would squint closed and the taste was etched into your brain if not your dental fillings. It was like when Jesus was on the cross, and one of the Roman centurions stuck him with a spear and then offered him a sponge tied to the end of a pole drenched and dripping in vinegar, but we had to be there too, drowning in the vinegar sloshed salad alongside him!

You could never get an explanation from her that made any sense. She just went up and down; mostly down. If we saw the storm blowing in, we would try and clear out and not get into the path of her rage. Unfortunately for us, she would usually blow two minutes after we sat down for dinner. We would either all be talking as if nothing was wrong, or all be quiet and getting ready for the damned thing to hit. Then, “God give me the strength to put up with you Goddamn kids!” she would wail. We would try and all look as innocent as possible and stare at the soggy brussel sprouts on the plate in front of us. We all knew that we were on our own if she singled one of us out. Everybody else would take a giant step backwards so to speak. “Better he than me,” or, “There but for the grace of God go I,” we thought to ourselves. On one occasion my younger brother, perhaps thinking strategically,  said just before the A-Bomb went off, “I really like the kidney stew Mom!”  Big mistake. She had reached the point of no return milliseconds before the hopeful but doomed ploy was proffered…

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