on the driveway. My father then sits on me and begins slapping me open handed, with the front and back of his hands, across my face.
The next thing I know, Giovanni is charging into my father from the side, knocking him off me. Turning his rage on Giovanni, he quickly climbs on my friend, cursing him and striking him repeatedly in the torso. My mother rushes outside at the commotion and begins screaming. “The neighbors are going to call the police! Stop it! Get off him!” she shrieks at the top of her lungs in a panic as she tries to pull my father off Giovanni. Finally he lets go and she walks him inside, along the way consoling him as if he’s a child who has fallen off his bike.
Giovanni is breathing heavily, and we sit on the pavement catching our breath and watching my parents console each other as they head back into the house.
Once they’re inside, Giovanni stands up and says, “I’m calling Papa.” I’ve never seen him so upset. He runs to the other end of the house, not waiting for me to follow.
I slowly get up, gather the rags and bucket, and then walk around the house to the garage, where Giovanni is already talking on a cordless phone he must’ve grabbed from inside. The conversation must have been short because as I turn the corner I see him going back inside the house to hand the phone to my father and then walk back outside to join me. We stand silently and listen through the closed door separating the interior of the home from the garage. I’m embarrassed by my father, but I also want the world to know what he’s really like.
My father speaks to Francesco in a hushed voice, “Yes, I understand. That’s right—boys will be boys. No harm, no foul. Sure, I can do that. I will, you too.”
He hangs up, and then I hear my name called, so I open the door and walk in. My father looks at me, his eyes fire red and his face flushed. “Why don’t you take Giovanni home now, since you boys don’t seem to like it here.” The words are an order, not a question.
In an instant Giovanni is off, gathering his things and leaving my father and me alone.
“After all I’ve done for you, you don’t appreciate me. You can just stay over there for all I care. That’s right, why don’t you stay there? And don’t you ever come back!” My mother comes in while my father is screaming and starts crying while he continues on with a frantic, irrational, and accusatory monologue.
When Giovanni enters the foyer with his bags, he opens the door without saying a word and lets himself out, giving me a look and a half-smile as he passes me, as of to say, We did it, we won. At this, I erupt with what has been stored inside me for months. I let my father know how much I hate him and that I never want to see him again and that I wish he were dead. To which he replies, “What did you say?”
“I said I hate you.”
He looks at me perversely. “Good,” he says, looking satisfied.
We walk out and I’m angry, scared, confused, and sad. We go to Giovanni’s house and Francesco ushers us in, as if saving us from a murderer on the loose. It turns out that Francesco and Greta hadn’t gone to Italy—in fact they’d never even planned to. The whole thing was a ruse in order to catch my father in the act.
Francesco speaks to me loud and clear, and tells me I’m to live at the Russo house from now on. He says, “Now you’ll never have to see that fucking motherfucker again” and waves his hand to the side, as if my father is a fly he’s swatting away. He says he wants me to understand that sometimes you have to lie in order to make the right thing happen, which in this case was to catch my father red-handed in his drunken and abusive rage. He looks at me firmly, man to man, and says that if he hadn’t convinced me that he and Greta were leaving the country, then knowing me, I would have fought with my father, said, “Fuck this,” stayed at the Russo home for a short period of time until my father cooled down, and then let the cycle repeat itself. He says what’s happening is not okay, not normal—things I’ve long suspected.
With mixed emotions I thank him, all while wondering what he told my father, because he ignores my questions about the specifics of their conversation. I’m speechless and filled with questions no one will answer. The way Greta and Francesco seem to know more about what is going on in my life than I do can be frightening. Sometimes when it really feels like they’re reading my mind, my hands shake and I can’t bring myself to make eye contact. I go silent at these times and I wonder if they notice and think I’m the weird one, or if they just brush it aside. As soon as I can, I escape to play drums or get stoned.
As I settle into my new home, Francesco wastes no time vaguely explaining that from time to time he and Greta host “spirit meetings” in their living room, what I will realize in retrospect must be some sort of séances during which past and present details of my life are supposedly revealed to them. When I inquire “Why me,” why am I their focus, both of them fall eerily quiet at this, and then one changes the subject. No matter how odd the things they say to me are, or will ever be, I always avoid acting in any way that might seem remotely disrespectful. I know they don’t freak out over things the way my parents do, but I don’t want them to ever have a problem with me. I never initiate a conversation on the topic of their spirit meetings and I never go to one, but Francesco and Greta will continue to reference this mysterious topic to me in an indirect manner. Eventually they bring it up almost daily. Over time, the bombardment of strange spiritual activity in the home becomes so thick that I am convinced these people are into some sort of satanism or witchcraft. I do my very best to ignore this and stay focused on being polite and getting high.
Soon after moving into the Russo residence, during parties Giovanni and I host with a small group of people, I discover his infatuation with his Ouija board. Once everyone has become sufficiently wasted or high and all other forms of entertainment have been exhausted for the evening, he always pulls out the board. Too tired or inebriated or too curious to refuse, our guests usually give in.
One evening, Giovanni and a friend of ours burst out of his room with Adriana following closely behind. They are headed outside and ask Greta for binoculars. I follow them all to the back deck, with no idea what’s going on. The three of them stare up at the sky, so I look too, but the sky looks the same to me as it always does. Greta is calmly standing behind them, smoking a cigarette, and Francesco is wiping a dish dry with a cloth while peering at us through the window over the kitchen sink. I ask why we are all out here, what we are looking for, and Giovanni simply replies that the stars are about to move. I know better than to laugh at him; after all, the group is outside with binoculars and a laser pointer and the adults are showing genuine interest. Something must be going on. When I look up again, sure enough, one of the stationary stars seems to slowly begin to move around.
Giovanni hands me the binoculars, “Look.” He shines the laser pointer in a stationary position and tells me to lock onto the end of the beam with my line of sight. When I find the beam through the binoculars, I see a craft with three blinking lights high in the sky. It silently glides on a linear course to the end of the beam and then makes two right-angle turns before continuing to travel on its original course, now at an impossibly high velocity. This takes just a second to unfold, but time pauses while I watch. I can’t believe my eyes. I have never been so intrigued—it’s beyond measure. I consider myself tough from all I’ve been through and yet I am trying to avoid being frightened by what I’ve just seen. Was that an alien spaceship? What was that?
I give the binoculars back to Giovanni and nonchalantly say, “Cool,” and then I walk back into the house, silently trying to process what just happened.
Much to Giovanni’s dismay, never once do I actively participate or even play along when he pulls out the Ouija board. He also doesn’t like that I won’t actively discuss UFOs with him. He often asks me what I think about having seen a UFO. I’ll say, “That was crazy,” but
