The Pigman & Me

  Eight hundred and fifty-three horrifying things had happened to me by the time I was a teenager. That was when I met my pigman, whose real name was Nonno Frankie. Of course, some of you don’t even know what a pigman is, but I do, so it’s my duty to warn you. Sooner or later one will come your way, and what you do when you meet him will be a matter of life or death. When your own personal pigman comes, you may not recognize him at first. He may appear when you’re shooting spitballs in your history class, or taking too many free mints from the cashier’s desk at your local hamburger hangout. Your parents may even invite your pigman into your home for tea and crumpets or a tour of their waxed-wood floors. If he shakes your hand you will feel a chill, but he’ll warm you with his smile. He’ll want you to be his friend, to follow him, and in his eyes you’ll see angels and monsters. Your pigman will come to you when you need him most. He’ll make you cry but teach you the greatest secret of life.

  If you haven’t croaked before finishing this book, then you’ll understand how I survived being a teenager, and you’ll know this important secret. The Surgeon General has not found this book to be dangerous to your health, but that’s probably because she hasn’t gotten around to reading it yet.

  PAUL ZINDEL

  THE PIGMAN AND ME

  a memoir

  CHAPTERS

  1 The Bizarre Adventures of My Teenage Life Begin!

  2 The Day It Rained Cockroaches

  3 How the Pigman’s Daughter Came into Our Lives

  4 The Day I Learned the Beauty of Worms

  5 An Unexpected Dinner

  6 Zombies on the Porches

  7 Nonno Frankie Wakes Up the Zombies!

  8 School Should Be a Big Pot of Juicy Meatballs!

  9 My First Fistfight

  10 My Second Fistfight

  11 My Mother Kills Lady, and My Sister’s Eyeballs Roll Backward up into Her Head!

  12 God, Death, and Boiling Lobsters

  13 The Slaying of the Apple Tree

  14 The Pigman’s Mind-Boggling Secret!

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Bizarre Adventures

  of My Teenage Life Begin!

  The morning I found my pet lizard, Albert, dead in my mother’s coffee mug was the day I should’ve known I’d soon be meeting my pigman. The mug lay in the rear window of our beat-up Chevrolet, and it rolled this way and that as we rounded the curves of Victory Boulevard. Albert had been missing for weeks. We simply hit a pothole and his little body popped up out of the mug while my mother was singing, which is what she did a lot of whenever she wasn’t threatening to commit suicide.

  “Casey would waltz with the strawberry blonde,” she sang, “and the band played on. He’d glide ‘cross the floor with the girl he adored, and the band played on.…”

  Mom’s short bobbed hair wiggled in the wind rushing through the open car windows. Her dark eyes scanned the roadway in front, afraid to miss a single speck of oncoming life. My sister, Betty, a year and a half older than me, sat upon one of our dumpy suitcases, staring forward. She was a very pretty and suspicious girl, with long Sheena-Queen-of-the-Jungle blond hair. Then there was me. Hair like a blond carrottop. A sensitive, slightly nice-looking boy, but I didn’t know I was either at the time. Actually, I didn’t think I cared very much how the world saw me then, but I realize now I did care very much. I mostly thought of myself as a tall, scraggly, ordinary teenager glimpsed in a funhouse mirror.

  “Mom, could you stop someplace so I can bury Albert?”

  “Of course, dear,” my mother said.

  She pulled the car over in front of a parked Good Humor truck. She and my sister licked Creamola bars while I laid Albert to rest in the soft, moist soil next to a wild daisy. I had bought the chameleon as a living souvenir during intermission at a performance of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Then I brought him home and housed him royally for four months in a luscious grass-and-twig-decorated pickle jar. I even fed him the most succulent flies and wasps I could catch, but he’d escaped at least once a month and hidden in the faded lace curtains of our last rented apartment. He was mind-bogglingly hard to find, which, I imagine is precisely what God had in mind when he designed chameleons.

  After Albert’s funeral, we got back into the car, which was filled with everything we owned. We had just been evicted because Mother called the landlady a “snooping, vicious, lurking spy.” Of course, we had also fallen a few months behind in paying our rent, which was the main reason we moved three or four times a year.

  “This time it’s going to work out,” my mother claimed happily as we drove on. “This time it’s going to really work out! This will be a home of our own! I won’t have to drag my poor children all over the place!”

  “Great, Mom,” Betty said, giving me a wink.

  “Terrific, Mom,” I chimed in, rolling my eyes upward.

  “Yes, kids! We’ll have a home of our own, with nobody to tell us what to do! Nobody! It’ll be Heaven!”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Day It Rained

  Cockroaches

  The three of us were very excited when we pulled up in front of our new home. There were some unusual things about it, but I’ve always been attracted to unusual things. For instance, I was the only kid I knew who always liked searching newspapers to find weird news. Whenever I found a shocking article or picture, I’d save it. That week alone, I had cut out a picture of a man who was born with monkey feet, a list of Seventy-Five Ways to Be Richer a Year from Now, and a report about a mother who sold her daughter to Gypsies in exchange for a theater trip to London. Also, there are ten biographical points about me you should know right off the bat:

  1) My father ran away with one of his girl-friends when I was two years old.

  2) My sister taught me how to cut out fake coins from cardboard and make imitation lamb chops out of clay, because we never had very much real money or food.

  3) I once wanted to be Batman and fly off buildings.

  4) I yearned to be kidnapped by aliens for a ride in their flying saucer.

  5) Ever since I could remember I’d liked to make cyclorama displays out of shoeboxes and cut out figures of ghosts, beasts, and teenagers to put in them.

  6) I once prayed to own a pet gorilla.

  7) I used to like to play tricks on people, like putting thumbtacks on their seats.

  8) When my father’s father was sixteen, he got a job on a Dutch freighter, sailed to America, jumped ship and swam to Staten Island, got married, and opened a bake shop, and he and his wife died from eating too many crumb-cakes before Betty and I could meet them.

  9) A truck once ran over my left elbow. It really hurt and left a little scar.

  10) I am afraid I will one day die by shark attack.

  About anything else you’d ever want to know about my preteen existence you can see in the photos in this book. However, I don’t think life really started for me until I became a teenager and my mother moved us to Travis, on Staten Island.

  When we first drove into the town, I noticed a lot of plain wood houses, a Catholic church, a war memorial, three saloons with men sitting outside on chairs, seventeen women wearing kerchiefs on their heads, a one-engine firehouse, a big red-brick school, a candy store, and a butcher shop with about 300 sausages hanging in the window. Betty shot me a private look, signaling she was aghast. Travis was mainly a Polish town, and was so special-looking that, years later, it was picked as a location for filming the movie Splendor in the Grass, which starred Natalie Wood (before she drowned), and Warren Beatty (before he dated Madonna). Travis was selected because they needed a town that looked like it was Kansas in 1920, which it still looks like.

  The address of our new home was 123 Glen Street. We stopped in front, and for a few
moments the house looked normal: brown shingles, pea-soup-green-painted sides, a tiny yellow porch, untrimmed hedges, and a rickety wood gate and fence. Across the street to the left was a slope with worn gravestones all over it. The best-preserved ones were at the top, peeking out of patches of poison oak.

  The backyard of our house was an airport. I mean, the house had two acres of land of its own, but beyond the rear fence was a huge field consisting of a single dirt runway, lots of old propeller-driven Piper Cub–type planes, and a cluster of rusted hangars. This was the most underprivileged airport I’d ever seen, bordered on its west side by the Arthur Kill channel and on its south side by a Con Edison electric power plant with big black mountains of coal. The only great sight was a huge apple tree on the far left corner of our property. Its trunk was at least three feet wide. It had strong, thick branches rich with new, flapping leaves. It reached upward like a giant’s hand grabbing for the sky.

  “Isn’t everything beautiful?” Mother beamed.

  “Yes, Mom,” I said.

  Betty gave me a pinch for lying.

  “I’ll plant my own rose garden,” Mother went on, fumbling for the key. “Lilies, tulips, violets!”

  Mom opened the front door and we went inside. We were so excited, we ran through the echoing empty rooms, pulling up old, soiled shades to let the sunlight crash in. We ran upstairs and downstairs, all over the place like wild ponies. The only unpleasant thing, from my point of view, was that we weren’t the only ones running around. There were a lot of cockroaches scurrying from our invading footfalls and the shafts of light.

  “Yes, the house has a few roaches,” Mother confessed. “We’ll get rid of them in no time!”

  “How?” Betty asked raising an eyebrow.

  “I bought eight Gulf Insect Bombs!”

  “Where are they?” I asked.

  Mother dashed out to the car and came back with one of the suitcases. From it she spilled the bombs, which looked like big silver hand grenades.

  “We just put one in each room and turn them on!” Mother explained.

  She took one of the bombs, set it in the middle of the upstairs kitchen, and turned on its nozzle. A cloud of gas began to stream from it, and we hurried into the other rooms to set off the other bombs.

  “There!” Mother said. “Now we have to get out!”

  “Get out?” I coughed.

  “Yes. We must let the poison fill the house for four hours before we can come back in! Lucky for us there’s a Lassie double feature playing at the Ritz!”

  We hadn’t been in the house ten minutes before we were driving off again!

  I suppose you might as well know now that my mother really loved Lassie movies. The only thing she enjoyed more were movies in which romantic couples got killed at the end by tidal waves, volcanos, or other natural disasters. Anyway, I was glad we were gassing the roaches, because they are the one insect I despise. Tarantulas I like. Scorpions I can live with. But ever since I was three years old and my mother took me to a World’s Fair, I have had nightmares about cockroaches. Most people remember an exciting water ride this fair had called the Shoot-the-Chutes, but emblazed on my brain is the display the fair featured of giant, live African cockroaches, which look like American cockroaches except they’re six inches long, have furry legs, and can pinch flesh. In my nightmares about them, I’m usually lying on a bed in a dark room and I notice a bevy of giant cockroaches heading for me. I try to run away but find out that someone has secretly tied me down on the bed, and the African roaches start crawling up the sides of the sheets. They walk all over my body, and then they head for my face. When they start trying to drink from my mouth is when I wake up screaming.

  So after the movie I was actually looking forward to going back to the house and seeing all the dead cockroaches.

  “Wasn’t Lassie wonderful?” Mother sighed as she drove us back to Travis. “The way that brave dog was able to crawl hundreds of miles home after being kidnapped and beaten by Nazi Secret Service Police!”

  “Yes, Mom,” I agreed, although I was truthfully tired of seeing a dog movie star keep pulling the same set of tearjerking stunts in each of its movies.

  “Maybe we’ll get a dog just like Lassie one day,” Mother sighed.

  When we got back to the house this time, we didn’t run into it. We walked inside very slowly, sniffing for the deadly gas. I didn’t care about the gas so much as I wanted to see a lot of roach corpses all over the place so I’d be able to sleep in peace.

  But there were none.

  “Where are all the dead roaches?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Mother admitted.

  We crept slowly upstairs to see if the bodies might be there. I knew the kitchen had the most roaches, but when we went in, I didn’t see a single one, living or dead. The lone empty Gulf Insect Bomb sat spent in the middle of the floor. My sister picked up the bomb and started reading the directions. One thing my mother never did was follow directions. As Betty was reading, I noticed a closed closet door and reached out to turn its knob.

  “It says here we should’ve opened all the closet doors before setting off the bombs, so roaches can’t hide.” Betty moaned, her clue to me that Mom had messed up again.

  I had already started to open the door. My mind knew what was going to happen, but it was too late to tell my hand to stop pulling on the door. It sprang open, and suddenly 5,000 very angry, living cockroaches rained down on me from the ceiling of the closet.

  “Eeehhhhhh!” I screamed, leaping around the room, bathed in bugs, slapping at the roaches crawling all over me and down my neck! “Eeehhhhhh! Eeehh! Ehhh! Ehh!”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll get more bombs,” Mother said comfortingly as she grabbed an old dishrag to knock the fluttering roaches off my back. Betty calmly reached out her foot to crunch as many as dared run by her.

  CHAPTER THREE

  How the Pigman’s

  Daughter Came

  into Our Lives

  Actually the most preposterous thing I witnessed that year of Travis was that my mother had arranged to buy, not rent, the house in Travis. You would do well to wonder how my mom was able to buy a house when we were broke most of the time, but what Mother lacked in money, she made up for in being able to talk a mile a minute. A lot of people liked her gift of gab, and several used to ask her advice about a lot of things, and she’d always make believe she knew what she was talking about. In this world it doesn’t seem to matter if you know anything as long as you pretend to know it.

  One of the people who came to Mom for help was Connie Vivona, the daughter of Nonno Frankie, my pigman-to-be. Truth is stranger than fiction, so brace yourself while I tell you how my mother met Connie Vivona.

  Connie Vivona showed up at our last apartment crying and holding the hands of her identical-twin sons, Nicky and Joey. Connie was simply walking the streets crying and ringing strangers’ doorbells because her husband had abandoned her and his two sons, and she was about to lose her mind. Her husband had gone to Las Vegas one night, decided he’d had enough of her and the twins, divorced her, and taken off to live in Paris.

  So one morning our doorbell rang. Mom peeked out from behind the faded lace curtains and opened the door, and there stood this plump, cute, young Italian woman with makeup and two kids.

  “Oh, God!” The woman broke down crying, straightening her red knit dress. “I have no place to live!”

  I know this is hard to believe, but my mother let this complete stranger in and told me to go play with the twins while she listened to Connie Vivona’s entire life story. And let me tell you, Nicky and Joey were very strange twins. They were zesty kids, five years younger than me, and they loved to do crazy things. They both had handsome little olive faces, springy black hair, and big eyes like trusting raccoons’. The craziest thing I told them to do that afternoon was to crawl down a flight of stairs headfirst. And they did it! If you’ve never tried it, you really should. It’s quite an experience at any age. Then, after
the stairs, I told them to spin around in circles, which they did until they dropped. Then I told them to catch squirrels in the backyard. I really liked Nicky and Joey, though I couldn’t tell one from the other. They loved everything I told them to do. They laughed and puffed, and even that very first day I could tell they looked up to me with enormous respect.

  And Mother and Connie got along great, particularly when Mother found out Connie had over $800 in a bank account.

  “There’s so much you can do with eight hundred dollars,” my mother joyously told her. “So much we can do.”

  What Mom finally got Connie to do was buy the house in Travis with $500 down. Even though the money was Connie’s, Mom explained that her own business expertise represented an equal contribution, so they signed the mortgage papers as co-owners of the house. The whole setup was so complicated it gave me a teenage headache, but the important parts you have to know are as follows:

  a) Connie and her twins were due to move in the day after us. They had gone to Man- hattan to pick up some of their belong- ings, which they had stored with her mother and father, Nonna Mamie and Nonno Frankie.

  b) Nonna and Nonno mean “Grandmother” and “Grandfather” in Italian.

  c) I had no idea then that Nonno Frankie would turn out to be my pigman.

  d) Nonna Mamie and Nonno Frankie had fled Italy because they hated its dictator, Benito Mussolini. A lot of Italians loved Mussolini in the beginning, but after a while they caught on to his character defects and knocked him off.

  e) Nonna Mamie and Nonno Frankie were gainfully employed at NBC in Manhattan. I thought that meant they were working at the National Broadcasting Company, but it turned out their NBC meant the National Biscuit Company. Nonno Frankie’s job was to help load batter into giant mixing bowls, and Nonna Mamie’s job was to stand at one side of a block- long conveyor belt and remove imperfect Oreo cookies before they traveled on to the packaging machines.