My parents hated my sister’s new boyfriend at first sight. Bob, a carpenter, was really a stoned-out surfer dude. His long, blonde hair was carefully blown-dry, a novelty in 1971, and he drove a red Volkswagen van decorated with flowers and peace signs and a bumper sticker that said. “Don’t laugh. Your daughter may be in here.”
“I need to check this guy out,” said my Dad and my mother, appalled, nodded gravely.
g the dope on Bob was simple; since my dad was a general contractor and Bob was a carpenter in the small, close-knit construction industry that was Fort Lauderdale in 1971, everyone knew everyone else. The word on Bob was not good.
Dad learned Bob was a slacker who, if he bothered to show up to work, arrived late, left early and got high at lunch. He also had a reputation as a racist and a bully.
This last piece of information confirmed my dad’s worst suspicions. Dad grew up in the only Italian household in a rough Cleveland neighborhood where the Germans looked down on the Irish and the Irish despised the Italians. After the war when he married my mother, a Slovenian princess from a family that, compared to Dad’s, was comparatively well off for immigrants, my mother’s father was so furious that she was marrying an Italian that he refused to walk her down the aisle.
Dad was acutely aware of the injustice of arbitrary social distinctions and he ran his business with a color-blindness that was unique in Fort Lauderdale in the early 1970’s. His management style seeped into his social life as well, which is how an unlikely friendship developed between Dad and Mr. Melville.
Mr. Melville supervised Dad’s team of laborers. He was a tall black man who looked a lot like “Linc” on the Mod Squad. He was married to Minerva, who sported an Afro like Angela Davis, only bigger. Mr. Melville and Minerva were frequent guests at major family events like weddings and First Communion parties, and a couple times a year Mr. Melville and Minerva came over for dinner.
Through an odd coincidence, Mr. Melville and Minerva were scheduled to come for a home-cooked spaghetti dinner at around the same time that my sister was pleading with my parents to give Bob another chance. My parents looked at each other with instant comprehension and Dad said, “Invite him to dinner Thursday,” at the same time Mom said, “The Melville’s are coming Thursday, ask Bob to come too.”
My sister, who like my brother and me, had grown up around the Melville’s, later said it never occurred to her that Bob might have a problem with the guest list. In any event she did not mention it to Bob, who immediately agreed to come to dinner on Thursday.
Thursday night the Melville’s and my dad were sipping iced tea on the back porch when my sister brought Bob in to meet the family. Bob smiled when he saw my father, but when he saw the Melville’s he stopped, his smile frozen in place. I believe the most descriptive word would have been “Awkward.”
I don’t remember much about the dinner because our table only seated 6 people so my brother and I ate on the back porch. What I do remember is that Bob disappeared before dessert was served. And I know that he and my sister broke up soon afterward. And several years later when my sister married her first husband, who was wildly inappropriate, but not a racist, Mr. Melville and Minerva danced at her wedding.