up from under the table and put your balled up sweaty napkin on your plate. Why don’t you go downstairs and get to know Giovanni better?” His words are more a directive than a suggestion.
Once downstairs I tell Giovanni how I feel, even though I barely know him and it’s his parents I’m talking about. He tells me not to worry about anything at all, and shows me his drum set and guitars. He has a Tama kit, an upgrade from my Yamaha starter kit, and assorted Sabian and Zildjian professional grade cymbals.
From this day forward, my life is never the same. Giovanni and I hang out at school and then I head home with him and we play music and eat the most delicious food. Soon, I’m going to the Russo home after school every night for dinner and spending every weekend with them at their house. I even get my own room there. They buy me clothes and take me on family outings to places like the movies or a theme park. I even learn how to cook a bit because it means I can spend time in the kitchen with Greta. For the first time in my life, I’m being treated with love, perhaps even spoiled. I mostly tune out Francesco when he speaks about his brand of new age universal philosophy, though I act as if I’m listening politely. I know that if I play my cards right, this newfound family will see me as a second son.
Being treated like a son is all I’ve ever wanted. At my house, I am treated like a dog. There’s no other way to say it. My father must see me as a dog-man because he beckons me with, “Come;” calls me to dinner with, “Sit;” and tells me, “Eat,” if there is still food on my plate, and it’s always been like this. My sisters are treated like pretty young girls, which they are, and my younger brother is told in front of me, “You’re the good son. Everything I have is yours, do you understand?” I may as well own the hard labor chores of the home because they are all mine. I’m the only one who has to do them.
Looking back, it will be clear that this period of my life is when the Russos took control of me. I even began dreaming about them on most nights, especially Greta. I get to know Giovanni’s sister too. Adriana is three years younger than me and we develop a friendship that will have a certain romantic quality to it over the years. To be perfectly honest, though, I never seriously pursue her out of a fear of disrespecting her family and ruining my friendship with them.
Never with the Russos does it feel like there is a sinister motive behind their treatment of me. Never do I think there could be some sort of catch yet to be revealed. But this doesn’t make their behavior any less weird. One night, Francesco gives Giovanni a book about how the mafia started and tells us to read it. It’s all about how the mafia, or La Cosa Nostra, started back in Western Sicily at the turn of the nineteenth century. Ultimately, it reveals how important it is to be the boss of your territory, your family, and your life.
Chapter 3
It’s while I’m fourteen and first getting to know the Russos that Giovanni and I start making a habit of procuring weed and beer on weekends to escalate our chances with older girls and up the ante of fun to be had. It’s my job to get the alcohol, which usually involves inviting Gavin to join us, since he can get beer from his dad. Giovanni, who is quickly becoming a brother to me, takes care of scoring the weed. He is always able to obtain the highest quality kind, seemingly without effort, pulling it out of thin air. When I ask how he gets all this bud, he tells me it’s from his friend in Chicago. Sometimes he simply says, “Chicago.” It’s more complicated for me because not only do I need to get the alcohol, but I also invite the girls and have to figure out how they get to and from the Russo house. It always seems to work out though. Where there’s a will, there’s a way!
Giovanni’s parents must know what’s going on because every weekend we smoke in his room with the girls and they never intrude. We have a good few months doing this, but then, in early summer, my parents want my siblings and me to join them at their summerhouse on the water, which is well out of our neighborhood, far away from my friends. I get out of this as often as I can, choosing to spend weekends at the Russo house instead, and it’s not long before it hits me that my home is vacant with my parents and siblings at the beach; we could have fun there without any adults around. So Giovanni, I, and a few guests start using the hot tub there, along with the rest of the house’s features. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this sooner.
One night, while hanging out at my house, one of the girls gets so drunk that she decides she needs to leave. She’s only fifteen so she doesn’t have a license, and she wouldn’t be in a state to drive anyway, so she calls her mother from our home phone to arrange a ride. A little while later, the girl’s mother tries to call her back on the number the girl called from, presumably to say she’s on her way, but the call is automatically forwarded to my parents’ summer home. When my father answers the phone—at an ungodly hour—he figures out what I’m up to. He busts me the next day.
And so it is that my actions finally catch up with me. My parents, of course, do not hesitate to punish me severely for “breaking their trust,” as they put it. It’s mandated that I go to the summer home with them and stay there until summer is over, and they assign me a rigorous never-ending gauntlet of chores. Most are basic house care but others are ridiculous, such as picking up sticks in the yard from sunup to sundown and raking the beach every day with a heavy steel rake.
My days begin bright and early. I’m woken at the crack of dawn by my dad turning on the lights in my room, hitting me in the face with a flyswatter, and stating my list of chores for the day before he heads to work. If I pull the covers up over my head, he smacks my stomach. Afterward he sneaks off to the liquor cabinet in the garage and through the thin cottage walls I can hear him unscrewing the cork on a scotch bottle and then taking a few glugs straight from the bottle. As I sit on the edge of the bed, dazed and half-asleep, my mom barges in and starts yelling, “Get up! Do what your father told you!” She continues to hound me as I get dressed, ignoring my request for privacy while I do so.
When the berating is at its worst, inhumane, really, I can’t help but scream back. “I didn’t do anything! Why are you treating me like this? Leave me alone!”
A look of disgust overtakes her at this point and she replies with a comment like, “We just might have to get rid of you,” and then slams the door. Moments later, I hear her in the garage consoling my father, who no doubt has been listening to our interaction. “Are you okay, dear? Did I go too far?” she asks him while he weeps. Why he weeps, I don’t know. Could it be that he hates me so much, or is so disappointed in me, his son, that the feeling overtakes him? I try not to think about it.
This is the summer I learn how to cook, do laundry, clean, and shut down emotionally. My parents treat me like shit, and what’s even worse than that is that my siblings are punished if they don’t also treat me poorly. I’m turned into the family scapegoat.
My oldest sister, Lindsay, manages it best. She always wanted to be an only child and is a very tough person to interact with. She can also be extremely selfish, with no real concern for her siblings, so when the mandate comes down from our parents, she simply carries on in the same way she’s always treated me, with disregard. Allison and Austin are horrified and confused as to how to handle the situation. We were friends! When a relative or someone else drops by the home, they blurt out, “We’re supposed to treat Nick like he’s a child, like he’s ten years old,” to sort of warn them. Allison and Austin, however, God bless them, never once join in. Allison gets grounded many times for being kind to me, and Austin gets sent to his room for things like being caught playing video games with me, but they never cave and always show me love.
When no one is looking, I do my best to talk with them about what’s going on. I sneak into Austin’s room at night to level with him about the situation and say that I’m sorry. He receives it well. Then, to avoid being heard as
