Anatomy of an Italian Immigrant

The BackBlast:

There are actually a few stories here. I’ll start with the last story. Yea-High. So this guy looks exactly like Bunny, lives next to Bunny, rides to the workouts with Bunny, and always stands next to him at COT. I met him 2 weeks ago at PWW-Bonesaw edition. I got passed by Bunny on lap 7, then I got passed by (who I thought was) Bunny again on lap 9. I yelled, what the fu&%?! To which he blankly stared at me wondering what he did wrong. Wasn’t Bunny. Then I got back to COT and that’s all I wanted to talk about, but nobody else seemed to care. Standard batflipper etiquette. And I’ll thank you for not commenting on the fact that I was lapped at Bonesaw.

Anyways. This guy doesn’t have a solid nickname. I don’t mean that he has one that isn’t very good, if that was the criteria everyone except myself and Whisky Dick would be up for a name change. I mean nobody is quite sure of his name. He thought it was either Yea-High (picture  a country fella answering a question about the size of his corn plants with his hand out hovering about 4 feet off the ground), or Van Der Beek (“I don’t want your life!” Varsity Blues). Thinslice and I are quite fond of Part Deux (said in a strong French accent, except when Slice does it, it still sounds Italian) since he is obviously the reincarnation of Bunny. Or Hezbollah. Although the visual similarity is striking to probably most men in said Shia Islamist Political Party, we’re gonna leave that one alone. So let’s go with Part Deaux. Or just Deaux, or PD. Either way, he had better come up with a thing to go along with his French nickname.

So, here’s the deal about this Italian Immigrant thing. All of Metro and a tiny portion of Cape Fear seems to be infatuated with ThinSlice. With his swarthy good looks and rebel attitude, who can blame you?  And I think I figured out something today. I asked Slice a very simple question. It was a yes or no answer. His answer was 300 words. And Steroid reminded me “Have you ever known Slice to answer anything in a single word?” That’s true. The entire workout I had been listening to him go on and on about how he doesn’t have to ask his wife’s permission for running King of the Hills 2021 . He does “what I want, when I want, whit whom I want, and I don’t need no permission from nobody. Especially not my wife.” Then it hits me, this guy is fronting.

I looked into it a little bit more. Daniel Quarenta, Thinslice, was born in 1978 in Puglia, Italy (they claim it is the birthplace of Ziti, but we all know it’s Sicily. Why would they try and even lie about that?!). His parents were Italian cobblers and not very good at it. When Daniel was still young they sailed to the United States in search of a better life (even good cobblers in Italy make crap for money). They arrived in New York on Ellis Island in 1984. They were able to keep their names and soon settled into a quaint Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn. Daniel’s parents opened an Italian restaurant where Slice worked after school bussing tables and rolling out pasta. His parents couldn’t afford a car (their cooking was apparently as bad as their cobbling) so Daniel had to run everywhere. School, church, tuba lessons, court. That’s why he’s so damned fast.

I know this is getting a bit arduous. So I’ll skip to the end. Here is what I figured out from speaking with several of his childhood friends. Thinslice didn’t actually learn to speak English until he was 14 years old! And he still can’t read or write it very well. His parents saved all of their pasta money and sent him to Luigi’s A-School for Boys where they taught him English. Now, a group of Italians teaching English wasn’t the best idea in the world. The school is now defunct due to Luigi’s big Italian appetite and ever bigger appetite for American women (Luigi’s gonna take just a leetle tuition money for-a himself today. I gotta nother date with a-Becky and she lika the fancy restaurants). But I was able to peek upon their teaching playbook. Rule #1, when you don’t understand the language so well, just talk a lot so nobody else says nothing. And that’s why Slice talks so much. Goes back to Luigi’s terrible English lessons.

In either event. We all listened to Thinslice disparaging his wife’s authority over him all the way to 10th street for some hill work. Then the group decided to give Terri some advice for his upcoming marriage (it was horrible advice Terri, I hope you didn’t take notes) to the Castle for some stair work. There were some burpees in there somewhere and we ended with 4 miles after which we pontificated on Part Deux’s name and origin (of him, not so much his name). Tormund said the prayer and then a group hung around to listen to a few more Thinslice stories. All-in-all it was a great day at Ranger. Ya’ll come back, ya hear.

Until next time.

Your friend,
Slaughter