“Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.”
— D. H. Lawrence
At exactly 12:03 a.m. EST on Black Friday, 2019, a Long Island man by the name of Lou Abruzzio (pronounced ah-BROOTZ!-e-o) was being thrust along by the shifting tides of a crowd trying to bottleneck itself into a Best Buy near Levittown when everything in the world changed forever. No one knew that Lou, 58, a diesel mechanic who had worked for the same school bus outfit for the last 31 years, was about to be placed at the center of the downfall of the Prince of Peace but that’s what happened.
Even now, not many people know about this. In fact, I doubt that anyone has read the brief, newish blog post, titled Long Island Man Changes Humanity Forever, that appeared on Chris Tissad’s blog, McRib Boy. This, I believe, on account of that fact that a quick look at the thing now reveals that it has no likes and no shares and no indication at all that any eyeball has ever glanced upon it aside from the author himself. A single comment below the five sentence paragraph is attributed to Tissad himself. It states, rather directly, “I don’t know why the fuck I bother writing these fucking things when no one ever reads them.”
The blog post is not long but it does, in retrospect, seem to be the only reporting on one of the most important stories of our time.
Or of all time, really.
The crowd outside the Best Buy trying to get in that night was probably well over 300 strong. At first there had been a slight air of semi-electric anticipation amongst the first early arrivals around noon on Thanksgiving day. But as darkness crept across the landscape and the store managers double-checked and triple checked and quadruple-checked (etc., etc.) they locked the doors, the people lined up out on the sidewalk began to experience an uneasiness that was tough to recognize let alone explain.
In due time, new arrivals began to have to park their cars further and further from the store in the parking lot. By 11pm, an hour before the much anticipated midnight start of this well publicized Colossal Black Friday Mega Sale, a certain panic began to set in. This swift rising sense of negative energy manifested itself in the form of many of the people present, their bellies stretched to the physical limit with roasted turkey and stuffing and gravy and baked ziti and garlic bread and little cubes of all kinds of cheese (mostly generic cheddars), straddling the odd physical line that has come to exist in recent times/ the line between overstuffed holiday sleepy and desperate consumer violent.
Perhaps, looking back, if the former condition had somehow been able to triumph over the latter, our tale would be a much different one. But that isn’t how things panned out. And so we are here now talking about a legend who no one has heard of. An anonymous man who gave his own life for the love of his fellow human yet has received nothing in return short of the unseen blog post written after the fact by the only witness who seems to have fathomed anything at all from the bizarre events of that fading time. Still, legend is the only word that works, I think. Legend. Nothing more, nothing less.
The thing about it is this. Abruzzi: husband, dad, new grand-pop (Peppo!), grease monkey, all-around decent guy: he was at the Best Buy that night on a whim to try and score ‘one shit-hot bargain’ (his words) on a Samsung 2019 QLED 4K Q90R 65″ television. He knew that there would be competition for said TV. He also knew that there was a very good chance that things could become a bit dicey once the eager crowd of shoppers was let inside. They would, he had told friends, all rush towards their chosen areas of the store, places where certain deals could be had, designated spots they had mapped out and planned ahead of time to get to, without mercy, however they had to, in order to be the one who got the thing that mattered most.
Lou, who had told his wife, the former Vivian Allegra D’Nunzio, now known around the neighborhood as Vivian Allegra D’Nunzio Abruzzi, or ‘Viv’ or ‘Vivvy’ for short, that he planned to put the big TV under the tree (or more likely in front of it) as a gift for their one and only living child, Antonio Vincenzo (pronounced vin- CHENZ!- oh) Abruzzi, affectionately known as ‘Big Onion’ by everyone who loved him, which just so happens to have been a lot of people.
Another son, Marco Alpacino (pronounced al-puh- CHEEN!-oh) Abruzzi, had died in 1994, at the age of 10, three days after being struck and killed by a wine-colored sedan being driven by a very drunk woman, an Eileen Murphy from Manhattan, who was visiting her sister, the former Lisa Murphy (now Lisa Dellasandro), who was dying from stage 4 breast cancer in a makeshift bed made out of a couch in a house three blocks up from the Abruzzi house, which stood in the 2300 block of Gladmore Street in the town of East Meadow. The accident occurred when Marco was peddling his bike a few feet in circles that covered both the sidewalk by his house and then the street. His brother, Antonio ‘Big Onion’, who was 8 at the time and was the apple of his older brother’s eye, witnessed everything.
‘Big Onion’, now 33, was indeed big. Coming in at 5’ 7’, 284 lbs, he had a stubbly beard and a gentle demeanor despite his heft. He wore tent sized cartoon character T-shirts and sweat shorts and light blue Crocs with white tube socks pulled up to his hairy knees and he was known up and down the local streets as the kid whose brother died in front of him. Although, to be fair, people didn’t treat him much differently than any other lovable neighbor at this point. He was autistic, they all knew, and he flapped his hands and talked almost exclusively about his favorite ball club, the New York Yankees/ his favorite tv show, The A-Team/ and his favorite foods, eggplant parm sandwiches from Lorenzo’s in the Diamond Square shopping center and hard-boiled eggs dipped in Crystal Hot Sauce and then rolled down through a long trail of salt and pepper mixed together on his favorite plate, a plastic Yankee Stadium souvenir dinner plate from the early ’90s, but to them, his neighbors, he was just part of the world. A familiar sight. Lou and Vivian’s boy who lived in their garage.
Tune in next week for the nail-biting conclusion!
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin.
