Goodbye America
It’s Saturday night. My grandma has been here since Wednesday. She sleeps on the couch.
The run down of my life since her arrival:
1.) Avoid her as much as possible
2.) Drive her to wherever she needs to go
3.) Pick her up from wherever she’s been
4.) Eat her food
5.) Listen to her snore at night
We get along. She likes physical comedy. She doesn’t speak much English.
I walked her around 18th avenue yesterday. I had to go to the bathroom the whole time. For those of you that do not know 18th avenue is a very special street. It used to be the center of the Italian-American experience. The very center. All roads led to 18th avenue. That was a long time ago. Nixon was president. Now it’s pure sadness. Almost half Chinese. Littered with crusty old Italian men. Their even older looking wives. And a plethera of mustaches.
Grandma wonders where all the Italians have gone, yet on every block she seems to pick out the Italian speakers in the crowd and start a conversation. She lives in New Jersey.
We visited a woman off 18th avenue and 67th street. She is three years younger than my grandmother and related to us. She has a lovely home. Most everything was granite. That which was not granite was a mirror. That which was not a mirror or granite had been thrown away long ago.
She offered us espresso. They do that. We excepted. We do that. She gave my grandmother a DVD: a home video that had recently been transferred. She said it featured my recently deceased grandfather in Sicily, 20 years ago. I was not excited. My grandmother was. We hurried home.
After dinner my grandma made me put the DVD on. I was dreading this. I was thinking about it all through dinner. The DVD ruined my pasta and almost ruined my steak.
I didn’t want to see her cry. It’s really depressing. Especially on a Friday night. She’s taken me to his mosileum twice. Both times she cried for an hour and touched his picture on his granite slab and said, “Why did you leave me? Sal, why did you leave me?” It’s pretty miserable. I thought about breaking the DVD. The stupid thing. But I didn’t.
We couldn’t figure out what year it was made, but the quality was pretty good. Not just the footage, but the camerawork. There were a couple shakey parts but not too many. And there he was, my grandfather. Still alive. Fat. With really dark hair, no gray. And he was short. And happy. And my grandmother started crying, and went into her, “Sal, why did you leave me” routine, but then she stopped and enjoyed the thing.
I haven’t heard his voice since he died. I like the way it sounds. I guess I realized that too late. He was kind of a terrible person. He loved me and all. Very generous. But kind of nasty to everyone. My mother mostly.
There was this one part of the video where everyone was saying hello to all the people in America. My grandmother looked into the lens and said, “Ciao Laura, Ciao Nicola, Ciao Alessandro” and then some other old person did the same and I was getting all of these greetings from people I didn’t know, and people who had died, and people who I’d never meet. And I started wanting my grandfather to say it to me. I wanted him to say hello. But he didn’t: son of a bitch. And then I realized, he wouldn’t have been saying hello to me anyway, he would have been saying hello to the one year old version of me in America. But the one year old version of me wouldn’t have needed him to say hello. He could have heard that on the phone or waited untill he came back to Brooklyn. I needed him to say hello. Me now. I wanted to interact with him. But he never did. He ended the video by looking into the camera and saying, “Goodbye America”.
