About Mike
I am currently an Associate Editor for Mad Swirl Magazine and a regular contributor to the Red Hook Star Revue.
My writings have appeared in Narratively, Pif Magazine, Longshot
Island, Beautiful Losers, The Honest Ulsterman, Chagrin River Review, The New
Engagement and many other publications.
My short story collections, Hallucinating Huxley and Freud's
Haberdashery Habit, were published by Alien Buddha Press. Both are
available on Amazon.
Published by Ovunque Siamo Press in 2019, my book CALL ME GUIDO explores three family generations as seen through the lens of the
Italian American song tradition.
In 2019, I was nominated for the
Pushcart Prize by Ovuqnue Siamo Press.
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About CALL ME GUIDO
Call Me Guido is about three family generations as
seen through the lens of the Italian American song tradition.
Simultaneously confronting and courting Italian-American
stereotypes head-on, all of the stories are connected by crooner themes: An
uncle who discovers himself by believing he’s Tony Bennett; a son discovering
Sinatra’s fragility while driving with his father; Bobby Darin selling his soul
to possess the gift of performance; a mother, dark and strong, like the earth
itself, teaching her son the meaning of strength; a mobster hired to kill a
singer who wouldn’t cow-tow to the mob. In this collection, there are
gamblers and mobsters, but philosophers and poets too.
As poet Joey Nicoletti (Thundersnow) writes, these are “the
stories of relatives, potato farmers, performers, imagined aristocrats, and the
ballads they sing.” John Keahy (Seeking Sicily) says, “This collection, in
quick bites, informs, entertains, and surprises---a masterpiece of
storytelling.”
Alfonso Colasuonno, cofounder of Beautiful Losers
Magazine writes “Mike Fiorito navigates his readers through the
ethnic twilight of the 21st century Italian-American experience in CALL ME GUIDO, a book that is hilarious, thought-provoking, and poignant in
equal measure. Fiorito’s CALL ME GUIDO will be regarded as a
seminal work of Italian-American literature.”
An Excerpt from CALL ME GUIDO
One More for My Dad
Driving in the car
with my father, he reaches over to turn on the radio, steering with his left
hand. He puts on “The Imaginary Ballroom,” a program that plays Sinatra, Martin
and Bennett.
Sinatra’s voice
emerges warmly from the speakers.
“Yes, it’s alright
with me,” Sinatra sings sweetly. The song is not full of bravado; it’s tender
and hesitant. He’s telling a woman that she looks like his previous lover; she
has sweet lips too, like his old lover. He says that if she’s lonely one night,
it’s alright if she kisses him with those lips.
We never hear her
response.
I hate to admit that
it’s a great song and that Sinatra sings it dramatically and convincingly. I
don’t want to like my father’s music — he desperately wants me to.
I look over at my dad;
he turns the music up louder.
There are parts of the
song that Sinatra sings in a whisper. He’s pleading with the woman. This is not
the Sinatra I had despised growing up. A braggart, a “wop” gangster. This is
the voice of a fragile and sensitive person. If I said this to my father, he’d
say, “You’re too deep for me,” which would piss me off. I’d hear that as “I
don’t want to talk about that kind of shit with you.” So I don’t say anything.
I have a reputation to uphold with my dad. I am the tough, independent kid,
unlike my brother Frank who, as a kid, cried when my mother washed his hair in
the tub.
I am also the one who
punched a kid in the face so hard when I was about eight or nine, I knocked his
tooth out. The kid’s father was so angry he came to our house, knocked on the
door.
My father opened the
door.
“Do you know your son
punched my son in the mouth and knocked his tooth out?”
My father looked at
the kid. He had a big gap to the left of his two front teeth.
“I want your son to
apologize,” the other man said.
“Michael,” my father
shouted, “please come here.”
I came to the door,
dirt still on my face from playing outside.
The man looked me up
and down then looked at his own son. Standing next to his kid, I was about a
head shorter.
“You let this kid knock
your teeth out?” the man asked his son, fixing his stare at me.
His son started to
cry, like he was about to get a worse beating than the one I’d given him.
The man grabbed his
son by the shirt, and dragged him away.
When they were gone,
my dad said, “You gotta learn to control yourself.” He didn’t yell at me. He
never directly encouraged me to fight, but when retelling the story to my mom
at the dinner table, he laughed a bit.
“He don’t take shit
from no one, this kid,” he said. Being tough might get me far. The world is
cruel.
Then, when I was about
fourteen, he and my mom came back from a parent-teacher meeting at my school.
“I met Mr. Amato,” my
father said. Mr. Amato was my science teacher. It was his first year and my
classmates and I weren’t interested in making it easy on him. In the lab, I had
hit a kid in the back of the head with a frog kidney.
“He said he has a hard
time keeping the class in order.”
I listened
attentively, curious to hear what else Mr. Amato had to say.
“I raised my hand,” my
father said, “and asked him if he could single out the troublemakers and punish
them.” I told him I thought that was a good idea.
“He asked me my last
name,” my father said, then paused.
“When I told him
Fiorito, you know what he said?”
“I don’t know,” I
said.
“He said, your son,” –
my father paused and sighed – “is the ringleader of the group.”
He looked
disapprovingly at me, curling his tongue in his cheek.
“Ringleader” echoed in
my head over and over.
Shaking his head, he
had a slight grin on his face. He seemed to at least be proud that I was in
charge.
The sound of the
Sinatra songs brings me back to the present.
We stop at a red
light; my father taps his fingers on the steering wheel and then looks over at
me.
He lowers the music.
“Why do you have a
mopey face on?” he asks.
“No reason.” I’m not
sure what in particular was bothering me, but I’m sure something was. Something
was always bothering me.
“Are you worried about
us going to live with grandma?”
I’m not, but I say
yes. The housing authority had found out that my mom was working and had
evicted us from the projects. Since rent was based on income, we were at fault
for not declaring my mother’s earnings. But my mother paid the rent; my
father’s gambling debt consumed almost all of the income he made. Whereas my
father was a gambler, sometimes stripped into vulnerability, my mother was
constant, hardworking and indefatigable.
“Don’t worry,
everything will be okay.”
I am not worried about
that, at least I don’t think I am.
“We’ll be there for
only a few months,” he says.
“Grandma lives near
your school,” he adds.
I think of how nice it
will be to walk to school, instead of taking two buses every morning.
He turns up the music
again.
I change the station,
looking at him for approval.
He nods okay.
“I Can’t Get No
Satisfaction” is playing.
My father lowers the
music.
“I like this song,” I
say over Jagger’s shrieking “And I try, and I try.”
“It’s noisy,” he says.
“This is the guy who struts like a rooster?”
He starts to jerk his
head back and forth, mimicking Jagger.
I make a face at him.
“He does more than dance like a rooster,” I say.
I hear Jagger’s words
about not wanting to listen to TV announcers and wanting to do his own thing as
if he is speaking to me directly.
I don’t know if my
father hears the words, or if they would matter to him. Jagger is a rooster, is
all he knows.
“He’s alright,” my
father says. “He’s got balls. Can’t sing, but he’s got balls.”
You don’t know shit
about music, I think to myself.
I look out the window.
I’m thinking about
Mick Jagger and then about how Maria Hermano sucked my dick earlier that day.
“I told you not to
worry,” my father says. “It’s going to be okay.”
I’m happy he’s worried
about me, even if for the wrong reasons.
“We’re going to stop
over at Pete’s to get sausage,” he says, “before we pick up Mom at the train
station.”
I nod.
“Satisfaction” is
over. He looks at me before turning the station back to the oldies.
“Old Devil Moon,” sung
by Tony Bennett, comes on.
He looks at me,
raising the volume.
“It’s not noisy; this
is quiet music.”
The guitar playing is
terrific. Bennett’s vocals swing with feeling.
“You like this?”
I shrug my shoulders,
saying, “I don’t know.”
“Is he the one that
looks like a parrot?” I ask to get him back for the knock on Jagger.
“What, Bennett?”
I point to the radio.
He’s got a big Italian
nose, like my father.
“He sings like a
parrot.”
“At least he doesn’t
strut like a rooster.”
We both laugh a
little, but I don’t reply. I let him get the last word so I can hear the rest
of the song.
THE HISTORY OF FEAR
My sister,
Gina, calls me after she read my story.
“Oh my God,
why did you write that stuff about Dad?” She’s not frantic, but she’s upset
that I wrote publicly about our father’s gambling problems.
“I write
about our family because it’s hard to write about,” I say. “Because it
matters.”
“You know
Mom can’t see this story,” she adds. And I know that too. Too many details
about how he borrowed money, and the general despair we all felt. Though it was
an almost daily discussion when we were kids, it’s now a subject to be avoided.
When my father died twenty-five years ago, he became saintly. His earthly sins
were buried in his grave.
“I know. I
don’t want her to see it. I don’t want to upset her.”
“Well, I’m
happy for you,” Gina says. She means it, too. “I’m thrilled for your
success.”
My father’s
worst critic, when he was alive, was my mother. I remember how it upset me to
hear her talk to him. Before she moved out of our house for a few weeks, her
attacks on him became even more vitriolic.
“If you
have to get another job, do it,” she said. “I’m working all day, come home to
make dinner, clean the house then sell jewelry at night,” she added, raising
her voice. Then. “I don’t care if you never come home.”
This last
statement clanged off the project building walls and rang throughout the house,
like a rusted metal bell hammered on a steel stairwell.
My father
didn’t respond. He had swallowed so much guilt, he couldn’t speak. The guilt
stuffed his mouth, froze his throat and sank into his stomach. From there it
went straight into the infinite space of his soul. Enough guilt to fill the
universe. He looked down at his crossword puzzle and tapped his foot in his
slipper. In silence.
Hearing the
shriek in my mother’s voice bothered me as a kid. Why did she have to be so
mean? Now I know better. She was out of her mind with worry. How will we pay
rent? How will we make it to the next day?
She went on
long into the night. Her voice searing and desperate.
But
nowadays, my mother only praises my father. About how smart he was. How
talented. How handsome. The truth is they did love each other very much. You
could always see that. They hugged each other. Spoke kindly most of the time.
And they enjoyed each other’s company. It was the gambling that poisoned their
relationship.
And so now
I am the Fredo of the family. The snitch. I say things. I write things. You
have to understand that this tradition of keeping your mouth shut is very old.
It goes back centuries. It is the modern form of omertà, or code of silence. Omertà
is a dialect form of the word umiltà, “humility,”
in reference to the code of submission of individuals to the group interest.
Being taciturn, you’re serving the needs of a greater good. Shut up, don’t
upset your mother. Keep your mouth closed, show respect.
The roots
of our family silence extend back hundreds of years. It begins in Sicily and
Southern Italy in general. Since Sicily was a crossroads for empires, it was
often occupied by foreign powers. The Greeks, Romans, Moors, Normans, Bourbons,
and Nazis, to name a few. Average Sicilians couldn’t count on government, or
society, to help them. This was only compounded when Garibaldi united Italy.
Although Garibaldi recruited the South to fight the Bourbons in the North, he
then abandoned the South. The South suffered from lack of infrastructure:
schools, hospitals and so on. And the villages were under feudal rule; if you
were a laborer, there was simply no way out. They were trapped, like mice in a
cage. The only thing they could count on was family. Family was their refuge.
When Vito Corleone says “Never let anyone outside the family know what you’re
thinking,” he’s referring to the tradition of omertà.
Given the tumultuous nature of Sicily’s
history, its notable writers – Leonard Sciascia, Luigi Pirandello, Giuseppe di
Lampedusa, Elio Vittorini, and Maria Messina – have described an overarching
narrative of paura storica, or
history of fear. Fear of the outsider. Fear of the unknown.
In
writing about my family, I’ve committed a sin. I’ve broken a long held
tradition of silence. It’s as if I’ve woken my father from the grave. Only I
can see him looking at me disapprovingly. Behind curtains, behind doors.
Walking the halls of our project apartment, alone. Like I unleashed fear of the
outsider on our family.
And
while my sister and other siblings might be slightly wounded by my breaking the
silence, they are also happy for me. And proud of me. That’s another
contradiction in the Southern Italian soul. The love for family is so strong,
you can hate someone, or really be annoyed at them, maybe never even talk to
them, but still love them, still want the best for them. This isn’t always true
with every family, but it’s true with mine.
So
I continue to tell our story, our history of fear.
