'74 & Sunny (5 page)

“Yeah. You know what else is
different
? Mowing the lawn is
different
. Go mow the lawn. I want us all to be out front when Uncle Larry and Gino get here, anyway.”

My father wouldn't even have been home had it not been for his brother's arrival. He worked every damn Saturday of his life. So it's safe to say that every Saturday of
my
life, I was glued to
Soul Train
. It was church. Grape soda. Doritos. And becoming more and more enamored with black culture.

On the day of Uncle Larry and Gino's arrival, I eventually went outside and was rebounding and retrieving my brother-in-law Jack's free throws on our front yard basketball hoop when I spotted Uncle Larry's forest-green convertible Alfa Romeo speeding up the block and about to turn into our driveway. As usual, Uncle Larry had his leather racing gloves on and it was a toss-up as to what shined more brightly—his perfectly round, bald head or those bright, pesto-green, laughing eyes of his. In his youth, the pictures show that he would've given Paul Newman a run for his money. As he aged
he was more a Yul Brynner type. Poor, clueless Uncle Larry was honking the horn and shouting for my father to come outside, and already—seconds into their stay—Jack had to lay down a simple rule we lived by without even thinking about it twice.

“Hey . . . Uncle Larry!”

“Hiya, Jack. You look great. How are you?”

“Listen,” Jack announced. “You can't park here. You're on our basketball court. Can't play basketball with your car on the basketball court.”

To Jack's credit, he was an elementary school gym teacher in Tuckahoe, New York, and—at various times in his tenure—had also coached the high school's varsity football, basketball, baseball, and soccer teams to winning seasons as well as county and state championships. He was also the high school's athletic director. Jack was a serious jock. I almost never saw him without a clipboard and a whistle.

Uncle Larry looked utterly confused. “We're just gonna get Gino's bags and I'll come back and move the car in a minute.”

“Can't do it. We're shooting free throws. We shoot five hundred free throws every Saturday,” Jack said. “You're breaking our rhythm.”

“You're not kidding,” Uncle Larry said.

“Hey. No.”

“Boy, oh boy . . . good luck, Gino,” Uncle Larry said.

When Uncle Larry moved his car to the curb and they
approached the house, as my family spilled out to greet them, Jack shouted to Gino, who was carrying a couple of pieces of luggage.

“Hey, Gino . . . think fast,” Jack said, as he tossed him the red-white-and-blue ABA basketball. “You're wide-open! Five seconds left. Knicks are down by one. Hit the shot. All you!”

Gino dropped his bags just in time to luckily catch the bounce pass. His pressing smile was as hard to look at as his lack of any idea of how to shoot a ball into a hoop twenty feet away. The ball looked like it weighed thirty pounds in his hands.

“Shoot it,” Jack shouted. “Four . . . three . . . two . . .
shoot it!
”

With all his might, Gino sent up a shot that went over the backboard, bounced on the roof a few times, landed in the side yard, and came to rest in a small pile of dog shit courtesy of one of our mutts, Sonny or Pippen.

Jack broke the silence with a sharp sigh. “Hey . . . Knicks lose. Gonna be a long summer.”

As all the members of our family were hugging and kissing Uncle Larry and Gino, I was so obsessed with my ABA basketball that I went and retrieved it from the pile, washed it off with the garden hose, and disappeared into the laundry room to get a towel and shine it as best as I could. But the ball had miles on it. It had been through epic, last-second moments between me and hundreds of imaginary opponents. When I wasn't trying to perfect a finger roll like Dr. J, I was performing the straight-up, climb-the-ladder jumper
of his New Jersey Nets teammate, “Super” John Williamson. There were some nights, way past dinner, when the winter wind was whipping so hard that the zipper on my ski jacket made it sound like the metal collar and tags on the neck of Greg Lavazoli's vicious Doberman when it was loose and fast approaching. But I stayed with the play, and time and again, either Walt Frazier or Earl “the Pearl” Monroe helped me pull out a buzzer-beater before I bolted to the front door to actually see if it was my zipper that was scaring the piss out of me, or, in fact, Lavazoli's bloodthirsty dog. This was when Dobermans and German shepherds were the scariest things on four legs. Nobody had pit bulls yet.

Uncle Larry had taken the long route from Jersey that day and had cut through Manhattan's Lower East Side—where he and my father were raised—so he could get the best bagels and lox and even a handful of knishes at Yonah Schimmel on East Houston Street. (That was the only non-Italian food my father allowed in the house.) Meanwhile, my mother had matched him by putting together an incredible cold antipasto plate of salami, hard-boiled eggs, anchovies, olives, and roasted peppers, with fresh garlic, basil, and lemon zest spread all over it. And then there were mussels that we had picked several days earlier on a trip to a local marsh. They were steamed with the perfect amount of garlic, butter, and white wine. We ate them quickly as if they were potato chips. We only slowed down whenever one of us bit down on a small, dark pearl.

(And fuck Rachael Ray. None of these meals could be prepared in a flash. That would've been an insult to our family and guests. Some of these meals took two days to plan: my father had to harvest the mussels and my mother had to scrape off the barnacles, pull off the moss, and begin slaving over a hot, summer stove, flavoring them and watching over them until they were perfect and not too rubbery. Thirty-minute meal, my ass.)

When everyone finished their fair share of the mini Saturday feast, my father returned from Jack and Ro's backyard bulkhead—where he was proudly getting our boat ready for a fishing trip—he proudly told the men and boys that it was gassed up and ready for us to go out and bring home some fish.

“Larry,” my father said. “Weakfish don't bite too often, but they're biting this week. And it's high tide. Let's get in the boat and go.”

But Uncle Larry had other ideas. He wanted to make sure Gino had all the athletic equipment necessary to compete anytime a game broke out in the school yard.

“Alfred,” my uncle said. “Lemme take A.J. and Gino to the sporting-goods store and buy a few things.”

With the boat's engine running, and the high tide coming in quickly, that was the last thing my father wanted to hear. “Larry, Larry . . . not now. You're talking to a sailor. We'll miss the fish.”

“Al, let me just do this,” he said. “A.J., hop in the back of the car and tell me what I need to buy.”

“Dad,” I screamed over the boat's engine, “we're only going to Babylon. We'll be right back.”

The inside of Babylon Sporting Goods on Main Street was something I had seen only through the back window of my father's car as we raced past it to see a movie at the RKO or buy some booze at the liquor store down the block from a man my father named Storio Longo
because of the long stories he spun. We never stopped at the sports shop. We never had the money to buy me new equipment. My sports equipment was the stuff Jack would sneak home from his school's supply closet from time to time. It was weathered and used and all read
PROPERTY OF TUCKAHOE HIGH SCHOOL
. I never knew the smell of a new baseball glove or the perfectly tight seams of a Clincher softball. But when Uncle Larry parked in front of the place that Saturday in June and held the door open for Gino and me, you could've told me I had just landed on the moon.

I walked in the store and brushed my hand against everything. Even things I would never, ever own, like soccer nets or tetherball sets. Uncle Larry's green eyes lit up, while Gino's enthusiasm shrunk a bit. It was obvious he didn't know sports stores.

“A.J.,” Uncle Larry said, “what does Gino need to have this summer to play with the rest of the boys?”

Talk about a loaded question.

The sales clerk stepped in and offered his help. But Uncle Larry declined, saying his nephew was going to choose what
equipment he was going to buy. And then I heard a phrase, or the formation of words, that I had never heard in my life.

“Money is no object,” Uncle Larry told the clerk, as I grabbed basketballs, footballs, baseball bats and mitts, and even some lacrosse sticks, even though I had never played the game.

Because we had always struggled financially throughout my childhood, I was used to hearing my mother yell into the phone at bill collectors, “If I write you a check it'll bounce from here to the moon.” Or, even better, in her private moments when she was balancing our family's checkbook in the middle of the sun-splashed kitchen table, using her ninth-grade education and no calculator: “Well, if a trip around the world cost a nickel, we wouldn't be able to get off the friggin' block.”

Now here I was with my uncle's open checkbook, bouncing out of the store and squeezing all the new merch into the back of his sports car.

“Thanks a lot, Uncle Larry,” I said.

“No problem,” he said. “As long as you have fun all summer. You hear me, Gino?”

Gino's head and soul were not quite aligned yet, as he fiddled with the radio and protected his hair from the wind whipping around the drop-top.

“Hey, Gino, what grade is for ten-year-olds in New Jersey?” I asked.

“I just finished fourth grade,” he said.

“
Yech!
Fractions,” I said.

“Yeah, they're not too bad,” Gino said. “It's mostly adding fractions with unlike denominators when it gets tricky.”

“Well, I'd rather go fishing than do fractions any day of the week,” I said. “You ready to fish, Uncle Larry?”

“Your father is the fisherman in the family,” he said. “But he'll teach me.”

Right then and there I knew my uncle and Gino were in for trouble. When it came to people fishing on his boat, my father had the patience of a time bomb. He had a habit of telling you how to do things once before sending you off on your own. If you didn't catch on, he'd steal glimpses of you in moments of complete incompetence and just shake his head, take a long drag on his cigarette, and mutter to himself. Not tossing the anchor overboard correctly, or squeamishly baiting a hook, or leaving the clamming sacks back home were practically capital offenses.

By the time we got back and headed for the dock, my father was already waiting at the wheel with Lorraine's fiancé, Frankie, and Jack. We shoved off and meandered down the canals of my youth and into the slapping tides of the Great South Bay. The bay had been good to us for years. In the summer of 1974, the water was still clear enough that you could see straight to the bottom, fishing twelve feet deep or so. Maybe more. There were times when we were fishing for blowfish or flounder that we could actually see where the bigger fish were and we'd drop our lines right on top of them.
It was almost unfair. There were days when we'd fill a garbage pail full of fish in a couple of hours and we'd have to turn home because there was no more room to keep them on board. And sometimes we'd come home with so much that my mother would curse us.

“Oh, Jesus Christ! Who the hell is going to batter and fry all that damn flounder?”

“You are,” my father said, “with a smile on your face.”

And she always would. And whatever we couldn't eat would go to the neighbors up and down the block.

On this particular day, the water was choppy and Gino and I sat upfront with extra-large Windbreakers on to ward off the waves that were splashing into the bow of the boat. Behind us, beneath the steering column, my father would always keep a huge flask of Scotch on board and traditionally brought it out for the men to “toast” certain things during the journey. Whenever the first white cap was spotted, the flask was passed around to all the men and everyone said, “
A salute!
” The flask also came out whenever we spotted the first nice pair of tits on someone else's boat
. “A salute!”

First sighting of seagulls following a school of bluefish?
“A salute!”

First bite on someone's pole?
“A salute!”

First fish on board?
“A salute!”

I remember Gino got seasick in the first five minutes and Uncle Larry was three sheets to the wind before he dropped his line in the water. We had what we called a “pisswah” on board,
which consisted of a blue-capped Clorox bleach bottle with the bottom cut out. This was what the men and boys could pee into before dumping their business overboard into the ocean. Uncle Larry never saw the huge, gaping hole in the bottom, so he promptly unscrewed the cap, stuck his prick into the bottle, and didn't realize he essentially peed all over the tackle box. Not too long after that display, my father turned the boat back around and headed near home for the flats to do some quick clamming, while his brother and nephew slept it off. Frankie and Jack snickered a bit, telling me I had a long road ahead if I was going to get Gino to toughen up and catch up to our standards.

“Gonna be tough jerking off to Pop's
Playboy
s with Gino staying in your room,” Frankie said. “Right, Jack?”

“Oh boy,” Jack said. “I'll give him till August before his balls explode in his sleep.”

“You guys are gross,” I said. “I don't do that.” I was lying, of course, as the burning cramp in my right forearm would attest.

Frankie leaned in real close as we headed back down the canal. “Who knows, maybe you'll be teaching Gino by August. You guys can have circle-jerk parties.”

“Don't listen,” I said into Gino's ear, as he was waking up. “These guys love talking about jizz.”