Women: One Man's Journey

By Lanny Larcinese

Women: One Man's Journey is a memoir in which the author's relationship with women throughout his life has been the subject of fulfillment, mystery, and sometimes grief. In it, he ponders to what degree such experiences result from inherent differences between the sexes; or something he brought to the table; or something individual to each of the women in his life; or the result of societal changes in both women and men. And while some might argue these questions occupy only older men, a divorce rate still in the high forty percentile, MeToo revelations which are rife, and economic equities continue to dominate airwaves and public and private discourse.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Aug 14, 2018
• ISBN: 9781543943719

Book preview

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WOMEN AND MEN IN MY EARLY LIFE: MIXED REVIEWS

My story, in great part the story of the male-female battlefield in my head, began when as a small boy at family gatherings I preferred being in the kitchen with the women rather than the living room with the men. Why is this experience so profound and memory of it so clear? It was a vision of women at their best, important for me to witness, along with a particular brand of manhood.

In the steamy kitchens of extended family I am seen but not heard. I’m a little shy as I know I am not like these women, yet fascinated as my mother, aunts and older cousins gossip. I am happy to see my mother enjoying herself as titillation and drama roil like the ever-present pot of spaghetti sauce on the stove in the garlic-redolent kitchen. An aunt stirring the sauce in a red-splotched full-bib apron stops and interjects another knowing dig at men, and turns smiles into shrieking laughter as she waves a wooden spoon, a baton conducting a chorus of snickers and shared irony. I’m a little boy, so for now it is only a spoon, but as years fall away and the kitchen ritual gets replicated like anise-flavored pizzele, I come to see it as a symbol, unarticulated but imbued with meaning shared by these women and generations of Italian mothers and daughters and aunts, a ubiquitous instrument that symbolizes food and family which to many is love and happiness. Meanwhile, I say little, but deep down know that this is good.

In the living room, the men’s conversation is not about feelings, like the women’s, but about concrete, everyday things articulated with an undercurrent of competitiveness and eagerness to impress—maybe about politics, the Yankees, or the best route to Pittsburgh. Like Uncle Ernie, the most nattily dressed in black turtleneck and slacks that seemingly establish authoritativeness, who holds forth about directions though they seem to make little sense. I don’t yet drive but intuition tells me he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It sounds like this:

OK, so you go down 36 until you get to Route 254. There’s a big Hudson’s billboard on the corner…

All the other men: Yeah, yeah, I know that sign. There’s a Sunoco station across the road right?

Uncle Ernie: Yeah, that’s it, and a print shop next to it.

Other men: Right, I know that intersection. So, what do you do then?

Don’t turn there. Keep going straight through two lights …

Other men: Do I count the blinker?

No, don’t count the blinker. Go about three mile. You’ll see a used car lot.

Then what?

Don’t turn there. Keep going east and look for that big furniture store, what’s it called…

Uncle Al: Stanley’s.

Uncle Dom: Yeah, Stanley’s. I been there. He’s real nice. Do you turn at Stanley’s?

No …

Dad: This is all bullshit. That’s not how you go. Here’s how you go …

The men in the living room were not refined men, but ambitions, trades-oriented and entrepreneurial men with working class roots. They were family men—open, spontaneous, friendly, and valued intelligence though formal education had not been in their stars, and only few, my father among them, the youngest, with intellectual curiosity about conceptual matters.

I had little need to navigate anywhere or dissect double-play combinations. But my path to manhood was unknowingly influenced by the sub-text of such banter: a group of men building a consensus as to the best route to a destination, or judge performance of politicians, economists, athletes or other men. An individual man led while the others challenged or deferred. So, leadership, hierarchy, and cooperation spilled out of the living room just as laughter, warmth, and togetherness spilled out of the kitchen. I craved the latter – the room where feelings dominated the talk – my hunger for their expression acutely felt but as yet unknown. Yet each of the two rooms stayed embossed on my soul for the next six and a half decades.

But back to that kitchen …

Cui bono? one of the black-frocked Christian Brothers of my high school might have asked about the women in the kitchen, to what good? The answer is intimacy. I – perhaps all men – need it and get it mostly from women. Is that what love is, or at least part of it? Why must men rely on women for it? If we had our own internal supply, would it interfere with getting things done? Is it all part of the holy arrangement?

Harmony, or its lack, between the ache for intimacy and the need for freedom is the crux of my story; and, I suspect, the music to which male/female relationships is danced. I have been a man eager to traipse and reveal my inner landscape as well as get into street fights over silly things like a law school parking space; as eager to plum emotional dynamics as analyze solutions; and eager to find moral answers as to consider its effects on relationships—none of which is to say it got me where I needed to go, something like Uncle Ernie’s directions. My life has been a little strange, though it shares much in common with many people, but just as flour and water makes bread, it also makes twisted pretzels.

You think too much, people have said. Yeah, I know, can’t help it. Thoughts and feelings ricochet off each other in my head. But I like the cacophony—it emanates both from the kitchen and the living room.

Another thing: A long lens really helps.

Streetcar tracks. The low-pitched clackety-clack of a trolley rumbling down Grandy Avenue in Detroit, Michigan. It is 1946 or so. I am three and crave long pants like my older brother’s. A dark-haired mother in a housedress is here. She’s in her late twenties, and, as I will learn later, very attractive, but for now, Mommy. My brother Ron, three years older, looks after me. My father, not long out of the service, works in a T-shirt and rolled-up pant legs, hauling auto frames stacked like pancakes on a flatbed truck. Sometimes he stops home with the fully-loaded rig and parks it on our street. I am awed by the massive truck and its cargo of steel as I watch him clamber into the cab and pull slowly away, hauling the heavy load. We live on the second floor in a wood-frame house, upstairs from a bar on a crowded, city street. The trolleys’ rumble and clanging bells peak as they approach the house, then fade as they pass. Its recurring presence reassures me.

We play in the street. My brother puts pennies on the trolley tracks to be squashed to the size of quarters when the heavy trolley rolls over them. This is an amazing thing. I like where we live. I like playing in the streets and the trolley noise and tracks and squashed pennies. I like my little friends, especially Butterball.

She is a chubby little girl who lives across the alley. We are playmates. I don’t think everybody calls her Butterball. Mommy tells me not to .Once, I got into trouble when I pulled down her underpants and bit her on her bottom. I was only playing. It was a fun game my brother and I played with each other. I didn’t realize I was playing too rough until Butterball’s mother told me I was. I thought she could take it. That didn’t seem to count for much. Butterball’s mother came upstairs screaming and shaking her fist and forbade me from playing with her daughter ever again. But it passed.

The Butterball dust-up would set a troublesome precedent despite all the time I spent in kitchens with women. The Women’s Movement in the ’70s and ’80s really screwed me up. I couldn’t reconcile assertions of strength with equally loud claims of vulnerability. It didn’t make sense. Butterball didn’t make sense when she cried bloody murder over a little bite. When I look back on all my relationships with women, it’s hard not to think Butterball is where it started. But scroll back to that good looking and sexy mother. That may be another theory. I didn’t mean to hurt Butterball, yet there they were, my teeth marks on her chubby derriere plain as day.

As I mature, or not, women will remain a problem. I idealized their otherness as exciting and mysterious, which in turn left me vulnerable, for which I donned armor and it screwed me up more. To complicate the picture, from the age of nine, I had had a raging libido, so I became further locked into need. I made up my mind that women were to be loved from afar, for besides being mysterious, they were also dangerous. Butterball ratted me out and got me into trouble. Why? I was only playing. I yearned for women to be like the ones in the kitchen, but as I aged I learned otherwise, and my armor only added to my muddled mind and rendered me as confusing to them as they to me.

Sometime between ages three and five, we moved to a different neighborhood. Life unfolded before my eyes with no questions as to why, or whether it was good or bad. I just showed up and did as I was told, and voila! My home and neighborhood and furniture were different. No argument, no philosophy, and – not that I was resilient, though I was – life was a movie I watched from the balcony.

Compared to Grandy Avenue, Corbett Street was Lake Shore Drive. I wouldn’t call it upscale, but definitely middle class – movin’ on up, I guess – with lawns and trees and playgrounds and such. Our house was a big, corner brick number with two tall pines, a big elm, a cherry tree, large fenced yard and a garden with a fishpond. The fishpond never had any fish in it, not even water except for slimy rain run-off, but in a little boy’s imagination was many things: a trench from which to shoot the enemy; a grave to bury a gorgon; a place for hide ‘n seek even though you were usually caught except after dark. And the cherry tree? Once you clambered onto the roof of the garage, you could lie like a sultan on shingles warmed by the summer sun, and pluck cherries from overhanging branches.

I entered first grade in that neighborhood. The Goodale School.

I am six, finally ready to go to school like my big brother, and proudly wearing long pants. On my first day of school we are late. My mother walks me there, four or five blocks with only one turn. After she leaves I am put in a classroom and sit next to another little boy wearing a Cub Scout uniform. His name is Barry. The uniform is blue with gold trim and I am impressed by it. He looks like a little soldier which is what I would like to be.

I like school. I like the smell of paste and the blast of colors from crayons and drawings and finger paints. After lunch we are let out to the playground. All the kids scatter. I think my first day of school is over, so I go home. I am not afraid to navigate on my own; I keep walking straight and remember to turn at the single turn where I can see my house.

This goes on for days until I am finally sent home with a note asking why I am disappearing at lunchtime. That, and I have a speech defect and should see a therapist, which makes my father crazy. The school thinks my mother brought me home; my mother thinks the school has let out. She hasn’t done her homework. Finally, we get it worked out.

For entertainment I ride my tricycle. It is very spiffy, with thin, colored streamers flaring like rainbows of vinyl from the tips of the handle grips, and a new wire basket my father put on the front, a gift that thrills me. I’m allowed to ride around the block but must not cross streets—with one exception: I can cross the street on the far corner diagonally opposite from our house, so that I can go to the little grocery store.

Mommy sends me to buy eggs. I pedal my brains out. I feel like I’m going faster than my father’s gray Dodge with the ram’s head hood ornament. I give the grocer a note and some money. He gives me a paper bag and change. I stow the bag in the basket of my tricycle, bang down the curb then up the curb, and head home with legs pumping like little pistons. I get home, proud of mission accomplished. Mommy opens a now-wet bag; eleven of the eggs are broken. She screams at me. I don’t understand what happened or why. She pours the contents of the bag into a frying pan and cooks the already well-scrambled eggs. She makes me eat every ounce of the gooey mess, standing over me, screaming Eat! Eat! as I am crying. The cruelty towards me crushes me and is more sickening than nausea from the eggs, and for the next sixty-six years, I cannot eat an egg.

The eggs were probably intended for my father’s breakfast. At the time, I didn’t know of his forcefulness or my mother’s fear of him. All I knew was that he drove that big truck and came home from work each day with multi-colored Chuckles candies for my brother and me, and sang little songs to us in bed. He would have forgiven me for the eggs. She wouldn’t, perhaps fearing he’d take it out on her. Or maybe she had a more sinister reason. I thought in my childish way we were a family of four; I didn’t know we were a family of five—the fifth being the family dynamic, having its own effect on each of us and haunted like a malevolent poltergeist. I felt like she hated me. I spent the next four decades working on it. It was a road I needed to take on my journey, but along the way was like dragging a piano.

My upbringing was the opposite of helicopter parenting. My parents were all wrapped up in their business. As children of the Depression, financial security was everything. Their business was very demanding with weird hours, and they slept during the day. Kids were something you had, but parenting wasn’t something you actually did. They’ll find a way to work it out, Dad had expediently counseled. Nurturing independence was one thing, abrogation another. Yet, as early as six, I learned to find my own way. And when my daughter, Amanda, was seven or eight, I left her home alone one time, sleeping, while for hours I was away negotiating an important real estate deal. When I got home she was awake and frightened half to death to find herself alone, not knowing what happened to her father. I gave her some flimsy excuse and have felt guilty since. Maybe as a kid I had been frightened half to death too. Maybe I’d forgotten what it felt like. At least I had a big brother. Much of my life has been good, but sometimes I’ve been a dangerous fool.

We must have been doing OK financially. Mom worked as a waitress in a well-known barbeque restaurant and in addition to his day job, Dad worked part-time with her and made sandwiches. It was a golden time in the country and for Detroit. The soldiers had all come home after Truman dropped the bombs on Japan, saving a million lives, one of which could have been my father’s, in which case my baby sister would never have been born. Had the war continued, Dad would have been reassigned to the Pacific Theater. A lifelong Republican, he nevertheless thought Truman was our greatest president, owing the Missourian his very life. The Japanese were rabid, terrific fighters with a million man army, and would have protected their homeland to the death at great cost to the U.S. and likely our family’s fortunes.

Postwar, auto plants transitioned from wartime footing to domestic manufacturing. Wartime austerity had resulted in pent-up demand for goods, services, housing, and cars. And in that robust economic environment, my mother had gone to work for an alcoholic named Al Binkowsky, who owned a then-twenty year old business called Bungalow Bar B-Q. My parents were a classic American story—the children of immigrants taking advantage of opportunity, transcending lack of formal education with vision, risk-taking, and backbreaking work. At times, they had to keep me with them as they worked and Al would take me to the tavern across the street, sit me on the bar, and ply me with potato chips and candy while he slugged down shots and beers as my parents kept his business alive. Finally, Dad and Mom bought out Al. Mortgaged to the eyeballs, they had to rent out our recently-obtained nice house with the cherry tree, tall pines and fish pond. Also, I had to leave the school at which I was finally spending the whole day. Our family moved upstairs from the restaurant—a grim but exciting and disproportionately formative three years in my life. I was seven.

As industrious Americans of stout character, my folks were wonders. Like many, for decades I could only see my mother and father through the prism of my own existence, oblivious to the discipline and drudgery of running a business, especially a restaurant with night hours. But as I came around the curve and tasted life on my own, their achievements looked Olympian. I often used to wonder at older people getting weepy at thoughts or mention of their parents. I would think, what’s the big deal? Not anymore.

Of course, there are millions of stories like theirs. For a while now, I have been a political and social conservative and a patriot. How could one know my parents’ story and feel otherwise about conservative values, our country, and what opportunity looks like and what success requires? Even growing up as the child of entrepreneurs I admired my parents’ moxie. But parenting? That was sketchier.

THEBUNGALOW YEARS –

LIVING ABOVE THE JOINT

What a place! What a period in my life—from the time we first lived upstairs from the Bungalow and as I continued to work there through age twenty. The three years we lived upstairs – ages seven, eight, and nine – are deeply imprinted on my heart.

To a young boy even the jukebox was fascinating—circulating bubbles, multi-colored lights, mechanical arm that magically selected the right record, laid it perfectly onto the turntable and dropped the needle just right onto the record’s edge. It played constantly.

Decades later, heart-wrenching ballads like Tony Bennett’s Cold, Cold Heart, Johnny Ray’s Cry, or Jo Stafford’s You Belong to Me are still in my musical catalogue, their melodies and lyrics branded on my brain. Even when customers were scant, the waitresses, all young women, pumped money into the juke box and listened to the wails of Patsy Cline or Joni James over and over. The music of troubled love filled the dining room while the waitresses’ occasional faraway looks were beyond my boyhood ability to understand. Though I had heartbreak and yearning of my own, I couldn’t identify with them because when you’re a kid, whatever is, is.

During late-night rush hours the volume was turned up and non-stop music leached through the ceiling into my bedroom. When I hear one of those fifties