'74 & Sunny Read Online Free PDF

unknown to me, our family’s upstairs telephone line was not in my parents’ master bedroom. Instead, the big, white rotary machine sat on a tiny glass-topped, wrought-iron stand right outside my bedroom, down the hall from my parents’ door. This unfortunate placement gave me horrifying access to the sudden and sometimes gory details of the deaths of almost all my aunts, uncles, cousins, and some really close acquaintances. By the time I was four years old, I had already lost both sets of grandparents. By the time I was twelve, I had grown accustomed to the phone ringing at ungodly hours, hearing my mother trying to slip on her Dearfoam slippers as she raced down the hall and stopped at my door to receive what was undoubtedly a death call. Maybe there are some families out there who wait for the breakfast hour, at least, before delivering the bad news. My family delivered it as it came, even at two in the morning.
    It usually took my mother five or six rings to even get to the phone, but when she did, I would already be wide-awakeand sitting up in my NFL sheets, staring at the posters of Farrah Fawcett and the Fonz on the opposite wall.
    â€œJosie died! Oh, Al, my sister Josie died,” my mother would yell down the hall. “Ahhh . . . poor thing. She suffered enough. At least she’s out of pain now.”
    Or:
    â€œMillie’s dead? When? How?” And then the details would be relayed to my father right outside my door. “She was throwing up blood for two days. Her lungs were just shot. They had tubes in her throat and in her side trying to clear her chest, but she went tonight. Ah, shit, and now my brother Louie has chest pains and a numb left arm! Jesus Christ, Louie, have them check you out. You’re there now !”
    And:
    â€œYeah, Mae! What’s wrong? Eileen was killed in a car accident? Oh my God! Thirty years old. Somebody ran a light on Sunrise Highway and plowed right into her. She died in Gregory’s arms. Oh, Mae . . . what can we do?”
    Calls like those would prompt my father to wake up the entire family, sober up immediately, and invite the grief-stricken family over for coffee and his famous verdura omelets. It wasn’t unusual for relatives of ours to drive from Brooklyn to our home in West Islip, Long Island, some fifty miles away, and go over the funeral and wake details right at our kitchen table.
    On those days, my father would forbid me to go to school. He wanted me to see the grief and be there to lift the spirits of my cousins whenever I could.
    â€œListen to your father,” he’d say to me, kneeling down. “This is more important than anything you’re gonna learn in school today. You be here for your family.”
    This particular late-night phone call, however, the one that changed my life that summer, made me sit up in bed and pay closer attention, because this time no one had died or was facing a terrible illness. This call had a different tone. My mother passed the phone to my father almost as soon as she picked up. It was dead quiet in the hallway, and that meant I could hear every syllable that was coming out of the receiver, as well as my father’s calming words.
    It was the sobbing voice of my father’s older brother, Larry. Uncle Larry was a doctor who lived in New Jersey and had a very successful medical practice. Through the years, Uncle Larry had been there for us many times when my father’s salary was not enough; he’d graciously send a check along to make sure our monthly nut was covered. He had three daughters, Geneva, Susan, and Robin, and two sons, Larry Jr. and ten-year-old Gino. By the time the summer of 1974 came and went, it was no surprise—but a hell of a shock to my macho uncle Larry—that his oldest son, Larry, was looking forward to leaving home and starting a somewhat mysterious new life in San Francisco.
    Although he was a well-respected doctor, Uncle Larry