Common Sense, Gowanus Version

Many of the neighborhood men--Joe Coppola, among them--who lived by the Gowanus in the ‘50’s and ‘60s worked “down the docks.” My father spent 30 killing years unloading ships at the Black Diamond Lines pier at the “foot of Court Street,” dirty, dangerous, brutal work, straight out of “On the Waterfront": gangsters, crooked union (International Longshoremen’s Assoc.) and all the rest.
Joe had dropped out of school, was drafted and fought in the P...acific in the terrible battle for Peleliu Island. Unlike the millions and millions of veterans who used the GI Bill to advance into the middle class, my father, intelligent, broad-shouldered and handsome as a Roman centurion, retreated to the piers.
He worked so relentlessly the men in his “gang” called him “the animal” in Italian. High praise. Even the wise guys left him alone when he refused to take money from the omnipresent loan sharks. (Want to know more about him, see http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/…/dutch-shoes-and-dead-…)
“I do this so yous guys can have a better life,” he’d tell his four sons. (I was the only one who listened.) In our family, my uncle, Sonny Giordano, and my big, bruising cousins, Jimmy and John Pomarico had broken the pattern and joined the NYPD. When I made it to Saint Augustine high school, they’d approach me with heartfelt career advice:
“Vinny, become a sanitation worker. They got a great union. The work ain’t dangerous. You can retire at 40.”
Looking back, they may have been right. At the time, I didn’t aspire to be a garbage man, particularly in a neighborhood where the canal and the back lots, teemed with feral dogs, tail-less cats and rats. So I studied hard and harder. My mind opened up to new ideas and horizons. It was the 1960s.
Of course, this pissed off my father. Every time we argued politics or anything else actually—disagreements soon became shouting matches and slapping matches with me on the losing end.
“You’re smart all right!” Joe would shout. “But you ain’t got common sense! Everything you know is from books!” This from a guy who spent 40 hours a week "studying" the Racing Form.
My erudite uncles, "Joe Turf" and "Punchy" Giordano, agreed with this assessment.
Like an asshole, I accepted this. For the next 10 years, I went out of my way to do manual labor—unloading trucks, working in food processing,, gasket and candle factories, taking shady jobs from the neighborhood gangsters to prove I had “common sense.”
Looking back, I came to realize, doesn’t all knowledge come from books?

Summer on the Gowanus

Carroll Street was always teeming, the air thick with humidity and fumes belched from the trucks thundering along Third Avenue from the 29th Street piers.
The gamblers, Jerry Pep, Freddie Fish, Muzzy, among them stood on the corner shouting, cursing scratching their balls, arguing the day’s winners at Aqueduct or Belmont. Across the street, in front of the Capri Club, Mikey Romanelli and The Goose, dressed like undertakers in dark suits, hovered, ready to collect the bets, and later, collect the losers. They stored the scribbled sheets in the steel blue U.S. Post Office mailbox next to the red fire alarm box on the corner. A safe place since no one trusted the Post Office after Americo Guzzi dropped a cherry bomb down the chute.
Next door, Chitty and Buffalo Manzo, grilled sausage on a half-steel drum filled with charcoal, served with peppers and onions on Italian bread from Gallo’s bakery, the intoxicating aroma wafting in the air On the opposite corner, Rosinna served homemade lemon ice so delicious, truckers would line up in front of her store for a nickel’s worth scooped into Dixie cup. At night she lit a naked bulb above the side door of her store and fried 10-cent calzones in a vat of dirty oil while you waited. Further along Third toward First Street, Victor the blacksmith, biceps bulging in a medieval leather vest, shoed horses belonging to Angeletti and the other fruit peddlers who sang out in Italian on their horse and wagons. ("E rook e' rob" for broccoli rab) Another smell in the air, another sound adding to the cacophony: A one-eyed rooster who’d lost track of time, crowed all day in front of Goldie’s Live Poultry market.
Singsong, the girls skipped rope, played hopscotch on boxes chalked in pastels on the dirty sidewalk. We shouted and cursed, pitched pennies in front of John Sanseverino’s candy store, played kings against the wall of the Typhoon Air Conditioning Company, and high-pressure, high-stakes stickball (The Goose would pit our team against squads bankrolled by other wise guys) on First Street, never realizing the ancient brick wall that ran from Third Avenue to Whitwell Place was an artifact of Brooklyn’s first professional baseball stadium, Washington Park.
I played outfield. A towering fly ball over your head meant you had to keep running and running--toward Prospect Park, to escape your owners' wrath. I'll take Steinbrenner any day.
(to be continued)