Can't We All Just Get Along?

One of the great mysteries of life is how we can surround ourselves with the right people…or not… and how we can isolate ourselves from possibly enriching relationships, all based on first impressions and misconceptions. And then we can mature to the point where we can analyze our behavior and change our opinions.

I grew up in an all-white neighborhood. Back then I called my family middle-class when the reality is we were pretty darn poor. I just didn’t know it. I also told everybody I was Italian, though I’m only half; my mother was of German, English and Irish heritage. Why her ethnic history was invisible, I don’t know. I grew up identifying exclusively with my father’s heritage.

There were a couple of other Italian families on our block, but only one of those families had a kid my age. He was Fiore (properly pronounced, it's F'YOH-ray' (roll the 'R' lightly), though we usually pronounced it 'Fyor') Santaniello. Both his parents were Italian immigrants, so for the full-blooded Italian I believed myself to be, he truly was. And maybe that was the wedge. I don’t know.

You would think that our shared heritage, no matter how pure one’s or the other’s might be, would be a binding glue, but it was far from it. You see, Fiore and I never really got along. Sometimes we could play together, but I think we were both too wrapped up in trying to make things go our own individual ways. There’s my childhood creative impulses I mentioned in an earlier post. Maybe he had the same impulses, something I rejected or resisted. He also seemed more imaginative than I, able to conjure better jargon from military or police or space genres than I could in our play together, which gave him a more worldly air and, hence, my impression of his superior intelligence or, perhaps more accurately, my impression of him trying to appear superior.

Whatever the reason, we could go from the highest heights of camaraderie to the deepest depths of adversarial animosity, sometimes within minutes. From grades K through 6, Fiore was the only kid I ever actually fought with. There were other conflicts, with bullies for instance, and a shoving match once with Robert Buckner. But Fiore was the only kid with whom I ever traded fisticuffs, throwing punches, really trying to hurt each other. The funniest part about it is in the probably three years of animosity and violent encounters, in all the punches we threw at each other, neither of us ever landed one! There was bloodshed, though – mine – and depending on your point of view, you might even say it was my fault.

Fiore and I were in the summer either between 4th and 5th grades or between 5th and 6th. I was in Little League baseball that season (for what proved to be my last) and a mid-day practice had just ended on the field at our school’s playground. As the other kids from my team filtered away in the directions of their various homes, Fiore, who had heckled and taunted me and others all while he watched us practice, hopped on my Schwinn Sting Ray bike and began taunting me, refusing to give me back my bike. He rode in circles around me as I tried to convince him, force him or capture him to give it back, occasionally swinging really close to me, but always darting away before I could reach him.

I don’t remember the words, but they were the perfect words, and I said them. They had the effect I had intended – his anger – but an unintended result: he turned the handlebars and rode straight at me, rage in his eyes. I threw my baseball mitt to the asphalt of the school playground and squared to face him straight on. I wasn’t scared at that moment, but I was at best as angry as he was, and if he was going to try to hurt me by running me down with my own bike, I was sure as hell going to try to hurt him back for his efforts.

And he did come right at me! I grabbed the handlebars and wrenched them to one side. His momentum stopped suddenly, and his balance thrown off, he toppled to the asphalt. I wrestled with the bike to get it off of him, ready to pounce on him and begin the fistfight of my life when…he started laughing . Laughing and pointing at me. Just then I felt a cool sensation on my upper lip. I reached up and wiped at it, and looked at my hand. Blood. LOTS of blood! I hadn’t even noticed it, but when I wrenched the bike’s handlebars, one side had slipped free of his hand and whacked me right in the side of the nose. It was a faucet!

Horror-struck, embarrassed, angry all at once, I started crying. I ran home, pulling the bike alongside me with one hand and holding my nose with the other. When I got home my youngest sister, seven years my senior, saw the bloody, blubbering mess that walked in the front door, and had what I think I can safely describe as a conniption. Her reaction made my emotional state even worse. She finally got me calmed down enough to tell her what happened, only that made EVERYTHING worse, because she tore off down the street and got into a shouting match with Mrs. Santaniello! Now, not only was I upset, angry and embarrassed, but I was humiliated because my big sister went and fought my fight.

Our last fight happened the following winter. We verbally taunted each other along the two-block walk from our school to our street, and then, on the corner just one door from my house, we came to blows. Again, we each struck out, as we were probably the worst pugilists who ever lived. But I got the advantage when, as Fiore threw a wild fist, he happened to be standing on a patch of ice. His effort pulled him off balance, and his feet slipped out from beneath him. Once again I had the upper hand: Fiore was on the ground. Again I was ready to pounce on him when, out of nowhere I heard my mother’s voice: “(FARRAGO!) Knock it off RIGHT NOW!” She had managed to get out of work early that day (memory fails me…was it perhaps the last Friday before Christmas?), and was standing on our front stoop, glaring at us. DAMN her timing! Fiore got up and ran off since, in those days, other kids’ mothers were feared even worse than bullies. I can’t help but wonder if Mom stood at the door and watched us flailing at each other until the point when Fiore fell, and then intervened when there was the potential of somebody actually getting hurt. Or maybe she didn’t feel she could take Fiore’s mother in the second fight that would ensue. I also wonder why I never got in trouble. Maybe for the same reason. I got the upper hand. I fought a fight I didn’t start (though who really knows who started it?), and by falls I had won. End it.

Fiore started getting into trouble as we approached adolescence, though he never took a total turn for the worst. Our friend/foe seesaw ended when he one day thought it would be funny to lure my friend and next-door neighbor, Ben Fonseca’s 6-month old puppy with a treat down to his house where he unleashed his bad-tempered dog on it. The puppy never had a chance to begin with, but the dogfight ended prematurely when both dogs were hit by a passing car. The puppy died within minutes, and the Santaniellos’ family dog ran off and disappeared, but was found the next day under their back porch, dead. Away from his parents, Fiore never expressed remorse for what happened that day, for what he did that day. I couldn’t see my way around it, and our relationship, stormy as it was, ended.

Four years ago I met and spoke briefly with Fiore at our 20-year high school reunion. He had left our school at some point to attend a big local Catholic high school, and I had been unaware that he ever returned to ours to finish his education. He had done a four-year stint in the Marines, which I knew about, and then I heard nothing more until our reunion. We spoke so briefly that I didn’t get much information. He drives a truck these days. I don’t know if he’s divorced or never married, but at the time of the reunion he was not married. His younger brother, whom Therese Ballassone liked more than she liked me when I was in sixth grade, and who swore from as early as the fourth grade that he would be a doctor when he grew up, grew up to be a doctor – a surgeon, in fact. I always got along with him, even when he was “stealing” the girl of my dreams.

I recall in those few moments while I spoke with Fiore that I never once thought about the fights, the animosity, the poor dogs. I was in the moment and wanted to know what the hell else he had been up to over the prior twenty years, and wished in that moment that we could spend an hour to find out who each other had become.

A couple days after the reunion a simple fact dawned on me, at which point I had to kick myself for never knowing during our childhood, and therefore never being able to use against him in all our fights, the fact that his name, in Italian, means “flower.”