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enjoy this Kenneth DiMaggio writing in the free cc&d Tax Day 2011 PDF file chapbook Poems and Stories from The Blue Collar Book of the Dead				You can also order this as a 2011 6" x 9" perfect-bound paperback ISBN# book! Click on the cover spread for the book Poems and Stories from The Blue Collar Book of the Dead

A Flower for a Bad Girl

Kenneth DiMaggio

    I’m still not sure when you became my first girlfriend. But I do know that when you beat me up, that was our first date.
    I was eight when my folks got divorced. During the week I lived with my mother and her folks in a suburb outside of Hartford. On weekends, I stayed with my father and his folks in the Italian section of Hartford. It was where my mother as well as father grew up. It was also where I met Sophia DiRobertis, the girl who beat me up on our first date.
    The Southend, or the “Italian” section of Hartford reminded me of an old cranky pit bull. The suburb next door where I lived—Wethersfield, was more like a young and still awkward Labrador retriever. Many of the people in my town were Italian transplants from Hartford. Thus the predominance of plaster statues of the Virgin Mary on the front lawn. The Southend had similar statues on lawns a quarter of the size in my neighborhood. And the houses were two or three stories high and lined with porches. Stores were a sling shot pellet away on nearby Franklin Avenue. These stores were not like the ones in the strip mall in my town. In what was supposed to be a market, (also called a “Pork store”) elephant leg-thick cheeses hung from the ceiling. There was something called a “Five & Dime” which was like a little department store, but sold stuff that no department store in the suburbs sold, such as semi-legal fireworks like sparklers, cheap 25-cent toys like balsa wood gliders, and penny candies like fireballs.
    And then there were places that were sort of like stores, but didn’t sell anything; storefronts with an Italian name followed by the word “club” and three or four oak-tree size guys in sleeveless T-shirts too small for them sitting before small tables in front of their club, which you knew enough not to go near.
    I pretty much “amused” myself in the backyard of my grandparents’ two story house. (The second floor was where my father lived.) If I was lucky, I would fly a glider three or four times before it broke or got stuck in the tree in the next yard. (Which I was forbidden to go to. “Looney-ticks!” is how my grandmother described them.) Then I might look through some of my father’s old baseball cards I found in the cellar. (Who the heck wants a card with Mickey Mantle or Joe DiMaggio.) Then I would do something I love—read. And because I loved reading so much, I’d quickly finish the boiled-down “Young Adult” version of famous battles like The Alamo or Custer’s Last Stand. After that, there wasn’t much else. Stay away from Grandpa’s tomato garden, which he seemed to love more than Nonna. (The only reason he probably stayed married was to get her old stockings which he used to tie his tomato plants). I could always go back inside and watch television with Nonna...re-runs of TV shows that should have never been made in the first place like Mr. Ed or My Mother The Car. Inevitably, I would succumb to watching at least one show about a talking horse or a talking car. Before that, however, I fell into what I would later recognize as an absurdist, philosophical act. I would take the handle of my old Radio Flyer wagon, and just pull it behind me in a circle. Over and over and over my grandfather’s well tended to backyard lawn. If a hoodlum named Sophia DiRobertis did not steal my wagon, I would have left a permanent, circular rut in the backyard of a house in the Italian Southend. Similar to the wagon trail ruts out West. Only this tiny circle was made by a pre-adolescent with no idea how he had a touch of Sisyphus and maybe some Asperger’s Syndrome. Luckily a bad angel by the name of Sophia DiRobertis came into my life.
    I had already seen her a few times. She watched me from a tall limb in the tree in her backyard. At first I thought she was a boy from the way she was wearing a baseball cap, overalls, and with the legs rolled up to reveal a pair of black beat up Converse High Tops. Looney-tick.
    And then one day she spoke.
    “Hey kid? Can I tell ya something?”
    “Yeah...” I mumbled, not wanting to hear it.
    “You’re really weird, ya know that?”
    “Yeah...” I agreed. Unlike you though, I was going to leave something behind. Even if it was a circular rut in a backyard.
    “You don’t have many friends, do ya.”
    “I got tons of them,” I said. “You just don’t see them.”
    “Just like they don’t see you. Tell ya what. Bring your wagon over to my house. We’ll hang out. We’ll find something.”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “My grandmother doesn’t want me leaving the yard.”
    “She didn’t want your grandfather or your father leaving either, that’s why they’re always at the bar or The Knights of Columbus running up a tab. My mother told me all about it. Come on, I’ll meet you in my driveway.”
    Dang. I knew my Dad frequently went to The Vesuvius Lounge and Banquet Hall, but I thought the Knights of Columbus was a Catholic organization. I didn’t know it had a bar—no wonder Grandpa was always making a big deal about going to church and the K of C!
    When I got to her driveway, Sophia was already there waiting for me.
    “My name’s Sophia. My mother named me after Sophia Loren. You got to be kidding!”
    “My name’s Frankie,” I said.
    “Like hell. It’s Francis.”
    “It is not!” It was, but—even if I knew that was Frank Sinatra’s first name, I still didn’t want to go around and say, “Hi, my name is Francis.”
    “This your wagon?” she said, as she reached for it.
    “Y-yeah,” I said.
    “Not anymore,” she said, as she grabbed the handle from me. “Sucker!”
    “Hey, you give that back!” I said.
    She was already expecting me to run after her, and she already had a punch waiting for me when I got there. POW! Right in the nose! Not only was my face full of blood, and my nose throbbing like it had a mega-migraine headache, but I was also crying loud enough for my grandmother to hear it—and now start screaming my name.
    “Hey, you better go home. Your grandmother’s calling you, Francis.”
    “She’s right! You are a bunch of lunatics!”
    “Yeah? And whose wagon did I just take!”
    “Who cares! I got a better one at home! And I bet you don’t even have an old bicycle!”
    From the way her sneer now crumbled, she probably didn’t even have a lump of coal to play with.

    Next weekend at my grandparents, there was a brand new Stingray bike waiting for me. They felt I was spending too much time in the backyard. They felt I should get out more in the neighborhood. Not too far. So long as you see lawns with the statue of the Virgin on them, you are safe.
    About five minutes after riding down the street, I heard a familiar voice yell, “Halt!” Before I turned around, I knew who it was. I just didn’t expect her to have a BB gun rifle pointed at me.
    “Go ahead,” I said, as I got off my bike. I was more disgusted than afraid. “Here, it’s yours.” I flicked down the kick stand so that the bike could stand on it.
    “Hey where ya going!” she said.
    “You can have the bike, alright?”
    “You leave and I will shoot you! And I oughtta shoot you for being such a pussy. Giving away your bike.”
    “Well you have a gun pointed at me, don’t ya?”
    “You could have tried riding away.”
    “And then you probably would have shot me.”
    Her giggle was her answer. Much as I hated to, I could not help but smile.
    “Come on!” she said.
    I was walking my bike with her to her house. Um- and hopefully, nobody would notice her gun.
    Once we were in the back of her yard, I saw my old red wagon. It was leaned up against the fence. Inside the wagon was an empty Coca Cola bottle. Littering the ground before it were shattered glass petals from previous bottles.
    “Recognize it?” she said.
    “Cool,” I said.
    “Watch,” she said. And then she raised the rifle, aimed it for a moment, and hit the bottle below its neck. The glass made a loud spit-like sound as it was hit.
    “Now you try,” she said, handing me the rifle.
    Maybe she should have given me some lessons. I not only shot over the target. I hit my house, just below an upstairs window.
    “You idiot!” she hissed.
    We briefly ran for cover. My grandparents already warned me about these looney-ticks. Now that one of them was shooting at them? They would be out of the neighborhood for sure, and I would lose a cool friend.
    Reluctantly, she let me shoot again. This time she helped me aim the rifle. Well, at least I hit the back of the metal wagon. That’s what it was there for, right? That’s why she took it from me, right? After a few more shots, I hit the bottle, and after she took the gun from me, she shattered what was left of it. That was when we discovered we were out of bottles.
    “Come on, I know where to get another one,” she said. Which turned out to be her house. Which also explained why Sophia was a couple of crimes away from Reform School (and good luck with a “student” like her.”)
    Like my grandparent’s house, Sophia’s house was a three family. We went into the kitchen on the first floor. That was where she, her mother, and her grandmother lived—
    “YAP! YAP! YAP!”
    —and a small tan poodle that just wouldn’t shut up!
    “Rocky! Shaddup!”
    It did after Sophia’s mother told it to be quiet or else. As for this being Sophia’s Mom—had to. Sophia was a chip off the larger chip that was on this middle aged woman’s shoulder. Though Mom was from another era. Her multi-frosted bee-hive shot back like the hair on the Bride of Frankenstein, and she had enough red lipstick, blue mascara, and make up to make her face look more like an ancient Roman wall fresco. Her knit, black pullover-jersey was chain-mailed with about a hundred plastic black tidily wink things. Since she was involved in a card game, every time she smacked down a card, half of her glossy black spangles rattled. And should Sophia’s mom fall into a river or ocean for whatever reason, forget about it. Whether real or not, her fingers had enough diamonds to prevent her hands from swimming to the surface.
    If Sophia’s Mom was a peeling Roman fresco, Grandma in her pale white bathrobe was more like a plaster-covered figure from Pompeii after the eruption of its volcano. If we had entered a little later, I might see how Grandma would have the same bee-hive as her daughter. (Her hair was presently wrapped around rollers the size of small sewer pipes.) At one time Grandma may have been pretty, but now she had a thin, severe face that looked a bit like Uncle Sam (without the beard of course) telling how he wants YOU to do something that’s not going to seem so glorious later on. Grandma was also more old fashioned judging from the crucifix the size of a snub-nose pistol hanging around her neck. Grandma could also chain-smoke like her daughter. Both ladies had overflowing ashtrays next to them with at least one and possibly two burning and still smoke-able cigarettes inside of them. There was also a half filled-bottle of anisette on the table, and both of their glasses would soon need a refill from that bottle. I don’t know what card game they were playing; there was just a row of cards before them and every other minute one of them would smack down a card.
    Judging from her mother and grandmother, I could see where Sophia got her pugilistic charm. Maybe that’s why there was a deliberate effort to “feminize” the kitchen; that, and maybe because these three gals who could have been a roller derby team had a soft spot for a toy poodle named Rocky, because the kitchen (and I fear the rest of the apartment) was Poodle Heaven. There were velvet paintings of poodles, ceramic lamps with the bases shaped like poodles, cookie jars and piggy banks shaped like poodles, calendars, refrigerator magnets, cups, plates, and even the handle of cooking spoons, either pictured of shaped like poodles. Meanwhile, the poodle himself sat on his own velvet pillowed-bed never letting his two onyx eyes off of me, as if just waiting for an excuse to go after me like he was a pit bull.
    “Mom, Nanni, this is Francis,” Sophia said.
    “They gave you a bum name, too, ha kid?” said Sophia’s mother. “I’m Lorraine.”
    “Nanni” shriveled her mouth in response; it seemed as if she was reminded of that fact more than a few times.
    “Sounds like someone who styles hair without a license—which is what I do. Ha ha! But when I named my daughter after the most beautiful actress in the world, what does she do? She looks like more of a boy than you!”
    SMACK! From a card she just smacked down on the table.
    “Mom...!”Sophia whined. It was a plea that was registered half in anger, half in embarrassment.
    “I give my three daughters all American names,” Nanni explained. “But with the way they marry this guy, divorce that guy, get arrested for smacking around another guy, I might as well call them Jezebel One, Jezebel Two, Jezebel Three.”
    SMACK!
    “Nanni...!” Sophia whined in the same angry, embarrassed plaintive tone. Also, grandma should have been “Nonna”, but this “family” was a creature all to itself, just like its Italian.
    “So you gonna offer your friend a glass of soda or what?” Lorraine said.
    “We were just—wondering—if you had any empty bottles,” Sophia mumbled.
    “You and that damn BB gun!” Lorraine said.
    SMACK!
    “I told ya to knock it off before you get in trouble!” she concluded.
    “An’ whose fault is that?” from Nanni. “Your latest prince of a boyfriend gave it to her. Soon as she saw a rifle rack in the back of his truck, she gotta have a gun. Can’t find a nice Italian man like her father!”
    SMACK!
    “What nice Italian man! They’re all babies!”
    SMACK!
    “Honey, what man isn’t. “
    SMACK!
    And instead of responding, Lorraine just smacked down another card on the table, which her mother almost instantly matched with a card that she just SMACKED down, and within less than a nanosecond it was SMACK! SMACK! SMACK! SMACK! SMACK! Or as Sophia now explained:
    “And this is how World War Three begins in my house. Let’s go.”
    YAP! YAP! YAP!
    “Shaddup!”

    Once outside, I felt like I had been kicked in the gut. I was in a mood for blood! Well, bottles, but we didn’t have any.
    “You got your bike, right?” Sophia said.
    Oh-oh.
    “Uh, yeah,” I uneasily said.
    “Good,” she said. “you ride while I get on the back of your bike. I’ll tell you where to go. Forget shooting at bottles. There’s a lot better stuff to shoot at than bottles!”
    “But—“ is all I could say. Too late, because she was already on the back of my bike. And while holding her BB gun. While I was going to pedal through streets with people I went to church with on Sunday morning, or folks who sometimes had coffee and cookies with my grandparents, Sophia would be on the bike, and knowing her, wildly waiving a Winchester repeating rifle that a lot of folks would think was the real gun that won the West.
    Cool.
    “Okay, “ I said as I started to pedal away. The bike wobbled for a bit until I was used to having a gunman—excuse me, gunwoman on back.
    “Sure, no problem,” she said. I could already sense the barrel sticking above my shoulder.
    Too late to kick her off now. Not that I wanted to either.
    “Okay then, just promise no shooting at any of the Virgin Mary statues,” I said.
    “What the hell, you think I’m some kind of Communist?” she said. “A gangster, maybe, but I ain’t no Communist.”

    Two gangsters. Or two cowboys. Or two bikers—or two gangster cowboy bikers (on a Stingray, not a Harley) or something like that. We only knew that it was damn fun! Riding through Hartford with both of us whooping it up while one of us wildly waived a gun, and once in awhile aimed it at some frightened, flabbergasted faces. To her credit, Sophia did not shoot one BB at anybody or anything. Heck, just waiving that gun and yelling like Attila the Hun was fun enough. Fun that would soon end once we left our neighborhood and came to the swampy outskirts of Hartford; swamp, that was also bordered by a bank of clay hard enough to sustain a railroad track. When the track made a curve around the swamp, Sophia told me to stop. Any train coming to this bend would have to slow down. If we were lucky, a train would be coming along any minute.
    But shoot a train?
    “Are you afraid?” she asked.
    “No,” I said, because as I now realized: “It’s like shooting a tank, and shooting a tank with a BB gun!”
    “Then here ya go,” she said, throwing me the rifle.
    And just as I caught it:
    “And whattiya know. Here comes your train.”
    “Dang, there is a God,” I said. “And good thing you didn’t shoot at the Virgin Mary—even if she was a lawn statue.”
    “Okay! Your train’s coming! And I want to shoot too!”
    Ping! Ping! Ping! The BBs harmlessly bounced off of the approaching locomotive. When Sophia took the rifle, the BBs did the same as she shot at the box cars in tow, though neither of us expected some of the tiny steel pellets to ricochet back. Something like that would have made me quit right then and there, but no, I grabbed the rifle from her and shot a few box cars myself, after which she took the gun from me and did the same. Not only were we lucky to have a slow moving train, we had a long slow moving train, which was eventually going to end with:
    “I’ve got the caboose!” I said.
    “Like hell! It’s my gun and my idea!”
    I think I might have actually wrestled the gun away from her. I’ll never know. As we tried to wrestle it away from each other, a police siren made a short sharp, wail behind us. Two police sirens as it turned out, and with another cruiser pulling in behind us, what did the Hartford cops think? They had Bonnie and Clyde? I mean, where were we going to run? Past a slow moving freight train and into a swamp? That’s exactly what Sophia did. And before the police put me in the back seat of the cruiser, I already gave her name up.

    Unfortunately, I did not get arrested. It was worse than that. I didn’t go to my grandparents for a few weeks, which upset them. My mother blamed my father for not being around in my life, which upset him. My grandparents finally stuck up for their son and accused my mother of not raising me right. That upset her. Add them all together and you get everybody UPSET with me.
    Well, it’s not like my family never had moments when everybody felt like killing everybody in the family; I just had not been part of it before, but now I was. Welcome to my family. (And believe it or not, I still think I turned out alright.)
    But this incident gave my grandparents the push to do what a lot of old Italians in Hartford were already doing: move to Florida to get away from their no-good disgraceful children. By now I knew about families like mine. By now I knew that I would be spending a lot of time in Florida, and I was right. I just didn’t think it would be spent in a retirement village called King Arthur’s Way.
    Well, it was sad to help my grandparents pack up the old house. I just wouldn’t be losing a place where I spent much of my childhood. I would also be losing a slightly exotic neighborhood. In the suburbs, I would never find a “Pork Store” and in front of it, barrels filled with olives you could almost smell from a block away.
    I didn’t realize I was leaving my grandparents house forever until I stood in the backyard. For what would be the last time. The backyard, where I used to throw up my gliders. The backyard, where I would pull a wagon round and round like some Philosopher of the Absurd, (and I hope, not as someone with asperger’s syndrome). The backyard where I once met a girl named Sophia DiRobertis. Who was now looking at me from the back porch of her house. This would probably be the last time I would see her. She probably knew that as well. So how could I not waive goodbye to her?
    She just gave me the middle finger and then went back into her house.
    “Oh yeah?” I said. And even if she was no longer there, I gave her back the middle finger.

    Girls. By the time you entered high school, your soul was restlessly dreaming about them. Girls. Especially in a Catholic high school, where they wore required plaid skirts (which they always illegally hiked up). Legs that gleamed beyond the innocence of their white knee socks. No different for their white blouses, and many of them open to gold First Communion crucifixes (forgive me Jesus).
    Nerds. Oh God, why did I have to become one of them in high school? Well, at South Catholic High School, I might have been spared some of the hazing that nerds got at Whethersfield High. South Catholic was also an affordable and easy to get to prep school for families in the suburbs surrounding Hartford. For many of those families like mine, South Catholic was, well, Catholic, which meant we would also get some form of moral guidance. Also, South Catholic was in the old Italian Southend neighborhood of Hartford.
    No matter where you go to high school, there is always one girl that every boy lusts after. At South Catholic, this girl was Gina Santopietro. Besides being the pretty girl that ran for and won every pointless student political office, she talked to everybody, even nerds like me.
    “I’m really in love with that book you lent me.”
    —which was followed by a playful squeeze on the shoulder. (Did she just touch me? Yes!)
    “I may only understand half of what is going on, but it sure is keeping me up at night! Do you mind if I hang on to The Prophet? It’s soooo deep.”
    “Sure. Keep it. I’ve got more books. Any book of mine you want—it’s yours!”
    “Thanks Francis. I’ll see you later in World Civ.”
    One of my books that I lent her—was keeping Gina Santopietro up at night. Oh Gina, what might you be wearing late at night while reading Kahil Gibran?
    SMACK! Whoever had just walloped the side of my head, it was hard enough to briefly rattle it. Well, even South Catholic had its share of jocks who treated nerds like old sports equipment. But when I turned around to see what third rate football player smacked me, I saw someone I would expect to see in Hell. But not in a place that was trying to be Heaven.
    “Sophia?”
    “You didn’t think I forgot about that time you gave me the finger, ha?”
    Yup. It was her. She would not forget something like that. I was still shocked to see after all these years—in a school like this. Hell, in a skirt! Despite being a little on the short side, having calves that were a little on the chubby side, (but a rack that was more ample than most of the other girls in school) she was not that bad.
    “You like what you see?”
    “Ha?” I cleared my throat. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. And what are you doing here?”
    “I broke out of reform school.”
    “Really?”
    “No, because this is reform school, and if I don’t get to class before the bell rings, this will be the third time I got detention this week. I’ll see you later. We’re in the same Study. Not that you noticed. Oh, and say hi to Gina for me. ‘Oh my gosh! This book—like—had big words! It must be deep!”

    Deep. About a minute after you graduate high school, it seems anything but that. At that time though, you take stupid silly things like the Snowball Dance, seriously.
    The Snowball Dance was like a prom but without all the formalities. What also made the dance popular, was that it was held in late February, when half of Hartford is buried by snow. (Honestly, the whole city should be buried by it). And by late February, even good Catholic teen boys and girls were getting cabin fever; so who wouldn’t want to go to such a dance?
    “What? You want to go?”
    If I was in shock, it was because—
    “I didn’t say that; I just asked if you were going!” said Sophia, followed by: “...jerk!”
    “Well, of course I’m going!”
    —even if it would be with the group of guys who would be dateless; I would still be going. And there would also be a similar group of dateless girls, though not the girls we wanted to ask to the dance. We may have been dorks, geeks, nerds and all that, but when it came to girls, we were no different than the jocks and popular guys who always got the good looking girls: shallow.
    “Well, good for you!” Sophia said.
    What the hell? It sounded like...
    “You want to go to the Snowball Dance?”
    “Duhhh!”
    “Wow,” I said, and laughed. Then:
    “Well, I’ll probably see you there.”
    That’s when she punched me in the arm.
    “Ow! What the heck was that for!”
    “Whattiya think!”
    What could I think? That someone like Sophia would care about a stupid dance? Like she was “one of us”? Well, maybe we just never let her be one of us. Maybe...
    She was now pulling books from her locker; more like trying to find a dignified way to exit. I’ve never seen Sophia more vulnerable; no, hurt. No, a 15-year old just as confused, geeky, and afraid like me. Well, not this time.
    “Sophia DiRobertis,” I said, “I’d like to ask you—“
    Nope.
    “Would you please—“
    That was better, but why’d you freeze?
    “There’s no one else I want to go to that dance with...”
    And?
    “But you...”
    She just pulled a book out of her locker.
    I turned around. I would still go to the dance. But I would never look down on “dateless girls” again, or even put girls in that category. Before I was about to go, Sophia put her hand on my shoulder and gently held me there.
    “And I don’t want to go with anybody else but you,” she said. “That’s why I already turned down two other guys.”
    “Two other guys—“
    “And I hope I was not stupid turning them down,” she said.


    Stupidity. Why do we associate that word with “lack of intelligence”? That might be one meaning for the word, though I think it’s a poor and insignificant definition. You can be truly smart but also stupid; in the sense that you don’t know when to be insincere, to shut up, to smile at someone you truly want to kill. That’s another form of stupidity, and unfortunately, Sophia had that stupidity.Religion class was an easy A. All you had to do was sit there and occasionally nod. Heck, Mrs. Halloran—who was also our Social Studies teacher—didn’t take the class that seriously. Half the time the class was about “moral issues”—which meant we could talk about anything that was an issue: drugs, sex, marriage, divorce, death—religion class was not that ba—
    “What about Jesus.”
    A topic Sophia brought up. Wait. We never talked about Jesus in Religion class before!
    “Well, with many of you about to make your confirmation, your religious advisor will talk to you more about what it means to be confirmed,” Mrs. Halloran explained. The way you talk to someone who was slow but also a bit unpredictable.
    “But what’s that got to do with Jesus!” she said.
    “Well, that’s something you can take up with your religious advisor...!”
    “Well, I can’t, because my religious advisor!”

    And because she said in the tone of some Country Club hostess, it got a few giggles.

    “Like you, and everybody else in this school, infantizes Jesus.”
    Ha? Was our collective gaping confusion.
    “You make him into a baby—just like us!”
    “Sophia—that’s en—“
    “Well Jesus wasn’t a baby! He disobeyed authority! He broke the law! He was a DELINQUENT!”
    What is one way to describe a gun shot in a space you would never expect to hear one? Well, calling Jesus Christ a juvenile delinquent in religion class—heck, calling Jesus a delinquent period—Sophia! Even from someone like you—that was going too far! Dang if she didn’t zero in on my uneasy grimace, and nobody else’s! Well I don’t care! Fellow philosophers of the absurd or not! Even if it meant abandoning you...
    ...and once she saw that I was going to abandon her again, she left the class before Mrs. Halloran could tell her to go to the principal. Principal? She was now beyond any Principal.
    But she was still a 15 year-old girl looking forward to going to her first high school dance. And as punishment, the principal would not allow her to attend the Snow Ball festival.
    Something like that shouldn’t matter to someone who called Jesus a delinquent. Well, she stopped showing up for school. The rumor was that was kicked out, was transferring to a public school, or was already in reform school. (I didn’t think Gina Santopietro could be such...a witch.) Sophia didn’t help things any by telling me to go to hell before hanging up on me. (What am I supposed to do? Get kicked out of school with you? Just because I read some cool books and listened to some cool records that nobody else but the two of us listen to and read?) Worse, I still had to go to the Snow Ball dance. Didn’t matter if my date was on the lam. I got dragged into the group that Billy Ahern’s Mom was chaperoning. (I think my Mom even called her up to take me along. Thanks Mom.) Because that’s how I found myself in a station wagon with three other 15-year old boys who could not stop fidgeting in their cardboard stiff polyester pants and blazers and two year 15-old girls giggling at the boys who knew they would all have to take turns dancing with them. And getting their picture taken. And being told how cute they are. And not just by Mrs. Ahern, but by all the parents, teachers, and even the principal. They would all be there at the Snow Ball Dance, our first rehearsal for adulthood.
    Sophia was right. We were being infantized.
    “Excuse me—Mrs. Ahern?” I said. “I need to go—I need to get out.”
    “Francis? Is something wrong?”
    “Ow! Mom—tell him to quit stepping on my feet!”
    “Francis, are you sick?”
    “No, I’m not sick and will you please stop the car!”
    “I can’t stop car and Francis I am responsible for you!”
    “You’re not responsible for me! I’m responsible for myself! And my name’s not Francis! It’s FRANKIE! God damn it!”
    “Ow! Mom! He stepped on my foot again!”
    But at least it he moved the hell out of the way when we were at a traffic light. I wasn’t that far from Sophia’s house either. We could still make the opening of the Snow Ball Dance—especially if I ran. Of course, my new shoes and my polyester clothes would be mucked up (but more comfortable). I still wasn’t sure if Sophia would want to come to the dance. The hell with her. After the way I practically jumped out of a speeding car? (And the way Mrs. Ahern was going to tell my mother about it—probably tonight!) Sophia was coming with me to that dance. Because,
    “Rebels don’t run!”
     “That sounds really stupid!”
    There was a “crack” in her voice; the crack of someone who had been crying on and off for quite awhile; probably since she was told she could not attend the dance. Something I did not think would bother her.
    “I don’t care!” I declared. “I’m tired of being Infantized!”
    She giggled and then said:
    “That’s not even a word, you know that?”
    “Well, it is now.”
    “Okay, well, I made it up.”
    “Okay, well, I’m the second person who used it!”
    “But it’s going to take me forever to get dressed!”
    “You’re already dressed.”
    “I’m wearing Converse for one thing!”
    “Cool. Come on.”
    “I can’t!”
    You can, and she did. And soon, we did. I don’t know when we started running to the school, but not long after we did, we held hands. It must have been thirty five or so degrees out, but neither of us felt it. I could only think about the time when we were both riding on my Stingray bicycle. How free we felt! Like nothing or nobody could touch us! Well, the BB gun might have helped.
    We had no such weapon now. I’m glad too. It made our flight through these obese, slate gray tenement-streets more alive and free. We didn’t need any weapons to protect us from this world peeking at us like some old lady from behind a curtain (and just enough to confirm that the kids today are up to no good!)
     So she could call the police. So what? What were the cops going to do? I quickly looked down at my shoes. They were a muddy, wet mess! So were my stiff, pressed, polyester pants! My blazer as well! As for my tie? I ripped it off and threw it behind me! That was when I also realized how I was part of somebody else. “Take it easy,” Sophia said. I squeezed her hand to let her know I understood. We both giggled. We might have felt like escaped fugitives, but we must have looked more like two kids in kindergarten from the way we slowly ran while holding each other’s hand. I just felt like I could have kept on running like this. The dance was no longer that important. The two of us running like this together, was better than any dance.
    And why the heck did you need one—no two cop cars out in front? Not for a dance at South Catholic. What were all these people doing outside for that matter? It seemed like half the dance was outside, and half of those people seemed to be parents, and all of them looking or pointing at us.
    “What the heck...”
    We both stopped running at the same time and looked at each other, like—maybe we should go back. Too late. The crowd and the cops swarmed around us. I tightly grabbed Sophia’s hand. The cops were going to have to arrest us together! Damn if they didn’t get called quick! Damn if—
    “FRANCIS!”
    Mrs. Ahern or one of the chaperones must have called my Mom! As for the cops—they were there for—
    “Sophia!” I cried out. They practically had her in the car when I noticed her. “But she didn’t do anything!” I tried to explain. “I’m the one who dragged her out! She didn’t do anything!”
    “What did you do to your shoes!” my mother said. “They were brand new, Mister! And you even lost your tie!”

    Which I manage to “lose” after briefly wearing one. The last time I wore a tie was when I interviewed for an adjunct teaching position at a community college in Hartford. I was between “lives”. I had just been laid off from my New York one, where I went after getting a master’s degree in literature.
    I had a job proofing and later editing copy for a medical trade journal focused on dermatology. Most of my copy was about cosmetic surgery. Once in awhile I’d get something exciting to proof or edit, like an article on leprosy.
    I lived on several couches and futons belonging to friends, friends of friends, and people who needed a friend to help them with their rent. My last futon was in a loft above a drag queen club, The Pyramid Club, in the East Village. Apparently, the singer Nico from the band The Velvet Underground once lived there, and mostly everyone who passed through that loft claimed to have known her. (They were lying.) Also, mostly everyone had a drug or alcohol problem, which they were always denying. I knew I needed to leave when I was at the bar one night, and ran into—
    “Hi! Long time no see!” Ðfollowed by two pecks on my cheek, and then: “Isn’t this place just crazy?” Not anymore; not when it meant meeting an old South Catholic classmate named Gina Santopietro.
    So I applied for a PhD program, for which the University of Nebraska-Lincoln gave me a great offer. (What? Everybody’s got to go to Yale? Hey, my future school’s football team can kick any Ivy League football team’s ass any day). I would not matriculate until the fall semester, so I went back home and luckily got two classes in composition at Mark Twain Community College in Hartford. I discovered how much I liked teaching. I looked forward to having a teaching assistantship in Nebraska. I also discovered I would miss teaching at Mark Twain, where I made some good friends among the faculty. For my last week there, one of the full time professors asked me to teach his class while he was at a conference. It was in his class that I discovered that one of the students was Sophia DiRobertis’ mother—Lorraine?
    “Yeah! How ya doing! Francis, right?”
    “Um—Frank.”
    Like a lot of adults in this community college, Lorraine was enrolled in its certified nursing program. It was one of the few steady jobs in this area. Growing old and helpless was a big business in and just outside of Hartford. Unfortunately, growing old is not something that many people in Hartford could count on. Every other day there was a story on the news about some kid shooting another kid, or some cop shooting a kid, or some delivery man or school kid shot in the crossfire between a cop and a kid. When Lorraine told me that Sophia had cancer, I was initially shocked: somebody was in peril from a natural disease, and not from the decay of civilization. Sophia, Lorraine, and her mother (she must be about a hundred!) were still living in Hartford; renting a third floor apartment in a porch-fronted clapboard tenement, housing which now struck me as being from another age. Why dontcha swing by and say hi? Sophia and Nanni would love to see ya.
    However old Nanni was, her orange-red hair was now a thing of artificial permanence like the polyester she wore. She was still smacking cards down on the table with her daughter across from her; between them was one of Lorraine’s nursing text books covered with cigarette ashes and empty, cracked peanut shells. Hope I never get sick on your shift. Rocky the dog was long gone (that would have been a mutant toy poodle if it wasn’t.) There still had to be a dog in this family, and this time it was an overweight brown dachshund who yapped at me while I was in the kitchen. Also, this room was decorated in various forms of kitsch relating to dachshunds, including a paper towel holder shaped like one, to a ceramic piggy bank where both ends were shaped in the head of this droopy eared canine. Scary as this kitchen was, I was afraid to leave it for the room to the left of it. It had been over 10 years since I had seen Sophia. I had not seen her after that disastrous night in the school parking lot. After that, she was kicked out of South Catholic for good, and then went to public school, reform school? Well, actually, it turned out to be a couple of semesters at the nearby state college, where she majored in Art, and the room I had just entered was her studio. Her water colors and drawings were taped throughout the room. If she only barely glanced at me when I entered, it was because she was engaged in finishing a “visual thought” on the drawing she was presently working on.
    “You don’t like my art work, do you...”
    She said it without any animosity. She sensed my uneasiness, disappointment. I just didn’t expect all these forests, brooks, farm houses, pastoral stuff.
    “It’s the closet I’ll ever get to having my own home,” she said.
    “Don’t say that,” I uneasily said.
    She just giggled. I finally saw the large multi-colored knit beret covering her head (but failing to completely cover her loss of hair). I also noticed how thin her legs and arms were from beneath a kimono decorated like the spray painted graffiti and symbols of a subway car.
    “So how was my mother as a student,” she asked. She rested the large drawing pad across her knees.
    “She said she’d have all her papers for the semester next week,” I said.
    “That’s when school’s done, isn’t it?”
    “Well, um, she can take an incomplete,” I said.
    “She probably will,” she sighed. “But I hear you’re back in school. For your PhD?”
    “Oh, I guess...I always do...go back to school, I mean. And then, and then...fuck!”
    “Don’t swear,” she said.
    “I’m s-sorry,” I said, as I stopped crying. “I’m sorry.”
    “You lived in New York for awhile, ha?”
    “And you’ll never guess who I saw...Gina Santopietro...and in a drag queen bar.”
    “I always figured that’s where she got her style from.”
    “But once I got to date girls like that...they were so...boring, you know?”
    “Then why do you keep dating them?”
    “Because, well, they look good, you know?”
    “You always were a jerk.”
    “I know...”
    “Come here. Next to me.”
    And after I sat next to her on the couch, I tried to joke:
    “Okay, but I feel like the cops or somebody like that is going to come along and break us up.”
    “Do you want anyone to?” she asked.
    “No,” I said, and then I took her hand. “No.”
    And then I gently slid my palm against hers; she did the same to mine. My fingers traced up and down and across her wrist; her fingers soon reflecting a similar gesture of the love our hands were now making. No one could tell us otherwise. I never thought that two people could make love with just their hands, but ours did. Our hands undressed, explored, caressed, unashamed, and when our hands finally became one, we had finally made love to each other. It’s what we had to make love with, and out of all my previous sexual experiences—okay, all two of them. So what.
    But this was the first time I made love with a woman.
    “Thought you kids might like some iced tea.”
    With the timing only a suspicious mother could make, Lorraine had entered with two glasses of iced tea.
    “There’s always somebody coming along, ha” I tried to joke with Sophia.
    “And this time worse than the cops,” Sophia said.
    “Oh, where the hell’s my brains! I keep thinking you two are kids, but you’re not! So let me come back with real drinks! Whattiya drinking there Frankie? Scotch? Gin and tonic?”
    “Actually, iced tea, but—I’ve got to go. I’ve got a stack of papers to correct, and—”
    “Are you saying I’m not going to hand in my papers?”
    “No, not at—“
    “Mom...!”
    “And not only am I going to have all your papers, this girl is also going to be back in school. She’s going to be back.”
    “I know she will,” I said.
    But Sophia had looked away from both me and her mother, who was soon sat down and joined the conversation—or rather, took over the conversation. Neither did I mind how it was initially about sausage-shaped dogs, and then the Off Track Betting Parlor. (It did not bother Lorraine one bit that she was the only woman in a space filled with twenty or so men who were like her first husbands and last few boyfriends: Losers—and just to emphasize that point, she even spelled it out for me: l-o-o-s-e-r-s.)
    I don’t know when Nanni came in, but that’s when I learned that Marciano was the best fighter of all time and that it’s a shame he never got to fight Ali. By the time my head was swimming with boxers, Dachshunds, great race horses, I had been talking for almost one—maybe one hour and a half? However long it was, it was long enough to briefly forget that Sophia was sick until I felt her mother’s tears on my cheek when she kissed me goodbye.

    My mother saved the obituary while I was away at school. Lorraine got her daughter a plot and a stone at a local cemetery; the only permanent place Sophia would ever get.
    Before going to the cemetery, I went back to the old Southend neighborhood where I met Sophia. It’s where I also lived on weekends with my grandparents. My grandparents? They are doing fine at King Arthur’s Way, in south Florida. When am I going to come out and visit? I will; despite the way “retirement village” makes being old sound like a fast-food type of franchise.
    My grandparents’ house was still kept up. I don’t know who lived there now. Most of the Italians in the neighborhood were gone. Many of the new homeowners were from Bosnia or Kosovo. It seems like whoever is the latest group to immigrate to the U.S., they put down some roots in Hartford.
    As for the house where Sophia lived...the fence was gone, and so was the tree from where she spied on me. There was nothing familiar about her house except...for a rusted, red wagon in the backyard. The people who now lived there, used the wagon as a small garden. Filled up with dirt, it was able to sustain four—no, five geraniums....no, four...Oh, damn it...of all the things to get arrested for. Even if it doesn’t look like anybody’s around. I couldn’t look more out of place by digging out a geranium from an old wagon that used to belong to me—well, before a girl named Sophia DiRobertis took it from me...so even if I did get caught, these flowers were by rights, Sophia’s. Though I only needed one.
    “And guess where I got it from? You remember our wagon? It’s still there; in your old backyard. But it’s now filled with soil and flowers; like a miniature garden. So simple, but so solid.”
    Her grave was a simple flat stone. It listed her name, the date of her birth, the date of her death, along with a rose engraved on each side.
    “I hope Mr. Gregory Derek Kloter whoever he is, doesn’t mind.”
    It was from his grave I stole the empty plant holder from. (Hey, even for a rebel and punk like you, Sophie, I wasn’t going to leave your flower in the empty Dunkin Donuts cup I brought it in.)
    “See what a bad influence you’ve been on me?” I said, as I put the plant above her grave. And then as I patted her grave:
    “Goodbye—“
    and after an uncertain pause had passed: “—my love.”
    Maybe it was because of the radiance from a late summer afternoon, that all the stones in this cemetery had a sparkle and glimmer.
    And if one grave stood out more than any of the others, it was because of a flower that one recent visitor was finally able to bring from his past.

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