Year of Award

2023

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Type

Master of Fine Arts (MFA)

Degree Name

Creative Writing (Fiction)

Department or School/College

Department of English

Committee Chair

Judy Blunt

Commitee Members

Brady Harrison, John Wicks

Publisher

University of Montana

Abstract

In 2020, Tommaso Davide Guastella Riccio is ninety-two years old in New York City when the global pandemic shuts down the city. Over the course of Tommaso’s confinement, he reminisces about a decade of his youth from 1936-46. During this long-ago decade, Tommaso comes of age in the Italian section of East Harlem. At eight years old, he discovers baseball; the Yankees; and his first hero, Joe DiMaggio. Then Tommaso discovers jazz. Along the way, he loses his father, Alfredo, a subway worker, and his older brother, Peter, ships off to Europe to fight in World War II. Tommaso lives alone with his mother, Angela, who sells illicit wine that she bottles in the basement of their apartment building. In the New York City of the thirties and forties, Tommaso falls in love with the drums through the late night jam sessions at Minton’s Playhouse where jazz musicians like Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker hold court. When Tommaso finally works up the courage to try to sit in on one of these sessions, he discovers Charlie Parker has moved out to California. The eighteen-year-old Tommaso embarks on his own journey to California to fulfill his goal of playing with one of the greats. When Tommaso gets there, he finds that Parker is “relaxing” at Camarillo State Hospital. Tommaso breaks into the Hospital to play in one of the impromptu jam sessions Parker holds inside while a patient. In the present day of 2020, through this retelling and the feelings and memories it resurfaces, elderly Tommaso strengthens his bond with his only child, the sixty-year-old Connie.

Download

Share

COinS
 

© Copyright 2023 Christopher Patalano