My First Nervous Breakdown

I was raised by wolves. Not the good kind that you see on Discovery Channel that mate for life and take care of their young, but the bad kind that dress in sheep’s clothing and eat Little Red Riding Hood.
This is when my big Italian family of wolves disappeared.
It was 1968.
It was the year that Martin Luther King was shot, then Robert Kennedy…
So it was already a pretty bad year. It was like a Sam Peckinpah movie … the naïve but brave sheriff that doesn’t carry a gun is shot by the bad guy that of course does. He gets it in the shoulder and then the leg… but he’s still standing, and he might make it and then… (GUNSHOT) he takes one in the back and he’s toast. And there’s nobody in town to stand up to the bad guy and after that the town votes for Richard Nixon… you know the rest.
1968 was also the year my Italian grandfather Francesco Medaglia died … not a newsworthy event, not even that sad really because he was old, except that he left all his money to only two of his eight children…his two oldest sons, one of them being my father.
Actually my father shouldn’t have gotten anything, being the second oldest, because that European thing – primogeniture – was to leave it all only to the oldest son. But my grandfather did this because he was so charmed by my mother the sociopath because she was beautiful and sweet, but mostly because she was a perfect little suck-up. “Why can’t you be more like Marie?” he said to his own daughters over and over again. You can imagine how that went over. And you can especially imagine how it went over when Marie got her hands on the money, and they got nothing.
And that was when this entire family of Italian wolves disappeared from my life because all the grown-ups that had been excluded from the will got together and decided not to speak to us again until my father and my uncle shared the money. And the sociopath Marie, who never cared for all these annoying relatives anyway, was never going to share money. So…. I went from spending every Sunday at my grandfather’s big brick house in the Bronx, playing and growing up with my many cousins, to never seeing any of them again.
So I gained some weight, got a little scowl, wore a lot of black, learned the meaning of the word suicide. I was depressed!
But the story gets more interesting because the ringleader, the one that came with the idea of the boycott and convinced everyone to follow along with it, was the youngest of my grandfather’s children, my Uncle Joey aka “Father Carmelo,” a Catholic Priest.
“Father Carmelo” was the angriest about his exclusion from my grandfather’s will, feeling the most entitled to the money because he had brought honor to the family by becoming a priest and he believed that he should be rewarded for this – not a very spiritual attitude, but “Father Carmelo” was not a spiritual guy which you might already have figured out.
So I never saw these people again…my big psychotic Italian family, except, ironically, for “Father Carmelo.” I saw him because he got a part in The Godfather. I got to see “Father Carmelo” and mostly I got to hear him because they used his voice over the baptism scene which included a huge massacre… “do you renounce Satan (bang, bang) …”
…something for me to talk about with my therapist for the next few years…
But the story comes to a hilarious conclusion in 1993, when “Father Carmelo” finally dies and sitting in the front row at the funeral parlor in the Bronx is his wife. It seems “Father Carmelo” had secretly married, and the stress of this secret marriage had caused him to have a heart attack – heart attacks being very common in my big psychotic Italian family.
This caused tremendous shame to the family and a huge scandal, especially when “Father Carmelo’s” wife went on Sally Jesse, who was like the mother of Jerry Springer … and she went on as “the secret wife of ‘The Godfather Priest’.”
It gets better.
“Father Carmelo,” always a leader in the family, had convinced his brothers and sisters, my aunts and uncles, to follow him in another scheme which was to put all their assets in his name since, being a priest, he did not have to pay taxes. My aunts and uncles, being fond of money, as you know by now, found this a good idea and went along with it. That meant, since he was married at the time of his death, that all these assets and this money that my aunts and uncles had turned over to “Father Carmelo” went to his secret wife who was also crazy. By all accounts, just crazy enough to fit perfectly into my big psychotic Italian family.