My father was out of control.\u00c2\u00a0 You never knew when he’d snap, what would set him off.\u00c2\u00a0 It could be something recognizable, concrete, like wrecking the car, but he also reached over the dinner table and smacked me when he heard the tines of my fork hitting my teeth.\u00c2\u00a0 And if you fucked up a phone message, you’d be threatened, made aware that his LIVELIHOOD depended on what came out of the receiver.\u00c2\u00a0 Hell, sometimes I’d leave home just to avoid having to pick up the telephone.<\/p>\n
Maybe he couldn’t be blamed.\u00c2\u00a0 A teenage brother was run over in the driveway.\u00c2\u00a0 A sister committed suicide.\u00c2\u00a0 His one-handed father died and left his estate to his first family, forcing my father to go to night school and support his mother.\u00c2\u00a0 He had nobody to complain to, no one to take his frustration out on, but his raw deal somehow stuck with him, it would come out of him with the slightest provocation.<\/p>\n
There was the time I got bad grades in high school.\u00c2\u00a0 C’s instead of A’s.\u00c2\u00a0 He started yelling two staircases below.\u00c2\u00a0 He was bellowing for me to come.\u00c2\u00a0 And although Wendy, the littlest, could avoid responding, my older sister Jill and I had to obey.\u00c2\u00a0 I found him in the playroom almost foaming at the mouth.\u00c2\u00a0 And then he led me into the garage, where he banged my skis on the concrete floor repeatedly.\u00c2\u00a0 I’d like to tell you I was worried he would break them, but I was more worried about him.\u00c2\u00a0 It was like living in a horror movie.<\/p>\n
A.J. Soprano is a loser.\u00c2\u00a0 At least as much as an 18 year old can be considered so.\u00c2\u00a0 He flunked out of community college.\u00c2\u00a0 He’s hanging with a bad element.\u00c2\u00a0 But he, himself, is not a bad kid.\u00c2\u00a0 He just wants to find his place, to fit in, in a world that makes no sense.\u00c2\u00a0 One within which his father flaunts the rules, but he has to play by them.\u00c2\u00a0 Where his father almost dies, but he can’t defend the family honor by exacting revenge.\u00c2\u00a0 What is the appropriate path for a Mafia Don’s son?\u00c2\u00a0 What’s the motivation, the ambition?\u00c2\u00a0 A.J. doesn’t know.\u00c2\u00a0 So he lolls around, doing nothing.\u00c2\u00a0 And this drives his parents crazy.<\/p>\n
I drove my parents crazy.\u00c2\u00a0 I was a lazy no good son of a bitch.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s a quote.\u00c2\u00a0 I can still hear it in my head.\u00c2\u00a0 But I couldn’t understand how I was supposed to make the switch.\u00c2\u00a0 From being all I could be, the culture vulture my mother encouraged, to a working stiff.\u00c2\u00a0 Someone who suddenly put money above all else.<\/p>\n
I heard in the nineties minimum wage jobs went begging.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 But that was not my experience in the seventies.\u00c2\u00a0 You had to shine up your personality, make connections, lie about your experience and work the angles to get a job.\u00c2\u00a0 And all the foregoing is anathema to me.\u00c2\u00a0 I possess these skills not whatsoever.<\/p>\n
I escaped by working at summer camps after high school and freshman year.\u00c2\u00a0 Where, in exchange for room and board, you get a minor salary.\u00c2\u00a0 And subsequent to my sophomore year of college, I went to Europe, which my mother believed would enrich my soul.\u00c2\u00a0 But after junior year, I was stuck.\u00c2\u00a0 I needed to work.\u00c2\u00a0 And I could not get a job.\u00c2\u00a0 After ten days home from Middlebury my father reached his limit.\u00c2\u00a0 He took matters into his own hands.\u00c2\u00a0 He got me a job working construction.<\/p>\n
That’s what Tony got A.J.<\/p>\n
Oh, Tony wanted to smack his son around.\u00c2\u00a0 As my father did to me.\u00c2\u00a0 But Carmela prevented this.\u00c2\u00a0 And Dr. Melfi pointed out that maybe if Tony’s mother had protected HIM, his life might have turned out differently.<\/p>\n
Tony came home to A.J. and his buddies playing video games.\u00c2\u00a0 My father opened the door to my room to me lying on my bed listening to records.\u00c2\u00a0 Tony took A.J. into the garage.\u00c2\u00a0 And calmly explained to Anthony, Jr., that the following day, at the crack of dawn, he was going to show up at a work site.\u00c2\u00a0 Unlike myself, A.J. talked back.\u00c2\u00a0 You didn’t talk back to my dad.\u00c2\u00a0 Nothing pissed him off more.\u00c2\u00a0 My father told me I too would be waking up early, to be employed at E & F Construction.\u00c2\u00a0 I resigned myself to my fate.\u00c2\u00a0 And then Tony took A.J.’s abandoned football helmet and smashed it through the front window of his Xterra.<\/p>\n
This was my dad.\u00c2\u00a0 When he was angry, nothing had any value other than his emotions.\u00c2\u00a0 Didn’t matter how much he’d spent on something, how rare it was, it was meaningless relative to the point he was making, it could be sacrificed.<\/p>\n
We took a silent ride to the east end of Bridgeport the following morning.\u00c2\u00a0 Where my legendarily early to rise father dropped me off at E&F at 7:30 a.m.<\/p>\n
I was not the only summer employee.\u00c2\u00a0 There were five others.\u00c2\u00a0 Who looked at me like I was, the only Jew in sight.\u00c2\u00a0 They laughed at my lunch, a hunk of Hebrew National salami, as they ate their white bread sandwiches.\u00c2\u00a0 No one spoke to me.\u00c2\u00a0 I lived inside my head.\u00c2\u00a0 And endured the first day like Vito endured his days working construction in New Hampshire.\u00c2\u00a0 Constantly studying my watch.<\/p>\n
My father picked me up about an hour after we broke, when the lot was empty, and wore a shiteating grin all the way home to our house in Fairfield.<\/p>\n
The next morning he pronounced that he could not give me a ride home that evening.\u00c2\u00a0 I had to find my own way.\u00c2\u00a0 I finally got up the gumption to ask one of my coworkers for a lift.\u00c2\u00a0 Reluctantly, he agreed to drop me off at the freeway exit.\u00c2\u00a0 I’ve blocked how I got home from there.\u00c2\u00a0 I might have hitchhiked, but I believe I walked, stewing the whole way.<\/p>\n
Wednesday, we had to lift steel girders.\u00c2\u00a0 You know, of the type they use to build highway overpasses.\u00c2\u00a0 But what truly pushed me over the edge was the ride I took with the driver of a dumptruck.\u00c2\u00a0 Who waxed rhapsodic about the joys of construction, and said at the end of the summer, if I did a good job, they would give me a hardhat to keep.<\/p>\n
After running the gauntlet and finally making my way home that evening, I told my father I was never going back.\u00c2\u00a0 I’d worn a back brace for five months the year before.\u00c2\u00a0 What kind of trial was this?<\/p>\n
My father blew a gasket.\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t know what pissed him off more, the fact that I wouldn’t go back or having to face Kenny Zarrilli, whom he’d leaned on to get me the job.\u00c2\u00a0 No big deal to Ken I didn’t think, but despite constantly boasting about his relationships, my father almost never cashed them in.<\/p>\n
The following morning he woke me up early.\u00c2\u00a0 He kept banging on my door.\u00c2\u00a0 Counting down the minutes till we were going to leave.<\/p>\n
I stayed in bed.<\/p>\n
For some reason, he didn’t lose control upon issuing the final warning, maybe he was worried about waking up my mother, still asleep in the next room in our split-level.\u00c2\u00a0 He just fired up a ton of intensity and shut the door.<\/p>\n
I removed my backpack from the closet.\u00c2\u00a0 Filled it with clothes.\u00c2\u00a0 And then quietly slipped out the front door.\u00c2\u00a0 And journeyed down to Black Rock Turnpike.\u00c2\u00a0 Where I stuck out my thumb and eventually landed at my college roommate’s house on Cape Cod many hours later.<\/p>\n
Lyndon was surprised to see me.<\/p>\n
As for what my father thought, I don’t know.\u00c2\u00a0 This was decades before cell phones.\u00c2\u00a0 And I wasn’t about to reach out.<\/p>\n
A week later I returned.\u00c2\u00a0 I found a non-lifting job working at the City Directory and E & F Construction was never mentioned again.\u00c2\u00a0 I’d like to tell you that was the end of my trauma, but I’d be lying.<\/p>\n
I don’t know how it works out for A.J.\u00c2\u00a0 I always thought he’d join Tony’s crew.\u00c2\u00a0 I hope he stands his ground.\u00c2\u00a0 And finds his way to fulfillment.\u00c2\u00a0 Because doing what other people tell you to do is no way to live.\u00c2\u00a0 Then again, in this era where kids are attached to their parents until they die, it’s hard to forge your own path, never mind follow it.<\/p>\n
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