Gregory

Hot Lips was just about to lay into Frank Burns again when the phone rang. My mother clasped both hands to her heart, expecting the worst, just like she did every time the phone rang. And, just like I did every time it rang, I jumped out of my skin. Not because I was expecting bad news. But because it was so Goddamned loud. It was louder than the fire bell at school. I hated that phone. Even for 1979, it was archaic—powder blue and heavy, with a rotary dial that you could hear from upstairs and a ring that you could hear from down the block.

Nobody had powder blue anymore and rotary dials, oh my God, forget it. It was like Archie Bunker’s phone or something. But then again, we didn’t have a phone at all until 1971, and then it was only because my grandmother had gotten really sick and my mother needed to be readily accessible in case something happened. Before my grandmother took a turn for the worse, my mother would have to go to the drugstore at 7th and Porter to use the pay phone inside the store. The drugstore phone booth was not one of those scievy metal phone booths, like you’d see on the street, the kind you had to stand up in. It was wooden and had a seat and a door with a knob. It even had a little fan that you could turn on and off. I actually didn’t mind my mother having to use the pay phone, because I liked to sit in the phone booth with her and, almost always after she used the phone, she’d let me sit inside and wait for her—unless someone else was waiting to use it—while she got herself a couple packs of filterless Pall Malls and some rock candy for me.

I wasn’t really that self-conscious about not having a phone back then. I never thought we were poor; I just figured that the kids who had phones were rich, like the Brady Bunch kids. Maryanne Revak was rich, I knew. She lived on the same block as me, but she not only had a phone downstairs, but a push-button princess phone in her room, which also had a pink shag rug. Her father worked at Domino Sugar, so they could afford it. I knew they were rich, the Revaks. They even had an open staircase—exactly like the one on The Brady Bunch. You could look down from the top stair and see people sitting in the parlor down below. Nobody I knew had anything like that—nobody!

I wasn’t an envious kid, so it didn’t bother me that Maryanne had fancy steps and a carpeted bedroom. I had my parents’ love, and even at an early age I knew that not every kid got to experience the intense love that my family shared. Sometimes I wished I had a princess phone or carpeted floors, but usually, I didn’t think about it.

The only thing that bothered me was that we didn’t have a shower. Even now, it’s hard for me to say. I knew my parents didn’t have money to spare, but not having a shower? Even homeless shelters had showers! We had a shower curtain around our tub, so nobody would really know unless they opened the shower curtain while they were in our bathroom. Even when we did have a shower—when I was really little—it wasn’t built into the wall, like Maryanne’s or Debbie's and Linda’s. Their showers came out of the wall, and their tubs were connected to the wall and flat against the floor. Our tub was big and deep and had ugly claw feet that reminded me of the gargoyles on the JYC building across the street. “People pay alota money for a tub like that,” my mother told me. Yeah, sure. Where? Where do they pay a lot for a tub like that?

South Philly had always been stuck in a time warp compared to other places, and my family was stuck in a time warp compared to the rest of South Philly. While the people in our neighborhood seemed to be 20 years behind the rest of the world, my family was at least 40. Not only didn’t we have a car, but neither of my parents had a drivers’ license—or had even ever sat behind the wheel of a car. So, even in our old-fashioned neighborhood—where, at the height of disco, a scissor-and-knife man who wheeled a pushcart with a pull-down seat and a pedal-driven, motorized grinding wheel still walked through the streets hawking his sharpening services by yelling “Niy-EEVS! SIZZZ-ERRRS!—my family was considered old-school. I felt like Mary Ellen in The Waltons.

So, when the phone rang that night, I wasn’t just pissed off, I was mortified. The screens were in and the parlor window was open, so the whole neighborhood could hear our stupid antique phone, even with the fan running. Even though it was only May, my mother had the fan running continuously, “to circulate the air,” she said.

I rolled my eyes, sighed, and walked to the phone—slowly, looking back at the TV to see if Major Houlihan was finally gonna clock Frank this time. “Hurry up!” my mother yelled impatiently, still holding her heart.

I blew a huge bubble then sucked it back in before lifting the receiver.

"Hello?” I asked, cracking the gum I’d just sucked in.

“Put Daddy on, Babe.” It was Mindy, my brother Gregory’s wife, and
she sounded very serious.

“What’s a matter?” I asked.

“Baby, I can’t talk now. Put Daddy
on—please!”

“He’s not here. He went to the library…”

“Go get him. Hurry!”

“Where’s Gregor…?”

"Gregory’s in the hospital! Go get him,
now!”

I dropped the phone and ran past my mother, barefoot and crying.

“What is it? What is it?” What’s wrong?!” my mother cried, following me out the door.

I jumped off the top step, and ran through the dirty street, which was now also wet with the rain that had just started to fall. That almost-summer rain smell—wet asphalt mixed with concrete—filled the air and tears filled my eyes.

My fear hadn’t yet taken hold—at least not enough to keep me from using my upper arms to push my tiny 34-Bs together to create a semblance of a cleavage as I ran past Donny and Petie DePasquale on the corner of the 601 Bar. I didn’t know about teasing then. At 16, I was as boy crazy as a Catholic girl with strict parents and two older brothers, 6-foot-four and 6-foot-five, could be, but nothing more. In fact, compared to my friends, who’d either gone all the way or who’d at least had hickeys, I was totally innocent. “Sheltered,” is what my mother called it later. I’d French kissed, but only with steady boyfriends.

Donny and Petie were my brother’s friends, and I’d known them since I was a baby, but in the past year or two, they’d started looking at me treating me a little differently and, I’d recently noticed that they both had hair on their chests and sizable bulges in their jeans. I had never seen a penis, but I felt Billy’s after the junior prom, though only through his jeans. He was my steady boyfriend, sort of, so it was okay to touch as long as we didn’t go under each other’s clothes. I had no desire to go any further. What I felt scared me a little, and I had no problem waiting until I got married. I liked the way those bulges looked in pants, but I didn’t want to know any more.

I could see my father now, but he couldn’t yet hear me calling him. I didn’t yell as loudly as I could have; I didn’t want to scream in the street like all the dirtballs and degenerates in the neighborhood did all the time. I’d wait until I got closer. After all, this wasn’t the first time. We’d gotten many calls about Gregory, and everything always turned out okay. My father would talk to Mindy, calm her down, Gregory would come home, and everything would be back to normal—well, normal for us anyway.

I caught up with my father at Fifth and Porter, about two blocks away from our house and three blocks before the library. My dad usually went to the library on Wednesday evenings, when they were open til 8 o’clock, and I hated to bother him.

“Dad! Dad!” I cried, a little out of breath now after running two blocks.

He stopped and turned around just as I reached him, his arm wrapped around the stack of books he’d planned to return.

“Dad, Gregory’s in the hosp…”

“Jesus God,” he said, the color draining from his face. My father had been in and out of the hospital recently and he didn’t need this aggravation. But this time, I sensed sadness, not just aggravation. It ruffled me a little.

“Dad is he gonna be alright? Is he gonna be alright?” Whatever my father’s answer was would be The Answer. The Correct Answer. The Only Answer. I always felt like my father had a direct phone line to God. He was so honest, so strong, so sincere. My mother used to say he had Abe Lincoln’s morals and Gregory Peck’s face. God liked my dad. He and my dad had a close personal relationship, I always thought, probably because my dad was so good. So, if my dad said Gregory was gonna be alright—even though he didn’t know what had happened, or where Gregory was—then he was gonna be alright.

“Well, I hope so,” my father said, shaking his head slowly back and forth as he turned around and put his arm around my shoulder. “I hope so.”

As we started to walk back home, it struck me that I’d never seen my father look so shaken or dejected. Did he know something that I didn’t? They were always hiding things from me, my parents, so it wouldn’t surprise me. Always hiding things about Gregory. I’ll bet he knows something, I thought.

“Well, what if he’s not? What if he’s not, Dad?!” I demanded.

“Then we bury him.”

Gregory had been in trouble for as long as I could remember. And everyone always told me that I had an incredible memory. “Trouble” was a catchall my parents—especially my mother—used for all of Gregory’s problems. When the truant officer came to our house when I was three years old to find out why Gregory, who was almost 16, wasn’t in school, I knew he was in “trouble.” When I was four years old and my parents told me that Gregory would be spending Christmas with my Uncle Sarge and Aunt Florence—whom I’d only seen once in my life—I knew that what it really meant was that Gregory was in some kind of “trouble.” And when I was seven and I saw the reflection of pulsing red light through my bedroom window and heard my mother crying, heard my father saying “I have a young girl here, officer! I don’t want her to hear this!,” I hid my head under the covers, because I knew Gregory was in “trouble.”

In my mind’s eye, I can see myself lying in my blue-and-white plaid stroller, drinking Karo and water (that’s what the ladies gave their babies in the sixties to settle a stomach; moms didn’t worry about caffeine and sugar back then) out of a bottle, biting hard on the rubber nipple to make the sweet elixir come out faster, watching the white fringe on the canopy blowing in the light breeze, trying to kick it with my newly-polished white baby shoes.

I couldn’t have been an infant, because my shoes were hard-soled--brown soles with white stitches all around; I know, because I remember, clear as day, banging them against the metal foot rest of my coach—that’s what they call strollers in South Philly—banging them hard then soft, hard then soft, until the motion of my mother rocking the coach up and down, rolling it back and forth, lulled me to sleep. Maybe I was one, or 18 months. I was old enough to know that, when my mother whispered, something was wrong. My mother had a full, hearty voice; even her whisper was loud. But when she whispered—or spelled; spelling was even worse, but she didn’t start doing that until I was a little older—that meant something was wrong. And that something usually had to do with Gregory.

And, even as a baby, before I could form the most basic words, or articulate my thoughts or feelings, I knew that I was safe in my coach, safe in my crib, safe in my mother’s arms. And I knew there was chaos and discord all around me, in that primal, intuitive, pre-verbal way that babies know things.

So, while my mother rocked me back and forth in the coach, leaning against our front step and whispering to Pearl Learner, I looked at the fringe and kicked my feet, in tandem with the rocking motion, loud enough to drown out the whispering.
I have no memories of a cold, wet diaper against my skin; no memories of matted, sweaty hair being combed out for a class photo by a frustrated, stressed-out mother; no memories of sticky, smelly undershirts soiled with caked-on Gerber baby carrots or applesauce. That wasn’t my world. That was Petey DeNaro’s world. He lived next door and was the one of Sue and Dee DeNaro’s six kids who was closest to my age, and was never clean or fed, always smelled like piss, and had dirty black fingernails and green snot running out of his nose.

Sometimes I was jealous of Petey, though, ‘cause in the summer, he was allowed to walk outside with no shoes or socks, even if he wasn’t going in his wading pool. His mom let him go in the street and cross by himself, before he was even in kindergarten. And he was allowed to go under the fire plug at night in the summer, when the guys would turn back it on once the cops had stopped coming around for the day. His brother, Junior, had a wrench that he stole from a police car, so as soon as a cop would come by and turn off the hydrant, Junior would go in the house, grab the wrench, and turn it back on.

Usually, by 7:00 or 8:00 pm, the cops would get tired and give up, and the teenagers and the guys on the corner would turn the plug on and keep it on for hours. Petey would be under the plug with them. Sometimes, if it was really hot out, my mother would let me stay out with Debbie and Linda, while she sat on the step talking with their mother, Mary. But we weren’t allowed to leave the step, so we just sat and told stories, or listened to the radio quietly. Usually, by about 9 o’clock, Chickie or Minnie Cooper would start screaming out the window that there was no water pressure and somebody would have pity and turn off the hydrant. Then the party would break up and we would all go in.

Yeah, the DeNaros lived right next door to us, but Petey’s world was not my world. My world was one of Snowy White-washed crisp, clean undershirts and socks; downy-soft cloth diapers that were picked up weekly by Sylvia at the laundromat or “Sylvia The Laundry,” as she was know; warm baths and baby powder; three hot, homemade meals a day; saying prayers with Daddy and bedtime stories before bed—and my parents spelling and talking in Pig Latin.

"I found p-i-l-l-s in his drawer,” I’d hear my mother whisper to my father. Or
“d-o-p-e.” They didn’t call drug addicts junkies in those days. The term, the term that I remember, the term I hated was “dope fiend.” I didn’t know what “dope” was and I had no idea what “fiend” meant, but it sounded so ugly. Like “monster.”

There was a bunch of guys with alternately funny and scary names like Fat Back, Slim Back (no relation to Fat Back), Monk, Turk, and Paulie Duck, who I knew were “dope fiends.” And then there were the “good kids” who got “caught up” with the “dope fiends.” They all had regular names, like Joey Marciano, Joey Iella, Joey LaTerra, Joey Carto, Johnny Rosanno, Johnny McCabe, Tommy and Ralphie Monteferrante, and Irv Ballaban. And, of course, Gregory. Like Gregory, they all came from good homes and, like Gregory, they were all good-looking, clean-cut, well-liked, and respectful of their elders. Johnny Rosanno and Joey Carto both OD’d in the same year—1968. I didn’t know what OD meant. I just knew that they were dead. I didn’t know what dead meant either. But I knew they weren’t coming back, and I knew that after they died, my mother was screaming, crying, and praying more than usual for a long time. My Grandmother was frying breaded smelts on Christmas Eve when Gregory came in crying about Johnny Rosanno. My mother whispered to my Grandmother, but I heard her anyway: “Overdose.” Johnny was 18, the same age as Gregory.

I knew it was bad when my father said he didn’t want me to go to school on Thursday. I was in 11th grade and had missed only three days since freshman year, once for a fever and once, for two days, because of strep throat. “You better call into work, too,” my father said, in the same dejected tone he had the day before, when I’d told him that Gregory was in the hospital. “Tell him you’re not sure when you’ll be back.”

My father was just as big on not missing work as he was on not missing school, and now he wanted me to miss both. I called my boss at my after-school job at the Steak and Sub Pub in the Gallery Mall, and told him that my brother was in the hospital. “God will do what’s right,” he said. Now what the fuck did that mean, “God will do what’s right?” And who did he think he was to even bring God into this? Fuckin’ faggot!

All we knew was that Gregory was in a coma. Apparently, he’d had a seizure and choked on his own vomit, all in the span of about a half-hour, the time it took for Mindy to walk to Settlement School and pick up the kids—five-year-old Melanie and two-year-old Jessica-- from daycare. “Coma,” I said to myself. “Coma. Coma. He’s in a coma.” It wouldn’t sink in.

The phone rang all day that day, and my parents were back and forth between answering the phone and whispering in the kitchen. I had to stay home in case there was news from the hospital and, since we were going up there in an hour or so, anyway, I took the opportunity to write a break-up letter to Billy Marlette. It was something I’d wanted to do for a long time—we had nothing in common, anyway—and somehow, my brother being in the hospital gave me balls of steel. I needed somebody to lash out at, and he was the perfect choice.

I walked with my parents in total silence to 11th and Porter to wait for the trolley. It was still raining but, since Jefferson Hospital was right on 11th and Walnut, at least we wouldn’t have to walk in the rain when we got off.

There was a big poster of Snoopy on the door of Gregory’s room, which also had a small window. I thought that was odd. I’d never seen a hospital-room door with a window. When we got there, my other brother, Jeff, who was eight years older than me and five younger than Gregory, was standing outside of Gregory’s room in the hallway, along with Donny and Petie.

Petie came over and hugged me. “Ah, there she is, there she is,” he said. “There’s my girl.” Petey had always reminded me of Gregory, except he was about 10 inches shorter. He looked a lot like Sonny Bono, except with wavy hair and a goatee, like Gregory. I hugged him back and started to sob. He hugged me tighter and didn’t say “everything’s gonna be alright,” as I thought he would. That scared me. But by then, I’d stopped looking for cues. Gregory was in real bad shape.

My parents walked over to the front of Gregory’s door to speak to the doctor, who talked to them for just a minute, shook my father’s hand, patted my mother on the shoulder, then left. My father was as white as a ghost and I could see that he had tremors. “He has severe brain damage,” I heard him tell my brother. “If he lives, he’ll be a vegetable. If he lives.” I pretended not to hear as I went over to hug my mother. Just then, a priest—a very tall, bespectacled priest dressed in a black robe and clasping his black rosary in front of him--ran by and into Gregory’s room. I freaked out, crying and screaming “No!,” and started to run toward the door, but my brother Jeff grabbed me in his arms and held me with all his might as I flailed my arms and legs. “Shhh, shh,” he said, trying to calm me down. “Stop, you gotta stop!”

“Greg! Gr-e-e-g! Gr-e-e-g! Oh my God! Gr-e-e-g!” I screamed. I couldn’t stop sobbing or calling his name and had a hard time catching my breath. “Greg…Oh God! Don’t let him die! Please don’t let him die!’

My parents went to church almost every Sunday and, though my father was by birth Russian Orthodox and never formally “converted,” it was close enough that he just adopted Catholicism as his religion and was a fairly observant Catholic. My father had always said his prayers every night before bed. My mother, who was fairly religious, prayed regularly, too, but her prayers were usually in the form of Novenas to St. Jude, most likely for Gregory’s salvation, which she’d said diligently, in nine-day, nine-week, or nine-month increments for what seemed like years.

But on Thursday night, when I went into their room to say goodnight, my mother and father were on their knees with their eyes closed and their hands clasped tightly on either side of the bed praying for Gregory.

I don’t know how I missed the phone ring, as loud as it was, but I did. It was my parents’ creaky bedroom door that woke me up in my bedroom, a tandem room that was attached by another door.

“Ma…Dad,” it was Mindy, sobbing. “Ma…Dad…it’s over.” I could hear Jeff in his room down the hall, sobbing and banging on something—the wall? The floor?—and screaming over and over “What did you do, Greg? What did you do?”

My teeth began chattering uncontrollably and my stomach grumbling, as if my bowels were about to give way. My entire body was trembling severely, but I could not move. It was like being in a dream where you try to scream but no sound comes out. I could not move, couldn’t turn my head or lift my arms. I wanted to jump out of bed and run to my parents, but my body wouldn’t move. I learned later that there was a term for this: hysterical paralysis, a condition brought on by severe trauma.

My poor parents were slow to rouse. Perhaps it was denial, if not utter disbelief. I heard my father say “Wha…what?” in a slurred, groggy voice. But my mother, who wore a hearing aid but slept without it, needed to be shaken. “Mom! Mom! Get up!” Mindy called. She was crying.
“Is Gregory okay?” my mother asked.

Then there was sobbing. Wailing. Screaming.

“Mom, no. Mom, it’s cardiac arrest.”

“Well, is he coming home?”

“Ma, he’s gone.”

I heard myself screaming, I felt my eardrums aching, my stomach turning inside out from the vibrations of the screams, but it was all coming from somewhere outside of me. I felt as if I had left my body and was watching this scene from another place.

Mindy came into my room and tried to move me out of bed. I held onto the blanket from my bed, and carried it out of the room, slowly.

My parents were walking through the hallway, and my mother was wailing “My son! My son! My son!” Then she collapsed onto the floor and my father fell down to his knees on top of her, trying to lift her.

Somewhere in the tumult, my mother realized that it was May 25—the same date that her mother had died eight years earlier—and began to call for her mother.

Somehow, maybe with Mindy’s help, my body got out of a nightshirt and into clothes. Mindy’s friend Dottie showed up at 3:00 am, in the pouring rain, to drive us to the hospital. The 15-minute drive seemed like an eternity, as the rain beat mercilessly on the windshields and the car swerved and straddled the trolley tracks on 11th Street.

The whole way there, I shuddered. Amid the sobbing and wailing, I saw Gregory for a moment by myself. I put my head down on his chest and heard nothing—no breath, no smoker’s wheeze, no nothing. Just hollow, empty nothingness.

Gregory couldn’t have a Mass of Christian Burial, because he had not been baptized in a Catholic church and had not been married in a Catholic mass. That did not, of course, prohibit the Catholic church from taking my father’s money every week in the collection basket.

The Russian Orthodox wake gave me nightmares for months. The priest looked like Rasputin and chanted my brother’s name in Russian, along with some archaic and spooky Russian prayers, as he swayed the gold incense burner bearing back and forth, filling the room with the putrid aroma of frankincense that mixed with the smell of funeral flowers.

My father knelt down in front of the casket and rested his head and arms on Gregory and sobbed. I had seen tears in my father’s eyes only once, when his sister died, but now he was crying like a baby. My heart broke for him. In all those years of tough love, in all those years of spending his measly house painter’s salary on lawyers and bail and rehab and therapy, in all those years threatening to call the police, in all those years of telling Gregory to pack his bags and leave—my father really loved Gregory.

“Oh, my precious little boy,” my father cried, his tears falling on the 6-foot-4 man who was his first born. “My little baby, my precious son!”

I went into the bathroom, exhausted from grief and the physical stress my body had been through, and vomited. When I came out, the funeral director was closing the casket.

Jeff held me with both arms as I felt my legs gave way. I remember my
feet not touching the floor as the pall bearers carried Gregory’s casket through the door to the hearse.

“Don’t put him in that car! No please don’t put him in that car!” I cried. Jeff held me there until Gregory was in the hearse.

Then we all followed behind for my brother’s last ride.