That was made clear to me in 1st grade by Dick McCann, the fourth of 5 sons in an Irish Catholic family. He came up to me in the schoolyard and said: “You lost the war.” He was obviously happy to be able to say it. And he was looking forward to teasing me about it. But because I had no clue what he was talking about, it was impossible for me to react in a way he expected. I wasn’t sad or shocked or ashamed. I was baffled. So he just repeated his taunt one or two more times and then walked away, rather disappointed, I assume.
That day, after school, I told my mother what had happened. She smiled and said: “You were not in the war. I was. And I did not lose. I won. See? Here we are, in America. I won. We won.”
I never told Dick McCann what my mother had told me. He wouldn’t have understood anyway. Only the eldest of the McCann sons had any brains. John followed in his father’s footsteps and became a lawyer. The two sons older than Dick were very unpleasant, dolts, bordering on being bullies, because they ruled the nest now that the eldest had moved out. In fact, one day, a few years later, I remember running and hiding behind an open garage door as Austin, the second son, came roaring down the street in a car with his crazy buddies, holding a .45 automatic out the window of the passenger side and waving it around, pointing it at me and the other kids walking down the sidewalk, yelling at us. I saw the open garage on my right and scrambled quickly to hide behind the half-open sliding door. Austin and the immediate danger passed. I have never forgotten it.
Two girls were finally added to the McCann family a few years later when Dick and I were in 6th grade. By that time Dick had proven himself to be an unreliable sometimes friend, sometimes enemy. Many years later, after I came back to the USA from my life in Africa and India, I looked him up. He was sharing an apartment with somebody and hanging out with John Waller, another guy from BHCS who was also once an unreliable friend. It seemed like it was only from my side that contact was initiated or wanted. One day I went to meet them at the beach and, from time to time in the middle of our banal conversation one of them would take a little side stroll through the sand to a shed nearby. This happened every 30 minutes or so. They would stay in there a couple of minutes and then emerge. I figured they were doing drugs of some kind. That was the last time I saw them or heard anything from them.
Today I thank McCann and Waller for making clear to me, once again after my return to the USA, that I am not an American.
Not even my American father could make me American. I never even met him until I was 25. And no lasting bond came out of that meeting. My Italian mother couldn’t make me a real Italian either, never having lived there or had any real contact with other Italians. Even though I’ve always had an Italian passport.
After all, we weren’t immigrants. Milena (my mother) was a functionary of the Italian Foreign Service, stationed in Los Angeles at the Italian Consulate, dealing with Italian immigrants and Hollywood Italians. And we lived in Beverly Hills.
In second grade at BHCS (Good Shepherd), we had Phonics. That was absolutely my most favorite course. And Miss Helveston, our beautiful young teacher (not a nun!), was the second grown woman I had true loving feelings for, obviously Platonic, but nevertheless an emotional connection from the solar plexus. (The first was beautiful blond Ankiza, my summer holiday nanny at a beach town in Croatia.)
Phonics was no longer a subject in 3rd grade, and by then Miss Helveston was no longer a teacher at our school.
Because people like Dick McCann and the other kids at my school were so unreliable, and because I played baseball with a passion, my real friends were all baseball players like me. My Little League years were spent in Roxbury Park, after school, playing ball. Then my PONY league years at La Cienega Park, always with more or less the same guys who loved baseball, like me. 98% of them were Jewish. Much more reliable friends. United by a love for baseball, I spent more time with them than anyone else. Especially by the time I got to high school, where my Catholic school friends were no longer visible.
One of our favorite things to do after school or after baseball was to go to Canters on La Brea. We had to be careful what we ordered because the servers (called “waitresses” in those days) were more like our strict aunts, who made sure we never had milk to drink if we ordered something with beef. They were always happy to provide extra dill pickles, but they hovered enough to make sure we didn’t get rowdy or too loud. They ran the place—a white-aproned flock of middle-aged Jewish women who could be nice or ironically nasty, as the situation demanded. Their superb little humorous comments made sure that each time we visited Canters we left well-fed, smiling and happy.
Here I am now, a guy with a mixed cultural heritage, who claims English as his mother tongue, though I learned to speak Italian and Croatian first, along with French. My French wasn’t super, but it was the language spoken in my kindergarten in Zagreb. I had to understand whatever was being said to me in that language. English was in the mix as well because of Joe Arcuri, a Sicilian American who worked in the American consulate and was my mother’s best friend in Zagreb, and then forever after, until both got into their late 70s, a few years before they died. I dealt with all those languages equally, replying in the same language I had been addressed in.
Then, when I was 5, we boarded the SS Independence for New York. As we boarded the ship, I told my mother that from now on I would only speak English. She thought I was just saying that. Afterwards, when she spoke to me in Italian, I always answered in English—the iron will of a hard-headed little kid.
English became my native language.
It’s really not all that surprising. My mother was in love with Shakespeare and Dante and jazz. She filled me up with mythology as well, and when I started reading Dickens in 9th grade, my future was being formed and shaped by the language, the music and the rock ’n roll (Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, Chuck Berry) that I listened to on my bedside radio, at night before going to sleep, at the lowest volume possible so that my mother wouldn’t hear. In Nairobi, when I got my first dose of pure Shakespeare and then The Beatles, I was baked and ready to emerge from the oven.
I bought a guitar and started writing songs, poetry, and eventually wrote a long article for the St Mary’s School yearbook. English language and literature found a home and lived inside me.
In Kenya, I was not a Kenyan, nor was I a Brit, and later, when I went to Durban, I was not a South African, though I adapted my accent to the local one, as I had in Nairobi earlier, so that I wouldn’t sound noticeably different, like the poor kid who came to St Mary’s a year after me. I still can’t remember his actual name, only the name everybody called him: Yank.
Everywhere I went (or was taken to, like our luggage), I absorbed everything, including, in my early 20s in Durban, lots of speed and gangia. It took me a while to recover my brains after all that, so by the time my mother was transferred to India, I was not a hippie.
Luckily, India also made me immune to gurus and cults. Except for a gullible minority, most Indians despised the money-making gurus that had invaded the West. There were enough real, sincere gurus around who lived ascetic lives and demanded nothing of anyone. They gave of themselves and their knowledge without expecting anything in return. Not transactional in the least.
India also gave me time to read Ulysses by James Joyce. Each day, for 6 long hot months, I sat in my air-conditioned room and read the book I bought from a New Delhi Connaught Circus book stall for 10 rupees. Finnegan’s Wake was in my cheap book library as well, and though I tried to read it, after Ulysses, I failed to get past the first 20 pages. I don’t feel guilty. I have never listened to Wagner’s Ring Cycle either. Bits and pieces of these extravagantly long and complex works are enough for me. I prefer John Lee Hooker and a Parker novel by Richard Stark. They make me feel alive and pull me along through the black and blue.
So, I’m not an American.
What is an American anyway? The only people who have the right to be called native Americans are those that migrated to the continent from Eurasia and the Pacific a few thousand years ago. The rest only arrived in the Americas about 500 years ago, mostly from Europe. 500 years is nothing in terms of world history. And all those people are migrants. They ran from war, from poverty, from persecution, then decided to wreak war and persecution on the people who were there before them, dispossess them of their land and push them into poverty. And they imported slaves from Africa and the Caribbean to do the heavy lifting.
Now a new regime wants to be like the original regime and return to a time when slavery was OK and persecution of “the other” was normal. That is a cycle of some sort, I guess. I know that I am not an American, but neither was Dick McCann or John Waller. Not really. They were from families of migrants, refugees, who just occupied the land and wore the political garb they were handed down by the original European invaders.
The ones posturing as Americans in the new regime are actually rather recent migrants and refugees, having no claim to being “original settlers” like some of the members of the previous regimes. Besides, most are “nouveau riche”, gaudily showing off their stolen wealth by flashing gold and diamonds, like gangster rappers with their bling. They are no more American than I am.
In the end, I’m a EuroAmi hybrid—steeped in European culture and mythology (thanks Mom!)—who uses Anglo-American culture and the English language to express himself in a world where the rulers have made it possible for their Anglo-American culture and language to trickle into every little nook and cranny on the planet.
Maybe some of my aqua-vitae will trickle into one of those pockets and cracks, go to work as a restorative, therapeutic drink and invigorate somebody’s resistance to ignorance.