My Cousin Richie

I fly up for my brother's wedding held in one of the glittery Bensonhurst halls Italian-Americans love. Big band;  feasting followed by “Venetian Hour,” preceded by “Cocktail Hour,” topped off by a flaming post-midnight breakfast. My sister-in-law has a tuxedo for four-year-old Thomas and a personal stylist to do 12-year-old Gaby’s hair. Having been married by a justice of the peace with a “Here Comes Da Judge” sign on his desk, I marvel at all the splendor. Unknown to me, the groom had quit the job I’d gotten him at Newsweek and was now a bookie. Unknown to his Armani-clad bosses—seated at their own gangster table near the kiddie table—he was a crazed gambler.
When I step out of my limo, all my female cousins are screaming, “He’s coming!!”
“Who?”
“He’s starring in a new movie with Robert DeNiro!”
“Who?”
“Cousin Richie! Richie Castellano!”
That’s odd. Richard Castellano, who played the portly “Clemenza” in The Godfather (“Leave the gun; take the cannoli”), had died 10-years before. At that moment, one of the shrieking teenagers thrust a glossy headshot at me. Sure enough, the cutline proclaimed “Richard Castellano,” but the broken-nosed visage smiling at me was my cousin Richie, “Richie Mel.”
Everyone knew that. Or so I thought.
*****
One of the last times I’d seen Richie, I was living on Fifth Street (above 8th Avenue to connoisseurs of Park Slope). Teaching English at Automotive High School in Williamsburg. That morning, I was unlocking my car when I heard a hoarse shout.
“Cuz! You gotta help me!”
I looked up. “Hey Richie. What’s up?”
“Cuz! I’m begging ya!”
Everyone in South Brooklyn shouted. All day, all the time, as if they really were players fretting and strutting on some invisible stage. The rest of us were scenery for them to chew.
“What’s wrong?”
“Cuz, they say I robbed a gas station!”
“What?”
“I’m innocent. I swear to my mother! They saying I shot a guy…with a shotgun!”
“Get outta here!”
“Fuckin’ cops! You know how they lie!”
I did know. Ten years before, I'd made the mistake of getting drunk on Tango, pre-bottled rutgut vodka and orange juice. A very bad choice for a Catholic high school boy. I was swept up in a dragnet--there had been a street gang murder that night--and dragged into the 78th precinct where a two cops took turns beating me for hours hoping for a confession. They were disappointed when the real killer was caught and marched in. By way of apology, an Irish cop walked me outside, punched me in the stomach and threw me down the concrete steps.
Richie paused as if to find his mark. “Cuz, you’re an educated guy. You went to college. I’m stupid! You gotta help me. I know I did some things, but I’m innocent this time. I got a wife…”
He choked back a sob. “Maybe…maybe you could talk to Uncle Sonny.” (Our uncle, Sal Giordano, was an NYPD detective so straight he was known in the neighborhood as “Elliot Ness.”) “Uncle Sonny knows people.”
“I could call him.”
I knew Uncle Sonny's first impulse would be to strangle Richie. For years, he and his wayward brothers—“JuJu,” “Jimmy Psycho,” and “Popeye Anthony”—had been the bane of Sonny's existence. (Another Castaldo brother, despite his nickname, "Alibi Ike," went on to lead a blameless life, serving in the Air Force, building a successful career, supporting a wife and family.)
“Maybe you can write a letter to the prosecutor," Richie added. "I was thinking the bishop too. You know my sister Carol works in Our Lady of Peace rectory. She cooks for the priests…Cuz, I’m really scared.”
“What’s his name?”
"Who?"
"The bishop."
“Fuck I know.”
I’d always felt Richie and his brothers—all smart, engaging, personable guys--were a photographic negative of my family. Or victims of some mysterious curse. The curse of growing up by the Gowanus Canal. Three of my brothers had graduated from college; none of us had ever been in trouble (all this would change). I felt guilty; I’d committed the sin of hard work and ambition.
“I’m fucking innocent!” he sobbed.
“Come on. It’s okay." I gave him a pretend hug. "Nothing’s going to happen. I promise. When I get home from work, come by. We’ll eat. I’ll help you. Ok?"
This was the Vietnam War era; the Watergate era; the Berrigan Brothers…injustice, civil rights
“You mean it Cuz?”
“Sure…But I gotta get to work now.”
“No problem. I don’t want to bother you. I know you’re a busy guy. Responsibilites.”
As I was tossing my briefcase—stuffed with papers I’d spent half the night marking--into my green Karmann Ghia, Richie called out again.
“Cuz...”
I sighed and stood up. The tears were gone. He was grinning. I stared as he pulled a greasy wad of bills from his pants’ pocket. Hundreds of dollars. He fanned it in front of my face.
“Cuz,” he said. “But I got the money!”
He couldn’t resist. He had to let me know he thought I was an idiot.
***
Years pass before I see Cousin Richie again. Out of jail, he’s now pursuing a career as a prize fighter. It turns out our family has a long boxing history. One of my earliest memories is a tabloid photo of my maternal grandfather, club fighter “Jim Jordan,” standing, thick arms raised in triumph, over a battered black man named “Preacher” something or other. The caption is typical of the era: “Negro’s Prayers No Help Against Jordan Onslaught.” All seven Jordan (Giordano) brothers, lumberjacks in Itay, were outsized men. Two were pro-wrestlers in the 1930s, one supposedly a “Russian.” In Chicago, an astute fan heard this Russian hiss in Neapolitan dialect to his brother—“Take it easy! Goddamn it! You’re hurting me!”—and the jig was up. My grandfather had big hopes for his eldest son, but my Uncle Tony’s nickname (“Punchy”) said it all.
Richie is holding court in Snooky’s Pub on Seventh Ave., surrounded by a gaggle of intrigued women. (Think Johnny Boy in Scorsese’s Mean Streets.) The same girls, braless and casually available I, with my droopy mustache and faded jeans, my teaching job, my books and bullshit, could not get my hands on. This is post-hippie era Park Slope. The communes of the mid-‘60s—one of them, the four-story brownstone at 16 Polhemus Place could be had for $60,000 if you could find a banker willing to write a mortgage—are passing away like the elvish people in Lord of the Rings, replaced by armada of arrogant Gen X'ers pushing Peg Perego prams, assuming nothing and no one existed before they’d arrived on scene.
Trim, blond hair cut unfashionably short, nose suitably broken, Richie spots me at the front of the bar. “What is it Cousin Vin! Get over here!”
“Here we go,” I think
“This is my cousin. He’s a school teacher.”
Instantly, the women’s eyes glaze over. With a ninth grade education, and a fourth grade writing style, Richie had spent two years writing his prison memoirs; in longhand, on spiral tablets, in multi-colored ink that had arrived at my apartment every few months.
“Cuz!” he'd suggested. “Polish this up a little. You know how. We split the money!”
A blizzard of misspelling, cliché, and repetition. I couldn’t say this the few times he’d called me to check on our “investment.” But Richie is nothing but resilient. To my relief, he’s surrendered his literary aspirations along with his orange jumpsuit.
“Cuz, I’m fighting next week in Sheepshead Bay,” he crows, shooting jabs in all directions. “I’m gonna kill this fuckin’ guy. Am I right ladies?”
The women instantly perk up.
“Cuz, get these girls some drinks. I’ll get yous all front row seats.”
The fight was actually staged at a street festival near Emmons Avenue. Tickets were free and Richie was knocked out in the first round. A dying swan, nose streaming.
“Cuz, I’m bleeding!”
****
Fast forward. I’ve flown up from Atlanta to visit my mother. I'm crossing Third Avenue—the Carroll Street Bridge and the Gowanus Canal glimmer in the summer haze—when Richie spots me.
“Help me Cousin Vin!” he rasps. “They’re gonna kill me!”
He was clinging to the iron rail fence of a rundown apartment building on the corner. A sedan idled at the curb. Two guys were grabbing at his arms. I didn’t know them, but I’d grown up with the third guy, Chuckie R, a capo in the Colombo family run from prison by Carroll Street’s own Carmine “Junior" Persico. Chuckie had been a serious, thoughtful guy; never intimidating, always interested in my career as a journalist in the American South. Our parents had been friends growing up. It seemed to me Chuckie had had the misfortune of being born into a particularly ill-starred and oft-targeted mafia family. Today he’s serving life in prison on a RICO conspiracy with a dozen of his cousins and uncles.
“Cousin Vin!” Richie shouts frantically.
By now, Fat Rosie and Carroll Street’s other resident gossip mongers are all eagerly watching.
“Vinny,” Chuckie says, “Get this fuckin moron to shut up.”
“They’re gonna kill me. Don’t let them take me!”
“Nobody’s gonna hurt you!” Chuckie hisses.
“Richie shut up!” I plead “It’s okay.”
All I want to do is visit my mom. Once again, I'm caught in his mad web. Any moment, I knew Gloria would be out the door, charging up the street to our rescue. (It had happened before when my brother Thomas who was gay, beat the hell out of Michael Romanelli, a bigshot bookie's son.) Chuckie takes me aside. It turns out that, while jailed, Richie repeatedly claimed to have numerous connections among the correction officers and administrative staff of a particular prison in upstate New York. He was so well-connected, he insisted, that for a few thousand dollars, he could guarantee that some wise guy’s son, nephew, father or cousin would be provided exceptional treatment and perks—the best jobs, free access to food parcels, choice of cellmates, books, who knows what. An offer they couldn’t refuse. With generations of family members being incarcerated at a dizzying pace, it was a perfect, though wildly reckless scam. Richie collected thousands of dollars and then disappeared.
Now he's was back and the word was out. Another family, perhaps a murderous splinter of the Colombo family in Bensonhurst or Howard Beach, has put a contract on Richie. All this was patiently explained to me as if what I thought counted. I don’t understand this world or its arcane rules, but my cousin—certainly no made-man—was under the protection of the Persico faction.
That’s a very long story, maybe going all the way back to his father, (“Uncle Fat”) who as a young man was crippled by a Southern scab driving a tractor-trailer into a dockworkers’ picket line. Uncle Fat made the most of his martyrdom. He’d limp into supermarkets on Fifth Avenue, pack his cart with steaks and beer and groceries for his wife and offspring, then threaten any hapless proprietor who dared to hand him a bill with his cane, shouting,
“Let them pay!” And they did, for years.
Richie was simply going to a meeting; get a talking to, after which, some outsized lug would doubtless “throw him a beating.” The phrase demonstrates how absolutely unimportant one’s well being is in the grand scheme. I guess what the Alcoholics Anonymous types mean by “powerlessness.” But Richie would live to rise again.
And, of course, he did.
***
When Analyze This premiers in 1999, I swear I spot him next to Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal. WTF! I track down his sister Carol in Brooklyn, and she proclaims him “a star!” (The whole family exaggerates.) “Richie got me on the set! Robert De Niro kissed me.” (Approximate translation: “Fuck you Vinny and your college education!”)
As “Jimmy Boots,” De Niro’s "dese and dose" bodyguard, Richie croaks just 16 lines (“What are you, some kind of moron?” among the more memorable), but like a viral vector, exposure is more than enough for him to infect an exponentially bigger—and much more naïve—population than a Park Slope bar or the streets along the Gowanus Canal.
I’d spent time in Hollywood—most journalists think about it—I’d seen the throngs of unemployed young actors clustered Sunday mornings in Studio City, futilely comparing notes and filching casting calls. You want Italian? I met dozens: New York-Italian, Chicago-Italian, San Francisco-Italian, blueblood Italians from Rome and Milan; artistic, handsome, beautiful, stupid, charming, effeminate, dangerous, talented Italians—Chazz Palminteri had parked cars!—none of them going anywhere. And here was Richie, strutting and fretting, giving advice and television interviews, fabricating madly: “….. I come from a big family with mob connections. When I was a kid I saw people killed... by the time I was 12 or 13 years old I was an alcoholic. That was the only life I ever knew, the only thing... So I was a street guy, a bank robber (N.B. gas station becomes bank; bank will become shoe store). And in order to survive, one of the skills you got to develop is acting. I been shot, beaten to a pulp with lead pipes, you name it, at various times in my past life—I’ve even been pronounced DOA one time when they took me to hospital. Altogether I survived ten contracts on my life – ten…” . His claim about being dead might be true. What Richie didn’t say, what I recall, is that he overdosed, probably on Tuinals or Seconals, and his brother, Popeye Anthony, an ambulance driver, found him on President Street.
Richie now had an agent; he had a website; he was organizing a film festival. He had a French wife!
I sure didn’t. This was too much.
Richie was no longer a cousin, or a “colorful” Gowanus character. Richard Castellano, ne Castaldo, was a story. At Newsweek, my editor Terry McDonell had me spend a month with the Rolling Stones; at Men’s Journal he’d ordered me to Hanoi after I mentioned a popular disco named “Apocalypse Now.” (He made me eat snakes.) At Esquire, he’d sent me to the New Mexican desert to find Jimmy Baca, a mad Apache poet who’d taught himself to read in prison and held Wallace Stevens’s chair at Yale. (He made me eat mushrooms.) But Terry was no longer at Esquire—he’d temporarily been banished to a fishing magazine—and the new editor, a baldy suburbanite, didn’t know me or care about Richie. This was a shame, because Richie and his new wife, Jocelyne Castellano, aka Jocelyne Castaldo-Castellano, aka Maria Jocelyne Castellano, aka Marie-Helene Rousseau aka Marie Rousseau (the “aka's" are significant), had moved to bucolic Narrowsberg, N.Y., and were plotting to rip off the entire county.
Richie arrived in upstate New York in the spring of 1999, a few months after Analyze This opens in 2500 theaters. (The film would go on to gross more than $100 million.) I know this because I tracked him down. (“Cousin Vin! Where you been?") Jocelyne, in a breathy French accent invites me to their First Annual Narrowsberg International Film Festival. (WTF!) My cousin is now become Jean Paul Belmondo?
A thousand miles away, I feel the old, mad Richie virus singing in my blood. (Surely, he’d find a place for me, his cousin, in the festival.) I fight it off, instead profiling another mad actor, Eric Roberts then living along the Hudson River.
Richie appears in Narrowsberg, a flyspeck along a bend of the Delware River. He arrives draped in black leather with a bodyguard named “Mondo” and a black Cadillac like one of Boccaccio’s shimmering young nobles in the Decameron. Actually, the plague-bearer in “Masque of the Red Death.”
Sixteen spoken lines and he opens the “Richard Castellano School of Acting.” Forty-two people sign on. Sixteen lines and the merchants and an ill-starred chicken farmer named Borg are convinced their hamlet will become “the Sundance of the East.” Sixteen lines and Richie announces he is starring in a gangster movie—Four Deadly Reasons—to be shot, for some unfathomable reason, in Narrowsberg. A good citizen, he wants to include local actors and investors. A lord, he struts, lapels flying like F-16s, down Main Street, shouting at everyone he meets, playfully shoulder-punching stolid burghers like they’re goombahs.
“What is it?” he demands of everyone, but only he does the talking.
His life isan open book, mostly fiction: the gas station he told me he’d robbed is now an armored car. (The next time he's arrested, he will shrink it a shoe store.) He has “$2 million stashed away.” He’s killed people and danced away from “ten contracts” on his life. By the Gowanus, these fantasies would have been dismissed with a knowing grin, a playful “slap in the head,'" or a knowing "Get the fuck out of here.!" In Narrowsburg, they’re intoxicating, an opportunity, unspoken, "to wet their beaks in the champagne fountain of celebrity.
Mornings, he storms into the Chatterbox Café on Main Street and announces he's buying everyone breakfast, then breezes out without paying. He brings in crews of “walyos” (guaglioni, affectionate Neapolitan slang for street corner guys) from NYC to people his movie. He scatters checks to wide-eyed vendors like rice at an Itallian wedding. John Borg, the chicken farmer, turns out to be a cinephile. Richie "casts" him as a “Marshall Dillon-type” character. Borg lives in a double-wide trailer; he invests $154,000.
Time passes, seasons change; checks bounce like cherry blossoms, then falling leaves, then a blizzard. A year later, in August 2000, Four Deadly Reasons is screened for the people of Narrowsberg. Richie is nowhere to be seen. This screening is later described on PBS' This American Life as “…a hastily produced, 15-minute montage of scenes from the movie. It's a porn film without sex scenes—awkward dialogue, noodly soundtrack, gratuitous use of bikinis and double entendres, and, most outrageously, no scenes with people from Narrowsburg..
What next unfolds is best described in a series of articles that ran in the Sullivan County Democrat over the following two years. In short, Richie’s dizzy trajectory is blunted. He's charged with four felony counts out of a cornucopia of extravagant malfeasance; named as defendant in at least 16 civil suits involving rental cars, equipment, meals, disgruntled actors. Even Mondo turns on him. Richie has a restraining order against his own bodyguard, certainly. Then his own attorney sues him.
The alleged felonies involve a scheme to secure SAG cards for aspiring actors (“Cousin Vin, I got the money!”),essentially the same con he’d successfully pulled with real wise guys . In Brooklyn at this point the gangsters are more likely to dispose than depose him.
On trial in Sullivan County Court, he chews scenery, constantly interuppting the proceedings, speechifying, ignoring threats of contempt from the bench. (My brother Joey, no angel, tells me, “Richie thinks the judge is a director.”) Ultimately, he plea-bargains, agreeing to restitution and a year in county jail. Of course, he doesn't appear for sentencing.
Reports circulate that he’d been found naked on the Verrazano Bridge about to commit suicide. (I don’t know what movie that was.) He's arrested walking “half-naked” in Manhattan and hauled off to Bellevue Hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. He claims he’s “taken too many shots to the head as a professional fighter.” (!) He checks into drug rehab, buying 90 more days of freedom. In Narrowsburg, folks are pulling their hair out.
Richie finally appears in court appropriately costumed in orange jumpsuit and shackles. Nonplussed, he asks Sullivan County Judge Frank J. La Buda to do him a "personal favor" and knock three months off his sentence. His daughter is getting married on Staten Island. “Can’t you find it in your heart to let me go to my daughter’s wedding?”
“This is not Let’s Make a Deal!” La Buda snaps.
Meanwhile, farmer and naïf, John Borg, who’d lost his life savings, is parading outside the courthouse with a hand-lettered sign reading “Hang ‘Em High!” Borg apparently couldn’t resist a final cinematic flourish.
Some of the money that dribbles into Narrowsburg over the next months covers Richie’s $12,000 restitution. The mone consists mostlyl of $20 money orders, suggesting that our family and his old neighborhood didn’t forsake Richie once his star had dimmed.
****
The world changed on September 11th 2001. Richie didn’t.
The 7th edition of the “Queens International Film Festival” kicks-off in winter of 2009. Its founder and executive director is none other than Jocelyne Castellano (aka Jocelyne Castaldo-Castellano, Maria Jocelyne Castellano, Marie-Helene Rousseau and Marie Rousseau). Year after year, it turns out, festival vendors and exhibitors from Connecticut to Texas are stiffed on fees and equipment rentals, perchance even hot dog sales. When projectionist James Hill threatens to take his grievance to the media, a gravelly voice hisses over his phone: “I know you’re a smart guy and you’ll understand what I’m telling you between the lines: You won’t talk to nobody!”
By now, you can guess what movie that line is from: My Cousin Richie.
Like Ebola, the virus that's responsible for my cousin's genius and his criminality may be dormant, waiting for a suitable host to begin replicating madly. In 2012, one of Richie and Jocelyne’s myriad victims, a Brooklyn-based filmmaker named Dan Nuxoll contacts me. He remains totally convinced the couple will make one hell of a documentary.
Rest assured Dan

For My Classmate on Memorial Day

Ernie Palmieri: I Hear You Singing In the Wire

Ernie Palmieri sat by the radiators in Sister Mary Malachy’s haunted classroom. I sat a few rows away in the dead zone in the back of the crowded room, reserved for misfits and troublemakers. Tall, with startling green eyes and coal black hair, Palmieri was no wiseguy. Quiet, easygoing, seemingly marking time, even in elementary school. He lived up Carroll Street toward Fifth Avenue; I lived down by the Gowanus Canal. He had two sisters, maybe twins, with that olive complexion you see in medieval frescoes and southern Italian farmsteads. He mostly avoided the nun’s wrath (seehttp://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/05/fly-fishing-on-gowanus-canal-part-i.html) waltzed stiffly with the rest of us in our overblown Christmas production to Verdi’s “La Donna e mobile” in the parish recreation center. My cousin JuJu and his thugs jeered and hooted in the darkened auditorium. And then Ernie was gone.
We were just 14-years-old.
I went to an all-boys Catholic high school in Park Slope. Wore ill-fitting jackets and ties every day. Endured more years of beating and bullying, this time by Christian Brothers. Learned things.
Ernie would have gone to Manual Training (now John Jay H.S). on Seventh Avenue. I don’t know if he graduated. Walking home from school, I’d see him behind the counter at Ben’s Pork Store, a salumeria on Fifth Ave near Carroll Street. The place was fragrant with Parmigiana Reggiano, marinating mushrooms, prosciutto, salamis and wheels of civiletta sausage, tastes and smells that intoxicate me to this day. Ernie is his white butchers apron, always smiling, sneaking me a hunk of soppresatta I couldn't afford.
I went to Brooklyn College. He and an older brother, Julio planned to open their own butcher shop in Bay Ridge. I had no idea who I was or what I wanted to do with my life. I remember being achingly lonely as the umbilical that bound me to the Gowanus began to rupture. War was on the horizon. We were 18-years old.
Ernie met a girl, Mary Lou Lobianco, planned to marry. When the call-ups began in earnest in 1965, I, native-born, couldn’t think of enough ways to avoid Vietnam. Ernie Palmieri, an American by choice, enlisted. After basic training, Ernie was assigned to the Army’s 71st Helicopter Assault Company, jockeying thin-skinned UH-1 Huey choppers into very bad places, inserting and extracting grunts, pulling out the wounded and dead.
I didn’t know any of this.Most people I knew didn't care. I was teaching English to mechanics at Automotive High in Williamsburg, a very different Williamsburg from today. I found my father’s records in the school basement. He’d made it past second year,then left to fight in the Pacific. On Carroll Street, we listened to doo-wop music, the Four Seasons, Young Rascals, Sinatra like the wise guys in the Capri Club. I was late coming to the Beatles and Stones but I remember, of all things, a country song about the war, not mocking or bitter, but devastating in its power to pierce me like a dagger and capture longing and loss of war:
“... Galveston, oh, Galveston,
I still hear your sea waves crashin’,
while I watch the cannons flashin'.
I clean my gun, and dream of Galveston.
...Is she waiting there for me,
On the beach where we used to run?I
I'd never run on a beach with a girl, but there was another song seemingly about a telephone lineman in Kansas. I understood that guy better than I knew myself.
I became a reporter. The war ended, but another was beginning. Out of concern, guilt or a need to make amends, the working class kid who missed the working class war, I began covering Vietnam veterans. I wrote the first story on women vets, skilled nurses, kids themselves, who tended the horribly wounded and comforted the dying—for Newsweek. One of these women, Lola McGourty, is still my friend 35 years later. I wrote a book, “Uneasy Warriors” about Vietnam’s Green Berets, JFKs own soldiers, elevated as heroes and then cast down in defeat. I went to Hanoi to visit an American vet who'd returned to assist children damaged by Agent Orange and the aftereffects of the conflict. I was there a month and found a new generation of Vietnamese. The posters in Hanoi now depicted B-52s dropping long strings of Coca-Cola, but the war was a distant memory. The young Vietnamese wanted iPhones and flat screens.
***
In Washington, D.C., I found Ernie Palmieri at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. He was waiting there for me on Panel 13E, Line 23. (see http://www.vvmf.org/Wall-of-Faces/39328/ERNEST-PALMIERI) Ernie was killed on December 8th 1967, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, on a rescue mission extracting soldiers who’d come under attack near Cu Chi, the site of a massive underground tunnel complex built by the Viet Cong that is now a major tourist destination in Vietnam. The bullet may have been fired by a sniper in a schoolhouse the choppers spared because there were kids playing outside the building.
Ernie’s parents, Rocco and Maria, were waiting at Penn Station to claim his body when it arrived from Delaware by train. If they were anything like my parents, a trip into Manhattan in the middle of the night, in itself would have been daunting. Specialist 4th Class Ernest Palmieri, the smiling kid who sat by the whistling radiators in Our Lady of Peace school, who made his First Communion in a white suit with me, who attended mass every Sunday—attendance was mandatory--is buried in Long Island National Cemetery.
The story doesn’t end there. On August 16, 2008, U.S. Army UH-1 helicopter (tail number 65-10068), Ernie’s chopper, arrived in tiny Mineral Wells, Texas where it was mounted on a steel pillar as one of the city’s National Vietnam War Museum exhibits. Four men from Ernie’s unit, the 71st Assault Helicopter Company, old men themselves, showed up to honor him. The museum provided free hot dogs for the first 500 attendees.
Even this was nearly a decade in the past. And yet, yesterday, when the media mentioned the death of Glenn Campbell, and inevitably began playing the haunting strains of Galveston and Wichita Lineman, Ernie came alive again, as I knew him so long ago, as I never knew myself, and the loss was such I thought my heart would burst with a grief that lain dormant for fifty years.




http://www.vvmf.org/Wall-of-Faces/39328/ERNEST-PALMIERI

The Oldest Guy In the Gym

 Is me. Wondering why, I return always to the past. A teenager, I remember standing on the corner of Third Ave and Carroll Street watching the cars flash by heading for this mysterious and unknowable island, Manhattan...remember being on the corner of Fourth and Carroll in 1976 as the first runners in the NYC Marathon swept by (The other Italians in the neighborhood could care less)....remember staring at the towers of Midtown from my classroom window, teaching in Williamsburg...working in the Columbia J-School library the weekend class ended, watching the frisbees sail by the window....winning the fellowship that landed me in the U.K. and a job at Newsweek.. I remember so many nights on Madison Ave and Peachtree Street, the last guy in the skyscraper. Now it's the gym rebuilding after being sick. And it seems like my whole life has been about becoming...and never arriving.

A Christmas Carol

In 1971, I move to a walk-up on Hicks and Pineapple Streets in Brooklyn Heights. The rent, as I recall, was $149 a month, a stretch for a 23-year-old substitute teaching in Williamsburg. On Carroll Street, my father Joe, the dockworker in whom love and rage forever warred, erupted when I announced I was leaving our family’s cramped row house by the Gowanus. I depart under a volley of curses and threats: “Don’t fuckin’ ever come back!”


The bad Joe loved his family even as he splintered it. He’d lost his mom as a teen, was immediately drafted and thrown into the hellhole that was Peleliu Island. Knowing these things, I cling to the illusion that the violence and rage, and the never-ending money problems would wash away like the tides. We’d be a “normal family."  The good Joe slaved down the sweltering holds of cargo ships for decades to put me through college and all four of his sons through Catholic school. But Good Joe couldn’t hold it together against the darkness seeping into our souls like Gowanus sludge.


Skipping out the door, I never thought to help out.  I still feel the shame of it. I was working at mostly at all-boys Automotive High, the vocational school Joe had dropped out of.  I found his records in a dusty file cabinet in the basement and discovered the NYC public school system classified my father “non-white.”


In the 1970s, Williamsburg was carved into Balkanized enclaves—Hassidic Jew, Puerto Rican, Italian, Irish, Pole, African-American, Junkie. You’d get knifed walking to the annual teacher’s luncheon at Peter Luger’s steak house the under the Williamsburg Bridge. I didn’t, but I played hooky one Friday, and one of my students, Alphonse Presley, a sweet kid up from the South, got stabbed by the white junkies who haunted McCarron Park. He nearly died.


Brooklyn Heights was another world, a warren of pre-Civil War townhouses and Episcopalian churches, so far removed from the teeming tenements of Brooklyn it could have been London’s Mayfair district. The Heights was home to White Anglo Saxon Protestants, a rara avis in the outer boroughs.  Truman Capote and Henry Miller had lived there. Norman Mailer lived there, his brownstone overlooking the Promenade and New York harbor. There was a mincing population of middle-aged, pre-liberation gay men—and the predators they inevitably attracted.


My Hicks Street apartment was on the dark side, in the long shadow of St. George. The hotel had tumbled so precipitously into SRO/welfare status you could buy cuchifritos at the newsstand, and incubate titers of infection in the pool. A Gilded Age barber shop persisted. A shave, hot towel, neck message and a dousing with cheap fragrance cost $3.00. The barbers were old and trembly, the tiles cracked and pitted, the towels frayed.


Bruno Rubeo lived down the street with a cat named Shelob and a hippie girlfriend, Claire. At the time, he was selling handmade pizza out of a converted postal van in Red Hook, anticipating the food truck madness by 40 years. Bruno would become Hollywood famous (“Platoon,” “Driving Miss Daisy”), live in an Umbrian palazzo, marry a sweet Mexican beauty, die way before his time. He was my best friend.


I met a red-haired Sicilian named Marguerite at a rock club in Bay Ridge. She lived in a four-story limestone townhouse overlooking the Soldiers and Sailors Arch in Grand Army Plaza. Her parents were doctors; her father had a family coat-of-arms mounted on the wall, not something I saw a lot of in Brooklyn. He told me I wasn’t “right” for his daughter; she told me she’d spent her 17^th birthday at an orgy on Staten Island.


I was pursuing a M.A in medieval literature at Brooklyn College—hoping to convince myself I was an academic type—wading through Piers Plowman and the Faerie Queene, taking arcane linguistics courses, my Brooklyn accent so thick my professors grimaced and classmates giggled when I answered a question.  I’d spend my afternoons reading on the Promenade in the shadow of Mailer’s brownstone, fending off a different variety of fairy queen. Just a mile from my Gowanus neighborhood, I was lonely, isolated, didn’t fit in.


And soon enough, I was broke. Demand for my substitute teaching skills thinned spectacularly when one of my students, the class clown, climbed out the window of our third floor classroom at Enrico Fermi Junior High, inching his way along a narrow sill to the next classroom. Kids screamed and howled, but howling was normal when you were a substitute. Blissfully unaware, I kept scrawling whatever nonsense the regular teacher had left on the blackboard until my next door colleague banged at my door dragging Carlos by his ear.


Fall turned to winter, the Promenade emptied, bitter winds howled off the harbor. My 4^th floor walk-up faced the brick wall of a faded residential hotel on Pineapple Street. (Heights streets come in a variety of flavors—Cranberry Orange, Pineapple.) On Christmas Eve morning, my brother, “Joe Bear,” stops by, equally broke, trying to figure out how to buy gifts for our parents and younger brothers, Thomas and Gregory. We turn the corner to Pineapple where my puke green 1965 Corvair, a shit box that burned more oil than gasoline was parked.


Sometimes, Brooklyn Heights is so still and isolated you can forget where you are. And find yourself totally alone in the middle of New York City.
As we're walking toward Willow Street, a large object hurtles into the sidewalk ten feet in front of us, narrowly missing the spiked iron fence running alongside the hotel.
Thunk!
“What the fuck!” Joe screams.


I’m speechless and breathless, but somewhere I sense it’s the sound a watermelon might make thrown to the ground from a very tall ladder.


I look up to the top floors of the hotel, then down at the object.


“A fucking dummy!” I shout, walking closer. I’m starting to grin at our foolishness.  A fucking trick!


“Joe it’s a dummy! These cocksuckers...”


This all happens in milliseconds, my synapses leaping from connection to connection... On Carroll Street we’d make dummies during the World Series, hanging the Yankees or Mets or Dodgers in effigy from telephone wires that zigzagged from one side of the street to the other...the “cocksuckers” are the students from Long Island University who I remember live in a dorm on one of the hotel’s upper floors.


“Motherfuckers!” Joe shouts, pointing up.


There’s nobody there. A window curtain streams in the wind like banner/


I move closer. The dummy is wearing blue pajamas, sitting on its ass, legs stretched toward he curb, head hunched between its knees.


“Assholes,” I flash, “even sprinkling ketchup to make it look real.” Actually, I'm impressed.


Three feet away, I bend down; a tingle of vertigo stirs in my skull. The pajama top has slid up, the pants down, the ass exposed and obscene. The thing has grey hair. So many details! The lower back is split wide horizontally...there’s thick red gore and filaments white tissue splattered everywhere. One foot away, I’m reaching down to touch....


“Vincent, what are you doing!” Joe screams. “It’s a man!”


A man.


A lonely old man living in an SRO hotel who grows despondent at Christmas time and jumps to his death. Of course it’s a man! The holidays are prime time for suicide...Or maybe he was thrown out the window?  Murdered for his few possessions?


Or did he intentionally try to hit us?


“This fucking prick!”


A suicide bomber way ahead of his time? This conversation goes on for two minutes inside my head. I look up. Joe and I are all alone on a dead quiet street with an exploded corpse shielded from the world by a line of parked cars....my car. Finally Joe flags down a passing cab. There’s a fire station, a block or so away, on Middagh Street. As I learn much later, my high school buddy Steve King is on duty there. A lifetime later , King will witness the bodies plummeting from the World Trade Center.


The driver speeds off.


At that moment, bizarre as it sounds, a man in a maroon dressing gown appears at the door of a townhouse across Pineapple Street. He’s holding a steaming cup of coffee, maybe looking to retrieve his Wall Street Journal.


“Is there a problem?” he asks.


“Mister, don’t come over here,” Joe manages.


“How do you mean?” The guy crosses the street.


“Mister....”


He passes in front of my Corvair. Glances down, spills his coffee and throws up.


I hear sirens in the distance.


“Joe, I don’t wanna stay here.”


"Fuck this."


An hour later, we walk back down the street. There’s an idling police car, an ambulance, maybe somebody from the fire station. The dead man is gone. A guy in a cheap suit—the hotel manager-- is bitching to the cops about all the problems and paperwork the old guy is causing him.


A Department of Sanitation street sweeper, an enormous machine with two circular brushes stands by idling, waiting to mount the curb.


“We’re leaving.” Joe calls to the driver and points to our Corvair. He motions me to pull out.


I walk to the driver’s side, unlock the door.


"Jesus."


The hood, passenger side fender and windshield are smeared with clots of blood and soft tissue. It so bad I have to drive across Montague Street with my head out the window. We head for the car wash on Atlantic Avenue. The Corvair looks like it has been driven through an abattoir.


We get to the car wash, no problem.


They wave me right on through!

 

 

Summer on the Gowanus Parts I & II

Carroll Street is 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 Pepe, Freddie Fish, Muzzy, among them, stand 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, hovere, ready to collect the bets, and later, collect the losers. They store 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 trusts the Post Office after Americo Guzzi dropped a cherry bomb down the chute.
Next door, Chitty and Buffalo Manzo, grill sausage on a half-steel drum filled with charcoal, served with peppers and onions on Italian bread from Caputo's bakery, the intoxicating aroma wafting in the air. On the opposite corner, Rosinna serves homemade lemon ice so delicious truckers line up in front of her store for a nickel’s worth scooped into Dixie cup. At night, she lights a naked bulb above the side door of her store and fries 10-cent calzones in a vat of dirty oil while you wait. She's missing the tip of one of her fingers and the “surprise” is to find it in your calzone.
Further along Third toward First Street, clanging, as Victor the blacksmith, biceps bulging in an ancient leather vest, shoes horses belonging to Angioletti and the other fruit peddlers who sing out in Italian on their horse and wagons. ("E rook e' rob" for broccoli rabe)—another smell in the air, another sound adding to the cacophony: A one-eyed rooster who’s lost track of time, struts and crows all day in front of Goldie’s Live Poultry market.
Singsong, girls skip rope, play hopscotch on boxes chalked in pastels on the dirty sidewalk. We shout and curse, pitch pennies in front of John Sanseverino’s candy store, play kings against the wall of the Typhoon Air Conditioning Company, and occasionally, high-pressure, high-stakes stickball (The Goose pits “The Seven Battlers” against squads bankrolled by other wise guys). Games are played Sunday mornings on First Street. It never registers that the ancient brick wall that runs from Third Avenue to Whitwell Place is an artifact of Brooklyn’s first professional baseball stadium, Washington Park. I play outfield. A fly ball over your head and you have to keep running to Prospect Park. Wise guys are sore losers.
Church bells sing out the Angelus, Carvel trucks their maddening jingles. Fat Rosie, Baby Chick and the rest of the maldicenza (“mad-un-guins” to us) sit outside the sweltering apartments, gossiping nonstop and knitting beaded hats like the hens cackling by the guillotine during the French Revolution—never missing a thing.
On Saturday nights, Eddie Pole staggers down Carroll Street drunk, salary spent, his sons, Johnny Boy and Penguin, wife, and succulent daughters, Ginger and Cookie, take turns pulling his hair and pummeling him. One summer, my Uncle Punchy, a jealous guy, rams his candy store’s juke box out onto the sidewalk, sending “In the Still of the Night,” and other doo-wop faves spinning dizzily down toward the canal.
Anthony i-pazzo, Sally i pazzo (pronounced “ou-bots”and meaning crazy) Monduche, "Joe the Toe," Mrs. Mahoney (she curses God), assorted crazies, a dwarf (with an outsized penis) and other defectives—these are our family members—wander aimlessly and harmlessly through the streets
Sweltering, we have no pools, no sprinklers, no garden hoses.. Red Hook pool means risking your life to Puerto Rican gang-bangers who call themselves, Apaches.
We open the Johnny pump next to Monte’s Venetian Room, grab an empty 28 oz. can of Italian tomatoes—top and bottom removed, squat down behind the gushing hydrant hands cupped tightly around the can, and send a powerful spout of water jetting 30-40 feet in the air onto the far sidewalk Instantly, younger kids are in bathing suits, teenage girls wriggling in shorts and suddenly see-through blouses, guys knocked on their asses by the frigid blasts.
We wait, because ultimately, this is who we are, for the convertible Electra 225s and Caddys driven by wise guys in pale blue leisure suits from Court Street coming across the Carroll Street bridge. They slow down to a crawl, pull the cigars from their mouths, shoot warning, then murderous looks at us--and we fuckin’ drown them.
One night, Fat Ernie backs his 4-door '56 Olds right up to a gushing Johnny pump, slides down the rear door's power window. I'm crowded in the back seat with three other guys when a tsunami roars through the open window, knocking me senseless. Instantly, I'm underwater, drowning, panicked, fighting to open the door in a moving car on Union Street in the middle of May, then gushed like garbage onto the street.
The weeks before the Fourth of July 4th are skirmishes leading up to cataclysmic war. School is out; fireworks have begun flowing into the neighborhood from Chinatown (You’d buy a $5 “mat” from “chinks,” or Italians from Little Italy who are likely to mug you on Mott Street before you got to the train station), then by the truckload hauled in from Carolina by wise guys. Each day the explosions are more prolonged and intense—firecrackers give way to cherry bombs, torpedoes, ashcans, M-80s, rockets, helicopters, whistling “nigga-chasers” that race along the sidewalk before exploding.
On July 4th, Honey Christiano and his crew combine all the unsold fireworks into a day-long picnic and explosion fest. In all things, the wise guys are like murderous children. Fun is throwing a braided pack of exploding firecrackers in your face, a powerful ashcan into your car, aiming a blazing Roman candle through your open bedroom window. Of course we follow their lead. By 3 P.M., Carroll Street is ankle deep in exploded fireworks (little boys hunting for unexploded firecrackers, blowing off their fingertips) our ears ringing.
There's more. Nightfall sends barrages of  rockets into the overheated air. Buffalo Manzo takes a sizzling bottle rocket in the eye. Though blinded, he's ready next year. Honey, a master thief, somehow locates high explosive mortars destined for the Coney Island fireworks show. Intended for an offshore barge, Honey shoots off thousands of dollars worth on the corner of Third Avenue and Carroll. Somehow, no one is killed
Another year, he accesses a load of military flareguns—no doubt some poor Marine will come up short—and begins firing the multicolored exploding cartridges on parachutes onto our tarpaper roofs. I think it's great. The first thing I do when I arrive in Georgia in 1979, is buy a ton of legal fireworks. Somehow, it's not the same.

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)