FIRST IMPRESSIONS
When we were done talking, Angelo shook my hand, told me to come back tomorrow, and when I did, to come in through the back door.
To a kid, that’s pretty exciting right from the start. I’d never walked in through the back door of anywhere except my parents’ house; had never seen the inside, the back room, the inner workings, of anything.
Okay, so it wasn’t like getting asked backstage at the rock show or being given a guided tour of the space shuttle. Just an invitation into the kitchen of Ferrara’s Pizza on Cooper Road, a neighborhood joint fifteen minutes’ walk from home. It wasn’t even a job so much as a test. "You come," Angelo had said. "You like me, I like you, then maybe, eh?" He’d shrugged. "Then maybe you come back. Maybe not."
The next day, I came back. I remember the smell of ripe Dump-sters, acidic like hot tomatoes and yeasty like stale beer. I remember the intimate crunch of my shoes as I walked alone down into the alley/parking lot behind the place, cigarette butts strewn on the broken concrete and the sound of raised voices on the other side of the rickety screen door that let into the kitchen. I heard shouting that sounded happy and serious both at the same time—impossible for me to reconcile with the simple emotional architecture of my particular and quiet suburban upbringing, where shouting only ever meant something bad—and impossible to translate because it was in Italian. I, of course, spoke not a word of Italian and (perhaps unwisely) had taken my first job in a place where Eyetie was the primary language. At the time, this seemed only a minor inconvenience.
I remember reaching for the door and feeling the dry heat baking through the screen on the palm of my outstretched hand.
Wow, I thought. That’s uncomfortable. Maybe the air conditioner isn’t working.
My second thought was that perhaps my choice (guided by my mother) in wearing a cadaverous blue button-down shirt and dark slacks with pointy-toed dress shoes to my first day of work had been a mistake.
But she’d been so proud, so happy. She’d insisted that—at least on their first day at a new job—everyone ought to dress as though they were attending a formal ball where one’s clothing, carriage and grace would be studied with some rigor. Because one never truly knew what they were in for on their first day of anything, it was all a matter of first impressions. And Mom was a big believer in first impressions. I’ve seen pictures of myself when I was a small child, in the years before I had any control over how I dressed me, and have witnessed the full flowering of my mom’s obsession with firsts. Coming home from the hospital, I looked like a small ham dressed for trick-or-treating in a Winnie-the-Pooh bunting complete with ears and paws. First day of school? Corduroy Toughskins and what appears to be a midget’s dinner jacket. In my first-grade school picture I am wearing a plaid bow tie and cummerbund and a gap-toothed grin so wide and crazy I am frankly amazed I wasn’t immediately prescribed something. At my First Communion, I looked like I should be serving drinks.
There is a treasured family photo of the four of us—Mom, Dad, me and my little brother, Brendan—posing on the edge of some mountain in the Adirondacks. It’s the first mountain the four of us climbed together, according to my mother. Myself, I’d say it was probably just taken in the woodlot down at the end of the street where I grew up, except that the ground behind us in the picture seems to be slanting upward at some ridiculously steep angle, and none of us are actually standing. We are, in fact, clinging, crablike, with fingers and bootheels to a rock outcropping and quite plainly trying to keep from sliding off to our deaths.
In the picture, my mom and dad both look like teenagers. She’s wearing shorts and hiking boots and pigtails and a look of manic, totally insane joy—an expression she wears, in one form or another, in every photo ever taken of her. He has a beard and a mustache, a flannel shirt, and the air of a man expecting to be eaten by a bear at any moment. Brendan is four years old so it doesn’t matter what he’s dressed in, but I have been attired in what appears to be a pair of miniature lederhosen like a tiny pitchman for European throat lozenges.
Anyway, Mom was big on firsts and big on dressing up for them. So it being 1988 and this being my first day of work, that was what I’d done—dolling myself up in my blue shirt with the too-large collar and poly-blend slacks and pointy shoes, looking like a short, skinny thrift-store version of the lead singer from Foreigner and having balked only at the addition of my best red leather tie. It was a pizza joint, I figured. A tie would just be overdoing it.
I pulled open the door and stepped inside. A radio was playing something unrecognizable and full of accordions. The air above and around the three double-deck pizza ovens was warped by the furnace heat radiating from them, like looking at the world through water, and everywhere else was thick with flour. It hung like a dusty cloud. The floor was gritty with it, every flat surface covered with it. The kitchen was a microcosm of motes and streamers, the thin stratus formations disturbed only by the passage of bodies through it and the suck of ventilating fans; a universe of flour that whitened everything it touched. To take a breath was to inhale whole galaxies of finely ground wheat, and the taste was like chalk on the tongue riding an olfactory wave of tomatoes, oregano and char. In two minutes, I’d sweated through my pretty blue shirt. After three, I was ready to pass out.
Angelo saw me standing there and broke out laughing, the cigarette in the corner of his mouth bobbing, the dusty skin around his eyes wrinkling. Natalie, his wife, made a face like I was the funniest, saddest thing she’d ever seen. And I just stood there, weaving in place and sweating while the accordions honked and everyone in the kitchen erupted in laughter and language I didn’t understand.
Finally, Angelo took off his glasses and wiped at his eyes. He pointed to a corner of the kitchen with a coatrack and some clean aprons stacked on a shelf. "Jason. Go. Change," he said.
So I did.
MY MOM HAS THIS STORYshe likes to tell. Well, not a story exactly. It’s more like an act, a shtick she falls back on whenever someone asks her what I was like as a kid.
Jay used to be such a sweet boy. You remember that show Family Ties? Well, Alex P. Keaton was his hero. He dressed like him, acted like him. He was always more comfortable around adults, you know? Very polite. Very smart. When he was little, he used to dress up all the time. One day he’d put on an army helmet and a backpack and be a soldier. The next day he’d wear this adorable little Boy Scout uniform and carry this bird book around with him. And I’d always get a call from Mrs. So-and-So down the end of the street and she’d say, "Cindy, Jason’s running away again. And he’s dressed like a spaceman or something."
But he always came home, didn’t he? He always came home and he was always so sweet. See? Look at this . . .
At which point she will unearth a box of pictures or, worse, a framed-portrait collection of me through the years, from like five or six years old on through maybe eighteen. It’s an annual, one portrait from every year, arranged in an oval around one central photo, larger than all the others: a studio portrait of yours truly at eighteen looking like King Dickweed in a turtleneck sweater and blue jeans, brown leather jacket thrown jauntily over one shoulder, shot against a back-drop of disco lights as though I’d been caught by the paparazzi on the dance floor of the Dork Club.* It has come to be known over the years as the Wheel O’ Jay.
With the Wheel serving her like documentary evidence, she will run through the years with quick and practiced ease.
This one, he’s what? Nine years old? Maybe eight?
I’m eight. She knows that perfectly well. And even if she didn’t, you’d think the Cub Scout uniform and the manic, wild-eyed leer of total elementary school picture-day psychosis would be a dead giveaway.
Look at him here, she’ll continue, her voice hard and nasal like Marge Gunderson from Fargo after a toot of helium. Isn’t he cute? That little tie and sweater vest. That was the year we all went to Atlantic City. To the boardwalk. He was so excited. And this one. Doesn’t he look happy? He was twelve here. Our first cat had just died . . .
Her affection for the photos starts to wane considerably by the late eighties, by the time I’d made it to high school. But still, she’ll shrug, tap at the glass. She will claim that I was nothing short of a perfect little mama’s boy until I reached my eighteenth birthday. An absolute angel, sweet as a gumdrop. Never mind that by eighteen, I’d already spent my first night in lockup, had already held and left three different jobs, had moved out (and subsequently back in) twice. She doesn’t mention to guests making the rounds of the Wheel what it was like to stand up in the judge’s chambers and agree to discipline a wayward son who was up on charges of possession of controlled substances, criminal trespassing and contributing to the delinquency of a foreign exchange student. She doesn’t tell the story of how, in an effort to get me to quit smoking on my seventeenth birthday, she gave me a pack of Marlboro Reds with a picture of my grandpa tucked inside the cellophane. He’d recently died of lung cancer (among other things), so the picture showed him in his casket. And she’d painstakingly written Hi, grandpa! in blue ballpoint pen on each individual cigarette, then somehow managed to get them all back in the pack.
