My father looked and acted like Jimmy Stewart, the fifties movie star, who presented a laconic and passive temperament in the characters he portrayed. My mother as a young woman was in love with Jimmy Stewart, and my father admitted that he was certainly a Jimmy Stewart substitute. My father's name was Jim, he had no middle name. My brother, who is two years older than myself, is named James Stuart Britell, after my father of course.
I attended the wedding of my sister's son, Matthew Zegarelli, last year, and it was an opportunity for all of what's left of my family to be together in the same room at the same time. We were all sitting in the church in silence, and there was a delay in the proceedings. I turned to my siblings, nieces and nephews and I said, "You do know that all of us are just a big accident, the result of a mistaken communication."
I had their attention.
I said, "Dad dated Mom once, and although the date went well, he felt he couldn't measure up to her expectations. He did not call her again, and a year went by. Then she received a letter from a person named Billy Britelli, a distant cousin of my father's, asking her out on a date. She thought the letter was from my father and called him up and accepted the date. My father thought that my mother was making this all up to go out with him, and so took place the second date."
Not only did my relatives not believe this story of mine but they accused me, with some aggravation, of making it all up right on the spot just to entertain them. They thought it was an "Uncle Tommy." An "Uncle Tommy" would be to pull people's legs in complete seriousness, at important social gatherings.
For example, we didn't go out to restaurants very much in 1958. Restaurants were for wedding receptions. When I was ten I was sitting in the dining room of Twin Ponds, in their huge room for catered events. It was a wedding reception, I have no idea whose. A hundred people were sitting at round tables separated into family groups. First soup was served. Everyone sat, eating the soup, but Uncle Tom was slurping his soup. He would set each spoonful to the very edge of his lips and then suck the soup into his mouth making as much noise as possible. As with all gags of this type, probably handed down from generation to generation and probably formalized by the "Comedy Dell Arte" in the seventeen hundreds, probably done in Rome under Vaspasian, he did the routine three times, each time louder than the previous. Then, when he was sure he had the attention of everyone in the room and the necessary silence, he turned to everyone waving the spoon about and said, "Mixing the air with the soup improves the flavor and helps the digestion. It is the only way to eat soup."
My mother loved the actor Jimmy Stewart, and she loved my father for looking and acting like Jimmy Stewart, but I think actually she was more in love with Rock Hudson and Cary Grant. That was the tragedy of my father's life, and mine, indirectly, by fall out. But don't expect me to mine that vein of my childhood, after all, it is only conjecture. And every man must compete with the imaginary men that pervade womens' minds. My dad was Jimmy Stewart and not Tony Curtis. I was not Elvis, but aspired to pass for Albert Camus in high school. Clarence was not Little Richard.
I WAS IN LOVE WITH JANE RUSSELL
And, yes I am well aware that the opposite is true. Women back then had to compete with Marilyn Monroe, and not just Marilyn but the abstracted and idealized image of that woman as hinted at in cinema. I was not in love with Marilyn, and I never liked
Bridget Bardot either, those movie faces had no effect on me. But for a few weeks, almost a month, I was in love with Jane Russell. She was the first of a number of beautiful women who have loved me, and then cheated on me. How could that be, if when I was 12, she was 20? I will explain later, if I can just ever get back to telling you about Clarence.
Since my father died when I was in seventh grade, when I was thirteen, I have only snapshots of him in the form of fragments of his conversation which in time became the truths of my existence,
and my only beliefs, such as: "Never use force," or "You are a Britell, and Britells don't kill people."
This is how it happened that he said "Never use force." I was trying to undo the bolt on the back wheel of my bicycle. The bolt was rusted shut. I had balanced a wrench on the bolt and was hitting it with a hammer for all I was worth. This was happening in the cellar, in the old part of the cellar that we called the "cold" cellar. My father had been in the kitchen and he heard all this hammering, and he came in and saw me doing this and he said, "Never use force."
I asked him why he didn't go to World War II. He said that both my grandparents fled Italy to avoid the first World War, and that, "Britells don't kill people." I often think of this when I see all the endless arguments against war. They are all lost on me. When my time came to go to VietNam my only concern was how much it would cost to go to Canada, and nothing else. But I wasn't drafted into the army because of my lazy eye, my amblyopia. It was my right eye, so I couldn't sight down a gun. When the doctor told I was a reject, I was sitting naked in a cold room in Detroit. It was in 1966 and I immediately thought of that day in sixth grade when I tried to instantaneously heal my right eye. It turned out that eye was just perfect and hunky dory all along. As any Christian Scientist would have said, "There was no NEED to even PRAY, it was perfect all along, a reflection of the DIVINE mind all along." That is the way Christian Scientists talk.
SINGING WITH MY FINGERS IN MY EARS
My father was talking on the phone in the kitchen, and I was trying to get his attention. He was saying, "It's going to take two more weeks....I've been tied up." I was pulling on his pant leg and I was saying. "Dad, do you believe in God, do you believe in God, Dad???" He pushed me away and continued his conversation, but I wouldn't release his pant leg. He hung up the phone and looked at me for a very long time in silence, then he answered my question with, "I don't know, what do you think?" It was the silence more than the answer that struck me.
Another snapshot I have of him is of his having me sing with my fingers stuck in my ears. Across from me on the living room rug was my brother Jimmy Stuart, who was also singing with his fingers in his ears. Then there was my sister Suzy, she was also singing with her fingers in her ears. My father, who was playing the guitar and also singing, did not have his fingers in his ears. The reason for blocking out hearing was because we had all memorized different parts of a piece of music, and in order to sing our own parts without being drawn off key by your neighbor you had to sing with your fingers in your ears. We were singing "That Old Gang of Mine" in four part harmony. My father lover barbershop harmony. He was a member of the SPEBSQSA, The Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America.
So that was the key, and now you have the key finally that unlocks the mystery of how Clarence saved me from failing eighth grade. It was because I was an expert at barbershop harmony. I had been doing it for several years. My brother and I had won prizes in New York for duet part singing.
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