Lou Abruzzio's Final Christmas
Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.
-D. H. Lawrence
At exactly 12:03am EST on Black Friday, 2019, a Long Island man by the name of Lou Abruzzio ( pronounced ah-BROOTZ!-e-o) was being thrust along by the shifting tides of a crowd trying to bottleneck itself into a Best Buy near Levittown when everything in the world changed forever. No one knew that Lou, 58, a diesel mechanic who had worked for the same school bus outfit for the last 31 years, was about to be placed at the center of the downfall of the Prince of Peace but that’s what happened. Even now, not many people know about this. In fact, I doubt that anyone has read the brief, newish blog post, titled Long Island Man Changes Humanity Forever, that appeared on a Chris Tissad’s blog, McRib Boy. This, I believe, on account of that fact that a quick look at the thing now reveals that it has no likes and no shares and no indication at all that any eyeball has ever glanced upon it aside from the author himself. A single comment below the five paragraph blog post is attributed to Chris Tissad himself. It states, rather directly, “I don’t know why the fuck I bother writing these fucking things when no one ever reads them.”
The blog post is not very long but it does, in retrospect, seem to be the only reporting on one of the most important stories of our time.
Or of all time, really.
____
The crowd outside the Best Buy trying to get in that night was probably well over three-hundred strong. At first there had been a slight air of semi-electric anticipation amongst the first early arrivals around noon on Thanksgiving day. But as darkness crept across the landscape and the store managers double-checked and triple checked and quadruple-checked (etc., etc.) they locked the doors, the people lined up out on the sidewalk began to experience an uneasiness that was tough to recognize let alone explain.
In due time, new arrivals began to have to park their cars further and further from the store in the parking lot. By 11pm, an hour before the much anticipated midnight start of this well publicized Colossal Black Friday Mega Sale, a certain panic began to set in. This swift rising sense of negative energy manifested itself in the form of many of the people present, their bellies stretched to the physical limit with roasted turkey and stuffing and gravy and baked ziti and garlic bread and little cubes of all kinds of cheese (mostly generic cheddars), straddling the odd physical line that has come to exist in recent times/ the line between overstuffed holiday sleepy and desperate consumer violent.
Perhaps, looking back, if the former condition had somehow been able to triumph over the latter, our tale would be a much different one. But that isn’t how things panned out. And so we are here now talking about a legend who no one has heard of. An anonymous man who gave his own life for the love of his fellow human yet has received nothing in return short of the unseen blog post written after the fact by the only witness who seems to have fathomed anything at all from the bizarre events of that fading time. Still, legend is the only word that works, I think. Legend. Nothing more, nothing less.
_____
The thing about it is this. Lou Abruzzi: husband, dad, new grand-pop (Peppo!), grease monkey, all around decent guy: he was at the Best Buy that night on a whim to try and score ‘one shit-hot bargain’ (his words) on a Samsung 2019 QLED 4K Q90R 65" television. He knew that there would be competition for said TV. He also knew that there was a very good chance that things could become a bit dicey once the eager crowd of shoppers was let inside. They would, he had told friends, all rush towards their chosen areas of the store, places where certain deals could be had, designated spots they had mapped out and planned ahead of time to get to, without mercy, however they had to, in order to be the one who got the thing that mattered most.
Lou, who had told his wife, the former Vivian Allegra D’Nunzio, now known around the neighborhood as Vivian Allegra D’Nunzio Abruzzi, or ‘Viv’ or ‘Vivvy’ for short, that he planned to put the big TV under the tree (or more likely in front of it) as a gift for their one and only living child, Antonio Vincenzo (pronounced vin- CHENZ!- oh) Abruzzi, affectionately known as ‘Big Onion’ by everyone who loved him, which just so happens to have been a lot of people.
Another son, Marco Alpacino (pronounced al-puh- CHEEN!-oh) Abruzzi, had died in 1994, at the age of 10, three days after being struck and killed by a wine-colored sedan being driven by a very drunk woman, an Eileen Murphy from Manhattan, who was visiting her sister, the former Lisa Murphy now Lisa Dellasandro, who was dying from Stage 4 breast cancer in a makeshift bed made out of a couch in a house three blocks up from the Abruzzi house which stood in the 2300 block of Gladmore Street in the town of East Meadow. The accident occurred when Marco was peddling his bike a few feet in circles that covered both the sidewalk by his house and then the street. His brother, Antonio ‘Big Onion’, who was 8 at the time and was the apple of his older brother’s eye, witnessed everything.
‘Big Onion’, now 33, was indeed big. Coming in at 5’ 7’, 284 lbs, he had a stubbly beard and a gentle demeanor despite his heft. He wore tent sized cartoon character t-shirts and sweat shorts and light blue Crocs with white tube socks pulled up to his hairy knees and he was known up and down the local streets as the kid whose brother died in front of him. Although, to be fair, people didn’t treat him much differently than any other lovable neighbor at this point. He was autistic, they all knew, and he flapped his hands and talked almost exclusively about his favorite ball club, the New York Yankees/ his favorite tv show, The A-Team/ and his favorite foods, eggplant parm sandwiches from Lorenzo’s in the Diamond Square shopping center and hard-boiled eggs dipped in Crystal Hot Sauce and then rolled down through a long trail of salt and pepper mixed together on his favorite plate, a plastic Yankee Stadium souvenir dinner plate from the early 90’s, but to them, his neighbors, he was just part of the world. A familiar sight. Lou and Vivian’s boy who lived in their garage.
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Let’s sidetrack a second, talk about Christmas. Me and you. Just us, candid and all.
I mean, tell me something, will ya? What do you make of where things have ended up with Christmastime? Not just the day itself but I mean the whole thing. The whole season, I guess you could say. How did it end up so shot full of holes? Or why? And how did we take it from what we had as kids to this sick, mad business it has become?
Don’t bullshit me or hold back or whatever on account of hiding something either. I don’t care what you’ve done. I swear. I just want to understand what happened. Please believe me. Maybe you even want to understand the same thing that I do? To tell you the truth, I think a lot of us do but we’re probably afraid because we helped destroy it. Listen. For me to judge you about how you have participated in the death of the holiday would mean that I would have to be innocent of any such thing. And as you can probably guess by my questions, I am not innocent.
Not at all!
Not even close!
But I am here, you know?
I am here and I am ready to fess up, admit my transgressions, not in the name of Jesus or whatever, but more in the name of the feeling I used to get when I was a kid. I know you know what I’m trying to say. For me and you, Christmas was magic. It was a capsule we climbed into and were surrounded by rare, surreal warmth and that kind of velvety peace that were like nothing else in the world to us back then. But how did it just go away? I need to figure this out and I need other people to help me do it, man.
Remember what I’m saying?
You remember that deep true sensation that death was impossible and that everything was charmed and that the lights on the tree were a promise from on high, your Jesus or your God or your stars or your universe or whatever the hell you were thinking, it doesn’t even matter now. We weren’t even thinking most of the time back then. We were swept up and away by a drifting wind that carried us in its arms and blew us through a dream state for a few weeks a year. And now it has become something else entirely. Ruined by money. Shattered by the hijackings left and right. Someone stole all of it out from underneath our noses and now here we are, looking at all of these Decembers that exhaust us even before they start.
I used to wake up and look out the window and see snow had fallen in the night.
Now I look out the window in the morning and I see someone standing down in the yard in the dark. He’s holding a fat stick in his hand and he’s using it to slowly indicate that he wants me to come down there.
Come down here, buddy.
That’s how he moves the stick.
Come down here and take it like a man, son.
I don’t know who he is. It’s too dark to tell. I see his silhouette out there in the outskirts of the back porch light. He appears to have long hair. Like the guy from Soundgarden.
Ugh.
I’m doing all the talking. I know I am. I’m sorry about that.
Anyway.
I think it might be Jesus.
Out there in the yard.
I mean, if I believed in him at all.
_____
The way that blog post guy might have described things if he actually described things at all probably would have told about how Lou Abruzzi, when all seven of the Hempstead Turnpike Best Buy managers opened the doors, he got swept up in the rough sudden instability of something bigger than him. No one was expecting it to feel like it did and for Lou, he was caught off guard, but not only that: he was also lifted up off the actual ground. That was something he didn’t see coming. Who would? The reality of the rising of your own body against your will or desire is a much different feeling than when we submit ourselves to it willingly as we ride the waves at the beach or float and zip and rush along on roller coasters in the hot blue summertime.
What occurred to Lou right away, as the heat of the lit up inside of the store collided with the raw cold swooshing through the gates with the throngs rushing in, was that he must have made a mistake.
That was his very first thought.
Oh boy, oh boy, I must have done something wrong here!
In the instant that followed, it might have entered his mind that there were no real malicious intentions on his part in any of this, at least none that he could recognize. The line had closed in all around as the blue-shirted managers stood watching them through the glass. Then the line had heaved forward and Lou had felt his back twitch and his skin begin to ripple with what might best be described as fresh fender bender goosebumps. But that feeling was short-lived as it turns out because then a manager reached upwards and his fingers must have touched a switch or a button because everything went into slow motion after that.
Lou understood the pressure at his back and the emerging new din from within the old one. The voices of the past couple of hours in the freezing line had now sonically altered themselves into something hideously unrecognizable. This is no human sound, Lou told himself as he was thrust forward. This is monsters! This is monster sounds that are coming from behind me!
Of course, there was alarm in many people’s eyes at that moment. As in the early stages of fierce battle, the threshold of belief is often flooded over with a crashing madness as even the toughest fighters find themselves somewhat surprised at the capabilities of his fellow man. What has dawned in many down through the ages dawned on Lou right there and then when he began to understand that his agency was no longer his own.
All of his Americanness, every part of his soul that previously believed in the foundations of his middle of the road Catholic life up until now/ church as kid/ his alter boy Sundays/ his exclusive Easter and Christmas Eve congregation appearances now that he was older and busier and crushed beneath the weight of a planet sized hole in his heart/ his dead parents up in a better place watching down over him like they were in the balcony of an old movie theater smiling down/ spilling popcorn/ Vivian and Big Onion back in the kitchen/ maybe Onion in his Yankees pajamas, looking like a little boy again/ all of his sorrows and his sadness and his love for his lost son/ sweet, sweet Marco/ oh, gentle funny Marco with the devilish smile/ the handsome faced boy with the big black eyebrows so lush and full/ so Italian in his looks/ such an easygoing, confident flow for a little kid/ such a loving brother to Big Onion who was so young then/ so young and far off from the rest of us, Lou thought, as all of his existence up until that very moment turned in on itself and crashed down/ human constructs imploded, one by one, by human greed/ Lou was no longer himself. He was, he recognized just then, no longer within his own body.
The wave rushed hard by a manager who disappeared beneath the boiling surface of hatted heads. Lou watched the man go under. Then he saw boxes bobbing and flying, spit and tossed by the active sea, like tiny boats in a hurricane. Colored things appeared out of nowhere and then were inhaled by the mass as it moved to fill every void it could find. Turning to his left, Lou felt a hand on his shoulder, and as he managed to crane his neck upon the crest of the wave, he saw a black woman, a kind mid-fifties lady he’d exchanged a few pleasantries about too much pumpkin pie with earlier. This time though she was wild-eyed and screaming although Lou couldn’t hear her voice except the faintest trace of it trying in vain to rise above the roar of the mindless crowd. What he did hear though was the sound of the air being sucked down into the hole that appeared in the rippling beneath her just as she too sunk down into some other world beneath the surface that heaved Lou along.
At one point, flat on his back, the undulations of the ecstatic massaging him strangely, Lou watched as light fixture after light fixture passed away over top him as if they were train cars moving along, one by one, headed to some other place/ some other city or some other stockyard or distant depot/ never to be seen by me again, he thought. Then just as the halogens and the ceiling tiles began to put him into a panicked trance, Lou was terrified to feel his body being uprighted by new currents under his limbs, spastic forces that twisted him and shot him forward so that he found himself actually standing on a kind of raft or surfboard, which quickly turned out to be another person’s body, decked out in what looked like a North Face puffer, but unmoving and face down. It was then, as human figures shape-shifted into metallic blurs and back again into flailing people and then back once more into chrome-ish warriors battling one another in front of huge boxes of PlayStation 5’s and Bluetooth sound bars and cases of this and cylinders of that, that Lou, the Italian-American, DadBod, lovely neighbor, bus fixer, sad happy man child of life, saw the city of Samsung 2019 QLED 4K Q90R 65" TVs rising up out of the war-torn horizon as the wave raced him towards it while at least fifty angry armed madmen and wildwomen began to clash violently to score one of the oversized showcase units.
The wave stopped then and tilted itself like a dock collapsing.
Lou felt himself unable to stop or start anything at all.
He simply rolled, powerlessly, down off of the thrashing fingered surface of that horrible surf, landing on his feet at the very moment that an elderly Puerto Rican woman in a fruit green parka, swinging a thunderous purse, and backed by what appeared to be her two gym rat sons, began to pummel the simple-minded ill-equipped fools who dared to approach her straddling her 2019 QLED 4K Q90R 65" steed the way that a horseback general would sit, right before his glorious death, absolutely mad with the kind of paralyzing fear that has often been misdiagnosed as immense courage down through the annals of the harshest fights ever fought.
Locking eyes with those three majestic warriors at once, Lou pissed his pants and thought of Big Onion having ice cream at the sink and his heart exploded into an effervescent rage of unstoppable life.
End of Part 1!
Tune in Next week for the nail-biting conclusion!
Hello Ho Ho! I want to wish each and every one of you a Merry Christmas or a Happy Hanukkah or a Wonderful Kwanza! Whatever you do, whoever you celebrate, however you do it…I don’t give a damn. I just hope it’s really special for you and your people.
From my family to yours…Happy Holidays!
Serge
Thunder Pie is always edited by Arle Bielanko!
Subscribe to her Substack here! Letter to You!
Photos/ Art: Serge B./ Arle B.
If you want to send me a little holiday bonus/ please do it. Especially this week! You are supporting my small artist mom-n-pop business when you do! And a hearty thank you to the readers who did so this past couple of weeks. Love and appreciate you guys so much.
Things I Liked This Week.
A friend of mine posted on social media about something called a Hobo Nickel. I’d never heard that term, but needless to say: I was intrigued. It turns out that Hobo Nickels are small masterpiece works of art. Wikipedia aptly describes what I am now fascinated by: “The hobo nickel is a sculptural art form involving the creative modification of small-denomination coins, resulting in miniature bas reliefs. The United States nickel coin was favored because of its size, thickness, and softness; but the term hobo nickel is generic, carvings having been made from many denominations. Because of its low cost and its portability, this medium was particularly popular among hobos, hence the name.”
I’ve been doing a bit of musical revisiting to the legendary country band Alabama’s Christmas album. Released in 1985 when I was 14 years old and heavily into listening to and learning about country music, the record became a real holiday staple in our house. I had a cassette of it that I wore it the f*** OUT! I remain an Alabama fan to this day/ they truly were one hell of a band.
Slim Dunlap from another legendary band, The Replacements, died this week. And although that wasn’t anything I liked at all, his death did inspire me to revisit a time when I was young and rock/roll meant everything to my friends and me. Our lives were bigger than they seemed. I know that now. I didn’t know it then. I tip my hat to Slim and thank him for his dedicated service. You can read my musings here.
My stepson Piper had brought home not one but TWO homemade Christmas ornaments from fourth grade this week. That, in addition to the one he made me for my birthday, brings a total of THREE HOMEMADE CHRISTMAS ORNAMENTS by Piper this year alone! That really excites me and I’m digging them so much. I love the stuff the kids make in school for the holiday/ I’ve kept everything through the years. They are my most valuable
possessions.
Serge... your storytelling dragged me in to the point where I was almost there....then to stop.....😲
Now I have to wait 7 more days to find out the end of the tale...
Unless of course there's a part 3....🤔
This one is a puzzler. I googled Chris Tissad. Nothing. I googled Lou Abruzzio. Nothing. I’m at a loss. But I’m hooked. Great storytelling. No doubt. At all. Btw, the attached audio would appear to be some sort of AI thing, yeah? Because your name keeps being pronounced “BI-lanko” and the _ and / are being audibly announced: underscore underscore or slash. In the event you’re not aware. I miss the attached audio at the end of the written piece that was pure and included the bit of 20,000 streets. Minor quibbles, nevertheless.
What happened to Christmas? Not sure. I have a theory though. We grew up. We lost our innocence. We lost the magic. And we try to recapture our Christmas memories and experiences for our kids, but in doing so turn them from something that was sweet and spontaneous to something preplanned and packaged. We have to watch all the movies/shows, do all the things: Rockefeller Plaza? Check. The windows at Macy’s? Check. Bake the cookies. Trim the tree. Decorate. Tasks done with love, but sometimes with a sense of obligation/of NEEDING to do. We want the kids and grandkids to experience what we did—I think I’m speaking very specifically for our/my generation, because I think my folks generation was just doing it without the sense of responsibility we have—we INSIST on it, perhaps with the hope that we’ll somehow recapture our own wide-eyed wonder and innocence. And for some folks what “making a Christmas” boils down to abundance. The biggest/newest/most expensive. How better to show love than by spending a boatload on a 65” tv or a PlayStation or whatever the fuck the hot ticket item is this year.
If you ask me—and you did, so…/the Charlie Brown what Christmas is all about gospel truth is those homemade ornaments from Piper. Those small, (in)significant things that you’ll be hanging on your tree for the next 30 years are what Christmas is all about. That’s what’ll live in your heart henceforth. And when your kids see them in years to come and are filled with their own nostalgia for their own simpler times and laugh because “you still have that?” that’s what’ll will continue to keep your cup overflowing. Revel in it. Bathe in it. Christmas is what we make it. Not what Best Buy or Target or Amazon tell us. May the Ghost of Christmas Present’s horn shower down on you and yours this holiday season.