The year of the nurse 20/20 "A journey to myself."

By Anthony Leotta

In the wake of the Covid pandemic, the world in many ways seems to be re-emerging from a catastrophic nightmare. This is the true story of one man whose life underwent a remarkable transformation amidst the chaos. Entitled, "20/20 The Year of the Nurse: A Journey to Myself," it tells the story of growing up in a dysfunctional family in New York and adapting the role of caregiver even from the earliest days of my life. In many ways, this inevitably led to my calling as a nurse.

But this is not just the story of my professional life. As a young man searching for love and fulfillment, I thought I had found both with what I believed at the time was a wonderful man named Johnny. However, that dream was in fact an illusion. It turned out that I was in the manipulative grip of a hardcore narcissist, a destructive personality type of which I was naively unaware. My life went further downhill as I also learned of a deadly genetic disease within my family, and dealt with some tragic losses.

The good news is, this seemingly dark story takes a dramatic turn and becomes a tale of victory and overcoming, that will offer hope and inspiration to countless others suffering under similar circumstances. As the world plunged into panic when the brutal plague of Covid hit, I had embarked on a deep and profound spiritual journey of self-discovery that ultimately led to my personal redemption.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9798350901054

Book preview

BK90077431.jpg

20/20 The Year of the Nurse: A Journey to Myself

© 2023, Anthony Leotta.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Print ISBN: 978-1-66788-600-8

eBook ISBN: 979-8-35090-105-4

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter One

"G o through these rings of fire in your life; it is only fear that holds you back; we are here for you, echoed her words to me. It’s coming back for me to tell you this. And I’m not talking about your deceased relatives. I’m talking about angels, guides that are with us from the beginning of our lives. For the second time in my life, I was told by a clairvoyant that I would be writing this and that I was here in this life to help others. The first time was when I was around nineteen. I had gone to see a psychic that I had met at a gay bar in Sayville, New York, known as the bunk house, where I would fatefully meet my life partner. But I’ll come back to that a bit later. It was one of a few places where the gays went every Friday night to socialize, and it was there that I had met her. She had offered me a reading while socializing at the bar, and so I took her up on it. I had gone to her home later that week when I decided to contact her, and she told me many things about my young life. I suppose the only difference is now I have over thirty years of experience to share in my journey with you. I remember that I was sitting in her living room all those years ago as she walked around her kitchen while offering me a cup of tea. Her daughter had come home, and there were some exchanges between them, as I recall. And while sitting and waiting for her, a thought popped into my head that I wanted to ask her about but wasn’t sure if I should. It was then that she turned to me and said Yes, without the question having ever been asked. I sat there in astonishment. I like to put those things out there so you see that I’m real." I would later go on to have many other spiritual and divine occurrences showing me just how our angels and spirit guides are always channeling us in our lives if we’re open enough to receive them. And every so often, if we’re lucky enough, we get to know that divine connections that we sometimes get to share in our fleeting time together.

Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Anthony Leotta, born to Diana and Rodney on August 30, 1964. I was one of five children born second to the last. There were two older brothers and an older and a younger sister in my family. And like many kids of the ‘70s growing up was a tumultuous time of transformation, change and identity. I think by the time it came to the younger of us my parents were so caught up in their own stuff there was little left for us. I believe in many ways that I was fated and primed as the co-dependent and the fixer of my family unbeknownst to myself. Another of the many psychics I saw during this journey told me that this was something I was supposed to do in this lifetime, as I will go on to reveal. And it was with no little surprise that I would go on and do it professionally, too.

I’d like to think that my family had saved me as much as I have genuinely tried to save them looking back all these years later. My mom was a wonderful spirited person who had a psychic sense that I got from her but only I had ignored my own. I can say now after discovering and understanding what being an empath is that I have a very good intuitive sense about things. But maybe it has to do with my sun sign in Virgo and with a rising in Cancer. My mom had some deep traumas in her life beginning with abandonment by her mother Louise (aka Dedalumpa). Mom would affectionately give her this name because she used to sing a song to my older sister using this made-up word. Mom was great with assigning identities to people summed up in just one or two words based on some characteristic that she would identify about them. Louise put my mom and her older sister into a taxi as little girls and sent them to live with their wicked stepmother, Lily. Mom described Lily as a Joan Crawford type, and she was also known as Diamond Lil, because of the many diamond rings that she had acquired over the years. Mom said that when she lived with Lily in their New York apartment that they were the supers of the apartment building in Manhattan because of the cheaper rent they got. Mom said they would have to shovel coal into the furnace to provide the heat to the building. They were also responsible for the cleaning of the hallways and entry areas of the apartment house. Mom said that Lilly would paint their whole apartment in one night and have it all put back together by the next morning. She told me that Lilly had got hit once on the head by one of those heavy steel doors. You know, the ones that you would see propped open on the city streets and leading to basements as you walked by them. Mom said that Lily didn’t act right for a long time after her injury. Mom said that sometimes Lilly wouldn’t leave the house for days and that she had become fanatical in her ways.

Louise (Dedalumpa) my maternal grandmother had met another man, named Charlie, who was an Irishman and bartender working in the Dikeman Street area of the city. It was predominately an Irish neighborhood during that period of the ‘70s as I recall, and Charlie was a popular fragrance for women, and of course Dedalumpa had it. I can still remember the bottle sitting on her dresser in her bedroom of their Bronx University Heights apartment that overlooked the Hudson River and the Major Deacon Highway. Charlie would be lying in bed watching TV whenever we visited with Dedalumpa. Mom used to say that she’d have to write Louise first to schedule a phone call, and then to schedule our visit. Of course she was exaggerating this, but I’m sure it was how she felt. My mom hated that fragrance and that was probably because she hated Charlie even more. Louise had abandoned two daughters for this man, and it was also just a few years prior that she had also given up two of my mom’s sisters to adoption. I learned that my maternal grandfather Bill was a drinker, and consequently, Louise didn’t love him as the rationale for these events. Bill, as I learned, was deemed a hillbilly who was always playing a guitar, as told by Mom’s sister.

Dedalumpa never owned up to any of this to my mom and my mom held onto that resentment of her. Looking back on it, I don’t know if it was courageous of Louise to go after the man that she truly loved, giving up her children, or if it was just plain selfishness. We would later reconnect with one the two daughters that Louise gave up through a genealogy DNA test given to Mom’s sister by her daughter as a Christmas gift one year. My aunt had told me that she never imagined this outcome and only did it to know her family origins. Mom would tell me that years earlier she tried to find her but was unsuccessful. I know that it had always bothered my mom that her sisters were given away, and I knew that she never forgave Louise. In Dedalumpa’s defense, I later learned she had experienced some traumas as a girl. She had lost her younger brother Carlton, who had drowned falling through the ice while skating together as children. And I would later learn about Louise’s sexual abuse at the hands of her father, Pop Rogers, who would bizarrely end up living with her and Charlie in their Bronx apartment years later and becoming his caregiver. My aunt would tell me that once as a teenager she had seen Dedalumpa having sex in a car with some man and that she was horrified when she saw that it was her mother. It took me some years to figure this out, but these events had set the tone for Mom’s life, and perchance my only aunt’s, too.

I mean think about it: your mother is giving you away as a three-year-old child? The sense of abandonment that they both must have felt is unimaginable. And I know for certain that everything that came after in my mom’s life would come back to this one question for me. It’s amazing how impactful the things that a person experiences can make or break us as human beings, and conceivably set the tone of one’s life, as I will go on revealing. My mom met my dad while she was a cigarette girl working in the famed Copacabana nightclub in New York City during the mid-1950s, through a crowd of mutual friends. She told me that when she was younger she looked like a young Kim Novak, who was a famous Hollywood actress of that era. And that once Nat King Cole’s manager got her address, probably by paying someone off at the nightclub, and that his manager had showed up to her apartment early one morning where she living with Diamond Lilly. Mom said that she told him she was from the South and that her father wouldn’t appreciate it, alluding to his race. Her generation was a very prejudiced one, which was is a sad truth, but it’s just how things were, and perhaps in many ways they still are.

Mom was beautiful with the bluest of eyes, which all five of us got from her and from my dad, too. She was a pretty rebellious teen for her time in the 1950s. She once told me that she and some of the guys in the crowd jumped off the 59th Street Bridge into the East River of New York. I mean thinking about that now she was pretty fearless and maybe a little crazy, too? I mean, who the hell would ever do that today except for maybe a suicidal person? She once told me that she and a group of her friends were also charged criminally with a felonious assault charge. Mom had the article among some of her photos, and which I remember seeing once: it showed her, along with a bunch of other teens on the street and all were looking down to the ground. Some of the boys had done something to an elderly man and because she was part of the crowd they had charged them all. My aunt would tell me some years later Mom was accused of hitting the man while using what she described as a garrison belt, although Mom never told me about this. My aunt would tell me that she believed my mom was also raped during this time while in the house of dentation for women.

Mom was quite the character to say the least to everyone that ever knew and loved her. She was always brutally honest to people with a gregarious and humorous personality mixed in. She was good with her life’s experience, and always seemed to simplify things, providing the answers that people had often looked for in her. She told me that when she met my dad he had wanted to impress his friends and asked her to come wearing the costume that she would wear while working at the Copa nightclub. I’m sure that she enjoyed the attention, too. My dad’s family lived in the lower 50s of Manhattan but would later move to Corona in Queens where that famous Italian lemon ice king and the New York World’s Fair still stands today. I remember going there as kid and enjoying an Italian ice with all that sweet syrup loaded in the Dixie cone at the bottom; boy, were they the best!

My dad came from a large Italian family. My grandfather Anthony had married Virginia Michaels of English and German descent. I was named after him even though I would learn that my mother couldn’t stand him. I would also later learn that their last name was also changed by my grandmother Virginia. I guess you could get away with that in those days? My aunt Joan, my great uncle Joey’s wife, and Tony’s only living younger brother, said that Virginia had come up with some story about the mafia coming after them. But I would learn that the name is actually spelled just like the actor Ray Liotta. No relationship, of course, and Ray Liotta, as I learned years later, was also adopted, but who knows? Thinking about it now, Virginia probably feared the last name thing because my great paternal grandfather Stephano was killed in NYC by some organized crime thing. I discovered that he was stabbed in the street as told by one of my cousins. But I never understood why she had changed only my dad’s name and not the rest of her children’s. I would find this out when Uncle Joey was called to the office of vital statistics in Manhattan after applying for a passport. My aunt said they made him change his last name after the 9/11 attacks. The office had pulled the records of my great grandparents Stefano and his wife Laura, who had both come here from Italy by way of Ellis Island. My aunt would later tell me her story once that after they had discovery the name change she would say to Uncle Joe that they weren’t legally married. She has some witty sense of humor and always the calmest of demeanors. It was something that I had always appreciated about her and I recognized their love of each other, which I had also felt transcended all of us. Aunt Joan always made us a part of her family; I mean, what are five more kids in the mix?

Many times my parents would go to the local bar with them whenever we visited. It would be their favorite pastime, of course. I’d be there with my ten cousins, yes, it’s not a typo, and there were ten children between them! I would also have something to do of every minute in my multigenerational and extended family. Mom was always good at regaling her tales. Once she said they were all at the bar socializing, and there was some Italian man who kept touching my mom’s hair, while saying to her what nice she had. She said that she was wearing a long blond wig that evening and that the drinks were going down pretty easily. Eventually, she got annoyed with him for continuously touching her hair and she pulled the wig off while throwing at him and yelling. Here, take the fucking thing!

During another time my cousin Anne told me that the parents had all gone out drinking this one night, and had all got home late, going to bed right away. It was the next day that Anne said she noticed on the wall near where my mom had slept that she had taken off her false eyelashes and stuck them to the wall. I always enjoyed hearing that story, even today, especially from Anne with her Flushing Queens accent. It always brings me back to my roots of city life, and what family truly was then.

My dad was the oldest child in his family. Dad had a brother, Charles aka Tony boy, and sisters Judy, Jill, and the youngest of them, Cheryl, born in 1955. My grandfather Tony was in the junkyard business, as many men of the era were, and Dad worked in the family pulling junked cars apart for their parts. Dad was a hard worker and a pretty quiet man. My mother would tell me that she felt that the family always shunned him and never really treated him right. I would later find out the reason why that was. My mother wasn’t one to hold back or mince words, and she would tell you where things were at, which is probably why Tony didn’t like her. It was because she had stood up to him, and that was something that women just didn’t do, but especially for their generation. Mom would say, No great love lost there, whenever referring to him. Mom said when she first started dating Dad it was always a process getting him to the phone and that she had envisioned that he had lived in a mansion. My grandparents would call my dad to the phone in dramatic style yelling his name throughout the house. But maybe it was an Italian thing. Mom told me she was attracted to Dad because he wasn’t like the other guys. He was small in stature, as were all the men in Dad’s family, and that Dad had no ass, too. Their union was by default, for the same reason that many of that generation got married: unwed and pregnant. As many of us knew, this was a disgrace for a woman and it was looked down upon.

They were married in October of 1958 in the All Souls Church in Manhattan. Ronnie, my oldest brother, would be born three months later in January 1959. We lived in the Pink house, as my mother fondly referred to it, because it had pink aluminum siding. It was located off 103rd Street and Waldron Avenue in Corona, Queens. Not far from the school where Paul Simon wrote his famous song Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard. It was also across the street from my grandparents Tony and Virginia, who had a house on Waldron Street, too. Mom said that she hated living across from them but that she had endured it because it was cheap rent.

A catastrophic thing happened to my dad around age six which I believe set the stage for his life, and why perhaps he wasn’t truly accepted by his family. One day Uncle Joey was over at my dad’s house visiting with him and his sister-in-law, my grandmother. Virginia directed Dad to keep an eye on his younger sister Jill while telling my Uncle Joey, who was in school, to head off so that he wasn’t late, while she had ran down to the corner store for, what I believe as I was told, olive oil. My grandmother had left something cooking on the stove, and Jill ended up playing near it. Most children of the era were dressed frilly with satin then, and Jill was engulfed into flames before my dad’s eyes! I remember hearing that my dad was too little to even reach the sink, and had to get a chair to fill a pot with water while trying to extinguish the flames. His sister Jill burned to death before his eyes!

When Virginia returned Jill was slumped over a chair and was dead. Imagine the devastation for a seven-year-old boy seeing his sister burn to death, and the fear that he was to blame. Of course there was no therapy then, and so where do a family and little boy put that? That’s why my mother believed his parents treated him the way that they did throughout his life. They couldn’t accept their own responsibility in Jill’s tragic and untimely death. Although no words were ever spoken of blame as I recall, it was visible in retrospect through the great dysfunction in my dad’s family that would surely follow. Years later Dad always feared that my youngest sister Lisa would suffer the same fate. And seeing the only photo of Jill among Dad’s things as I grew up, my sister Lisa was a dead ringer of her, both with long golden blond hair. Mom would tell me Dad would always remind her about Lisa whenever she was cooking, and still can recall his words today while watching Mom in the kitchen.

Mom would tell me about Dad’s violent and unpredictable side during those years, and what she went through while living in the pink house. Dad often worked long days and he would leave her two dollars on the kitchen table every day for whatever she needed for us five kids and herself. I guess in the 1960s that was good money? Once she said that they were play fighting on the floor and he began to choke her and then forced sex on her. I can’t imagine what that was like for her but it would be revealed later why he was so unpredictable. Somehow I think that many women of the era must have endured a lot of violence especially during that time, and behind closed doors. I’m certain that Mom wasn’t the only one that suffered in silence at the hands of their spouses. She was pretty open with me and probably to a fault where no kid should have learned these sorts of secrets from their parent. But perhaps in some ways she became almost as a sister to me rather than my mom as I would continue to grow up, and it was just as the psychic would later tell me. I never really thought of it that way, at least until I heard her words spoken to me.

I would go on to be the fixer for my role in my dysfunctional family. I think it’s always been inherent in me somehow, but especially as a Virgo. We seem to have the answers for everyone’s life and their solution too as we see it. Mom told me one night she took my brothers out after Dad got home from work on this evening. She told him that she was going out to visit with a friend or get cigarettes as I recall. She told me that she had made an arrangement to have my father harmed that night as a way to get back at him for all of his abuse of her. Mom could be malevolent, as she was the sign of Scorpio, and anyone that knows astrology I think knows what I’m talking about. I think that Hillary Clinton is one also, but I digress. They say the window to the soul are in the eyes and there’s something about a Scorpio’s eyes that as bright as they are somehow reveal an intensity and secretiveness when staring back at you that you’ll never know what it is that are ever pondering. I learned that this was a man who was a junkie, as Mom would describe him, who came into the house with a large lead pipe while my father was asleep innocently on the couch. Dad always slept with the covers pulled high up over his head and this man beat my father within an inch of his life. I don’t know if it was the blankets that saved him from a fatal beating this night but Mom said that when she returned there was blood everywhere and that my dad was in the bathroom upstairs now putting the pieces of his scalp back together. I mean can you imagine? It still freaks me out drawing a visual of that scene even until this very day. He was taken to Elmhurst hospital where ironically, I was born just a few years later, and where Diamond Lil would years later die. It took Dad three months to recover from that attack. Mom said that he had residual migraines that lasted for months afterwards and that were extremely unpredictable, and he would often be silent not speaking for long periods of time. Mom said he never really knew who was behind it but that he had surmised that it was over a pool gambling debt, and not due to Mom’s prearrangement.

Chapter Two

I was conceived that year, in December ‘63. Mom would later tell me that I was their love child, as bizarre as it sounds, and that she found out she was pregnant while she was working as a chamber maid at the brand-new hotel LaGuardia of the New York World’s Fair in Queens. I still reflect even today on the promise of their life together whenever I travel into Manhattan and see that huge steel globe that marks the park in the distance from the expressway in passing. Mom told me there were two more pregnancies, one before me and one after, and that she had given herself two self-induced abortions. I’m sure there was a lot of that going on, as legal abortion wasn’t an option for women in those years. She told me she used a pill she had gotten from the corner druggist known as Humphries #11, which was used for athlete’s foot then, and lye boy soap together and soaked in the bathtub to induce the miscarriages. She told me that in those years it was required by women to have had several pregnancies before they would give you a legal tubal ligation. Oral birth control was in its initial stages of development and not yet available until around 1967, when Mom learned about it from her sister-in-law Margaret, aka Chunky. Mom said that she never liked her either, referring to her as a prim and proper bitch.

My memories of the pink house have diminished now but some things remain in my mind even today, like my brothers always trying scaring me in the dark, and calling me Little Lord Fauntleroy, an old movie from the 1930s. Ironically, I saw the movie while flipping through the channels recently one night before sharing this journey. Thinking back on it I was always a very sensitive child. Once I was jumping on the bed and hit my head on one of those old steel radiators, the kind that always gave the best heat with their hissing noises spewing from them. I was bleeding from my head and I still remember my mom’s face of panic while she was frantically looking for my shoes in the living room of the pink house. She said that the blood from my head was percolating out of my scalp as she described it but my dad had already put me in his tow truck, and took me to the hospital. I still can remember sitting in Dad’s tow truck with no shoes on till this day. That’s one thing I was lucky enough to get from my mom, which is a pretty good memory. Mom was good at that too. I think it’s a Virgo thing, because we just seem to remember everything! It’s sometimes a blessing and sometimes a curse I suppose.

Mom was resolute to get us out of the city, as things and times were changing and there was no chance that Dad would ever be more than a junkyard worker in the family business. It was a period when young families were moving to Long Island in a second wave with the promise of better living. My grandfather Tony was busy drinking and cheating on Virginia, who by then was in and out of the psychiatric hospital known as Creedmoor, which actually still exists today. I remember seeing a photo of her once in a newspaper clipping among my dad’s things, where dad’s mom was sitting on the floor of the hospital with her head between her knees and her unkempt gray hair hanging down in front of her face. I remember feeling sad that she was alone, and the stigma and shame of it. Stigma wasn’t something unfamiliar to me and would soon follow me for a long time in my life. The article must have been some type of exposé on mental health treatment facilities which at the time were getting noticed for their poor and inhumane care of people. Uncle Joey and Aunt Joan would help dad’s mother many times during those years, and she would always call upon them and ask to be taken to the hospital whenever she was getting sicker. I think she had felt safe being in the hospital because she was losing control of her life. My Uncle Joe and Aunt Joan became her safety net, and I remember them always being there for her. Mom would tell me Virginia was never quite right to begin with. Once, she said, when she lived briefly with them after marrying my dad and before moving into the pink house, that Virginia would always leave one egg on the counter in the morning for my Mom to feed Ronnie his breakfast. My mom confronted her about this one day when she then lunged at Mom attempting to pull Ronnie from her arms. Mom said Virginia would always sleep on sunny days, and would wash and wax the floor on rainy ones. Mom would tell me that if Virginia didn’t have one vacuum but that she had owned three of them. I can recall once that she was in the car with all of us kids, and my dad was driving all of us somewhere. Virginia was on the floor of the car crouched down under the dashboard and afraid for