Angelo’s Pizzeria, My Mom, and Life (as we knew it) Back in Those Days

Craziness was all around us, and nobody worried about it. Talking with friends, I am finding it had been the same for many of us.

“What are you doing with that sauce?” Brian asked, as if I had just stolen money from the register.

“The guy at the front counter wanted tomato sauce on his Italian Sub. What did you want me to do,” I protested, taking the ladle of hot sauce and dumping it across the cold, unfolded hero sandwich, right on top of the shredded lettuce and thinly sliced hotbox tomatoes.

I was thirteen, and I constantly worried too much trying to make everyone else happy. I was in blue jeans and a white t-shirt, our customary kitchen attire, and had an Angelo’s Pizzeria’s apron tied around my thin waist. My blue Keds sneakers were old and peeling apart, and my feet already hurt.

“Did you tell him you had to charge him for it?” Brian asked, unabashedly picking his nose and then flicking whatever his finger had found down onto the floor.

I looked up at him with the ladle still in my hand and an incredulous look upon my face. “How much extra are you gonna charge for a ladle of sauce?”

His face suddenly registered a profound challenge, and he then pounced on me, grabbing me around the neck with his right, pizza-flour coated arm. The flour immediately deposited upon my cheeks and chin as his hairy arm rubbed against my skin. He pinned me against the back-kitchen counter with his groin pressing firmly against my butt.

“Hey! Every nickel counts!” he said, and to drive home his point, he proceeded to dry hump me for the next thirty seconds. I resisted enough to realize it was useless, and I honestly did not know how to feel — all kinds of emotions ran through me at once.

In my powerless state, and well … shall I say my embarrassment, I looked to my right only to see the waitress staring at us. “Nice,” Mary said.

She was a part-time student at the community college in Paramus, NJ, and she was sweet, petite, and kind. I had developed a crush on her from my very first day of work. “Brian — stop it!” She made a loud clang by carelessly dumping plates from one of the tables out front into the sink.

Brian stopped and looked at her, still pinning me against the counter with his body. “You’re gonna be next!” he replied.

He then backed off of me and scuttled back to the pizza counter out front. It was 4 pm, almost the weekend, and Brian always got nervous anticipating the buzz of a busy Friday night.

Grease is the Worst.

“He’s crazy,” I said to Mary, as I finished wrapping the Italian Sub and bagged it. I deposited the sandwich through the opening in the wall leading to the front counter. This was also where we had our pizza station and oven.

Brian was there waiting to retrieve it, and he rung-up the sale to the man standing at the counter. Mary and I stood silently waiting and were not disappointed when we heard Brian saying, “There’s an extra quarter charge for the sauce.” We both just shook our heads.

Brian’s anxiety was, in part, due to the fact that all of his employees were an assorted collection of boozers, stoners, teenagers, and sex addicts. There was the indoor restaurant to handle, but also a very busy pick-up and delivery service, with five of our own mini-station wagons.

I just wanted to survive and be successful at something, and so I had learned never to fight back against Brian. Also, some part of me was genuinely fond of him.

It was the late seventies, and kids did not complain or expect the world to be perfect. We grew up knowing the world could explode at any moment, and that, at best, it was a chaotic place and always would be. In it, there were some good people, some bad people, and a whole bunch in between.

For better or for worse, we tended to take care of our own problems as best as we could, and our highest driving principle was that the last thing in the world we would ever do was to make a fuss over anything concerning our own lives. It would be an embarrassment to admit we had a problem.

Before returning out to the dining room and being the caretaker that she was, Mary asked me, “Why do you let him do that to you?”

Wiping my hands on a kitchen rag that was smelly and probably germ-infested, I answered as honestly as I could. “Because he needs to get his aggression out somehow.” I opened the nozzle which allowed grease from the fryer to pour out of the tube and into a white bucket for disposal.

Vietnam Trickles Down.

It was true — from my earliest of days, I had always been a deep-thinker who tried figuring everybody out. I had known from my first few days at work that Brian was full of reckless energy and uncontrollable sexuality. According to Gavin, Vietnam had destroyed him, and now, in his recovery from that deplorable experience, he was going through a bitter divorce from his wife of twelve years and he had a terrible relationship with his nine-year-old son.

My older cousin, Gavin, my dad’s favorite nephew and Brian’s business partner, was the reason I had gotten the job at such a young age. They had opened this, their third store, literally at the end of the road from where I lived five days per week at my dad’s house.

Both Gavin and Brian had served in Vietnam together and had been pals growing up in a small city, of lesser affluence, in Northern New Jersey. Gavin was a serious businessman looking to make a good living, while Brian was a bit of a stoner himself — a greaser and biker who was known to have made it with almost every waitress he had ever hired.

I had grown up in this small, but affluent town, which was loaded with upper middle-class families looking to remain private as much as possible, and with a penchant for keeping up with their neighbors as far as appearances and luxuries.

My dad was a highly successful businessman who owned a chain of beauty salons. My brother and I were the envy of the neighborhood since we were the first kids in town to have a built-in pool, a trampoline, go-carts, and our very own pinball machine, which my dad had won in a poker game.

Mary came back into the kitchen as I was pulling two tins of hot entrees out of the oven and putting them onto dinner plates. She pinched me on the cheek before grabbing the two plates of veal parmesan. “Still, you shouldn’t let him take it out on you.”

Everybody always said that to me and I hated it. Mostly, because I simply did not know how to be anything else. My only sibling was my brother, who was three years older than me, and he had taught me from the age of three that it would be a good idea to learn how to toughen up.

I could have been a concerto!

Overburdened with work and divorce, my dad simply did not know what to do with us. A series of nannies were hired, and soon fired, by my dad. I knew that my innate qualities somehow bothered and challenged his tough-as-nails image and ego.

Earlier in my life, my mom had gotten me into violin lessons at school, which I had loved. When they divorced, I was almost seven, and my dad stopped taking me to them.

I did not know what to call it back then, but today, one would say that allowing others to abuse me was my brand.

I only wanted to be well-loved by others, and for the most part, outside of my family, I was. My good looks, athleticism, and my charm; my being a responsible and caring person who was also somewhat intelligent, helped me to get through it all.

I certainly never got any special favors from anyone, and most times, I would think I was doing okay in life. I would not know that a world of chaos awaited me since just beneath the surface of my brave and stoic countenance, were pure and unresolved emotional knots.

Pizza for Everyone!

On this Friday night, by five-thirty, we were reeling. Steve, the pizza guy, was yelling at his little brother to get him more sauce from the fridge. I was busy rolling balls of dough right out of the stand-alone mixer, Brian was now in the kitchen, and Nancy was running written tickets (restaurant customer orders) in, and plates of food out of the kitchen.

Throw in four delivery boys checking out wall maps and helping to answer phones, the radio blaring Barracuda by the band Heart, which was Vick’s favorite song in the entire world, and you get a picture of what it was like.

Vick was the second pizza guy, and the first person most of us had known who was dating a Black woman. My cousin Gavin would be working tonight at his and Brian’s first pizzeria several towns away.

Brian came to me with the phone hanging from around his neck. He lifted the cord and handed it to me. “It’s your cousin Gavin.”

I took the phone from him. “Hi, Gavin.”

“Make sure Brian doesn’t drink too much tonight. It’s going to be busy, and I need everyone on board working together at full capacity. Tell him to pay everyone cash from the register at the end of the night.”

I sometimes felt that Gavin took me for granted and thought I owed him since he had done me the favor of hiring me in the first place. I never believed that he had any idea how much work and responsibility I took for the care of their store (and really, I did this for no other reason except that I was a perfectionist and had to see everything done to the highest level).

Beyond that, I knew he had no idea about how ill my mom was since my dad did not tell anybody, and my brother and I had learned to follow suit. Mental illness back then was such an embarrassment that nobody mentioned it in conversation.

For that reason, I carried the weight of my mother’s illness all by myself. “Sure. I always do. Thanks, Gavin.”

“I’ll be there later, after the rush here.”

“Okay.” He hung up. That was it. Yes, I wanted everyone to know what I had to deal with, especially Gavin, but having learned to help run his store had at least taken me out of my isolation and the pain I felt deep inside, and so I never bothered him with any of it.

It was important for me that I perform as expected, and so nothing about my mother; and therefore, by extension, nothing about any of the abuse I had endured, could be discussed.

I went back to finishing kneading the batch of one-hundred-and-fifty pizza dough rolls, and then heard Brian yelling at me, “Get in here — I need five orders of shrimp scampi for the dining room, yesterday!” So, I rushed into the kitchen and placed a large iron skillet on the stove, added some olive oil and minced garlic, and began sautéing the large, butterfly shrimp.

Stress is good for you.

Though I got along well enough at school and in most other environments in those days, Angelo’s was an entirely different beast altogether. All of my attributes were needed to survive the course of any busy night, and the strain on my ability to cope was continuously challenged.

I only worked Wednesday night, weekend nights, and an occasional Saturday afternoon when I was not going to take care of my mother.

Taking care of my mom had been my full-time position since I was very young. She had a long list of psychological and physical ailments and lived by herself in boarding houses ever since my dad had divorced her when I was six.

Usually, whatever landlord would take her, would usually dispose of her back onto the streets after only a few months.

My mom was unable to work and lived on Supplemental Security Income (welfare and food stamps). She received $425 per month for expenses and about $85 per month in food stamps. I would give my mom most of the money I earned so that she could eat well during the week when I was not with her. My father would chip in and give me twenty or thirty dollars every weekend to help out with expenses for the days I stayed with my mom.

The thing that kept coming back to me throughout my childhood and adolescence were these three mandates: take care of business, do not complain, and tell nobody your secrets.

Sex in the Seventies.

I worked at Angelo’s throughout my high school years. It never got easier, but I learned a great amount. During the winter of my sophomore year, after yet another busy Friday night, Steve took me and his girlfriend, Anita, a new waitress at Angelo’s, in his black pick-up truck with a cap on the back, to Hunter Mountain, New York, for late-night skiing.

Once we had arrived, the three of us laid in the blankets in the back smoking a joint and drinking the hell out of bottles of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill.

Anita giggled a lot, and as they caressed one another, they kept looking at me and laughed. I did not get it. They asked me about my sex life. I was fifteen and did not know I was supposed to have had one. Funny thing was, I did have one, but it was not the kind worthy of discussion. I soon fell asleep and they went skiing, and when I woke up, it was morning and we drove home.

At some point, my cousin Gavin sold his half of the restaurant to Brian, who then owned it outright. The summer between my sophomore and junior years, we were all sitting in the booths out front in the restaurant after the close of business. Our new waitress, Marjorie, who was also a nurse at the local hospital (with a bevy of student loans to pay off), was being coerced by Vick, Steve, and Brian, to do something but I was not privy to whatever it was.

They had bought me two bottles of Boone’s Farm, and I had been so thirsty, I guzzled the first and was thinking about finishing the second. Everyone else was drinking beer or vodka.

Suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, Marjorie grabbed me by the hand and pulled me towards the men’s room. She dragged me inside, and the door instantly slammed behind us. I tried opening the door, but the men on the other side were holding it shut and were shouting, “You’re not coming out until you get your…,” well, you get the picture.

Marjorie said, “C’mon, it will be alright.” She had me sit down on the toilet as she gracefully undid the button on my Levi’s. I decided to sit back and let it be. Since once was not enough to please everybody, she went two times with me. It was my first woman ….

Unspeakable.

With this experience, memories from an earlier period of life flooded my mind with torrents of whimsy. Over the next few months, I would try to reconcile them all on my own, but it was exceedingly difficult to do this and so these occurrences fled to a place within my brain which immediately locked firmly for the next ten years.

With my parent’s divorce, I had been home alone many days when I was between the ages of six and ten (when my dad had finally remarried). My older brother was supposed to be watching me, but he was a sports fanatic and was always at the gym at school, or on the field with his teammates.

At the age of nine, during the summer of 1971, a neighborhood bully, who was fifteen-years-old, began hanging out with me quite often. Nobody liked him and he was a loner. He stole from others and said mean things to everybody. I was too kind-hearted, isolated, and too broken from my mom’s problems to know any better.

This boy introduced me to poker, and since my dad was a gambler, I took to it instantly. However, Scott cheated and I was inexperienced, and so I lost all of my savings from my allowance after the first three days. Over the next three days, I was in debt to Scott for future allowance.

I kept on trying to win and he kept on saying, “Double or nothing!” Once I owed him over two-hundred dollars, we both realized I would be paying him off for the next two years, and he offered me a deal.

Strip Poker, Anyone?

To pay off my debt, I could play strip-poker with him. I would make five dollars per day doing this. This did not seem too bad a deal, and I accepted. Strip-poker soon segued into daily games of strip-Monopoly (since Monopoly was my favorite game and I thought I would have a better chance at beating him, but he cheated on this too), and finally, we settled on strip billiards, since he had a pool table and a bar in his basement, and both his parents were often at work.

We would go down into the basement, and I would not know why at the time, but he would always play the song Aqualung by Jethro Tull. At first, he was very patient with me, and he showed me how to use the stick, to line-up shots with the cue ball, and I loved the game.

He would drink bourbon from a shot glass and I tried a beer once or twice, but that was it. As I continued to lose and was down to my underwear, he would come up behind me, ostensibly to help me to line-up the cue ball, but he would start to rub his groin against me.

It was subtle enough at first that I did not know what he was doing, and truthfully, I enjoyed the physical closeness. Sometimes, we would take a break and sit on the couch, and he would show me his older brother’s porn. Most of these times, I would already be completely naked. I do not believe in all the years that we played, I had ever won enough for him to take off more than his shirt and shoes.

After several play periods wherein we continued to play pool even after I was naked, after having looked through the porn magazines, I would continuously lose to him, and the first few days I would just get dressed and go home.

About a week into this, when I had no more clothes left to take off, we continued to play and after I lost to him again, he took me to the couch and said, “I know how you can quickly get out of debt to me if you are brave enough.”

I did not want to pay him all of my allowances, especially because I often used them to help out my mom. I said, “How?”

He then loosened his pants, pulled them, and his underwear, down to his knees, and showed me his penis. He flapped it back and forth, and as it grew, I became transfixed. I was only nine. He was fifteen.

I resisted at first, but then I thought of my money and my mom. He started to caress my hair and I was mesmerized by the affection. When I could no longer escape the seductive nature of it all, he instructed me what to do.

Of course, I never told anybody about it, and this was the start of many interludes between us that went on for two years or so.

My mom had congestive heart failure due to scarlet fever as an infant, and then she had developed late-onset paranoid schizophrenia at the age of thirty-five.

Society was not up for the challenge of helping the mentally ill. As her life was speeding downhill rather quickly, I remembered feeling lost and despondent but determined to move forward.

To make matters worse, she resisted the little bit of psychiatric treatment that was available to her, mostly because the medications used to treat schizophrenia back in those days left most patients like zombies, literally.

My mom was very often committed to Bergen Pines Psychiatric Hospital, where she would be strapped to a bed. They would keep her for up to thirty days, get her calm with the medications, and then release her to the public with very little in the way of follow-up. I do not know how this was so, but from the time I was twelve, I was able to ride my bicycle for the six-mile trip to the hospital and they would allow me to see my mom of my own accord. The conditions were deplorable and she was often clamped to her bed with restraints around her ankles and wrists and drugged to near oblivion.

None of her family was able to help, mostly because they did not want to or were not in a position to do so. Throughout my teen years, I remained worried that my mom, Maria, was likely going to be committed to Bergen Pines Psychiatric Hospital after each of her incidents.

Her favorite was stalking men walking home from the train station in either Hackensack or Westwood. She would follow behind them as they walked to their homes, and eventually she would ask them if they were the gatekeeper, whatever that meant. When they said no, she would insist they actually were and that she was there with the key needed to open the gates to heaven (the truly terrifying thing about this is that it is the absolute truth and it came well before Ghostbusters II, the movie, had even been a thought in anyone’s mind. For those who don’t know, Rick Moranis and Sigourney Weaver played a similar pair in that movie. Maybe the writer had someone close who had worked with the mentally ill?).

When I turned seventeen, I was still working for Angelo’s pizzeria, and it was possibly the only consistent and predictable thing in my life. I would be heading out to Penn State University in the fall to study meteorology. Since I now had my driver’s license, I had begun helping out with deliveries as needed.

One Friday afternoon, as I drove down a busy avenue with a Ford Pinto Wagon full of hot pizzas, freezing rain and sleet were falling steadily and I should have been happy that I had just been accepted to Penn State. However, I was busy thinking nobody wanted to help me with my mom. How could I leave her by herself and go away to school? In a quandary about what I should do, the red Angelo’s delivery wagon I was driving suddenly skidded across an intersection and rammed right into the back of a blue Mercedes Benz.

I went to college at Penn State that fall, but wound up dropping out in the middle of my sophomore year in order to take a Greyhound across the country and look for my mom somewhere in Phoenix. She had called my aunt to let her know she was there. I got there and she had called my aunt again to give her the cross streets of her boarding room.

I found her and convinced her to come back to New Jersey and that I would get an apartment with her. We found one in Lyndhurst and I took a job at a bakery working the overnight shift but also then registered at New York University full-time where I could commute to school and earn my degree.

I then had a stroke of luck come my way. One of my literature professors, knowing I wrote well and who understood how desperate I was to stay in school and yet take care of my mother, offered me an opportunity to write scenes for an upcoming novel being written by his friend. I jumped at the chance and it turned out, I had a knack for converting notes into great literature. Once I had established success with this, more opportunities arose — another friend of this professor, who worked at a neighboring college, and then one of his colleagues approached me looking for the same. Thus, my career as a ghostwriter was born. It was great — I loved it and the cash pay was just enough to take the edge off for a while.

Although this was going well, not so much having taken residence with my mom. We lived in the bottom floor of a two-family house and I was told by the upstairs family that my mom cried all day when I was at school. I would come home and calm her down as we had dinner. Sometimes I could coax her back to reality, we would eat in peace, and then enjoy television together. Sometimes she would scream, “Get away from me, devil incarnate!” In which case, we would have the night from hell.

It’s common for those with schizophrenia to believe their caretakers are possessed by the devil.

I would sleep for about three hours with my bedroom door locked since occasionally I would catch mom with a kitchen knife in her hands roaming the apartment late at night, and then I would head to work at the bakery.

In my absence, her crying never stopped, and the neighbors were constantly complaining to the landlord. I tried to appease them, but to no avail, and honestly, who could blame them? This would start the process wherein my plan to take care of my mother would ultimately fail.

The Eighties — just as tough, not as much unsupervised sex.

This was how we did things in the seventies and eighties: nobody got involved with family problems; spouses had become easily expendable; mental illness was seen as a weakness the person themselves had to control (as if they had a choice to behave normally).

The sexual initiation (now abuse) of a minor was seen as a rite of passage; older siblings competed with, and often times dominated, younger ones in order to prove their mastery of the American system of competitive cultural heritage, and they had been trained not to show them care, love, or support of any kind.

This was the way things were, for better or for worse. Also, kids loved to work because really, there was nothing else going on. Television simply did not have the draw of the internet.

I held out for almost three years with my mom, but it was too much. I had grown exhausted and stressed to the max. I moved back home with my dad and left my mom to stay with the one friend she had been able to make in all of the years since my dad had divorced her. She had met him at a bar on a Friday afternoon. He was a golfer, widowed, and the superintendent of the apartment house where he lived in Hackensack, New Jersey.

He had always made my mom laugh, and for some reason, he understood her and enjoyed her company. He had said to me when I was twelve, just before I had started working at my cousin’s pizzeria, that if my mom ever needed a place to stay, she was welcome to sleep on the couch in his living room.

I drove her to Jeremiah’s apartment and he welcomed us with open arms. For a few weeks, as I desperately searched for somewhere safe my mom could live long-term, everything seemed fine.

I would take her out to eat twice a week, and we went to the movies. I had gotten her to take her medications regularly for now with Jeremiah’s help.

I came home from a ski-trip weekend with friends one Sunday evening to see cars lined up along the streets of my father’s house. Relatives and friends from across New Jersey were all there to pay their respects to my dad and brother.

When I entered the house, my dad informed me that my mom had died from self-inflicted wounds that Saturday. It had been two months to the day after I had left her at Jeremiah’s. Where had all these friends and relatives been all the years when my mom and I needed them? After hearing my dad’s words, I ran into my bedroom and locked the door behind me.

Eventually, I earned my bachelor’s degree in social services and literature from New York University (by this time I had left behind the idea of becoming a meteorologist, realizing that writing and caretaking were my things). Next for me was moving out to Pennsylvania in order to earn a master’s degree in counseling at PSU. While pursuing my degree there, I worked at homeless shelters and halfway houses, but I also continued ghostwriting for the university elite, their friends and colleagues.

Seems there is always a great need for good writers who are willing to take pay to turn the ideas of others into great literature. I discovered over time when I pressed the issue, that the books I had helped to write had been published by major publishing houses and two turned out to be quite successful. I did not understand how the publishing world worked back then (let alone now, lol!) — the names of the authors were always changed into pen names, the titles of the books themselves were completely different, and much of my writing, though in essence similar to my original versions, had been altered quite substantially. However, that bothered me very little — it did me a world of good knowing I had contributed to published works of art.

Meantime, my brother became a successful professional boxer until he broke his knuckle and then could not punch anymore.

Over the course of the following years, he had somehow managed to get my dad to turn over ownership of two buildings my dad had owned — two rich commercial buildings where his former businesses had been located in one of the wealthiest of N.J. towns (these were meant to be my dad’s retirement funds). My brother immediately sold those to start his family and, of all things, an Italian restaurant, in Georgia.

Later, my dad told everyone that my brother, who had transitioned into financial planning as a profession, had gotten him drunk at their favorite Italian restaurant and had the paperwork all ready for my father to sign over the buildings. I believe my dad wanted my brother to have them and just told everyone (including my stepmom and I) that he was drunk and unaware what he was doing when he had signed.

My father had a weakness for my brother … maybe because my mom and my brother had never bonded, or more likely due to old Italian heritage which dictates the oldest son gets the lion’s share of a father’s legacy and inheritance. My father had lived his life vicariously through my brother during all those years he was a prized professional boxer, when it had still been a possibility that my brother could have become a famous and well-known athlete. Who knows for sure?

The sad epilogue: really, the world has not changed.

They say if you are focused, you can succeed at anything. That’s one thing my brother and I shared and had always both believed … and it turned out, it was partially true.

I earned my master’s degree, and after having worked as a counselor for a decade or so, I then crashed emotionally, having gone through divorce and then another span of years in absolute emotional turmoil.

I picked-up the pieces through my faith and God’s graces, and I have been a very successful ghostwriter for the past twenty-five years, still trying to sort out the pieces of the utter brokenness of my early beginnings.

Although the world was not against me back then when I was a child, its indifference at almost every point in my childhood led to a nefarious and completely unknowable paradox of neglect. It happens in life, and yet I see the chaos in the world around us today.

Things have not gotten any better. I see that people still want to change the world nowadays— but I must say I doubt they ever will — however, I truly believe all they need to do to make their lives, and the lives of those around them, so much better is to improve the quality of the love they share within their own families. This means taking time to be with those they love, and doing so while including all members in the process— especially those who are mentally challenged, different, otherwise angry, but especially those who may not deserve it.

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Blessings to you!

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