The story of how my dad and mom first met went something
like this.
They were both at a USO club in Santa Monica California in
1943. Big band music is playing. My dad
is in uniform. He walks up to mom. She is sitting alone at a small table. She
has a yellow rose pinned to her white dress.
“So...tell me, why is the prettiest girl at this dance
sitting here all alone, with no one to dance with? Is your dance card full?” My
dad asked.
“No, my dance card is not full, Corporal. Maybe I’m more
woman than most men can handle.”
“Wow that sounds dangerous.”
“Very dangerous!”
“Okay...how about a test drive? How about a dance? I’m Marty
Casarona.”
“Alright Marty, you look brave enough. I’m Norma Johansen.”
“Oh...a German. I’m a lucky guy!”
“And you’re an Italian. This could mean trouble.”
My dad takes my mom by the hand to the dance floor and they
start to dance. After about one minute, he smiles. “This isn’t so bad.”
Mom says nothing and just smiles. Before she knows it, my
dad’s hand starts to move down her back. His hand ends up touching the top of
her butt. Mom pulls away from him and slaps his face as hard as she can. Mom is
upset and leaves the dance floor. She goes back to take her chair. Dad is dazed
and is standing there alone with his face beet red. People around the dance
floor start to laugh. With tears in his eyes, he walks back over to mom and
gets down on his knees. Mom is looking in the other direction.
“Please...please I’m so sorry.” He says sheepishly.
She turns and looks at dad and just smiles. It was love at
first sight for sure.
They got married in Jackson Mississippi. In 1944 and as the
song says “They got married in a fever.” My Dad was going to be shipped out
overseas. He wanted to make sure no one would snap up my mom while he was away.
Plus since there was a possibility of him not coming back and getting killed
fighting the Japanese he begged my mom to tie the knot. He thought if he was
going to die he might as well have sex with my mom first. Since she was one of
the few women who turned down my father’s advances, it would be one more notch
on the belt. Funny how most of us are
wired. It seems most of us always go after the ones that seem slightly out of
our reach.
Which reminds me of the only “sex talk” my dad ever gave me
at 16. I was walking down the hall. My
father was shaving in the bathroom.
“Keith come here for a minute.” My dad never took his eyes
off the mirror. “Your mother wanted me to talk to you about…. uh… you know….
sex.” “
“Oh” was my only response.
“I’m sure you know
how it all works. So I have only two things to say to you. Be careful the last
thing you want is to get some young stupid girl knocked up… right?”
“Uh… that’s right Dad.”
“Okay. The other thing I want to tell you is to always go
after the good looking girls. They are just as lonely as the ugly ones! Got
it?”
“Yeah… sure Dad.”
“Make me proud son.”
My dad was a New York City hustler for sure. His grand
adventure began when he did get shipped overseas. He spent two and a half years
in Honolulu, having the time of his life. He would have tears in eyes years
later, when he would tell everyone he ever met that those two years were the
best years of his life.
He told me many times with a gleam in his eye. “You could
have been half Japanese!” I didn’t really know what he meant by that. Before he
died in 2012 he told me about his secret love affair with a young Japanese girl
on Oahu.
My Dad told me that Hawaii was paradise back in the war
years. There was just one problem, no women. Well, there were women, just not
enough of them to go around. There were
tens of thousands of young service men, who needed to a women’s companionship on
the island. It was the law of supply and demand and demand was high. It was so
high that there was literally lines in front of whore houses in down town
Honolulu. My Dad hates lines and sloppy
seconds, let alone sloppy three hundred and fifteens. He was always looking for
short cuts in his life. Ways to “beat the house,” as he would say. Nothing gave
my father more satisfaction then beating the system, any system. Which is why
my father didn’t make a very good Jehovah’s Witnesses. Whereas, they are all
about following rules, he was all about bending them, if not completely
breaking them. Some of their rules he never really liked were the “no smoking” and
“no sex outside of marriage rule.” He wasn’t keen on the “no gambling,” and “no
lying and no stealing,” ones either.
So my father even though he was married, had a real problem
in Hawaii. How was he going to get laid? More importantly, how was he going to
get laid and not pay for it?
One Saturday he and a couple of friends, decided to explore
the island. They took their jeep and
drove to the north end of the island. They
found many small villages nestled in the jungle paradise. To their surprise they
found lots of Japanese Americans living there. They stopped at a shack that looked
like some kind of restaurant and order a couple of beers. The old man who
served them was pleasant enough. They couldn’t help but noticed a couple of
good looking Asian girls working in the back.
My Dad had to ask. “You folks Chinese?”
“No my friend, we of Japanese ancestry.”
“Really? We thought they shipped all you Japs… I mean you
folks to camps.”
“No… many but not all. We are good Americans. In fact my son
is serving with 442 regiment in Italy.” Have you boys seen combat yet?”
“No. we are with a headquarter unit and will probably never
leave Hawaii.”
“Well, my son has, he has killed lots of Germans and
Italians!”
“Hey, pops I’m Italian!”
“Really? Did they ship off any of your family to the camps?
Like they did ours.”
“No, they didn’t.”
The old man just stood there and shook his head.
Even my Dad could see the irony in it. “I know it’s pretty
messed up.”
“Yes, it is son. In fact my family can’t even go down to
Honolulu without the servicemen there giving them some kind of beating.
“How do you get your supplies then?”
“With great difficulty.”
My Dad got a strange look on his face. There was an angle
here for sure. .
The old man starts to smile. “I must admit we don’t see too
many of you guys up in this neck of the woods either, which is fine by us.”
My Dad smiles. “Well… what is your name?”
“Yoshi”
“Well Yoshi… that is to about to change.”
My Dad was a staff Sargent and had this great job in the
motor pool. How did he get this job? He
lied. He said he was an ace mechanic before the war. He knew very little about
how motor vehicles worked at all. He literally did nothing all day long. If a vehicle
needed repair he would just delegate it to someone else. However if you needed
a jeep, he was your man. He would trade jeeps and other vehicles for favors.
Sometimes he lent out all the jeeps. For example, if an officer asked for a
jeep to go to town on a date, sometimes he might get an eight ton truck
instead. He loved screwing over the officers and doing deals on the side. A double
bonus.
Gas during the war gas
was going for 15 cents a gallon and was highly rationed. However on the black
market you could sell it for almost pay two bucks a gallon. He told me how he
would steal gas from the navy. The motor pool would send over their five
thousand gallon tanker truck to the ship yard. My Dad got the idea to strap on
twenty five gallon jerry cans to the side of the truck. The Navy hated to fill
those small cans but they did anyway.
His CO would get the receipt for 5100 gallons and call my
Dad in.
“What the hell is this Sargent? Our truck only holds 5000
gallons.”
“You know those Navy guys they are all screwed up.” Yep, my
Dad had an answer for everything.
One of my father’s greatest coups was sugar for sex. If
there was anything harder to get then gas during the war it was sugar. One of
my Dad’s friends was Walter the mess hall Sargent. He told Walter about all the
lovely horny Asian women that lived on North end of the island. Before you know
it, two jeeps loaded down with 50 pound bags of sugar, coffee and gas were
heading north, to do some trading with the natives.
After a couple of months of this my Dad and his friends were
treated like kings. Not only did the villagers get some sugar in their coffee.
They got treated like real people.
Yes, in the end the girls were waiting there with open arms
and open legs too.
So, I guess I could have been half Japanese. Maybe there is
a half brother or sister of mine somewhere in Hawaii who looks half Italian too,
who knows.
However a part of my father was Japanese. Even though both
his parents were full blooded Italian emigrants.
All his dental work was done for free in the Army. All the
work was done with silver. He needed some crowns done and really wanted gold.
It was going to cost him a small fortune.
“No problem.” His dentist told him. “You can get your gold for
just a few cents on the dollar.”
“How?”
“Easy, the first marine division is in town. They got all
the gold you want.”
“The marines have gold?”
“Yes they do. it is jap gold, son!”
“Jap gold?”
“The marines do some dentistry work on our jap friends.
After they kill them, they collect their gold fillings and teeth.”
“Oh.”
“If that bothers you, you can always pay full price.”
So guess where his gold fillings came from?
There was another story he loved to relate. I must have
heard a hundred times. It was the chocolate for whiskey story.
A day in the motor pool, my father was chomping down a Hersey
chocolate bar. There were two more on his desk. All of which he had been stolen out of the C
ration kits. A young officer from Alabama strolls in to get a jeep. .
“What’s that you have there Sargent?”
“A chocolate bar.”
“Well, I really like chocolate and it’s hard to get it around
here.”
“It sure is but whiskey is even harder to get.”
Whiskey was rationed and hard to get. The officers were entitled
to one fifth of “Three Feathers Whiskey” a month. Plenty of beer for everyone
but not much hard liquor.
“I don’t drink.” The officer said.
My dad got that look in his eye. There was a deal in the
making here.
“I would be happy to give you ten Hersey chocolate bars for
your bottle of whiskey.” My dad piped up.
“Really you could do that?”
“Sure, it would be tough but I could make that happen.”
So this went on for many months, they traded chocolate bars
for whiskey. My Dad had a waiting list for the booze. He would get as much as
$80 a bottle. This was my father’s finest moment. To screw the establishment
and make money too, what could be better?
Things do change. The battalion went on an eighty mile hike
one day. Everyone stopped for lunch. The young Lieutenant set down on a rock
and opened up his C rations. Much to his surprise he looked down at his Hersey chocolate
bar and realized it was the same kind that my father was giving him.
The next day, the lieutenant called my father in for a talk.
All hell broke loose.
“So Sargent Casarona what do you do with the whiskey I been
giving you?”
“Selling it mostly.”
“How much a bottle?”
“About $40 a bottle.”
“Ok… Our deal is still on but I want $20 a bottle on top of
the chocolate.”
“Yes sir!”
He was still coming out on top.
Yes, my father was having the time of his life in Hawaii.
Wheeling and dealing and making new friends. Then the worst possible thing
happened. The war ended. The party was over. He told me on VJ day you could a
pin drop in the barracks. No celebration, the two year vacation from the real
world was over. All the kids out of the pool.
I always wondered how he ended it with his Japanese
girlfriend. I remembered seeing her picture in his army photo album. My father
had a big dilemma, he already was going to have a hard time explaining his new German,
protestant wife to his Italian catholic family in the Bronx. So, I don’t think his
Japanese Buddhist girlfriend ever had a chance. Yep, my Dad had one too many axis
women in his life. Because of that I ended up half German rather than half
Japanese.
My Dad’s family never did like my mother and her strange
religion anyway. In their minds my Dad was supposed to have come home to the
Bronx and married a nice Italian, Catholic girl. Marty was always the rebel,
one of the few things I learned to like about him, in my later years.
He loved Asian women because when my Dad died in 2012 his
girlfriend who was 40 years younger than him was from Thailand. He told me he
had the best sex of his life with her. It was all about the sex for him and all
about the money for her. When he died he left everything to her. Judging how
often he told me they had sex and what his net worth was at the time of his
death, I figured it cost him about $880 every time they had sex. I hope it was
the best sex he ever had because, he could have gotten a Los Vegas hooker for
the same money. Yes, she had him wrapped around her little finger as did my
mother and his second wife Martina.
He sent me his will in 2007. It outlined how he basically
gave everything to his girlfriend. Which
was fine with me except he made no provisions for his grandchildren my children. I was very upset about this and called him
up.
“Dad, I don’t care about me but nothing for your grand
kids?”
“Relax, I got you guys covered.” He said.
“Really what are you talking about?”
“I’m making you the executor to my will. This is your ace in
hole.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s simple. This is how it will work. Once I’m dead, you
as the executor of the will can contest it.”
“What?”
“Yes, after I’m dead I don’t give a shit about her. You can
contest the will and get all the money back.”
I try to live my life very Zen. However, I can’t recall a
time in my whole life when I have gotten so angry. I totally lost it.
“Are you out of your mind? The last thing I want to do after
you dead is get a lawyer and spend thousands of dollars trying to clean up the
mess you have created.”
“But Keith, you have the ace in the whole.”
My Dad was a funny guy. Pussy wiped to the very end!
