The Eternal Return

There are recollections that seem to run like an ever looping film, a memory train that never arrives at the station. Forever running in your head and with time deluding you into thinking that this is not nostalgia but flesh and blood , current not past. Per secular secularum. This story takes such a journey, a memory that transcends the cerebral and enters the temporal. The Eternal Return.

Billy Pinto was the light in his mother’s eye. His father died while Billy was a small boy and his mother embraced her only child as both offspring and surrogate husband. This is not as odd as it seems, family plays an important part in the life of Italian Americas and mother son relationships are often very strong , made stronger when a father is absent.

So they lived in Oedipal contentment in a small angular home, called so because it sat on a corner or angle of a small street off Passyunk avenue. The house , unlike other homes in the area, had a small garage which held various motors.

Cars and motors played a part in this boys life. He grow to beauty and was the type of man that caught the eye of men and women, I don’t imply this in a vulgar sense but in a sense that he could attract man and women to him regardless of sexuality. He had a natural charisma built on his good looks and open personality.

Billy was related to my neighbors and his family held cumpare relationship with my Aunt Maria’s family. I first remember Billy in the late 60’s when he worked at a local petrol station that existed on Passyunk avenue and Dickinson street.

Amazingly there was once a time when gas stations would be located on street corners with scant regard to safety. The station was owned by a real character in the old neighborhood, Augustino Auggie Di Giacomo, the father of a man , also Augustino Di Giacomo, that in the 60’s -80’s was vice Principal at St. John Neumann High School. The son was a career educator and a man of integrity and intellect, the old man was the father of educators and an education in himself. Old Mr. Di Giacomo spent the live long day in soiled tee shirt bemoaning the latest tragedy to engulf the Phillies which , in the late 1960’s and 70’s under its obtuse manager Danny Orzark, was without rival the worst team in Baseball. The old man was at times crass or curt and I would suspect he was also disenchanted by the fact that just 50 meters away, at Dickinson and Garrett street, stood a similar gas station owned by a man whose name sounded like that of a Spanish Conquistador- Ponzio. How either of them did business and raised their families in close competition and at a time when fewer people had cars and gas was only 20 cents a gallon , is another profound mystery of my youth.

Billy , with a very 1960’s Mod mustache, provided a breath of freshness and youth to the ancient tottering business. In addition every girl I knew from my sister to my cousins were in love with him. Many a father was directed by their daughters to take petrol at Di Giacomo’s so that Billy could pump the Gas. Perhaps the old man brought Billy there for that purpose? Billy Pinto was a better more attractive gas pumper then either Old Auggie or rival Ponzio, to be sure.

Billy also rode a motorcycle and had an interest in the machines. In a positive way, not like Mob Guy. Billy was never any type of crook or gangster wannabe, he was just a kid that liked bikes.

Billy was the kind of guy boys of my generation looked up to. He always would share a story with you or help you out when playing half ball or any of the other streets games we played back then.

When I worked in the Twin Shop at 10th and Tasker Billy would come in alone or with one of his cohort of friends, especially a man named Reds, and entertain us with what really were the most uninteresting stories, but Billy had a way to make even the mundane sound momentous.

I remember one summer night in the late 70’s when a group of us were hanging out on the corner of 10th and Tasker until a policemen drove by at 2 am and told us to please get off the street cause the neighbors were calling and complaining about our noise. Billy convinced the policemen to drive us to the Melrose.

Yes Billy was a fixture in the neighborhood and the various corners that comprised its social life. Like a fish he swam through the South Philly social scene of the time, everyone’s friend, everyone’s buddy.


As I grew up and went thought college and moved about South Philly after my marriage, Billy was always there. I would walk through John Wannamker’s on a Saturday afternoon and bump into – Billy Pinto. I would go to a disco in Atlantic City and see -Billy Pinto. I would leave Mara’s Pizzeria on Passyunk avenue and in comes- Billy Pinto. When I lived on South Street at 3rd (1983-87) I would often see Billy at a bar and then we , his friends , and my wife would stand around 3rd and South talking and joking, turning Philly’s little Soho into a South Philly Hang Out corner.

Billy never married and never had any long term girl friends that I knew of. He lived with his mother in the house with the garage and was joyfully content with the arrangement, as was his mother.

I remain totally uncertain of what it was he actually did for a living, but he did something , and it was legal. His passions seem to be his motors and his mates.

As the 80’s gave into the 90’s Billy remained unchanged like the Picture of Dorian Gray and I continued to run into him everywhere I went. When I left South Philadelphia in the 90’s and would only return at Christmas or the summer , I would still run into Billy at most of my outings.

It seemed to be our Karmatic destiny that we would cross paths continually.

As the 21st century approached it seems Billy Pinto would remain forever cruising the streets and the local shops. He was destined to be one of those quintessential figures in South Philly, a perennial nice guy , the kind you would always stop and have a chat with. Billy was the kind of guy that typified many of the good qualities of Italo South Philly, warm unthreatening friendship, consistency, and a sense of community.

However we delude ourselves when we take comfort in consistency , for nature is not consistent. Life is fortuitous and you must always be ready for the unexpected. One spring day in 1998 Billy was attending to a car in the garage of his home. The car was idling and Billy had gone in front of the car to get a tool, perhaps the emergency break was not set or did not function. The car moved, Billy was hit. A freak accident. Billy died ( Requiescat in Pace).

I was greeted with this sad news when I returned to Philadelphia that summer. It was very hard to believe as Billy was young and just seemed to be a permanent figure in the neighborhood. It seem incredulous to me that he was dead, until the next day while walking along Passyunk avenue I caught sight of his mother, a slender women with dyed hair, one look into her eyes confirmed what I could not believe. Billy was dead. The look in his mother’s eye haunts me still, for it was the most melancholic glance I have ever seen.

I still find it hard to believe he is gone, on subsequent trips to Philadelphia I would ask- how is Billy Pinto, to be responded with a cocked head and- Frank Billy died, remember.

But when I think of South Philly I still have visions of Billy surfing its streets and businesses, this is the memory train that never reaches the station.

Billy Pinto is now a thought possessed by a fondness of the past, of nights at the twin Shop at 10th and Tasker in the late 1970’s, of South Street in the 1980’s.

It is a trick our memories play on us, we subconsciously see the present through the eyes of the past.

Nietzsche had a theory that everything that has happened, happens again and again, The Eternal Return he called it. Perhaps Billy Pinto is for me like an Eternal Return. Perhaps in a quantum physics time warp Billy still makes his rounds of South Philly and pumps gas for old Auggie Di Giacomo.