Ritchie Gigliotti

Negotiating the rusty shopping cart through the isles of the Pen Argyl Weis, I’m trying my best to navigate between the skids of boxes in the center of the floor and the employees stocking shelves. What would be the job of an overnight crew anywhere else in the country is done at peak business hours in this sleepy little town trapped in the past fearing sundown. I swerve back and forth to not mow down a lanky teenage boy with a pubic-esque Harpo Marx wig placed in the center of his forehead.

How this became the international male quaff they settled on is anyone’s guess.

Everyone in the building hates me and refuses to make eye contact. My outsider status is obviously apparent with my clean shit and lack of body odor and hot wet ass smell. They know I’m not from these parts and don’t cotton to big city carpet baggers frequently patronizing their establishment with my EBT card. This is MAGA country, where the working class break their spines and spirit performing hard labor to finance the Zionists plight for Isreal. A clueless conglomerate of confused antisemitic Caucasians championing the wrong side because a New York billionaire figured out a way to optimize their hatred.

This is the grocery store I’m forced to use due to it being the only one in a five-town radius. Their callus price gauging should be applauded on its sheer ruthlessness alone. It feels as if the place were a franchised and buying expired products that feel off the truck instead of the real deal. That would explain them never having anything you’re looking for, including Weis brand fare. In this store the motto is “You’ll get what we have, and shut up about it.” Nothing within these walls has any flavor and you’ll have to take a second mortgage out on your home to buy a pound of hamburger meat. They charge even more for the filthy yardbird shrink-wrapped in salmonella.

The whitecaps are restless today. Alabaster afros on every four-and-a-half-foot octogenarian dingbat standing in the middle of the lanes gazing into oblivion, causing me to ponder who left the front door open. Where are their handlers, their obese Hattian nurses helping them spend their money? Not in the Slate Belt, we have freedom here. Freedom to irritate every living creature with our obnoxious willful ignorance.

When I get to the register, I max out my per diem in shame as the staff flash their judgmental stares. I walk to my car and attempt to not get runover in a sea of vulgarly enlarged pick-up trucks commandeered by men in stained neon orange t-shirts. As I’m loading my trunk, I overhear two hundred pounds of mayonnaise poured into cat hair covered leggings demean her child with profanity.

In the evening hours when one is in need of a pack of cigarettes the only option is to head over to the gas station in Pen Argyl. This is where I go to see all for the “White Privilege” I hear so much about. Men covered in grease, stinking of sweat, oil, and tire fire smoke, feverishly scrubbing away at scratch off tickets. Elderly crippled men trembling as they drag along some sort of life support system, waiting in line to bid on the Lottery. People missing limbs knock, knock, knocking on heaven's door sitting at poker slots. Depression engulfs the facility as people pray to win just enough change to scrounge a pack of smokes. Yeah, the Caucasians have all of the advantages.

The immigrants working there have yet to figure out the concept of change and other aspects of American currency. They have nothing but distain for their clientele. They know that the people here have no other options, and they exploit that any way they can. Price gouging abounds with the look of pure hate in their eyes. One particular fellow behind the counter will blatantly ignore you as he babbles incoherently into his phone.

One day while one of the employees pretended not to see me as I stood there for five minutes, I left a miniature Strech Armstrong doll I had fished out of my pocket on the counter as I walked out. The next day when I returned to try again, I saw that they had it crucified on the wall above the cigarette display. Someone clearly has it out for the Aryans.

Oddly enough though, I drive these people around like a taxi service when I see one walking the street in the dark. I get the feeling that if I don’t, one of the Johhny Bulls down in Bangor will run them down and write it off as an accident. At this point the immigrants will walk up to my car if I’m sitting in a parking lot and just get in like I’m on duty. They never pay me and the next time I see them they behave as if they don’t even know me.

By the time I was starting Holland Township School in the fall of 1984 my metamorphosis was well underway. I had always been an unhealthy child but in the past two years I had accumulated more doctors than friends. It would seem the crackpots were lining up with new theories as to why I was sick all the time, why I had trouble breathing, and why the headaches would never go away. Some of these snake oil salesmen even had their own published books and diets. One of them had me on a food cycle that prohibited me from repeating an item for four days. Meaning that if I had a ham and cheese sandwich on bread with mayo on Monday, I was going to have to get really creative with lunchtimes until Friday. Rice cakes and dates reared their ugly heads.

By the fall of that year, I had graduated to ten pills a day and had put on a serious amount of weight. I spent two weeks that September in the hospital on top of being a new student, so most of the school days were surrounded by whispering. I had already been considered awkward and strange but now I was doped to the gills on medication. One of them being a psychotropic steroid. A little pill that would cause sleepless nights of terror and daytime hours of extreme violence.

Bullying and hazing were commonplace in the 80’s and being the weird fat kid is an easy target, unless he’s completely unhinged. My daily routine was get mocked in home room, insulted before lunch, get pushed around during recess, then coming out of a black out with brutalized children on the playground. When I was fully aware of what I had done I was whisked away to the principal's office where he would console me and tell me I just need to try harder to calm down. I couldn’t tell if the man had been informed by my doctors that this was going to be a side effect or if he was secretly pleased that I was wiping out the bully population. After the first couple months of the school year everyone was getting along swimmingly, and no behavioral notes were ever sent home.

As time went on my dosages increased and it began to feel like I was drifting between planes, uncertain of what was real or fiction. I made spare cash selling hits of my inhalers to the older kids. Mostly I spent my idle time meditating in the cemetery across the street from my house. I would spend hours reading the stones and talking to the dead. At night I was terrified to look out my front window at the place but in the daylight hours it offered serenity. My favorite thing to do was crawl into the freshly dug graves and contemplate as I watched the clouds pass by. Staring from a deep rectangle obscured from everyone watching heaven evolve from the dirt window, there was never anything that could measure up the peacefulness.

After a bit, the sleep deprivation testing would begin. Having a single busy working mother left opportunities for the doctors to do treatments that borderline on unorthodox. Their chief focus harnessing my ability to connect to the other side. They showed me various charts and graphs indicating that while I was unconscious one half of my brain was having a conversation with someone who wasn’t in the room. So, they would dope me up on phenobarbital whilst hooked up to the machines and watch me, taking notes. I was starting to understand what was happening and what all of these drugs and medical quackery were leading to, they wanted to speak to the dead.

When my mother found out what was going on we moved. We packed up everything and vanished, returning to the folds of the Golden Rectangle, my name for the shape of Warren and Northampton counties that form an off-kilter diamond with a river running through it. I was still unhealthy and required shots and medication but felt safer back with my old doctors. Looking back now though, I wonder if all of them were in on it together.

When Nicholas Roseto, the founder of the town, fell to his death in the slate quarry in 1908, it should have been the signal that it was going to be a rough road ahead. Digging into the Earth's core in a quest for greed and a pathway to the devil resulted in a wrath of God. By that point though it was too late for the Italian people to return being that Cholera and famine were on the other side of the ocean. So, they chose to suffer the abuse of the American mining industry.

Slate mining was brutal for everyone involved but for the Italians it was fatal. Being immigrants, they had the job of being lowered by ropes into the mines to chip away at the ice. A treacherous endeavor involving slippage, falling to their deaths, and being crushed. Even noted black nationalist W.E.B. DuBois made several comments about the deplorable treatment of the Neapolitans in the new world. Still, it continued in Northampton County until the resources were depleted.

This business of the savagery of the Blue Mountains led to innumerable amounts of natural gas and slate dust being released into air, creating a new ecosystem trapped under a dome. Everything existing inside was affected. This is the source of the healing factor of the Rosetani, the longevity of its people, and immeasurable healing properties. No one dies in Roseto. There is no suicide, alcoholism, mental illness, or drug abuse. The land simply won’t allow it.

Slate is the base stone which balances all chakras. It causes harmony of the four elements, regulation of the system, and leads to wisdom as well as protection. We’re breathing this in every day. It coats our skin, bathes us in our water, and is internally within us. The only time the madness settles in is when you try to resist and fight it or question what’s its doing. When I ask too many questions, the serpent beguiles me, and I meditate it away. Much more can be ascertained from one's ignorance. I am a passenger patiently waiting for the drink cart to come around. I do not want; I merely graciously accept the gifts.

As time went on, I would encounter a rouge’s gallery of unwanted guests in my home. Foul spirits from the other side plaguing me in attempt to destroy the fabric of my dwindling sanity. The first one arrived in December of 2022, and unlike the ones who tormented Ebeneezer Scrooge these had no message or life lessons. Just imprints of their misery.

The first was “L’implacabile miserabile stronza,” or to those of you speaking British, the unrelenting miserable bitch. She is a tidal wave of all-encompassing depression that drowns you in her sorrow. She exists solely in my bedroom and tends to keep only daytime hours. I will be sitting on my bed reading, and a complete wailing misery washes over me. Often driving me to tears and a wailing that had never happened to me before.

Most people would accredit this to a mental disorder, but I can assure you nothing like this had ever happened previously. Not until settling into this bedroom had I felt this unexplainable disease. I tend to walk through life on the fool’s path unable to pick up on social cues, with the belief that everyone thinks I’m as special as I do. It isn’t ego, I simply feel I’m a fun person and naturally assume people like me, only to find out later that I was wrong. For the first time though I was ravaged with self-loathing and doubt. I became scared to leave my room not only thinking that the outside hated me but that they intended to do me harm. Then as rapidly as it came, it would vanish the second I stepped out of my bedroom door.

In the Harry Potter series, there is a ghost that hangs out in the men’s toilet of the school and cries all the time, something I found comical until greeting it face to face. Only there was no face. There were no shadows, moving shapes, nothing but an intense feeling of aggressive depression. I’ve always assumed something terrible had once happened in this bedroom but now believed it to be a multitude of events. The energy felt feminine. I can’t explain how I know this except that I’ve never seen a male become this destructive against themselves. Only a woman would be capable of holding this much darkness for so long. It’s as if she’s wrapping her arms around me to show me her pain.

In close knit neighborhoods with sidewalks and no natural predators, people let their cats out at night. This is why Roseto is home to “I Gatti Urlanti” or the Screaming Cats of Roseto if you will. Magnificent, beautiful creatures who patrol the streets while the rest of us sleep soundly. Sentinels of the darkness making Roseto the only place in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania that has no rodent problem whatsoever. God bless these fuzzy faced murder machines.

Being one of the few night owls in my burg, I’ve become quite familiar with these creatures and have studied their behavior. They have their own communities and cliques that interact with one another exactly like people. They pass each other while performing their routines and nod and say hello like a neighbor greeting another on their way to work. There truly is a language filled with various sounds that I’ve yet to interpret. Sometimes those sounds are otherworldly howls.

There is a short wooden fence beside my house that acts as a podium from which one will sit on and holler, calling the others to listen in the assembly. The cries beckon one another to emerge from the shrubbery to hear the latest news. It’s fascinating when they do it right in front of me, flashing dirty looks like I’m intruding in their affairs. I can’t imagine they think very much of me.

It's hard to tell exactly which of these cats are pets and which are feral as they are all healthy-looking specimens. Everyone around here leaves out little plates of food as offerings, present company included. They never seem to have much time for me though, and even when they stop to look at me and listen, they then just wander off as if I were a hulking mongoloid. The little girl next door overheard me talking to them one night and warned me to be careful what I say to them because she believes a few of them to be shape shifters. I have to agree with her.

The cats seem to be on a mission of sorts and express meticulous care in defending the perimeter of my property. They walk the grounds with an intense purpose as if they are warding off something. When it snows you can trace their footprints into map like patterns.

I was aware of the paranormal element of the house from the first night I slept in it. Throughout the evening, I kept hearing what sounded like someone walking up and down the stairs. I would venture from my bedroom expecting to see my mother, but she was sound asleep. It then graduated to the smell of cherry tobacco smoke and the murmured whisperings of people having a conversation. Being that the old Marconi Social Club was located on the street behind my house I chalked it all up to Frank gathering up some of the boys to come over for a nightcap. I had even had a dream or two about sitting with the old gang playing cards while a sweet woman brought us sandwiches. They ribbed me and made jokes in Italian at my expense, all in the name of good fun.

The majority of places I’ve lived have had some form of hauntings, so all of this was old hat to me, but then the incidents began to take on another turn. Impish pranks, like something a child would do. The touching of the feet sticking out from under the blanket, items being moved to other locations, and small things disappearing. I started to be concerned when small plastic balls would be found in various corners and underneath the radiators. It occurred to me that I didn’t have the full cast sheet on who else had resided inside these walls.

The home was built sometime during the 1890’s and what followed after that was known as the Pioneer Period. When a large group of Italian immigrants settled into a territory of the Irish they were not met with open arms. This was an age of extreme racism and violence. Murders were commonplace and blood soaked the earth. At the same time the Black Hand had made its way across the ocean and Sicilian extortionists did their worst to the people from their own country. Pile on top of that the horrors of the mining industry, and the number of the dead begins to rival the living. With all of these secrets it would be impossible for me to ever find out the true history of my building.

One day while trying to figure out why I was the only house on the street with a large yard I noticed the numbers on all of the houses on Chestnut. Even numbers to the right, odd on the left, and all in sequential order. All were accounted for except the location where my yard begins and that would be the number 129. Clearly there was another house here long ago that no longer stood, and what became of it or happened within it is yet another ball of confusion.

With Frank passing in 1999 it left a whole twenty-two years of shenanigans before I arrived. All I know of the last tenants was that they were Jewish, the patriarch of the house went insane punching holes in the walls and pouring kerosene in the oil tank, and they had a little boy who couldn’t sleep in the bedroom that was now mine. They painted three black mountains on the wall, and I have no clue what the significance of that was. I’ve seen the same exact mountains painted on the windows of other homes in the area and I’m afraid to even ask. Something really bad had to have happened in my bedroom and it feels like a botched exorcism made it even worse. People played around in here with things they knew nothing of, and the result was a vortex into oblivion.

Frank DeFrank was born in the house on Chestnut Street in 1916 and lived there until he passed on January 1st, 1999. This could explain part of the mysticism of my abode, having both a gateway as well as an egress between both worlds inside the same building. That’s why it has always felt as though this house was breathing, having a heartbeat and a pulse. It’s a is a part of him and carries the imprint of his existence.

Frank was a member of the Ladies Garment Workers Union back when Roseto was a titan in the industry. This whole area was filled with dress mills in the mid twentieth century responsible for dressing America. He was also a member of our Columbia Fire Company, and you can even see his name listed on the World War II memorial outside of it. Frank proudly served. I swell up with pride every time I walk past it. Even though I never met him in this world, he feels like my friend.

He was also very musical. He was a trumpet player in the legendary Roseto Coronet Band and a drummer in the Roseto Bugle Corp. I imagine that’s why the place starts jumping every time I play the scene in “Ball of Fire” when Barbara Stanwick sings Drum Boogie with Gene Krupa’s Orchestra. Although it’s hard for me to believe that ANY red-blooded American wouldn’t get all hot and bothered watching that little smoke show.

Frank was a Catholic like any sensible Italian and in 1953 he took a wife, his beloved Lucy Pagano. He had two sons, both still living, and was an avid gardener. Once I found that out, I began to understand why I became so obsessed with maintaining this yard. I need it to be perfect when the kids come over to play in it, and most of the neighborhood does. I know it makes Frank happy to see everyone hanging out back there. From what the locals tell me, Frank use to always have pockets full of candy to hand out to the children. A habit I also took on since living here.

Whether it was constructed as a puzzle box or designed by a masonic cult, the house was assembled in a such a way that no furniture could ever be placed within it. Something was going on at every wall and corner. Dressers, curios, cabinets, and various shelving are all built into every facade that doesn’t have a plethora of windows, doors, or an oversized incased heating unit. The stairs are seven inches in length and fourteen feet in height. The ones leading into the attic stop at the roof and you have to hoist yourself up to crawl into the rest. The house never had any intention of being lived in by humans.

Unnecessary two-foot drop ceilings in certain rooms, deep walls that feel like there are other rooms behind them, and a sense that the living room was renovated to be a waiting room for an office that doesn’t exist. Be it limbo or purgatory this is where the dead sit holding their numbers. Parts of the house look like the nineties, other parts resemble the sixties, and remnants of the thirties are scattered about. It seems as if every couple of decades new people try to gussy up the place but are either scared away of have their remains entombed somewhere on the property. When pulling out old insulation in the room beneath the half bath I found some stained and ravaged clothing from a bygone era.

Still, none of this held a candle to my discoveries in the basement. There is a metal pipe with a spigot on the end with a thick metal wire welded into it. I have no idea what is behind the underground wall from whence they came, but It’s more confusing as to why the previous owners would electrify the water. Maybe it has something to do with the inch and a half thick gigantic metal pipe that comes from the ground that leads to a hole on the outside of the house with a grate on it. A functioning toilet is also down there with no indications that a bathroom ever was. It simply exists on its own. There is a panel on the one wall that I purposely avoid because I think it leads to a tunnel that runs beneath the street. Every time I hear banging at night, I imagine it’s some squatter creeping through to sleep in one of the many empty spaces behind my walls and ceilings.

The porch is monstrous and built on a slight angle, so the water runs off of it even though it has a roof. It was an old Roseto tradition to sit out there smoking and drinking wine interacting with all of your passing neighbors. I imagine that could be the only reason to build something over your driveway, thus eliminating it for only on street parking. I like to pretend that’s the reason it exists as opposed to it being a way to hide the bodies you have to bury that your friends would drag over from the Marconi Club.

The house on Chestnut Street looked as though no one had lived in it in two decades, the mess crammed into the basement indicated that this was probably true. The thing they never tell you when purchasing a home in Pennsylvania is that the previous tenants had no understanding of dehumidifiers. Therefore, every basement in the Keystone State is damper than a Florida swamp, breeding molds every color of the rainbow. This is why the people here are so unhealthy and pounding on deaths door. Everything is wet, smelly, and decomposing. It was going to require an industrial strength type of machine to dry the place out, but first the garbage had to be tackled.

The cellar, the room under the second bathroom, and the crawlspace beneath the porch were stuffed with what could only be the remains of an old sailing ship. Why anyone would need to hoard this much decaying lumber is anyone’s guess. Rotting Formica furniture fell apart as I dragged it outside. Splintering driftwood crumbled under my feet. It was hours' worth of transporting debris to my backyard. When the basement was finally cleared, I could see the old cemented over cistern, just like the one the Sicilians tossed Edith ford down.

With that room scrubbed, scoured, bleached, and vacuumed, I hooked up the ever so glorious dehumidifier and hung DampRid bags everywhere. The room under the bathroom was pretty much the same only with more rusted paint cans and after a week of that I ventured underneath the porch to begin that excavation. Nothing but decaying wooden ladders from the early twentieth century, iron boat weights & cannon balls, and derelict lead painted windows from various houses in town. It was vile and treacherous. Even though I was gloved and masked with eye protection, the house had won, and I became violently ill. It felt like every illness I had ever had from birth attacked me at once, Flu, pneumonia, fever, rashes, respiratory failure, and intense muscle pain. I was beaten, I was tired, and I went upstairs and crept into my bed.

Everything went black.

A series of spiraling dreams were to encompass me for the next two weeks as I lay dying in the house that I knew would eventually become my tomb. They started out simple enough with one eyed black cats in my bedroom as familiars, leading to ones of being instructed by a concierge of an old hotel hiring me to document the hauntings of each suite. They twisted into nightmares of driving around in a beat-up brown Ford truck by my father as he tried to escape hell, begging me for forgiveness.

The first night I slept here I felt my naked soul drift out of the window circling above my house in an astral traveling sense then floating to the street below as the oldest living Rosetani smiled at me conveying that I was finally home. The last of these dreams involved me running through the streets of Dante and Garibaldi peering in every window and seeing myself at various ages in different traumatic events of my life. I knew if I stayed in that room a minute longer, I would be lost forever so I dragged my carcass downstairs.

As I stepped out onto my porch to enjoy a cigarette, I noticed the massive eight-foot pile of refuse I had stacked in my back yard. No one had ever come by to pick it up. My mother had called countless junk removal services but to no avail. People refused to come to this town. Water delivery, contractors, home improvement people, either no one answered their phone, or they did but would never show up. The isolation was starting to materialize, and it had become apparent that if we needed anything done, we would have to use our localized resources only.

For as far back as I can remember people had been telling me to never go to Roseto. A portrait had been painted of an enclave of Italians that would dislike me because I wasn’t a thoroughbred, being only twenty-five percent. It’s an ideology I’ve delt with from ignorant people who believe one can be a poseur ethnically: similar to full blooded African Americans disregarding people of mixed race. It’s ridiculous due to the fact that to the people who hate Italians, I’m Mediterranean enough worthy of racial slurs.

To these people I would tell them that bloodline rules only apply to becoming a capo in La Cost Nostra and that wasn’t something that interested me. Still, they would clamor on about how I would never be accepted. That out of respect for the Omerta I would be shunned, and that the real Italians would eat me alive. I ignored all of this as I had no intentions of going to this mythical location yet couldn’t comprehend why people were warning me about it.

Seeing that their words had no effect on me they would trail off speaking quietly and end the statement with one mantra, “Roseto has ears.”

The story of Roseto begins in 1882 when Father Luigi Sabetti discovered a piece of land outside of Bangor Pennsylvania that resembled Italy so much, he began writing letters telling people to come over here to escape poverty, cholera, and Vatican abuse. The original settlers were from the Apulia region, and they began building a town resembling Roseto Valfortore and christened it Nuova Italia. The original houses, one of which I’m lucky enough to call home, was built by Nicola Rosato. Nicola would go on to have his head crushed in a mining accident setting the ominous foreshadowing of the plight of Italians to come in this country.

In 1912 the town was incorporated as Roseto and one of those men responsible was Nicola DeFrancesco, the original owner of the house I live in. This was the first town in America governed and policed by Italians and went on to become a titan of the garment industry. Loaded with dress mills, they created the fashion worn all over the world. This alone should have been enough to put Roseto on the map, oddly enough though the town became famous for something completely different.

In 1961 Dr. Stuart Wolf discovered something that would come to be known as “The Roseto Effect.” An unexplained phenomenon where the people of Roseto were having fewer heart attacks and were living longer than the rest of the country. A perplexing conundrum considering the Italian people were prone to eating incredibly unhealthy food and sitting on their porches drinking wine and smoking cigars. So, a study was conducted and the only answer they could come up with is that it was happening because of the people’s close-knit families and their love for one another.

When I learned that I buckled over laughing in hysterics. As an Italian It’s hard for me to fathom that being screamed at all day and getting smacked upside the head for blasphemy could help you live longer. Living with your whole extended family in one bedroom seems like more of a recipe for suicidio. Furthermore, did doctor Dr. Wolf think that any of these subjects were being truthful? Getting an answer from an Italian is like pulling teeth from a chicken. They’re evasive, suspicious, and not remotely trusting of an authority figure poking around, present company included. To this day asking my mother anything causes her to react like it’s an inquisition and she becomes defensive as if I’m accusing her of murder. All this from just asking how work was that day. My Nonno Louie said it best when asked why he didn’t like Jehovah’s Witnesses, and he answered that he didn’t like any witnesses.