CHAPTER TWO

          From the earliest memory fragments popping up in the inquisitive mind of John W. Petrocelli, son of the flamboyant Veronica and master shipper Ronald, uncomfortable days in elementary school played out like old movies, in sepia brown and white.  He was forever getting in trouble particularly in geography and history classes, always raising his hand to insist his grandfather had told him, had actually told him, of being with Custer  for his last stand against the wild Indians and how he, Grampa,  had saved Custer’s life on many occasions.  The wide-eyed believer, the child John, also proudly related how his grandfather, with only one bullet left in his rifle, had aimed at ten ferocious Indian warriors approaching General Custer, fired his trusty Winchester and killed all ten with that one bullet.  The other schoolchildren were no competition for John’s grandfather’s tales and he wore the invisible crown of champion spellbinder until the teacher gave him a whack on the back of the neck for such impossible exaggerations, which mystified John.  He couldn’t prove his grandfather had ever killed anyone or even knew how to load a rifle, but since he had listened enraptured for years to these tales he wanted to believe with all his heart, he saw nothing wrong in trying to share the thrills he himself had grown up with.  He never stopped hoping however, down deep inside, that the basic facts of the heroic adventures of his grandfather were pure truth and not pure fiction.

His grandfather also loved the stock car races and used to drive John and two of his cousins around in those old 50s cars, long after they were no longer being manufactured.  He drove them to the stock car races, then on the way back home, the kids would stare hypnotically at the trembling speedometer as it hovered near the number 100, then crept up even higher.  The cars were not built to withstand those kinds of speeds and they weren’t aerodynamically sleek like modern-day cars are and couldn’t cling to curves on the highway at all, so the kids hung on inside for dear life as the entire vehicle strained and stretched its metal skeleton, trying its best to hold together but also seeming to gather itself for a twisted implosion at the same time.  Several times during these harrowing escapades down the two-lane highways, John’s grandfather narrowly missed head-on collisions and the kids in the back seat ducked down fast and clenched their eyes shut, waiting for Death to shatter the car and their skulls, but they got lucky.  Safety belts were nonexistent then and the bottom line was the pure luck of a man with a Guardian Angel that was working overtime.  John’s grandfather drove as if the car was a four-wheel drive vehicle and he was Barney Oldfield himself, who, Grampa told them, was the first man to drive a car 60 miles an hour on a flat road, and that was in 1921.  He was Grampa’s hero and the old man drove like he thought he was invincible, crossing dividers, jumping curbs, never using the turn signals, his weathered hand flopping out the window holding his eternal cigarette.  He was a chain smoker and had the raspy voice to prove it and was always waking up to a smoldering mattress that had to be doused with a gallon or two of water before the house burned down.  He was a colorful character and even in the face of his obvious shortcomings, was John’s first nonconformist hero and his masculine role model when he was an impressionable child.  He credits his daring grandfather with his own spirit of courage and nonconformity as he has explored uncharted areas of the human mind and psyche with great success, even as peers and teachers disparaged his efforts.  But we are getting ahead of ourselves in the telling of his story.
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Throughout his early childhood, the relationship between his parents was a living hell, a cyclone and a hurricane all at once.  He remembers heavy drinking being a constant and it seemed the only calm areas in the stormy seas occurred when one or the other of his grandmothers “dropped in”, smiling bearers of delicious things to eat, such as fine pastries or warm cookies from an exclusive bakery that catered to upscale ladies and their tea parties.  John’s favorites were the ladyfingers and the miniature chocolate eclairs and the Napoleons and the petit fours, with the pastel hard shell sugar icing and the delicate icing flowers on top.  In the hot summer, there was thirst-quenching lemonade made with fresh-squeezed lemons and little mountains of granulated sugar that melted down into the chipped iced and then poured into heavy glasses that quickly dripped condensation down their sides onto the white crocheted doilies, handmade by the same grandmother that made the pitcher of pale yellow lemonade.  In the cold winter, there were mugs of steaming hot chocolate with whipped cream piled in miniature snow drifts on top, and tiny curls of shaved chocolate scattered on top. The whipped cream sealed in the heat of the chocolate, so it was a race among the cousins as to who could stand the blistering heat on the tongue and the roof of one’s mouth first without too many tears revealing how much it burned.  And oh, when it cooled just to the right temperature, when a whole gulp could follow a mouthful of fresh gingerbread, life was worth living again, in spite of the parent’s screaming fights.    However, the perceptive grandmothers could not be there to prevent all the worst arguments and put the fires out before memories were engraved on young hearts and minds. 

One of John’s painful memories occurred when he was only eight.  His mother and father had been drinking, as usual, shots of Irish whiskey straight and often, when the yelling started.  John and his two brothers scrambled to hide out of harm’s way, under the kitchen table, terrified they would forget their young son was easily bruised or cut, and they began to throw things across the kitchen at each other.  They screamed and yelled words that were unintelligible to the eight-year-old and his brothers, and the reason for the apparent hatred was lost on the children, all of whom felt responsible for the family nightmare.  Veronica began to throw all her china dishes at her husband, Ron, who ducked as the plates and cups and saucers burst into shards like a dangerous ice storm of broken glass.  During a lull in the mayhem, the children crept away unnoticed and curled up together in one bed, with the coverlets over their heads and each one longed for a grandmother to walk in with cookies or gingerbread and smiles and sanity. 

Sometimes on Friday nights, John would be allowed to spend the night with his grandparents, his father’s parents.  Every Friday, his grandfather would come home with a case of Scotch whiskey balanced on his shoulders as he made his way up five flights of stairs.  To young John, it seemed to him as though every Catholic priest in their parish and surrounding ones came by his grandfather’s kitchen on Friday nights.  They sat around telling bawdy jokes, smoking, laughing, swearing, enjoying the camaraderie in a safe environment in the home of one of their most faithful parishioners who was insistent about furnishing them, the Holy Fathers, with plenty of whiskey.  Perhaps Grampa thought his small sacrifice of the cost of the whiskey was a small price to pay for any added blessings for his own soul when the time came, but whatever the reason, the child John stayed out of the way, eavesdropping and not understanding everything he heard, but getting as close as he dared to the bluish veins bulging out of the priests’ large noses.  Their breath stank of cigarette smoke and whisky but the child grew to associate those odors with the chosen few, those who had authority and who wore the white collar of the priesthood.  They were the only accepted connections between humans on earth and the Blessed Lord Jesus Christ, his Virgin Mother Mary and God Himself.   That made John’s grandfather even more of an important figure in his young life.

Usually, to a family of this era in the boroughs of New York City, a medical doctor ranked right up there with the local priest, but in John’s case, his grandmother was like a healer, or more fittingly, a witch doctor.  She had a cure for every ailment known to man and some of the cures were often worse then the problems themselves.   For croup, her mustard plasters were known for the painful blisters they left on the tender skin of a child’s heaving chest; for sore throats, a tablespoon of poisonous turpentine mixed with sugar usually shocked the nerve ends in the throat into numbness and if death didn’t ensue, the ailing were considered on the mend.  Red clover was used as a blood thinner but if too much was ingested, the patient died from internal bleeding; garlic was crushed and mixed into a paste with olive oil to ease earaches, a warm tea bag pressed onto a closed eyelid was said to cure pink eye and dandelion root crushed with water was supposed to remove warts.  When John suffered from constipation as a young child, his grandmother made him bend over the kitchen table and she inserted fresh parsley coated with Vaseline into his rectum, which he hated so much he simply never again told his grandmother when he was constipated.  Whiskey rubbed into a tender gum would help a toothache and Coca Cola syrup, which in those days actually contained cocaine, was also used for many ills and the patients attributed their blissful reactions to mystical powers of the one administering the dosage rather than to the substance in the syrup.  Some of these pain-relievers were also strong sedatives and people got to the point where they weren’t too upset when they had a slight pain they could treat themselves.  And in addition, they could almost enjoy their convalescence.

The parents of school-age children in Greenwich Village of the 50s could scare the wits out of their kids by threatening to tell their teachers anything they had done that was forbidden.  The youngsters were intimidated because unlike today, their teachers could physically whack them around and the physical pain wasn’t as bad as the humiliation in front of their peers.  At St. Anthony’s Elementary School on McDougal Street in the Village, the instructors were a select group of Franciscan priests and nuns and a few lay people as well.  The irony was the priests and nuns were the sons and daughters of local mobsters, leaders of the Mafioso.  The enigma was that nearly every prominent Italian family had both priests and nuns and mob figures among its ranks, so there was a constant dichotomy of belief systems in an undercurrent influencing every family at all times.   The young men who chose to go to seminary and join the priesthood, and the girls who opted for becoming a bride of Christ as a nun, wore the habits and frocks of their Orders but underneath that hot wool ran the same volatile Mafioso blood that burned in the hearts of their parents and grandparents.  The discipline administered by the staff at St. Anthony’s was physical and strict and left marks both on the children’s skin and on their souls.  Years later, John said reading about prisoners who were tortured as prisoners of war made him wonder if perhaps many of the torturers might have attended Catholic schools. 

When John attended St. Anthony’s, the school uniforms consisted of blue pants and white shirts with blue clip-on ties upon which the letters SAS were embroidered, standing for Saint Anthony’s School.  At first, he resented the cookie-cutter identities the class groups represented but as time wore on, the students underwent a change of heart and the fact that they were all dressed just alike became a type of comfort, a reassuring statement to the outside world.  They were united and therefore, safe.  There was safety in numbers, as he had heard his grandfather say many times and when he looked around during the school assemblies, he felt a sense of enveloping security because he could take a deep breath, lean back in his seat, and just disappear.  If he wanted to, that is.  He kept thinking about a picture he had seen in the school encyclopedia once of migrating Monarch butterflies. There were thousands of them, hundreds of thousands, and all looked exactly alike.  Their orange and black designs were identical or almost so to that of their companions.  And as a cloud of migrating butterflies there hovering to rest on the California coast as they were pictured, they were worthy of a prize-winning photograph. But if there had been only one?  No, John didn’t think anyone would have paid a bit of attention to just one.  So it was good, very good, to be wearing a uniform of blue and white, like everyone else.  It meant he “belonged.”  And that was good, very good.  He smiled for the whole assembly and walked out proudly. 

One day in religion class, his best friend, Richie, asked the teacher why priests couldn’t get married.  His question was truly asked in all innocence and he and John had discussed this puzzling question during recess and sleepovers before, and both had decided Richie was the one to ask the question, right into the face of the priest who taught religion. 

After Richie asked his question, the priest’s face turned dark red and he became apoplectic, almost choking on his bile, and grabbed Richie by the neck in a death grip with both hands so hard John saw the veins in Richie’s neck standing out funny, dark blue and bulging. He thought they might burst and Richie’s blood would spurt everywhere and then he looked into Richie’s eyes and saw an expression of desperate, sheer terror.  He was screaming or trying to and the priest was screaming back, “You know why, you know why, say so, answer me, you little trouble-maker!” 

Richie gagged and clawed at the priest’s hands on his throat, gasping for breath and when he could finally speak, screamed out, “Because.  .  . they.  .  . are married.  .  . to God!”  The angry priest loosened his grip on the boy’s neck and Richie folded into himself and fell to the floor.  His uniform shirt was out of his pants, his collar button was torn askew and his tie was twisted down on the floor.  He was shaking all over as fear absolutely wracked his whole body.

 
John watched as the priest wheeled around and stormed out, his cassock flaring with the speed of his withdrawal.  He slammed the classroom door as he left and John leaned over to help his friend get up and dust himself off.  Richie was frightened but none the worse for wear and looked at John gratefully but said nothing.  John’s sympathetic glance locked into Richie’s fearful one and they knew they would never discuss this incident with anyone, not even between themselves.

John walked home that day, kicking an empty spinach can most of the way.  He decided that was it for him and since priests were married to God Himself, well, even if he couldn’t find proof in any of the religious reference books, it was a good enough answer for him, especially if it helped him avoid a beating.  He would never, ever, have to ask why priests couldn’t marry.  He simply decided he didn’t need to know the exact reason or have proof of any reason people just accepted on blind faith.  Blind faith was the answer, he decided.  And he remained Richie’s best friend for the rest of their school years.
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John likes to say he learned his multiplication tables with pain as his teacher.  He had had difficulty with numbers from the year one and that was before educators and psychologists had been trained in recognizing dyslexia or dyscalcula which is dyslexia as it relates to mathematical comprehension.  Some people cannot grasp the concepts and others think in mathematical aspects, especially those with a propensity toward music and music composition. 

No one realized there was a distinct and definite reason young John could not wrap his brain around the multiplication tables.  It just did not compute.  He still, even as a grown man, has nightmares of the day he was called on to stand up and recite the tables for the number eight.  The nun stood over him, with her fearsome-looking starched white balaclava hood making her look like some satanic sister from Hell and she repeated, “You, John!  Recite the multiplication tables for the number eight!” 
John’s blood turned to ice water and an overwhelming fear wrapped his heart in a coldness that became a permanent mental block.  The imposing Sister stood over him with her stiff, winged headdress and his tongue had swollen too large for his mouth.  He could not articulate the right answers.  She repeated the command and still he could not perform and complete the tables.   His outstretched hands got whacked with a wooden ruler so many times they were numb.  This form of punishment was repeated so often, John’s hand became more and more numb.  Years later he realized he was being taught a conditioning exercise.  Today, John believes his confused helplessness in the face of IRS audits and other related subjects is due for the most part to the fear anything related to math can conjure in his mind.  He was never convicted, however, as a deliberate and fraudulent defendant.  This was an education in itself, courtesy of his intimidating teachers, the nuns and priests at St. Anthony’s Grade School.  And as he says now, he simply “doesn’t do numbers.” 

The strictness of the school was an accepted condition.  John remembers clearly when a priest once lined up seven boys, including himself, and walked down the line so rapidly none thought to move out of the way and he struck each boy fiercely across the face and head.  When he had hit all seven, one of the boys named Louie said, “Now, what was that for?”  The priest wheeled around, scowled at the startled boys and said, “That is for anything you will do!” 

A few of the teaching staff were laypersons and one in particular enjoyed his power over the children and grabbed the boys by their earlobes and tugged them into submission, whatever the fuss was about.  He was particularly severe on the overweight boys, forcing them to stand nude facing a wall, holding their buttocks up and outward by their hands behind their backs.  A fellow classman was appointed to swipe a metal ruler between their butt cheeks if they wavered out of position and if their imbalance persisted, the teacher himself would box their ears.  Many kids in that generation began to turn to drugs and alcohol, in an attempt to escape reality even then. 

This same lay teacher made his students write, “Silence is the Golden Rule”, if he caught them talking or whispering in class.   They’d have to write it from a thousand to five thousand times.  It didn’t take long for one of the more inventive students to sell copies of the handwritten slogan to those being punished.  Paper was an expensive luxury then so the race was on to see who could write the slogan the smallest and the most number of times on one piece of paper.  Then more sharp little businessmen caught on and charged a dollar for a thousand slogans and they did very well, soaking their cramped fingers around cool bottles of Pepsi or Yahoo as their reward.  This was John’s first introduction into the entrepreneurial world of feeding the public words they wanted to hear and getting paid handsomely to do it.  Selling the slogans was a baby step, of course, but eventually it would lead John into much greener pastures.

             Foreward | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3| Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6| Chapter 7