When I was eleven, my mom developed a problem with her hands. She was in great pain and had to quit her job. She needed a lot of surgery, and I decided to find a job, because there was no money. When it was raining outside, I had to wrap my shoes in plastic bags because I had the cheapest ones you could buy. They were fabric with cardboard soles, and if they got wet, they would split open. I hated to go out in the rain because other kids would make fun of me with my feet wrapped in bags. My father was working three jobs already, a twenty-hour day, and I was old enough to say, “I’ve got to change this.”
Through odd jobs I was doing, I met a guy who told me he was looking for somebody to work at night. He said nobody wanted the job—it was unloading fifty-pound bags of flour and baking pies from one in the morning until seven. All I wanted to know was how much it paid, and when he said $600 a week, I said, “That’s $2400 a month—I want the job!” He wondered what my family would say, so I talked to my dad who said, “I don’t like you working at night but I know how you are, and you’ll do it anyway. So just don’t tell your mother.”
My dad told me to tell my mom that during the week I wanted to stay at my aunt’s house, three blocks away. My aunt was only seventeen, and she lived with my mom’s parents and older sister. It was a perfect plan. The only people who knew about it were my aunt, my grandpa, and my dad. But the job was forty miles away and there was no bus at one in the morning, so my grandpa said, “We’ll do this: You can use that motor bike over there every night as long as it’s back by eight and you don’t take it before midnight.” (Like I said—Mafioso Nonno.) So that was what I did. I “borrowed” this motorbike every night and I never even knew whose it was. Taking it was actually the least illegal thing I was doing, because you have to be fourteen to drive a motorcycle, not to mention to go to work.
I did that job for two and a half years, from one in the morning until seven. The bakery had a nice storefront but there was a basement down some outside stairs, and that was where I worked. There were twenty double-decker ovens down there, blasting heat. My job was to get raw pies from the store, take them outside and down the steps into the basement, bake them, then take them back upstairs—outside again—and into the store. Finally, I’d arrange them on the shelves so everything was fresh for the morning.
The constant change in temperature made me sick every other week, and still I went to work. I spent my nights on the steps, sitting in the middle of the staircase. Ten feet up it was ten degrees, ten feet down it was one hundred and twenty. It was so hot and damp in the basement that I would wait for the pies to bake wearing nothing but my underwear. Then I’d put on a jacket over my underwear, check for people in the street, go up the stairs to get into the store with the pies, back and forth again and again. This went on for four to five hours a night. The first two hours of every night I spent helping this big guy unload fifty-pound bags of flour from his truck into the store. My back would be killing me—I was eleven years old! Eventually my mom found out because of all my aches and pains, and all she could say was, “You’re going to kill me with this, but thank God you’re helping.” So I kept doing it because I made $600 a week and it kept my family fed. To this day, when I see an apple pie my back hurts and I sweat and get hot flashes.
Of course, working all night made it hard to stay awake in school. I got suspended once because I was sleeping in class, and my mom stormed into the principal’s office when she found out I wouldn’t be able to go to school for a week (I wasn’t too upset, as you can imagine). She dragged me with her and said things to him I can’t repeat in a family cookbook. She also said, “You suspended my son? Do you know what he does all night? He’s working all night to help our family, standing on his feet from one to seven in the morning, and you suspended him? What do you do all day?” She was like a beast, screaming, “My kid is going to be at school every day or we have a problem here!” My mom is the best thing in the world. And like most moms, she would kill anybody on the spot if she believed that for some reason that person was against her son.
