The early 1960s snapshot above has long fascinated me. Most likely taken by my mother Joan (RIP) with her trusty Kodak Brownie in our green and yellow kitchen at 680 South 5th in Lindenhurst, it shows my father Mario (RIP) and brother Mario Jr. (RIP) grinning in their matching navy blue Gulf coveralls, while my sister Joanie (RIP) and brother Marc look on. Whether the coveralls were store bought or sewn from a pattern by my mother or grandmother Evelyn (RIP) is lost to time. My father and Uncle Emil owned Trophy Motors on the border of Lindenhurst/West Babylon, a few yards north of the Long Island Railroad Babylon branch, pumping “That Good Gulf” gasoline and featuring two service bays. Mario repaired the vehicles, Emil ran the office, and Mario Jr. would sometimes tag along (my brother Marc and I were too young). I have no idea how much Trophy Motors pulled in but remember money always being tight around our house. Shopping at A & S or Woolworth’s or Billy Blake’s you’d grab something you thought you couldn’t live without, wave it in front of mom and hear some variation on…
“Put that BACK!”
“We can’t afford it!”
“With WHAT money, Christopher?!”
“You think we’re ROCKEFELLERS?!”
Single-income households were common and none of my friends had mothers in the workplace. Did we also share having to endure the same heated arguments around spending?
“Why are we getting more oil delivered? Didn’t I say to leave that damn thermostat alone?! Every time I look at it you’ve turned it up.”
“How many sweaters you want me to wear, Mario? It’s freezing in here! Are we all supposed to get PNEUMONIA?!”
I was conscious of money – our lack of it – from an early age, especially after we’d visit Uncle Emil’s house in Copiague. I’d come away thinking He’s doing a lot better than dad. His house was bigger, nicer, with more rooms and a large attached garage. Uncle Emil kept the Trophy Motors books and years later my father confided in me that his brother had been embezzling. My cousin J.D. scoffed at this when I bought it up once and it may be the reason we haven’t talked in years, though with my relatives who knows? If we had a family crest it’d depict two silhouetted figures back-to-back, chins raised, brows furrowed, arms folded across their chests and, above, in Latin, IMMENSUS ALIENATO.
ENDLESS ESTRANGEMENT.
Because my father was a mechanic whose hands were never always dirty, from an early age it felt to me that we were near the bottom of his family’s food chain. College-educated Uncle Homer lived in Katonah in a big old sprawling mansion on several acres, wrote ad campaigns on Madison Ave. and bought rare Italian sports cars my dad would help restore for a future cut of any sales (decades later my father was still bitching about getting shafted out of any proceeds because Uncle Homer died before his divorce was final and his widow wouldn’t honor any handshake agreements). Uncle Donny – whom my father called “The Golden Child” – worked for the phone company and seemed to always have money for nice clothes, nice cars and whatever else he desired. On my mother’s side, Yalie Uncle Bob was a newspaper man and wouldn’t live anywhere but Manhattan, usually on the Upper East Side (in contrast, Brooklyn-dwelling probably-didn’t-finish-high-school Uncle Joe once took all us kids to the Cold Spring Fish Hatchery where he tried to steal a rainbow trout out of one of the fish runs. You know, “For dinner.”).
From the time I was 15 I had a job so I could earn a few dollars to put gas in my moped, buy model kits and magazines, albums and guitar strings and whatever else my mother (my dad had moved out three or four years prior) deemed irrelevant. I worked as busboy, stockboy, bakery assistant, assembler in a (piss) factory, telemarketer… whatever I could. It never occurred to me to continue my education beyond high school because nothing about my future ever occurred to me. I lived in a constant, always on now, not knowing if I’d even be around long enough to bring any plans to fruition. And how the fuck would I pay for college on my own? My parents didn’t have the money and no one ever sat me down and said Here’s how you can get some loans if you want to go.
Sometimes I wonder how things might’ve turned out if the electric guitar and punk rock hadn’t come along. What would I have done with myself? I know I loved comedy, especially Saturday Night Live and Monty Python and Mad magazine. I wanted to be the next John Belushi, sans the dying young part. One night during senior year I even tried doing standup during an open mic night at Richard M. Dixon’s White House. Richard M. Dixon was a Nixon impersonator, most famously appearing in Where The Buffalo Roam, who parlayed his “fame” into a supper club near Commack. All I remember about my aborted standup career is that a completely unknown Rosie O’Donnell followed me on stage.
Then the Nihilistics came into being and I thought This is it. This is what I’m doing. The jobs are just jobs. Fuck that shit. This is gonna be what gets me out of here. Which is why it hit me so hard when some on the NYHC scene initially dismissed the Nihilistics as slumming suburbanites from Long Island. Like Mike, Ron, Troy and I left those shithole clubs in Manhattan and went home to our sprawling mansions with big lawns out front and built-in pools out back. Like we were inauthentic interlopers because we didn’t spring from the mean streets of Manhattan or dirty boulevards of Queens or pre-hipster Brooklyn or gritty Staten Island or even the boogie-down Bronx.
To be from Long Island marked you as not hard at all but the opposite. Fuckin’ New York Soft Core.
And then we’d get on stage and blow everyone away with our death’s head intensity (it wasn’t our musical chops). See if you can spot the common factor in all the interviews I’ve conducted for NIHILISTIC…
You guys scared the shit out of me.
You weren’t fucking around.
You took no prisoners.
Everyone else seemed to be on a picnic compared to you.
The one word I heard over and over again? MENACING.
So maybe it’s good we were dismissed by the city-dwellers on the scene as suburban pussies. They had no idea what we contended with: alcoholism, boredom, bullying, small town strictures, domestic violence and never enough money. The Nihilistics weren’t fucking around, which is why I sometimes wish the band ended its run after Mike died. I caught some video of the current incarnation from a few years back and it was like a bad punk rock comedy act, any sense of menace long gone.
But in our prime… we were something to see.