"Welcome" by Courtney Sell
In this summer issue, we experience the world made anew for a teenage boy discovering music and girls; another world made content by routine and family; and a world made solitary by a struggling film director. The accompanying artwork captures landscape and life, revealing that there are many worlds waiting to be discovered with fresh eyes. We hope you’ll be drawn into these worlds, however familiar or foreign.
IFP is proud to present authors Diana Ferraro, Robert Weinberger and Aaron Romano, and artwork by Courtney Sell and Ira Joel Haber.
Nonfiction
Sex, Drugs, & Vic Giovanni: a memoir
by Robert Weinberger
Vic Giovanni is my new piano teacher.
He is thirty-five, wears Hai Karate aftershave, drives a maroon 1970 El Dorado, and sits too close to me on the piano bench.
For the first fifteen minutes of every piano lesson, Vic Giovanni details his sexual exploits, claiming numerous rendezvous with many Hollywood actresses. He doesn’t use words like hump or screw or other words I know, but boink, buff, bang (his favorite), ball, boff, bleep, and just about anything beginning with the letter b. Every actress he has either boinked or banged.
Vic Giovanni is determined to make me popular with the opposite sex, the chicks. “And chicks dig a guy who can bang those piano keys,” he explains, emphasizing the word bang with a wink.
In case you haven’t already noticed, Vic Giovanni talks in 1960s lingo, but for the early seventies, he’s already behind the times. Think Sammy Davis, Jr. in a Nehru jacket and love beads, a cigarette in one hand, and a scotch on the rocks in the other. You dig?
I introduce Vic Giovanni to my older brother, a Woodstock alumnus, and a true child of the sixties.
“Hey, man, what’s happening?” says Vic Giovanni, grabbing his hand for a contrived soul handshake. My brother rolls his eyes behind Vic Giovanni’s back. I tell my brother about all the women Vic Giovanni has boinked and banged, and my brother tells me Vic Giovanni is a big, fat liar, and I am stupid to believe anything he says.
“It’s true!” I argue, and my brother asks me to name somebody Vic Giovanni has boinked, so I tell him about a beautiful actress whose television show I watch every week. We look up her age in the Information Please Almanac, and I realize that if Vic Giovanni boinked this actress when he said he boinked this actress, he did it when she was seven-and-a-half years old. That’s the moment when I really hope my brother is right and Vic Giovanni is a big, fat liar.
So I start feeding Vic Giovanni the names of actresses from the Information Please Almanac—all kinds of actresses. “Banged her,” he says about one. “Boffed her good,” he says of another one. So I start giving him the names of dead actresses. “Oh, man, I boffed her through the roof,” he says. Then I give him the names of any famous woman I find in the World Book Encyclopedia. Within a few weeks I learn that my piano teacher has banged, boffed, and boinked everyone from Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross, to Helen Hayes, the First Lady of the American Theater.
The funny thing is, despite this weekly musical Kinsey report, Vic Giovanni is one helluva piano teacher.
“I’m gonna teach you to play rock ‘n’ roll and you’re gonna do it good and you’re gonna like doing it good,” he declares in a way that makes me wonder if this eloquent wordage is how he woos his chicks. It’s a lot different than my lessons with my first piano teacher, Hadassah Rosenblatt, a Brooklyn housewife who quietly sipped hot tea from a glass wrapped in a shredded napkin, while my fingers awkwardly butchered the “Volga Boat Song.”
But that was seven years ago, and now, at age fifteen, I am ready to bang.
For the next eight weeks, I memorize every chord, one per week.
“E flat minor seven,” barks Vic Giovanni, and my fingers fly to the chord.
“A flat six!” I’m already on it.
“C flat minor.” Easy.
And then, one day, after all the chords are covered, Vic Giovanni arrives with an electronic synthesizer.
“You’re ready,” he says, and with the touch of a button I am banging, no, pounding the piano keys of our family’s mahogany Hardman Peck with the accompaniment of an array of pulsating rhythmic sounds to “Honky Tonk Women,” “Let It Be,” and “Proud Mary,” as well as the entire musical score of Fiddler on the Roof for the benefit of my parents.
News of my newfound talent finds its way to my high school. Stuart Socolov, president of our community’s local Jewish teen youth group, and a fellow Vic Giovanni disciple, stops me in the school hallway.
“Hey, I heard, like, you can really play piano! That is, like, so far-out!” spouts Stuart Socolov in pure Giovanni-speak.
And I think to myself, Yeah, like, wow, get away from me, but Stuart Socolov wants to hook me into going to another one of those Jewish social mixers. I mumble no and try to walk around him, but Stuart Socolov keeps after me.
“It’ll be, like, so cool, man,” he says.
Yeah, right! This isn’t a Saturday night party that all the cool kids go to; this is a Saturday night Jewish mixer. No wonder I’m invited.
Stuart Socolov reads my mind. “There’s nothing religious going on, if you catch my drift,” he whispers, and he winks. And I wink back like I have the slightest clue what his drift is.
My parents drive me to the mixer. I can tell it is the proudest moment of their lives and with good reason. I have finally ventured out of my room, and our house, on a Saturday night. They wave goodbye, excited and tearful, hoping I won’t throw up, much like my first day of kindergarten. I stand in the deserted parking lot of the rented Knights of Columbus banquet hall in my brushed denim blue jeans with bell bottoms as wide as Texas, a blue flowered shirt with elephant lapels spread open under my mutton chop sideburns, and a purple sweater vest which covers my one-hundred-thirty-pound physique (up ten pounds from the year before).
Yes, my parents are happy. Probably doing high-fives in the car. Happy that I am joining. Happy that I am socializing. Happy that I will not end up like some loser atop a university bell tower with a rifle.
The bruising rhythm of The Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar” hits me full force as I step inside. The hall is dark; some couples are dancing and other couples are making out in the corners.
Stuart Socolov finds me. He has his arm around Anat, the rabbi’s daughter. “Mingle,” he says, and I walk around and try not to bump into anyone dancing or making out. The music stops and “Alone Again, Naturally,” sung by Gilbert O’ Sullivan, comes on and all the make-out couples start to slow dance, and I know this is my cue to get off the dance floor.
I wander downstairs to the basement. There’s an old piano in the corner, and I sit down and start to play “Close to You,” part of my Carpenters’ repertoire, the only songs I can play by heart. Someone sits down next to me. She is tall, with glasses and braces and long, thick, curly hair, and the most beautiful mezzo-soprano voice I have ever heard. Her name is Lorna Gold and she is in the eighth grade, two years younger than me. Years later she will tell me that at that very moment she knew she was in love, because I was the first boy she could make eye contact with and not tower over while sitting next to each other on a piano bench.
I continue to play and Lorna Gold continues to sing. For a brief moment in time, we’re the Richard and Karen Carpenter of the south shore of Long Island. Stuart Socolov and the rabbi’s daughter find us sitting together and start singing that dopey song that starts with the two of us k-i-s-s-i-n-g in a tree, and ends with some stuff about love, marriage, and a baby carriage.
“Shut up,” I say, embarrassed, and Lorna Gold giggles and moves closer to me on the piano bench.
Lorna Gold follows me around the Knights of Columbus hall the entire night, trying to get me to slow dance with her. She is an eager six-foot-tall puppy dog—the little sister I never wanted.
“You wait,” she says. “Someday I’m going to be rich and famous and beautiful, and then, you’ll be sorry.”
A few weeks later the youth group organizes an outdoor picnic at a local park and I spend most of the afternoon trying to avoid Lorna Gold, who wants to tie her leg to mine for a three-legged-race, even though I don’t see any three-legged-race on the agenda.
“C’mon,” says Stuart Socolov, grabbing my arm, “I want to show you something.” He pulls me deeper into the woods. “Where are we going?” I ask, and he just says, “C’mon, c’mon.” I can barely hear the sounds of the other kids and I’m starting to get a little nervous, because although Stuart Socolov is my friend, he’s not a best friend or anything like that. How well do I actually know him? At this point I’m not sure I want to be out in the woods with him, too far to scream for help.
We reach a tiny shack and Stuart Socolov opens the door and pushes me inside. It’s dark and I can barely make out the shadows of a group of people sitting in a circle. Then the smell hits my nostrils. A bong is passed from person to person. Stuart tugs at my arm and someone makes room for us in the circle.
My eyes adjust to the shadowy figures who inhale deeply and lovingly: Bill Patterson, National Merit Scholar; Laurie Petrie, Five-Time Honor Roll Champ; Ellen Patimkin, President of Future Young Librarians of Long Island. I’m not sitting here with the long-haired stoners from my school who stumble through the halls and sleep through class and always forget their gym uniforms, but with a shack full of overachievers, all of whom broke fourteen hundred on their PSATs—except for me, who squeaked by with one thousand, a fact no one needs to know. And everyone kind of looks at me with that amazed look that says, You get high? (the emphasis on you), and I look right back at them with that look that says, Yeah, I get high, (the emphasis on I), knowing full well that I’ve never done this before.
So I take my seat next to Margery Rothblum, a petite girl with braces and a blonde Afro whom everyone’s nicknamed Golda, because she’s always absent on all the Jewish holidays, even the ones nobody has ever heard of, and she says, “Hi, how you doin’?” like we’re in the lunch line at school, then she passes me the bong. I take a deep breath and watch the bubbles in the bong churn, careful to hold, exhale slowly, and not cough like a first-time moron, something I learned from an Elliott Gould movie.
One hour later Stuart Socolov and I stagger out of the shack and back toward the woods, giggling about nothing. When we emerge from the clearing I see Lorna Gold facing us, her hands folded across her chest.
“Hi, Laura,” says Stuart Socolov, collapsing into hysterical laughter.
Lorna looks at me, this sad expression on her face. She knows and this wave of shame rushes over me. Suddenly I feel like Al Pacino in Panic in Needle Park. I am a bad, bad, naughty boy. Lorna turns and runs back to the picnic, and I start to run after her, but Stuart Socolov stops me.
“What do you care what she thinks?” he says, and I shrug and say, “Yeah, who cares what she thinks?” But I do.
This teenage walk on the wild side is still fresh on my mind several days later when Vic Giovanni shows up for a lesson direct from an extramarital motel tryst. Sweaty and disheveled, he quietly regales me with another tale of debauchery, complete with a lengthy recitation of the post-coital menu: bagels and lox, “with a schmear of creamed cheese.”
My mother calls me into the den after my lesson.
“I want you to listen and I want you to listen good,” she says with a look that means, I know-that-you-know-that-I-know-that-you-know-that-I know what’s going on, but you don’t know how I know what’s going on.
“Your father and I are paying good money for you to play the piano for thirty minutes,” she continues, her teeth clenched together in her I-mean-business tone. “And from now on I expect you to play that piano for thirty minutes. Do you understand?”
I shake my head that I understand that I know-she-knows-that-I-know what I think she’s heard. The next week, when Vic Giovanni sits next to me on the piano stool and starts to tell me about his boinking and banging, I interrupt and tell him that I should get back to practicing my latest chick-charming opus, “Sugar, Sugar.” Vic Giovanni looks hurt, like I have interrupted our sex lesson with actual piano playing.
The following semester, when I am a junior, I will stop taking piano lessons so I can study for the SATs. Vic Giovanni says he understands, but he doesn’t, and he promises he will keep in touch and stop by the house, but he never does, not once. Just before graduation, my brother and I are stopped at a traffic signal when Vic Giovanni pulls up next to us in his brand new 1974 gold El Dorado. I start to roll down my window, but the light changes and Vic Giovanni takes off, flashing me the peace sign. I look over at my brother and he rolls his eyes.
Lorna Gold envisions herself as my savior that last semester of high school, the Kim Novak to my Frank Sinatra in The Man with the Golden Arm. She doesn’t ever mention the clubhouse incident in the woods again, but I know what she’s thinking. “Geez, it was just a bong!” I want to say. “Nothing more.” Like I’m this doomed drug addict destined to live my life on the Bowery, washing car windshields for spare change. And I know, I just know, that if I ever came clean to Lorna Gold about a few early morning tokes in Stuart Socolov’s Volvo before first period homeroom, or the couple of puffs behind the Massapequa Community Center to celebrate Simchat Torah, she’d fold her arms across her chest with that look that says I knew it!
We often pass each other in the school corridor, a gaggle of giggling sophomores at her side. She waves and calls my name, a little too forced, with a look of expectation, and I wave back, sometimes. Lorna Gold signs my yearbook, a little heart underneath her name. We promise to keep in touch, to write, call, whatever, but when I move three thousand miles away, the communication becomes an obligation and soon ceases to exist.
And then, years later, I receive her note. Lorna Gold is coming to town to sing. At first I think it’s some kind of amateur recital, but then I open the Los Angeles Times and there it is: “IN CONCERT: LORNA GOLD.”
I’m surrounded by hundreds of people and Lorna Gold enters stage left: sleek, confident, coiffed, and I think to myself, Hmm, well whaddya know? And her voice, that angelic voice, envelopes the sound of opera. It’s German opera so I don’t understand a word of it, but it’s enchanting nonetheless.
Someday I’m going to be rich and famous and beautiful, and then, you’ll be sorry.
I visit Lorna Gold backstage and she thanks me for my roses. “They’re gorgeous,” she says, “I can’t wait to show them to my husband.”
She stands before me, this once gangly, awkward teenager with big glasses, frizzy hair, and melodious voice, and I’m transported back two decades to that moment in the Knights of Columbus banquet hall where I confidently banged Vic Giovanni’s well-taught chords and Lorna Gold harmoniously warbled Burt Bacharach. Only now there’s that slight twinge of regret, that boy, if I’d only known then…
So I tell Lorna Gold how wonderful she looks, but she doesn’t offer a reflexive so do you reply, not at first. She smiles, and we hug, and it might be my imagination but I could swear that as an admiring group of well-wishers surround us, she gently prods me back into the crowd. And I realize in that instant that Lorna Gold doesn’t need to hear my platitudes about beauty and talent, however earnest and sincere. No, she doesn’t need any of that, and with good reason.
Lorna Gold has done just fine.
I haven’t played the piano for years. My parents eventually sold our family home and the mahogany Hardman Peck. But I do own a keyboard with seventy-six keys and it gets the job done. Recently I unpacked a box from storage with all the sheet music from my teenage years, so I dabble a bit, adding some bass and a hint of percussion. I even found my handwritten list of chords.
There’s one song I’m working on. It’s an early seventies chick-magnet tune called “If You Let Me Make Love to You, Then Why Can’t I Touch You?”
Groovy title, huh?
Vic Giovanni would be proud.
© 2011 Robert Weinberger
* * *
July of my Youth
by Aaron Romano
The temperature begins its slow climb early as I join Mom in the garden. I’m in charge of moving the hose from one row of vegetables to the next while she searches for ripe offerings. My face is dotted with beads of sweat, and my summer tan resembles the color of rich soil between my toes. The sun beats down on the back of my neck as I keep on the lookout for camouflaged, renegade tomato hornworms. Water from the hose cascades down aisles of squash, cucumbers, and green beans, saturating the ground.
“Make sure to soak ‘em good; it’s going to be hot!” Mom says to me as I begin to transfer the hose.
“Okay, I will.” I pick up the hose, place my thumb over the spout and give everything an extra spray before setting it down in the next bed.
She calls again from behind a row of green beans, “And make sure not to get water on the ripening tomatoes or they will split.”
“I won’t!” I holler back, feeling as though I need to yell in order to compensate for the wall of beans between us.
I can almost feel the garden growing around me. I wish that when these precious moments occurred, a camera would click and the captured moments could transcend time. This is how I like to remember things.
Everything is flourishing in mid-July. Tomatoes dangle like rubies, green beans like scrawny witch’s fingers, and the corn is swollen, tucked into fibrous cocoons. Mom has already filled a basket with today’s bounty and enlists me to head back up the hill to get another. “And bring the sunscreen with you; I don’t want you getting a sunburn,” she says while plucking flowers from the tops of basil stalks.
Our house sits atop a hill overlooking the Dry Creek Valley. In the heart of wine country, the soil is rich and perfect for growing vegetables. Each year we sow seeds in the earth, and our return is always bountiful. During the peak of summer, you can hardly find room on the countertops for the profusion of zucchini, tomatoes, corn, and the other dozens of items we cultivate.
Heat radiates from the pavement and is already oppressive for ten-thirty in the morning. I walk barefoot, the scorching asphalt quickening my pace. I have what my sister long ago deemed “river feet.” Many of our summer afternoons were spent along the river, where we abandoned our shoes and clothes for skipping rocks and wading in the cool waters. The bottoms of our feet became rough and calloused from walking on hot, sharp rocks. I sometimes wish my feet were still like that; it seems as though the older I get, the softer they become.
I drop off a basketful of goodies on the kitchen counter, grab a second basket and a glass of iced tea, and make sure not to forget sunscreen before heading back down the hill and into the garden. Mom is hunched over a tangle of prickly lemon cucumbers, tossing them into a growing pile behind her. Water is overflowing the banks of the rows, creating muddy trenches. I hustle to transfer the flow to the next bed before handing Mom her glass of iced tea. She takes a few sips, stretches, and wipes away the sweat and dirt that has collected on her face with a handkerchief.
“Phew! We should probably call it a day pretty soon and retreat inside. What sounds good for lunch?” she asks between sips of iced tea.
“I dunno, maybe tuna salad. Can we make popsicles?”
“Sure we can,” she replies, ruffling her hand through my hair. Her tan is golden, dirt underneath her fingernails, and she’s marked by tiny abrasions on her forearms. This is the moment in life that I like to remember Mom. Before the tumultuous struggle with her alcoholic husband, my father; before age wore on her bones, preventing her from tending to a pristine garden; and when I was younger and the idea of Mother was more than that of a provider—she was everything.
Her garden is an affirmation for life. She treats each plant with such delicate attention, you would think it was one of her children. Each tiny plant is tended with unwavering care until it is fully grown and doesn’t need as much attention.
We never seem to have much money for extravagant meals; any way we can think to save a dollar is welcomed. Each spring, she works the soil in a half-acre plot for our garden. Everything is planted in abundance and variety in order to last us throughout the summer. Working in the garden is for her; its return is for us.
As if our prosperous garden isn’t enough, Mom always spends a week in August or September canning items for the winter. Beets, pears, homemade applesauce, and blackberry preserves are canned for future meals when we will inevitably have to shop for additional produce at the grocery store rather than our backyard.
There is no such thing as a perishable in our house. Nothing goes to waste, which is probably why, to this day, I continue to seek the comforts of food rather than people. I long ago discovered that people are like perishables and I’ve seen too much go to waste. So I select my friends like I select my produce, looking carefully for blemishes and signs of mishandling or spoilage.
I find it amazing that bags of seeds costing less than two dollars each are capable of feeding a family of five for the entire summer, fall, and winter. Fresh, handpicked produce that is still warm from the sun’s touch is indescribable, and I am forever grateful for the opportunity to experience this at such a young age. Eating things in the moment of their perfection is the way it should always be, but rarely is. As a kid I usually ate the majority of the vegetables that came from our garden, while refusing store-bought items. I wish I could say that at a young age I was aware of the inferiority of supermarket produce, but in reality, I was just really picky.
After the garden is watered and harvested, the afternoon passes slow and long. My brother and sister and I watch 3,2,1 Contact on KQED, and eat lunch before escaping into our eleven-acre back yard, which isn’t so much of a yard as an open field where a child’s mind can run wild. Oaks, madrones, and manzanita trees dot the landscape in tiny, condensed clusters of forests that double as forts, clubhouses, and hideouts. Today the heat keeps us underneath the protection of madrones and live oaks; we eat Otter Pops, tell stories, and designate new spots along the property with names, such as Slip and Slide Hill and Wild Boar Rock.
As the sun begins to fall on the west side of the house, I find myself in the kitchen with Mom. She doesn’t force any of us to be in the kitchen to help her, but I volunteer. There is comfort in the aromas that cling to the fringes of her apron. I am heavily involved in the stirring of sauces, assembling casseroles, and of course, taste testing. Mom has yet to deem me capable of wielding a knife without causing harm to others, or myself, so I watch inquisitively as she rocks the knife in a sewing machine-like repetition that breaks down the vegetables in half the time.
Acting as Mom’s sous chef, I grab items from our pistachio-colored fridge and from our pile of freshly picked produce. As the layers of flavors are added to the pots and pans on the stovetop, vapors start my stomach stirring. Ratatouille is on the menu for tonight; though it smells delicious, it’s something that I won’t eat, but will continually be forced to try. Fortunately there will also be chicken and corn on the cob.
The burners are turned to low, and together as a family, the five of us take our drink of choice out to the yard and sit in the shaded warmth of the beckoning evening. The sprinklers are on, watering thirsty blades of grass, and we kids can’t resist the opportunity to jump through the whirling sprays of water, so we run inside to change into our bathing suits and frolic in the dancing water. I stop to rub water out of my eyelashes and notice Mom sitting side by side with Dad, her hand interlocked with his.
These moments became so fleeting with time; I wish I had taken time to enjoy them while they were there. Now the idea of Mom and Dad together is about as clear as an underdeveloped photograph.
After dinner, dusk settles into the sky with colors that resemble the carrots and eggplant from our garden. We all grab a colander and head to the massive blackberry bush that sits in a seasonal creek on the backside of the property. Nothing makes me feel more nostalgic than blackberry cobbler with Mom’s homemade vanilla ice cream. I absolutely love blackberries, simply for the memories attached to the juicy purple fruit that stains my hands with a violent, violet tint. My sister fell in the bush one summer evening while attempting to get the larger, darker berries deep within the thorn-filled bush. She wailed until the very last thorn was pulled from her body. Our family picking blackberries together, this is how I like to remember things.
For every blackberry picked, I eat at least two. The last remaining streaks of light fade from the sky, but we know our way back to the house, even in the dark. This is summer, this is my youth; in the morning I will wake and repeat with subtle variations.
And this is how I like to remember things.
© 2011 Aaron Romano
* * *
Fiction
Chasing Doves in the Dead of Spring
by Diana Ferraro
What is Greta doing in Wilmington now?
Alberto can’t figure it out; he breaks into a sudden sweat. His white hair, too long, sticks to the back of his head. He is holding the phone away from his left ear while he watches a persistent couple of doves flying again over the kitchen windowsill. Doves are a plague in Buenos Aires and one of the reasons Alberto hates his native city. Greta is old enough to have kept the habit of old international calls and still raises her voice. Alberto chuckles secretly as he does every time she makes a fool of herself. She is screaming now at every sentence. She explains she is interviewing a Japanese filmmaker for an article on immigrant artists. Nothing can be too bad between them if she still takes the pain of lying to him but she could have interviewed him: he is a movie maker, too. Alberto knocks on the glass and the doves flutter away to return a second later. He could be an immigrant by now if Greta had consented to marry him instead of sending him back to Buenos Aires to observe his six-month wait until returning to the States.
He tries to sound funny: “I have a couple of horny doves here.” Greta wants to know if they are inside the apartment—if he has finally accepted that pets are the best company for lonely people.
Alberto loathes Eleanor, the big fat grey Angora cat who shares Greta’s home back in Alexandria.
To change the subject, he asks about the filmmaker. Greta gives him an unknown name which makes him immediately think of punk movies, a genre he particularly dismisses, interested as he is in being part of the most traditional Hollywood elite. Greta’s voice continues to show an undeniable professional enthusiasm, as if she were typing one of her gossip columns and not lying in bed as she surely is. Alberto asks Greta what she is wearing, and as he thought, she is still in the caramel lace nightgown he loathes, the one that transforms her into the caricature of the old-fashioned diva she never became. While Greta abounds in unnecessary details about the life of her Japanese interviewee—quite tall for a Japanese man it seems—Alberto gets distracted thinking about the film he is dreaming of shooting in California and the script that has to be rewritten, postponing the project for at least one more year. When he goes back to Greta, she is announcing that she will stay in Wilmington for a couple of more weeks because there are other people to interview, such as the lover of a former state representative turned singer and a best-selling romance writer.
“Why all of them in Wilmington?” muses Alberto, sinking into the well known depression that he knows will cost him half a bottle of whisky, at least. People seem to have a life in the States while he is doomed to sit and wait in Argentina. American producers ignore him and the ridiculous fiancée he has hooked to get married doesn’t even miss him. He is aging, agreed, and he doesn’t make money like he did when he was an ad director before he decided he was too much of an artist to compromise. Greta is even older and not good looking at all, and Alberto would like to tell her how lucky she was to meet him because a husband is always a husband. But Greta is now too busy describing the romance writer, not a woman as expected, but a man in his forties.
❡
The two doves are proudly walking on the sill. They don’t care either for Alberto’s quiet presence behind the glass, staring at them with an increasing rage. Greta has hung up the phone a long time ago while Alberto was still digesting her not too convincing explanation about Wilmington and the fall and the late red leaves, and people traveling south for beauty and inspiration. For Alberto, it is spring and everything renews, except for him. He can see buds and green leaves on the trees beyond his patio. He can smell the year maturing and soon blooming into a new summer. He can even witness two doves steadily bringing bits of branches to make their nest on the sill. Alberto knocks furiously on the glass. Then he opens the window and sweeps the nest’s foundation with a stroke of his hand. The doves come back and then fly away, indifferent, somehow understanding their love for life is not welcome near Alberto’s home.
❡
Alberto weighs whether it’s too early for a drink. He needs to do something, to change his fate. Sometimes Alberto considers that his lack of luck in life has to do with the fact he lives in a lousy country; other times that an especially ugly god has chosen him as a new Christ to punish the too talented and ambitious human race which competes with his power. This time he is rather inclined to throw the guilt on Greta, a sly bitch who doesn’t respect him and whom he cannot trust anymore. He decides to drink his first glass of scotch, raving about what can still be done at the embassy if they would finally recognize that he is an unknown great artist, a faithful admirer of American movies and someone worthy enough to add to the States as a new quality immigrant.
❡
Alberto moves into the living room and collapses on the sofa, spilling some scotch from his overflowing glass. Plan A—getting Greta to fall madly in love and marry him—has failed. The fire is over and now they seem to be just friends, even if they sleep together every time Greta wishes to. In spite of her withering looks, Greta manages still to have as many lovers as she wants with her promises of introduction to influential people in show business. During the past few months, Alberto discovered she was seeing an attractive black young actor who surely reminded her of Obama, tall and handsome, and with a sweet smile that Alberto, alternatively bitter and sour, couldn’t match. Wilmington and the suspicious red leaves were now probably uncovering a new find, the punky Japanese director or someone else.
Plan B requires a sponsor and Greta, who also owns a freelance service company, could play that role, but she is undecided about helping him. She claims she cannot convince the producers to give him a chance because they said he has not the stature of a filmmaker but of a screenwriter, at the most. Besides, Greta always favored rather an Argentine career for Alberto, based on the fact that the American audience doesn’t care too much about the Latin American dreams Alberto wants to convey. Greta described Alberto’s script of an obscure and poor Argentine plumber who dreams to be hired by his cousin, a successful immigrant in California, as sentimental crap. She tried to convince him that he needed to think beyond Italian Neorealism if he wanted to achieve something in her demanding country, which she didn’t recommend. Greta told him that his natural inclination for low melodrama made him a better fit for independent Latin American movies, and that’s why she advised him to make films in Argentina. No matter how primitive those films might look, according to Greta they had their charm. As a well fed child who had too many good things and never starved, Greta liked them. Alberto didn’t agree with any of this, having abandoned the useless leftist bias back then when he almost died fighting for it.
❡
Alberto drains the last drops of scotch. Maybe Greta also likes him being poor and a failure so she can exert her compassion to feel better about herself. He remembers the doves. Are they still picking branches and straws? He stands up with some effort; he hasn’t slept well and maybe drinking so early was not a good choice. He walks to the kitchen then over to the window. No doves. Alberto remains there for a while, absorbed, as if finally reaching that nirvana of people who don’t worry too much about anything because life is a pure delusion. While he considers whether it is safe to open the window or not, two doves, slightly smaller than the previous ones, fly straight to the center of the patio. Alberto can frame them in the window, a medium close up, then a close up. Doves making love briefly, one mounting the other for no more than a second and then flying around and away, far from the sight of the astonished onlooker who thinks now the doves are mocking him. Someone has sent them, Alberto suspects.
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Petrified, Alberto stands in front of the window waiting for what he knows comes next, as if he had already seen that film. Greta is making love in Wilmington with someone who is not him and the first couple of doves is back with straws on their beaks, determined to build their nest on Alberto’s window sill. In a flash, Alberto imagines a line of four colored eggs, as in an Easter basket, and two doves in love hatching them by turns. Had Greta married him, they could have adopted children. Doves make eggs as he makes films, he thinks, as awakening from a dream. He pours himself another glass while he observes with a scientific eye the couple of doves. He thinks about taking pictures and about taping them. In the old times, he would have shot them, smiling at the image of the filmmaker as a hunter, chasing, shooting. He has a rifle too, somewhere, but he isn’t sure if it’s in this apartment or in some other place where he has lived in the past. The two stubborn doves are flying back and forth, building their nest at an unreasonable speed. Greta should be taking a shower now. Not the pill after, she has no eggs. For sure, the lover has already left the bed to only return when she wants to. Alberto almost feels sorry for the poor guy who has taken his place maybe with as great expectations as he had back then.
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A third glass of scotch makes him feel even better. Greta is a great gal and he cannot blame her for having no eggs, for leaving him waiting for six months in Buenos Aires, for making him unavailable to his producers at Hollywood, for wanting him to shoot beggars and make of poverty a beautiful film. Who is Alberto after all to dream himself as a desired guest in Disneyland? A tourist in the land of the rich, answers the male dove. Alberto hears him, and also the female dove who wonders aloud why Donald Duck and Daisy couldn’t be portrayed as pigeons. The nest is almost finished, and Alberto feels he can have a fourth glass. He is now in the mood and even if he had never considered shooting cartoons, he promises to give it a try.
Alberto lightens. He remembers the rifle against a wooden wall, in the back of an old closet at a shared house when he was a student and springs in Buenos Aires were gorgeous, so beautiful! He basks on the recalled scenery: burgeoning buds everywhere, a lustful nature, pale violet flowers covering pink sidewalks, pink flowers on the swollen drunken trees, Alberto’s member sticking out as a fifth limb ready to spread his seed in every opened woman, those wild fruits he easily gathered on the streets, in late November days, pregnant with hopes and summers to come. With his glass in hand, tasting the flavor of what looks now an excellent blend of old rye that he has previously mistaken for the only cheap brand he can afford, he wonders if Greta would pay one more time for his trip.
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The doves have finished their nest and they are flying around, pondering what has to be done next. Alberto doesn’t think twice. He opens the window, picks up the nest and throws it as far as he can. The doves hover around for a while and then leave without saying this time a single word to Alberto. Dizzy and wobbly, he walks to his bedroom. He knows the doves will be back, that unfathomable plague. It is the beginning of October and spring has only begun. There will be many doves to come, in couples, to scorn him, because he is drinking too much and his dick and his brain won’t respond as fast as they used to. He has enough money to pay for his trip to meet Greta in Alexandria, enough money to fly to California and tell the producers he is more than a writer. He takes his shoes off, and with a hunch, he rummages in his closet. He knew it. The rifle is there. It has always been there, just in case. Alberto had told the story to Greta when she still admired him for his past courage as a militant. You never knew when the military will be back, he had said, or when old fellows would come looking for some weird revenge. A loaded rifle that can be put into the mouth, thinks Alberto, its cold tip against the palate. Like Hemingway, the producers would say, freezing him as a writer for eternity—never a director, never enough of a man. A rifle that can be shot, Alberto would say to Greta, if she were there to listen and see his finger pressing hard on the trigger, as if chasing doves.
© 2011 Diana Ferraro
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Author Bios
Aaron Romano is a graduate of Sonoma State University with an english degree and a concentration in creative writing. He grew up immersed in the Sonoma Country food and wine industry, and while he entertains other themes and genres outside of this, his nonfiction generally uses food, family, and culture as a vehicle for inspiration. He has spent the last seven plus years working in the hospitality industry selling food and wine. Every day he continues to learn and experience the Sonoma County lifestyle, which is the perfect environment for his pursuits in writing.
Robert Weinberger was raised across the street from the Cyclone roller coaster ride at the world-renowned Coney Island amusement park in Brooklyn, New York. Despite this trauma, he has forged an eclectic career as an entertainment publicist, journalist, and screenwriter. His screenplay, Tell Me a Movie, was a finalist in the prestigious Nicholl Fellowships in Screenplay competition and his memoirs, The Letter and The Year of Living Nervously have been published in Memoir (and). In a previous life, Robert toiled as a publicist for Universal Pictures, working with some of the most recognizable names in the entertainment industry — none of whom return his phone calls.
Diana Ferraro is a bilingual Argentine writer with three novels, two novellas, and three short story collections published in Spanish. “Chasing Doves in the Dead of Spring” belongs to her first short story collection in English, The Map of Solitude. Some of her stories have been published or are forthcoming at Foundling Review, Danse Macabre, Midwest Literary Magazine, Palabra Literary Magazine, and The Acentos Review.
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Artist Bios
In 2007, Courtney Sell traveled overseas for the first time, to India and Uganda, opening her eyes to the poverty and struggles people face every day. After graduating from George Fox University in 2009 with a degree in art and emphasis in graphic design, she returned to India and spent a year working in a home for handicapped children. Through these experiences, her passion grew for the oppressed and marginalized in the world. She is currently employed as a graphic designer at All God’s Children International, serving children in need through adoption, orphan care, and missions.
Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn New York. He is a sculptor, painter, book dealer, photographer, and teacher. His work has been seen in numerous group shows, both in the U.S. and Europe; he has held nine one-man shows, including several retrospectives of his sculptures. His work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum Of American Art, New York University, The Guggenheim Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum & The Albright-Knox Art Gallery. His paintings, drawings, and collages have been published in many online and print magazines. Over the years he has received three National Endowments for the Arts Fellowships and two Pollock-Krasner grants. In 2004 he received The Adolph Gottlieb Foundation grant, and in 2010 he received a grant from Artists’ Fellowship Inc. Currently he teaches art at the United Federation of Teachers Retiree Program in Brooklyn.
Ink-Filled Page Summer Issue 2011 copyright © 2011 Indigo Editing & Publications
Cover Design: Jon Wise
Cover Art: Courtney Sell
Coeditors: Martha Byrne & Kori Hirano
Publisher: Ali McCart
