The Gauntlet

By Anthony Pecoraro IV

A rebellious teenager, rejecting his family, joins a street gang. Driven by anger he looked for trouble and often found himself on the wrong side of the law. After being charged with a felony, grand larceny, and a failed attempt at suicide, he found himself at the beginning of a forty-year journey trying to understand the demons that haunted him. Challenged by his son, he began to document the events that shaped his life. What he thought would be a cathartic exercise became “Letters to Brian.” After family and friends encouraged him to continue writing, he penned his first book. “The Gauntlet.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthony Pecoraro IV
• Release date: Feb 26, 2012
• ISBN: 9780985075101

Anthony Pecoraro IV

After thirty-five years in Health Care Anthony Pecoraro IV, known to his friends as Nino, was challenged to publish the letters he had written to his son. "The Gauntlet" is a story of rebellious teenager that rejects his family, and joins a street gang. Driven by anger he looked for trouble and often found himself on the wrong side of the law. After being charged with a felony, grand larceny, and a failed attempt at suicide, he found himself at the beginning of a forty-year journey trying to understand the demons that haunted him. Challenged by his son, he began to document the events that shaped his life. What he thought would be a cathartic exercise became “Letters to Brian.”

Book preview

Letters to Brian

Copyright 2012 – Anthony Pecoraro IV

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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ISBN978-09850751-1-8

Information about the sale or distribution, of a hard copy, of this book can be made at:

Sail Adventures LLC.

PO Box 514

Lake Orion, MI 48362

[e-mail]

letterstobrian.com

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Table of Contents

Prologue

Introduction

Letter 1 - Leaving Home

Letter 2 - Shock and Awe

Letter 3 - Greetings from Parker

Letter 4 - Yellow Foot Prints

Letter 5 - High and Tight

Letter 6 - Canvas Sea Bags

Letter 7 - Roll Call

Letter 8 - Dump and Run

Letter 9 - A Long Day

Letter 10 - The First Meal

Letter 11 - Push Brooms and Pull Brooms

Letter 12 - House Mouse

Letter 13 - Bucket Life

Letter 14 - Double Time

Letter 15 - The Pit

Letter 16 - Field Strip Your Butts

Letter 17 - Night Games

Letter 18 - Where is Atherton

Letter 19 - Sleeping at Attention

Letter 20 - Motivation Platoon

Letter 21 - Close Order Drill

Letter 22 - A Painful Lesson

Letter 23 - Gomer Pyle

Letter 24 - Mail Call

Letter 25 - The Porcelain Rendezvous

Letter 26 - Hand-to-Hand Combat

Letter 27 - The Karate Kids

Letter 28 - Slowly Sinking

Letter 29 - The Becker Game

Letter 30 - Edison Range

Letter 31 - The Inspecting General

Letter 32 - The Gas Chamber

Letter 33 - Graduation

Letter 34 - Advanced Infantry Training

Letter 35 - Coercion

Letter 36 - War Games

Letter 37 - Four Hundred Eighty Hour

Letter 38 - Processing for Nam

Letter 39 - Touchdown In Country

Epilogue

Appendix

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Special thanks to:

Sid, my wonderful wife of thirty-nine years – she lived this crazy adventure with me and reviewed every draft. Her faith and input was invaluable.

My daughter Courtney, who was the first person to teach me what unconditional love was all about.

Brian my son, if he had not asked me to write him letters while living in Florida, this book would not have been written. He has been a very special gift from God. Together we broke the pattern of hatred that existed between fathers and sons in my family line.

My editors: Robin Dicicco, Karen (Go Bucks) Crogan, Sue Kinch, Debbie Potts, and Dennis Upsure. They provided valuable insight and asked great questions that helped round out the project.

Al and Sally Pelletier, the first guinea pigs to read the original draft, and encouraged me to continue writing.

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Dedicated to: My dad, who died before I got to know him.

Prologue

I never had the opportunity to know my dad. I remember he was a gentle soft-spoken person, but intense. In the twenty-three years I lived in his home, I can remember only one conversation he had with me. I was eighteen and he called me into the living room to discuss the birds-and-the-bees. He leaned forward to share his fatherly wisdom. I can remember his words exactly as he delivered them. Son! Just don’t do anything stupid, he said. The room was silent except for the sound of the furnace that had just kicked on. Is that it? I asked. Yes, he said. He was unable to communicate with me, and I hated him.

Born in 1900, he traveled to America, alone, at the young age of sixteen. He sought to build a life and escape the poverty and entanglement of the gang wars in his hometown of Palermo, Sicily. The Mafia was establishing roots in America too, but he would be able to protect his family in a large and growing new world. He could vanish into any community, village, or city and begin a new life without people questioning his past. He could start over.

At his first job, when he arrived in Michigan, he made five cents an hour. He then got a job working at Chrysler for twelve cents an hour. He paved the way for his mother, father, and siblings to follow him to the land of freedom. He met my mother and got married in Detroit. It was an arranged marriage – he was thirty-three and she was twenty-two. As young adults, they lived through the Great Depression and WWII while starting a family. After the war, America was on the road to prosperity. He not only cared for his young family, but he supported his father, mother, and sister. His parents lived next to us, in a two-family flat. He cared for them his entire life, and that placed additional stress on his young marriage and family.

My dad’s father was an angry and abusive man. I remember walking past him and frequently receiving his backhand, just because I was within reach. My three older sisters knew him as a mean and a spiteful person. I discovered, later in life, that my dad vowed to protect his mother from his father. Each day he came home from work, he first checked on how his mom was doing before he entered our house. That alone says more than my imagination can dream up.

When my mom came into their family, she was emotionally and verbally abused. She was raised in a happy and jovial family, but became angry, reactionary, and swore like a drunken sailor. I remember she frequently slammed cupboard doors, and pounded her rolling pin on the counter.

I learned early in life that I couldn’t trust what mood she might be in. Over the years I observed her behavior, she taught me that a reckless outburst of anger would keep others away from you. She could go from calm into a rage in a split second. I used that same strategy successfully to keep people away from me. I was good at keeping my distance. It is easy, but I wouldn’t recommend it. It works well but it is not healthy.

The lesson on trust, however, came from my dad in one swift moment. When I was ten years old, my older sister was bugging me and I called her a rat. In a rare moment of fury, my dad chased me into my bedroom. By then, he was fifty-seven years old. It was no contest – my speed as a ten-year-old left him in the dust. I dove under the bed, where he couldn’t get to me. After ten minutes of the standoff, I made him promise not to spank me when I came out. As soon as I came out, he broke the promise and gave me hell with his thick leather belt. That was the last time I cried. I vowed never to trust anyone. I told myself when you get close to someone you will get hurt and betrayed. I built a shell of armor around my emotions that the horrors of war would not penetrate. I have learned that vows you make can affect you – and those you care about – for a lifetime.

There were a few occasions when my father attempted to bond with me. When I was eight, he took me bowling a few times and we played checkers on the living room couch. I remember this because we had just moved into our new house in Saint Clair Shores, a suburb of Detroit. When I spent time with him, I felt I was special but I learned not to look forward to it. For the most part, my father was just the man that shared dinner at my table, and then disappeared into the living room to read the paper.

When I was in junior high, I played on the school’s basketball and baseball teams. He attended only two of my basketball games in three years. When I was in eighth grade, I made the final basket in the semifinal Catholic League championship game, with only a few seconds left. I played second-string point guard. Our first-string guard fouled out with only a few minutes left and I went in to cover. Their guard was taking the ball up the court for one last drive when I slapped the ball out of his hand, burst down the court and made the basket as time ran out.

The crowd exploded and my team lifted me up on their shoulders and carried me off the court cheering. But, I wasn’t the hero of the game. The final basket really didn’t mean anything. We were ahead by eighteen points, so the two points just rounded our lead to twenty. But, playing in the game and being carried off the court was exciting and made me feel special and proud. I wished my dad were there to see it. When I told him about the game he said That’s nice. He wasn’t much for showing emotion.

He attended one of my baseball games the year we won the league championship. I was chosen to be the All-Star second baseman, but he wouldn’t let me play in the All Star game. It had something to do with my age and league rules. League rules allowed thirteen-year-olds to play in the regular season, but not in post-season games. I was thirteen, but looked much younger. I tried to convince him that no one would know that I was thirteen. He tried to explain that it was the honest thing to do, but I didn’t want to hear it. I got tired of playing organized sports after that, and besides, I was looking for more interesting things to do. The streets were calling my name.

My three older sisters knew my father differently. To them he was a loving man, younger and happier. He was forty-seven years old when I arrived on the scene. He began having heart problems in his mid-fifties and it wore him down. He retired at age sixty-two, after years of health problems and nervous breakdowns. His vitality for life had ebbed away. He was only a shell of the man he had been when he arrived in America at sixteen. He had nothing to offer a late-in-life boy who tested every boundary and limit he imposed.

When I was a toddler, I recall seeing him fly into a rage throwing chairs and flipping tables. I never saw an emotional reaction from him except when he had nervous breakdowns. He would disappear for months at a time. When I was about eight, I discovered he was in the hospital. When I visited him, I heard my mother and the doctor discuss shock treatments. The last time he had a breakdown I was sixteen. He returned a solemn, broken man. I remember him sitting on the sofa watching The Price is Right. He had given up, and by then I had gotten accustomed to him not being there for me. Neither my mother nor dad could show love, or any emotion other than anger. I never saw them hug, laugh, or kiss. Our home was sterile, more like an operating room than a carnival.

I was twenty-five when my father passed away. He had a series of strokes and his body was failing. He spent the last month of his life in a nursing home. He couldn’t speak or move his arms or legs. He could barely move his right hand. My sisters tried to encourage him to write. They placed a pen between his fingers, held a paper pad to the pen, and supported his hand. Regardless of how much he concentrated, he wasn’t able to scribe a single legible letter, much less a word. This made him extremely frustrated, and watching his decline was very hard for my mother and sisters.

I was at work when I got a call from my sister. It was 1:15 p.m. Dad had a massive stroke. They think he only has a few hours left. When I got to the hospital, my mother and sisters stood at his bedside sobbing. He was barely conscious. I stood in the back of the room as rigid as a cold steel pillar. I learned in Nam that death was just a cold hard life event; you shake it off, and move on to the next objective. I couldn’t understand their emotional outbursts.

I didn’t want to be there, but I came to support my mother and sisters. As I stood in the back of the room, my sisters asked me to go up to the head of the bed and tell my father that I loved him. I looked at them in defiance and stood rigid, unshakeable. They pressed me for several minutes. I reluctantly gave in to their demand.

Tell him before he dies. If you don’t you will regret it for the rest of your life!

I moved to the head of the bed and looked at the broken man. I stared into the face of a skeleton. His eyes and cheeks were sunken in. His skin was a pale gray. His lips were dry, crusted and chapped. My sister tried to give him a sip of water but he couldn’t swallow. The water rolled out the side of his mouth onto the bed. My mother took a wet washcloth and softly wiped his brow, cheeks, and lips. He seemed to appreciate it, or at least that’s what my mind led me to believe.

His breathing had slowed to eight shallow breaths per minute. He struggled with each breath, and his body was cold and clammy. He could no longer move his eyes, and it looked as if he was staring up, at the ceiling. There wasn’t much time left. I bent down, close to his ear, and the smell of death burst into my nose. I had smelled it a thousand times in Nam. I forced out the I love you dad, and saw his chin quiver as he tried to move his lips, but he was too weak. I then noticed tears well up in his eyes and a single tear slowly flowed down his cheek. It was a moment I didn’t expect and will never forget. In a split second, my worldview of my father changed. I realized that this was not the man I knew growing up. That single tear sent me on a journey to discover who