'74 & Sunny Read Free Page B

had mounted above the knob to their master bedroom. I would come into the smoke-hazed room to a fully naked father shaving in the mirror and my mother in a worn-out muumuu. I often needed ten cents for lunch money. When things were really tight financially my mother used to silently open the top drawer to my father’s magical dresser—the one with the pistols, the lock picks, and the naked-lady playing cards—and fish out a “wheat” dime from my father’s prized-but-pitiful coin collection. “Don’t tell your father,” she’d warn me. I also remember how some teachers, upon seeing the older, out-of-circulation dime, would swiftly pocket it and switch it out with one of their newer-minted coins.
    My father got dressed for work and came downstairs smelling of Winston cigarettes, Old Spice cologne, and Dentyne chewing gum, calling, “Now all you sombitches come give yo poppa a kiss.” He kissed my mother, then pinched her on the breast and gave her a hard smack on the ass.
    â€œThat hurt. You bastard.”
    â€œI love you too. Go fuck yourself.”
    It went like that between my mother and father.
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    T he year I turned twelve, it became somewhat of a customary job for me to pour my father a tumbler of Scotch the minute he walked in after a fourteen-hour workday. He was never particular about the Scotch he drank. In fact, he often dared anyone to tell the difference between a shot of Johnnie Walker and a bottom-shelf brand, the kind that usually came with a handle on the bottle. I had gotten used to letting my top lip touch the whiskey before I handed him his glass, but he’d often see me shudder as I handed him his poison.
    â€œYou’ll get used to it,” he’d say. “But don’t ever drink it without me knowing about it. Promise your father.”
    â€œI promise, Daddy. It burns my mouth anyhow.”
    â€œWanna know the best thing about Scotch? Never gives you a hangover. Thirty years I’m drinking Scotch, never had a hangover, woke up sick, nothing.”
    â€œThat’s a helluva great thing to tell your son, Al,” my mother would say.
    â€œWho’s gonna tell him when I’m dead? Thirty years .” He’d wink at me, and I’d watch him down his first glass and ask for a second. That was the one he’d take into the kitchen and enjoy with his ten o’clock supper, as my mother and I sat next to him and listened to him tell us his tales of the day as a carpet and linoleum salesman for Kaufman Carpet.
    Most of the stories were peppered with references to his superiors as kikes or m azo Christos (Christ killers), and tosome of the customers as cocksuckers or schmucks because they couldn’t make up their minds and denied him a sale. My mother would listen intently, letting the volcano bubble a little, but always pacifying him before the lava started to roll down the mountain. And I would sit there at the table and tell him about my day.
    One night he came in with a glint in his eye. He handed me a gallon of bottom-shelf Scotch he’d bought and told me to take it to the bar in the TV room.
    â€œWhere’s Fat Ro?” he asked, his inside joke for Rosalie’s near-perfect figure. “Where’s my NuNu?” That was his nickname for Lorraine. “Everyone asleep but you and your mother?”
    â€œYep.”
    â€œWell, that’s too bad.”
    I knew he could tell something was wrong.
    â€œSchool was good today?” he asked.
    â€œYeah, you know, it was all right.”
    â€œWell,” he said between bites. “ School is school. If it were fun, they’d call it ‘play.’ ”
    â€œYeah, I guess.”
    â€œWhat’d they teach you today?”
    I had to be careful. That day’s school lesson was about immigration. And, to my father, the only immigrants who mattered were Italians. The rest were quickly