FLASHING MY SHORTS by Salvatore Buttaci

A flash of painful remembrance, a memory of a wounded World War II veteran, a tale of Uncle Pete who wasn’t really Uncle Pete at all, and then the darkness of a life once lived in unrestrained laughter.

 

 Encounter 

 

Years of hard drinking had driven him to seed.  He slept under cardboard  on the coldest New York City nights, and his days were taken up begging for spare change.  

One morning a passerby stopped to look at him.  He turned his unshaven, toothless face away.  But the woman continued staring.  “Is your name Thomas?” she asked.  He shook his head.  “Thomas Cole?” she persisted.  Again he gestured no.  He could see the tears wetting the woman’s face.  She could not see his.

Leaning against the streetlight, he watched his daughter lose herself in the rush hour of pedestrian traffic.  

                    

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War Hero

 

“Crazy Joe” Devlin was a war hero, but to neighborhood kids like me, he was free entertainment.  If wisdom was mine back then at thirteen years old, I would’ve praised Joe, thanked him for his military sacrifices at Normandy Beach.  Certainly I would not have been party to the verbal abuse we heaped on shell-shocked Joe just for laughs.

One late July afternoon Johnny Reichling lit a firecracker and tossed it in the air.  Two things simultaneously happened: (1)  “Crazy Joe” dove into Mrs. Minogue’s hedges; and (2) my father was walking towards me on his way back from work at the bakery.

“Follow me,” Papa ordered.  He yanked my arm.  I followed.

“What’re you doing?” he asked, his dark-brown eyes squinting in anger.  “That man got hurt bad in Europe, protecting our freedom over here.  And you treat him that way?  Make a fool of him and of me too?”

Papa grounded me for a week.  He made me write an apology letter to give Devlin.

“Back up this letter by respecting Joe from now on,” Papa said.  “Your friends.  Let them be stupid, but you’re my son.”

When my one-week “house arrest” ended, I sought out Joe Devlin and handed him my letter.  Basically, it said I was sorry, that I would never be cruel again.

Joe read the letter.  I watched his eyes dart from line to line, his hands tremble.  Then Joe said, “Sir, half my men died on the beach.  The wounded need a medic quick.  I’ll take that gunner out myself.”

He shoved my letter into his shirt pocket and saluted me.  He stood at attention, waiting.  Hardly breathing or blinking.  Finally I saluted back.  The war hero nodded.

               

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 Six Legs, Pete 

 

I knew an alien once who posed as my uncle from Sicily.  We all fell for it, even my father who was supposed to be this alien's own brother.  What gave him away in the end?  Even aliens grow senile and Uncle Peter was no exception.  He stopped taping up his extra four legs and when we visited him at the old people's home for the last time.  We found him in his wheelchair, a blue blanket on his lap, and where his two feet should have been propped on the wheelchair step there were six.  

"You got six legs, Pete," my father says in case my pseudo-uncle doesn't know yet.  "Six legs, Pete," my father says again.  "We all got two; we figured you did too.  What kinda gag you pulling, Pete?"  

At that point, despite old age and debilitating senility, the alien I used to call Ziu Pietru jumps up on six legs and commences to beat my father with two antennae he had hidden under his Yankees cap.  Several attendants had to pull away the beast from eating my father's face.  

Dad spent nearly a year in hospitals, shaking bandaged head in unending disbelief.  "We slept in the same bed when we were kids," Dad says.  "Where were those legs then?  And those TV antennas on his head.  Is that why he always wore a hat?  I had only four brothers, not five?  Help me out here.  Some answers please.  I am losing my faith."  

Strangely enough, while attendants had been struggling to subdue Alien Pete, he suddenly transformed himself into a tiny torn-wing bumblebee, and one of the old ladies jumping up and down in abject fear stepped on him.  

Because of my firsthand experience, I have for a long time believed in life in outer space.

          

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Amerigo Tanucci 

 

Some folks have tremendous instincts for humor, and we naturally gravitate towards them in our desire to share their positive outlook, stand, you might say, under their yellow happy-face umbrella.

Then there are those who wear optimism and comedy like situational masks behind which they hide clandestine secret lives of hostility and regret.

My Uncle Amerigo was the true-blue poster boy for the “Don’t-Worry-Be-Happy” movement that had taken up arms of laughter against the slings and arrows of outrageous cynicism.

Of all my uncles, Amerigo was the one I loved best because, not only did he recount hilarious made-up stories, but for each one he told, he would slip into my shirt pocket a shiny silver dollar and tell me often, “Get yourself a big sack so you can grow rich on these hi-ho silver Morgans!”

 

 

When he died, the laughs did not die with him, for he had left strict funereal instructions to Aunt Elena which she graciously carried out despite the seeming sacrilege…no, madness!…of it all.

As mourners knelt before the coffin, Uncle Amerigo dressed in the make-up and motley of a court jester, an answer machine was activated to begin a message in my deceased uncle’s uplifting voice: “Sorry I’m not here to take your call, but please leave your name, your number, and a brief message and I will try to get back to you someday!”

                         

 

 

                                                                                                                  

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  The above four short-short stories appear in Salvatore Buttaci’s Flashing My Shorts, published by All Things That Matter Press and available in book and Kindle editions at http://www.kindlegraph.com/authors/sambpoet 

 Buttaci lives in “Almost-Heaven” West Virginia with his wife Sharon.