Years ago, actually many years ago, I wrote what would become my first Rizzo book. It was called like a deuce, which was a reference to the Bruce Springsteen song Blinded By The Light. The lines went:
He was just blinded by the light
cut loose like a deuce, another runner in the night
blinded by the light
Mama always told me not to look into the sights of the sun
Oh, but Mama, that’s where the fun is.
Springsteen was referring to a souped up car, like “a little deuce coup” to quote a Beach Boys’ song, but I intended a double meaning. Rizzo just wasn’t a sports car zooming around in the night but also a wild card, as in “deuces wild” in poker, so he was in essence unpredictable. He was my journalist protagonist who was too cocky for his own good. And Rizzo in the first Rizzo books (like a deuce & Rizzo & Mike) had a dog who was a little wild, too.
Now Rizzo as a character stayed with me and aged in a series of books I wrote using him, mainly because various agents I had couldn’t seem to sell any of those books and I just refused to let him go. He became, as had many of the characters in those books, personal friends of mine, as real to me as real friends of mine, who in many ways influenced the characters in those books. The bantering between Rizzo and his best friend Peter was so similar to the bantering over dinner tables, in kitchens, in bars, walking on the street, in theatre lobbies that friends of mine and I indulged in all these many years. Those characters were, in essence, my friends and me. And the nameless dog that was, as Jimmy Powell once quipped after reading the earlier book, the second most realized character in the novel, was my dog Frodo, alive in those pages, a ghost in the novels to follow, haunting Rizzo, and also that other character who pops in and out of various novels of mine, Anthony Provenzano.
So it wasn’t unusual that one day last week when I was talking via skype with my old friend Chuck Thegze, he started asking me about some parts of my life he only became aware of by reading my blog. Now Chuck has known me since he was the West Coast editor of Avon Books and he tried to buy my book Rizzo & Mike for Avon (that was 1978) and though the house eventually passed on the book, Chuck and I became good friends. We both still remember the night we played pool in some pool hall in Santa Monica and also the night he came to my house in Santa Monica for dinner of my famous red clam sauce and he met my ex-wife Jane (who wasn’t my ex-wife at the time) and my dog Frodo, who left a lasting impression on all my friends and family.
So we got to talking about Frodo, who in Chuck’s mind is spiritually connected to the Rizzo books and to LA even though Frodo was a native NYer just like me who just happened to spend part of our lives in Ohio (perish the memories) and LA. He wanted to hear the story of my first night in LA, when after having driven across the country in a make-shift caravan with 3 cars, a U-Haul 24 foot truck, 6 adults (Dave Capus, his girlfriend soon to be second wife Peg, Dave Reed, another friend of David’s named Bill, Jane, and me), one child (Peg’s daughter Ivy), a cat (Dave Capus’ whose name, sorry, David, escapes me)and my dog Frodo (and yes, he was named after that character in Tolkein’s books in the hopes he, too, would be loyal and brave, which he was, though a bit wild, too, perhaps because of the way I played with him.). The two Daves, Jane and I, and the dog drove ahead to find lodgings for us all and that first night we all stayed in a 4 person motel room in Canoga Park which allowed pets. We did find a 5 bedroom house in Simi Valley where we all lived together for 2 months but that’s another story. The first night, though, the two Daves went off scouting out bars while Jane and I drove into Beverly Hills to have dinner with my only friend in LA, Rip Crystal, & his girlfriend who would eventually become his wife, Fran.
Whew. That was a long intro.
Anyway, we hired some kids to stay in the motel room to watch Frodo while we were gone and when we came back around midnight, the room was empty but there was a note to call their mother. As it turns out, she had the bright idea of bringing them all to her house, and Frodo, who probably thought he was being kidnapped, bolted out of their door at his first opportunity to escape and disappeared somewhere in Canoga Park miles from the motel, lost and probably scared, which pretty much sums up how we felt when after spending 2 hours driving throughout their neighborhood calling his name every 100 feet or so, finally dragged ourselves back to the motel thinking we had lost him forever on our first night in LA.
However, much to our surprise and relief, he was waiting for us expectantly on what was to be our bed, his tail wagging profusely, those cries of joy coming from us all, and the two Daves laughing as they explained how Frodo was pacing up and down the block in front of the motel waiting for someone he knew to come home. How he found his way back was a mystery; however, that night I let him sleep between us though insisting he stop wagging his tail.
There are so many stories featuring Frodo but my favorites revolve around his total loyalty to me. As a puppy, he wouldn’t eat unless I sat next to him on the floor and would throughout his life insist on climbing onto my lap while I was trying to write, hunched over my trusty Smith Corona, even when he grew up to be a 60 pound dog. He was black & tan, half German Shepherd and half Collie, with a slightly pointed head and those long, floppy ears which I refused to have clipped. He was fixed late in life (when he was five) by Jane who had him living with her the first time we separated in North Hollywood because I agreed to let him live there to protect her since she lived with another actress and both felt safer with Frodo around. Besides, I lived in a much smaller place in Malibu and it was really too small for him. How he became neutered, though, without my permission happened because he bit the first boyfriend she took up with after leaving me. I loved him for that, but was distressed she had him fixed and almost took him away from her. But I relented because I did worry about her and Lauretta, her roommate.
The other time he proved he was my dog was just before I left LA after losing my store. I had been housesitting at Ren Weschler’s mother’s house for the two months prior to leaving and Frodo was staying with Jane and her soon-to-be second husband Jack. Our agreed upon understanding was that arrangement was only temporary until I left for NY because up until that time he was with me but I couldn’t have him at Ren’s mother’s house. A few days before I was to board the plane for NY I called Jane to arrange picking up Frodo. She then asked if I could change my mind and let her keep the dog because, as she said, “Jack likes him.” I thought that Jack was getting Jane but there was no need for him to also get my dog and told her to let Jack get his own dog. She kept pleading, though, so I offered a compromise. I told her to bring Frodo to the acting school where she was working when no one else was there and that I would come to the school, sit for a while talking to her, and then get up to leave. If Frodo followed me out to my car, he went with me to NY. But if he stayed in the school with her, she could keep him.
Well, that’s what we did. He was happy to see me, jumping, running circles around me, and finally calming down enough to lay on his back so I could rub his stomach and chest. After a while, when he was resting quietly, I got up to leave. As soon as I stood, his ears perked up, and as I walked to the door, he got up and followed me. We walked down the stairs to the parking lot together, and when I opened the car door, he climbed in, and laid his head on my lap as soon as I was seated behind the wheel. He never even looked back. And thus we flew off into the sunset together.
He would let me take a bone out of his mouth without once objecting, chase a stick for hours and dare me to take it away from him, bark at anything or anyone that came within a block of whatever house we lived in but could tell the sound of any car belonging to a friend of mine within 150 feet of the house and stand, his tail wagging, at the door waiting patiently for them to enter, would walk next to me off his lease and would stop on a dime if he tried to chase another dog or squirrel when I yelled “no!” He had the saddest dog eyes and the wettest nose which he would somehow find a way to stick inside my shirt. He loved spaghetti, lettuce, and raw peanuts, and would go through a large box of milkbones in less than a week. I loved him more than I’ve ever loved any animal and it broke my heart when after fifteen years, he finally couldn’t walk anymore. Taking him to the vet who finally gave him an injection that put him to sleep forever was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I cried for over ten minutes in that vet’s office, unable to leave him there, still seeing his eyes as he looked up at me just before the needle went in. I had him cremated, and his ashes sit on my desk today, just as they have sat on my desk these 20 some odd years since that day, physically with me just as he is with me in spirit, still in my memory, my heart, till I join him once again to play fetch in some heavenly field.
memory piece
Sunday Dinners
We always had company on the weekends when my father was alive, especially his family, but after he died, they stopped coming and things grew quieter at home. It was also difficult financially which is why my Aunt Mary and my grandmother gave up their apartment in Brooklyn and came to live with us so that they could contribute to maintaining the house and helping my mother. Also, visits from relatives changed during that time and Saturday night was when we saw an influx of my mother’s family coming around. Sometimes it was my mother’s youngest brother Mike, his wife Vivian, and three of their four children, my cousins Theresa, Phyllis, and Michael. My older cousin Joe was married to his first wife by then and though they visited, too, it was generally on holidays. Saturday nights, though, became poker night as I mentioned in an earlier post and dominated by Uncle Joe (my grandmother’s youngest brother), his wife Bernie, and at that time, before the advent of Charlie, my Aunt Mary and that card shark in the family, my mother. My grandmother didn’t really play, but sat, watched, made coffee, spoiled her grandchildren with homemade zeppole filled with raisins, and sometimes made espresso which, as anyone knows, is a vital ingredient in any Italian household.
But I don’t want to write about Saturday nights. I want to write about what became for me my most cherished memories of those years: Sunday dinners. And to be even more specific, the Sunday dinners during the 3 year period from my senior year in high school through my two years commuting to my junior college.
Those dinners were just the family: my mother, my Aunt Mary, my grandmother, my three brothers (Johnny, George, and Robert), and me. Harry was there, too, for most of those years, sitting in his high chair and making my grandmother smile as he sang the Italian songs she had taught him. Sometimes a friend from my acting school would come as a guest. Either Henry Munoz or Alvin Miller which would delight my grandmother because Alvin could eat three helpings of spaghetti with meatballs and sausage which was a record in the family. Where he put it, I’ll never know, because he was skinnier than me, but it made my grandmother beam in wonder. The surest way to an Italian mother’s heart is to have seconds and even thirds of whatever they cook.
And, of course, there would be music playing on the stereo I bought for my mother one Christmas from Arnie’s Electronics in town. Arnie’s also sold 45s and it was the scene of George’s greatest ordeal when Johnny and I made him return the single Laugh, Laugh by The Beau Brummels 5 times because each single was warped. George had to do this because he was the youngest. We didn’t count Robert who was too young to be persuasive. This is probably the first real training George got in persuading a jury, though I doubt he sees it that way. Al Martino, Jerry Vale, Sinatra, of course, Connie Francis, and, for George, The Four Seasons so he could sing along. We all also sang along to Lou Monte’s Pepino The Italian Mouse and The Beatles’ Revolver album and Rubber Soul. There was always music in the house and it was easy to get my mother to dance by putting on Lou Monte singing Calypso Italiano. For a joke, I would sometimes put on the Kate Smith album my father had mistakenly bought for my mother when she was recuperating from her hip surgery. She would still remark years later how she would never understand how he got it into his head that she liked Kate Smith. But usually it was some Italian crooner singing about Naples, which translates into love with songs like Eh Marie, Eh Marie, a song my aunt’s husband Frank often sang to her before his untimely death.
We always ate at 2pm and it was always some form of pasta, though we never called it pasta, just spaghetti or macaroni, which was anything that wasn’t spaghetti. My grandmother sometimes made her homemade cavatelli which just melted in your mouth and was loved by all, just as we all loved her raviolis, which she made on holidays, both cheese and meat filled, and they, too, melted in your mouth. They were also huge and three filled a plate.
Ah, but I’m getting off-track again so let’s get back to Sunday dinners.
So we would all have to be at the table by 2. My mother waited for no one. If you weren’t there, you didn’t eat. Holiday dinners were like that, too, and I, for one, learned that lesson early on but my sister seemed to always be late (she had 5 kids to deal with so it’s sort of understandable) but our mother began serving at 2 regardless. So on Sundays, all of us were seated and ready to go at two o’clock sharp.
There was salad first (soap was served first only on holidays) which my brother George never failed to point out should be eaten with the dinner to aid in digestion but which everyone else ignored. George was always pointing things out like that which only resulted in Johnny making a face. And Johnny made a lot of faces at the table, often making caustic comments in response to George’s witticisms, and the three of us would banter back and forth, teasing each other, our mother, Aunt Mary, who would often laugh so hard she’d beg us to stop before she would “pee in my pants”. which never happened, nor did she ever have to run to the bathroom just in case. We never teased our grandmother, except maybe about those hot peppers she had hanging in the basement near the oil burner to dry, but instead would wander out to the kitchen on Sunday morning to watch her knead the dough for the macaroni she was making and take the piece she would cut off for each of us to eat. But afterwards, as we all settled back to coffee and cake, I would sometimes kid her about how strong the coffee was by pretending it dissolved my spoon. She always smiled, enjoying it all, the teasing of her daughters by her grandchildren, unconditional love in her eyes.
It was a Sunday dinner that was the scene of many a sisterly argument between our mother and aunt, mainly revolving around cooking which is something Aunt Mary could only do if our mother was not at home. This was usually lunchtime, when our mother would work as a teacher’s aide in the high school, one of two part-time jobs she had, the other being a babysitter for a Jewish family which would cause her to say, “When I come back next time, I want to be a Jewish housewife.”
Grandma’s eggs and potatoes sandwiches were indisputably the best, but Aunt Mary’s came in a close second. This was one dish our mother couldn’t duplicate. And Aunt Mary ‘s rabbit in tomato and wine sauce was also unequalled, though after her death I did cook that for a few Thanksgiving dinners until one year when I cooked an especially large rabbit and quipped that it was really a cat, no one would eat it except my sister and me. It was the last year anyone asked me to cook it again.
But back to Sundays and those arguments between the sisters. The most heated one occurred over what you call sauce. Aunt Mary insisted it was called sauce while our mother insisted it was called gravy. As a matter of fact, it was always called gravy in our house and the only time this was called into question was by Aunt Mary. Well these two sisters went at it for probably 5 minutes, which was a long time to argue in the house since arguments rarely lasted more than a minute. Grandma remained neutral, and we brothers tried to avoid anyone’s eyes lest we be dragged unwillingly into it. But our mother turned to us finally and asked, “Well? Who’s right here?” Now up until we all started going to restaurants, we would have unequivocally answered gravy, but since we never saw it called gravy on any menu that served Italian food in our limited exposure to menus, we had to side, though rather reluctantly, with Aunt Mary. Our mother was stunned. This was betrayal in her eyes. Didn’t she clothe and feed us? Do our laundry? Give us ice cream every other night and one piece of fruit daily? Wasn’t she the head of this household? How could we side with anyone but her?
That was a sad day at the table on Lyon Place.
Years later, after all the women were gone and I was alone reading the Sunday New York Times, I came across an article on Italian cuisine. And there, in the New York Times which has, as any NYer knows, “all the news that’s fit to print”, was the statement that in Southern Italy, where both sets of my grandparents came from and thus, where we all were descended from (albeit Johnny and George come from that land that we Italians discovered and Robert comes from someplace further north, they are all Italian in our eyes), sauce with meat in it was referred to as gravy. In fact, though this was true for just Southern Italians, any meat sauce was called gravy regardless of whether it was for a roast or a pasta dish.
So both were right, but I could not tell them, since they were just two of the ghosts that haunt me. But I called my brother Robert to tell him since he was the acknowledged chef in the family and prepared the “gravy” for all our holiday meals. And at the next family dinner with my brothers, I announced it to the table at large, thus finally vindicating our mother.
Sunday dinners. Even now, in Turkey, thousands of miles from what’s left of my family, I still make a pasta dish for myself. Sometimes a tomato sauce, usually with sundried tomatoes or fresh tomatoes, or a meat gravy, or just olive oil and garlic with salmon or shrimp. I miss using Italian pork sausage (something I can’t get here) and making my clam sauces (again, I can’t find baby clams here) but one does adapt. And Sunday dinners are, for me, still a family affair, even if I have no family of my own to share it with, there is still a tradition I do not have the heart, or desire, to change.
My Two Fathers, Part II
Charles Frederick Russell. Charlie. My stepfather.
Perhaps it would be best to begin this by giving some background.
Charlie was the oldest child with one younger brother, Albert, and two younger sisters, Susan and Bertha. He was born in Manhattan but his father, a contractor, soon moved the family to Long Island where he built houses that he would later sell. They ended up in Lynbrook in a big, sprawling three family house where they lived on one side and rented out two apartments on the other side. Charlie would eventually buy this house after his mother died, paying his three siblings their market value shares, but that’s getting ahead in the narrative.
Charlie went to high school in Lynbrook and then to Gettysburg College, a private coed college in Pennsylvania. This was just before the Great Depression in 1930s America, and he graduated in 1930 when that Depression was a year old.
He was a mathematics major so he found employment in the one place math was essential: banking. Charlie went to work at Chase Manhattan Bank (the bank Rockefeller built) in NYC and worked there until the US entered WWII, then Charlie joined the army, became a staff sergeant, hit the beaches at Normandy on D Day, and eventually was assigned to General Patton during his push to Berlin. There’s a letter I found while sorting through the attic before coming to Turkey from the US State Department informing Charlie he had some medals that he was awarded that he needed to pick up. A Bronze Star was among them. Charlie, though, never collected his medals, just filed the letter away with his other papers from his military service. I wished I had known about those medals while he was alive because I would have liked to know what he did, and why he never picked them up.
Charlie lived his whole adult life in the house his father built in Lynbrook. He also worked for Chase Manhattan Bank as a loan officer until he retired in 1972. He was a shy man and was described as follows in his junior year in the college yearbook of 1929: “’Charlie’ blew in from New York three years ago and has not found his way out. His many week-end walks lead but to the Battlefield. We don’t like to say that ‘Charlie’ is a misoginist, but it sure looks that way.”
In addition to misspelling misogynist, they also misread his character. He didn’t dislike women; he was just painfully shy around them. And those long weekend walks were not just about investigating the battlefield, but respites from the pressures of having to be socially active.
His two sisters, though, throughout his life kept trying to introduce him to available women, but he stayed a bachelor until that irresistible force known as my mother set her sights on capturing him. It started innocently enough, at least for all appearances in the Russell family, as my mother, a widow for almost 10 years, started playing cards with Charlie’s mother, who, though also a widow, had her two sons, Charlie and Albert living with her. My mother, who, of course, will be the subject of her own post, had a plan with a clearly defined objective: Charlie.
It started with grocery shopping. My mother let drop in conversation with Charlie’s mother how the elder Mrs. Russell was so fortunate to have a son who did her shopping for her. She only wished, my mother would say, that she had someone to take her grocery shopping. And, of course, Charlie took the bait and offered to do that.
Soon the visits to the Russell household escalated into more intimate conversations after his mother’s death and Charlie, who was always described as the shy one, found himself inviting my mother to take a vacation with him on one of his many trips to Europe. And that vacation changed his life irrevocably. Charlie married my mother at age 66 in Italy during that vacation and returned to find himself not just a husband but a father and grandfather as well. I guess you could call that a case of instant family.
Charlie took to his new roles with an enthusiasm that was quite remarkable. He was kind, patient, helpful to everyone and was instantly loved by my multi-cultural family. There were my sister and her husband, five children, and several grandchildren, and my three brothers who, though not biological brothers, were integral parts of our family. My parents had been foster parents and I had, altogether, 7 brothers which I’ll have to explain in a different post because their stories are quite complicated, but at the time of my mother and Charlie’s marriage, there were three brothers who were part of the family: 2 Chinese (Johnny and George) and one Irishman (Robert). And since my mother was the acknowledged focal point of the family, all roads on her side of the family led to our house. My two Chinese brothers and I were no longer living at home by that time, but were all in Manhattan, and only Robert, who was still in high school, lived there but we all converged on the house for regular monthly Sunday dinners and holidays saw 30 odd people seated around the extended dining room table with several kids in the kitchen. So Charlie became, with my mother, the host to not only her children and their children but to her brothers and sister, our cousins, boyfriends and girlfriends, eventual husbands and wives, and interracial pairings that had, up to this time, been a foreign concept for this conservative Republican who found himself growing more liberal after each family gathering. To say Charlie blossomed is an understatement. He was always kind and considerate, but now he had dozens of people to whom he could open his heart to. And we all took this shy, humane man into ours.
He loved my mother unselfishly. He would spoil her with his gifts, his total commitment to her family, his unwavering support of her wishes and her dreams. My mother had faced financial struggle after my father died, and even when he was alive, we were a working class family that managed to always stay one step ahead of the net. Though we had a television, it was black and white (I still get surprised periodically when watching an old movie to realize it was actually filmed in color), and there was only that one vacation with my father, but Charlie took her to Europe a few times, to Hawaii, across the United States, and down to Florida once a year for their annual vacation. He bought her every piece of jewelry she wanted, even over her very feeble protests that it cost too much, bought her favorite Russell Stover chocolates on a weekly basis, ate whatever she put in front of him without once complaining, and was a passionate lover, too. In fact, Charlie became a role model for me in that respect. He taught me that when and if you truly love someone, you put them first, above yourself, because that is the true mark of love. That the person who did not want to be part of their lover’s world but instead insisted on their lover being immersed in their world did not really love the other person, but was exhibiting a kind of self-love. They wanted an admirer, someone to look up to them rather than be an equal partner in life, someone to feed their ego so that they could lose themselves in their own vanity. However, Charlie showed by his devotion not only to my mother but to her family, too, that if you truly love someone, you never put your own interests first but strive to find a way to fulfill both your needs. For the person who demands total capitulation to their wishes and their goals does not really love anyone but themselves. He also felt that if he was the one who was the stronger, the one who possessed more, then he should give more and he did. All the love he had stored in his heart all those solitary years was lavishly showered on my mother and our family.
There were so many acts of kindness that he bestowed on us. Personally, I’ll always remember how I came limping back to New York after losing everything in LA when my marriage and bookstore both went “belly up”, as they say, within months of each other. It was just the dog and me returning to stay at Charlie’s house on Lyon Place while I took a few months to regain my equilibrium and find a job. I had some cash from the going-out-of-business sale in the ruins of my beloved store which I budgeted to get me to my first month’s salary. But I needed a car and only had $1500 to buy one. So Charlie took me to used car lots while I looked at cars within that price range (this was 1980 so there were actually cars at that price range worth buying) but nothing caught my fancy until I saw this red Opel sitting in the lot drying in the sun from a recent washing. It was love at first sight but it was out of my price range ($3200) and so I sighed after lovingly running my hands over its steering wheel and patting its hood, but forlornly walking away. We got in Charlie’s station wagon and drove off to the next lot but when he parked, he turned to me and said, “You want that other car, don’t you?” I nodded, sighed, said I couldn’t afford it, and got out to look at other cars. Charlie followed me and put his hand on my shoulder and said, “I’ll lend you the money without any interest and you can pay me back monthly.” I didn’t want to exceed my budget but he said, “Len, I want you to be happy and that car will make you happy. So I want to help you buy it.” After all I’d been through and all that I lost, that kind offer to give me something of value back in my life brought tears to my eyes. And I bought that Opel, a car I loved driving, but found I loved the man who helped me regain some small piece of self-worth even more.
There were so many other incidents of his kindness. I remember he drove my mother across country (Charlie loved to drive) to visit me in Los Angeles when I had the bookstore, and they stayed at the apartment with my wife Jane (not yet my ex-wife), me, and my dog Frodo in Hollywood. Charlie spoiled the dog by walking him 6 or 7 times a day. That dog, who loved me more than anyone else and would often climb up into my lap wherever I was sitting to sleep there (he was part German Shepherd, part Collie so he was not a small dog but weighed 60 pounds), soon made Charlie his second favorite person in the world. Charlie also discovered that Jane and I had a fondness for homemade fruit pies made at a bakery in the neighborhood and would buy a pie a day as dessert after the dinner my mother insisted cooking each evening. He also found a place that made homemade ice cream so it was pie a la mode each evening at our apartment in Hollywood during the week that they stayed with us. And finally, my good friend Chuck Thegze always mentions the one act of kindness that impressed him when he visited me in New York during my first months back. I was still staying on Lyon Place and had not moved out yet to live in Queens with Steve Cohen so Chuck stayed in the guest room on the third floor. We would wander around the city together during the day but at night, after dinner, we would be downstairs listening to music in what was my own living room on the first floor. Charlie came down that first evening with a six pack of beer which he put in the refrigerator that was down there and said, “This is for you boys.”
For Chuck, that is his most vivid memory of Charlie: that small act of kindness. But small acts of kindness are really what define the character of a person. It’s easy sometimes to be flamboyant in one’s gestures but to be consistently kind in all the small ways that make up our lives is really what makes a person special. And Charlie was special, is still special to me, and all of us in my family and my friends who met him. That shy man who became my second father occupies a very prominent corner of my heart. And whenever someone tells me that I have been especially kind, I think of Charlie and smile.
I’m sure if there’s a heaven, Charlie is up there sitting on one side of my mother while my father sits on the other side and both men have come to an understanding. Though they had very different lives and different personalities, they both loved my mother equally in their fashion. And both also know she loved them, too, and if asked, could not choose between them. They are like a couple, both men melting into one, and my mother, with her husbands by her side, holds court in their corner of heaven and says, “Let’s play some cards.”
My Two Fathers, Part I
I know that title sounds like some sit-com from the late 1950s/early 1960s starring Fred MacMurray & Bill Bixby but I wouldn’t have cast either of those two actors in the roles. No, it would be more like Ben Gazzara and Joseph Cotton. And the real star of the show would be the woman they both were married to, though, of course, at different times: my mother. But she deserves a whole ‘nother memory piece all to herself. So this will be about the two men in her life and the two who served as role models for me in what a husband should be.
First, there was my father, biological father, that is. A first generation Calabrese Italian who, if you know anything about the people from Calabria, you know when saying that you are supposed to bite the knuckles on your left hand and rap your right on a wooden table or whatever else is handy that’s hard and say “testa dura”, which translates into English as hard-headed. And, in the case of my father, passionate, intelligent, and compassionate. And tough, Not in the sense of someone who walks around looking for a fight but in the sense of someone who could endure hardship. And there were hardships in his life: his father died of pneumonia before he was two leavng his mother a widow with 2 infant children. She remarried Vincente Ruggiero and had 6 more children with him before he died, too, which meant my father never made it past the 8th grade but, being the oldest in the family, went to work to help support his mother and 7 brothers and sisters. And that became the pattern of his life: work and responsibility and more work.
He worked at the Downtown Athletic Club which was an exclusive private men’s club up until the women’s movement finally caused it, like many other private men’s clubs, to open their membership to women. He did not live to see that happen, though, and the club was, in his time, filled with well-fed Republicans. The club was famous for sponsoring the Heisman Trophy which American football fans know as the award given each year to the most promising college football player. The club was in an historic building in Battery Park, which, though not physically damaged on 9/11 was one of many businesses in that part of lower Manhattan that fell victim to the fallout that followed the attacks and it finally went bankrupt in 2002. But he didn’t live to see its doors close, either. When he died, it was still an exclusive private men’s club that people like Richard Nixon belonged to.
He read three newspapers a day and loved to discuss politics and sports with whomever was available. The members of the club loved him, and the other employees thought enough of him to elect him shop stewart to negotiate with management on their behalf. I learned at an early age that opinions were worthless unless you could back them up with facts and once when I said I didn’t understand the way some people thought or acted, he told me to always try to stand in the other person’s shoes and look at things from their perspective before judging anyone.
I never really knew him since I saw so little of him. He was up early and out of the house before I went to school and came home sometime between 9-9:30 every night. He could have been home faster if he took the Long Island Rail Road but took the subway and buses instead in order to save money on the commuting. That commute was the main reason he never wanted to leave Brooklyn but my mother, as usual, won that argument. Weekends and vacations he worked around the house, doing the chores my mother assigned him. We only took one vacation during his lifetime: 2 weeks in East Hampton where my brother Johnny and I fished almost every day and I remember only catching an eel that we actually ate. We did go crabbing, though, and had better luck there. And, of course, we swam. He barbecued and made friends wherever he went. People always seemed to take to him and he was respected.
In his family, he was the patriarch and he had heartache raising his brothers and sisters (all 7 of them lived with my parents after his mother died) but they would generally all obey him. When he died, the funeral parlor was packed the three days of the wake and everyone cried, including every single man that was there. There were over 40 cars in the funeral procession and not a dry eye at the burial site.
He loved to socialize. There were always people at our house on the weekends or we drove to New Jersey for family gatherings at my Uncle Mike’s who had a large property and a brick barbecue pit that I actually helped build. He once wanted to buy a bar that was for sale in the town we had moved to after the war–Massapequa–thinking it would allow him to actually be home more, or at least in the neighborhood, but my mother was against it. Many years later, when I wanted to open the bookstore that was to become Intellectuals & Liars, she supported my idea and had my stepfather lend me the $3000 I needed for my share of the original capital investment, telling me she regretted standing in my father’s way for his dream so would not oppose me in mine. Of course, my mother was always supportive in everything I did but her saying that said more about her relationship with my father than with me.
He had periodic strokes caused, it seems, by a calcium deficiency and it was one of those strokes that happened in the middle of the night on New Year’s Eve, 1962, that resulted in his being taken to the hospital on New Year’s Day, Jan. 1, 1963. He went into a coma that same day and died 5 days later on Jan. 5th at a little before 6am. I still, even today, can hear that phone ringing to give us the news and my mother shrieking, refusing to answer it, knowing no good news comes at 6 in the morning, and my Aunt Mary had to pick up the phone as we all crowded around on the stairs and got the news. January became a dreaded month for my mother after that, and, in her final illness, she feared dying in January herself. Ironically, she did die in the same hospital as my father on January 29th, 2001. It became a cursed month for me afterwards. I still find it is hard to shake the sadness January always brings.
Though my mother was devastated by my father’s death, and there was a long period of financial instability in the family causing both my Aunt Mary (my mother’s older, widowed sister) and my grandmother to leave Brooklyn and move into the house with us to help, it did, in many ways, result in some of the fondest memories I have of my teenage and young adult years. But those memories I’ll save for another post and I will also postpone flashing forward from the early 60s to the early 70s to introduce the other father I was blessed with: Charlie Russell, my stepfather. His story I think I’ll save for another time. My Part II, as it were. or will be
Now I will say that though I really never got to know my father while he was alive since he was always working and thus a shadow in my early life, I did get to know him after his death from the stories my family and family friends who came around told me. It was almost as if he had to die for me to know him and to realize the depth of my feelings for him and the debt I owe him in terms of my character. For my father taught me not to be afraid to love someone with my whole heart, to stand up to schoolyard bullies for they were the real cowards in life, to have the strength of character to follow my dreams, to never give up unless admitting defeat was better than being too stubborn to know your own limitations, but to learn from those limitations and to turn them into strengths, to be empathetic and to never judge another human being without first trying to see things from their perspective, to value education, to be knowledgeable about more than just my own field of interest, to never start something I wasn’t willing to finish, and to be proud of who I am and the people I come from. Finally, maybe the hardest lesson was to learn to forgive those who do you injury, but not to forget. And to paraphrase my father, it’s more important to be honorable and right than it is to be materially successful and wrong. It is, after all, my own face I must look at in the mirror and, as he told me once, that person staring back at me in the mirror was the only one I had to prove myself to.
I still see my father in dreams now. He visits me on those nights and we talk. The sleeves of his white shirt are rolled up to his elbows, his tie is loosened, the top button of his shirt undone. Sometimes we are sitting at the old dining room table drinking wine, or we’re walking down a street toward a subway stop so we can go to Ebbets Field to watch the Dodgers finally beat hell out of the Yankees, or we’re in the backyard and he’s grilling Sabrett hot dogs and I’m telling him about my day, maybe asking for advice, but probably just having that heart-to-heart conversation I never had the chance to have. And I say Dad, in those dreams, I am your son.
Opening Night, a film by John Cassavetes
I just finished watching Opening Night on DVD again after having not seen it since it opened in LA sometime around Christmas in 1977.
1977. LA. Another lifetime ago.
That would be the first Christmas season at Intellectuals & Liars with Jimmy, Gordon, & Joel, before Randy joined us, or Bill. What did we sell then: the literature, the poetry: the small press editions like Black Sparrow copies of Charles Bukowski or Mulch Press books of Paul Blackburn, novels by Joan Didion, Thomas Hardy, Hemingway, E.M. Forster, Tom McGuane, Don DeLillo, Robert Coover, Gary Snyder, Charles Olson, Jack Kerouac, Frank O’Hara. Barely 1000 feet of selling space divided into 2 rooms, those reminder tables in the back with hardcover copies of Scandinavian plays for $1.98 and the hardcover copy I kept of Sunflower Splendor, 3000 years of Chinese poetry, which I have here in Istanbul and periodically still lose myself in.
I loved that store, that brick wall with the barred window, the coffee urn and 2 armchairs with a can for contributions that never seemed to get as many coins put in as were taken out by various local denizens who came in not to buy any poetry but for a cup of coffee to go.
But there were the readings, the lively talks afterward fueled by our passion for the written word and Gallo Hearty Burgundy, the customers many of whom are still dear friends.
But this isn’t about the bookstore. This is about that damned film that brought these memories back, about the young woman in a black evening dress sitting in the audience next to Zohra Lampert who plays Ben Gazzarra’s wife, one of the hundreds of extras there to play audience members watching the play within the film being performed and who dreamed of being stars one day themselves. About seeing a ghost from the past and remembering the time, that first I&L Christmas, going to see that movie in Hollywood, and then the rest of the images: the bar at Tampico’s Tilly’s, Bill Mohr dancing in his seat at the Air Lane Bar across the street, Jimmy Powell having his Coke and cigarette for breakfast, Randy Signor charming the female sales reps, Vimal Duggal sharing a bean & beef burrito lunch every weekday, Ren Weschler instructing me in the fine art of seeing, Maureen Strange raving on about some Donald Barthleme story in the New Yorker, playing pool with Chuck Thegze while listening to The Police sing Roxanne, running with my dog Frodo on the beach in Santa Monica, my friends, some long gone, others still a part of my life, but not that face, not that black evening dress, not that Midwestern smile, nor that store, or those poets raging in the night, or the madness and humor and sorrow that was LA, that was part of our youth, so very long, long ago.
Movies, like music, like books, when viewed, listened to, read again, can transport us back, if we’re not careful, to places we may not wish to go. Perhaps, though, whether we want to or not, it’s best to take these journeys. It doesn’t change the way things are, but maybe, just maybe, it can change the way things will be.
And isn’t that what they say history teaches us: what to duplicate, and what to avoid, and the wisdom to know which is which, and what is what.
Leonard Durso 