My Name is Nobody

The cousin/roommate has been transferring my grandfather's biography tapes to CD over the past few weeks, so every now and then when I pass by his room I hear things like "And so I told that fella ... that he could take his job ... and shove it up his ass."

Grandpa was a sailor.

So, last night, while driving out to Costco we were playing one in the car, and he's talking about his days in the Brooklyn Naval Yard before he sailed on the Indianapolis (side note: yesterday afternoon we heard all about how he saw FDR get a bath - ! - grandpa spied him through a neighboring porthole while FDR was on board ship), and he's going on about painting with enamel and some long story about not obeying orders but how it didn't mean anything but that he knew this guy Randall was out to get him but he would never disobey orders again except for that time he didn't ask for permission to leave the ship when he was walking his family down after a visit and he had to come back and the officer of the deck, who didn't want to dress him down in front of his parents, told him to ask for permission to come and go because that's the way they do it in the Navy and he saluted the officer and saluted the flag and then went back down to his parents to tell him how he had gotten in trouble, thereby dressing himself down in front of his parents...

You get it. They're old man stories ("So I tied an onion on my belt, because it was the style at the time"), but with some gems.

One of those gems is the story of Phyllis Petrucelli. Her father didn't like that Luigi, that sailor, so they had to meet on the sly in Jersey and because they walked in the shadows a rumor started that she was pregnant. Now ... Grandpa wasn't a simple man. He was a naive man, in a simple way, and he doesn't quite explain the connection between walking in the shadows and splitting up when they came to the neighborhood (so no one would know they were together) with her being pregnant. And it doesn't seem to be connected with being in the shadows as much as when they separated at the neighborhood -- he knew that hiding their relationship would get them into this kind of trouble ... ? So everyone said they had to get married -- even though she wasn't pregnant -- but just before he shipped out he got drunk at a party and told a friend that he couldn't get married before he shipped out because he was "just too drunk."

So if he hadn't gotten drunk and had married Phyllis in Jersey City (or if an ulcer hadn't kept him out of the war and off of the Indianapolis when it went down), there's a really good chance that I wouldn't be here.

Fascinating.