Preamble One: Gabrielle’s daddy, Sergio
Gabrielle was born in an Appalachian town in the late-1940s. Her father managed to get his shift covered that day and the next. He could hardly decide which was more exciting, the birth of his first child or two days off of working down in that goddamned sooty mine.
Sergio took full advantage of his time off and decided to sleep in. After working for the past sixteen days in the mine, he needed the sleep. The previous night, when his wife went into labor, he made the prudent decision to phone a taxi service and arrange an early-morning pickup of his wife for a ride to the hospital. That night was a very special time for Sergio. He stayed up drinking beers and playing with the television set that he had recently bought for the household. The television was thrilling and even drowned out the moaning of his wife. He was convinced that he had made yet another bold and rewarding decision by buying the thing.
He got the idea to buy the television from one of his co-workers who had convinced him that the purchase, although quite a luxury, would be well worth it because its presence in his home would be proof that he was a true American and that it would provide endless hours of entertainment, which he would need, having a new baby on the way. So Sergio proudly went to the appliance store and, in English, ordered the biggest and best television set that he could afford. He knew that his father would have been proud of him now that he was living in America, in a row house that he could afford on his own without sharing it with another family, fitted it with a television set, and had a baby on the way.
In the early morning of the day of Gabrielle’s birth, Sergio had made sure that a taxicab picked up his wife and took her to the hospital presumably well before the birth would occur. After the taxi came and left with his wife, he sat back down in the plush chair, lit another cigarette, opened another beer and attempted to find something to watch on his beautiful new television set. He found that all he could tune in was high-pitched static but this was still far more interesting than pounding coal so he sat back, took a swig of his beer and a deep inhale of his unfiltered cigarette and relaxed knowing that he had finally made it.
He was in America. He would soon be blessed with an American baby, and he was ready to forget all about his poverty-stricken past in Italy. As he drifted off to sleep while his monstrous television broadcast static, his neighbors pounded on his door in a wild plea to make Sergio cut off the noise so that they could have another hour of blessed sleep before their work shifts began. But he was already dead to the world having finished his beer and letting his cigarette butt fall onto the hardwood floor of his house. His half-conscious mind laughed at the plight of his poor, ignorant neighbors who were so much less fortunate than him.