Dirty Dishes Read online

  But the uniforms were just a symbol of the rules and the officers who enforced them. It was like an entire community populated by clones of my father: When you spoke to an officer, you were not allowed to make eye contact—your gaze was to be directed at the ground or off to the side. You had to say “Sir” before simply saying “good morning” or “excuse me.” If you deviated from these rules, you were to extend your hand, whereupon whichever adult you had offended would whack you across the knuckles with a wand.

  For all the reminders of Papá, there were no stand-ins for Má. I don’t know where the barely palatable gruel they served at school came from, but it sure wasn’t lovingly prepared by a maternal figure in the kitchen. Every time the grub was slapped down on my plate by one of the servers, I’d try to imagine the beast who had created it, eventually conjuring the image of a decrepit hunchback clothed in rags, with one leg shackled to the stove. How else to explain such inhumanity?

  I had three very good friends at the school: Barbato, Michele, and a third boy, Paolo, whom we called by his last name, Granci. Our bond was formed quickly. Of the twenty-five or so children in my class, we gravitated toward each other and became fast friends, vowing to watch each other’s backs.

  I also had a nemesis: a senior named Menichetti with bulging biceps, a thick neck, and crooked teeth, who had it out for me from Day One. Whenever he had the chance, he’d knock me on my ass or come up behind me in the study hall and smack me on the back of the head so hard that I’d see spots. I had a rebellious streak back then, but I was only eleven, and I knew that if I tried to fight back, it would only lead to a real beating. One day, my class was marching to the dining hall when I saw him leaning forward on a parapet that surrounded the campus soccer field, watching a game. I broke out of formation and ran up behind him, bringing my boot-clad foot up between his legs and catching him hard in the balls. He fell to the ground in a heap, clutching his groin and wailing. He was rushed away in an ambulance and later that day I was called into the office of the camp commander, where he and his two lieutenants, an officious, bespectacled trio, informed me that my boot had almost severed Menichetti’s scrotum from his body and that he would be hospitalized for several days. They proceeded to dress me down for half an hour, then sentenced me to serve time in the brig: after dinner each night, an MP would drive me to a nearby military base the school was affiliated with and I’d spend the night in an honest-to-goodness cinderblock jail cell. In my mind, I’d only traded one prison for another, and I didn’t really care. The only thing that weighed on me was that Menichetti would get out of the hospital one day and would no doubt seek his revenge. With this in mind, I asked the commanders for permission to visit him in the hospital and apologize. The commanders, impressed by my maturity and remorse, arranged for me to be taken to see him on my way to jail one night.

  When the evening arrived, the MP escorted me to Menichetti’s door and waited outside. I went into his room and when he saw me there, his eyes widened in anger. He actually began to lunge out of bed, but the pain was too much and he settled back down.

  “Menichetti,” I said, speaking loudly and gregariously so the MPs could hear me through the door. “I know you’re angry, but I’m here to apologize.”

  I pulled a wooden chair over to his bed, sat down, and leaned in close. “Listen to me,” I said, affecting my best tough-guy impression. “I know that you’re thinking of coming for me, but if you do, you better kill me. Because if anything happens to me, then my friends and I are going to come for you in your sleep.” Small wonder I’d go on to identify with Vito Corleone.

  Menichetti never did come after me, but within weeks I had a new problem to contend with: our hormones were kicking in and there were no girls on whom to focus our romantic attentions. The only real women we came into contact with were the ones who worked in the school’s dining hall, most of whom were too old and unattractive to be of interest. But there was one woman, Carmela, who became a shared obsession for me and my crew. She was an almost absurdly voluptuous creature, not unlike what you might see in a Fellini movie. In her early forties, she wore snug uniforms that accentuated her breasts and ass. Valkyria (“amazon”) we called her under our breath. She was our Brigitte Bardot, our Sophia Loren. When she would come around to clear our table, leaning in to collect our plates and glasses, my friends and I would shift in our seats so our elbows or shoulders would brush her crotch. She never reprimanded us, so when she left the table, we would marvel to each other at how she “wanted it.”

  Carmela was also charged with sweeping and mopping the dorms during the day, when we were all holed up in the classroom building. There was a strict policy that forbade us from leaving that building during school hours, but there was a twenty-minute recess between the second and third period and after several weeks of mealtime groping, we decided to pay a visit to the object of our affections.

  We planned the mission like a prison break. As one of us stood lookout, the other three snuck out through a side window. We ran along the shadows cast by the administrative buildings and in through a window in the dorm that we’d left open that morning. We tiptoed together through the hallways until we found her, mopping the floor of one of the sleeping quarters, her formidable hips swaying from side to side with the movement of the mop. We just stood in the doorway, fondling her with our eyes. Catching sight of us, she giggled and began exaggerating her movement, taunting us until we gave in to temptation and rushed her, all of us at once, and grabbed at her ass, pulling at it like a wad of taffy.

  Rather than angering her, this amused her even more, and she began laughing.

  “Voi, siete piccoli, ma che fate. Vi piglio a schiaffi,” she said. I’m bigger than you all. If you don’t stop, I’m going to slap you.

  We left and traced our steps back to the classroom. Hormone-crazed idiots that we were, we took her lack of outrage as a half-yes, an invitation to rendezvous with her again at a later date. We were more obsessed than ever. I’d lie in bed at night and imagine her mopping that floor, swinging her hips from side to side, looking over her shoulder at us and winking.

  About a week later, my friend Barbato and I made another go of it, again sneaking out between classes. We ran into the dorm, only to find that it was utterly silent. We couldn’t find her anywhere. We decided to abort our mission and hurry back to the classrooms, when we heard a noise from the communal shower room. Our eyes almost popped out of our heads. It didn’t take more than a quick look between us to confirm that we were both thinking the same thing: she was getting ready to take a shower after a hard, sweaty morning of work.

  We ran down the hall and carefully peered around the corner. She was in the shower all right, but she wasn’t alone: she had her legs wrapped around one of our schoolmates. As he pounded her against the tiles, she moaned with unabashed delight. We were horrified, especially when they turned around and I saw that the guy who was giving it to her was none other than Menichetti!

  We left the building in disgust, betrayed by our darling Valkyria, our Carmela.

  Deprived of the one thing that gave meaning to our lives, my gang of four made escaping from the school our mission in life, and we spent every free minute plotting a way out. Over the next year and a half, we escaped a half-dozen times: we’d get off the school grounds and hitchhike to the nearest rail station. Aboard the train, we developed a hobo’s knack for avoiding the conductor so we never had to produce tickets. I’d get off at Grosseto and my friends would continue south to their hometowns. But these adventures always ended the same way: the school had phoned ahead to my father and when I got home, he wouldn’t even let me into the apartment. He’d drag me by the collar to his car, a four-door light-creamy-yellow Fiat 1100 with green trim, and drive me back to school, whereupon the camp commanders would scold me and sentence me to another week in the brig.

  After two years, I was at my breaking point. One afternoon, in the spring of 1966, I was sitting in the second-floor study room when I spied the three
school commanders walking down below. I had a milk bottle in my hand and, gripped by an irresistible impulse, I climbed outside the window onto the ledge that encircled the building. I lobbed the bottle in their direction. It landed right in front of them and shattered.

  Nobody was hurt, and I got my wish: they expelled me.

  BACK HOME IN Grosseto, I took up acting during my summer vacations. Like most things I’ve been drawn to, it was a way for me to honor my intense need for self-expression. My theater friends became like another family to me: any theatrical production is by nature very intense, and the act of creating an alternate reality on the stage makes for quick and abiding friendships. I found myself spending more and more time outside of our family home, in part to limit my time with my father and in part because I was nurtured by these new friends and by a community so free of inhibition.

  Eager to spread my wings and get off on my own, shortly after I turned sixteen, in the summer of 1969, I went to work for my uncle Natalino, who owned a restaurant in a nearby seaside resort town. He had been in the restaurant business all his life, mostly running dining rooms on cruise ships, but when he and his wife had kids, he put down roots, taking over the management of a restaurant called La Caletta (The Little Bay) on the ground floor of a seaside boutique hotel in Porto Santo Stefano, just about forty-five minutes from Grosseto.

  He offered me room and board and a small sum of money in exchange for my services, so I headed to his place for the summer. Early one morning, we piled into the family car and my parents drove there, tracing a road that snaked along the coastline. As we approached the beach in Porto Santo Stefano, we passed old homes and just before the road dead-ended, we came to the hotel. I got my duffel bag out of the trunk and we walked through the modest, well-maintained lobby to the restaurant to find my uncle.

  La Caletta was a dreamy setting: a smart, sleek space fashioned after Giò Ponti designs of the era with lots of sharp angles and glass. It was an enormous dining room with an adjoining outdoor terrace and a total of about one hundred eighty seats. Situated on the ground floor of the hotel, it was set in among the rocky coastline, seeming almost of a piece with the terrain, and offered a perfect view of the flat, azure water beyond the sand.

  My uncle, a handsome, hyperactive chain smoker with cerulean blue eyes and black, slicked-back hair (he looked like he was related to my father instead of my mother), emerged from the kitchen and there followed a quick bout of hugging and cheek pinching. After some family chitchat, Natalino turned to me and, with a twitchy wink, said, “OK, Pino, let’s go.”

  My parents turned to leave, but before they did my mother looked her brother in the eye and admonished him, “He’s in your hands, Na-talino.”

  “Va bene,” he replied with another wink. Don’t worry.

  My parents took off and Uncle Natalino walked me through the hotel lobby to the end of a corridor, through an employees-only door, and upstairs to the dorms, located in the attic of a wing far removed from the guest rooms. The accommodations were cramped and steamy and smelled faintly of mold. The only ventilation was a little window, set at shoulder height, looking out onto the sea. There were two bunk beds in my room, and my uncle turned to me and said, “You are the last to arrive, you get the top.”

  I nodded and tossed my bag up there, and he gave me a quick tour of the hotel, showing me a few of the guest rooms and the various exits out to the beach.

  We then returned to La Caletta and Natalino quickly made it clear that there would be no favoritism for his nephew, telling me to sweep and mop the entire restaurant as quickly as I could because lunch wasn’t too far off. I did as he asked and, after a quick tutorial, he had me set all the outdoor patio tables, putting a tablecloth, then glasses, napkins, silverware, and a bottle of olive oil on each of them. Once the terrace was set, I headed back inside, stopping to turn around and look over my handiwork. I hadn’t particularly enjoyed the past few hours, but when I surveyed the area—perfectly neat and orderly and ready to receive its visitors—I felt a surprising sense of pride, of mastery. Natalino appeared in the doorway, obstructing my path. He peered outside, taking in the results of my efforts, then stepped out of my way and let me pass. He didn’t say anything, but just like my mother and that frittata, this was a good thing; his silence indicated approval.

  It had already been a long morning, but things were just getting started. I donned a white dress shirt and took to the service floor, acting as a busboy for the lunch shift. I learned as I went, taking cues from my co-workers and asking questions when necessary, which wasn’t all that often because I found all of this easy if not especially gratifying. I quickly picked up on visual cues that required immediate attention and added to the sense of choreography you see in any good restaurant: empty water glasses needed filling immediately, preferably the moment a customer sat down. Same with bread: when orders were taken and menus were confiscated, a basket had to be deposited on the table. And at the end of a meal, dirty dishes were to be removed as soon as it was clear that the customers were finished eating. This last concern was of particular importance to my uncle: nothing pissed him off more than dirty dishes cluttering a table, because they signified the transformation from guests enjoying a meal to people sitting in the company of garbage.

  I was a quick study and though I didn’t love the work, it only took a few days for my co-workers to become another surrogate family, just like the one I had found in my theater productions back home. After service each night, we’d find our way to a bar, or to somebody’s home, and party late into the evening. My first weeks were glorious and liberating. Sometimes, we’d even borrow a scooter from my uncle and visit those watermelon fields, followed by midnight showers in the springs of Saturnia. Whenever I turned the key in the scooter’s ignition and zoomed back to La Caletta along those country roads, with the wind in my face and the trees and hills silhouetted all around me, I experienced the ultimate feeling of freedom, of flight.

  THE ONLY TRADE OFF for those late nights was contending with one of the more menial and lonely tasks at the restaurant: sweeping and mopping the floor in the morning, which a different busboy was scheduled to do each day. The job did have its charms: you got to look out the big glass patio doors at the beach, with the waves rolling in beyond the shore, and to listen to the radio my uncle provided to keep the morning guy company. One of my favorite songs was the Italian pop classic “Sapore di Sale,” which means “Taste of the Salt.” It’s about a young girl on the beach and the taste of salt on her lips and her skin; it always makes me think of Bo Derek jogging in slow motion in that famous shot from the movie 10. It’s a perfect evocation of the pungent smells and tastes of the ocean and of the sexy, summer scene of the Italian seaside, and it was an apt living soundtrack to those mornings.

  A bottom-liner, my uncle didn’t care if the guy charged with opening the restaurant showed up at ten or ten thirty in the morning, so long as the dining room had been thoroughly swept and mopped and set up for lunch by eleven o’clock. To facilitate sleeping in after all those late nights, when my turn came around, I’d sweep the dining room before leaving at the end of the dinner shift, so when I came in the next morning, I only had to mop it. I sometimes wondered if I could have gotten away with not mopping at all, because I often had the feeling my uncle wasn’t paying much attention to any of this. But one morning he was off at the market with his chef, and the boy whose turn it was to do the morning clean-up only swept, skipping the mopping. When my uncle and the chef returned, they went into the kitchen to drop off the vegetables and fish they’d procured, and when they reemerged, my uncle looked down and said to the guy, “What happened to the floor today?” which is a really clever way to put the question because it makes it perfectly clear that he knew what was up, but gave the defendant a chance to twist in the wind a little and maybe make the mistake of trying to lie.

  “Nothing,” the boy said.

  “You didn’t mop it.”

  “I did.”

  �
��No you didn’t,” said my uncle.

  The busboy opened his mouth to again insist that he had, but my uncle cut him off: “The mop in the kitchen is dry.”

  For all of his success, it was at that moment that my uncle became something of a hero to me, when I realized how much he knew, how many little tricks he had up his sleeve. I also loved the theatricality of how he handled the situation and the harmlessly sadistic humor of his method. Plus, he taught me something about disciplining one’s staff when he told that guy he’d be mopping every morning for seven days straight.

  As I stood there grinning at all of this, and at the thought of sleeping in for a full week, my uncle leaned in close and said to me, “You’re a family member. You ever embarrass me by pulling something like that, and it’ll be ten times worse.”

  I WOULD NEVER have the chance to do anything worse, though, at least not as a busboy, because I was about to be promoted. We did a lot of tableside preparation at La Caletta: filleting roasted fish and whisking salad dressings à la minute (Italians love their dressings à la minute). Because of the skills I’d developed at home, my fingers knew their way around the plate, and I could pick up any technique after just one demonstration. Filleting fish was second nature to me, but I also quickly demonstrated a deft touch at plating pasta al cartoccio (pasta and shellfish cooked in parchment paper) and at cracking open the hard exterior of fish baked in a salt crust. After a few weeks of witnessing my plating ability in full flight, my uncle made me his dedicated waiter when he himself worked the dining room.

  In this new job, I got to follow the progression of a meal from the front of the house and the back of the house, and it was fascinating: when people ordered wine, he was usually too busy to fetch it, so I’d do that. When he took their order, he’d write it down and hand it to me and I’d hurry to the kitchen, hand it to the chef, and keep a carbon copy. Then I’d return to the kitchen to pick up the food and run it to the table. I was doing this for about ten tables at a time, some just starting their meal, some in the middle, and some finishing, and it was a lot to keep track of, but that’s just it: I didn’t keep track of it, not in any real way. My mind just naturally took in the necessary information and arranged it in order of priority and practicality that changed from minute to minute.