Dog: A Memoir
Joseph Cuomo
When I was about seven or eight, I was the odd target of the racism of my friends, even though we were of the same race. It was, in a way, a form of play. And yet, it wasn’t. It was cruel. And yet, it wasn’t really serious. Which was confusing. The kids in my blue-collar neighborhood, most of them of Irish descent, exaggerated the vowels in my name, inserting an alien consonant, chanting it over and over again, their prepubescent voices unnaturally deepened into sideshow baritones.
Cuuu-ooooom-bo, Cuuu-ooooom-bo, Cuuu-ooooom-bo, accompanied by raucous jungle noises, trilling monkeys, screeching birds.
At the time, I didn’t understand what they were doing. I didn’t understand that they were turning my name into something African. But I knew what they meant. I knew they meant to humiliate me. And it worked. I burned with shame. I was shunned, singled out, something strange, alien. And yet, I had freckles and fair skin. My mother is of Swedish, English, and (though I didn’t know it then) Irish descent. And so it was, as it usually is, the idea of difference, rather than difference itself, which the neighborhood kids rallied around, like a baseball team.
Not that I thought of myself as Italian. My only thought was to run, disappear. I was a freak, and felt like one. I could never make sense of the many fights I was goaded into. I could never understand the practice of combining play with violence. When slapped—out of nowhere, by someone who wasn’t at all angry or upset—the confusion itself was enough to paralyze me. The ways of my gender were a mystery to me. And the mystery outran me. It was there wherever I went. It was as though I were trapped inside some nightmare nature film, the boys butting heads like rams or goats.
And of course, they knew. They could smell it on me, my father’s violence. They could sense I was something of a beaten dog. And so, they hounded me, hunted me down. They literally threw bottles at me. And the sentence itself is enough to take me back there. The watery glint as it leaves the hand, the hollow whirring as it clears my head, the anticipatory instant, and—beyond all anticipation—the startling explosion, the invisible splinters on the pavement. All as a form of idle entertainment. Whiling away an entire day, like wild animals playing with their dinner. Which scrambled to elude them, darting through yards and parks and driveways, alert as a squirrel, flattening myself against the muddy ground, hiding in the spiny bushes, darting from tree to gummy tree.
A jungle life in the blue-collar suburbs.
By some strange coincidence, all of these boys were a year older than me. Which may have had something to do with the isolation I felt among them.
Now, as I write this, the coincidence comes clear. We had just moved from the Bronx, where I had received first communion in first grade, to Queens, where the children of the faithful were made to wait another year. So when we moved, I skipped a grade, not academically, but ecclesiastically. I was a second grader in public school, a third grader in Released Time (some public school kids left class early once a week, to receive religious instruction at the local Catholic school). And I can still see the double line behind me, snaking down the crooked streets, as we walked the same route each Wednesday afternoon, from P.S. 33 to Our Lady of Lourdes.
It’s odd how signals reach you when you’re too young to receive them. But somehow they do. Somehow I knew, even though I had skipped a grade, that being in Released Time was a snub, a demotion. We were inescapably beneath the students whose seats we were sitting in. The seats were theirs, so were the desks. And the students themselves were free for the afternoon, free of the classroom, free of the nuns. As we were not. We were the chore the nuns took on, with an almost palpable disdain. We were religious riffraff, the spirited lower classes, we were the white nun’s burden.
And at the end of this sentence, I hear my father shouting into the phone. This was not unusual. My father’s normal speaking voice was a shout. The same could be said of many of my uncles and cousins and aunts. So the volume was not remarkable. Neither was the fury with which he spoke (my father was not an easy man). It was the object upon whom that fury was unleashed. My father, I realized, somewhere in the middle of the conversation, my father was cursing out a priest.
The story was later told and retold, so it’s unclear to me now what was clear to me then. But I do remember the shock of it, the dizzying anarchy, the clash of absolutes. There was the unquestioned authority of my father, and then there was the unquestioned authority of the Church. And one of the two was now being challenged, overruled.
Don’t tell me, my father was saying, don’t you tell me. You think I don’t see things, you think I don’t know. You think I’m a fucking asshole? I know, believe me, I know. That’s right, that’s right. I know my kids would be sitting in that goddamn school right now, if my name didn’t end in a vowel!
There it was, the mysterious impetus, the bewildering cause for this effect. Again, it’s difficult to sort out what I was able to make of this. There was my father’s name, which was my name, too. There was the priest. And there was the gap between the two, between the priest and my father. The priest had done something unforgivable, even though he was the one who forgave us, forgiving all our sins.
Apparently, my parents had attempted to enroll us in the local Catholic school, in Lourdes, but were told there wasn’t any room. Then, some months later, an Irish family happened to move in, and all their many Irish children were immediately enrolled. The priest, at whom my father was screaming, was also Irish, as were most of the priests in our parish.
If my name didn’t end in a vowel, my father said, and would say, throughout my childhood. It would become the coda to other stories as well. He was often telling the same story about the same thing, or at least the same theme: how someone out there in the suspect world was trying to screw him, how he had been underestimated, and hadn’t or wouldn’t put up with it.
During the War, my father would say, they had me stationed in Tennessee. You know, before we got shipped over. And the sheriffs in this frigging town, they threw me in jail, the bastards. Worst jail I ever seen. They didn’t even have no toilet, just this trough, like horses drink out of, this trough running through the cells. Of course I was bombed. We all were. We knew where we were headed. But that ain’t why they arrested me. You wanna know why? You wanna know why? For dating a white girl.
Unlike me, my father was dark, olive-skinned.
When I was buying a house, he would say, there were people in certain neighborhoods that made it clear. They weren’t gonna sell to someone like me. Someone with a name that ends in a vowel.
I used to go to these dances, he would say, up in Connecticut. And in those days, these dances were restricted. No Jews. And I had this friend, Arnie. Arnie was a Jew, but he had a Roman nose. Now I’m Italian, but I had a Jewish nose. And we’d go to these dances in Connecticut, and they’d stop me at the door. And there’d be Arnie, waving to me, sailing right on through!
This, unlike the others, was always a funny story, my father found it funny. He would laugh, he would sigh, he would rub the top of his bald head with his callused hand, the sound faintly reminiscent of a rake on the lawn.
Your grandma, he would say, your mother’s mother, she says this at my wedding. At. My. Wedding. She says, his voice abruptly fluty, I never expected to have an Anthony in the family. That’s what she says.
My father’s middle name, his confirmation name, was Anthony.
She didn’t expect to have a son-in-law with a name that ends in a vowel.
It seems there was a presumption attached to that vowel, a presumption that still shadows similar names. Apparently, my grandmother, my first-generation Swedish-American grandmother, had imagined that my father and his family were connected to the mob. There is a paradox embedded in that presumption, and in my father’s indignation. The paradox, in this instance, is that they were.
One of my uncles, Uncle Patsy, was a very minor player. He was a bookie and a bartender. He had green tattoos on his hairy arms, he crushed beer cans with one hand (Ballantine, the beer of Yankee fans), he kept Playboys on the end table by his chair. But one of my other uncles, Uncle Babe, was the real thing. He made the Daily News, he did time. My father told me he had taken the rap for some powerful men, and in return was promised, upon his release, half of Jersey. He ran a night club, the name of which escapes me now (all I remember is a matchbook with cocktail glasses in silhouette), he wore a toupee (the only man in our family to do so), he donated a chalice to my grandmother’s church (I remember its surprising weight, its dark velvet bag, the incongruity of its dazzling presence in the ancient tenement). He lived in an orange house with black trim, like a black shirt with a white tie.
When Uncle Babe died, collapsing of a heart attack on his lawn, my father and Uncle Patsy made his last rounds, returning to that same gaudy home and the second wife and second set of kids, with shopping bags stuffed with cash, like characters in a film.
Some years later, one of Uncle Babe’s sons (from his first marriage) would have a very minor role in The Godfather, as an extra in a crowd scene. And I recall now Uncle Patsy’s indignant critique of this film.
Those guys ain’t like that. They’d never shoot anyone.
They’re gentlemen, he said, without irony. They’d hire somebody!
When we lived in the Bronx, Uncle Babe took me to the corner candy store, and spoke a sentence I had never heard before, and would not hear again.
You can have whatever you want.
At the time, I didn’t understand why my father was so incensed by this. Later, when we moved to Queens, Uncle Babe offered him $100 a month, just to put a phone in our house. Which, in the early 1960s, was a considerable sum. It was more than the mortgage payment. My father was working two jobs then, one during the day, one at night for the differential, the latter full time, sorting mail. But he turned the offer down.
This is not to suggest that Uncle Babe was a black sheep, that his presence wasn’t welcome. He was a black sheep, but he was also an unpredictable source of wonder and amusement. My father would tell a story about my uncle in a hardware store, he was buying a garbage can, and asked my father to help carry it to the register.
Get the frig out of here, I says (my father said). What you need me for? Pick the damn thing up yourself!
But the two of them could barely lift it. The garbage can, it turned out, was full of power tools. My uncle was shoplifting. But this was not the point of the story. The point was that when they got to the register, my uncle decided to argue with the cashier. There was a dent in the side of the can, apparently, and he wanted money taken off the bill.
What balls! my father said, laughing. Here I am sweating frigging bullets, and he’s arguing about what, a couple bucks! Pay the man, I says. Just pay the man, Babe!
But he did it, my father said, sighing happily, he did it, he got the money off.
I can see that toupee of his now, I can see each of his brothers taking turns wearing it, the glossy black hat of hair hopping from one bald head to another, each of them sporting the same wry poker-face, the same trim mustache, my aunts doubled over in Grandma Minnie’s congested living room, the chairs backed up against the sofa, knees pressed together as in a subway car, card tables appended to the enameled kitchen table, which had been moved to the living room for the meal, the endless meal, fried eggplant and marinated chicken and fat macaroni and beefy meatballs and hot sausage and sweet peppers and salad with olive oil and olives and escarole and round loaves of spongy bread and vats of sauce, sauce that had been simmering all day, sauce whose warm, red scent permeated the hallways, the bedrooms, the bathroom, even the stairwell, so that on the second floor we could anticipate what was awaiting us on the fourth.
Upstairs, Uncle Louie and Aunt Jean and Uncle Patsy and Aunt Anna and my grandmother and my mother and my father and my sister and my cousins would sit crowded around the several dissimilar tables, now joined as one under the overlapping tablecloths, surrounded by the floral-print sofa, the olive-green armchair with its yellow piping, the little round TV with its stilt legs, and the one wide, narrow-paned window, which looked out on nothing (unless you stuck your head out), nothing but midday sky. And we would eat, the adults drinking red wine by the gallon, followed by coffee with anisette, followed by scotch on the rocks, the older children drinking seltzer flushed pink with wine—we would eat until the sky that filled the narrow panes grew dark and disappeared.
During those inexhaustible dinners in her small apartment, the other adults preoccupied with food and liquor (He can drink you under the table, shoo, I’m telling you, under the table!), it would be my grandmother who caught my vacant gaze. She would squinch up her rubbery face so that the protuberant nose and hooked chin would almost, it seemed to me, meet. She would do this to make me smile, and she would succeed.
It was an act so thoughtful, so endearing—bringing a small boy back from the brink of disappearance—so potent was the gesture itself that to this day when there is a child in the same room, any child, attached to relative, friend, or stranger, I must repeat it, must anchor that child, must give back what was given to me.
* * *
One afternoon, sitting at our long, dark dining room table in Queens, my grandmother berated my father. I have no idea what she said—it was in Italian—but I can still see his face. He hung his huge head, stared at the floor, silenced, cowed.
Which astonished me, that another human being could wield such power over him. I’d never seen anything like it.
Right now, I have my grandmother’s room in my head. The lurid crucifix, shiny tired walls, the line of molding a foot from the ceiling, the spectral dark in midafternoon, black dresses on the doorframe, gaping black shoes beside the bed, the votive candles on the huge bureau, ominous holy pictures with their haloes, the grim photo of my grandfather (who’d died when I was two), the wild shadows on the wall, rising threads of black smoke, quivering, disappearing.
It was a two-bedroom apartment, a fourth-floor walkup in the south Bronx. Before I was born, my parents had lived there with my grandparents, until my mother couldn’t take it anymore.
I never knew that she was the one who had taken the initiative, found an apartment, signed the lease, moving her new family out of her in-laws’ home and into her own, a fifth-floor walkup, a bus ride away. Throughout my childhood, my father was in charge, made every decision, my father ruled our lives, or so it seemed.
He had a sign like a nameplate beside his chair, which read: The Boss.
Right, Chief, my mother would say, you’re the boss.
Back then, I never knew how capable my mother was (she’d gone to Hunter College when it was difficult to get in, but had soon quit to get married). I never knew how she guided my father, sustained him, how she held him in her arms when he cried. At the time, I couldn’t imagine my father crying (I still can’t), I couldn’t imagine him taking anyone’s advice (let alone, the advice of a woman—women, he would say, had one job: to listen, obey, which was a joke, and yet, it wasn’t). All I knew was that she deferred to him, let him—appeared to let him—order her around.
Now I sometimes think of her as pretending to be what she was not, like a character in a film, an actor who believes in the film, fully committed to the part. Of course, as a woman in the late 50s, early 60s, there would have been very few roles available to her, but she didn’t seem to see it that way, as a constraint. There was no hint of resentment, of a dream deferred. For her, this was the dream—she embraced it, cultivated it, turning herself into something superfluous, ancillary, like a sofa or a chair.
And yet, at the same time, she was so clearly the center of my young world. She listened to me, talked to me, read to me. She taught me how to write an essay (a fourth-grade essay about a ham sandwich, which was apparently so evocative, the teacher refused to believe I’d written it). She sang to me during a thunderstorm when I was frightened. She taught me how to make pancakes (I can still see the bubbles forming on the wide disk). She drew cartoons for me, played with me, tickled me, wrestled me on the floor, straddled my chest, pinned my hands above my head.
Years later, in college, I would think of it as one of my first erotic moments, though it’s difficult to say now if this was so, difficult to say if I felt anything like that, pinned beneath my mother on the living room floor. But back then, it was exhilarating, it was fun—all of it, almost everything she did, was vital, reassuring, indispensable.
And yet, my mother presented herself as anything but indispensable. She presented herself as a servant, whose job it was to cater to my father, tend to him, anticipate his needs. She was incapable of opposing him, no matter what he did. She was afraid of him, certainly, but it was more than that. She lacked the authority to oppose him, object in any meaningful way.
This was the great paradox of my childhood: my mother couldn’t stop my father’s violence. And yet, her presence, her love, was the only reason I survived it, kept my sanity, to whatever extent I did.
I didn’t see this at the time. I didn’t see it for many years.
* * *
Now, of course, it would be seen as a form of child abuse. Now social services might intervene, might take the child (me) away from him. But this wasn’t how it was then. Back then, beating a child was a sign of good parenting. You beat your child because you cared about your child, cared enough to beat him.
There was a paddle that was sold at the time, in the shape of a small oar, yellowish wood, red inscription, Spare the rod, spoil the child. The paddle was designed to be hung on a wall, and it was. Parents saw it as a kind of declaration: of love. In this house, that paddle said, we love our children so much, we aren’t afraid to hit them.
Corporal punishment was the norm, even in school—a nun slapping a friend of mine, his head snapping back, like a boxer taking a punch. A lay teacher slamming another friend’s head into the blackboard, and the next day: his first epileptic seizure. Later, in public school, a heavy set of keys being hurled at a boy’s head. A shy, chubby boy being made to change in the girls’ locker room. The thick, silver grating that covered the walls of the gym, like a cyclone fence, the narrow space between the fence and the wall, just big enough for a radiator, the gym teacher, Mr. Kaye, locking a boy behind that fence, imprisoning him. The gym teacher was laughing, we were all laughing, we were all afraid, we were laughing because it’d happened to someone else.
If any of us complained about this when we got home, we’d get beaten again. We must have done something, our parents believed, to deserve the beating at school. Many of us believed it as well.
When I’d just started high school, a classmate of mine was told to bend over, put his hands on my desk, his face now facing mine. The Dean of Discipline (a brother we called Stinky) smacked his ass with a ruler, hitting him so hard, so relentlessly, the metal edge of the ruler flew off.
I can see that boy now, his nose nearly touching mine, his mouth contorted, face deeply flushed, his wet eyes wild with pain. He hadn’t done his homework. I hadn’t done mine, and I was panicked. I thought I was next. But I hadn’t done my homework once. He hadn’t done his for a week. And it occurs to me now, as I write this, that none of my teachers ever hit me. I almost never got in trouble at school, from the time I was old enough to go, when I was four or five.
Which may be why it seems so odd to me now, that my father was so hell bent on making me obey him. I was already an obedient child, almost obsessively so, obedient as a soldier, quiet as a soldier, the haircut of a soldier, my tie tucked into my shirt like a soldier’s—a blue tie with yellow letters, HSS, Holy Spirit School—I sat straight in my chair like a soldier. I did what I was told. And yet, my father didn’t seem to think so, or didn’t think it was enough.
His presence ruled the small, rickety apartment, the apartment was the world, that fifth-floor walk-up in the south Bronx, the wide kitchen in which we played, long hall with the telephone stand, the living room at the distant end of the hall, small TV in the massive console, the small bedroom jammed tight with beds, four of them, and the narrow aisle, the size of a window ledge, between my mother’s bed and mine.
My father would become furious when I laughed, wouldn’t stop laughing, my sister and me in our beds laughing back and forth, breaking each other up, that formidable presence just on the other side of the wall. I could hear the TV, mumbling.
At the time, I couldn’t understand why he was so insistent about this, so enraged, that we couldn’t stop laughing. Now I think I know why. My father wanted private time with my mother in a room that was anything but private. He wanted as much privacy as he could get. He wanted us to fall asleep.
We wanted to play. I was five. My sister was three.
Are you two gonna stop now? said my father, huge in the doorframe. Are you gonna stop?
One, said my father, two.
My sister giggled.
No, Michelle, I whispered, no!
My father dragged me out of bed, dragging me by the ear. My ear ripped off but it was still on, ripping. My mother’s face was breaking, running red. My mother was screaming crying. My sister was screaming crying. I could hear my father’s belt coming off, clapping through the loops.
No! my mother shouted. No, Joe, what are you doing?
(My father was Joe, I was Joseph.)
You wanna know what I’m doing? You wanna know? I’ll show you what I’m doing.
The thick belt stung hot like boiling water.
I was lying half in, half out of my pajamas, swimming across the carpet, trying to get away.
* * *
Sometimes my father beat me even when I wasn’t supposed to be asleep, even when I was simply playing in the kitchen or lying beside the floor fan or watching television. He beat me just to beat me, or so it seemed. Sometimes, though, the beatings were present even when they weren’t. Sometimes they consumed me. I couldn’t have articulated it at time, but sometimes I lived in such fear of them that even when I was not being beaten, I existed on two simultaneous planes. There was whatever was going on around me, and then there was also the threat of being beaten, an alternate reality in the form of a threat. It sat beside me wherever I went. It hovered around my head like weather. It stuck to me like a scent. It focused me on what wasn’t there, that storm looming just above my head. I saw the lightening before it struck, before it was even a whisper in the wind. I saw it everywhere.
So there were the bruises, the rug burns, the throbbing ache, there was the crack of the belt, and then there was the agony of the possibility. Sometimes there was. Sometimes this was what consumed me—that I could be set upon at almost any instant, for no apparent reason. For the beatings were often unconnected to any recognizable behavior on my part, which also meant there was no way to stop them. No alteration in my actions would have mattered. There was no logic, no recognizable order to which I could submit. I couldn’t even obey.
But while it was actually happening, there was terror of a different kind. I wouldn’t have been able to describe this back then, but I remember it. I remember that everything seemed to stop. Everything seemed strangely distinct, definite, freakishly vivid and raw and real, the nappy pile of the carpet, the bevel of the baseboard, the distant dome of the hall light, my father’s shiny black shoes moving toward me, the terrific heat and sting of the belt.
This was my first lesson in living in the moment, a lesson I didn’t even know I was learning, the terrible, primitive power of living in the now, being forced into the now. Time slows, swells, swallows you whole. You enter it. You become it. It tattoos itself to you, like a soldier under fire in a war. Which is electrifying, even as it’s unbearable, even as it damages you, perhaps because it damages you, it concentrates you, commands your full attention.
A beating focuses you. It strips you down. The mind and the world are one. There is no hidden interiority, no parallel reality. There’s none of that anticipatory anxiety. No expectation of some horrible upheaval, no future hazard you have to be mindful of. There’s no other thought in your head, no distraction. There is only this, the moment you are in. The moment is more real than reality. You are more fully alive, more fully present than ever.
For the worst is now.
Decades later, when I was a teacher at a college, teaching in a prison in Queens (through an outreach program), one of my students was a man who had robbed an extraordinary number of banks, and he was surprisingly frank about what it had been like, to roll the ski mask down, pull his gun out, rush through the wide, glass doors into the unknown.
You never knew, said Louis, if some guy was gonna do you. Or make you do him. You never knew if you were gonna come back out in a bag.
The routine was to rob a car the day before, the car they’d drive to the bank, which they’d later drive to a second stolen car, which they’d then take to the airport. At the airport, they would split up. His partner might fly to Houston, and he might fly to San Francisco. The day he flew to San Francisco, Louis thought he’d been followed, thought he saw someone watching him in the lobby of the hotel. He spent the entire night between the sofa and the wall, his gun leveled at the door, his mind furiously awake, heart hammering, eyes dilated in the dark.
I remember thinking at the time that this was why Louis had done it, why he’d robbed so many banks. It wasn’t the money, or not simply the money. It was the state it put him in, that delirious state of alert, that rush, that focus. It was this he could not give up, this that had propelled him back into another bank, had made him draw his gun, risk his life. That feverish taste of necessity, that violent taste of fate, to be driven entirely into where you are—to be convinced of this, to know there is nothing else, nothing in all the world, nothing in all of time.
Except this.
* * *
And yet, at the same time, the beatings were so ordinary, so much a part of our life, one Easter, my mother and I decided to turn it all into a joke. On the TV’s dark console in the Bronx, there was an outsized, white, artificially frosted egg, with an opening at one end, and through that opening: another world, a diorama. I can’t remember now what it depicted. All I recall is that the egg that housed it was considered something of a family treasure.
One day, just before my father came home from work, my mother and I decided to play a little trick on him. There was an array of Easter cards, like Christmas cards, displayed on the TV, and I hid the egg behind one of the larger cards. I can see my mother now in her apron, hazel eyes, pokey nose, hair permed into curls, my father in his angled fedora, wide ears, long nose, trim moustache, reminiscent of Clark Gable. As soon as he came through the door, my mother assumed her most put-upon tone.
Do you know what your son has done? she said. She told him I had broken the egg.
My father’s exhausted face came alive with purpose. He didn’t even take off his coat. Slowly, deliberately, he marched into the living room, his belt coming off, his heavy step on the parquet, his enormous bulk bearing down on me like a truck. I was standing near the TV, waiting until the last delicious, excruciating second—then I removed the card.
I didn’t do it, I said, shivering with fear and excitement. See, I didn’t do it, I didn’t!
There was a moment when it seemed my father couldn’t absorb this, couldn’t stop himself, couldn’t pull back from the beating.
Then: laughter, raw, intoxicated laughter, his, mine, my mother’s, that lovely sense of release, that giddiness. We were laughing at how close we’d all come. It was as if we’d been standing there in the middle of the road, and a car had just veered so very near—but just sped past, just missed.
* * *
Sometimes my father smacked me, whipped me with a belt, took me by the hair or the wrist, dragged me the length of the hall, my arms giving way, chin bouncing off the carpet, the ache exploding in my ribs, hip, the throbbing where the hair had been pulled, the tumid wrist, the burning knee.
And yet, strangely—though it wasn’t strange then—I loved him, loved him as only a child can love his father, blindly, desperately, absolutely. It’s likely he loved me as well. He carried me on his shoulders in the hall, running wild and fast, like an amusement park ride. He played ball with me in the park, took me to Giant games at Yankee Stadium. He was proud of me, proud enough to tell stories about me.
Taylor, with whom my father sorted mail, was a large black man with a warm, fleshy face. My father and I sat with him and several other large black men in the bleachers at football games, one of which was the 1958 championship between the Giants and the Colts. All I remember is tearing up sheets of newspaper, so that my father and his friends could throw it, the confetti raining down like dry, dirty snow. Apparently, it was bitterly cold in the stands that day, and one of the men, with my father’s permission, offered me a shot from his flask.
You should’ve seen this kid, said Taylor (said my father). He just tips his head back, he don’t even blink!
I was six years old.
Which is to say, these things coexisted: the beatings and the love. Not that this softened the violence in any way. The love only made the beatings all the more confusing, all the more personal.
When I was a little older, one of the first books to hit me hard was The Call of the Wild. I can still sense those pages coming alive, all these many years later, the man, Thornton, cursing his dog, Buck—fervently, softly, lovingly. I can still see myself sobbing as I read this, shattered, knocked flat, a mess.
I don’t think I ever told anyone, I don’t think I ever said it until this very sentence, but I saw myself in Buck. I saw in Thornton’s love for his dog my father’s love for me. I believed this, wanted to believe it: that the rage, the cruelty, the violence was really love.
Part of me still wants to believe it.
For many years, Joseph Cuomo was the Director of Queens College Evening Readings (www.qcreadings.org), a literary reading series he started in 1976. He has also debated Jerry Falwell on CNN, interviewed China’s most prominent dissident before the massacre in Tiananmen, and produced an award-winning public radio documentary on American Fundamentalism, broadcast in the U.S., Canada, and Australia. His work has appeared in The New Yorker Online, The Wall Street Journal, and Don’t Tell Mama: The Penguin Book of Italian American Writing. Solstice has just published “Diane” (www.solsticelitmag.org/content/diane/), and Qu is about to publish “Fifteen,” both of which are excerpts from his first book, a memoir, which he has just completed. “dog” is an excerpt from that same memoir. www.josephacuomo.com
