Sleeping with Lumbago: Often Humorous, Always Personal Stories

By Sam Culotta

Spanning seven decades from his 1940s childhood in Rochester, New York, to his retirement in Southern California,Sleeping with Lumbago documents the events and experiences of author Sam R. Culottas life. He recalls his Catholic school days, his familys migration west, his teens, his military service, and, most notably, the dynamics of his Sicilian-American family.

With his signature sardonic wit and good-natured criticism, he takes on nuns, schoolmates, friends, and neighbors as well as more than a few professions, religious institutions, social conventions and, of course, himself. In the story And Then There Were Two, Culotta discusses the unusual and embarrassing discovery made during a physical exam at his Catholic elementary school when he was in sixth grade. Caution: Friends May Be Dangerous to Your Health describes a narrow escape from injury, accident, and mayhem when his buddy Don pulls a dangerous stunt in his 1949 Mercury.

Sleeping with Lumbago presents a collection of humorous personal essays that document the unexceptional life of an unexceptional man with an exceptional amount of wit and discontent.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Sep 26, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462050611

Sam Culotta

Sam R. Culotta earned a bachelor’s degree in English from California State University– Fullerton. After retirement from a career in finance, he worked as a writing tutor for a community college. He is also the author of Family Suite. Culotta lives in Southern California with his wife of forty-eight years.

Book preview

Contents

Acknowledgments

And Then There Were Two

Justice

Bunnies and Bass

The Roots of All Evil

Music’s Willing Fool

Transcontinental Divide

Caution: Friends may be Hazardous to Your Health

The Old Ways

If Hired, I Will Not Serve

Security

Guard Mount

The Chicken Came First

Runner in the Night

Our House

Why Are You Being So Quiet?

Bury the Egg in a Secret Place

But, Baby, It’s Hot Outside!

Oh, Look, Honey!

Is Mr. Sam Going to Decorate?

It Was Quiet Here Once

Oh, Lucky Us

Are We in Texas Yet?

Out of the Mouth of Dad

AARP Goes To Laughlin

The Spinal Chronicles

For my grandchildren,

Claire Brytte and James Wilson Culotta

Acknowledgments

I WOULD LIKE TO THANK MY wonderful family for their help, suggestions, and love. I am forever grateful to Joe Green—poet, scholar, and friend of the arts—for his editing help and for his constant encouragement and tolerance.

A good storyteller is a person who has a good memory and hopes other people haven’t.

Irvin S. Cobb

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And Then There Were Two

AS FATHER GIVES HIS HOMILY, PRINCIPAL Sister Mary Aloysius, played by Meryl Streep, moves silently down the side aisle, her reptilian stare fixed on her intended victim, a young boy who has dozed off. As she arrives at his pew, she bends down her bonneted head and slowly turns toward him. With a brief whisper, she startles him into horrified awareness, issues a rebuke, and moves on. Her face is corpse cold, scrunched by her wimple; her skin is drawn so tight her cheekbones threaten to tear through. Her Gorgon’s glare can turn the whisperer to stone, freeze the titter on the titterer’s lips. The movie is Doubt, and Sister is inflicting her own code of justice. She is judge, jury, and executioner all in one. Her ability to inspire fear is awesome. Perhaps younger audiences don’t get it, but I do. I remember the Sisters of Notre Dame, nuns from a Boston-based order, who were at least as intimidating and awe-inspiring as this fictional nun.

***

It was 1951 I was eleven years old and in the sixth grade at St. Michael’s in Rochester, New York. During class, Sister Mary L., the little lioness, told us we were going to undergo physical examinations this morning and directed us to proceed to the health office and follow the instructions of the nurse. We were clueless, but we lined up as instructed and filed out in an orderly manner, headed to the designated location where we were met by a nurse who separated us by gender, boys to the right and girls to the left.

We were accustomed to following instructions and would never dream of questioning authority in whatever guise it appeared. But there was a titular hierarchy: first was God, then our parents, then the priests and nuns, and then law enforcement, and so on. Of them all, we were most fearful of the nuns. To cross a nun was to offend God, parent, and country; justice was swift and certain, and there was no court of appeal since everyone else in our world shared a healthy respect for these brides of Christ.

The room we entered was divided by foldaway screens that had been arranged in such a way as to provide a reasonable degree of privacy. After a turn or two, you came into a cubicle of sorts where a doctor sat. There was a small table to his side with various instruments that glinted in the milky light that filled the room, a mystical illumination that produced no shadows. There is nothing on earth as cold as a chrome or steel implement lying on a metal tray. Nothing produces more dread than that instrument being picked up and brought toward you by a doctor or dentist.

A nurse followed me in and read my name to the doctor. I figured she’d leave immediately, but she hung around to assist. Immediately I was made uncomfortable when the doctor had me remove my shirt. Other than at the beach, the only women I had ever been shirtless around were my mother and aunts. The nurse stood behind me with some sort of paperwork apparently meant to document whatever was about to happen to me. The doctor uncoiled the stethoscope from around his shoulders and proceeded to check my heart. As he moved the cold disc around to various parts of my chest, sides, and back, I listened for any signs of concern or disgust. His movements brought his face close, and I smelled a curious mixture of cigarettes, coffee and Sen-Sen.

Finished, he mumbled something unintelligible to the nurse who made a few notes and then resumed her dutiful pose. Next he chose from among his assorted weaponry a cylindrical gadget with a head on it that ended in a beak-like protuberance. This turned out to have a light in it intended for looking into my defenseless ears after the icy beak was inserted. More mumbling, more notes, followed by a penlight sort of thing that he shined in each eye and a dry stick with which he gagged me while telling me to say ahhh. My "ahhh was more of an Arghhh."

I was relieved when the doctor put his light and sticks away and shifted his position. I figured the worst was over. I was so very wrong, and not for the last time that day. Lower your trousers, young man, he said. I just looked at him, dumbfounded, figuring either I had heard wrong or he was talking to someone else. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the nurse still standing there. It wasn’t until he repeated himself that I realized it was for real.

Only my conditioned reflex to obey enabled me to overcome my terror and drop my pants. I suddenly remembered my mother’s mantra about wearing clean underwear because you never know. He had me sit down and began tapping me here and there with a rubber hammer. At one point, he hit me under the knee, and my leg kicked out. Weird feeling, that. I was almost beginning to enjoy this when he told me to stand up and lower my underwear. I had no choice but to comply, and for the second time in my life I felt utterly ridiculous and totally embarrassed. (A year earlier, I had been railroaded by my mother into joining a gymnasium program with my godmother’s son. One afternoon I ran naked onto a stage where mothers were gathered to watch their kids do floor exercises. I realized it wasn’t the way to the pool and could only spin on my bare heel and run like a bat out of hell for the locker room, my ears buzzing with their collective laughter.)

Now, exposed to God and man (and nurse, as far as I could tell), I stood before this stranger who bent down to handle me in a place very few had ever handled me. Through my feelings of discomfort, I noticed that his head was balding on top, and this gave me perverse comfort somehow. He took me in his grip and began to consult with himself, his head cocked to one side. Hmmm. Yes. And more hmmm. He asked my age, and I told him, eleven. He nodded again and then instructed me to cough, which I did, spitting a little on his brow in the process. I wondered if I should apologize, but my concern was lost in relief when he told me to get dressed and to stop at the nurse’s station on my way out.

As I hurried into my clothes, he mumbled something to the nurse, who this time was moved to ask something back, after which he explained further. I heard the strange word testicle. I wasn’t sure just what that was, but it made me uncomfortable anyway because I figured it had something to do with what he had felt when he was squeezing me down there. But I was just happy to get away from him and Nurse Nightingale.

The nurse’s station was a table set up in the front of the room where we had come in and been directed to our respective fates. An angel of mercy awaited me with my file, which the attending nurse must have spirited to her while I was busy covering my shame. Doctor has noted that your right testicle has not descended and wants you to see your family physician for a follow-up visit. She gave me a note for my parents signed by the doctor. I still wasn’t exactly sure what this meant, and I could tell that the nurse was reluctant to go into detail, but she explained enough for me to understand that my worst fears were realized. I took the form she gave me and followed her instructions to return to class. On the way back, some of my classmates were buzzing about the examinations and sharing their experiences.

It turns out that one of the boys had a heart murmur. He didn’t have a clue as to what it was, and the others made fun of him by putting their heads near his chest and saying they could hear it mumble. I knew this was a serious condition because my aunt, who had scarlet fever when she was young, suffered from this. When they asked me how my examination had gone, I avoided full disclosure and made up some lame story. I was jealous of the kid with the heart condition. I would have settled for polio or tuberculosis, anything but a stupid, lazy testicle.

Back in the relative safety of the classroom, I opened my math book with an unaccustomed sense of relief. I was really good at reading and writing. I was not so good at ’rithmetic. In fact, I hated it and dreaded every time I was called up to the blackboard to work problems. My ordinarily ordinary brain blanked out when faced with the slightest mistake in calculation. One step down the wrong path left me lost in the woods, a Hansel without Gretel and breadcrumbs. This problem stayed with me throughout my schooling and ultimately sent me into the air force when a failed college physics class torpedoed my GPA.

Ironically, there came a day when the logic of it all began to make sense, but by that time I was a family man in mid-career, and algebraic equations were of very little use to me as a banker. On this day, however, math promised to be an escape from the macabre world I had just visited. The humiliation of standing at the blackboard making inane scratchings with a piece of chalk seemed comforting by comparison. I was beginning to relax into normalcy when Sister took her seat and began to move her books around.

As I unfolded my homework, I heard her speak the words that turned my blood to ice water.

Well, boys and girls, that was an interesting experience, wasn’t it? Why don’t we go around the room and share what the doctor told us? Anne, you begin, and we’ll go row by row. Oh, my God! I could feel my face burn and was thankful for my olive complexion that, darkened by the recent summer vacation, hid my otherwise visible sense of panic. Anne was in my row; I was the fifth seat back. I immediately utilized my rudimentary math skills to calculate that I had about five minutes, at best, to come up with either a plausible lie or a very clever camouflage. Hoarse throat … can’t talk. Water on the knee … I didn’t know what that was but had heard of it, and it sounded serious. I considered gout, or swollen glands, always one of my favorite get-out-of-school ploys, or Parkinson’s disease, which my grandfather had. What else? What else? Hurry up, she’s getting to me! Hurry!

Sam, what did Doctor tell you? The moment had arrived. If I ever would be able to look a nun in the face and lie, now was the time. I may have had only one mortal sin to spend, and if so, this was the situation that justified the cost. I could do it; I could do it! I looked into her round pink face with those little eyes that could turn to death rays at the merest whiff of sin. I heard my words go out as though spoken by the boy behind me. Sister, Doctor said my right testicle has not descended.

Too late, I realized I had told her the truth! I had laid myself bare on the altar of her rectitude and exposed myself to the ridicule of my classmates. It was all over. If there was ever a chance to be one of the cool kids, it was flying away on the wings of those nine terrible words. But to my surprise, my misery was immediately replaced by something semisweet, something akin to revenge.

She had asked for it, and she got it. Here you go, Sister: a testicle. That’s right—a testicle! A private part! I could tell I had caught her off guard. She’d been listening to all those cutesy ailments and making her mealy comments, and now she was faced with something she hadn’t expected. Even at eleven, I recognized the difference between curiosity and nosiness, and my Sicilian upbringing had taught me never to ask personal questions of people in front of others. Her discomfort was made apparent by how quickly she looked down at her papers and jumped to the boy behind me.

As for my classmates, my fears were unfounded. They wouldn’t know a testicle from a Popsicle, so the most I got were a couple of quizzical looks and a few snickers from boys who didn’t know what they were snickering about but had the unerring instincts of the prepubescent for anything down there.

About a week later, my mother took me to see a doctor, and I was subjected to the indignity of being de-pantsed and handled once again, although this time Mom was there to offer emotional support. We were issued a prescription for what I later learned were hormone pills: clear, brown capsules filled with something like jelly, as I recall. The entire incident was shelved, and life returned to normal. Sister L. never mentioned the physical exam again, and my classmates had moved on to better things, such as dodgeball and chasing one another around the schoolyard.

Choosing whom to hit with the ball and whom to chase around the yard were unarticulated expressions of affection, early indicators of the eroticism that would consume us soon … well, me, for sure. These were the end times of innocence. This year’s childlike mating dance would become a much more serious matter by the following year. We would soon have greater appreciation of grown-up feelings like joy, heartache, yearning, jealousy, and sadly, shame: words we’d only heard in songs, movies, and soap operas.

***

I don’t know how much time had passed, but one night during my bath I noticed that where there had been one, there now were two. I hesitated to share this discovery with my mother for fear of the consequences, but she asked, and I had to confess. When I asked her if she could just call the doctor and tell him everything had fallen into place, she gave me that sweet, affectionate smile I loved, but by the way she tilted her head, I knew what was coming.

Justice

FROM AN EARLY AGE, MY EXPERIENCES with nuns were often confusing or fraught with danger.

One afternoon, when I was in the third grade, our class was reading from The Song of Bernadette, a story about the girl who was visited by the Blessed Virgin Mary at Lourdes, France, and who later became a saint. Because I was a good reader, I was given the responsibility of helping the other students. I would walk around to the desks of those who were having a problem with a word and coach them. Near the end of the lesson, Sister had each of us read a small section aloud and warned that anyone who made a mistake would have to stay after school as punishment. When my turn came, I stumbled a moment over the clumsy name Bernadette. A few of the kids chuckled. When school ended, Sister told me and a few others to stay after.

I couldn’t believe I was being punished. I had been helping the other kids read! Surely Sister realized I knew how to read the word Bernadette! Why was she doing this to me? I sat there with the tired afternoon light fading outside and wondered what my punishment would be. Sister took a boy who had misbehaved earlier in the day into the adjoining classroom. I heard the unmistakable whacks of the heavy yardstick she used and the boy’s accompanying yelps. I figured I was next. I was going to be beaten with a yardstick for making an innocent mistake! I was angry and despondent as I sat and looked out through the windows clouded by winter’s buildup of rain and snow. The dirty panes reflected the yellow ceiling lights.

The students whose punishment had been to go outside and pound the chalk out of the erasers returned to the classroom and took their seats. We all sat there like criminals waiting to be processed and led to our cells. A few minutes later, Sister stomped back into the room, dismissed all the others, and told me to pick up her book bag and follow her. She was clearly in a foul mood and didn’t say another word to me all the way out of the building.

I trudged along in the gathering dusk behind Sister Mary Agnes. My skinny body was tilted toward the arm that lugged her overloaded book bag. The schoolyard was oddly hushed, free of the students who would be in the warm embrace of their homes by now, sitting in front of their radios, listening to their favorite shows. Sister’s black rosary beads scuttled against her black skirts, which rustled across the tops of her black shoes, which beat a heartless pattern against the dark paving stones.

I assumed I was going to stay with the nuns at St. Michael’s, and that my mother might never know what happened to me. I didn’t know what I would do for pajamas or clean underwear. Would the nuns let my family come to visit me? Did they have a radio so I could listen to Sky King and The Green Hornet? I seriously doubted it.

From what I had seen of them in my short time at school, the nuns seemed joyless, too absorbed in prayer and in keeping us focused on the path to heaven by way of the one true faith to have time to listen to the radio or go to movies. I didn’t understand why they would want a boy like me living among them. I wondered if there were others there I could play with, other boys like me who had misbehaved or failed to please. I hoped there were.

We reached the convent stairway, and I noticed that Sister had to press her hand against her thigh in order to mount the gray stone steps. As I struggled along behind her, the satchel banged against my legs. I shifted it from arm to arm, but I knew better than to complain. I felt that I should offer to help her up the stairs, but I was otherwise encumbered; and besides, I was afraid to touch her anywhere. At the top, she took a short pause to catch her breath, and then she pulled the large, ornate door open and ushered me into the gloomy vestibule, made no less welcoming by the dim colors lent by the stained-glass door panels.

There were wraps on hooks, rubbers, boots, and umbrellas on the floor, and black-strapped buckled satchels like hers resting along the wall. Put the bag over there, she snapped at me over her shoulder. I put it alongside the others, relieving the ache in my shoulder, and when I turned around she was heading up the stairs toward the living quarters. Like one of the damned souls I’d seen in our books, I lowered my pitiful head and started up the stairs behind her.

As I climbed, I noticed a scent like the one in my grandmother’s closet, a cross between mothballs and polka-dot dresses. It was that amorphous but unmistakable odor I associated with elderly ladies: a mysterious and slightly threatening aroma. Suddenly, she realized I was behind her and stopped to look back at me, somewhat surprised. "Where do you think you’re going?" she asked.

With you, I answered sheepishly.

Go home, now! she snapped and turned to lumber up the remaining stairs—to where, I didn’t know and feared to imagine.

***

It was almost dark when I sprang out of the convent and began to race home; the air was fresh and cold. It brought back to mind the time when I was in kindergarten and the teacher let the class out early because it had begun to snow. A winter storm of almost blizzard proportions had blanketed the streets, and by the time I made a turn or two, I was completely lost. I trudged aimlessly in my floppy boots, mittens, and earflap hat, scared out of my wits. Despite my fear and