VULNERABLE
I was a bit of a loner. I often sat on the stoop of our building in Borough Park, listening to 7-inch 45 records on my gray, portable Panasonic record player. I also listened to AM radio, which, in the early seventies, wasn’t heavily formatted at all. It was very organic and ranged from pop to hard rock to R&B. I would hear Rare Earth’s “I Just Wanna Celebrate” and right after that Aretha singing “Respect,” then Grand Funk Railroad’s “I’m Your Captain/Closer to Home.” Between WABC and my Panasonic, that’s all I needed. At other times, I would stay in my room with the door shut, dancing and dreaming. I didn’t care about people or anything, I just cared about listening to music—it was heaven.
I attended St. Frances de Chantal until I graduated to high school. One of my favorite early memories was walking home from school in seventh grade and hearing music coming out of an old store front where the windows had been covered up with sheets. I peeked past the edge of one of the sheets and saw three long-haired musicians banging out this amazing music—very Led Zeppelin-like. It was mesmerizing. Every afternoon, I walked by there, sat outside and listened, completely captivated.
I learned later the band was called Sir Lord Baltimore and they had an album out on Mercury Records called Kingdom Come. One of the older neighborhood kids had the album and showed it to me. It was the first “gatefold” album cover I ever saw, and I was in awe. Along with the music, the thing that captured me was the artwork. Art and photography would become worlds I obsessively traveled in as much as rock ’n’ roll. I also learned later that Sir Lord Baltimore’s style was considered very new, very different from traditional rock at the time, and was described in Creem magazine as “heavy metal”1—one of the first times that phrase was ever used.
Around that same time period, we got TV Guide every week. In the center was an advertisement for Columbia House Records, and you could order ten records for a penny. But of course, being young and clueless, we never read the fine print. If we had, we would have seen that every record after that was $4.99, which, to a young pre-teen, was a lot of money! What I remember specifically about signing on with Columbia House was ordering Alice Cooper’s Killer album. I knew about him because I saw him on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, and I was completely enthralled by his theatricality.
As I knew from a very young age about my passion for music, I also knew that I liked men. I fooled around with the neighborhood boys a lot and although we know that young kids experiment, I liked it a lot more than the rest of them. The thing was, even if I didn’t have the word for homosexual or gay, I was attracted to them. We would go behind a wall at the cemetery, or in somebody’s home basement and pull down our pants and show each other what we had—I just loved it. It was a precursor to my later life, and my adoration of men.
However, I actually had a girlfriend for one minute. Her name was Tammy and I lost my virginity to her. She lived around the corner by New Utrecht Avenue on 55th Street, with her mom, Gina, and her younger sister, Kim. Gina was very “gangsta.” She worked at a bar in Manhattan and was very close with Jilly Rizzo, whose saloon, on West 49th Street, was a popular celebrity hangout. Rizzo was also Frank Sinatra’s best friend. Gina kept herself very put together, with long shiny fingernails and a well-done frosted blonde shag haircut. Whenever she went to work, Tammy and I fooled around. But that was it for me and girls.
As for my homosexuality, I never knew about that phrase “being in the closet.” So I guess I was “out” since the day I was born. I never hid it. When I was fourteen or so, I even went so far as wearing crushed velvet purple shorts around the neighborhood. I remember thinking to myself, “Oh, honey, this is a little outrageous!” but all I wondered was how do I add to the flamboyance, not how to tone it down.
In fact, at 86th Street and New Utrecht Avenue, which was in the heart of Bensonhurst, there was a very “hip” shopping area with a store called The Farm. It sold fringe jackets and elephant bell bottom jeans. They also had these beige high-heeled wedge sandals for women that I bought for myself, and happily paraded around the neighborhood wearing them. I had zero fear of what people would say about me. I don’t know where that came from so, in a peculiar way, I never saw a closet.
In May 1973, my dad’s mother, Marie, died. She was the matriarch of the family and her death shook everyone. My dad was devastated. He had been very close with her—a mama’s boy from a very early age. He was inconsolable.
My grandfather was also grief-stricken, and that was an unexpected sight for me. He was an army man from WWII, and had a very stern and stoic way about him. But when my grandmother died, I saw something in him change. It was like a part of him physically died with her. His body language altered—he started to slump and drag himself everywhere.
I remember being at the house a lot with the family, for support, and one time, my grandfather asked me to come to his apartment by myself. He was feeling very depressed, and when I got there, things turned strange. He asked me to come to his bedroom and had me lie down on the bed. I didn’t understand what he was doing so I just followed orders. Suddenly, he climbed on top of me. He was fully clothed and after some time passed, he satisfied himself. I was stunned. I was thirteen years old and I didn’t know what to think.
The confusing thing was that afterwards, I went back to his apartment a few more times. I still don’t know why. He died two years later.
That experience with my grandfather, that molesting, that groping—not only left me shaken but it threw me into a place of complete self-protection, which exists to this day. It ruined my ability to be open and vulnerable to getting involved with a man in an intimate relationship. It set me up to prevent that kind of abuse from ever happening again. I began spending more and more time alone, which, in an odd way, I preferred.
Yet, something inside me, I don’t know what, moved me to find a professional to talk to—a doctor, a therapist, a counselor—even though not discussing anything of importance was set into my bones from a very early age. I sensed that what had happened to me was wrong, and that it might cause me a lot of problems in the future.
I came across a “teen clinic” at Maimonides Hospital in Borough Park. That’s where I met Danny Papa, a community mental health worker. I started meeting with him once a week and we discussed many issues concerning my mental health, but only as much as my fourteen-year old brain could handle, so of course, I never told him about my grandfather’s abuse.
In later years, I realized that if I had told him about the assault, he would have contacted the medical team at Maimonides because it was required by law that he report any physical or mental abuse communicated by a client. But he never had to call them for me, because I never said anything.
At some point, Danny gained my trust, and I felt he had taken a liking to me. We started talking about our mutual interest in music and photography and he asked me many questions about what I wanted to do in my life.
Our relationship became more than counselor and client. After some time, Danny invited me to his home to meet his wife, Maria, and we ended up spending a lot of time together as they took a very kind interest in me. I spent many evenings there, playing backgammon and watching TV as we got to know each other better. It became a safe haven for me. I think Danny was concerned that my father wasn’t around much and, although I was close with my mother, I believe he felt there was something missing for me. Danny and Maria soon became a second family for me, and I have been blessed to know them, their daughters Jennifer and Corrin, as well as their grandchildren—to this day. It is a relationship I treasure with all my heart and soul.