Vito and I grew up in the same, mostly Italian, neighborhood ( my best friend Patti was Irish and lived halfway down the block from me), in the Coney Island area of Brooklyn.
He lived one block over but we all attended the same Catholic grammar school that our parents had gone to. Vito was one year older than me so we were in different grades. We'd known each other forever and in high school we started dating.
His family was Sicilian, as was mine. We both had large extended families that were loud but loving and everyone knew everyone. So no one was surprised when we starting going steady. My friend Patti and I were very close and sometimes I was torn between them when I had to choose one over the other due to conflicting events.
Vito was not tall but he wasn't short either. He had dark curly hair and brown eyes and a killer smile. It was the kind of face you'd see on a Roman coin, noble but a bit cocky. After his face what most people noticed about him were his arms. He had huge biceps and his muscled forearms rippled when his hands moved. Like me, he had an olive complexion and tanned easily. We practically lived at the beach all summer and he was the one who taught me to surf after I pestered him so many times he finally agreed. He was a good teacher and I was a better student and soon caught on.
Vito's father owned a small construction company and from an early age he was put to work doing physical labor like shoveling mountains of sand and carrying bricks and cinder blocks up scaffolding or going up a ladder with a bundle of shingles on each shoulder, which explains the muscles.
When we were at the beach we'd carry our surfboards on our outside arms with our inner arms around each other, both of us deeply tanned and looking so good we drew stares for both guys and girls.
I turned 18 my senior year of high school but Vito had graduated the year before and was now working construction for his father full-time so we mostly saw each other on weekends, except when Patti and I had swim meets which was often.
That put a strain on things because Patti and I had grown close and we were co-captains of the swim team so I really couldn't blow off any of our meets or practices.
Then we came up with a plan to spend the summer exploring the beaches of Long Island. When I told Vito about it he muttered under his breath, "Lesbians!" and stormed off. To be honest I couldn't blame him because I loved him and I loved Patti and I was going off to college in the fall far away from both of them.
I've written elsewhere about that so I'll pick up at the end of summer when a tragic turn of events turned my world upside down.
I'm not prepared yet to go into the details of that tragedy but suffice it to say on returning from our summer adventure I waved goodbye to Patti and the next day I contacted Vito not knowing if he'd started dating someone else or how he felt about me after a summer apart.
