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itismeangied) wrote2022-05-22 05:08 pm
My Heart's Opossum
“Rotten device, I'll say it twice. I'm too much, I'm too much comforted here” - Pavement "Father to a Sister of Thought"
I left you three times and always came back. It might be the pizza, or the fact that all the important people in my life live here, enmeshed as we all are. But so comforting.
Youngstown, Ohio is a once-vibrant steel town where my ancestors settled. My father grew up in the industrial Brier Hill neighborhood, bustling with large Italian-American families, and famous for an eponymous pizza style made with red “Sunday” sauce, “sprinkle cheese” and bell peppers. The sauce was sweet and the crust was crunchy. This recipe carried many through the Depression with the help of homegrown produce and backyard pizza ovens. The house my father grew up in was right across from the mills. Soot would cover the back porch and my grandmother took great care to sweep it down often. The house was torn down in the late nineties, but I still like driving past the lot. I remember going there to visit Carmel and Anthony, my grandparents, whose parents came from Italy, one from Bari and the other Sicily. The furniture and heavy traffic areas were always covered in plastic and portraits of Jesus and JFK adorned the walls. I loved my grandmother's teeny tiny fruit magnets. I remember catching pollywogs in the pond behind Mrs. Natale’s house. She pronounced watermelone as if it was the last one to exist and served us big thick slices. She would watch you take a first bite with her mouth agape, watching intently, and she would close her mouth when you ended the bite and smile with wide eyes, “it’s good?”
I wish I could have tasted my great grandmother’s cooking. Fresh dough for pasta and bread, meatballs and sauce and homegrown grapes and figs. A highball glass of red wine made in Uncle Frank’s basement would knock you on your ass. The rich history is handed down in so many stories, some beautiful, some terrifying and some that were never spoken. I was saddened when I read that Brier Hill is listed as the most dangerous neighborhood in the city. 1,049 violent crimes per 100 thousand people.
My mother grew up in the next town over. She describes Main Street as house after house of huge families where everyone knew each other. She had three sisters and two brothers and was the second youngest. Her brother Billy died in a car accident in Yellowstone when he was 19. She was five years younger and I can still feel the sadness she carries for that loss when she talks about him. She says I look like him, we both have green eyes. I loved reading the letters she wrote to her brother when he moved away. She wrote many of his friends as well, “I don’t know why I did that, " she says.
They all lived together in a small three bedroom house with her parents and grandmother. Her mother and father got one downstairs bedroom, her grandmother claimed the other, and I imagine the upstairs just had beds strewn everywhere. My mother tells stories about when the Christmas tree fell on her younger sister, when she would buy penny candy and read Beatles magazines at the corner store. Tales of riding on each other’s backs playing Don Quixote, organizing homemade carnivals and charging for admittance. Writing threatening notes to the evil mother across the street who brutally abused her children. She always was the one who stood up for those who needed it. Her brother still lives in the house. It’s so small I have trouble imagining how everyone and their personalities fit inside, with one bathroom! We had a huge birthday party there when I turned four and watching the home video still brings tears to my eyes. The school my mother attended at the end of the street no longer stands. Recently, she accidentally drove to that house on her way home from work despite not having lived there for almost forty years.
When my twin sister and I were born, my parents moved us to the safest part of Youngstown at the time, the west side. Hundreds of blue collar single family homes with some apartments sprinkled in. They moved from an apartment on the North Side where their landlord had just been shot. We were welcomed by wonderful elderly neighbors like Betty, who would make us special treat bags for Halloween. We named our second cat after her. DeeDee used binoculars to watch over her neighbors and lavished everyone with unsolicited advice and constructive criticism. There were some kids in the neighborhood, but nothing like what my parents described while the baby boom was happening. We did find adventures of our own. We met all kinds of interesting people at the playground at the end of the street, which is now a school. We caught our first stray cat, Blue Skies and nursed him to health. We formed a kids club whose name is secret and we met in the woods behind our house. There was a rival club who we tangled with, once we retaliated by throwing fudgesicles in their pool, which looking back was a regrettable waste of resources.
We would walk around selling magazines and chocolate bars. Mrs. Pasquale let us in and showed us her extensive salt and pepper shaker collection and told us stories of her life, well the same four stories over and over. My mom was worried sick. We were going to move out of the city before high school to get a better education. Every open house we went to, I was terrified that it would be my new home. My mom and dad ended up splitting up and my mom got the house. I never wanted to leave anyway. High school was pretty rough. I saw lots of fights, got my first detention then suspension and learned a lot about subjects that weren’t on my schedule. I kinda wouldn't trade it though.
The first time I really left Youngstown was to go to grad school. New York. It sucked, an intellectual pissing contest that cost me $10,000 for one semester where I drove home at least two weekends a month. I left again about four years later to visit my sister in Santa Fe. I packed my bags for two weeks and ended up staying over a year. I remember smoking cigarettes, smelling the sweet pinon trees and wishing I could run down the highway back home. I drove from New Mexico to Ohio in a rusty Nissan relying on printed out Mapquest directions. The third time I left, it was for Chicago. The night I arrived I had a sick feeling that didn’t go away for two years.
I am staying at my mother’s house where I grew up until I move in with my fiance; he bought his parents’ house. It’s not in Youngstown. I am not sure why it is so hard to leave. Just weeks ago there was a drive-by one street over. I heard eight shots lying in my bed. I’d hoped they were fireworks, like everyone does. Last night, there were reports of gunfire in the parking lot of my high school that I walked to every day for four years. Down the street, a trap house has loud fights and weekly visits from the police. Over the years, my car has been broken into a total of four times. My purse was stolen while I was laying down upstairs. They just waltzed right in. Someone found my license in a bush a couple years later. I told them, “just throw it away.” A couple that lives in Betty’s house just had a baby so they don’t break windows and yell anymore. And years ago, the US Marshall’s raided DeeDee’s old house. All I know is, there are cars in and out of there all day.
My mom says she will sell the house one day and move in with her boyfriend out in the country. I partly believe her. It’ll be so safe. And so quiet.
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- Erulisse (one L)
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I keep telling myself it's always fireworks, because I don't want to think about the possibility of gunshots so close to where I live. I lie to myself about that, because I know someone was killed on my block a few years ago, but I don't think I can tell the difference in sound.
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Please stay safe!!
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