Fast Forward: The Contemporary Journal of Tina Scompigliati-Flanagan
Boston Outsider / Humor
I drive to Somerville today for my father’s memorial Mass, and who do I see in the church parking lot afterwards but Louie Malatesta, the owner of the Bonbon Salon, where I once worked. (“Straight as a pin, but ugly as sin,” is what we used to say about him.) He introduces me to his new wife, a cute little Filipino woman. I’ve heard that she brings him to Mass every Sunday and that she made him throw out his Bo Derek movie collection and his bong. She’s pregnant, and they seem happy.
After I drive Ma home to her condo, I go to the old neighborhood and take a look around. Our old house is still painted reddish brown, but the lawn Madonna is gone, and there’s a rainbow flag on the porch. I imagine that there’s a nice lesbian couple living there, and that in between softball games they have long heartfelt talks about being oppressed by the Patriarchy. Patriarchy. . . I remember that word from the Women’s Studies course I took as an elective at U.Mass. when I was going there nights for my business degree. It’s just a fancy way of saying that men can be jerks, but with four older brothers I didn’t need Women’s Studies to gain that insight.
Our old street is populated by professionals and Tufts professors now. I see a few helmeted children riding bikes around, and I laugh thinking that a kid who used a crash helmet back in my day would have been teased about it for the rest of his life. The four or five blocks where my brothers and I played were Kid Heaven. There were kids everywhere, running around and raising hell, kids and their mutt dogs.
Many of the canines were siblings to one another. There was a low-rent dog breeder on the other side of our block. He owned a male German shepherd and a female collie, both unfixed, and every time they had a litter, he’d sell the puppies for eight dollars each. The local children were all influenced by television, and so a female dog with collie features might get the name Lassie. Because “Hogan’s Heroes” was a popular series, dogs with dominant shepherd traits were often dubbed Klink, Schultz, Burkhhalter or Hochstetter, although a female could be Helga or Hilda. I suppose that a male poodle would have been called LeBeau after the French P.O.W. on the show, but this is a moot point, since the poodle breed was unknown in the neighborhood. A kid with a poodle would have been as big an outcast as a kid in a bicycle helmet.
Across from the former Scompigliati mansion is the Jamesons’ old place. Mr. Jameson was a tall, thin man who worked in a candy factory, lugging around sacks of sugar that weighed almost as much as he did. His wife was addicted to Franklin Mint collector items, and their house was full of Elvis Presley commemorative plates and scary porcelain Shirley Temple dolls. Every night at about seven, when Mr. Jameson was on his fifth tall Narragansett, he’d look around the house at all the gewgaws and start yelling at his wife about the household budget. Then she’d yell back at him about his drinking.
I was walking by the house with their son Sean once when such a dispute began.
“My parents are chanting Vespers,” Sean said, making a joke of it.
But I could see that he was embarrassed, so I invited him to come to my house to watch “Star Trek.” We were about fifteen then. Sean was in my Spanish class at Somerville High. He was my first boyfriend, a perfect gentleman who preferred studying to sports. My brother Eddie, of course, thought that Sean was a little too genteel.
“Face it, you big-haired bimbo,” Eddie advised. “The kid’s a fruit.”
Sean did break my heart and leave me after high school, but it was to go to a Jesuit seminary. He was always good at Spanish, and now he’s a missionary priest in Peru. He travels to mountain villages that are connected by primitive dirt roads, and sometimes he rides on a donkey like Jesus entering Jerusalem. Sean’s two siblings took divergent career paths. His older brother Billy is in prison for robbing armored cars, and his younger brother Tommy is a Somerville cop. If there had been a Jameson sister, she would have been bound by the Law of Cliches to become a whore with a heart of gold.
The trip down Memory Lane has been nice, but it’s a long ride back to New Hampshire, and I think it’s time to go. My husband Kevin has our little ones, Liam and Fiona, all to himself, and they can be a handful. My life is wonderful, but on the drive home I can’t stop thinking about Sean Jameson. One year at a school reunion I saw a picture of him that had been taken in a Peruvian town. He was bearded and dressed in peasant clothing, surrounded by children and dogs, and I thought that he had managed to travel thousands of miles and still find a bit of home. I think I’ll send his mission a little donation.
