“Will you stop calling him that?”
“It’s… it’s not right for a woman to read…” Britney started, quoting Beauty and the Beast. “Soon she starts getting ‘ideas’ and ‘thinking.’”
“No movie talk,” said my mother. “Use your own words, honey.”
“Britney, if you don’t finish your ravs, you won’t get dessert.”
“No!”
“Okay then. No dessert. You get moonAtz.” (Translation: nothing, nada, zilch.)
“Vic, honey, are you feeling okay? You look pale.”
“You didn’t get that Southern Italian skin. Must be your mother’s side.”
“I’m okay.”
“Go take a hot shower, you’ll feel better.”
Hot showers, those were my mother’s panacea. At the first sign of the sniffles, we were sent to the shower and then made to bundle up.
I took my shower and put on my sweatshirt and went into the basement to watch the Packers play the 49ers. I liked Steve Young and Jerry Rice, and for Christmas I got both of their jerseys—Steve Young in red and Jerry Rice in white. On Christmas morning I rushed down the steps to the basement and tripped and fell into the mountain of gifts that sat under the tree. It didn’t even hurt. I started opening one while I was still lying facedown on the carpet. The whole pile, all of them, were mine, mine, mine. God, that made me feel good; that made the winter warmer, and I forgot about the sun for a few hours.
“Where’s your jersey?” asked my father. “We just got you two 49ers jerseys for Christmas. Go get one on.”
“But Mom said to bundle.”
“You can put it on over your sweatshirt. They’re big enough.”
“Okay.” And I started back up the stairs.
“I don’t know why you can’t be a Giants or Jets fan like your father!” he called up after me.
I put on the white Jerry Rice jersey, #80, and headed back downstairs. Our basement was a multi-level, multi-roomed part of the house. My mom had an office full of desks and computers. My family had more computers than anyone I knew—we didn’t even know what she did at her job. The main room had a couch and the Lay-Z-Boy where my dad fell asleep every night in front of this giant, thick television we got from my aunt and uncle out in Mendham that had a crack in the bottom of the screen. We always had to let it load for a few minutes to allow the black-and-white fuzz to calm down; if you needed to watch something at 9:00, better turn it on by 8:55.
The second part of the basement had a two-step decline. There we kept a billiards table that we also got from the same aunt and uncle; there was also a space down there, with more TVs and video games, that Tony, Karl, George, and I filled up with farts until midnight. There was a little bathroom covered in vintage posters from Mexico and Guatemala that were leftover from the old lady who lived there before us and were still there the day my parents sold the house in 2016. And at the end of it all was the laundry room, a deep and dark place where shirts swayed from the clothesline like bodies in a noose. If I had to get to the refrigerator to get my dad a beer or take out braciole from Corrado’s to thaw, you can believe that I brought a weapon with me.
The lighting was dark, and the walls were made of tawny wood—the whole basement looked like it had been in a ’70s porno. The walls were covered in my father’s degrees: bachelor’s, master’s, doctorate. My mother didn’t go to college, and she wore it like a badge of honor: “Haven’t done too bad for a girl with only a high school diploma, huh?” she would say. We still didn’t know what she actually did, but she brought me to work one time and showed me this giant white room with thick bundled cables crisscrossing into giant black machines—it reminded me of something out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. And above the couch, my father left space on the wall for me: “That’s where we’ll put your awards, Vito. It’ll be great.”
I curled up in the corner of the couch with the heavy, soul-soothing blanket that was ubiquitous among basement dens. I could hear Britney screaming all the way from her bedroom: “You are such a disease!” she shouted, quoting Home Alone. My mother made her do all of her speech homework from the therapist in Westfield every night, and every night there were screams and tears and the gnashing of teeth over crumpling paper. But my mother refused to accept the quick fix of drugs that so many of the other parents used to render their children mindless zombies (as in the original, obedient creatures devoid of free will, personified in White Zombie—not the face-eating, brain-munching nightmares of George A. Romero).
My father turned up the volume on the game—Brett Favre had made a theatrical scramble before getting knocked out at the one-yard line.
“Next year that will be you, pal. You excited to start football?”
“Yeah. That will be phat.”
“What? Fat? What do you mean, my friend?”
I had heard Tony say it before and didn’t really understand what it meant. Tony was always saying cool things like “phat” and “spaz” and “sick” and “psych,” but I didn’t know exactly when to use them, and he wasn’t there to help explain. I considered calling Karl—the Geiger’s were #9 on the speed dial—if my father continued to inquire about my budding cool syntax.
“Oh, um… it’s like…”
“Oh, it’ll be so great, Vito. I loved playing football. You’ll love it too. Let me see your hands.” I flashed my hands like I was a mime in front of a wall. “You need big hands in football. Okay, they’re getting there. What position do you want to play?”
“I want to be a punt returner, like Deion Sanders.”
“Deion Sanders! He’s such a jerk. What do I say? No jerks. What about a quarterback, like