301 pages

English

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L Is for Lion , livre ebook

State University of New York Press - Annie Rachele Lanzillotto

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301 pages

English

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A propos
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Extrait

Description

Finalist for the 2014 Lambda Literary Award in the Lesbian Memoir/Biography Category presented by the Lambda Literary Foundation

This vivid memoir speaks the intense truth of a Bronx tomboy whose 1960s girlhood was marked by her father's lullabies laced with his dissociative memories of combat in World War II. At four years old, Annie Rachele Lanzillotto bounced her Spaldeen on the stoop and watched the boys play stickball in the street; inside, she hid silver teaspoons behind the heat pipes to tap calls for help while her father beat her mother. At eighteen, on the edge of ambitious freedom, her studies at Brown University were halted by the growth of a massive tumor inside her chest. Thus began a wild, truth-seeking journey for survival, fueled by the lessons of lasagna vows, and Spaldeen ascensions. From the stoops of the Bronx to cross-dressing on the streets of Egypt, from the cancer ward at Memorial Sloan-Kettering to New York City's gay club scene of the '80s, this poignant and authentic story takes us from underneath the dining room table to the stoop, the sidewalk, the street, and, ultimately, out into the wide world of immigration, gay subculture, cancer treatment, mental illness, gender dynamics, drug addiction, domestic violence, and a vast array of Italian American characters. With a quintessential New Yorker as narrator and guide, this journey crescendos in a reluctant return home to the timeless wisdom of a peasant, immigrant grandmother, Rosa Marsico Petruzzelli, who shows us the sweetest essence of soul.
Prologue: The Blue Suitcase

Part One: Bronx Tomboy

Eat with Guys You Trust
Breakfast Is to Coat the Stomach
The X
Stoop
The Return of the Rust
A Good Eater
The Tin Ceiling
Sidewalk
Licking Batteries
Teaspoons and Heatpipes
Kitchen Bird
Kindergarten, Boot Camp: 1968
Sister Rosaria
Quicksand
Lasagna Vows
Ravioli, Homing Pigeons, and Teletype Machines
Grandpop, the Hook, and the Eyebrow
Made of Rubber
Sister Giuseppina
Sister Ercolina
Playing War
Lead Pipe, Montezuma, Icicle
Hand to Hand
The Return of the Lasagna
Street
How to Catch a Flyball in Oncoming Traffic
The Names of Horses
Rook to Queen Four
Burning Rubber and Penmanship
Trestles and Love
Silence, Violence
The Blue Angel
Bronx County Family Courthouse
Parkchester Poseidon Adventure
The Lady in Black
Fast Break

Part Two: Educationa Girl

The Temporary Apartment
Permanent Wave
Useless Expertise
Hunger Beat Agida
Sistermazione
Walk Softly but Carry a Big Pockabook
Lunch Is to Clean the Blood
Slow, Loud, and Clear
Asthma, Green Money, and the Feast
Brakeman
Outfield Greens
My Mother, the Plaintoff
Aunt Patty’s Bullfight
You’re Just Like Your Father
Junkie Pride
Mary Perry
College Entrance
Strike One
Fontanelle Aurelius
The Miracle Worker of 233rd Street

Part Three: Kimosabe

The Best Place to Have Cancer
Room 621
Shake ‘n Bake
The Fastigium
Dope and Demerol
The Pipeline
Truckstop Paranoia
Chemistry
Amara
Brazil Upside Down
Belly Up
Overheating
Triple Boiling Point
Eat ‘Til You Sweat
The Tumor Board
The Radioactive Man Says, “Don’t Give Up the Ship!”
Thoracotomy
One Mis-sip-pi
Magnetic Lace
Lesbianism, Suicide, or the Nunnery
How to Wake Up a Marine in a Foxhole
Red Death
Interventions
Falling and Flying
Civilian Life Sucks
Deep Bell

Part Four: How to Cook a Heart

Wallid Walla Bint
Equator Crossings
Bronx Italian Butch Freedom
Never Come Out in a Lincoln Continental
A Nightclub Named Devotion “Roma o Morte!”
Vrrooooom!
“Cosa Mangia Oggi!”
My Mother’s Aorta
a’Schapett
Shave My Head
Enter Audrey Lauren Kindred
Rachele’s Pocketbook Fritatta
How to Poke a Guy’s Eyes Out
How to Cook a Heart

Part Five: Annie’s Parts

Mr. Fixit
Six Places to Buy Milk
My Father, Marconi, and Me
Sciamannin’
Horizontal People
Radioactive Feast
Limoncello and the Black Bra
Garlic, the Ave Maria, and the Blue Leg
Cittadinanza
Assassination Focaccia
Spearmint Gum Cure
One Day My Horse Will Come In
Madeleine and the Magic Biscotti
How GrammaRose Became a Peach Tree
Fruttificare
The Lasagna Stands Alone
Three Days from Eternity
Don’t Make ‘Em Burn
Pipe Dreams
The Little Fish and the Big Ocean
Three Hundred Cream Puffs and the Illusion Veil
Lingua Madre
Sì o No?
A Couple of Teaspoons of Coffee and a Couple of Drops of Milk
Becoming GrammaRose Peach Tree

Glossary
Acknowledgments: Exquisite Pleasure
Credits
Author’s Page

Sujets

Gay Studies

Ethnic studies

Memoir

Informations

Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	11 janvier 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438445274
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	6 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1098€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

PRAISE FORL IS FOR LION

“Annie Lanzillotto, the bard of Bronx Italian butch , is an American original, a performance artist and cultural anthropologist whos e work is unique in theme, sound, affect, and effect. This memoir reveals her to be s omething more: an astonishing writer possessed of an utterly inimitable voice, a voice a t once as richly soulful as her mother's lasagna and as bracingly unsentimental as her father's Marine masculinity. Lanzillotto's stories bounce and stretch with the e lasticity of her trusted Spaldeen, keeping us just a step ahead of the flying emotiona l shrapnel of an intensely lived life as we move from the mean streets of 1970s Bronx to the Ivy League, the Memorial Sloan-Kettering cancer ward, the banks of the Nile, and the Italian mezzogiorno. A landmark of ethnic expressivity,L Is for Lionportrays the iconic Italian indelibly American spaces of kitchen, stoop, sidewalk, and st reet; the body as a site of humor and tragedy; and, above all, the family war zone as an uncanny intermingle of poignancy and brutality.”

—John Gennari, author ofBlowin' Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics

“L Is for Lionrown but never leavesis a book about a girl named ‘Daddy’ who goes to B the Bronx. This long-awaited memoir by lesbian stor yteller and performance artist Annie Lanzillotto traverses the distance from Arthu r Avenue to Cairo to Sloan-Kettering and back again in an ethnography of the self and of an era. It's a book made of dismantled padlocks, and of doors, opened and close d; of spoons clanking against radiators in an attempt to speak or scream; of Ivy League classism and World War II racism; of language ‘spoken and broken.’ Equal part s humor, guts, and grief, it's a disarming story of all that a person—body, mind, an d soul—can undergo without going under, in which ‘Bronxite’ is a new kind of rock.”

—Mary Cappello, author ofAwkward: A DetourandCalled Back

SUNY SERIES IN ITALIAN/AMERICAN CULTURE

FRED L. GARDAPHE, EDITOR

Me at the town limits of Acquaviva delle Fonti, Bar i, Italia. I was jogging with my cousin Tonino out into the fields. Photo: Antonio Lepenne, 1986.

Illustrations by Rose Imperato

Published by

STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, ALBANY

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

Excelsior Editions is an imprint of State University of New York Press

For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY

www.sunypress.edu

Production and book design, Laurie Searl

Marketing, Fran Keneston

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Lanzillotto, Annie Rachele. L is for lion : an Italian Bronx butch freedom memoir / Annie Rachele Lanzillotto. p. cm. — (SUNY series in Italian/American culture) “Excelsior Editions.” ISBN 978-1-4384-4525-0 (hbk. : alk. paper) 1. Lanzillotto, Annie Rachele. 2. Italian American lesbians—New York (State)—New York—Biography. 3. Italian Americans—New York (State)—New York—Biography. 4. Bronx (New York, N.Y.)—Biography. I. Title.

HQ75.4.L36A3 2013 306.76'63092—dc23 [B]

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

2012009553

for my Mother, my best friend

No matter where you go, you have to suffer aggravation, and you have to suffer joy. —Granma Rosa Marsico Petruzzelli

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse. —Epictetus

All things fade into the storied past. —Marcus Aurelius

prologue

The Blue Suitcase

S eptember 16, 1962, domestic violence cases in New Y ork State were transferred from Criminal Court to the newly established New Yo rk State Family Court. Assault of a stranger outside your front door was punishable to the full extent of criminal law, while assault of a family member inside the front door wa s not. Marriage became a license for abuse. Two weeks later, I was conceived. I said , “I better go down and protect that woman, the courts ain't gonna do shit.”

What better way to heal this family than a beautifu l baby girl?

Family Court had no muscle. Victims were referred t o civilian agencies for help. My mother's case was referred to the Salvation Army an d then switched to Catholic Charities. Family Court did not have the power of t he State of New York behind the plaintiff. This is the stage on which I was born, o n Saint Raymonds Avenue in the Bronx.

Our street was named after Saint Raymond Nonnatus, or, the not-born; Raymond was taken from his mother's uterus postmortem. As an ad ult, he bartered for the freedom of slaves by trading himself into captivity, where he exuberantly preached. To stop his inspirational speaking, his lips were pierced and l ocked with a padlock. As an offering for Saint Raymond's intercession, supplicants leave padlocks on altars. My father, perhaps knowingly, did one better. The last decade of his life, while in a residential mental home, he dismantled padlocks that he found w hen he scavenged the neighborhood trash. It's not an easy task. Padlocks are built of two dozen intricately cut steel plates fashioned together by pins and a yoke. After my father was done with them, the last thing these wildly cut steel plates and pins resembled was a padlock.

My parents were married in 1947, after my father re turned home from World War II. Anticipating the trips they would take, my mother b ought a royal blue leather suitcase at Gimbels. It had hard walls and thick brass hinges t hat popped open with a catch. The blue suitcase stayed under her bed for fifty years, twenty-five with my father, and twenty-five after she escaped the brutal reality th at had becomela vita quotidiana, their daily life. With the blue suitcase, she ran for her life. She slid it under her bed, full of her keepsakes; my name bracelet from birth, all her chi ldren's oversize kindergarten diplomas, newspapers from the first lunar landing a nd of Joe DiMaggio's career milestones, old coins. Every few years she would op en the suitcase to find a birth certificate or to look among her keepsakes, and hav e a coughing fit from the aged newspapers. This is close to the process of writing this memoir, for me.

My mother, who read me books every night, taught me , “Books open and close and the things inside them stay inside them.” At two years old, I had no idea what she was talking about. I scratched and grabbed at the pages of my storybooks, convinced that I could pull the characters off and make them real. I was confused and upset when they didn't jump off the pages to play with me. Half a c entury later, I still grab at characters, only now, from inside my brain, and I transfer them onto blank white spaces where they

can be real again and find you, beautiful Reader.

This book, for me, is one gorgeous rearrangement of all that otherwise would be locked. This memoir, like any other, is about how w hat we refuse to remember carves us into who we are. I place this book, unlocked and open, spoken and broken, into your hands.

Some names have been changed to protect the living.

Annie Rachele Lanzillotto Yonkers, New York, 2011

part one

Bronx Tomboy