Memoir of Domenic Fusco

A View From the 81^st Floor

Looking back at my life, Making Movies and Ministry

Chapter 01          I was Born at a Very Young Age

The airplane wheels squealed upon hitting the tarmac, just as the beautiful woman, about thirty-five, sitting next to me pressed a business card into my hand. She smiles.“Those are some of the most interesting stories I’ve ever heard. If you ever write a book, I want the first copy.” I smile back. I’ve heard that before, but “I’ll have to wait until my mother passes on.” She pauses. “That’s… honorable of you.” “Not really.”She laughs. “Why not?”

“Because my mother told me she’d sue me for the royalties if I ever told any of those stories.”

She stares at me for a beat, then bursts out laughing, shaking her head in disbelief. Mom was eighty-five when she told me that. Well, she’s gone on to Glory, so here goes.

I was born to a few eccentric musicians at a very young age. Actually, I was born in New Haven, CT, so that I could be close to my mother, at least that’s what Mom would tell me. Anyway, Mom was a jazz singer known as the “White Billie Holiday” in the 1950s. She sang up and down Manhattan Island with Eddie Gourmet and other popular 1950s talents. Dad was a drummer and a trumpet player.

Every year, Mom would flip a coin. “Heads we clean, tails we move”. It always came up tails.

By the time I graduated high school, we had moved a dozen times. In 1952, we moved from North Haven, CT, to Yonkers, NY, then once more until we ended up in White Plains, NY.

We were not very good kids. My younger brother burned down a new house under construction; we once mud-balled our neighbor’s house for fun. We built a tree house in another neighbor's backyard, we crafted hot rods with noisy roller skates, and woke up the neighbors early Saturday mornings.

That, apparently, was the final straw.

Our New Home

As it turned out, Mom and Dad fought a lot, so they decided to put us in an orphanage-type home for boys and try to work things out. Mom’s 1951 Mercury rolled to a stop on a dirt driveway in front of an old mansion—once grand, now tired—converted into a boys’ home for troubled children. We climbed out with our suitcases, and Mom kissed us goodbye. It was a large, old, multi-room, wooden house where the heat was turned off at 10 PM each night. You could see your breath as you exhaled if you stuck your head out from under the covers.

We saw our parents 3 hours a month, but I don’t remember ever seeing them while there. Maybe I blocked out a few things. It was a lonely existence. Recently, our younger brother (at 75 years old) confided in me with a tear in his heart. He said all he could remember was how lonely he was being separated from us. He was only 7 years old, and I believe it had permanent damage that he is still working through. I use humor to block out some of my scars at 81. I still pray for his peace.

I’ll see you boys in a few weeks. Behave. That was it. We said goodbye and headed for the front door. There was a retarded teenager out front with us, making strange sounds; moaning and talking to himself. It was scary. My younger brother asked, Where are we? We didn’t answer as we were immediately met at the door by a Rabbi who welcomed us in.

Cold Nights and Eight-Cent Pretzels

It’s a cold fall evening, and the Rabbi shows each of us to different multi-bed rooms. Jerry, only seven years old, is put in a bedroom and begins crying. One of his ten or so roommates hollers. Shut up! Or I’ll make you shut up. Jerry buried his face in a threadbare pillow and learned his first lesson: silence is survival. In another room with 15 or so “inmates”, I was given a bed next to a window where a slight bit of moonlight would illuminate my face at times. With every breath, a cloud of vapor was visible in the room. The heat is turned off at night to save electricity at 10 pm, as I previously mentioned. The cold was deeper than anything I’d known—physical, yes—but also emotionally. Night after night, I wondered how children… we could be forgotten so completely.

That Spring, I was on the outside porch, and the Rabbi asked me if I wanted to buy a pretzel. They’re only 8 cents. I had a nickel. Sorry. 8 cents. I remember walking in the side door hungry. I noticed a candy machine in the empty hallway. No one was looking, so I stuck my thin arm up the slot and flipped a pack of salted peanuts out. With a bit of difficulty, I got a few more candy bars loose. I ran upstairs to the empty bedroom and hid the one bar I hadn’t eaten under an unused bed mattress. Whenever I got hungry late at night, I quietly went downstairs and pilfered a few snacks. I never caught.

The Cigar Bandit and Horney Toads

It was June, and we were told Mom or Dad would pick us up for a summer break.

The three of us sat on the porch waiting. I asked my brother, When did we see Mom and Dad last? My older brother Peter answered sarcastically, Who knows.

Then a big, brand new, red Cadillac El Dorado Convertible pulled up, and Mom got out.

Come on, boys.

We ran over, and I asked, Who is the man in the big red car. Mom didn’t answer. Where are we going? We’re going to Las Vegas. I’m divorcing your dad. Now get in the car and let’s go.

Shocked and about to shed tears, we jumped in the back seat. The driver guns the gas, and off we go. We look at each other and raise our eyebrows, shrug our shoulders as if to say, “What’s going on?

One Hundred Miles per Hour and One Hundred Dollar Bills

Off from Yonkers, New York, to Las Vegas, driving at speeds of one hundred miles per hour at times and robbing banks when convenient, all the way. Bill, Mom’s boyfriend, turns out to be a notorious bank robber wanted by the FBI. While traveling through Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, sometimes at 100 MPH, he robbed small-town banks at night while we slept in out-of-the-way motels. Bank safes had square doors back in the 1950s that blew off easily with one stick of dynamite. Bill lit the dynamite with a cigar and left it at the crime scene; hence, he was labeled “The Cigar Bandit”. He would leave the motel room late at night, rob a bank, return to the motel with his booty, and shuffle us off to another town.  Off to Vegas, robbing banks all the way from Yonkers, New York. Rolls of $100 bills, watches, and guns filled the back seat compartment with the convertible top up. When Peter pointed them out to Bill, he threatened us with some kind of death therapy.

Mom and Bill dropped us off in a small town outside of Vegas at a motel room that had a kitchen. Boys, don’t eat all the food we just bought you tonight. I’ll see you in a few days. Jerry was 7, I was 9, and Peter was 10 years old. Three cubs left to fend for themselves.

I cooked breakfast and sustained burns on my chest from splattering fat-sizzling bacon. Once we ate, we would spend the day catching horny toads and placing them at the entrance of an ant hole, and watch them gobble up ants for breakfast. Their little tongues would dart out of their smiling faces and vacuum ants as they emerge from their hole. There were 120 degree days in August, and Jerry and I acquired 2nd and 3rd degree burns. Peter got bitten by a gopher, and since we caught the gopher, the little creature was checked for rabies, and Peter was spared from a series of painful shots. Once in a while, we’d find a large tortoise with painted portions of its shell and imagine the Indians who painted it.

Postscript

When my mother was about eighty, she told me the FBI had called her after Bill was imprisoned. They’d been reading his mail and wanted to know who “the boys” were—thinking we were part of a gang. Mom told them the truth.

“They are my boys. They weren’t a gang,” she said. “Not yet.”

We never heard Bill’s name again. But he did give each of us a watch before we left. Mine was a Movado worth over a thousand dollars at the time.

First Airplane Ride

Eventually, we were put on a TWA twin-prop plane back to New York. I remember the beautiful stewardess who fed us and was so kind. Life was always toxic for us, and her kind demeanor is still fondly remembered after more than seventy years. The engines roared, lifting us to the slowly intensifying stars. Looking out the window at the desert, mountains, and a few lakes provoked my mind with unanswered questions. The hum of the props sang me to sleep as the ground faded totally black.

The stewardess woke us up for breakfast. I thought, great; no more cooking. We landed, and we were escorted by someone to the baggage area. Dad met us there. Not many words were spoken. I sometimes wonder what pain Mom and Dad felt shuffling us around from place to place, home to home. They did not put “fun” in our dysfunctional lifestyle. Mom was a case, one-of-a-kind, as my cousin Roger puts it. My Nonno (grandfather) would pop nitroglycerin pills when he would tell us stories with his broken Italian accent. U mudar, she can-ta by da $25 a dolla wash-a. She gotta buy da $75 a dolla wash-a. We’d laugh, and he’d just about cry. I loved my Nonno. We would write postcards to each other even after he returned to Italy.

What came next? We never knew.

It’s a bit hard to even recollect my past with the fear, violence, hate, and instability, never knowing what was next. In a way, I became the King of Denial. I have been encouraged by a good friend, a force in Hollywood, to do a movie, but it seems I never got past page 5 before I realized what people have told me for the last 7 decades to be true: you were abused. I would just quit writing and continue to tell humorous stories of the adventures of an eccentric mother, three boys abandoned by our birth father, the tales of our sociopathic stepfather, alcoholism, violence, instability, rejection, arrests, etc. When a police officer would knock on our door, the first question Mom would ask was, Is he dead?

I Wouldn’t Change a Thing God Planned for Me

What once felt like instability, I now see as preparation. What felt like displacement became perspective. And what seemed like a scattered beginning became the foundation of a life spent telling stories, stories shaped by movement, memory, and meaning.

Thank You, Lord!

I hope you enjoyed the first chapter, A View From the 81^st Floor.

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