Question everything. I have that posted above my desk in my room.

It’s a principle I live by. Always has been. At least since I was 16 and announced at Thanksgiving dinner that I didn’t believe in god anymore. My Roman Catholic family didn’t blink. They kept on eating Mama’s homemade lasagna. They were used to me saying outrageous things.

Mama had decided early on that I was well-named. “Doubting Tommaso,” she called me, mixing English and Italian. The nickname was a reference to the apostle who didn’t believe that Jesus had risen from the dead. 

The priest in religion class wasn’t as understanding when I expressed my doubts. He had me stay after school for the rest of the year, to sweep floors and scrape gum from the bottom of desk tops. As if that was going to make me stop wondering how Catholics could believe in three gods, yet still be monotheistic. “It’s a mystery of the faith, you’ll understand it when you die,” just didn’t cut it for me.

Writing was my salvation. Mama had an old Underwood typewriter in her bedroom. I’d stand on a small stool to reach the top of the bureau it sat on. She wouldn’t let me take it into my room, even though she never used it. For hours, I’d tap away on that primitive keyboard, churning out page after page that I hid under my tee-shirts in my drawer or carried with me in my back pack.

There was nothing I couldn't express on those secret pieces of paper. Even my most hidden feelings. Like how I lusted after the Sicilian boy with the black hair and olive skin who lived two blocks away. If anyone ever found them, I’d say I was writing from the perspective of a woman. Writers did things like that.

My first poems were published in the neighborhood newspaper, the South Philly Review and Chronicle. Nobody understood them. I kept the words vague to hide my true feelings. The editor encouraged me to keep writing.

My father didn’t react well to my pronouncement at dinner one night that I was going to be a writer. “You’re gonna waste your life!” he yelled before he stormed out of the room. Eventually he came to accept what I wanted to be. Sort of. “Do whatever you want. Just don’t write nothing about this family or I’ll beat the crap outa ya.” He wasn't kidding. I felt suddenly very isolated.

My brother helped me understand that ostracism was a time-honored tradition among writers. So was rebelliousness. He gave me a copy of a play he had just finished. No Exit changed my life. I read everything by Jean-Paul Sartre I could find . I spent countless hours in the library and in the narrow aisles of an old bookstore, soaking up some of the greatest thinking of the 20th century. Not to mention breathing in dust that Walt Whitman had probably dragged in a century before.

As my hair grew longer and my outlook on life more radical, I found my way to antiwar marches and eventually gay liberation meetings. For years, I carried Allen Ginsberg’s Howl in my back pack along with the Communist Manifesto. I quoted Jean Genet and James Baldwin to guys who picked me up when I hitch-hiked to and from college, even though some of them were more interested in something other than literary matters.

The first public reading of my work came after I won the Temple University “Young Poets” contest in 1971. I had just come out of the closet. Fired up with a newfound spirit of defiance, I walked up to the mic and introduced the first poem, mentioning that it was written for a guy I had been in love with.

No one, myself included, breathed until I finished.

Catholic leader has
foot-in-mouth disease

la familia es todo

(Traducido por Mirta Márquez Mecca, mi prima segunda en Argentina. Translated by Mirta Márquez Mecca, my second cousin in Argentina.)

 
Pregunto a mi tía si hay algo que pueda hacer por él,
ella está tranquila en su vigilia, sentada junto a su cama,
acariciando con sus dedos, las grandes cuentas marrones
de un viejo rosario.
ella dice: "lo que no puede tener de nuevo es a su hijo"

staring at papa
from a chair by the window
of that warm hospital room in south philly

two strokes and he is
shrunken
caved in
not at all the goliath who could
anesthetize me with a word
slay me with a glance

motionless is the hand
that kept me in line
mute the voice that reminded me
time and again
how much I disappointed him

the queer activist son
who put his passion for social justice
ahead of his duty not to shame la famiglia

now like the prodigal son
I have returned
answering the call of genes and chromosomes
voices echoing from a place I can't define
"la famiglia e' tutto"
family is everything

I ask my aunt if there's anything I can get him
she's sitting in her quiet vigil by his bed
her fingers caressing the large brown beads
of an old rosary
"what he can't have back," she says
"his son"

MUSICA

 

Tallase and Mecca

MAS MUSICA

I'm still doing music...now it's with the Peaceniks, a group that sings songs of the various struggles for social and economic justice (most of which I write). The Peaceniks now includes Diana Hartman on vocals, John Radogno on guitar and Pat Gerber on percussion. Like the Plastic Ono Band, our group is ever growing. For this performance at the Kitchen in San Francisco, Diana Hartman Jenny Wiley joined me on vocals. The song is "Yuppie, yuppie stole my pad," written during the dot-com boom when lots of people were losing their pads. For more of our music, go to youtube.com/avimecca.

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