I Am a Beautiful Boy

Rosie and Lou's Valentine, I am a beautiful baby boy. I say am because I still have that innocent wide-eyed boy alive within me in spirit. Whatever else my father might have felt about his baby boy, there was no denying he and Rosie had produced one beautiful boy. I beheld beauty as a baby staring up at the eyes of my gorgeous mother. Her dark brown Italian eyes like chocolate, her ebony hair so soft. Those were the eyes I first gazed into as I drank her milk, and that was the hair my tiny fingers curled around and hers were the mother smells I inhaled. Her loving voice first awakened my ears. So in those first few years of my life, my mother gave birth again, to my love of all things beautiful and soft and sensuous. Perhaps my bisexuality began then.

I was the love of my grandmother, Mama Nina. I was her Valentino, the beautiful boy of her beautiful girl. She died when I was 1. Then Mama had a miscarriage when I was 2. I was too young to know about that. Children know so little about their parents' real lives. We think everything begins and ends with us. When Mama was happy, I felt I caused her happiness. So, over the next few years, my gorgeous, vivacious mother began to disappear little by little. It was as if one morning I awoke and she was gone. In her place was someone with sadness in her eyes, someone who I would catch crying when no one was looking. Her face no longer lit up when I pranced into the room. No drawings or songs or hugs could bring her back from the sadness where she'd gone. Without realizing it, I blamed myself. The birth of my first brother when I was 4 seemed to interrupt her descent into--here's a harsh word--ugliness, but I know now it was only an interruption. By the time my second brother was born and I was 7, her beauty was lost to me.
I made it my mission to bring it back. I became the houseboy. You see, she worked. Italian grocery store owners who lived behind their stores lived more in their stores than their houses. So "the house" was only the place they slept and spent their Sundays. Every other waking hour was spent in The Store. If there is an early villain in my childhood, it is that store. I tried to burn it down when I was 10, and my fourth brother had been born. By the age of 10, my own descent into ugliness had been complete. The beautiful boy was thin.  My thinness was an issue in an Italian family.  The story goes they brought me to doctors.  "Why won't he eat?"  The doctors prescribed vitamins and cod liver oil.  Truth was, I ate, but odd things.  Like plaster from the walls of the house behind The Store.  And Colgate toothpaste on Honey Graham crackers.  Yummy!  I required suspenders to keep my pants up!  So what happened to the thin beautiful boy?  I describe it as the program kicking in--the "eat" program.  One day, I awoke and became aware that I was overweight; no longer a beautiful boy. I no longer pranced and sang and drew. I hardly spoke. What had become of the beautiful boy's beautiful mother?  Enter the fat boy.
Where's Daddy? I rack my brain for memories of him at an early age. I have a few. They bought me a Birmingham Barons toddler-sized uniform at the age of 4 and brought me to Kiddieland. Kiddieland opened the year I was born, and my parents aspired for me to be the King of Kiddleland. 

Everyone was so charmed by the beautiful boy in the baseball uniform that I got to ride everything I wanted for free! Daddy was proud of that and told that story over and over. Yes, he wanted me to be a ball player. At 6 he gave me a catcher's mitt and drove me out to some hellhole called a ball field. I had absolutely no interest in the mitt and was terrified that the pitcher's balls were going to strike me. The bat felt so awkward in my hand I struck out during the trials. And my pitching--well, there's not a word to describe that. I think that was the end of Daddy's pride in his Valentine. And he started spending baseball time with my two younger brothers, who did indeed go nuts for America's pastime.

Gee, Dad. Could you have ever guessed I'd end up yearning to be a catcher for some big-dicked pitcher whose bat I swing while polishing his balls with my tongue?

I wasn't Dadless.  He was a large manly presence in our lives, volatile, explosive, prone to beating us and, as it turned out, hitting my mother.  My brothers do not have these memories or perhaps more likely, they choose not to remember them.  But I remember Mama.  She loved that Irene Dunne movie, and I Remember Mama was one of the first books I read.  She loved Miracle on 34th Street--from the book by Valentine Davies.  She taught me a man could be a Valentine.  My Dad taught me a man could be a prick.  Children have no idea what yearnings and disappointments of adults are until they grow to have their own.  I saw only the man who berated her, ignored her, forgot to buy her presents for her birthday.  I remember one Christmas and Mama crying because Daddy hadn't gotten her anything.  He went into the store and pulled down an electric can opener customers could exchange Gold Dollar coupons for and gave it to her.  I thought that was worse than no gift at all.  After that Christmas, I began asking for money for chores so I could save up to buy her presents.  And so I did.  I never forgot a holiday with her.

Impressionist painters learn to create their pictures with dots of colors placed so closely together they don't resemble their original color but something else.  You cannot isolate the single color and say that's the painting.  It's the juxtaposition of the spots of color that make up that painting.  So it is with a life, at least my life.
So here's a splash of color for Daddy, in case he appears to dark to my readers.  He loved to read to me and tell me stories.  My brothers and I would pile into his bed on Sunday morning and bring him the comics.  He'd read the ones we liked (and some we didn't) and do every voice different.  We loved those Sunday mornings in bed with Daddy.  It was all innocent.  Except he liked to tease me by trapping me underneath the blankets.  I suppose his hostility towards me came out even then.  Maybe that's the wrong splash of color.

Story time.  Question time.  Question time about the story.  That's how supper in our house began.  When it was me and my next oldest brother, I would always start and end the round.  When there were three of us, we'd rotate.  Story time was my favorite time.  He'd tell the famous fairy tales and stories from the novels he'd read and loved.  We heard about Jean Valjean and Sydney Carton, David Copperfield.  He narrated the dog fight from Call of the Wild fiercely.  From him, I learned to read with animation.  So, Dick, Jane, Sally, Puff, and Spot came alive when I had to read out loud in the second grade.  (Years later, when Dad asked why I became an English lit grad student, he seemed puzzled when I said he had inspired me with these stories.)

But the stories I loved most were the ones he completely made up: Tales of the Blue Goose.  The story revolved around the exploits of a witch chasing a magical goose who had to turn colors to evade her.  The goose befriends a lonely boy who protects and hides him from the mean witch.  They were my favorites.  Question time and question time about the story obviously prepared me and my brothers in other ways as well, as we each did well in school.  Good going, Daddy.

The other credit I will give my father is my love of films came from him.  I'll share one vivid memory--my first drive-in movie experience.  He closed The Store early and announced we were going to the Fair Park Drive-In.  So we all piled into our new two-tone Buick and arrived right at dusk.  My brother and I were taken to the park area in front of this gigantic screen. The park was lit by the screen.  We thought we had died and gone to kid heaven. There was swing, a sand box, and a jungle jim.  We were having great fun in the sand box when all of a sudden the lights around the giant screen went off.  My eyes went to the screen. 

Magic happens in odd places.  The lights go down.  The speakers start to sputter.  And up on that giant screen, golden dots begin to bounce around, sort of the like the image on the T.V. when there was no picture, but golden dancing dots.  Then images burst onto the screen advertising movies in cinemascope.  And finally, the feature film.  As my destiny would have it, my first drive-in movie, big screen, magic in the dark movie was The Wizard of Oz.  I was transfixed and transformed.  There was no a dream world where I could escape.  I had only to close my eyes and I would be there in the magical world of the movies.  So each night, as I lay down to sleep and prayed the lord my soul would keep if I should die before I waked, I would drift into my dream pattern--that anticipatory moment when the lights go down, just before the film begins, when the projector is beginning to whirl, and anything is possible.

A Little Prince Is Born

Birth stories often begin with strange events. Tristram Shandy's mom asks his dad, as he about to squirt and make Tristram, if he remembered to wind the clock, and the juxtaposition of the two mundane acts somehow accounts for his rambling narrative of a life. I've no such excuse as I have no idea what my parents were doing when I was conceived other than fucking, and they loved to fuck. My beautiful mother was in labor with her first child--destined to be named Valentine--be child male or female--at the same time Queen Elizabeth was giving birth to Prince Charles. When the nurse presented Rosie with her first born son, she said, "Here's your beautiful little prince."

"His name is Valentine," my mother said, so the nurse added: "Then here's your Prince Valiant."

Even the nurse had not heard of a boy named Valentine. Years later, my father told me the story about the battle over my name. I asked how come he picked that name for me. "I wanted to call you Frank, after my father, but Mama Nina was sick and she so wanted a Valentino. We made it American, Valentine. But the nurse called you Prince Valiant, like the comic strip, and that's what I called you for a few years."


Right, Dad, I thought. Just before you stopped calling me anything at all. So the seeds of disappointing my dad and pleasing my mom were planted at my birth with my name. Ironically, he loved to read the Sunday comics to me. And Prince Val, though not my favorite, was always beautifully illustrated.

The Irish priest from St. Mark's, Father O'Reilly, sealed the deal on my name when he visited. "A fine Italian saint," he proclaimed. At least my dad told me the story of Valentine. (In those days, he told me lots of stories). Later, I researched Valentine myself and wrote "The Legend of St. Valentine" for my eight-grade religious education class. Legends don't have to be real, so I embellished. I wrote that Valentine was a Catholic priest in a rural Italian city where pagan beliefs battled the ways of the newly formed Catholic church. One of the traditions was an annual rape day---lusty boys got to grab a girl and have their way with her as a way of forcing a marriage. Valentine tried to teach the young and lusty that love was a better way of winning a girl, and he developed quite a following among young people married many of them. An emperor in Rome needed soldiers for the many wars emperors loved to fight, and he banned marriages. Valentine continued to marry the young lovers, and for this, he was thrown into jail. Here's where my legend introduces a true flight of fancy. Valentine basically disappeared from the town, so no one knew where their beloved priest had gone. Many thought he had just forgotten them. But, imprisoned in his cell, Valentine managed to write little notes in blood on the petals of pansies that he found. He wrote: "Remember your Valentine." And: "Forget me not. " (Sappy, yes, but it helps explain all those candy heart sayings.) Birds took the petals and dropped them over the village. The townspeople knew that Valentine lived and loved them, and vowed he would not be forgotten. The day they received their pansy petals became Valentine's Day

Ironically, I'm no Valentine. From my two-story, artificial-stucco, unsellable highly mortgaged prison, were I to distribute petals via birds, they would not be pansy petals. They are too stereotypically "gay" ; they would not say "Remember your Valentine." When I am released from this prison, I want all who once knew me to remember not your Valentine. He was a pervert who ultimately betrayed all who loved him. But my story will be told: he abandoned his family so he could get fucked in the ass.

My Name Is Valentine

My Name Is Valentine. Who would make up a name like that?


I'm a 60-year-old divorced bi guy living in the deep south. My life is miserable, and I've made a mess of it, so why am I writing at all? First, I intend at some point to end this misery. One way or another, I have to find relief and release from the prison I now occupy. My prison is my divorce house, 3500 square feet of unsellable, two-story, artificial stucco, estate-sized lot sitting in the middle of hell, I mean the suburbs. Let me start with my name, because maybe my misery begins there. Who would name their son Valentine?

My parents were Rosa and Luigi, the daughter and son of Italian immigrants. My father wanted to name me Frank, and my life would have taken a whole different course had he prevailed. But my mother wanted to name me Valentine, to honor her dying mother, Antonina. Antonina came to the U.S. from a small Sicilian village where there were few options for girls to dream, and her dream came from the movie star Valentino. She married my grandfather Gaspare (Jasper), who was no Valentino, in her teens, and she managed to produce a child every other year of their marriage. My mother was the 8th and the second daughter. And she was beautiful and full of life. She would tell her daughter Rosa about Valentino and the movies she had seen in her poor village. And her Rosa grew up beautiful and full of life. My mother defied her father's strict Italian rules. She told me once about the time when she was 16 and a soldier boy wanted to take her to the St. Mark's feast, her father said no. Her six older brother's said no. Her older sister Ida said she needed Rosa to work in the kitchen with her. But my mother held her ground: "I'm gonna walk around that feast with my solider boy and you can't stop me." That was my mom in her youth: beautiful, filled with spirit, independent, brave. Later I would wonder where that woman disappeared to.

My father was a soldier boy, although not the soldier boy my mom walked defiantly with at the St. Joseph's feast. In the hierarchy of Italian families in our city, my father was in the elite merchant class. My mom was in the poor peddler class. But they were gorgeous jitterbuggers. When I was small I would ask them how they met. They'd each tell the same story. He was standing in line for confession at St. Mark's, the Italian-built Catholic church all the Italianos attended. He was wearing his uniform. She was sitting next to her girlfriend Frances, who was dating a Lebanese merchant. And by merchant I mean grocery store owner in a black neighborhood. Italians in the deep south city where I grew up and live today were allowed to open stores in black neighborhoods. In fact, we lived behind our store. But I digress, a habit I have. Back to the story--Rosa, now known to her friends and siblings as Rosie, took one look at the move-star handsome soldier and told her friend, "I'm going to marry that boy.  He looks like Rudolf Valentino." Luigi, now known as Lou to his siblings and friends, saw her looking and turned to his friend Rocco and said, "Who is that gorgeous girl. I've got to meet her."

So I was blessed with beautiful parents who looked like the Italian movie stars of the 50's. I have no doubt there was great love there and great lust, and I was privileged to be born to them.

But that name, Valentine, doomed me. Yes, I had a great love too, Maria, and another great love, cock. And my love of one cost me the other, my family, my self-respect, and earned me my place in this prison.