(Title)??

9:00 PM: Ready to write a scintillating blog post. Ready to go!

9:02: Will put some music on for inspiration.

9:02-9:09: Hit “shuffle” after unable to decide what to play.

9:10: Don’t like that song. Skip.

9:10:10: Skip.

9:10:21: Skip.

9:11: Good song. Ok, here we go.

9:11-9:12: (Taps fingers).Stares at blank screen.

9:14: Skip.

9:15: Hey, where’s my phone? Uses “Find My Phone”.

9:16: Found phone but battery is at 8%.

9:17: Locate a charger, plug in phone. Says “Software Update” available. Might as well do it now.

9:18: Stares at blank screen.

9:18:20: Skip.

9:19: Ooh, that index finger fingernail is bugging me. Get nail clippers.

9:20-9:22: Might as well trim all of them.

9:23: Maybe I’ll make some coffee.

9:24: Stares at blank screen.

9:26: Skip.

9:27: Pours a cup of coffee, then throws it in the sink. What was I thinking? It's too late for coffee.

9:29: Puts fingers on keyboard, ready to type. Ok, I just need a title!

9:30: Hear a beep. Was that the smoke alarm? Tests both alarms, all okay.

9:31: Skip.

9:32: Stares at blank screen.

9:34: Hears the beep again. Pauses the music and listens for a minute. Nothing.

9:35: Skip.

9:36: Stares at blank screen. Oh, hell, I’ll tackle this tomorrow.

9:37: Skip.

9:38: Shuts computer off.

Song of the Day: Ian Hunter will be eighty-four in June. Four years older than Joe Biden. This song features the soon to be eighty-three Ringo on drums and the relatively youthful former Heartbreaker Mike Campbell on guitar.

Part Three, Tougher Than the Rest

Growing Up

 

                Fittingly, Danny Martini’s first memory was traumatic. Three older kids tied him to the top of a playground slide at the apartment complex where he lived and left him there, crying.  He was about four years old, so the memory was dim but terrifying, as it would be for any four-year old in that situation. When Danny considered the incident as he got older, he decided that A) he was the victim of a mean prank by some cruel older kids, or B) his big mouth got him in trouble. If it was B), it might’ve been the first time, but certainly not the last.

Danny’s first real memory was probably buried deep in his subconscious--a memory of slamming doors and screaming parents. As a baby he was surely often startled by the high decibel arguments from the other room. Throughout his life, loud noises almost always made him jump, probably a conditioned reflex from all that noise. Danny reacted that way to all loud noises, really.

With apologies to the Rolling Stones, Danny was born in a crossfire hurricane to parents ill- suited for parenting. Frank, Danny’s father, was the product of a closeted and missing-in-action father and an alcoholic mother. She finally chose the bottle over the boys and put Frank and his brothers in an orphanage. Frank absorbed as much corporal punishment as he could take and, at seventeen, used a fake I.D. to enlist in the Navy at the tail end of WW II. Frank returned to Syracuse after the war and found steady work as a custom cabinet maker. Most evenings he bent elbows at the bar with brother Bob. Frank was young and quite handsome, but shy. He struggled talking to girls. Then he met Audrey, a flaming redhead and fell “ass over teakettle,” as he phrased it, for her. Audrey got away, though and when his kids were grown, he admitted she was the great love of his life.

Danny’s mother Helen came from a large, dysfunctional, and desperately poor Italian family. Her father dulled the pain from his crippling depression with homemade wine. He seldom worked. Her mother was cold and cruel to Helen. She called her brutto bastardo (ugly bastard) and once beat her with a stick for losing ten cents. Another time, Helen told the kids, she was tied to a chair in the basement (“With rats crawling around my feet,” as Helen related the story) for another forgotten offense.  As Danny and his sisters Ann and June, grew older, they found Helen to be an unreliable witness, and they viewed her stories with increased skepticism. As small children, though, they absorbed every story as the gospel truth.

One night when Frank and Bob were tying one on, a pretty and petite brunette came in with a couple of her girlfriends. Frank whispered to Bob, “Hey, she’s pretty cute, huh?”

Bob said, “Whaddya telling me for? Go talk to her if you’re interested, Frankie.”

Frank never got the chance. The pretty brunette sat down next to Frank and introduced herself. “Hi. My name is Helen. What’s yours?” She was instantly smitten by the young, handsome, and clean-cut guy on the barstool next to her, and the feeling was mutual.

“My name is Frank,” he said. He could barely believe his good luck.

They had a torrid but tumultuous romance. Frank was reserved and quiet but could be mean, if provoked. Helen could provoke. Thin-skinned and hyper-neurotic, she went from zero to a hundred in a flash. They argued a lot, though it never came to physical violence. Whenever Frank attempted to shut things down, Helen turned up the heat and set them to boiling again. “And another thing…,” she’d say. She craved the drama.

After a few months, Frank had had enough. He was ready to end things when Helen surprised him with, in Frank’s eyes, the worst kind of surprise--she was pregnant. Frank did what was the right--the only--thing back in the 1940s; he proposed, and Helen eagerly said yes. Despite all the arguing and drama, she loved Frank. They quickly planned and got married at St. Augustus before Helen’s “surprise” showed. Otherwise, a church wedding would’ve been out of the question.

One night, the new bride suddenly doubled over in pain. Frank’s car was on the fritz, again. He  called a cab which rushed them to Memorial Hospital, where the ER doc delivered the bad news. Helen’s pregnancy was ectopic; one where the fertilized egg grows outside the uterus. In her case, the egg was lodged in one of her fallopian tubes, it had grown precipitously, and Helen’s life was in danger. The surgeon was able to save Helen’s life, though she was in grave danger with two quarts of blood, as she told the story, in her stomach. The baby was lost. A year later, Frank and Helen had their first child, a daughter they named Ann. Ann was born two months prematurely, an incredibly risky birth at the time, but survived. Ann was her father’s daughter in spirit, quiet and shy, the ideal child.

Five years and five million arguments later, still battling but still together, the Martinis were expecting again. This time, the pregnancy was carried to term and delivered by Caesarian section. Helen’s doctor, Andrew Port, held the baby over her head and asked her, “What do you think you have, Helen?”HeHeHHhhH

Helen looked up at the baby Dr. Port was holding. “Oh, I don’t have a girl’s name picked out. Please let it be my Daniel!”

 Dr. Port’s eyes crinkled as he replied, “It’s your Daniel.”

Daniel Michael Martini was a robust eight pounds, six ounces and the apparent picture of health.

Nobody knew, or imagined, that he was born with cystic fibrosis. CF was a much less understood disease in 1956. Clinical dogma in the fifties condemned CF babies to a short, hard life.  Kids diagnosed with it seldom lived into their teens. Mild cases like Danny’s were largely unknown.  Kids with CF had excessive salt on their skin when they got sweaty. They had a failure to thrive and had trouble gaining and maintaining their weight due to inability to absorb food properly. That symptom led to perhaps the most telling and obvious indicator--CF kids’ poop had a half-life roughly comparable to plutonium and seemed about as lethal. Even so, nobody--Frank, Helen, or the doctors--connected the dots. Danny had all the signs, but everyone thought he was far too healthy to have cystic fibrosis. CF not only flew beneath Helen and Frank’s radar; it wasn’t even on the radar.

In the twenty-first century, prospective parents are often prescreened to see if either one is a carrier of the defective gene that causes CF. Cystic fibrosis is a recessive genetic disease; if both parents are carriers, there is a one-in-four chance their child will be born with CF. All newborns are tested, as well, for a pancreatic chemical called immunoreactive trypsinogen (IRT); if that measurement is high, CF is suspected. Some states do DNA testing, as well, and when CF is suspected, a sweat-chloride test is also done.  As previously mentioned, babies with CF have salty skin from an excess of salt (chloride) in their sweat. This comprehensive approach to CF testing means that, today, few if any babies stay undiagnosed.    

Danny was a smart, sensitive, and talkative little boy. His older sister Ann doted on him. June, two years younger, drove him crazy sometimes, as little sisters do. He loved her but preferred playing by himself. Even then, Danny had a fertile and active imagination. Like most little boys, he loved dinosaurs. Helen read him dinosaur books and by the age of four he began reading on his own.  Danny knew all the dinosaur names and even how to spell them. He could spell “Tyrannosaurus Rex” forwards and backwards, a parlor trick almost nobody asked for. Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour, a popular talent show in the Sixties, never called. Every night, before he dropped off to sleep, Danny,  inspired by the Syd Hoff book, Danny and the Dinosaur, imagined how cool it would be to ride his very own Brontosaurus to school.

 When Danny was five, Helen saw a story about cystic fibrosis in the newspaper and, as she read it, grew increasingly alarmed. Danny had all the signs. Frank came home from work and hadn’t even shut the door before she ambushed him.  “Danny has all the symptoms of cystic fibrosis!” Helen said, on the verge of hysteria.

“Oh, you think these kids have everything,” Frank told her, which was largely true.

 She implored him to read the newspaper article. Frank was at the point where, if she said something was black, he’d say it was white. But he couldn’t deny she was right to be concerned. He agreed to take her and Danny to their pediatrician, Dr. Lawrence.  He was a good doctor but, like most doctors in the early sixties, he was out of his depth regarding cystic fibrosis. The CF center would have been the right choice--if there was a CF clinic. Upstate didn’t open their clinic until 1970.

Dr. Lawrence came into the exam room and Helen did all the talking. “He has all the signs of cystic fibrosis!” she told the doctor. “He coughs all the time, and he can’t gain weight. And his poop smells!”

Danny sat on the exam table and the doctor listened to his lungs through his bony chest. They sounded fine, if a little crackly. The boy was underweight with a persistent and throaty cough. Danny had never been hospitalized, though. How could a five-year old with CF stay out of the hospital? he wondered. Lawrence told Frank and Helen, “Danny is underweight, but otherwise fine. I wouldn’t worry.”

Helen dug in, an enraged mama bear defending her cub. Her son has a terminal disease, and they won’t do anything?!  “He has all the symptoms! He is not fine!” she exclaimed. “Aren’t you going to do some tests? How can you say he’s fine without testing him?”

This wasn’t the first time Dr. Lawrence dealt with this high-strung woman. He knew he needed to walk on eggshells because Helen was legitimately concerned about her son. She thought for a moment, then pointed to Danny, who had the telltale salty skin after playing outside that morning. “Look at his forehead!” she said, adamantly. “It’s salty!”

Dr. Lawrence looked at Danny, then Helen. Then he asked her, “Are you sure he hasn’t been rubbing up against the blackboard at school?” a supremely dopey question for a lot of reasons, mostly because it was the middle of July.

Danny’s mom licked her finger and rubbed it against Danny’s forehead. She angrily thrust it at the doctor and shouted, “It’s salt! Taste it, you asshole!” Lawrence declined to take Helen up on her unusual diagnostic test, but decided to humor her and scheduled a sweat-chloride test for her little boy.  The test came back negative. Back then, many mild cases like Danny’s slipped through the cracks. Cystic fibrosis was still a largely misunderstood disease.

With CF ruled out, Danny was misdiagnosed as having “chronic bronchitis,” a tremendous blessing in disguise. Danny and the whole family would’ve been much worse off if Helen and Frank knew their little boy had cystic fibrosis. Helen would have cracked under the strain. Every time he coughed she would have had a nervous breakdown. Danny’s mild case meant he had a relatively normal childhood. He had frequent coughing jags but hung in there and played outside all day long with his pals. 

Helen constantly tried to fatten up her son, to no avail. Danny ate constantly but his weight barely budged. Sticky mucus produced by CF not only clogs the lungs, it also impedes the ability of the pancreas to provide digestive enzymes that normally break down food that reach the small intestine. Accordingly, most calories are wasted without a daily regimen of prescription enzymes.  Danny wasn’t prescribed enzymes because he didn’t have CF--or so everyone thought.

Helen babied Danny. She was far too lenient with him.  She let Danny stay home from school whenever he said, “I don’t feel good.” She never asked questions or called him on it. Danny took full advantage of that, as most six- or seven-year-olds would. One day home from school led to two, then three, and then sometimes even a week. Danny dreaded going back and making up all the work he missed. The kids called him “sickly”, but they didn’t know the half of it. Nobody did.

Danny’s older sister Ann was okay with Danny being the favorite. June, not so much. She always craved center stage. June was usually the instigator and constantly created friction. Like her mother, she had to have the last word. June’s battles with her beleaguered father were marathons. Ann and Danny tried in vain to shut her down, to no avail. “Shut up, June!” they’d hiss, but she was her mother’s daughter.

Seemingly every evening, Helen aired some gripe, complaint, or grievance to Frank, who just wanted to be left alone with his newspaper and TV. Danny remembered seeing Frank’s doodles covering every white space in the paper with stars and hearts, in a futile attempt to block out his neurotic wife and noisy kids. Life in a small apartment with three needy kids and a buzzsaw of a wife would’ve been difficult for anyone, but it was like a hornet’s nest for the introverted Frank.

Most of the time the arguments were about money. Frank’s job paid well, but he and Helen spent it faster than he made it. A hundred fifty bucks a week got gobbled up by an expensive car payment, rent, food, and three growing kids who needed clothes or shoes. Helen worked part-time at Branch’s Pharmacy downtown, but she usually blew her check right in the store on toys and candy for the kids.

As a WW II vet, Frank was eligible, via the G.I. Bill (formally known as the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act) for a low-interest mortgage, something that would have let the Martinis put down roots, but he never even applied.  Helen never stopped chiding him about that. Instead of the security and stability of a home of their own, the Martinis moved constantly, one step ahead--and often behind--the landlord. Once, they moved into a place where Danny luxuriated in his own room for three whole months, before they moved out of there and back into the previous place. Danny and his sisters changed schools at least every other year. They made friends easily and then lost them, forever, in a childhood filled with loss.

At least they had each other. Danny and June, so close in age, became best friends, although not without their moments. Once, June stuck her fingers in Danny’s bowl of Jell-O and Danny lashed out. He scratched June on her cheek and left a permanent scar. Big sister Ann and Danny bonded over music. Ann and Danny sat, enraptured, in front of the TV that Sunday in February of 1964 and watched The Beatles on the “Ed Sullivan Show.” They both loved the Beatles, Motown, and the glorious mélange of styles that was AM top-40 in the sixties. The transistor radio was on constantly. They flipped back and forth between the two Syracuse top-40 AM radio stations. If the radio wasn’t on, that’s because a stack of 45s was playing instead. Ann put a nickel on the tonearm, a familiar fix to anyone from that era, if the record skipped.

The kids had each other, and they needed each other. Helen often went on a rampage over some minor problem, but was just as often fun and playful. She unquestionably loved her children, and they knew it. She taught the kids the Golden Rule, even if she couldn’t always follow it herself. The kids learned from her to empathize with the less fortunate. But her mercurial moods put the whole apartment on edge.  It didn’t take much to set her off and when that happened, the whole family paid dearly.

There was never any physical abuse, but the emotional and mental abuse was just as bad and left emotional scars. Helen and Frank’s arguments often escalated from simmering anger to full-volume rage. They screamed vile, hurtful things at one another, things no kids should hear. Often the arguments were accompanied by thrown and broken things. Often, the place was trashed. The three kids screamed and cried as they huddled together on the stairs. One time, Frank pulled a long kitchen knife and held it to his stomach. “C’mon Helen, is that what you want? I’ll do it!” Danny never forgot the yellow handle on that knife.

Even when the kids weren’t worried about their parents killing themselves or each other, they still got looped in on Helen’s adult concerns.  She verbalized every problem instead of keeping them to herself. There was no buffer in the Martini household between kids’ worries and adult worries. If the rent was late, the utilities were due, or the cupboard was bare, the kids were acutely aware. They felt anxious and uncertain thinking about how to fix those problems. Ann, Danny, and even June couldn’t just be kids, with kid problems.

Fear and anxiety, uncertainty and instability. Constant companions.

Helen’s tantrums extended beyond her family. She often argued with the neighbors, sometimes to extreme results. Helen strutted around the apartment complex one day clad in a two-piece bathing suit. Her enormous Caesarian scar showed, probably as a badge of honor. See what I went through for my kids?! Doreen, a busybody neighbor, offered the unsolicited opinion that Helen was too old to wear a bikini. Big mistake. Helen reared back and slapped, “that bitch Doreen.” Unfortunately, That Bitch Doreen called the cops and Helen spent an hour in a cell before poor, put-upon Frank bailed her out, after first telling her, “You put yourself there! Rot in there!”

That Bitch Doreen was the name of a family cat nearly fifty years later. Danny always said that if he won the Lotto, he’d spend millions on the best thoroughbred racehorse he could find and enter it in the Kentucky Derby, just to hear the track announcer say, “And here comes That Bitch Doreen on the rail!”

Helen had many, many redeeming qualities. She was generous, often to a fault. She once heard a sob story from a woman whose boy needed a winter coat, and she gave her Danny’s--his only winter coat. She was fun; she regaled the kids with stories and songs from her childhood, along with R-rated jokes. She played cards or Monopoly or Parcheesi with them, endlessly, which helped pass the time.  Helen really loved her kids, even when the pressures of parenthood meant she made some bad decisions.

But Helen was mentally and emotionally ill. She spent two short stints in a psychiatric ward--what she called “the nuthouse—once before Danny was born and once in 1964.  In the mid-sixties, medical solutions for bipolar people were crude and mostly ineffective, and generally effective antidepressants were years away. Helen probably wouldn’t have taken them anyway. While she was checked in, Frank juggled sitters, worked his forty hours, and then had to play dad and mom to three hungry kids. He did his best but was in over his head. Danny needed sneakers for gym class, so Frank took him to the Easy Bargain Center and without any idea what he was doing, bought Danny a pair of girls’ plaid sneakers over Danny’s protestations.