College Beer Run Goes Wrong

Joe went off to college in 1964, a fresh-scrubbed Italian kid with just the barest grasp of the English language. He'd managed to dodge a disastrous commitment to the seminary and priesthood and found refuge in a college that was far away and deep in the middle of American woods. St. Bonaventure was a nine-hour drive away (11-12 if you followed the speed limits!). Luckily for Joe, my father's barber business was pretty flush that year, and maybe proud of having a son in college, gifted him a '64 Impala to get him back and forth. Of course, this was only after agreeing to my mother's demands that it have plastic upholstery covers front and back. They were embossed with these little 3D cloverleafs that left imprints anywhere they contacted bare skin, but that's a story for another time.

At any rate, when he came back from school, it was with an armful of truck-driving albums... not even country and western, mind you, but hard-core, shit-kicking trucking music. Six Days on the Road, Diesel Smoke, Dangerous Curves—you get the picture. And he was wearing a pith helmet too. If you don't know what that is, think of any Tarzan movie where the white guys are lost in the jungle and surrounded by natives; the headgear they're wearing... those are pith helmets. I was confused. What happened to the nice Italian kid that left just a few months earlier? I didn't know it at the time, but it was one of the things that happens with cultural assimilation. You have no idea how things work in a new culture. You pick and choose elements of it, trying your best to fit in.

I learned English watching The Beverly Hillbillies and Mayberry RFD. For a while, I had the vocabulary and accent of a Carolina sharecropper. In Joe's case, the helmet was what the State Troopers were wearing at the time. By some coincidence, their vehicle of choice that year was a Chevy Impala. I guess the logic was that if he had to be doing 90 in a 65 mph zone, he may as well try to blend in. The trucker music? That's what was on AM radio up there. Foreign cultures. Strange traditions. They had nothing like this in Gioia del Colle. Besides, it kind of reminded him of Neapolitan folk music. Pick and choose. Try to blend in. See if you can figure out who you are along the way.

One day, he was sitting in his dorm room, and one of his buds asked him if he wanted to go for a picnic in Allegheny State Park. Before he knew it, he was in the back seat of a station wagon barreling down some side roads when they stopped at a deli to pick up some supplies. When his friends started to come out of the store, they were carrying cases of beer. A lot of beer. He reflexively grabbed one and loaded it into the car when this gentleman, bound by crutches and leg braces, came running... screaming out of the store. "Stop! Thief! Put those back!" Waving his crutches ominously. Terrified, Joe and his friends piled into the car and burned rubber trying to get away. He'd just committed his first felony.

He was just starting to watch his life flash before his eyes when things got worse. A police car came from behind, lights flashing and siren wailing. This is it, he thought. My life is ruined. He'd have to explain this to our parents and deal with the shame. Lose the car. Maybe an expulsion from college. Jail time. A hardscrabble life with tattoos and whiskey. Luckily, in those days, an open container of alcohol in a car was no big deal. The cops had noticed one of the guys in the car tossing a beer can out the window. Apparently, they had no idea about the theft that these guys had perpetrated a few minutes earlier. They got a ticket for littering and were let go with a warning. So now he's thinking, I'm safe. Crazy as this was, I'm not going to jail for grand theft.

A few weeks later, he's in the early stages of dating a lovely local girl named Valerie Reed (who he'd later marry) and gets invited to dinner. He's picking his way through a foreign menu, trying to figure out all these exotic American foods: Velveeta, mac & cheese, ketchup and mayo, egg salad, and white bread. When he happens to look up, he sees an oddly familiar, older gentleman walking into the dining room. With leg braces. And crutches. Valerie smiles and takes Joe by the arm, delighted to have a chance to introduce her new boyfriend. "... Joe, this is my uncle Leonard."