'74 & Sunny (15 page)

“Gino!”

“Hey, Nolan.” Gino smiled.

“Gino, listen,” Nolan started. “Bend your knees a little, and bend at the waist a little . . .”

“I know how to teach him,” I said. “I been diving since I was six.” Then I whispered in Gino's ear. “You can do this for yourself. I'm holding on to your shorts, I won't let go. Just put your toes on the edge, bend your knees a little, squeeze your ears with your arms, okay?”

He got in better position and began to lean a few more pounds of himself over the edge of the pool this time. “Don't let go,” he hollered.

“I got ya; I got ya,” I said, “Come on, bend over, squeeze
your ears, and point your head toward the water. You got this!”

Just as his shaking almost overtook his whole body, Gino did everything I had asked. The checklist was complete. All he had to do was fall forward and wait for me to let go of his shorts. “I'm ready . . .” he screamed. “Here I go!”

He leaned his whole body forward and was in perfect position to beautifully slide into a dive. I let go at the perfect second, only to watch Gino's arms pull away from his ears, point his chin to the sky and smack his body hard on the surface of the water. Splat!

He came up from under the water a second later. “Did I do it? I think I did it,” he screamed.

“Does your belly hurt?” I said.

“Yes, it's killing me. Does it always hurt when you dive?”

“No, Gino,” I said. “It only hurts when you
don't
dive and you do a belly flop!”

“Oh . . . I'm sorry. I thought I had it.”

“That's okay,” I said. “We'll get it right.”

While he was watching us and drinking from a jelly glass, Nolan opened up a shopping bag filled with brand-new Topps baseball cards. The ones that came with the dusty wafer of bubble gum in the pack.

“Look at this,” he said to Gino and me, as he dumped the goods on the backyard patio. “Baseball cards. You gotta look though. There might be a Lou Piniella in there!”

“Oh, this is so cool!” I said, as I ripped through the bounty.

Gino went searching but didn't quite know what he was looking for. Nolan picked up on that and began to help him. “Let's see what you got in this pack,” Nolan said. “Nah. Nah. Nah. Yeah . . . Bobby Murcer. You hold on to that card. He'll be a Hall of Famer.”

“Who's Bobby Murcer?” Gino said.

“Don't worry,” I interrupted, while shuffling through my deck of cards, with a mouth full of bubble gum. “I'll tell him.”

By the time we pushed the boat off the dock and headed down the crooked canals toward the bay, Nolan and Gino had bonded to the degree that Gino was actively listening to Nolan telling him how to scoop up crabs. My father was at the wheel, while Jack and Frankie manned the most important spots—on the bow, with the long nets and their giant handheld flashlights plugged into a car battery on the floor of the boat. I stuck to the back of the boat, my mission being to catch any crabs that escaped Jack and Frankie's angle. Gino and Nolan worked the other side of the boat, but I could tell my father wasn't expecting too much out of them. In the middle of the boat there stood a garbage can. It worked this way: crabs like to swim near the surface at nightfall. If you were good with the flashlights, you could spot some fifteen yards away and direct my father as he was slowly meandering in and out of the bridge's concrete pillars, which was no easy task.

“Pop! Pop!” Jack would say. “Ten feet to the right . . . ten yards ahead, I got my eyes on three right on top of the water.”

“Okay, okay,” my father would say, through a cigarette in his lips. “Here we go. . . .”

And that's the way in went all night. Whatever Jack couldn't reach, Frankie scooped. And vice versa. Maybe every ten minutes or so, I'd hear the guys tell me about a crab they missed. “A.J. . . . coming your way,” they'd yell. “Port side, two feet deep, a big muthafucka. Don't screw it up!”

And I'd get ready, with my smaller flashlight and longer crab net, as my father backed up the boat in tiny spaces while forty or fifty other boats were doing the same thing. It was maddening at times. I'd barely catch any at the stern because a crab would usually dart down to the bottom of the bay within a second if you reached and whiffed on it.

“Damn it,” Jack would say. “He was right there.”

“Sorry.”

“All right,” my father would assure me. “Let's get the next one.”

Meanwhile, on the starboard side of the boat, Nolan was teaching Gino how to hold a flashlight and a net. And it was Nolan—amid our maddening desire to fill the trash can with blue claws—who helped Gino scoop up a couple of crabs that might've gotten away. It was Nolan who taught Gino, on the spot, how to tell a male crab from a female crab. And it was Nolan who explained the oddity of catching a soft-shell crab. It was all stuff Gino would've learned back at the house, but Nolan's soft-natured coaching slid Gino into a different groove. To what extent, it wasn't yet apparent.

11

SPILL THE WINE

T
here came points during summer vacation where I didn't want to spend every single second outside, where every game or far-flung idea was a way of measuring our skill at sports or neighborhood mischief. It wasn't as if I was tired of the competition or scared of the challenges that my friends and I would put before one another. It was, plain and simple, a much better way to let Gino have me to himself. And in so doing, I felt like I could make his vacation much more memorable and less harrowing. Whenever I thought back to that teary phone call Uncle Larry placed to my house or the excursion to the sporting goods store or any one of the times my father shot me that look that said,
Take care of your cousin,
it just seemed like the thing to do. It was only right. If I expected Gino to be
front and center for all the crazy things my family, my friends, and I did or said and, more, figured him to just soldier on as if he were one of the guys, then I was going to have to do some of the activities he'd been asking me to take part in for weeks on end.

“Hey, what time does that show on PBS
Hodgepodge Lodge
come on,” I asked him out of the blue.

“What? Why?” he said, barely containing himself.

“You want me to watch it, right? It's your favorite show.”

“And . . . you're saying you want to watch it. With me?”

“Well, I ain't watching it all alone,” I said.

He was acting like a caged puppy when they see you walking toward them with food.

“Okay,” he said. “Let me put on channel thirteen right now and see. It's always on. I'm sure it's on. What if it's not on? Are you saying you only want to watch it with me right now, or whenever it's on . . . ?”

“Calm down, calm down, calm down,” I said, laughing. “Just switch the dial to thirteen.”

And sure enough it was on. And before me was the sight of a woman, the host of the show, which always made me flip the dial really quickly whenever I was making a pass and checking to see if the more-mature program
Zoom
was airing.

“There's
Miss Jean
,” Gino shrieked. “It's on. It's on.”

“All right now,” I said. “What am I watching? What happens on this show?”

Those simple questions, or more precisely, my interest
in
his
interests was to Gino what an intense game of stickball was to me.

Gino went on to breathlessly explain that Miss Jean would let everyone in on the wonders of nature. As we sat there and watched one episode and then another and then, to his insane delight, one
more
episode, I got the gist of what she was doing. This Miss Jean—as dowdy and masculine as a lesbian in Timberlands—would spend thirty minutes opening up a pinecone and exploring its depths in the hopes of seeing a beetle or worm. Or she would examine the habitat of a hedgehog or a red fox. She was always gentle in her approach to nature and, looking back, might have even been one of the leaders of our modern conservationist movement. But, boy, was she boring as fuck!

“Isn't she interesting?” Gino said. “I think she's beautiful.”

“You think that's a beautiful woman?”

“Well, if not beautiful, then
very
pretty.”

“All right, okay,” I said. “We been sitting here in this room—which is as hot as my balls—for ninety minutes. Can I show you who I think is beautiful?”

“You mean Debbie next door, right?”

“How do you know what I feel about Debbie?” I said.

Gino smiled a bit. “When we play flashlight tag, you and her disappear for, like, a half hour,” he said. “And I just figured you were sitting someplace real dark and talking and stuff.”

“And stuff?”

“Well”—he squirmed—“you know . . .”

“Yeah, sure, I get it,” I said. “Look, I think Debbie is hot, but she's young, ya know? I'm talking about showing you a beautiful
woman
. I wanna see if what I show you does the same thing to you as it does to me. I wanna see what happens.”

“Well, what's gonna happen?” Gino said.

“Just wait.”

We went upstairs and I laid chest down on the rug and fished out a
Playboy
from way back beneath my bed. I don't even know why I hid the things. My father always had
Playboy
s strategically placed around the house—in his master bathroom, next to his living room recliner, in the trunk of his car, et cetera. He made no bones about me opening one up. In fact, I think he wanted me to.

But there I was on the floor, moving aside an old pair of roller skates, an erector set, and a chemistry kit until I laid my hands on the box containing the board game Candy Land.

That was where I kept my stash.

“What is that?” Gino said nervously. “Is that a naked-lady magazine?”

“Yep. The best kind.
Playboy
. And it's a good one.”

I put it on the floor and started flipping the pages.

“It's hot in here,” Gino tried. “You wanna go in the pool for a while?”

“Soon,” I said. “I want you to see this girl—”

“What about Aunt Lilly?”

“She's cooking. Besides, we can hear her coming a mile
away. It takes her ten minutes to climb those thirteen steps. Relax.”

I flipped the pages slowly, passing a couple of pictorials before I kept it cracked open to the centerfold, which featured Miss July 1973, Martha Smith. (A few years later, Smith was in
Animal House
and appeared in a scene with her shirt getting ripped off to reveal her white bra. I remember she had her hair up and wore long, white, cotton gloves. That's what first got me hooked on her. Not my type at all—a little on the short side, blond, and a real WASP. But who has control over their first movie crush?)

“What do you think?” I said.

I watched Gino take it all in. He was actually amused, not shy at all, which surprised me.

“Let me flip through this for a second,” he said, giggling.

“Have a ball,” I told him, as I put the mag on his lap and I shuffled through the box for another issue. I carefully watched as Gino turned from the very first page all the way to the end, where they kept the naughty comic strip
Little Annie Fanny
. Then I watched him go through it from back to front, as he stopped on some things and breezed past others. It was in those little moments, when we each had a
Playboy
in our hands, that I cheated to see where Gino's eyes stopped. I saw he stayed on pages longer that featured handsome men selling Pierre Cardin cologne or Barbasol shave cream or YSL sports coats. We were reading the same magazine, whose very purpose touted a “lifestyle for men.” In those moments, it was
now obvious that Gino and I might be headed for two very different lifestyles. At least in our heads and lustful hearts, anyhow.

“A.J., Gino . . .” my mother shouted up the steps. “Peter and some other friends are at the door. Come on down.”

“I'll put these right back in the same spot if you ever wanna look again,” I said. “You don't have to ask me, just reach way in the back, inside the Candy Land box.”

“Umm, okay,” Gino said. “What does Pete want to do? Do I have to play if it's kickball?”

“Believe me,” I said. “After last time, kickball is the
last
thing we want to play.”

Most of the bad things we did that summer were hatched next door in Pete's spit-shined two-car garage. Whenever Pete's father was walking the beat on an overnight shift in the city, his mother was usually busying herself with housework or long chitchat sessions on the kitchen phone. Sometimes she'd be upstairs with her eldest daughter, Joanna, watching
Kojak
or whatever popular TV show was on that night. The last place she'd visit was the garage. Maybe she was afraid of what she'd see. For whatever reason, she never ventured in. Never knocked on the door, nothing. But it was the kid who was suddenly tagging along with Pete that made this night a bit more dangerous. I didn't want to scare Gino, but the “new” kid among us was Vinny D'Avanzo. Vinny was a kid who had moved into the neighborhood a year ago, and he was still convinced he had to do some stupid, daring things in
order to be accepted in our clique. He had a cute eleven-year-old sister named Tina who was always like a shadow to him. On this particular night, Vinny was dying to hang out with us but he couldn't shake his sister. So, in his own twisted, little mind, he devised a plan that we could all hang out in Pete's garage and be okay with Tina's company.

On many occasions, Pete's garage was like an after-hours club. There were nights we all sneaked in bottles of any type of liquor we could smuggle out of our houses. One night we even passed around a bottle of old, spoiled vermouth. Another time, we watched Richie Tischler blow smoke rings with his brother's unfiltered Camels. When we felt really crazy, we'd creep to the hallway on the second floor of his house and jump down the laundry chute and land in the heavy-duty hamper in the corner of the garage. It was a straight drop. I don't know how we didn't break our backs.

But that night was different. Gino and I followed Pete and Vinny to the garage and were quickly met by Richie and Perry, who were flipping baseball cards on the driveway. Vinny took us all aside before we entered the garage and gave us the skinny. Only God knows how he got this out of his mouth.

“Hey guys, hold up, hold up,” Vinny said, with a slight smirk on his face. “Tina wouldn't disappear. I can't shake her tonight. And my mom says I gotta watch her . . .”

Tischler was the first to pipe up. “Then what the hell are we gonna do with that little cockroach snooping on us all night?”

Vinny took an approach that put a stink on diplomacy, let alone family values.

“Listen,
listen
,” he said. “I told her she could hang out for a little while, but I asked her what price she was willing to pay.”

“And what'd she say?” I asked.

And here's where nothing makes sense at all, but—years later—it would become one of those handful of nights a boy never forgets. However she figured it out—maybe with a shove from Gloria Steinem—but Tina knew she, as a young girl around a bunch of boys, was holding a better hand. She laid out her deal points to big brother, and he explained them to our confused, frightened, and timid souls.

“So . . . Tina wants to hang with us guys tonight,” he said. “And we all know my little sis is cool, right?”

“Yeah, right, yeah,” we all mumbled.

“Well, here's the deal,” he said. “She said if we let her hang out with us for a night, she'd take her shorts off and show us . . . her
beaver
.”

And there it was. One minute you're sitting in your hot bedroom flipping through
Playboy
, trying to figure out life. The next, your cute, little neighbor—who you've known since kindergarten—is offering up her private parts as a way to fit in with the boys. Between Debbie's promise and Tina's offering, I was happy, excited, and sick to my stomach all at the same time. Gino was as white as the sheets in the hamper.

One of us, I can't remember who, started laughing wildly.
“What the fuck are you talking about? Where? When? She's just gonna pull her shorts down in the garage?”

“No,” Pete said. “Here's the deal: she's behind the azalea and rhododendron bushes right now. She won't do it in the garage with all the lights on.”

She had her scruples.

So, once we composed ourselves the best we could, we all marched quietly to Pete's backyard and lined up right by the giant bushes, where Tina was lying on a blanket, out of our view, with her shorts off. Fortunately, for us, the moon was glowing strong enough that we didn't need the bright lights of the garage.

Pete parted the bushes and we ducked in one by one. None of us had seen one in the flesh before. Tischler went first, Perry second, I was third, and Gino last. It was like a receiving line. Tischler was already in and out and laughing really loudly as Perry dipped behind the hedges for his ten-second view. By the time I walked in and knelt next to Tina, I could feel the other boys' faces staring at me through holes in the bushes. I didn't like the predicament I was in, since I really liked Tina. She was a brown-skinned, pretty girl—almost as dark as I was—because I think she was Sicilian on her mother's and father's sides. When it was my turn to do whatever it was we were supposed to do, I sat down beside her and touched her tight, flat belly and I looked in her eyes and tried to figure out her motive. It was nothing like the
Playboy
s up in my room. Tina's area was so small and delicate and, with her
little bikini lines glowing in the dark, I could barely make out any hair at all, but I took a good, long look. As beautiful and vulnerable as she was, I did what all the boys did: I just stared at what she was nervously presenting to us. She looked me in the eyes and giggled uneasily, then covered her area with her hands as if to say,
That's it, show's over.