Memories, Real and Imagined
My father had a heart attack on my 34th birthday. I’ve been trying to figure out how I got here ever since.
Lately, I think a lot about memories, and how past experiences shape our identity. I think about the little things, the little flashes of memory, the moments that reoccur when I’m paying for groceries, waiting for a light to turn green, feeding my newborn son.
Part of this is driven by my curiosity about my family, Italian immigrants who moved to the U.S. in the seventies to start something new. What is it about that experience that makes me this person, here, now? The other comes, without question, from my own experiences of parenthood. As a parent, it’s hard not to wonder how my actions will somehow shape these little people I am responsible for.
Growing up, I spent a lot of time in my family’s pizzeria. My folks worked the place open to close, sometimes until one in the morning. My days were spent playing with toys in the kitchen and being entertained by customers and family members. My father’s brothers worked in the restaurant. My grandparents lived with us.
My uncle Bruno was the baby in my father’s family. He was young when he came here, so that made him the most Americanized. He had a love for American muscle cars, he played the guitar and listened to AC/DC and Pink Floyd, and he was always looking for an excuse to get out of the restaurant. Shortly after he started driving, he took me to the movies. 48 Hrs. was released in December of 1982. I was four. We went to the late showing.
My uncle let me get the big soda that night, so shortly into the movie, say fifteen minutes or so, I began to shake and squirm in my seat. My creative writing brain puts this right around the inciting incident. Jack Cates (Nick Nolte)is called to investigate some guys at a hotel/whorehouse. All hell breaks loose. I remember, specifically from that time, the fully nude woman, then the gunfight. I recently watched the movie to confirm my timing was correct. In the scene, bad guys shoot at hard-edged cops who have complicated personal lives. Bullets fly and scantily-clad women scream and duck into doorways. The future me shouts, “holy shit, Mike from Breaking Bad.” But the 4-year-old me back then said, “I have to pee. I have to pee really bad.”
My uncle, had no interest in getting up in the middle of a gunfight filled with girls and cursing and blood, none. This was America, displayed in all its glory on a giant screen. Also, boobs.
“Just go and come right back,” he said. “It’s just out there.” He lazily motioned toward the back of the theater with his hand.
An admission: I was, and still am in some ways, afraid of the dark, afraid that someone is always hiding behind something, just around the corner, waiting to kill me. Sometimes I lie in bed and dream up all the ways I can be killed. On nights when it’s bad, I envision the person busting into into the house with a crowbar. The sound of glass breaking, the stale smell of his breath. If I listen carefully, the sliding of a muddy boot on carpet, the rustling of a clumsy hand in the “everything” drawer in the kitchen.
I was raised to always be in fear of my surroundings. My parents were new to this country, so everything early on was under suspicion in the same way we sometimes fear what we cannot understand. But my grandmother, who we call nonna, could bring to life all that was horrible in the world with the snap of her fingers. She had rehearsed terror and worry into an art form and she prayed, still prays, constantly in preparation for the impending doom that will surely, soon, fall upon us. She regularly reminded me that people stole little children to do unimaginable things to them. Strangers were bad, all of them. Nonna often used the threat of wolves who snatched up children that wandered too far off. As in, “Wait, wait, don’t go out there the wolves will get you,” when I wanted to play outside or ride my bike to a friend’s house. Sometimes she even went as far as to mention, uomo lupo, wolf man, a raging beast with a sometimes sad, kind face, who still makes appearances in my dreams.
The hallway outside of the theater was quiet, many of the lights had been turned off. I dragged my feet along the carpet, slowly, scanning in every direction, distracting myself with posters for The Toy and The Dark Crystal. At the end of the hall I turned left, back toward the snack bar that now sat empty. The workers were gone, the lights in the candy display off. Out of sight, a refrigerator buzzed and the soda machine let out a short burst of compressed air, pshhht.
I recall the lobby smelling strongly of popcorn and imagining myself jumping over the counter to steal some—or Lemonheads, which are still, 31 years later, my favorite.
I approached the bathroom with caution, bracing myself, taking a deep breath, and then pushing through the door, hard, to “scare” whatever may have been inside. Inside a man had been bumped by the door. He moved out of the way rubbing his arm.
“Oh shit, dude,” he said in a shaky voice.
A sudden heat came over me, fear, adrenaline. Part of me wanted to run back to the theater screaming at the top of my lungs, but I was seconds, less than seconds, from having an accident in my pants.
“Ugh, take it easy, man,” he said.
He turned back toward the sink and I took my place at a urinal, peeking over my shoulder to watch him as my heart tried to tear its way through my chest cavity. My pressurized urine smacked against the urinal with porcelain-cracking force.
The man wore a black leather jacket and black jeans like some of the teenagers I was used to seeing at the restaurant. I didn’t know this then, but he was very much early 80’s Joe Strummer. An earring dangled from his left ear, which my uncles had informed me before meant you were gay. But if you wore one in your right ear it meant you had AIDS. I didn't know what either of these things were then, but I assumed they were just one more thing to fear. My uncles, I imagine, were simply repeating what they’d heard. We lived in a very small town.
The man sniffed loudly, like he was pulling something into his throat. He kept spitting into the sink, and snorting, then spitting again. I took a second glance to see he was snorting white powder off a small shaving mirror just like the one my dad used from time to time. How I knew at the age of four that it was cocaine, I don’t know. But my memory puts him there, at the sink, me peering over my shoulder, acknowledging that what he was doing was cocaine and cocaine was a bad person thing. A snatch you up and throw you in a white van to do God knows what later kind of thing. A howl at the full moon, with long claws that pop and snap and grow into the place where normal fingers once were kind of thing.
I zipped, turned, and ran toward the door, bumping the man again. I blew through the doorway and ran, faster and faster, all the way to theater nine at the end of the long, quiet hallway. When I entered the theater, Eddie Murphy sang, “Roxanne,” and the ten or so people in the room, including my uncle, laughed aloud at this. I slid into my seat and tried my hardest to hide my fear and that I had sprinted back.
I can only imagine that once my heart rate stabilized, I must have been filled with questions. Who was that man? Was he really snorting coke in that bathroom? If so, why in the open, why not in a stall? Why didn’t it really bother him that I hit him with the door, twice? Did he drive a white van? Was he sitting behind me in the theater?
If I dwell on it long enough, I start to think about my own kids. What if they were put in a fearful situation like that? Real or imagined. Have they ever been that scared? Would they tell me if they were? On at least one occasion I’ve heard my nonna give them the bodysnatching wolves threat. Those days I’m thankful I’ve been too lazy to teach them Italian. They are memories my kids will never make in the first place. Although, now the white van from the eighties has been replaced by the pervert pretending to be your friend on the internet. The wolves are still out there, just in a different form. And I do my fair share to scare my children on that end.
I never mentioned the bathroom incident to anyone in my family. I really wanted to, but the real fear, in the end, was that to admit such a thing could mean no more movies with my uncle—no more adventures. To admit such a thing, would have forced me to acknowledge whether what I saw was real, or if it was a fabrication—a greatest hits of my fears projected onto a punk just simply blowing his nose. My memory can’t tell if it really happened, or if I’ve convinced myself that it did. Most times when I do mention a memory like this to a family member they shrug it off. “It didn’t happen.” “No, that’s not how it happened.”
Sometimes I have to wonder if our current self doesn’t simply infuse memories with the knowledge we’ve gained, revising to fulfill some kind of need for the enhanced details to be true. If our minds are able to create such sensory-laden fictions and pass them on as memories, then what? Do those fabrications become the thread of experiences that influence us now. Either way, those memories are the stories I tell, the ones I use to understand where I come from. And that fear, that real fear of something just out of site—just around the dark corner, is something I still carry with me. Maybe that’s the scary part.
