Take the Cannoli by Sarah Vowell Read Free Book Online

while we’re at it, is there such a thing as right and wrong?
    Until I figured out that the flight between questions is itself a workable system, I craved answers, rules. A code. So by my junior year, I was spending part of every week, sometimes every day, watching The Godfather on videotape.
    The Godfather was an addiction. And like all self-respecting addicts, I did not want anyone to find out about my habit. Which was difficult considering that I shared a house with my boyfriend and two other roommates, all of whom probably thought my profound interest in their class schedules had to do with love and friendship. But I needed to know when the house would be empty so I could watch snippets of the film. Sometimes it took weeks to get through the whole thing. If I had a free hour between earth science lab and my work-study job, I’d sneak home and get through the scene where Sonny Corleone is gunned down at the toll booth, his shirt polka-dotted with bullet holes. Or, if I finished writing a paper analyzing American mediocrity according to Alexis de Tocqueville, I’d reward myself with a few minutes of Michael Corleone doing an excellent job of firing a pistol into a police captain’s face. But if the phone rang while I was watching, I turned off the sound so that the caller wouldn’t guess what I was up to. I thought that if anyone knew how much time I was spending with the Corleones, they would think it was some desperate cry for help. I always pictured the moment I was found out as a scene from a movie, a movie considerably less epic than The Godfather : My concerned boyfriend would eject the tape from the VCR with a flourish and flush it down the toilet like so much cocaine. Then my parents would ship me off to some treatment center where I’d be put in group therapy with a bunch of Trekkies.
    I would sit on my couch with the blinds drawn, stare at the TV screen, and imagine myself inside it. I wanted to cower in the darkbrown rooms of Don Corleone, kiss his hand on his daughter’s wedding day, explain what my troubles were, and let him tell me he’ll make everything all right. Of course, I was prepared to accept this gift knowing that someday—and that day may never come—I may be called upon to do a service. But, he would tell me, “Until that day, accept this justice as a gift on my daughter’s wedding day.”
    â€œGrazie, Godfather.” It was as simple as that.
    Looking back, I wonder why a gangster movie kidnapped my life. The Godfather had nothing to do with me. I was a feminist, not Italian, and I went to school at Montana State. I had never set foot in New York, thought ravioli came only in a can, and wasn’t blind to the fact that all the women in the film were either virgins, mothers, whores, or Diane Keaton.
    I fell for those made-up, sexist, East Coast thugs anyway. Partly it was the clothes; fashionwise, there is nothing less glamorous than snow-blown, backpacking college life in the Rocky Mountain states. But the thing that really attracted me to the film was that it offered a three-hour peep into a world with clear and definable moral guidelines; where you know where you stand and you know who you love; where honor was everything; and the greatest sin wasn’t murder but betrayal.
    My favorite scene in the film takes place on a deserted highway with the Statue of Liberty off in the distance. The don’s henchman Clemenza is on the road with two of his men. He’s under orders that only one of them is supposed to make the ride back. Clemenza tells the driver topull over. “I gotta take a leak,” he says. As Clemenza empties his bladder, the man in the backseat empties his gun into the driver’s skull. There are three shots. The grisly, back-of-the-head murder of a rat fink associate is all in a day’s work. But Clemenza’s overriding responsibility is to his family. He takes a moment out of his routine madness to remember