Last Night In Twisted River

Dominic in himself, and the radio reminded him of all he missed. It had been better back in Boston -both the radio station they’d listened to in Vicino di Napoli and the music. The music had been awful in the fifties, the cook thought, and then it got so unbelievably good in the sixties and seventies; now it was borderline awful again. He liked George Strait -“ Amarillo by Morning” and “You Look So Good in Love”-but this very day they’d played two Michael Jackson songs in a row (“Billie Jean” and “Beat It”). Tony Angel detested Michael Jackson. The cook believed it was beneath Paul McCartney to have done “The Girl Is Mine” with Jackson; they had played that song, too, earlier in the morning. Now it was Duran Duran on the radio-“Hungry Like the Wolf.”

The music really had been better in Boston, in the sixties. Even old Joe Polcari had sung along with Bob Dylan. Paul Polcari would bang on the pasta pot to “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” and in addition to The Rolling Stones and all the Dylan, there were Simon and Garfunkel and The Beatles. Tony imagined he could still hear how Carmella sang “The Sound of Silence;” they had danced together in the kitchen at Vicino di Napoli to “Eight Days a Week” and “Ticket to Ride” and “We Can Work It Out.” And don’t forget there’d been “ Penny Lane ” and “Strawberry Fields Forever.” The Beatles had changed everything.

The cook shut off the radio in his Brattleboro kitchen. He tried to sing “All You Need Is Love” to himself instead of listening to the radio, but neither Dominic Del Popolo, ne Baciagalupo, nor Tony Angel had ever been able to sing, and it wasn’t long before that Beatles’ song began to resemble a song by The Doors (“Light My Fire”), which gave the cook a most unwelcome memory of his former daughter-in-law, Katie. She’d been a big fan of The Doors and The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. The cook kind of liked The Doors and The Dead, but Katie had done a Grace Slick impersonation that made it impossible for Tony Angel to like Jefferson Airplane-“Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit,” especially.

He remembered that time, just before Daniel and his wife and the baby had left for Iowa, when Daniel brought Joe to Boston to stay with the cook and Carmella. Daniel and Katie were going to a Beatles concert at Shea Stadium in New York; someone in Katie’s la-di-da family had gotten her the tickets. It was August; over fifty thousand people had attended that concert. Carmella loved taking care of little Joe-he’d been a March baby, like his father, so the boy had been only five months old at the time-but both Katie and Daniel were drunk when they came to the North End to pick up their baby.

They must have been smashed when they left New York, and they’d driven drunk the whole way to Boston. Dominic would not let them take Joe. “You’re not driving back to New Hampshire with the baby-not in your condition,” the cook told his son.

That was when Katie did her sluttish swaying and singing-vamping her way through “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit.” Neither Carmella nor the cook could bear to look at Grace Slick after Katie’s lewd, provocative performance.

“Come on, Dad,” Danny said to his father. “We’re fine to drive. Let little Joe come with us-we can’t all sleep in this apartment.”

“You’ll just have to, Daniel,” his father told him. “Joe can sleep in our room, with Carmella and me, and you and Katie will just have to find a way to fit in the single bed in your room-neither one of you is a large person,” the cook reminded the young couple.

Danny was angry, but he held his temper. It was Katie who behaved badly. She went into the bathroom and peed with the door open-they could all hear her. Daniel gave his dad a look that said, Well, what did you expect? Carmella went into her bedroom and closed the door. (Little Joe was already asleep in there.) When Katie came out of the bathroom, she was naked.

Katie spoke to Danny as if her father-in-law weren’t there. “Come on. If we have to do it in a single bed, let’s get started.”

Of course the cook knew that his son and Katie didn’t really have noisy sex then and there, but that’s what Katie wanted Danny’s dad and Carmella to believe; she carried on like she was having an orgasm every minute. Both Danny and his wife were so drunk that they slept right through little Joe’s nightmare later that night.

The cook and his son didn’t speak to each other when Daniel left with his wife and child the next day; Carmella didn’t look at Katie. But shortly before the would-be writer Daniel Baciagalupo took his family to Iowa, the cook had called his son.

“If you keep drinking the way you are, you won’t write anything worth reading. The next day, you won’t even remember what you wrote the day before,” the young writer’s father told him. “I stopped drinking because I couldn’t handle it, Daniel. Well, maybe it’s genetic-maybe you can’t handle drinking, either.”

Tony Angel didn’t know what had happened to his son in Iowa City, but something had made Daniel stop drinking. Tony didn’t really want to know what had happened to his beloved boy in Iowa, because the cook was certain that Katie had had something to do with it.

WHEN HE FINISHED WITH THE PIZZA DOUGH-the dough was having its first rise in the big bowls the cook covered with damp dish towels-Tony Angel limped up Main Street to The Book Cellar. He was fond of the young woman who ran the bookstore; she was always nice to him, and she often ate in his restaurant. Tony would buy her a bottle of wine on occasion. He cracked the same joke whenever he came into The Book Cellar.

“Have you got any women to introduce to me today?” Tony always asked her. “Someone about my age-or a little younger, maybe.”

The cook really liked Brattleboro, and having his own restaurant. He had hated Vermont those first few years- better said, it was Putney he’d hated. Putney had an alternative style about it. (“Putney is an alternative to a town,” the cook now liked to say to people.)

Tony had missed the North End-“something wicked,” as Ketchum would say-and Putney was full of self- advertising hippies and other dropouts. There was even a commune a few miles out of town; the name of it had the word clover in it, but Tony couldn’t remember what the rest of it was. He believed it was a women-only commune, which led the cook to suspect they were all lesbians.

And the butcher in the Putney Food Co-op kept cutting herself, or himself; cutting yourself wasn’t what a butcher was supposed to do, and Tony thought the butcher’s sex was “indeterminable.”

“For God’s sake, Dad, the butcher is clearly a woman,” Danny told his father, with exasperation.

“You say she is, but have you taken all her clothes off-just to be sure?” his dad asked him.

Yet Tony Angel had opened his own pizza place in Putney, and despite the cook’s constant complaints about Windham College-it didn’t look like a “real” college to him (never mind that he’d not been to college), and all the college kids were “assholes”-the pizza place did very well, largely because of the Windham students.

“Constipated Christ, don’t call it Angel’s Pizza-or anything with the Angel name in it,” Ketchum had told the cook. In retrospect, Ketchum had grown increasingly uncomfortable with Danny and his father choosing the name Angel-in case Carl ever remembered that the death of the original Angel had been coincident with the cook and his son leaving town in the first place. As for little Joe’s name, Danny had chosen it, though he’d wanted to name his son after his dad-Dominic, Jr. (Katie hadn’t liked either the Dominic or the Junior.) But Danny had refused to give little Joe the writer’s nom de plume. Joe had remained a Baciagalupo; the boy didn’t become an Angel. Both Danny and the cook remembered that Carl hadn’t been able to pronounce Baciagalupo; they told Ketchum it was unlikely the cowboy could spell it, either-not even to save his own fat ass. So what if Joe was still a Baciagalupo? Ketchum just had to live with it. And now Ketchum kept complaining about the Angel name!

The cook often dreamed of that asshole Gennaro Capodilupo, his runaway father. Tony Angel could still hear the names of those two hill towns, which were also provinces, in the vicinity of Naples -those words his mother, Nunzi, had murmured in her sleep: Benevento and Avellino. Tony believed that his father really had gone back to the vicinity of Naples, where he’d come from. But the truth was, the cook didn’t care. When someone abandons you, why should you care?

“And don’t get cute and call the pizza place Vicinity of Naples,” Ketchum had told the cook. “I know the cowboy doesn’t speak Italian, but any fool might one day figure out that Vicino di Napoli, or however the fuck you say it, means ‘in the Vicinity of Naples.’”

So the cook had called his Putney pizza place Benevento; it was always the first of the two towns or provinces