Authors: Joe Putignano
At the camp I was grouped with six other little daredevils like me. The other athletes were just as dedicated as I was, and for some reason that fact really bothered me. I got to feel that I wasn’t athletically special and not the only person imbued with supernatural powers. That understanding was profoundly humbling, and I knew I was going to have to train harder and longer than any other athlete in the world. I was positive other gymnasts didn’t have my plan. I knew they didn’t want to be an Olympian as badly as I did. But of course, I was wrong. They were as hungry and devoted as I was. We were all starving for a piece of glory, and we would tear each other apart to get it. To the human eye, we were little kids doing gymnastics; but in reality we were bloodthirsty, razor-sharp-clawed demons, ready to win. The blood loss from others would be our victory. We all shared the same desire, obsession, and lust.
I decided to make friends with them and to learn everything I could and bring it back with me to Massachusetts. I learned many new skills at the training center, but I was homesick and I missed my sister Jenn, even though we didn’t get along. She was three years older than me. I admired her wildly creative presence and deep-blue eyes, which seemed to be made of starlight, water, and diamonds. I left a piece of my soul under those mountains in Colorado. When I returned to World Gymnastics I continued to practice, but knew there were others who were training like me, tiny warriors sharpening their swords, carving their weapons, fighting with themselves to become the best, strongest, and fastest. There was nothing I could do about it—and it killed me a thousand times over.
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HE ULNA NERVE IS DIRECTLY CONNECTED TO THE LITTLE FINGER AND PASSES NEAR THE ELBOW
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ECAUSE IT IS NOT PROTECTED BY MUSCLE OR BONE, INJURY IS COMMON
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T IS ONE OF THE THREE MAIN NERVES IN THE ARM AND THE LARGEST UNPROTECTED NERVE IN THE BODY
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HE ULNA NERVE TRAVELS ALONG THE INSIDE OF THE ELBOW UNDER A BONY PROTRUSION KNOWN AS THE “FUNNY BONE.”
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OMETIMES WHEN THIS AREA IS BUMPED, IT CAN CAUSE A SHOCK-LIKE FEELING
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When I was thirteen, my father began to disappear from the family. I didn’t notice this because he often worked late and my focus on gymnastics kept me in an impenetrable world, with only my dreams and goals surrounding me. I knew my parents fought, but I didn’t know to what extent.
During those years, my entire family worked at the restaurant, Giovanni’s Avon Towne House. My father and his two brothers had inherited it after our grandfather’s death—an event that created a giant chasm within my family. What I remember most about my grandfather was a teddy bear he had given me named Oatmeal. Oatmeal was covered in soft white fur with a plaid bow tie and plaid paw pads. As with most gifts we get from people we cannot remember, we somehow take those people’s essence and infuse it into the thing they left behind. Oatmeal was my grandfather.
Unlike my parents, my grandfather seemed to be acutely cognizant of everything around him. His focus frightened me because it was alien
to my family’s ways. His death broke the links in the iron-chained fence of my extended family, and the peace we had obtained began to corrode, forever changing the family dynamics.
My brother Michael worked in the kitchen as a prep cook, supervised by my father; my mother was the hostess and manager of the waitstaff; my sister Trish was a bartender; my sister Jenn was a bus girl; and my cousins and aunts were waitresses.
My mother and father worked the same nights and saw each other more than they wanted to. I wanted to work with them, but I was too young. My family gave more importance to working a job than to education or sports. They had an “Old World” work ethic, and if someone didn’t work more than forty hours a week, they were considered lazy. I was petrified of being called lazy, and did anything to avoid being labeled as such.
Growing up in that business made for an interesting childhood. We had to celebrate our holidays on other days. Holidays were the busiest times, and even though we came together as a family to work, we weren’t actually
together
. The success of the restaurant brought us everything we ever asked for as kids. We weren’t rich, but we had enough money to live comfortably. The difficult side to this was that everything revolved around the restaurant. All of our family conversations were about other employees, and arguments that started at home continued into the restaurant, and those started at the restaurant continued into the home. The building was not just constructed from wood and stone; intertwined into the structure was the mortar of my family’s flesh and blood. It held us together, and it eventually destroyed us.
I had gymnastics practice every day after school from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m., and because the place where I trained was closer to the restaurant than to our home, my mom would take me back to work with her because she couldn’t leave her duties long enough to drive me home. Practice finished during the restaurant’s busiest hour.
I loved going back to the restaurant because I felt like I was hanging out with the adults and sat at the end of the giant, island-shaped bar
doing my homework. My father would cook me something in the kitchen and my sister Trish would pour me a Coke using the bar’s soda gun.
While other kids my age were getting ready for their next day of school, I was at the center of another world. To me, this was a much better experience than attending school, and being the owner’s son made me feel like a celebrity. I realized I had more respect at the bar than I did at school, and I was treated with extreme kindness by all the waitresses. Patrons sitting at the bar appeared to be friendly too, smoking and laughing and consuming fancy-looking drinks that sparkled from their perfectly round glasses.
I would bring my schoolwork to the restaurant, but it was difficult for me to concentrate. It hurt to grip my pen because my chalk-stained hands had deep calluses and ripped skin from the high bar, and no matter how many times I washed them, the chalk dust came back. I would stare at the textbook in front of me, trying to absorb the words, but I couldn’t—the world of the bar was too alluring.
My exhausted father came out of the kitchen looking unapproachable and tired. At the bar, my sister automatically poured him an ice-cold beer. The color of the beer made it look like urine and the foam at the top appeared sweet but sinister, although I knew it wasn’t sugary because I could smell the drink from his breath when he talked to me. My father changed when he held his beer, and that transformation was immediate. The color in his cheeks deepened and glowed like a firefly in August. The unapproachable man became approachable, and his beer-induced mood was different at the bar than at home or in the restaurant’s kitchen. It was his moment of relaxation, the peace people equate to sitting on the beach when the waves come crashing in, washing away their cares into the sea. I liked seeing him there with his beer in his hands as he stared contentedly at the television screen, drowning in the noise of happy people.
I sat at the bar and tried to do my homework against the noise of a realm in which a child did not belong. It was impossible to concentrate, and, given the option, I didn’t want to. After the rush hour ended, my
mother had her drink at the bar with her friends. In that moment, my mother looked happy, but uncomfortable. She was caught between two places, waiting for my father who was sitting down the way and whose eyes never left his beer. But after her first drink, she changed. The more she drank, the more she became part of the bar, morphing into a gorgeous glimmer in the darkness. She lit her cigarette and the blue smoke danced around her bleached-blonde hair as the alcohol strengthened her, guiding her from girl to woman, from confusion to hope. That thing she seemed to be waiting for only moments before had arrived. Her beauty became blurred as she crossed over from her sober self to her drunk self. I sat there between two statues: my mother and father brewing a feud like a thundercloud over my head. I was ready to go home. I was exhausted and needed to sleep. The illusion of this lifestyle didn’t last. At first it all looked so glamorous, but each passing hour brought more darkness and despair. Glamour had a curfew.
The distance between my parents became obvious, and even though they stood only a few feet apart, with customers and waitresses finishing their shifts with a drink, they were already in different places. My mom still loved him; her smile contained all the honesty and purity that love could ever offer. But my father was consumed in a darkness he perceived as the light of freedom, and his judgment was too clouded to be anything but selfish. I hated him for that, because it was obvious that he was moving away from the family he created. Ashamed to display us, his unfinished pieces of work, he decided to start his life over elsewhere.
As I waited for my mom to finish her drink so we could go home, the hours pushed toward midnight, and the closer it got to midnight, the more belligerent the customers became—stuttering like zombies, entranced in a ritual to erase their thoughts, their memories, and all that made them human. This place allowed people to slip in between the lines of the lives they were living, forming a liquid society of solitary pain. Every hope, prayer, resentment, and relationship was tied to the drink in their hands. They drank to rewrite their histories and futures. I began to hate alcohol. I hated what it did to people and the way it changed them from normal and nice to angry and
mean. I knew that I would never touch a drop, that I would keep those memories alive, clanging in my head like huge, iron church bells at a funeral. Sitting next to those drunks almost every night, with dopey, slobbering smiles on their numb faces, I received the strongest antialcohol message of any kid in the world.
Michael would come out of the kitchen during his shift, just to get away from the mayhem and heat. He’d lean up against the bar where I was sitting and observe the place for exactly what it was. Then he would look at me and laugh as he made a wisecrack about some poor, ugly drunk. He was the hardest worker I knew, and would go back into the kitchen to do the brunt of the work that nobody else would do. He didn’t seem to mind, and he did it well. I loved his presence because he brought humor to the demented world I was visiting.
After my mother’s repeated good-byes to her friends, we’d get into her car. She was always quiet, and I knew she was thinking of my father, who still stood at the end of the bar entertaining his own phantoms. Her eyes squinted in the darkness as she concentrated on getting us home. The empty highway was a perfect accompaniment to the silence we listened to, but I could hear her thoughts, and her rage altered her perfume, adding a mystery to her determined smile and denial.
What happens to a home when the people living in it leave? What happens to the family left behind? Do they live with the old memories, unable to move forward? The house’s reassurances slowly vanished and the memories once shared became dust on the furniture. My older sister Trish moved out, my brother stayed at the house of the girl du jour he was sleeping with, and my sister Jenn was often out with her new best friend, going to the movies or the mall. The isolation and quietness were my mother’s and mine to share, to live with, and to endure like a single burning candle that has the responsibility to heat a palace. My father was never coming home, and that was no longer a thought in our minds, just an unspoken truth never voiced.
How could I ask my mother where my father had gone? Wasn’t it written on her broken heart, on her clothing, on her pride? Her dark-brown eyes sparked with rage and resentment, burning the memories
of his body and face, searing his flesh, and sweeping the ashes of his laughter from her mind.
My mother, whose profound intuition for nature transcended anyone’s I had ever known, was betrayed by love, a missed shot from a broken bow. She was a woman lying by an icy riverbed with her head on the frozen grass, listening for the universe to give her direction. From her secret garden of ingrown thoughts, she watched the TV screen and pretended that moment didn’t exist, along with all the others forever locked in the solid waters. Her eyes filled with heavy tears that fell like ice drops from snowy branches. I couldn’t look at her, because to see her weep would make me cry, and all children are powerless over their mother’s tears. It was too late to get into this conversation again because the day had already been a lost war, and I had school in the morning. I turned to her, because I had to, and began to cry as we lost ourselves in our sadness. Together we cried—she cried for him and I cried for her, and the thunderclouds of her emotions sent lightning down my spine.
This cycle at night became a normal event in our lives. The raw emotions thickened like a dense fog blotting out the light. Her endless tears could have filled up oceans, and the delicate golden ribbon that strung her wounded heart together unraveled. Even though I knew the answer, I always asked her what was wrong, but she never spoke about it. I would hear her crying in the living room as I went to bed, and it killed me. I became a hostage to the music played by the broken instrument that had replaced her heart. I wanted to fix it, but I couldn’t. All that was once beautiful had gone. Together we perfected misery.
I would see my father at the bar each evening and wanted to ask him, “Where have you been? When are you coming home?” But I never did; I couldn’t utter those words, and instead observed all of the alcoholics as I reassured myself of how much I hated the substance that seemed to be the lifeblood of my family.
Countless long, uncomfortable nights led us to finally move on from the thought that my father would ever return home. We didn’t talk
about it. To speak the words would mean it was true, and it would have shattered the illusions and pretense in which we lived. My mom sank deeper into herself, and I began to believe her lies. I believed her fake smile in the same way I convinced myself plastic flowers were real. They looked like flowers, so they must be flowers. I believed she would be okay, but she would never be the same again, and neither would we.