BACK AT THE apartment, Patty cooked for the two of us, making the chicken cacciatore I’d taught her in Rome. I slouched on the sofa, surfing the handful of television channels available back in those days.
To my surprise, I quickly came across a familiar face, the politician Ronald Reagan. It was just a few weeks before the 1980 presidential election and he was making a speech. With his rosy Howdy Doody cheeks, rhythmic nodding, and folksy voice, Reagan quickly lulled me into a trance. I couldn’t understand a thing he was saying, but he exuded humanity and warmth and reassured me with his embodiment of everything that I had always associated with America—not New York, but America: its promise, its optimism, its open arms and open mind. If you want to understand the appeal of Reagan, you need look no farther than the sight of me, sprawled out on that sofa, an unshaven, unhappy, newly arrived immigrant, already beaten down by the grimy indifference of the city, but suddenly grinning ear to ear. I felt as if I had found an American papá, my own Uncle Sam. He was such a contrast to the archetypical Italian bureaucrat, those shameless shakedown artists who cared nothing for the people they “served.”
Just like that, my demons were exorcised. I knew that Reagan had been an actor, like me. Maybe not a very good one, but an actor nonetheless. And now here he was, poised to become president of the United States. This could never have happened in Italy. When I decided to become an actor, it wasn’t just my father who scoffed. Everybody had had their doubts. That’s the way Italians are: you aren’t supposed to stray too far from the family tradition, to get too big a head, to try something too ambitious or outlandish. But this guy, this Reagan, was about to become the most powerful man in the world, and it seemed perfectly natural.
Of course, I had no idea how long I’d have to stay here in America, or what I’d do. But that’s just the point, I realized: I could do anything.
I shook off all the negativity I’d been wearing like a shawl since we’d arrived. I shot up off the sofa so quickly that Patty almost dropped the plates she was carrying to the table. I told her that I was over it, and ready to get on with things.
We made plans to get up early the next morning and go into Manhattan.
THE NEXT DAY, a Monday, was sunny. I woke up excited, thinking, “Today is the day. Today’s the day I’m going to New York City.”
We boarded the A train. When we got through the tunnel under the East River and arrived on the Manhattan side, I couldn’t wait to get to the streets. I wanted to exit at the first station, Broadway-Nassau, but Patty talked me out of it and instead we got out at Chambers Street, near Wall Street. The difference between the Financial District and Ozone Park was like the difference between Kansas and Oz: there were huge buildings of marble and steel and glass that towered so high you almost had to bend your back to see up to their tops. It was one of those October days in New York City when it’s summer in the sun and fall in the shade, with the cool air splashing up against your face. In the canyons of the Financial District, the light didn’t come through directly, instead tinting the streets a refracted blue. There was steam billowing up through grates in the sidewalk, where it was sucked up by the wind and dissipated into the air. All around us, American businessmen raced to and fro, briefcases swinging at the ends of their arms like pendulums. The spectacle was insane, but I loved it: I had never seen such a pure expression of the power of money—what it can buy, what it can build, how it makes people feel, and how crazy it makes them act. It was a street-level representation of capitalism, of the raw desire and energy required to milk it for all it was worth.
And then there were Patty and I, in our jeans and corduroy jackets. We were very out of place, but nobody cared, and I loved that, too.
We went to see Patty’s family friend, a Yugoslavian immigrant I’ll call Hadi, who was a director of Bank of America on Broad Street. The lobby of his office building was immense and intimidating. We put on little visitor badges and rode the elevator up to his office. After some perfunctory greetings, he took us to lunch in the corporate dining room. Sunlight flooded the room through the floor-to-ceiling windows and I had the sensation we were floating above the city, with a view unlike anything I had ever seen before. As Patty and Hadi spoke, I kept stealing glances out the window: watching taxis and people glide along the streets and sidewalks, the metropolis playing out its life in miniature. As awesome as it was, I was a bit taken aback. One of the things I’d loved most about Florence was being in a city with great restaurants and museums that was also just a stone’s throw from the countryside, a duality that I considered distinctly Florentine. (The closest thing I can think of in the United States is Portland or Seattle, where you have all the electricity of town, but can hop in a car or on a bike, and be hiking up a mountain, or visiting a farm, or gaping at a waterfall in a matter of minutes.) Gazing out over Manhattan from that skyscraper, I was struck that there was no greenery in sight. If you were to put a building this high in Florence, or even in certain parts of Rome, you’d be able to see the countryside beyond the city limits.
Though I didn’t speak English, Hadi decided to tell me one thing in the language of America: “Just make yourself at home,” he said. “Look at me. I’m an immigrant. I came here and I went through all the steps and now I am what I am.”
For emphasis, he gestured at the portrait of the bank’s founder, Mr. A. P. Giannini, that hung over the dining room, and with a nod, he added all he thought I needed to hear: “Italian.”
WE LEFT HADI and walked north. Within minutes we arrived in the West Village, a neighborhood that made me feel right at home with its cobblestone streets and nineteenth-century brownstones. All the buildings were old and low and human, and I felt like I could be in Siena, or Munich, or Amsterdam.
I couldn’t believe how many different worlds we had been through in just a few hours: Ozone Park, Wall Street, the Village. I had a growing sense that New York could be whatever you wanted it to, that time and space had no meaning—you could snap your fingers and go from one reality to another.
At the end of the day, we picked up a Village Voice and secured a booth in a coffee shop to go through it and look for apartment listings. There weren’t many, but we mapped them out and scheduled appointments from the pay phone in the back.
I called my mother to let her know that I was in one piece, and she said that she hoped the situation would be resolved soon. From her somewhat guarded tone, I could tell that my father was close by, but I didn’t ask for him and he didn’t ask for me.
I also took the opportunity to call my lawyer in Italy and check in on his discussions with the military.
“They don’t want to hear from you,” he told me. “Things don’t look good. There’s a warrant for your arrest. If you come back, you’ll be put in jail.”
I looked over at Patty, sitting there circling apartment listings with her pen. She was the only person I knew on this side of the ocean, and all those terrible thoughts came flooding back, all those doubts about what might become of me here in America, where I had no marketable skills and didn’t speak the language.
OF THE TWO of us, Patty was the first one to get a job, as an assistant secretary in the private banking department of Bank of America. Though we were a one-income couple, her salary provided enough money that by the first week in November, we were renting a small, one-bedroom apartment at Third Avenue and Seventy-sixth Street on the Upper East Side. We would rather have been in Greenwich Village, but we couldn’t afford it. This was the only place we could find that had a living room, bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom for just six hundred dollars per month. From inside, the unit was charming, with a generous view down Third Avenue from the living room and kitchen. The owner was Italian—a member of the Bari family of Ray Bari pizza fame—and operated a pizzeria downstairs. He had also had the building painted with broad green, white, and red bands, representing the Italian flag, although he must have had a miscommunication with the painters because the stripes were horizontal instead of vertical. I love Italy, but it was a real eyesore.
We were living in the promised land of Manhattan, but I was alone during the day, and I didn’t know what to do with myself. I walked the streets for hours, aimless and confused. One day, I was on Eighth Avenue and having one of those moments you have when you first move to New York when you can’t tell which way is north and which way is south and haven’t yet learned to use certain markers, like the Twin Towers or the Empire State Building, as reference points.
A young guy in an expensive suit was coming my way. “Excuse me,” I said, calling on my growing but still meager vocabulary, “I’m lost.”
“I’m Alan,” he said with a smirk, and kept on walking. It took me a few minutes to decipher what he had said and realize that he was making a joke at my expense. Standing there like an idiot in the middle of the sidewalk, with people moving past me like rushing water around a rock, I felt more lonely than ever.
But the most upsetting aspect of life here continued to be the food. Everything that had to do with food depressed me. I’d walk by restaurants and see what people were eating: in neighborhood joints it was green salads with grilled chicken on top and in fancy eateries it was nouvelle cuisine, with its silly kaleidoscopic presentations.
Hungry for home, I decided to visit one of the restaurants in Little Italy downtown, a famous place specializing in seafood that had been there for decades. My walk through the neighborhood caught me off guard: the little souvenir shops with miniature Italian flags and soccer shirts and Frank Sinatra posters for sale—the most superficial, stereotypical depictions of Italian and Italian-American culture. And when I got to the restaurant, I didn’t know what to make of it: there were huge fish tanks in the dining room that made it smell like an aquarium. The food was unfamiliar to me: clams oreganata and other Italian-American dishes that had no true antecedent back home. They also served pastas that were overcooked and all seemed to be swimming in the same red tomato sauce, and were presented in huge mounds; in my opinion, even great pasta should be served in portions no larger than one hundred grams.
That indulgence was especially disappointing because I was so broke that I ate most of my meals in diners, or tried to: all I wanted was eggs, sunny-side up. Someone told me that occhio di bue translated as “cow’s eyes,” so I’d take a seat at the counter and, with my thick accent, order “eggs cow’s eyes.” More often than not, the waiter would look at me like I was crazy and proceed to ignore me until I gave up and left. I’d sometimes come back to our apartment and call my mother to check in; eventually Papá and I began to speak again, as well, but it was always strained.
Fortunately, after some sleuthing about, I was able to reconnect with two old friends from Rome who had come here before me. Oreste, an acting-schoolmate of mine, had chased an American girl to New York. They had gotten married and while he still had his roguish good looks, his acting skills were of little use here and he had taken one of the most common immigrant paths and become a cab driver. The other guy, a James Dean lookalike named Claudio who had come to attend the famous Actor’s Studio, had failed in the theater and become an executive with Agip, the Italian oil company.
When the three of us got together and hung out, we reverted back to our old ways, chain-smoking, laughing about our friends back home, and killing bottles of wine in quick succession.
But I could see that they were living very different lives. Essentially, they had become different people. Our get-togethers aside, they had been comprehensively assimilated into American society. In particular, Oreste peppered his conversation, even otherwise Italian sentences, with American slang like “asshole” and “motherfucker.” And they dressed like Americans, less conspicuously than they had previously. Maybe they couldn’t afford more expensive threads, but they seemed deliberately conformist in their jeans and knit shirts. There was an air of anticlimax about Claudio and Oreste: so alive and creative just a few years earlier, and now resigned to their workaday lives here in the United States, cogs in the capitalist wheel. I adopted a cinematic reference for these guys who looked familiar but were relieved of their vitality: Body Snatchers. I had nothing against America, but I liked myself Italian and wasn’t interested in becoming an American.
I’d come back to our apartment after spending time with these pod people and sit on the sofa in a stupor that was only partially brought on by the red wine coursing through my veins. I was confronting the specter of my own ambition. Back in Rome, after being cast in Antony and Cleopatra, I had been on the cusp of theatrical success. Would I have become a celebrity? Who knew? But the possibility had been there. Now, I was a step away from becoming one of the invisibles who drove cabs and sliced meat at the delicatessen and made deliveries.
To help maintain a strong connection to Tuscany, I’d wrap up my daily vagabonding around New York (job hunting, followed by lunch, followed by wandering the streets) with a trip to the local supermarket, then come home and make dinner for myself and Patty. I felt like my mother, cooking dinner for my father, although the state of supermarkets in America—this was long before the rise of chains like Whole Foods—demanded some creativity to even approximate what we ate in Italy. It was almost impossible to find a good, imported brand of dried pasta (meaning something made from durum), so after one gummy experiment, I gave that up for a time. I began to cook with tougher cuts of meat, punching up the flavor with spices like clove, nutmeg, cinnamon, pepper, and cumin—which isn’t Italian but makes a big impact. In time, I developed my in-America repertoire of vegetable soups, stews, and pot roast, and whenever I cooked, I played my cassettes of Italian pop artists such as Venditti, Battisti, and Dalla in the background. In this way, for a few hours each day, it sounded and smelled like home.
JUST AS I was loath to unpack my suitcase when we first arrived, the truth was that I was terrified of committing to a job here for fear that it would set me on the one-way path to obscurity. But eventually I came to grips with the fact that my stay was open-ended and that any self-respecting man had to go to work in the morning and bring home some money at the end of the week. So, with some help from a family connection, I hooked up with the owner of a small men’s clothing boutique, another transplanted Italian happy just to be in America. He ran a shop in the East Sixties, near Lexington Avenue, and he hired me as his right hand.
I have no idea how this guy made any money because the shop did precious little business. The mirrored walls were lined with long, steel racks that had men’s suits hanging from them, and in the center of the store were additional racks, suspended from the ceiling, on which hung imported slacks and sport shirts. He’d have me occupy myself by sweeping the floors, wiping down the mirrors and windows, and straightening the suits. Once I finished doing it all, he’d make me do it all again, even though sometimes nobody had entered the store since I had begun the endless loop in the morning.
After less than a week of this, I had had enough. On Thursday, I left for lunch and decided that I would never go back.
It was, on its face, an insane decision, but there are times in life when you have to make a change. I had to leave that boarding school, I had to leave Italy, and now I had to leave the boutique. I couldn’t quite put words to my rationale. If I would eventually be allowed to return to Italy, who cared how I paid the rent during my brief time here in the United States? And if I couldn’t return to Italy, then I might as well make peace with the fact that my acting career was at an end, and that I’d need to at least begin life here with a job like this.
All I knew was that I had to get out of there. I didn’t know what I was looking for but I walked south, downtown. I took a right on Fifty-seventh Street and passed Bergdorf Goodman and Tiffany’s.
Up until that moment, being in such moneyed neighborhoods had depressed me, but not anymore. The opulent surroundings inspired me, made me hungry for success. My bearing and stride took on more purpose. I stood up straighter, puffed my chest out, held my head high, and marched west on Fifty-seventh Street. In those moments I was transformed from a lost soul bobbing through the sea of people into that most classic of New York characters: a striver, somebody looking for his moment, his opportunity, and sure that the city was keeping it tucked away for him somewhere, if he just took the time to go looking for it.
I turned left on Seventh Avenue and headed downtown, past the Theater District, where the theaters were dark in the middle of the day. I kept forging downward, through the Sodom and Gomorrah they called Times Square, through the Garment District and Chelsea and into the West Village. I cut over to Sixth Avenue, the Avenue of the Americas, and, gazing east across it, something caught my eye: just above Houston Street there was a little restaurant with a canary-yellow awning stretched over the door with the name Da Silvano stenciled on it. Da Silvano means “Silvano’s Place,” but in a way that only Italians would understand. It actually means “to Silvano,” as in “let’s go to Sil-vano’s place.”
I crossed the street and walked up to the restaurant. I looked at the menu in its little windowed box outside: it was in Italian, and the food was the stuff I missed, like fegato alla salvia (calf’s liver with sage) and cacciucco (fish stew). This was a real Italian restaurant, like the ones we had back home.
I had never thought of working in a restaurant. Those summers back at my uncle’s place were fond memories, to be sure, but I thought of that as just something I had done when I was a kid to get away from home and make some money. But staring at that menu, and looking through the window as the waiters served food to the customers and cleared away the dirty dishes, I suddenly realized that this was where I had been headed when I had left the boutique.
I opened the door. There are two small dining rooms at Da Sil-vano today, but back then there was just one little room, with a bar in the back corner that looked like a confessional. The size of the room was irrelevant to me: it was the smells that sealed the deal: garlic, rosemary, and that sweet, tannic, primal scent of cooked wine and meat.
I identified the manager, a stocky young Italian guy named Delfino whose diminutive size and rigid posture reminded me of a jockey. Speaking in Italian, I introduced myself. He spoke with a thick Southern Italian accent that was a delight to hear. I didn’t waste any time and went right ahead and told him I was looking for a job.
I guess it was clear that I was new to the States, because he asked me what I was doing here in New York. I told him I had just arrived.
“Hai lavorato nei ristoranti?” he asked me. What restaurant experience did I have?
I told Delfino about my uncle’s restaurant. I got a bit carried away, explaining how much I’d done there and how natural I was at it, all of the memories reconstituting in my mind as I relayed them for the first time in ages.
I might have oversold myself, because he said to me, “But you don’t speak English. All I can offer you is a busboy job.”
I looked around at Da Silvano. It was small, but there was a real attention to detail, an authenticity and familiarity, from the exposed red brick wall to the simple white tablecloths to the espresso machine behind the bar and the pressed-tin ceiling. I didn’t want to leave.
“Va bene, busboy sia,” I said. Fine, I’ll be a busboy.
Delfino told me to come back at four o’clock the next day and we shook on it.
On the way out, I took another look at the menu. There it was, under Antipasti, third from the top: pappa al pomodoro.
I’d come to the right place.