My Brother, the Gypsy Scholar

It’s my brother’s 59th birthday today.

My brother is a gypsy scholar.

He used to be a gypsy cab driver.

He already has an MBA and a JD, but now he’s going to school for the hell of it. He just sent me a paper he wrote for his graduate course at the City University of New York. The paper is called “Microfinance and Social Justice.” It includes the line “money does not care who spends it,” which I like enough to have printed on a T-shirt. But then, my brother has spent his life saying things that I’d like to have printed on T-shirts.

It would be easy to celebrate Hugo’s many obvious accomplishments—his professional successes, his degrees, his three fabulous children, his long and happy marriage—as well the work he’s done through the Double R Foundation. There’s a room in Ellis Island named after our dad because of Hugo.

But . . .

It’s not that it’s always been easy. For example, my brother wrote the rebuttal to my introduction to Don’t Tell Mama: The Penguin Book of Italian American Writing (2002). There aren’t too many editors who have family members who insist on refuting their introduction to a collection of essays, but there you go.

It isn’t only on the page where Hugo has made an impression, either. I’ve always been a bit player in my older brother’s world. To be honest, everybody in the family was tutored by Hugo. We were analyzing If by Lindsay Anderson, listening to Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline, listening to Gene Shepherd on WOR, and reading Tom Wolf’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test before anybody knew what these iconic texts (not that we called them “texts” in Oceanside, Long Island) actually meant. Anything cool I’ve ever discovered, he helped me discover

Anything I’ve accomplished, I’ve accomplished because of him, and most of the huge mistakes I’ve made, I’ve made in spite of his advice to act otherwise.

My big brother went through everything first, which, of course, is the nature of older siblings, but he also went through it harder. My mother was never at ease in her life, but she was even less so with my brother than she was by the time I was growing up.

When he was born, she was still a brand-new immigrant from Quebec, having only just moved to live with my father’s big Italian family in Brooklyn. She could barely speak English, and he would sometimes have to translate from her patois to make her understood to the shopkeepers on Ocean Avenue in Sheepshead Bay.

In one of the stories famous in our family, my mother went to buy my brother a pair of rubber boots when he was about four. She didn’t know the correct term, and as was her habit, simply pronounced her version of the French word in an American accent.

“I want some boots for my son,” she said in her most sophisticated voice to the salesman at Sammy’s Super Cheap Shoe Emporium, or whatever the place might have been called. “What kind of boots, lady?” the salesman asked. “I want them in caoutchou,” she said. “Lady, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” replied the salesman, who, no doubt had heard pretty much everything in his day, but had never heard this phrase before.

I can imagine my mother putting on her best Veronica Lake expression, her blonde hair hanging over one eye, a haughtiness she would resort to when she felt like she was being treated like a foreigner. At this point, my brother, in his intelligent, astute fierceness that characterizes him to this day, explained to the gentleman, “My mother would like to buy me a pair of rubber boots.”

In other words, even when people were doing things for him, Hugo always had to do everything for himself.

We both grew up with very little, but Hugo grew up with less. Nobody ever gave Hugo a damn thing. He never got a leg up or a free pass or dinner on the house.

One of his favorite songs is Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “Everything We Got, We Got the Hard Way,” and he’s earned the right to sing it.

Happy birthday, big brother. Hope you get a good grade on your paper.

And thanks.

(Photo: Gina and Hugo in the Ellis Island room dedicated to their father)