Foot in mouth disease

My great-uncle Tony (we called him Zi’ Toni) had little use for fripperies of any kind. After losing all his teeth, he never bothered getting dentures, but his hardened gums attacked all foods with impunity, including steak and hot cherry peppers. I remember once he reached down into his big jar of peppers and gave me one to bite into as a joke. After failing to put out the fire in my mouth with a glass of water and chunks of bread, I had to resort to scraping the inside of my cheek with a wet dishrag.

Always decked out in a white shirt and tie, he would half-sing, half-hum to himself in company, the way people vocalize in the shower. In posing for photos, even before he lost his teeth, he always made sure he was holding a bottle of wine, whiskey or vermouth toward the camera, visually conveying his notions regarding the ultimate in human felicity. Sometimes he also donned an old conductor’s cap he had filched while working on the railroad. I noticed, too, that while relaxing at the table with a shot glass of whiskey in front of him, he always kept the first three digits of his right hand wrapped around it, as if guarding it against expropriation.

Nor was that that an idle fear. Sometimes when we visited, he greeted us at the door with the lament that my great-aunt, Zi’ Achilla, had provided “drinks for the fishes!” Apparently, there were circumstances in which he grew loquacious about my aunt’s shortcomings and derelictions of duty, and then she would go straight to the source and flush the contents of his Four Roses bottle down the toilet.

“He was making me stoonahd [driving me nuts] all day with his sermons,” she would explain to us, “and I got stoommagahd [fed up] listening to him.”

For the rest of our visit, whiskey-less Uncle Tony would be in a black mood while Aunt Achilla ignored his fretting. If caterwauling cats only one flight beneath us chose such a time to mate in the alley that ran the length of their three-room apartment, my irate uncle would fill up a macaroni pot with water. Raining it down on them from the living room window, he cursed them with “Vuh puzzah shkiahtà!” [May you explode!]

But to me and my sister he was always kindly. During each visit I could count on his slipping me a pack of Wrigley’s Spearmint and a shiny quarter on the sly, making believe, with a crooked shush-finger held to his nose, that we had to hide his largesse from stingy Zi’ Achilla. In later years, taking inflation into account, he wrapped a dollar bill around the pack of gum. Often, for the delight of my baby sister, he would twist a paper napkin into a long tube and stick it beneath his nose like a white mustachio while bleating mehhhhhhh! in imitation of an Italian sheep.

Aside from nipping and hot cherry peppers, Uncle Tony’s passion was professional wrestling from Bridgeport, which he began following avidly after he acquired a TV set. That was the classic era of wrestling, boasting stars such as the 640-pound Haystacks Calhoun, who sported a horseshoe on a chain around his neck; Antonino Rocca; André the Giant; Killer Kowalski, with his dreaded claw-hold; Bobo Brazil; Skull Murphy; Dr. Jerry Graham and his brother Ed; ;Pampero Firpo (the Wild Bull of the Pampas), and Nature Boy Buddy Rogers with his excruciating figure-four grapevine submission hold.

My uncle cheered the good guys and booed the villains, laughing heartily at their choreographed tumbles, but he revered “The Italian Strongman” and “Living Legend” from the Abruzzi — the incomparable Bruno Sammartino. Carefully removing from his wallet the latest Il Progresso clippings about his hero, Zi’ Toni’ proceeded to read me glowing accounts of Sammartino’s most recent victories with the aid of a magnifying glass. Looking up, I’d see an enormous black eyeball moving slowly over the paper.

My biggest blunder regarding my beloved uncle occurred when, in my childish ignorance, I asked him a question about a weird Italian nickname handed down to him from his grandmother. Not knowing what it meant, I had no idea it was offensive.

Uncle Tony laughed and shrugged it off, but my parents were aghast. Although many Italian families and individuals had nicknames at that time, only some of them, like that of an old guy known as “Trolley Car,” were openly acknowledged by their owners. Some nicknames, however, were used only behind the person’s back. My uncle’s nickname was of this latter type.

Scarlet-faced, Aunt Achilla said through tight lips: “When the little one speaks, the big one has spoken.”