On Being A Buttacavoli

If you want to know what it means to be a Buttacavoli, I will tell you this: my younger brother attempted to sleep with my wife and my older brother tried to sleep with me.

These two events, which occurred in 1967 and 1969, did more to make me the man I am today than anything else in life.

Now, at the age of 66, I can reflect with some satisfaction that after years of effort I have managed to escape the reality of my existence as a member of the Buttacavoli family.

At one time I seriously considered having my name changed, but an odd thing occurred which caused me to change my mind.

I was driving out of San Francisco in gridlock traffic, heading toward the Oakland Bay Bridge, when a man bolted from a building and hurled a large, green object into the passing cars.

As I watched the thing fly through the air, I was stunned to discover that it was headed right for me and sure enough it landed with a thud on the hood of my VW Bug, bouncing against the windshield before it flew into the street.

The "thing" was the largest head of cabbage I had ever seen in my life. I could only laugh because my name in Italian means "cabbage thrower".

So, I did not change my name after all. I would live with it, but somehow, someway, I would overcome the onus of what it was to be a Buttacavoli.

It has not been easy. It never is easy to recreate oneself, to make something out of nothing, or at least, something that was so sleazy it is impossible to rid oneself of it.

And, as far as I was concerned, nothing was more sleazy than being related to my brothers.

Becoming myself apart from them, as though they never existed was a task I was determined to accomplish no matter how long it took and it has taken virtually all of my life, indeed, it has only been the last year or two that I have felt free of the taint of being a Buttacavoli.

The process essentially was one of "cleansing," making myself clean of the Buttacavoli stain, rupturing myself from the past of my life which hung over me so heavily it stagnated not just my life but any possible growth.

This "cleansing" process was solely interior, that is, in my mind, but radiated to the very core of who I was. So, in that sense it was larger than I thought since it occupied my very psyche, my spirit.

So, then, the process, I realized was spiritual and it was the spirit with which I became preoccupied.

At first I attempted to engage my spirit through the faith of my youth, Catholicism. But the pedophile scandal thwarted any attempt in that regard and I found the Catholic church dismal and maligned by the specter of pedophilia among its priests.

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