Pilot was a fagot

“Because he was a fagot!”
Maybe Grandma had a point. We somehow got onto a Jesus discussion at the Christmas table and Angie asked why they killed Jesus. They.
“You know, he suffered under the Pontius Pilot.” I was quoting verse.
Then Grandma answered, “because he was a fagot!” I assume she meant Pilot but who knows, she voiced her opinion and concern. That was enough. No one challenged the point.
The boy was in the adjacent room slamming a talking car into the wall. It blurted out an indiscernible blabber rhythmically with each collision. This was amusing to the boy. The designer got it right – SLAM (slight pause) CRACKLE BABBLE. Slam Crackle Babble is the language of boys. I started laughing, they thought I was laughing at the ‘fagot’ blurt. They.
Grannie was bored and that was that. “I hate this town.”
That’s more like it, I thought. I watched her, nodding my head in agreement.
“You never see anyone on the streets. Just watch out there during the day, you’ll see. Nothin’”
“Oh, you miss the shootings and robberies on the streets then,” Dad (her son) says.
“I don’t care, it was alive. This place, pardon my French, sucks.”
She was expressing and speaking to me specifically because we were engaged in conversation and I was asking. It was her experience and she felt good expressing it.
“She’s got early onset Alzheimer’s,” Laura whispers as if in explanation of the digression.
“We gotta get you outta here or buy you a gun or something.” That’s seems to be my standard answer – get a gun. No one ever laughs but I still say it.
“Pilot was a fagot,” I tell my brother while he watches the kids play. He ignores me.

So this is Christmas. Lennon, that brilliant bastard, maybe even that particular line, set up the tone for my entire generation. Then some damn fool shot him in the back. Some other stuff happened then Cobain blew his own face off with a shotgun. That brings us to now. I could be shallow. I know it’s a response to the plastic materials from Singapore invading my hypereality scattered about the hardwood fields of play. I decided to drink wine and be merry even though the stress of being the least wealthy in the room was piercing my frontal lobe. They ask questions about my well being wearing sad expressions – eyes averting to the floor. No way to win it. Grandma had something to express so I thought we should talk:

“What year were you born Me-Ma?”
“Huh?”
“What year were you born?”
“Nineteen Twenty Five.”
Jesus H Christ. “Wow, that makes you eighty two.”
“I don’t know Danny, I stopped counting years ago.”
“And you were born here?” (In the U.S., she’s pureblood Italian)
“My Brother was two when we came here.”
“And he’s older than you?”
“He’s the oldest and I’m the youngest. But Danny, you should have met my mother, she was a pip. She didn’t take nothin’ from no one. This one time my father brought back a broom and the handle broke and she went right back to the hardware store and demanded a new one. She couldn’t speak a lick of English but she knew she was gonna get a new one. You know what happened Danny? That man wouldn’t give her one so she took the broken handle and smashed the rest of them. Broke all the other handles on the brooms. She was no dummy,” Grandma says, laughing into an emphysema coughing fit.
“Sounds like my kind of girl.”
“Oh Danny, you would have loved her. She - was - a - pip. Imagine her telling this to a judge and remember she didn’t speak much English at all.”
“And your parents spoke English?”
“No. They spoke to us in Italian growing up. Everything was in Italian.”
“So you understand Italian?”
I spoke some Italian words but she didn’t recognize them. I had an awful accent and she was used to dialect no doubt. “And where did you learn English?”
“What do you mean? I learned it here.” She meant Newark. She was born, raised, married, divorced, lived in Newark New Jersey her entire life. Went to Vegas twice and that was it. The rest of her days were in Newark.
“Grandma, we gotta talk more.”
“You like this stuff Danny. Every time you’re here you want to hear about this stuff.” Which isn’t exactly true but I wish I asked more fervently and earlier.
It was time to unwrap gifts so we attended to it. I knew I’d be back and soon. Grandma needed me and I needed her, had to figure out the reason for all my hair and buffoonish charisma and she had to escape the boredom of the new house and the madness that ensues.

Plus it was Christmas, however stupid, and a long line of bold and brave people brought it to me and me to it. And the kids were learning in rapid succession. I reached for more wine.