My full name is Graziano Giancarlo Marcello Buonfiglio. I live in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. I am a second-generation Italo-Canadian, and have lived in and around Toronto my whole life. My parents are Joseph and Nadine Buonfiglio, a lawyer and a secretary by trade respectively. I am the middle child in my family; my brother Ryan is a year older than me, and my sister Charlotte is a year younger. With the exception of Ryan, I don’t consider any of the aforementioned my family.
I cannot discuss my family without mentioning my grandparents, who filled the role of parents when my birth parents couldn’t, and that was 99.9% of the time. Pietro and Annunziata Buonfiglio are my paternal grandparents. They were from Palermo, albeit from different neighborhoods. Raimondo and Maria Grazia degli Angeli are my maternal grandparents. They were from Naples, or Napoli, and they too grew up in different areas of the city. All four of them came to Canada as Italy was losing World War II and Benito Mussolini was getting close to being hung in a public square.
The Buonfiglio and degli Angeli families initially settled in Vaughan, bordering Toronto to the north. They soon moved to what is now Corso Italia, along St. Clair West. Nonno Pietro and Nonna Annunziata set up a deli, and Nonno Raimondo and Nonna Maria Grazia opened an Italian bookstore. Pretty soon, both families welcomed children: Joseph, Michael, and Tatiana Buonfiglio; and Nadine, Kendra, and Romulo degli Angeli.
My father attended Harvard, and after living in the United States for a few years, moved back to Toronto in 1976 and started a law practice. My mother, on the other hand, stayed put in the area and considered being a nun for some time. Then she met my father at a Catholic singles’ outing. They were inseparable, and they got married in 1978 at St. Clare’s Catholic Church, which for our family was the religious central point of our lives.
As far as I can remember, my parents’ marriage was never consummated. Not even on their honeymoon, which they spent on the isle of Capri. My grandparents, on the other hand, managed to keep the passion alive for their entire lives. Sometimes, you’d have to hose them down just to get them off each other. Literally. One time, Nonno Pietro and Nonna Annunziata had a little too much Chianti and were found making out at Nathan Phillips Square… and it was December 1989, and the pond had frozen over and people were skating.
The closest that my parents ever came to intimate relations with each other was when me and my siblings were conceived. They dispensed of the romance of conception, and instead planted the seeds at an insemination clinic. One would think that even for being devout Catholics, they were quite progressive to go to a sperm bank. Wrong. They never saw each other naked, though I would learn as I grew up that they thought nothing of being naked in front of other people. Their marriage was less about love and keeping the family alive into the 21st century, and more of a partnership. They married for the financial and legal advantages of marriage.
Ryan was born in June 1980, and by all accounts it was a truly blessed event. They were so overjoyed when Ryan came into the world, there was dancing in the neighborhood streets. Ryan was the first child to come from our part of Corso Italia in a decade. It was a wonderful day for all… and a year later, I showed up.
Notice that I didn’t pepper that with romanticism. I was born on October 6, 1981. That was the day that the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat was assassinated. That was the time that “Endless Love” by Diana Ross and Lionel Richie ruled the music world. And at Toronto General Hospital, at 7:45 a.m., I came into the world. My grandparents were there, along with every other relative in the family. My mother had opted for a drug-fueled childbirth rather than experiencing again the pain of a child crawling out of her vagina or being taken from her stomach.
When she came to, she took one look at me and said, “Fuck this shit”. My life was never the same after that moment. My homecoming was a muted affair, no matter how much my grandparents wanted to celebrate it.
A year later, my mother was beaming with pride at the birth of Charlotte. She was absolutely ecstatic, and could not wait to show off her latest creation. Now, you’re probably wondering why my siblings had relatively common first names, and I got stuck with Graziano. My parents never named me. And this was only the beginning in a great line of incidents where I was not considered in the slightest. Nonna Maria Grazia named me after her maternal grandfather, Graziano Lambruschini. My parents simply went along with it, but they never referred to me by that name. Not to me, and not to anyone. It would be up to me to introduce myself. When I did so in the presence of my parents, they would utter a half-hearted “Yeah, what he said.”
In one word, I would sum up growing up with my family as: HELL. In Dante Alighieri’s “The Divine Comedy”, there are nine circles of hell: Limbo, Lust, Gluttony, Avarice, Wrath/Sloth, Heresy, Violence, Fraud, and Treason. The tenth circle of hell might as well have been my house.
Ryan and Chelsea were the apples of my parents’ eyes. They were the sun, the moon, and the stars. Ryan was the all-American boy – well, the Canadian equivalent. He did it all: hockey, lacrosse, Canadian football, and basketball. He was incredibly intelligent and did extremely well in school. He had strawberry blonde hair and could easily have passed for Zack Morris from “Saved by the Bell”. He was also an altar boy at St. Clare’s, and this gave him even more prestige in the family and in the neighborhood.
Charlotte was spoiled beyond compare. Whatever she wanted, she got, even if it meant getting it illegally. As a child, she competed in beauty pageants. I’ve nothing against beauty pageants; in fact, I follow Miss Universe quite religiously, but the child version is scary as hell. Charlotte, a brunette, wiped the floor with the competition those days, and that only added to her bratty behavior at home and at school. As she grew up, she traded the giant crowns of yesteryear for the even bigger crowns of high school popularity. She was captain of the cheer-leading squad, even as a freshman, and had the distinction of being prom queen at both Grade 11 and Grade 12. She never made any secret as to how she attained those accolades: she was banging people left, right, and sideways.
While my siblings were treated with love and respect, even at their very worst, I was pretty much the family’s whipping boy. I tried to please my parents in every single way whatsoever, but no matter what I did, I always got hit. Not a day went by that my parents and even Charlotte got their kicks off physically hurting me. The first time I remembered getting beaten was when I was five years old, and wanted a Teddy Ruxpin for Christmas. I was in the toy store with my mother and Nonna Annunziata, and I saw Teddy Ruxpin on the shelf. I pointed it out to my mother, and she responded by slapping me across the face and dragging me out. Nonna Annunziata did get me the toy for that Christmas, but I never got to play with it. My mother intercepted it and donated it to Toys for Tots.
My mother was an alcoholic and a drug addict. Substances and libations were her lovers, her friends, and her confidantes. She started after breast-feeding Charlotte. As the years passed, I would see her go to work all polished and clean, and I would arrive home to see her passed out on the sofa, a bottle of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc in her left hand and a joint in the other. When she wasn’t in her stupor, she would be screaming and slapping and throwing bottles at me. One day, I got fed up and poured the contents of every bottle of booze down the kitchen sink. My mother found out about this and beat me up in the wine cellar, which was in the basement.
My father was just as worse. He would come home from a hard day at work, or fucking one of the many girlfriends he had throughout the Greater Toronto Area, and just wail on me. I would be studying and doing my homework and he would storm into my room, grab me, and beat me until I was black and blue. It wasn’t until I went to college that I didn’t close out the night in my bedroom closet, huddled in the darkest crevices, crying and bleeding. There were nights that I didn’t bother spending at home. One night, in 1999, I sneaked into the same toy store from which a Teddy Ruxpin had been deprived from me, after being beaten up by my father for, once again, no reason whatsoever. I hid out in the teddy bear section, clutching a revamped Teddy Ruxpin, and fell asleep. Security guards found me the next morning, and I pleaded with them not to report me. They were kind enough to let me go, and no charges were ever filed.
At my darkest hours, my grandparents were there to help, and for that I will forever be in their debt. Nonno Pietro and Nonna Annunziata were fun-loving, feisty, and colorful. Even when life threw them curveballs, they never failed to keep their spirits up. I learned Italian through them; strangely, the rest of my family never really picked up the Italian language. They also taught me how to cook; whenever I was home alone, I may not have been the happiest person on Earth, but I was never hungry. Nonno Raimondo and Nonna Maria Grazia were the cerebral, intellectual, and reserved grandparents. I never was bored at their house, though. They exposed me to art, classical music, and literature, and always strived to make it enjoyable as opposed to a bloody dirge. I was happy to have two sets of grandparents from opposite extremes; I would not have been exposed to the world had they both been either zany or intellectual.
One thing that they mutually agreed on: they loved me. They were always encouraging me to do my best in school. They always offered constructive criticism and never believed in sparing the rod and spoiling the child. They were the ones who took me to the doctor. Had they had their way, I would have called them my legal guardians. They very well would have, had my father not managed to thwart their efforts. My grandparents were not perfect people, but as Grace Jones sang, “I’m not perfect, but I’m perfect for you”. I know that talking about them may sound hokey and romanticized, but you have to understand that when I was not in their presence, life was hell.
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