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There's a new Tony Soprano in Caldwell this season and after having had a brush with death, he's much more thoughtful and forgiving than the Tony we used to know. But to forgive Vito for his dishonor — one of the most despicable — would also mean that Tony would be accepting his behavior, and that just might be too much to ask from the big guy. Not only does Tony have a reputation to consider, but the new (improved?) Tony is now a bit more conscious of an even bigger guy who's got rules of his own. And Tony is expected to follow them.
Well, one of them.
While it's fine for family members to have a “goomah” — expected even, steal credit card numbers, shakedown business owners and chop people up into little pieces, it isn't fine to be gay. As Phil Leotardo (Frank Vincent) said to Vito's abandoned wife Marie (Elizabeth Bracco), “You're my cousin he married, making a mockery of the whole sacrament!”
Oh, the hilarious hypocrisy. What fun!
For us, that is, not for Vito. Vito probably won't get a chance to be openly gay in New Jersey, New Hampshire or New Delhi, for that matter. Gay men lack the titillation factor of lesbians, of course. It seems the only L word that can save Vito now is luck, and it looks like that's run out. His remaining days, I predict, are now counted in hours. And I base that conclusion on everything I know about Italian-Americans, which is quite a lot.
I grew up around a lot of Anthonys and Louies with sons named Anthony and Louie. I knew men who sold sausage and owned carting companies. I knew what a bookie was long before I cared that the Romper Room lady never said my name during the show.
Like Meadow Soprano, I had “uncles” with bizarre nicknames and never a hair out of place. Sometimes one would give me a twenty-dollar bill to disappear for a minute of two.
Ah, the sweet, greasy memories…
As Tony drives by Satriale's in the opening credits of The Sopranos each week, I smile fondly. My young life revolved around pork, you see. Pork was so vital to my family that I slept with 40 pounds of soppressata until I was about eight years old. Links of pork salami hung from the eves of my bedroom, dripping grease on sheets of newspaper laid out on the floor not ten feet from my bed. Vile? Hell, yeah! But what did I know? Only when I realized that not every little girl slept with hanging meat in her room did I object.
The back room at Satriale's is also something right out of my past. On Friday nights, my dad's buddies would come to our house, sit around a table just like the one in the pork store office (plaid table cloth and all), clog their arteries with Italian foods and play cards. On those nights our driveway looked like a used Cadillac dealership and a cloud of cigar smoke hung over the roof.
I was a typical Italian kid, I think. I was just like my “cousins,” anyway. We all knew how to make meatballs and play poker by the time we were five, and we each could distinguish a Seagram's VO label from the “ cheap shit” before we c ould read. Unlike Meadow and A.J., we were advantaged only in the sense that we ate well and enjoyed toys that our fathers “found” — toys like minibikes and toboggans. I thought I was the luckiest of us all, though. My father was the guy who always found ice cream. Gallons of it, in every flavor there was.
In my house, as in the Soprano's, Sundays were sacred. There were few excuses accepted for not being at the table at one o'clock on Sunday afternoon—very few. Family comes before everything, I was told. I believed that then and I believe it now.
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