A Utica Boyhood

[Dave]

I remember one particular incident from my childhood that should serve to illustrate the subtle prejudice. I call it, “Religion Matters, Even In A Snow Storm.”

As I trudged up Sunset Avenue carrying a canvas bag with “The Observer Dispatch” emblazoned on the side, I never realized I was marching along in the tradition of those orphan boys 100 years before who eked out a living selling newspapers. I was not an orphan, but the Rev. Mrs. Gasek ... her husband the pastor of Utica’s Grace Episcopal Church ... may have thought so when I came to her door during a blizzard on that wintry evening in 1955, to collect the bill for the week’s newspapers. The storm would turn out to be one of the city’s worst of the decade. Over 5 feet of snow fell in less than 24 hours. Adults would worry and fret, but to me a heavy snow was simply an event that required I lift my feet a little higher to get where I was going through the drifts. At eleven years of age, a big snow was just plain fun, especially when it closed the schools. I thought of myself as a boy of the north, a strapping Son of Utica, born in a blizzard so I was told. But to be honest, this storm was indeed beginning to worry me as I aimed toward home. There were no cars left on the roads, and it looked like folks had given up the frozen battle to huddle around their stoves and radiators. I was totally alone, out in the dark in a blizzard.




The Gaseks were the last customer on my route, and they lived in a comfortable house on the corner of Sunset Ave. and Newell Street, just three blocks from my home. As the wind rattled their window panes and snow piled up on the front porch, climbing its way to the window bottoms, the pastor’s wife answered the ringing door bell and opened her front door to behold young Dave, swaddled in six layers of clothing (none matching) and probably missing one glove, as was often the case in those days. "Forty cents, please," squeaked out from my midget apparition while the snow swirled past me and blasted against the poor woman, poised before me and resembling a windblown Donna Reed.

[Dave]

The Reverend was just arriving home, having had a harrowing drive up Genesee Street from his church. I would not accept the woman’s offer to step inside. After all, they were as Protestant as one (or two) could get, he being the minister of a downtown church, she being the hostess of no doubt over a thousand covered dish suppers. She insisted her husband take me home in his car. He looked a bit rattled but indicated he was game to head back out on the road. I declined that offer also, not wanting to be dropped off in front of my home by a non-Catholic clergyman, even in the middle of a howling storm of biblical proportions. Besides, how would I explain it to my parents? I tried to withdraw from the porch, stepping backward into the eye of the storm. Mrs. Gasek refused to let go of my arm, her feet firmly planted on the threshold as she stood shivering in the doorway. Today I chuckle as the vision of a couple standing in the gaping maw of a Stargate comes to mind, she pleading with him not to go. I could see the snow building up on her black woolen dress.
“You can’t leave,” she shouted into the wind, though barely inches from my face. “You’ll be lost in the storm! We’ll find you in a snow bank tomorrow! Frozen!”



The Reverend Mr. Gasek, perhaps hearing a whisper from the Holy Spirit, was suddenly inspired to ask for my phone number. He called my mother and asked her permission. She was embarrassed, but assented, and I rode home in a wonderfully warm and commodious black Buick. I was so comfortable when we arrived in front of my house, it’s a wonder I wasn’t ready to forsake the faith of my fathers and turn Protestant immediately.

The only mention of the episode that evening was from my Dad. "That was very nice of the Gaseks,” he said. “But the next time it snows so hard, come right home." Yeah, sure, OK Dad.

I suppose it's unnecessary to say the Gaseks were terrifically nice people. But all the same, I remained Catholic a few more years.

The Good News is that my generation of Catholics continued to meet and mix with more people like the Reverend and his family as we transitioned from Catholic schools to public colleges and acquired knowledge of the liberal arts and the wider world. Many of us married so-called non-Catholics and all of us probably count among our friends people from a variety of religions. And today, finally, from different races.

While I may be lighthearted in my memories, I’m not one for belittling my ancestors and their beliefs or traditions, having not lived in their time or faced their unique problems. But I have seen the hopelessness of men and women as everything around them undergoes change … except themselves. If there would be a universal prayer among religions, it should be, “Lord, change me.”

[Dave]

Every time I spot a green van, I think, "They're here!" I know that sounds crazy, but a few people believed it when I was a teenager on Cornhill. I suppose I helped the story along, continually pointing out the Martian presence to my neighbors.



I told Mrs. Gambino about the vans, and tried to persuade her that the blue mail boxes on street corners were for us earthlings, while the green boxes were to be used only by our alien overlords. I’d spin these tales when I stopped by her house after school on one pretext or another. Often she fed me something from the meal she was making. She was kind of sexy for an older woman in her thirties. Practicing my baloney on an adult who had the good grace to act like she believed me was just what a teenage boy needed. Mrs. G was habitually incredulous, and her reactions were always delicious. She was a terrific audience. I loved to hear her roll out the first syllable of “Oo Fah!”

"You'll never hear it spoken of in public, Mrs. G," I said, “but the Martians keep constant track of us."

"How?" she asked, fear creeping into her voice.

"The paperboys.” I said. “They're not human.”

“Oh-h, Madone a mia. Don’t tell me this.”

“It’s true. They're encased in a kind of body balloon that looks human. If you can get a look at the paperboy's belly button, you'll see a small green hose attached to it."

“Che brutta. No!”

I made this up while I stood looking out her kitchen window as George, the paperboy, came up the sidewalk to the back door of the house. Mrs. Gambino sat breaking up stale bread, making a pile of crumbs to go into what I called tomato sauce. She called it gravy. George and I were best friends. I hadn't gotten even with him for stealing a pair of undershorts from my dresser and placing them in Mary Margaret Bellamarino's homeroom desk at school, with a forged love note from me. Now he banged on the kitchen door and shouted, "Collecting!"

"My paperboy!" the woman gasped.

"I'm on their hit list, Mrs. G, I have to hide!" I said.

"Mama Mia, this is crazy. I wish Anthony was home!"

"If you can get hold of his hose and pull it off, he can't hurt you, Mrs. G."

Mrs. Gambino swept the bread crumbs from the table and stood up. She straightened her apron and walked resolutely to the door. Whipping it open, she lunged at George, pulling his T-Shirt right up to his nipples, then she grabbed for his belly button.

[Dave]

"Yow," yelled George, as he folded up and tumbled back out onto the porch. I suddenly noticed the knife gone from the table. Scared, I ran toward the two of them. George was down, but I didn't see any blood. Mrs. G was fuming.

"You're a Martian!" she screamed at him. "Where's your hose?"

"No, no,” I said, “he’s not a Martian. I was only kidding, Mrs. G."

She was laughing wildly now. She hadn’t been fooled.

“You're supposed to be a Mar-shun, Georgie,” she sang. "Where's your little hose-y?"

"If you find it, don’t cut it off," I said.

She swung around toward me.

"And you're full of crap-ola, Mister. Why did you tell me you stopped here this afternoon?”

martian payback.jpg

"Uh, I don't remember."

"Yes, you do. To sell me a renewal to the Penny Saver. You know they deliver it for free! You are a Very Bad Boy!"

“I needed the money to light candles at church,” I said.

Hey, it was only two dollars.

“I’ll bet you’re the kid who sold the priest a fake raffle ticket. For a trip to Las Vegas.”



Oh c’mon, I thought, I was only testing the theory that a man’s vice will always beat his common sense, even if he’s a priest. Besides, I gave him his money back in confession.

I hurried George off the porch and away from Mrs. Gambino, before she unraveled my entire junior criminal rap sheet. Later, I explained the little green hose to him.

"I feel sort of awful," I said.

"No, you don't."

I laughed. “Damn!” for a minute, I thought she cut you with the knife.”

“Nope,” he said, “But she had really cold hands. And she was aiming lower than my belly button.”

“I don’t believe you!” I said.

“Then why do I have bread crumbs down the front of my shorts?”



From Martian, copyright David Griffin, 2008

[Dave]

When I entered high school, we moved back to Cornhill and I was able to get a paper route in the neighborhood when Joey D. gave up his root. He told me it was either quit or be fired, because he had mouthed off to a woman who didn't pay him. It turned out she was related to a large advertising customer of the newspaper. Maybe she was just forgetful, but when she eventually tried to cheat me … said she'd paid me last week when she hadn’t … I asked to speak with her husband. Embarrassed, she began to loudly claim I had some nerve when the man walked into the kitchen from the next room. He'd heard the exchange and was now put in a delicate position. He either had to deal with his wife or have a second newspaper boy disciplined. I had no idea what he would do and didn't give a damn. A fifteen year old never gives a damn. He walked me out on the back porch and gave me my forty cents. He said nothing and neither did I as I left. From then until I left the route, each week I'd find 40 cents in an envelope taped to their kitchen door on Saturday morning. I assumed he put it there.

Customers like Mrs. Gambino, who I'm sure I could have convinced of the Martian menace if George had played his part well, were enjoyable. Some others were not. The Santini sisters were not.

[Dave]

Puzzle


My newspaper route in high school served over sixty customers in a densely packed neighborhood of homes. It stretched up a long steep hill through a mixture of two family homes and a few single family bungalows, each with a front yard no deeper than a bedroom. I folded all my papers beforehand, sitting on the steps of an abandoned building down at the corner across from Juan Kipper’s little variety store. Then I jumped on my bike, bag over my shoulder, and pedaled straight up the sidewalk to the end of the block at the top of the hill, steering with one hand and throwing papers on upstairs porches and ... BAM! ... against the downstairs front doors. Aluminum storm doors were just becoming popular, and a well aimed rolled up newspaper produced a deep thoroughly satisfying concussion.

I’d zoom down the hill on other side of the street at three times the speed. I was a sight to see. I could do the route in seven minutes if I didn’t crash into a tricycle left on the sidewalk or go flying off into the street when the bag of papers shifted its weight. If a customer objected to such artillery tactics and requested their paper be laid quietly on the welcome mat or even in their back hallway, I’d ignore them. If they continued to insist, I’d explain that such was impossible since it would disturb the economic balance of the newspaper’s pricing algorithm due to the extra work. If they were still listening at this point, I’d further explain that my delivery methods were fixed by federal statute because of Freedom of the Press. This bullshit worked two or three times, but eventually a few customers phoned the newspaper downtown and expressed concern for the little children playing on the sidewalk. I was ordered off what one customer called my Newspaper Rocket. I had to walk the route and trudge up the driveways of a few malcontents to nicely lay their paper in the back halls, including at the home of the Santini sisters.

[Dave]

The two adult sisters were the only blemish on my happy years as a newspaper carrier. By the time I was done with their arguing, shenanigans and the police, I’d had enough of Italian sisters for a lifetime.



They argued all the time and constantly insulted each other. When I stepped into the back hallway of their two-family home during that spring in high school, my stomach would churn when either woman complained to me about the other. No matter who I ran into first, all I remember seeing on either face was anger, a stony coldness that reminded me of the way dead people look in their casket. One woman complained that her contribution to their oddly arranged household was more than her sister’s. The other said she had suffered the most from their dead mother. I wondered if their mother was happy to be dead after a lifetime of listening to her daughters squabble, but I kept my opinion to myself. I may have been just their dumb fifteen year old paperboy, but the last thing I wanted to do was become part of their war.

The Santini sisters were welcome to live out their lives of bickering and insults as long as they didn’t try to involve me, I figured. I didn’t want to hear any of it. You’d think at their age .. nearing forty, according to neighbors …they would act like adults. I was only slowly gaining ground on my own walk to maturity that year, 1959, but enough examples surrounded me of other adult brothers and sisters who didn’t shout at each other. Too late, I realized their hearts clashed in a storm of bitter feelings over a man from many years before. Had I known how far jealousy drives an aggrieved heart, I’d have been frightened sooner.

[Dave]

“My sister, she’s stupid, stoonad,” said the sister in the downstairs flat whose name appeared as Mrs. Santa in my newspaper route collection book. Newspaper boys never cared about any of the names of customers on a route, but the newspaper management required the information for their records. Most names were made up by the paperboy in the hurry of teenage impatience. When a kid asked a customer’s name for his collection book and the customer responded with Hapanozowitcz, a kid wrote Mr. Happy on the line. A fifteen year old could handle Smith and Jones, but nothing more complicated. Struizziero became Mr. Stress, because a teenager in a rush wouldn’t say to an adult, “What was that? Can you spell it?” In the book I inherited from the previous paperboy, I found Mr. Loan Ranger and Mr. Rigley Field, names I assumed to be total fabrication. Juan Kipper, the older Jewish man down at the corner named roughly after his holiday was happy to be called anything civil, he once told me when I got around to asking his real name. In my collection book, the sisters appeared as Mrs. Santa and Mrs. Claus, but from neighbors I knew they were the Santini sisters. Downstairs was Mrs. Spina, a widow. Her sister upstairs was Miss Santini, a single woman, although she dressed as though still hunting for a man, preferring short skirts and blouses that would give most women pneumonia.

The Santini women had similar features, but to me they seemed as different as day and night. Although as attractive as her sister, Mrs. Spina dressed like an old woman and acted like one, her shoulders already stooped from a lifetime of bearing up under something I did not understand. While Miss Santini was seldom home, Mrs. Spina never went anywhere, except to Mass on Sunday morning.

“I stay here and take care of the house,” she had told me. “My sister is the one who works.” Her sister was also out often in the evening, or so I heard Mrs. Spina complain.

[Dave]

Jigsaw puzzles were Mrs. Spina’s only entertainment, the big kind in a large box of over a thousand pieces with a photo on the front of Mt. Rushmore or another romantic destination. She laid the puzzle out on a table and worked on it for weeks. The hobby might have been a family tradition, because her sister enjoyed puzzles and they competed to see who finished the same size puzzle first. But how they contended with each other produced more arguments, and for the year I delivered their newspapers they refused to speak to one another, except for hollering Italian curses up and down the back stairway.



On a Saturday morning in April, Mrs. Spina stood in her kitchen doorway, waiting for me to dig change out of my pocket. Sixty cents back for her dollar covered the newspaper’s weekly price of forty cents. Mrs. Spina was not a good tipper. She wasn’t any kind of tipper.

I heard the door open upstairs at the top of the back hallway. Miss Santini shouted out a stream of Italian, including familiar words like strunz, stoonad and pootanha, the latter an awful thing to call your sister, a prostitute, to use the nicer term.

Mrs. Spina turned and shouted a stream of curses back up the stairs.

“That woman,” she said to me, “she shoulda been offered to the devil.”

This was either an Italian rite that I hadn’t heard about or just an example of the inventiveness family members demonstrate when insulting each other.

I wasn’t coming up with any nickels and I dug deeper, checking both front pockets. “I’m sure,” I said to Mrs. Spina with my best Catholic schoolboy manners, “that God loves you both.”

“Oo Faa!” she groaned, “a little saint bringing my newspaper.”

I was trying to be funny.

“You do me a favor and you can give me just two quarters change,” she said.

“Sure,” I said. “as long as you’re not asking me to mow your lawn for a dime.”

“Oh, no,” she said, “come in the dining room and get a dish from the top of the armadietto for me.

“Come,” she said and grabbed my arm, still in my pocket diving for change. The woman was quite strong and dragged me through the door into the kitchen. She let go and moved to the doorway of her dining room.

“Come,” she waved her arm.

[Dave]

A buffet, a tall cabinet and table and chairs that would seat a large Italian family crowded the dining room. The furniture was old, the finish having dulled over the years. Mrs. Spina may have inherited her mother’s dining room set and I wondered if that might be another source of upset between the two sisters.

Mrs. Spina indicated the tall cabinet in the corner and on top was a colorful dish.

I stood on tip-toe, grabbed the dish and handed it to her. She headed for the kitchen with it in her arms and I followed, but stopped midway through the dining room.

On the large table lay a jig saw puzzle with a corner and two of the borders assembled from the many pieces that would eventually form a recognizable picture, often of a painting done by a great Italian master such as Giotto or my favorite later in life, Caravaggio. But it might also be a photo of Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon.

Mrs. Spina came back from the kitchen and stood next to me.

“She thinks she’s got me this time,” the woman whispered while holding an upraised finger close to her chest so that only I could see her pointing toward her sister upstairs. This was their favorite game, giving each other a puzzle with the photo on the front of the box removed. This trick made the work supremely difficult, and more so if the scene was of something unfamiliar, such as an anonymous mountain. In this game, the first to have every tiny puzzle piece in place was the winner. Mrs. Spina was at home all day and devoted quite a bit of time to the work. She was often the winner.

“Look,” she said, leaning over the puzzle.

I looked. It was indeed a puzzle.

“It’s black and white. No color,” she said, impatience in her voice when she noticed I wasn’t excited.

I could see that was true. So what? I thought.

“All the puzzles I've seen are in color,” she said. “I bet my sister used an old photo Mama took with her Brownie. She maybe sent it away for them to make into a puzzle,” she said. “We always talked about maybe doing that. Expensive,” she added.

“Wouldn’t that make it easier to guess?” I said. The two women would have seen the same photographs taken by their mother.

“My sister never makes anything easy,” said Mrs. Spina.

[Dave]

When I later climbed the back hall stairs and knocked on Miss Satini’s door to collect her forty cents, the woman answered in her bathrobe, but it wasn’t open. I supposed Miss Santini was the prettier sister when they were girls, and I guess they were still both attractive women, except that they were forty.
I didn’t tell Miss Santini I’d seen the latest puzzle. To be honest, I felt guilty entering Mrs. Spina’s flat. But I wondered if she would tell me what was in the puzzle photo. Besides, in her bathrobe, she was kind of sexy and I found myself enjoying our little visit.
“Mrs. Spina tells me you sent her a new puzzle,” I said.

Digging for coins, she glanced up from her purse with alarm in her eyes.

“You stay away,” she said. “ None of your business.”

“I wasn’t being nosey,” I said, indignant.

She handed me the coins and stood back.

“She saputa, my sister, a dummy,” said Miss Santini. “Thinks she’s so good. Always trying to show she’s better. Always thought she was prettier. Oh, she was so-o-o much smarter. And Angelo … she thought he loved her the best!”

“Who’s Angelo?” I asked.

Miss Santini reached for the edge of the door and began to swing it toward me.

“Our pet,” she said, and closed the door in my face.

[Dave]

That spring of my adolescence was made memorable when Jenny Swartout kissed me and moved her tongue against my lips as we lounged in the back seat of a 1939 Buick on a Sunday afternoon. Neither of us was old enough to practice foreplay in a Buick or anywhere else, nor did either of us have a driver’s license to take ourselves down a lonely road. But a junk yard sat not far from our church and the old cars attracted teenagers from our Sunday afternoon Chips & Soda group. Two by two the girls and boys sneaked out the back door of the church hall and headed across the field for the old cars.



I suppose a boiling over of hormones was responsible for my approach to life at fifteen years old. Time stretched out before me into the distant future and I yearned to finally become a man. Giving up Jenny for lost when she began dating an older boy, I fell for a new love in my life, a life largely played out in my imagination. Annette Altomare was a sweet girl who I lusted after. Without having ever said Hello to her in the school hallways or even smiled when I saw her on the bus stop, my mind soared with Hollywood movies of Annette and I at the altar getting married, Annette and I with little bambinos for whom I’d make a great father, and of course mostly Annette doing what came naturally but without a lot of detail I wouldn’t learn for a few years.

Sixteen became a magic number for me, but that birthday was almost a year away, an eternity. I would get a driver’s license and go anywhere I wanted without suffering the ignominy of riding a bus or hitch hiking. I‘d land a real job at the grocery store after school instead of this childish paper route. I’d be making real money and buy a car and take Annette out on dates. I’d get a convertible, maybe an old Mercedes from a widow who just wanted to get rid of it. Maybe she would sell the car to me for under a hundred dollars. Then Annette’s father, a burly policeman, would no longer look at me like extra-white trash, a name he reserved for Irishmen. He called me that name years before when he coached my Little League team and I never showed up for practice. I had seldom seen him since.

Meanwhile, I needed the pittance my paper route provided and so I continued to roll and fold the papers each night, toss them on front porches and in back hallways and come around on Saturday mornings to collect my due.

[Dave]

Toward the end of April I asked Mrs. Spina about the photo puzzle, but her enthusiasm had evaporated.

“Oh, it’s a picture of the two of us playing on Mama and Pappa’s bed when we were girls,” she said.

“Did you claim the prize?” I asked, laughing.

“No prize,” she said. “Who wins is the winner. You know what I mean?”

“You should have a prize,” I said. “Like a cake or a dish of ziti.”

“That woman couldn’t bake a fig,” said Mrs. Spina with a sneer.

The following week I arrived in the back hallway and found them arguing, shouting up and down the stairway. They couldn’t see each other around the bend in the stairs, but they easily heard the other as they cursed in the Italian their parents had used. Mrs. Spina threw gestures up the stairs in a way that was vaguely obscene and I’m sure her sister was just as graphic up on the second floor. I tried to interrupt to get my forty cents and leave, but was ignored. Finally the kitchen door upstairs slammed and there was silence. Mrs. Spina glanced at me.

“I’m collecting for the paper,” I quickly interjected before I lost her attention. But the upstairs door opened and Miss Santini began to shout again.

Suddenly Mrs. Spina appeared to sense something. She reached out and took my wrist, pulled me into her kitchen and slammed the door. Pushing me off toward the counter, she opened the door briefly and slammed it again. She stayed there a minute, opening it once more and looking out, so I wandered into the dining room to look at the puzzle. I thought I heard someone going up the stairs, but in a moment Mrs. Spina was standing beside me.

[Dave]

The black and white puzzle lay on the table. The right side was almost complete, as well as a small ribbon of the bottom border. Part of a bed could now be seen. A frame partially surrounded the half scene. I wondered if it was a window, but decided it was a large mirror, like the kind mounted on my mother’s dresser. I made out a woman’s bare leg, knee bent and pointing at the camera as she sat cross legged on the bed. The leg was bare to the hip and the girl had pulled a sheet up between her thighs to afford a little modesty. It continued a bit higher, but the top and side of her chest were uncovered. This was not a photo of young girls playing on their parents’ bed, as Mrs. Spina said a week ago. Here was a naked woman wrapped partially in a sheet.

The one arm visible so far was held high and the elbow pointed outward as if she held something in front of her. Enough of the puzzle pieces to define her face were in position, allowing me to guess the identity of the young woman.

“Is this your sister?” I said, embarrassed.

“Well … yes,” she said. “Years ago. She’s playing with our old dog.

“I don’t see a dog,” I said.

“But I know it’s the dog,” she said. “Our little … Angelo.”

[Dave]

Aside from Youth Group Sunday afternoon dalliances in the junk yard, which came to an end when the youth leader discovered why we were so interested in old cars, my social experiences in 1959 were mostly limited to school dances, where boys and girls showed up wearing their best shirts and dresses. If lucky, we might dance with a member of the opposite sex, but mostly we stood around trying to look cool, and almost always walked home alone or with members of our own sex. There was no hard and fast rule in any of this, just the effects of shyness and limited funds.

When Billy Callahan told me he had taken a girl out for a chocolate soda after the last monthly dance on Friday night at the high school, I was immediately transfused with enthusiasm to do the same with Annette.



“How much did it cost you?” I asked Billy.

“Forty-five cents for each soda,” he said, “plus a nickel tip.

“Under a dollar,” I said, my mind already at work on how to get my hands on that much money the night before I collected for my papers on Saturday morning. It was doable, I decided.

“Plus bus fare for the two of us,” he added.

“What bus fare?” I asked.

“You’re not gonna abandon her there on the street once you leave the Soda Shop,” he said. “You have to take her home on the bus.”

“OK,” I said, slightly disappointed.

”You’ve assumed a responsibility for the woman once you take her on a date and buy her a soda,” he lectured. “You have to escort her to her home and pay her way.”

“But she would have paid her own bus fare anyway,” I said.

“Haven’t you ever heard of chivalry?” he asked. “It means the man pays for everything.”

That seemed excessive to me, but I had no other opinions to fall back on, unless I asked my father, which I surely did not plan to do.