HAROLD (b. 1997, Steubenville, OH) is the author of Tropicália (2023) & HUMPTY DUMPTY (FSG 2026). He writes the free, weekly Substack THE ANNALS OF HAROLD; and coaches boxing & performs stand-up comedy in NYC.
BACK TO STEUBENVILLE
1
MY GRANDMA died, so I went back home to Steubenville.
2
MY DAD picked me up at the Pittsburgh airport; he was hungry, so we stopped at Huddle House in Weirton: a restaurant that gluttonically rewards every meal with a free waffle;
I don’t know if it was his chiaroscuroish intention, but he sure looked trim in the midst of the West Virginia wafflegobblers.
I said, “you lose weight?”
That didn’t elicit a response. I said, “how does it feel to be an orphan?”
It’s hard to be serious with my dad. I’d seen him lose a lot of people; I’d been to many funerals with him,
—and he’s a sentimental dude: the easiest way to make him cry was to get him talking about his grandpa, my namesake: Harold, —
but I’m also never gonna ask him how he feels without burying it (no pun intended) in a joke. . .
he had a complicated relationship with his mother, and I really wanted to know how he felt, but I knew it would be hard to get a straight answer.
He laughed, “One day you’ll know all about it.”
3
BETTY POMPA ROGERS, or as I called her “Nana”,
—a bastardization of the Italian word for grandma: nonna, which evinces her relationship to Italian identity; she always pressed me to remember that I had an “eye-talian grandma!”,
and though both her parents were immigrants from Italy and she grew up on “Italian street” in Steubenville in the 1930s (where her cousin Beans Pompa used to run around with Dean Martin), she didn’t speak any Italian, it was more or less beat out of her in the name of assimilation, —
died on March 3rd 2025, at 96 years old. My dad, his sister, and my cousins were with her in the hospital room when she died, and right before she took her last breath, she exclaimed, elated:
“my family is all back together again!”
This had been her bugaboo in her chair-bound waning (never senescence!, she was sharp until the day she died) ; one day she left my dad a furious voicemail out of the blue, demanding to know,
WHO THE FUCK RUINED MY FAMILY!?
And I guess that’s something I wanted to know, too; especially when I read her obituary and was reminded what a figure of tremendous matriarchal importance she was for certain people on my dad’s side of the family:
“As a proud Italian, Betty was unsurprisingly a wonderful cook – making Italian classics, hosting spaghetti dinners in her home, and teaching her kids and grandkids Italian cooking and baking traditions. She attended all of her kids’ and grandkids’ activities from being a den mother when her boys were in Cub Scouts to supporting her kids and grandkids at band, cheering, plays, choir, softball games, and much more.”
The obituary was long as hell [(it did have to cover nine decades!) and cost $1900 to run in full in the local paper,
(I texted my dad: “loved the obit” ; he texted back: “long”)]
& ardent, covering stories from her life that I’d never even heard, painting a portrait of a person that I did not know;
like this spaghetti dinner business: why was I never invited? Why didn’t she come to my games?
High as hell one night, reading that, I really felt, for the first time, that Nana was a real person, and this real person would be perpetually what I always felt she was, an absence in my life.
How come I grew up 10 miles away and felt like she wasn’t my grandma?
AN EXEGESIS OF FAMILY BEEF
4
MY PARENTS met in Las Vegas on April 14th, 1994.
My mom (who immigrated to the U.S. from Rio de Janeiro at 19) was 25, working as a cocktail waitress at Caesar’s Palace; she’d just settled in Vegas after fleeing a very bad situation in Los Angeles. . . :
my dad was 35, putting his life back together after the FBI busted him for bookmaking in 1990;
they met thru a mutual friend: this dude Ron, a pimp & cocaine dealer; if you knew 5 foot nothing, disheveled, cartoonishly-mustached oddball Ron, you’d think the fact that my mom & dad both were independently drawn into friendships with him was actually a perfect indicator of their compatibility.
My mom acted crazy as fuck at dinner, then offered to drive my dad to the airport (bc he was flying out to Antigua to see about this new venture), but she drove him the wrong way (on purpose), he stayed the night:
a month later, my mom moved in with him in Toronto OH.
5
MY DAD was born and raised in Toronto OH: one of only 2 cities in the entire world with that name.
I spent the first 7 years of my life there on 1324 Dennis Way. A house that endured a raid by the FBI in 1990, and by the IRS in 2003;
— there can’t be many houses that have been raided by two different federal law enforcement agencies in two different centuries. . . —
Everybody in Toronto knows my dad. A dude in my boxing class said his family was from Toronto; I said, “what’s your last name?”
He goes, “Pillar.”
I said, “I think I grew up next to your grandpa. He poisoned my dad’s cat!”
He said, “your dad is Jon Rogers?!”
WHEN my mom moved in, I don’t think a Brasilian had ever been in Toronto, — a fucking insular, unpulchritudinous enclave if there ever was one, — and she ain’t really the type to do things quietly. . .
my mom was 25, and it had been a hard 25, and now, here she was, in a little bumfuck town, all alone, except for my dad. . .
(I wonder if my dad realized how hard it was for her; honestly I doubt it, he has a lot of virtues, but emotional perspicacity ain’t one of them, which must’ve made her feel even more isolated, like her youth was truncated. And for what? Ohio? She must’ve really loved him)
. . . and she probably thought, well his roots are so deep here, his family could be my family eles vão me acolher. . .
And it’s nasty about humanity that this can read as naivety; because here’s a consummate outsider, come to roost in their henhouse unkowtowingly:
— — of course it was beef. . .
My mother must’ve been shocked.
6
FROM EVERYTHING I know, my Nana’s relationship with her mother-in-law was a horrorshow of contentiousness, and really, from what I can glean, because my Nana was a cultural outsider (she was Italian & my grandpa was Irish) with a big personality, who wouldn’t brook no bullshit;
you’d think this would be the perfect training ground to free herself from being caught in the cycles of the past, but instead, my Nana imposed everything she suffered on the next generation, —completely blind to how unfree & fated. . . —
for as long as I can remember, the way my dad’s family treated my mom was the biggest locus of strife between them. They fought about it all the fucking time.
Get a couple drinks in my mom, get her talking about Mother’s Day 1998 (where my father left her alone when me and my twin sister were six months old, to go spend the day at his mother’s house “because it’s mother’s day, she’s my mom”) and that shit gets Krakatoan quick.
She rolls off the litany of abuse right off the top of her head easily; it’s all rage, but you can tell how deep the hurt is to spark such a timeless anger.
THE BEEF was inconstant too: it’s a 30 year war, right? There’s oases of peace.
I always knew when it was back to clashing b/c I’d hear my mom awake in the middle of the night, keyboard clacking loud as hell, responding to vituperative emails with her own venom.
Three years before my grandma died, it seemed like everything was settled again.
My Nana would come stay over with my parents, and my mom would literally wipe her ass; don’t get it twisted, my mom can be difficult, but she was always above-and-beyondly doting to my dad’s parents, and her kindness was never remotely returned.
A year before she died, my Nana banned my mom from her funeral, and they never spoke again. . .
7
WHY DIDN’T my dad get the fuck out of town? Why’d he have to root himself so close to where he grew up?
I think it was an unconscious filiopieism; he didn’t think too hard about it, it was where he was always gonna end up. . . and it seems to me his strongest guiding principles are loyalty & duty, and if you don’t owe those things to your family, who do you owe them to?
But his duties as a son & a brother often conflicted with his duties as a husband & father, and he didn’t always have the most astute resolutions.
In the last few years of my Nana’s life, I continued to visit her every time I was in town, despite the fact that my mom & my sister stopped going;
my dad went to visit every Monday, —my mother never told him not to go, but he’d certainly get the cold shoulder from her on Mondays, —and he instituted a 3 strike policy: if my Nana said 3 bad things about my mother, he was out of there.
It’s telling that it wasn’t one strike.
I WOULD go visit because she was a lonely 90 year old woman, without whose existence, I literally wouldn’t exist, and she was funny; she’d rant & rave & cuss and apologize for saying the f-word and beg me to say that I loved her;
one time she read one of my substacks where I talk about my dad’s career as a bookie and for some reason she thought I was snitching on him to the feds, and she called me up going, “FUCK YOU HAROLD!” talking about how Brasilians love money. . .
The most normal conversation I ever had with her is when I was driving her to a doctor’s appointment and she asked me, “what are those things on a page that you write with?” I said, “what?” She said, “those things like when someone’s talking?” I said, “. . . quotation marks?” She said, “yes!”
She always told me she should write a book about her life; she was gonna call it My Italian Life.
It’s a shame that book doesn’t exist.
THE WAKE
8
AFTER OUR belly-bursting waffle-feast, my dad drove us over to Foster’s Funeral Home in Toronto OH for the wake.
My mother & sister had a great excuse not to attend: they were in Rio for Carnaval; we told everyone who asked in exaggerated exasperated tones:
“THEY’RE STUCK IN RIO! THEY COULDN’T GET A FLIGHT!”,
when in reality they were treating the coincidence as serendipitous, continued to samba (we might’ve been making jokes that it was upon someone’s grave;
I always talked about my American grandparents differently with my mom & sister. . . privately we referred to them as PooPoo & PeePee).
SMALL-TOWN wakes are a good reminder that you’re bumfuck-bred; literally randos I swear I never seen coming up to me like,
“I seen you play basketball in 7th grade!”, “I was in the room when you came out of your mom’s *****!”, “I was your dad’s janitor in high school!”
That last dude was Muff, who at 90 years old inherited 30 million dollars from a random relative and finally retired from janitorial work to live in a big house in Toronto with his wife AND GF.
STANDING SENTRY by the casket was my dad’s sister Aunt M, weeping up a storm, and my Nana’s caretaker at the end of her life, V—— : a woman my dad dated on & off for 17 years who he ended up dumping because she smoked crack and tried to stab him;
after their 1990 raid, the FBI referred to her as “a hub of non-gambling related problems”,
and this was a woman my dad’s family had NO beef with! Toward the end my Nana even tried to nudge them back together! (I for one am quite grateful I didn’t sprout from her loins. . . ).
My Nana looked great in the casket. Everyone kept saying, “she does NOT look 96!”
My Nana’s claim to fame was always her great beauty. Which drove a competitive wedge between her & my mother, I think.
I knelt down in front of her body, looked at her closely one last time, and I prayed to God I’d get a chance to create a family, and that it would be functional.
9
UNCLE FRANK, my dad’s brother was also in attendance.
Him & my dad are estranged, but when they seen each other they shook hands, started chumming it up like old pals.
I could see a glimpse of what it was like when they were in high school; a reality in which they would’ve been friends and I would’ve grown up with an American uncle. . . (my mom’s brother was a strong presence when I was young, but he was fucked up and that all fizzled out and he died. I didn’t get to go to his funeral.)
A woman came up to him at the wake and greeted him and he stuck out his hand, “nice to meet you, I’m Frank Rogers”
She said, “Frank, we were married. Twice!”
After a disastrous youth driving truck & being a destructive lothario in Toronto, he moved to Texas, became a horse dentist, then later went over to Afghanistan to be a mercenary.
He was telling me about a recent motorcycle trip he took, and when I took advantage of a break in his monologue to drift away he said,
“Hey! I ain’t done talking to you!”
I think of how many funny stories I would have about him if he would’ve been a part of my life. . .
10
IT’S A cornucopia of top-notch cousins! My cousins Bart: Bart Jr & Bart Sr. Two hirsute Italians shaped like barrels. Well, Bart Jr is shaped like three barrels tied together. He once bench pressed 800 pounds. Really!
I was disappointed to hear that his body is now too wrecked to continue lifting weights.
There’s Tall Zack, my autistic cousin who once killed someone “by accident” at the Walmart Distribution Center, and his wife Tall Anna: who my mom actually set up,
and the first night they had sex, Anna accidentally called my mom, — “Monica” right next to “Mom” on her contacts, — screaming and crying. . . Zack & Anna have a tall baby and seem very happy.
I have three first cousins on my dad’s side: Betsy, Frank’s daughter who he ditched on my Nana & Papa’s doorstep; and Meredith & Kelsey, Aunt M’s daughters.
Meredith & Kelsey were always my cool cousins, growing up, but the strife between our mothers made it impossible to have any kind of consistent relationship; you gotta pick sides in a war, and I side with my mother unequivocally.
The problem with that is that war usually springs from complete nonsense. So now I live in a world where I got no cousins I talk to because of, — — —
WHAT? I never got the point of all this pettiness when we’re all just gonna end up in the casket.
11
BUT HOW the fuck are you supposed to get along with your family?
It’s grim when you hunker down and think about it, how few examples there are of functional family conviviality;
think of our bedrock stories: who are the first siblings in the Bible? Cain & Abel. It’s murder from the get-go. It’s so easy to spot the ruinous petty in others. That insensible maw that rips peace apart.
Suddenly, though, you’re re-enacting the same wars in your own generation.
But there’s some stories I’m not allowed to tell. . .
12
THE CLOSEST I ever felt to my American family was in the summer of 2009. Aunt M’s husband George died suddenly at the dinner table.
It was the first time I ever witnessed how death can have like a hallucinogenic effect on people; it’s like they emerged from an Ayahuasca trip: suddenly they just want peace & love.
For like a week after the funeral, we’d go to Aunt M’s house every night; there was so much family there, convivializing, happy their own hearts were still ticking.
I had just gotten my football helmet, and I was showing it off, putting it on, and my grandpa grabbed my arm and told me I better get strong if I was gonna be a football player, —George played Center at Yale.
I remember feeling this odd, frightening feeling of gratitude for George’s death; like that’s what would allow me to be part of a big family again. . .
Later that summer, me & my sister went over to Aunt M’s house for a sleepover.
She took us to the grocery store to load up on snacks; chubby, euphoric, we got a bunch of shit, including a box of Oreos.
We put the Oreos on the kitchen table and stepped outside. When we came back in, we saw that the dog had jumped up on the counter and eaten all the Oreos.
Aunt M started screaming like a banshee, “OH MY GOD HE’S GONNA DIE!!!”, barking at me and my sister to “DO SOMETHING!”,
we were startled (& 12 years old), but eventually, she halted her complete shamblement and got something to make the dog puke.
The dog puked up all the Oreos outside; when we went back inside, Aunt M went to bed without another word.
She never invited us back over again.
13
I LIKED my Nana, but I have to be honest, I don’t like anything about Aunt M. She was the worm in my Nana’s ear, always re-igniting beef after it had died down.
Months before she died, my Nana wanted to call my mom to make amends, but my Aunt talked her out of it. Why? I don’t know; sometimes people who aren’t versed in this type of conflict assume it’s rational, but long-term combat needs delusion and irrationality to sustain it.
She gave me a hug and cheaply said, “I love you.” I didn’t say anything. I don’t even have her number saved on my phone.
She told me she would’ve read my novel, but she’s been so caught up with the Sarah J. Maas books. I said,
“You won’t like it. There’s no dragon cocks.”
IF I don’t like her, I really don’t like her unpleasant, sebaceous husband Karl; I wasn’t gonna go in, but Karl was talking mad shit.
Said he was gonna kick me out of the funeral if I pulled up.
Uncle Frank, —immediately entering my good graces, —told me he told Uncle K that if he tried to do that, “I’ll be happy to pick your teeth back up off the ground for you.”
I’m not gonna sit here and call my grotesque Uncle K an old pussy, but if he’s ever been in a fight, I’ll eat my shorts; and if he’s ever kicked anyone’s ass, I’ll eat my fucking couch.
Anyway: him and what army? Bart Jr’s on my side and he’ll launch Uncle K’s ass right into space.
Of course, Uncle K was just being a behind-closed-doors tough guy. When I pulled up, he gave me a handshake so oleaginous, I had to go to the bathroom to wipe off the grease.
14
MY DAD thru-out the wake was stately, hilarious, charming as usual; he gave a eulogy and crushed for 7 minutes, —everyone complimented his eulogy except jealous-ass Karl.
One of my favorite bits. My dad was talking about how Nana wrote letters to the editor of the local paper, complaining about the new Bishop.
My dad changed his caller ID to “STEUBENVILLE DIOCESE” and called up, pretending to be the Bishop:
“So the phone rang and my dad heard STEUBENVILLE DIOCESE and he picked it up and I said, “please hold for a call from Bishop Daniel Conlon.”
My dad said, “Betty it’s for you… you did it now!”
“Betty Rogers I understand from reading the paper you don’t like how I’m running things.” She stands her ground, and starts going at him good. I come back with, “I will take away your rights from visiting any parish in the diocese of Steubenville.”
She replied, “I will just go to Weirton.”
I was out of things to say so I said, “this is your son.”
She said, “the Bishop has a son?”
I said, “no Mom it’s me.”
She says, “JON! What are you doing with the Bishop?”
After that, she told everyone she knew how well she handled the Bishop.
15
AFTER THE wake, me & my dad went to Texas Roadhouse where we ate steaks and drank several gargantuan chalices of Michelob Ultra.
I thought, unhappily, about how I would be in his shoes one day; if life went well, for me: I would have to bury my parents.
I was trying to be OK with that; trying to appreciate the opportunities that sprung up in the face of such total finality.
After dinner we went to 7 Ranges, Steubenville’s gigantic Dave & Buster’s dupe; we played the basketball arcade game, and I smoked him.
THE FUNERAL
16
THE NEXT MORNING, I woke up hungover, and we headed to Saint Francis Church in Toronto for the funeral; the same church where I attended my parents’ wedding in 1998.
Unfortunately, my Nana’s favorite priest Monsignor Kemo couldn’t perform the mass because he was banned from the state of Ohio after serving a couple years in prison for stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from the church.
I hadn’t been to Catholic Mass in a while. I forgot about the pageantry: the egg-shaped smoke machine the priest swung around, hazing the place.
I did take communion despite the mortal sins on my heart. The priest looked at me skeptically, but I wasn’t about to leave without a slice of Jesus.
17
MY DAD hadn’t cried once since he picked me up from the airport; I don’t know if it was all the smoke in the room getting in his eyes, but as Mass drew to a close, he started to cry.
I put my hand on his shoulder and there were tears in my eyes. I don’t know if they were for my father, or what. My Nana was dead forever now. This was the last time I was ever going to be in the same room as her. She would never again say something to make me laugh.
You don’t realize how much gets buried with a person. Especially one that’s lived for 96 years. I wondered if my dad had any regrets. . .
Funerals are a glimpse into what it will be like when YOU are dead.
Outwardly, usually, they’re full of spin about the dead; it ain’t a time for the airing of grievances; but if you’re incisive, there’s lessons all around: about how to be as a person; how to use & misuse your freedom.
I’m not the kind of person who likes to hagiographize the dead; that’s a mewling & rosy-glassed love that I never had any time for; the only way to truly respect a person, to take them seriously, is to SEE them, faults & all:
I felt bad for my Nana; guilt & regret was undoubtedly heavy on her conscience, and she would never get a chance to rectify anything.
For the first time, watching my dad cry, I felt something like love for my Nana.
18
THERE WERE 65 people at mass. More than half of them accompanied the procession of cars over to the cemetery in Steubenville for the priest to say his last prayers and put her into the ground.
We put my grandpa’s urn in the casket (which should’ve cost extra, but my dad snuck it in there). . . my grandma used to say that after he died, whenever she would buy something on Amazon, the urn would shake; his ghost admonishing her.
I think if my parsimonious grandpa would’ve overheard that the funeral cost $21,000 his urn would’ve exploded.
AND THAT’S the end of my Nana.
I’ll never know what she was really like as a person. That hurts me.
I don’t know what my life would’ve been like if I had a loving, additive, uncomplicated relationship with my paternal grandma; to be honest, I never missed that love. But I could’ve done with more stories, more subjectivity.
If all the well-wishers are right, there is a heaven, and that’s where Nana is right now alongside my grandpa; maybe they’re holding hands, or canoodling in the back room of the bowling alley where Nana once bowled a 300 and Papa liked to take his girlfriends..
I don’t care about the afterlife. I wanna know all about the people who are with me right here. Because they don’t got long to tell me who they are.
While we drove away, I asked my dad, “what did you really think about your parents?”
He looked straight ahead: “let’s go get a drink.”
RIP NANA.
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