“écrite, la merde ne sent pas”— “written down, shit doesn’t smell.”

Roland Barthes (in Sade/Fourier/Loyola)

Yogi Berra once declared, “I never said half the things I said.” I suppose it would be nice if I could claim that I never did half the things I did, but alas, I cannot. I own a piece of a casino, and I have business ties with certain parties considered “criminal.” I also “have blood on my hands,” and I have absolutely no regrets about the actions I took to defend my family. The sexual escapades I shall share below make Fifty Shades of Grey look suitable for a convent school reading list. And yet…

I am also an educated classical pianist who garnered rave reviews at Carnegie Recital Hall (before the name changed to Weill Recital Hall in 1986), a patron of the arts, and a former college professor. Go figure! …For what it may be worth, decades ago I entered the world of kink, where I met people who did things that most vanilla people could never imagine. About these parts of my life, also, I am unapologetic, and as I might have explained as recently as eleven years ago, “Don’t blame me; blame Him, for He made me that way!”

I have also had many peripheral encounters with the spiritual world, though I simply do not understand the psychic phenomena I have experienced, despite the best efforts of my beloved wife to enlighten me. I am even more “in the dark” about the karmic energies of which she speaks. It will soon be all the more apparent why she affectionately calls me “clueless.”

Yes, I am Giovanni the artist, the criminal, the pervert, and the clueless, all rolled into one. And yes, I have lived.

My dysfunctional family was a mistake from the onset. My parents were miserably married, and I was often on the battlefield on which they waged war. Mercifully for me, every couple of years my father, Frank (Francesco) Bianchi, would absent himself during the entire summer, presumably to participate in music festivals in Italy. By the time I was a teenager, it seemed that on these occasions, my other parent would have some sort of unspecified business out of town as well, to my immense delight.

My mother, Anita Goldberg, was an attorney, though her career was not particularly successful. Her dreams of appearances before the Supreme Court never materialized, and the reality that inflicted itself around her took the form of wills, real estate closings, and her specialty—motor vehicle law. Yes, she was one of those less-than-high-powered lawyers who helped drivers beat speeding tickets, stop sign violations, and the like. She even took some clients who had been charged with driving while intoxicated, though only if she thought she could win. “Most of them are scum,” she explained to me, “but every once in a while, I get someone who should never have been charged.”

Frustration grew over the years, and she became more and more unhappy with life in general: a marriage that was dead, the inevitable divorce, a career that had gone nowhere, and a son who seemed singularly distant and disinterested. In late 1974—not long after I turned twenty-four—she drove her car into the garage, closed the door, and let carbon monoxide euthanize her.

My father, Frank Bianchi, was a violinist, but not quite good enough to support his musical habit. He actually signed with the Community Concerts division of Columbia Artists, played some fifty-odd recitals “in various shit-hole towns,” and made barely enough money to pay his mother some rent while remaining in her home…

Lenny_Cavallaro

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