‘Born on a Good Friday:’ Graziano serves up a book of memories I buried long ago

BOOK REVIEW

I only baptized one of my two children.  I felt obliged to do so.  Not by any pressures put on by others.  But because I was raised Catholic, went to a Catholic school until the 6th grade, was an altar boy for three years, went to confession regularly and I prayed hard nightly to whoever this God was to stop making me feel so guilty all the time.

Now, that guilt, I will forever believe, was instilled in me during my “impressionable years” (toddlers and grade schoolers beware!)  Every day, almost, I was reminded that if I sinned, I would be cast into hell, where the heat melts your skin and Satan never lets you sleep.

Or, until I sat in a box on Saturdays and confessed all my sins to a stranger.

It sure was a head trip.  And still is.

That’s why when my boy came about, we decided to go a different route.  Godless.

And that’s also why when my good buddy, Nate Graziano, (Graz!), handed me his newest collection of poems, “Born On Good Friday,” the cover alone made me feel the tickles of a panic attack. Graz as a kid standing at a tilt in a new blue suit with the price tag still on it. The new shoes soon-to-be play boots, the awkward smile, the crooked bow tie.  Fall in Rhode Island. Barren and cold.  Someone, please, knife me now.

Graz was about to serve up a book of memories that I buried long ago.  Or so I thought.  So, I decided, if I was going to eat this acid pill, let me careen about and get the pace of the book in random doses.

I started thumbing.

Oh, this sumbitch.  Right off I turn to “The Sin Box.”  I could smell that box of sin from forty years ago, still thick with the last heathen’s breath caked to the little screen dividing you and the stranger.  Or, as Graz wrote, “My Sin Box filled fast with my impurities: the depraved thoughts of sex, my many deceits, every minor transgression I needed to confess.”

Graz burns his list of sins in the end and laughs in the face of faith.  I would have never had the balls to do that.  Graz still does.

What’s next, Graz?  I see.  You never really feared God.  No, you did not.  You mocked him almost, or mimicked him more accurately, as you write in “The God of the Eraser World.”  Graz took to playing with rubber erasers as a tyke when most other kids might have a basketball or hockey stick.   Within Graz’s crazy eraser world, “I decided that playing God might be interesting.  So I imagined myself omnipresent and created a world of rubber eraser people…”  So bossy, Graz.  Great write.

On we go, thumbing a little deeper.  “A Lapsed Catholic’s Confession.”  The opening line alone would be a good investment for any stand-up comic.  “Bless me Father, for I have sinned.  It has been three decades since my last confession.”  Somehow, through the brutal hangover I endured reading this book of poems, I ripped a belly laugh halfway down the first fairway at Pembroke Pines Country Club, where I was working as a starter.

Of course, it was a Sunday.

A terrific poem, like so many others in this book.  Graz carries these poems much as he does his columns and novels, in the only voice he knows:  His own.  Some of the lines in the book, like this one from “The Woman in My Spam Folder” are ridiculously funny: “If Shakespeare was correct about brevity of being the soul of the wit, your email suggests clever volumes.”

That’s gold right there.  But it also takes a lot of work to lay a line down like that.  And maybe a few Bud Lights, but Graziano grinds when he writes. He fought for that line, shaped every inch of it. He goes commando when he writes, showing the reader all his earned scabs and dents that his decisions have afforded him.  He doesn’t whine about his scars.  He’s put them to good use.

I believe this book of poems is the best thing Graziano has published yet, columns, novels or otherwise.

And I’d sit in the box and tell that to any stranger.

Grab Nate Graziano’s new book downtown at The Bookery.

Rob Azevedo is an author, poet, columnist and radio host. He can be reached sitting in his barn at Pembroke City Limits and onemanmanch@gmail.com