The Babysitters

                   Have you noticed how babysitters are portrayed in movies?  Mom and Dad go out for the evening to work out their marital problems at the therapist and they enlist the help of a local teenage girl.  She plops down on the couch, turns on the tube while the kids run their hearts out.   When they finally tucker out and go to bed, her boyfriend, the second string quarterback, will come over before the folks are home.  Of course in these kinds of movies, the babysitter is taught a little lesson in sexual tact by some masked killer running around with a huge bowie knife.  This Hollywood version of the babysitter is of course, bloated and fake and totally out of the minds of a fetishistic writer.  My babysitting experience as a kid comes nowhere near anything I’ve seen in a movie.

                   After a summer of having our neighbors’ daughters watch us during their Senior year of High school, my parents would need another babysitting option as they were planning to go away for school.

                  When my brother and I were kids, our babysitters tried to turn us into Born-Again Christians.

                  After a day spent playing catch at the Terrone house driveway, we would go inside for dinner and a movie.  Dinners were always delicious, made of spicy fra diavlo sauce and other Italian delights at the comforts of a separate kids table. (I’m still bitter about having to sit at the kid’s table.  I’m twenty-two and I have to spend dinner talking about Sonic the Hedgehog and breaking up fights between my little cousins.) 

After dinner, my brother and I would retreat to the family room.  We would take our shoes off, and plop down on their carpeted floor atop of a clean bed sheet-as to not ruin the carpets.  In fact, despite the fact that there were several large sofas in the room (all covered with several sheets) I don’t remember ever sitting or moving around anywhere else in this large room.  We would be allowed to put on our choice of movie, except sometimes our choice would get vetoed in favor of a religious flick.  “You boys should watch this.  You can learn about God, and how to pray.” 

One time it was an animated version of the last days of Christ, where God comes back from the dead in the modern time to spread his word with troubled youths and foreign enemies. (It was from the eighties, and there were kids with punk hairdos and Russians.)  Often times, it would be the newest video recording of their son Michael.  Much (I’m sure) to his parent’s gratification, he was a preacher for their church.  He would sit in front of the camera for hours and shred it up on his acoustic in a room that must’ve been three hundred degrees telling by the copious amounts of sweat pouring from his face.

                  I was always a bit of a troublemaker at their house however; it wasn’t uncommon for me to secretly run all over their immaculate and forbidden yard, sprawl out on their couches, and turn off the Christian propaganda in exchange for a tape full of Three Stooges.

                  The Terrone’s are long-time family friends of my Dad and my Grandparents.  Conchetta Terrone grew up with my Grandmother Marie back in Italy and when she immigrated over to the States they remained close friends.  Dominic Terrone was a large, jovial and funny man who retired from Con Edison in Queens and soon after moved the family out into a large, gorgeous Colonial –style home in Long Island.                  

                 Because their house was so close to ours, we often had huge family gatherings there with our two families.  Dinners were enormous, often starting with salad and bread, then out came a jar of hot peppers that Dominic would chomp on fresh from the jar before the pasta dish, cold cuts, hot antipasto, then usually some kind of meat from the barbecue, then nuts and fruit, then coffee and cake.  Thinking about it, its funny how my Grandmother can pressure me to lose weight and eat better when I’ve just been accustomed to such gluttonous meals my entire life.  I can’t help it.

                  The Terrone’s became Born-Again Christians before they moved out to Long Island, according to my father.  He and their son Michael were close friends growing up.  The two of them often jammed together to their favorite rock songs, my father on bass and Michael on guitar.   They rocked it out to Led Zeppelin, Creedence, and the Rolling Stones.  Michael was a great soloist, perfecting the solos to old Grand Funk Railroad songs.   But when the family converted, the rock music became a big no-no.  I remember when I had just purchased my first cassette walkman, and getting scolded for listening to “Satan’s Words.”  I think it was the Batman Forever soundtrack. 

                  Their traditions and harmless attempts to convert my brother and I wouldn’t happen every time we were babysat.  Often enough my parents would pick us up right after dinner.  In fact, staying at their house was often very fun.  I never felt pressured to have to go outside and run around (I would’ve never been allowed to run on the lawn anyways). Dominic would sometimes sit around and read comic books with us and take us out for ice cream.  Dominic in particular was always really close with us, affectionately calling us his “buddies”.

                  “Ok fellas, today we’re gonna go see Michael preach.  Afterwards I’ll take yous out for ice cream” said Dominic one day.  Me and my brother looked at each other and sighed, knowing the day would be boring.  We never could have imagined what the sermon would actually be like.

                  After a long drive we arrived at the church.  It was different than our Catholic church, full of stained glass, marble floors, rows and rows of pews and gigantic crucifixes.  It seemed more like a house, with a small auditorium and a tiny alter with a microphone stand.  The carpet was a blood red color and rather than elaborate stained glass depictions of Baby Jesus and thirty-year old Jesus there was just quotes and flyers for church events on the walls.  A large pot of coffee with some mini muffins also seemed out of place.

                  Michael eventually took the stage, acoustic in hand.  All the chattering of the audience stopped and Michael got into his sermon.  He was moving around everywhere and speaking ultra-fast and was animated like a manic auctioneer.  In between his words he would dive into a song on the guitar.  Everyone in the audience had their arms up, praying to themselves.   Sometimes their prayers were in English, sometimes they were in gobbledeegook, a language even Indiana Jones or Robert Langdon could never ever decipher.   

“This is getting strange” I thought to myself.  My little brother looked on anxiously as Conchetta and her daughter got called to the stage.  Michael, yelling and sweating to spitting into the audience displaying the kind of hijinx and mayhem one would see at a Gallagher show, laid his hands upon Phyllis’s head, and next thing I remember her eyes were rolled back and she was lying down on the floor in tears.  It all happened so fast.  I was scared for Phyllis. 

“Is she ok?”

A moment later she was standing.  She was as pale a ghost.  Her mascara was running down her cheeks and she was limping back, holding on to Conchetta to help her stand.

“Now we have two very special children visiting with us today.  Let’s get Nicholas and Frankie up here and pray for them.” 

My gut dropped.  I was terrified.  What if he touches me and I fall down?  What if I fell and banged my head?  What if his hands shoot out electricity and that’s why Phyllis fell?

We finally get to the altar, and Michael reached out his hands to me for a handshake.  Before I reached his hand, I fell back on cue, trying to fake my reaction in fear of electric shock.   It felt so awkward when I soon realized that he just offered to shake my hand and say a few words.

                  A few years later we would all reunite but under much different conditions.  Dominic, whose heart had undergone serious work years earlier, passed away.  I was twenty.  At the funeral Michael spoke and this time there were no theatrics, everyone was real upset.  My Grandparents and the Terrone’s had a falling out a year earlier, and this was one of the first times they had seen each other since then, under the worst conditions they could imagine.

                  Michael’s sermon was unlike sermons I had heard at other funerals.  Rather than quote the bible and speak about how much Dominic would be missed, Michael spoke with optimism about Dominic’s departure into Heaven.  I miss him a lot.  I appreciate the hours he spent watching over us.  I’ve since questioned my religious beliefs, trying to keep my mind open to other philosophies and making my own judgments; but I know that wherever he is, he is his same jovial self and I can take solace knowing that wherever he is he’s unchanged.  Any uncertainty of faith I might have doesn’t change my conviction to this fact.

If there is a light at the end of the tunnel, I’d like to spend a few hours with my buddy.