Dion (eBook)

The Wanderer Talks Truth (Stories, Humor & Music)

Mike Aquilina, Dion DiMucci (Autoren)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
160 Seiten
Servant (Verlag)
978-1-63582-327-1 (ISBN)

Dion came up out of the Bronx in the 50s and tore through the music charts in a ferocious display of talent. He continued to make great music while slowly returning to his Catholic roots. His hard-won wisdom filters through his stories whether he's recalling how he went shopping with John Lennon and ended up on the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band or what it was like to travel in the Jim Crow South with Sam Cooke.

1 BRONX SOUL

IF YOU WANT TO GET to know me––if I want to get to know me––we’ve got to go back to the Bronx.

I’m not talking about the Bronx we can visit today, by taking the expressway or the subway. I’m talking about the Bronx of my childhood, a place of giants and monuments: Yankee Stadium, with its centerfield owned by Joe DiMaggio, and the Bronx Zoo, with its prowling lions.

But let’s turn the lens to a tighter focus. I’m not just talking about the Bronx of my childhood. I’m talking about the Belmont neighborhood, Bronx’s “Little Italy.” Today it shows up on the short lists of tourist attractions in Manhattan. It’s famous for its Italian restaurants. When I was a kid, the eateries were there, and their menus were substantially the same, but it wasn’t “cuisine”; it was just normal good food.

We had our own grocer too, with fresh stock of mozzarella floating in big bowls, bushels of basil, bushels of tomatoes, calamari in trays of ice, barrels overflowing with olives––brown, black, red, and every possible shade of green—and salamis and dry cheeses hanging by twine from the rafters. The ceiling fans turned slow and mixed all those aromas together. Whether you were talking about the business or its owner, it made no difference; they were equivalent terms: Joe the Grocer.

We had our funeral parlor that respected our mix of customs from the Old World and the New. We had our candy shop––Moe’s, on the corner of 183rd Street and Beaumont. A little storefront, it was stuffed with goodies––Mary Janes and Beeman’s and Black Jack Gum, Reed’s Hard Candy and Baby Ruth bars. From the day I was old enough to toddle from the front stoop of our apartment building with a nickel in my hand, Moe’s was my second home.

We had our record store, and you can bet that Hit Parade’s Top Ten were in the front window. Sinatra owned the airwaves the way DiMaggio owned centerfield, and these were points of pride for us in Belmont. We Italian Americans weren’t the stereotypical gangsters Hollywood made us out to be. We had arrived. We were just as American as anybody else. What’s more, we were shaping America’s new attitudes and styles. Now every teenager with a radio was singing like Sinatra. And every kid on every sandlot was rounding third with those long, loping strides like the Yankee Clipper.

The neighborhood grew out of the immigrant waves that washed over Ellis Island from the 1880s through the 1920s. My people arrived sometime in the middle of that. Italian Americans made their own culture. It was transitional. They were eager, but not quite able, to leave behind their old ways. They were anxious to look like Americans but a little resentful of the mainstream American prejudice against Italian immigrants, played out in gangster movies and newsreel and print coverage of Al Capone.

You could see all this at play on the faces of the young (and not-so-young) men who held up the lampposts on our street corners. They wore bluster like a costume covering their frustrations and insecurities. Dangling cigarettes, wearing expensive hats and suit jackets in the oppressive heat of a New York July, they were mafioso wannabes.

Those were just some of the faces in the crowd––and it was a crowd—on the sidewalks of Belmont, overflowing onto the stoops and steps, where the older folks gossiped and complained and the younger guys taunted other guys and sang out their love to half the girls who walked by.

Bronx’s Little Italy was little, but it packed a lot.

In the beginning, my own Bronx was smaller still. It was a two-bedroom, second-story walk-up, rented for thirty-six dollars a month by the most improbably matched couple in Belmont.

My father, Pasquale––my hero in so many ways––was like no one else you ever met. He was a dreamer, with an infinite capacity for wonder and awe. Put him in a museum or a park, and he had all he needed to transport his mind. He could pick up a rock or pull down a leaf, turn it over, and trace the veins as he waxed rapturous on nature’s great forces.

He could do the same thing in front of an impressionist masterpiece at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He had strong opinions. When I was very small, we’d go there or to the Museum of Modern Art, and he’d hold me up so I could see two paintings side by side. “See that one, Dion,” he’d say, pointing to the Dalí. “That’s the work of a draftsman. It’s all mathematics. It’s produced.”

“Now look at this one.” Then he’d turn my head so I could see a Van Gogh: “This is expression. The guy couldn’t get the paint onto the canvas fast enough to keep pace with his mind.”

I don’t want to give the impression we were great pals. We weren’t. My father was pretty self-absorbed, and he had a violent temper, which often found a convenient object in his only son. He was not above using his son as a shield or decoy when he shoplifted. And unlike most dads, he had time to visit parks and museums, because he never held a steady job. In more than ninety years of life on this earth, he never once made enough money to pay taxes.

He hovered around the edges of show business. Pasquale made puppets and gave shows in the resorts in the Catskills. He kept audiences amused between sets of the main event, the musical or comedy acts. Dad drew down forty dollars a night, but the shows were few and far between.

My father was way ahead of the curve on many things. Nutrition and fitness fascinated him, and he was careful about his diet long before it became trendy. He was into health foods, and the staples of his diet were blackstrap molasses, buttermilk, and yogurt. He worked out in his homemade gym in the basement of our building. He cobbled his own weights together by pouring concrete into tomato cans and fitting a bar between them. Again, he could do this because he never held a job.

Somehow this guy persuaded Frances Campanile to marry him.

My mother, Frances, was Pasquale’s opposite in every way. She was hardworking, and she hated handouts. Once I asked her what it was like to live in the Great Depression; she answered that she never noticed there was a Depression, because she always had “good jobs.” By “good jobs” she meant seamstress work in the sweatshops. But she was happy to have them. She was dutiful about everything. As an employee and as a mother, she did what she was expected to do. If we managed to pay the rent every month—and somehow we did––it’s because my mother was working at her “good jobs” and pulling down a regular paycheck. And because she could never abide the shame of an unpaid bill.

They say opposites attract, and my parents would be proof of that. They married in 1936, and they brought me and then my two sisters into that little world called the Bronx.

Opposites may indeed attract. But I can only go by what I see, and I never saw much of the attraction going on. I saw plenty of the opposition.

My parents never discussed anything. They argued, and they argued constantly. They yelled about money, mostly, but that was connected to everything else: my father’s failure as a provider, my mother’s shame and her resentment over the long hours she spent slaving in hat factories. They yelled simultaneously, since each had little interest in what the other had to say, and it had all been said a thousand times anyway. As I got old enough, I raised my own voice and added it to the mix.

Maybe it explains my ability, these many years later, to sing and shout for long, grueling hours at a rock-and-roll show and then do the same thing all over again the next night.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. And I’m not getting to the heart and soul of the Bronx I knew.

If you asked me in 1954 what was the heart of my neighborhood, I wouldn’t have needed a moment to think. Like any teenage boy, I liked to eat, but my heart didn’t race when I gazed into the window at Joe’s grocery. It raced like Daytona, though, when I stood at the neighborhood record store, Cousin’s, owned by Lou Cicchetti.

I was ten years old the first time I heard Hank Williams sing, and the experience was life-changing. I remember the moment vividly. It was a Sunday, and I could smell supper cooking in the kitchen, my mother’s tomato sauce. But when I heard that voice, nothing else mattered to me. For a boy in the Bronx, it was exotic, with its country moan and warble and its southern twang. But this singer was touching on something universal. If you were human, you were already tuned in to his station. I caught his name when the song ended, and the name of the song, too: “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.”

I bought it at Cousin’s the next day, and I started saving my change so I could buy everything else the guy had recorded. The money I used to spend at Moe’s candy store now had a new destination. Mr. Cicchetti knew to call me whenever the store got anything new by “that country singer,” Hank Williams.

This was right around the time my parents bought me my first guitar. On my instrument and with my voice, I tried to imitate whatever I heard my hero doing on his records. And I must...

Erscheint lt. Verlag	5.1.2023
Sprache	englisch
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
ISBN-10	1-63582-327-7 / 1635823277
ISBN-13	978-1-63582-327-1 / 9781635823271

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