I have it pretty easy.

My family is full of storytellers, so I suppose I’ll continue the tradition. I don’t know the extent of these stories’ truth, although there was a local newspaper article that recounted the bar-shooting.

First I’ll cover my dad’s side, the Italians and Mexicans. His grandfather from Italy worked on a small olive farm in Castellammare Italy. He was visited by a mafia man one to be shook down. Now, apparently my great grandfather was a tough bastard and he killed this mafia man. He was a smart bastard too. He realized he needed to leave, and so he left for America the next day. In America he was spit on, taken advantage of, and kicked around. He worked as a grocer, exploited as a slave in a textile sweatshop, and eventually ended up in Detroit. Here, he established a very successful laundry detergent empire, Roman Detergent, and made a good fortune. The Great depression wiped him out. He had a son, Michael Gioia, who moved to Los Angeles and met my grandmother there. Now let’s get into how she got there.

So now we jump to some Mexicans in Montana. My great-great-grandfather was a bartender. One night he stopped serving a man because he had no money. The man grumbled and left. He came back with a shotgun and killed my great-great-grandfather. That night his children decided they needed to return to Chihuahua Mexico. And so hopped onto a train boxcar. They were not the only ones on the train though. On the opposite side was another man. They realized it was the man who had shot their father. The whole night my great-great-grandfather’s murderer and his children sat on opposite sides of the boxcar, wide awake and staring at each other. The first place the train stopped was in California, outside of Los Angeles. My great-grandfather thought this as good a place as any, and so he and his siblings got out and settled in Los Angeles. He would go on to drink and gamble away his life, but not before rearing Dorothy Ortiz, my grandmother.

My mother’s side is less talked about and less mythologized. She’s not as good with words as my dad’s side. No one knows where her father came from. Somehow he ended up in Los Angeles. He was kicked out of high school for smoking cigarettes in the bathroom. Then he got a job at a movie studio and later became a Hollywood producer. He died from heart disease at fifty-two, leaving my grandmother alone with my mother and her sister. But my grandmother was a tough woman.

Tough might be an understatement. She was raised in a series of orphanages. Her father was alive and well. Every now and then he’d pick her up and tote her around for a few days, only to drop her off at a new orphanage. At age 16, she moved out with her brother and lived with him in a small apartment. She worked every job she could find, eventually working at a phone switchboard at Universal studios. Here she met my grandfather, got married, and reared my mom.

Now these people had interesting lives. My life? It’s been a dull affair, predictable and rather comfortable for its entirety. I cannot help but feel my grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents’ generations were better and tougher generations, having built great amounts of character through their suffering and hardships.