Opera, Cigars, Candor--We All Need a Friend Like Franco

I stopped smoking cigars 14 years ago. I love them, but my lungs don’t. Still, I occasionally light one up. The occasion being whenever my friend Franco offers one.

Franco is no Wolfgang Puck. You won’t find him hobnobbing with celebrities or guesting on “Live With Regis & Kathie Lee,” prattling on about some mutant, esoteric cuisine, like seared lion-fish pizza.

Most nights you’ll find Franco upfront in his namesake Gianfranco Ristorante Italiano in West Los Angeles, seated in his own private alcove. He reads the paper, sips wine, has a little dinner and steps outside every now and then to light up a short, hard, dry-cured Italian cigar.

He’s a bear of a man, this middle-aged immigrant from Oria, Italy, with silver hair, heavy glasses and a storm front of black eyebrows. Once, many years ago, he was an expert mason doing marble work on Italian churches for the St. Vincent de Paul Society. He’s a great lover of many kinds of music; opera plays perpetually in his restaurant. His favorite tenors, for very different reasons, include Giuseppe di Stefano and Mario Lanza.

He gives dinner to a guy who has lived on the sidewalk for 12 years. He likes conversation--and candor. He won’t like this article, because he’s too modest to suffer anyone writing about him.

I felt at home the first time I went to Gianfranco, back around 1983, long before I ever met its proprietor. I don’t think it was just because the music playing was Puccini’s “La Boheme,” an opera whose every note, to my simple ears, aches with comprehension of life’s fragility and poignancy.

I don’t think it was the wine. I don’t think it was the Italian side of my ancestry coming to life. I don’t think it was that even with only a few customers, Gianfranco seems bright and full of life. I don’t know what it was, but I felt at home.

Not long ago, at the end of a spectacularly unpleasant day, I went to Gianfranco and invited myself “home” to Franco’s alcove. When I left four hours later--full of good cheese, olives, bread, Chianti and dragging on one of those hard Italian cigars--I had partly restored the illusion that life isn’t such a raw deal after all.

Talking to a guy like Franco can do that to you. He’s accumulated a lot of years and experience, yet he hasn’t been beaten down. Overused, flaccid terms like compassionate and optimistic seem alive and relevant when applied to Franco. I find this confounding--and heartening.

We covered the gamut of usual conversational fare that night, except that, like all good conversation, it didn’t seem so usual. We discussed the lost souls in the neighborhood.

“For 12 years,” said Franco through his thick accent, “this man has lived right outside the restaurant. He’s not just homeless. He’s mentally, uh . . . problem. He needs help. He doesn’t beg. He doesn’t ask people for money.

“Now, I have a pair of shoes upstairs. He doesn’t want it. And his shoes are all gone! Sometimes I ask him if he wants food, and he doesn’t want it. Like last night, I say, ‘Hey Tim, you want some food?’ Not today. Other nights, he takes something. But he needs medicine. Maybe with medicine, he could recuperate.”

I drained my wine glass. Franco refilled it instantly.

“You know, there was an old man,” he continued. “He collects bottles. I’ve seen him here for many years. I know him, we give him bottles. He lives on the street, and he’s old--maybe in his 70s.

“Then one day, he didn’t come anymore. I just found out from someone, remember when it was cold a few weeks ago? He tried to get warm by sleeping inside a car wash. But he died. The wind took him.”

Franco shook his head, and I thought his eyes looked teary.

“You know,” he said, a darkness in his tone, “when I get up in the morning and look into the mirror to shave, I tell myself, ‘You own nothing.’ I remind myself. We all own nothing. We are here for a short time.”

*

We went on talking--about the roots of problems like homelessness: the breakdown of the family; the mesmerizing, soul-sapping influence of television; floundering public schools; annihilation of individual judgment by marketing/demographic study-dictated decision-making; governments choked by partisan, game-playing, lifer politicians; runaway technology.

“You know,” Franco said, “Technology has a lot of brain, but no eyes. . . . And now, there are so many hands, but they’re not doing anything because technology does it for them. And maybe they turn bad, or do crime.”

We talked about how his hands came to the United States to shape marble and stone for churches and synagogues in the early ‘60s, how he came to Los Angeles to see Disneyland but made so many friends that he decided to stay. How he raised his family here. How his restaurant was to be a marble studio until a wise friend pointed out that good pasta would likely sell better than marble. We embarked on tangents; genetic engineering took up a good 10 minutes.

“Who knows what’s going to happen with the manipulation of genes?” Franco said, pushing pepper cheese at me. “That’s another world we’re going to enter--it’s very scary. . . . Because I come from the Old World, and to see manipulation of genes, I don’t know if I’m going to accept everything.

“To me, the world is nice the way it is. I like to see fat people, I like to see skinny people, I like to see midgets. That’s where beauty is. Everything’s beauty. What if you never see another rotten tomato? Will tomato still be as beautiful? See what I mean?”

I said that I did, and told him of a man I know who was born with spastic cerebral palsy. He learned to paint as a child in Korea--very well--with his teeth, until they became too crooked to hold a brush. Then he moved to the United States, learned English, and graduated at the top of his class from UC Berkeley in engineering. He’s now in a doctorate program. They made a movie about him in Korea.

“So maybe if I’m not going to be that cute, I will not be born, maybe,” Franco said. “This boy with disability has a great gift.”

*

Di Stefano sang that cascading, embittered laugh in “Vesti La Glubba” from “Il Pagliacci” on the sound system. Franco remarked about how the United States has the “best government system” in the world, how the American spirit is strong but seems “scattered--somebody has to bring it together.” And how problems in inner cities can be solved:

“When I was a little boy, after school, one friend would go to the tailor for a few hours, and another to the mechanic,” he said, smiling. “Six, 7 years old! Sweep the floor, whatever. Apprentice! I think it was fun! So some of the kids, by 12 or 13, they already know a trade. Some, they went off to become a writer or doctor or thing like that. Some just become a tailor. . . . As soon as the mind start learning.”

We were just denouncing government for not pulling out the stops to start apprenticeship programs, and mandatory service akin to the Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930s, when a homeless guy in tattered Army surplus stuff walked in and asked for a soda. His voice was the kind of permanent rasp cultivated by chronic exposure to the elements.

“Sure, my friend,” Franco answered.

“I can’t pay you now,” the guy said. Franco answered: “Later.”

The guy laughed. “Later. Later. Always later,” he said. “You’re the best.” And he went on his way.

As I did, a few minutes later. Owning nothing, but puffing on a pretty good Italian cigar.