When Uncle Dan came home, he found me crying atop a crushed pizza box from Donatello’s Pasta and Pie. That was how I got my name. My birth name, until Uncle Dan had it legally changed two months before I started kindergarten, was Razor Trip.
I’ve seen the birth certificate. Razor Trip Marcino. Father unknown. That was me.
What did a single man, a Vietnam vet trying to escape his demons by opening a pizza joint in a fading town on the Jersey Shore, need with a two-month-old colicky baby boy? Not a damn thing. All these years later it was still hard to believe my uncle hadn’t shipped me off to Social Services with a Free to a Good Home sign pinned to my blanket. But he didn’t. I was lucky, and I wanted to make sure that Sarah Carpenter was lucky, too.
. . . . .
The flight attendant squeezed down the aisle, handing out peanuts and little plastic cups of water or ginger ale, the cart bumping against my shoulder as it stopped at our row, the bearded guy across the aisle waving his credit card and ordering a Bloody Mary as I snatched our peanuts and handed Kelly her warm ginger ale.
The plane hit some turbulence, and we leaned back in our seats.
“I never realized you like children,” Kelly said. “Was Sarah’s mother, Laura…was she at least appreciative?”
“Sometimes, but she took us for granted. Who knows? If we were five years older, she might have given us custody. But she wasn’t a bad mother. She loved Sarah, too. If I’m giving the opposite impression, that’s wrong. She loved her. We all did. It was impossible not to love Sarah.”
I drank my water and shared some “cute Sarah” stories, how she had called me Duck and liked to decorate my face with the sprinkles from her ice cream cone, how she loved the merry-go-round but would only go on it if I rode with her, the two of us straddling a painted pony spinning up and down, Sarah raising her arms and screaming with each revolution, my hands wrapped around her belly so she wouldn’t slip. These were good memories, the best ones that I had, provided the memory remained in a two-shot of Sarah and me and excluded Amy, who was sometimes drunk or stoned out of her mind, sprawled out on the floor while I put on puppet shows, Sarah giggling her way toward sleep while Amy stared at the ceiling, humming Tori Amos songs and waiting for the room to stop spinning.
When I told Kelly that Amy and I were Sarah’s babysitters it wasn’t a lie, but it hid the reason why I’d become so involved. Between her junior and senior years Amy had become unreliable, and I didn’t trust her to watch Sarah by herself. I never used words like alcoholic or addict, but back then Amy started her mornings with Cheerios and a joint, and she was never without her silver flask, a hand-me-down from her grandfather, a classic out-of-the-closet drunk who died from a broken liver when Amy was thirteen. The flask, usually filled with her favorites, Peach Schnapps, lived in her backpack, stashed behind an old sweater and the sketch pad she carried around to capture her bursts of artistic inspiration, Amy a master at sneaking sips, able to empty half the flask without my noticing, except when we kissed, her lips creamy-sweet, her breath warm and boozy.
During sophomore year, she was suspended for a week when three joints were found in her locker, and though she promised she’d never mess up like that again—fortunately the principal hadn’t called the police—I knew her promises were shaky, reinforcing my suspicions that I needed to be around to keep them both safe.
. . . . .
From my tenth birthday until I left for college, I worked nights at Jaybird Pizza, my Uncle Dan’s pizzeria a block from the ocean. In the off-season, it was just me, Uncle Dan, and a woman named Bonnie, who sometimes showed up with a black eye until Uncle Dan visited her boyfriend one night, letting him know that he had killed seventeen men in ‘Nam and one more wouldn’t mean a damn thing to his wretched soul. I suspected the body count was an exaggeration, but Uncle Dan didn’t talk much about his Army days other than to say that if the draft ever came back, he was shipping me to Canada, no questions asked.
For the summer rush Uncle Dan always hired extra help, but for most of the year it was just the three of us, two of us, really; the minute her shift ended, Bonnie disappeared. At the Jaybird, there were two small cots in the back room where we stored the extra flour and cans of tomatoes, and some nights, when I was still too young to look after myself, we’d sleep in the pizzeria, Uncle Dan preferring it to our small ranch house three blocks away. In the morning, we’d hustle home for a shower and a change of clothes, and then it was back to The Jaybird for another session of garlic knots, calzones, and large cheese pizzas, usually half pepperoni.
“When you find a good foxhole, don’t leave it,” Uncle Dan said, explaining why he never closed, why he never took a vacation even though he had enough savings to shut down for a week and get the hell out of Holman Beach, to relax and see the world.
During the off-season, whenever it
