Stories From My Father

Lindsay Saienni
Jul 20, 2017 · 5 min read

In 2014, I interviewed my father as the subject of a narrative piece for one of my writing workshops. It has never seen the light of day, until now. These are snippets from our conversations.

Happy birthday, dad.


1.

At sixty-five, Joe Saienni is short and a bit rotund. His hair retains its black color, with a peppering of gray. His nose is fat and wide, and his complexion has a natural tan color with moles littering his skin. His head shape is unusual, the back somehow flat and the facial half proportionally exaggerated like a cartoon character. If someone were to draw his silhouette, it would resemble a shrunken outline of the state of Delaware.

He drinks and eats things far past their expiration. He can build a computer, but can barely navigate the Internet. He is a retired DuPont biologist, yet he sometimes needs help spelling words past two syllables.

If you ask his family and friends about him, they’ll call him a chef, a paisan, a stubborn son-of-a-bitch, and a man who dropped out of school in tenth grade and made himself successful despite that.

2.

“I had a tough childhood. There were eight of us kids, including me,” Joe says. “We grew up poor, so we never owned a house or a car. We always either lived with somebody or rented.”

Joe spent his childhood inhabiting different parts of Wilmington, Delaware. When he was five, they moved out of the city to East Lake, on the east side of Wilmington. Today, it is Section 8 housing.

“I’ll never forget the first day we moved there,” he says.

In the back of the East Lake row homes, there were coal bins. Piled high from recent truck dumpings, they presented a perfect mountain for a five-year-old.

“I can remember climbing on top of it, and I looked down at my back door and I saw a redheaded kid. He was peeking in our house, trying to see who was in there. I watched a lot of Cowboys and Indians, so I jumped on him and tackled him,” he says. “His name was David Andrews, but we called him Pecker. He ended up being my best friend.”

3.

Joe’s father was a drunk. While he could be cruel under the influence, beating Joe’s mom and having affairs with women in the neighborhood, he would come home the next morning with pizza and a smile.

He died at forty-five, when Joe was sixteen.

“Growing up, we had a console that had the TV built into it, and then there was a sliding door on top and there was your record player. I remember we had one of those in our living room — which my father put his foot in,” Joe says. “But not yet.”

In this instance, Joe’s sister Marie was playing a new Beatles album.

“My father was so furious that she had spent $1.50 on this album. All I remember is him picking it up, opening the door, and sending it out like a frisbee. It might’ve killed somebody,” he says. “It was a brand new album, I couldn’t believe it.”

Marie was slack-jawed.

“He told her, ‘You can’t eat it’.”

4.

When Joe got to high school, he spent most of his days working and not in the classroom.

“I didn’t graduate, I quit school in tenth grade. I was held back, so I was older than everybody by two years,” he says.

In 1968, he became eligible for the draft. His eligibility made it impossible to find a job because he could be drafted at any time. He enlisted on April 1, 1969.

“I enlisted because they guaranteed me a trade for schooling.”

While at Fort Jackson in South Carolina, Joe received his orders for Vietnam.

“I came back to Delaware for a two-week vacation, had a whole goodbye party at my brother’s apartment. My mom and all her sisters were crying and praying for me.”

He went to advanced training in California. There, the men would rise at dawn, their duffel bags packed with essentials, and head out to the huge air force base where they’d stand with their company.

“They would holler out, ‘Company A!’ Then they’d start with the names. If they called your name, you went right on the plane and you were headed out.”

Luckily for Joe, Nixon had started pulling troops out, and his job classification was no longer needed in Vietnam. His orders, and possibly his fate, changed there on the base.

5.

Instead, Joe went to a base in Izmir, Turkey for two years.

“While there, me and a few guys decided to take R&R,” he says. They went to the Isle of Rhodes for two weeks.

“We rented motorcycles, and I’ve never driven one before. We went over this hill, and here comes me, the last one, and at the bottom is a tour bus,” he says. “So I avoid it and hit the island at the intersection and went flying like a circus act, and the bike was in pieces. I brought the handlebars back.”

Another night, they went to a wine festival.

“There was a bunch of German tourists bothering these Greek girls,” he says. “We came in and long story short, we told them we were Olympians.”

A huge storm closed the port when they were going back to Turkey, and to avoid being classified as AWOL, they hired a fisherman to illegally take them back.

“I was so seasick, I went on top of the boat and laid down. The boat would sink down, and the waves would come up,” he says. They made it back and were quarantined until Turkish officials let them back into the country.

6.

Once his service was over, he came home and took classes at the community college while working at the marine terminal. Once he quit there, he worked in steel, got into the union, then was laid off.

Eventually his military experience gave him entrance to DuPont. He started there making underlying for airplane carpets, then got into agriculture and eventually retired as a biologist.

“The only thing I regret is not getting the education to do that job,” he says. “People don’t respect you when you don’t have a degree.”

When asked if he could sum up his life experiences, Joe is silent.

“The only thing I would change is…I should’ve stayed in school,” he says. “If I stayed in school, I never would’ve had to worry about being drafted. I had orders to go to Vietnam twice, and luckily because I enlisted, that extra year saved my life.”


Note: This piece was edited by Mark Bowden [in 2014].

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Lindsay Saienni

Written by

Financial journalist in NYC. I like to write / @LindsaySaienni / lindsaysaienni.wordpress.com

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