Gowanus Crossing/A Life Along the Canal Chapter 2

Chapter 2

That evening, Americo entered the apartment as if there were land mines under the linoleum. Sometimes a slamming door was enough to trigger his father's anger. His twin brothers, Joey and Tommy, were curled like kittens on the parlor floor watching television, the dinner table, already set in the cramped dining room.
"Where's Daddy?"
His brothers, engrossed in the finale of the Mickey Mouse Club song, ignored him.
"....K-E-Y."
"WHY? BECAUSE WE LIKE YOU!"
Americo stared at Annette Funicello's breasts jiggling under her white turtleneck.
"M-O-U-S-E!" Tommy belted out the letters like a cabaret singer.
"You stink ‘Merico," said Joey wrinkling his nose. "Like the canal."
“You too.”
His mother was in the kitchen stirring a pot of boiling pasta.
"I'm home Ma," he yelled and darted for the stairs to stash his ruined pants.
"Almost 6:00 o'clock! Why so late?"
"I helped Sister clean the classroom."
"Why always you?"
" She says I’ll be a janitor someday."
"Don’t mind her! Go get washed."
In the upstairs bathroom, he scrubbed his pants with Ivory soap hoping to get the grease out, smearing the sink wit black streaks. He poured Ajax on the knees, then some of his father's Old Spice aftershave and scrubbed some more. Frustrated, he rolled the pants up, tied the legs into a double knot and stuffed them onto the top shelf of the hall closet behind unopened bottles of Anisette, Creme de Menthe and Four Roses whiskey, gifts from Christmases past.
He was on the couch reading a Superman comic when his father pounded on the door, making the Christmas bells, they used for a knocker, dance. Tommy let out a yelp.
Joe Guzzi didn't have a key to his own house. In his world, wife and kids were always home, dinner always on the table. Joey and Tommy ran to pull the door open. Americo stood up. Joe stood in the doorway in and army fatigue jacket and blue watch cap, his face wind-burned and raw. He carried yellow rawhide gloves and wooden-handled steel hooks, the tools of his trade, hung off his shoulder like epaulets. Tommy and Joey stood around him yelping like puppies.
"What did you bring us Daddy! Whatja bring!"
Gloria came up behind them wiping her hands on her apron, as eager as the kids. Americo, grinning like an idiot, felt himself drawn into the old routine. Joe unzipped his jacket. It was stiff, crackly with cold. Nothing. Joey and Tommy moaned. Americo could smell the salt tang of the Atlantic Ocean on his father. Tommy pulled at the thick army sweater Joe wore underneath his jacket. Dutch chocolates--dozens of tiny Easter eggs wrapped in brightly-colored aluminum foil, cascaded to the floor. Tommy and Joey squealed, then scrambled to pick up the candy. Gloria kneeling beside them.
"A Dutch merchant docked yesterday," said Joe. "A couple of crates slid off the draft and busted." Americo knew not to question good fortune. Every kid in the neighborhood would have bellyaches from chocolate tomorrow Joe reached into his jacket and handed Americo a brown paper bag.
"Go ahead guy. It's for you. I traded for it with Mikey Bats. His gang was working the Number One hatch. Different stuff."
Americo opened the bag. He pulled out a pair of hand-carved wooden shoes. A miniature Dutch village was painted in blue and yellow and red onto the tops of the shoes. Americo could even make out a blond boy and girl holding hands. The girl held a bunch of tulips.
"I figured you'd go for that."
"Thanks Dad."
Americo reached up to kiss his father's cheek. It was bristly, cold as ice in the overheated apartment.
"Let me carry the hooks. I'll be careful." He turned and hung the tools in the closet under the stairs. Gloria scrambled to collect the chocolate from the twins who were stuffing Easter eggs into their mouths.
Friday was payday. When his sons groaned at the piselli and pasta, hard-boiled eggs and tuna fish Gloria, a devout Catholic, had prepared, Joe ordered a pizza from Lenny's on Fifth Avenue. Half-an-hour later, Americo was gorging himself on pepperoni pizza, washed down with cream soda and chocolate.
After dinner, he called Sally. The line was busy, busy, busy.
At 10:00 P.M., feverish and shivery, Americo crawled upstairs, climbed into the lumpy bed beside his sleeping brothers. Joey was rolled up, a mummy in the thin chenille bedspread. Americo unwrapped him, covered Thomas's frail, milk-white body and lay back. He could hear his parents downstairs going through bills, could smell Joe’s Lucky Strikes burning one after another. He decided he'd tell his father what they’d found in the lot first thing in the morning. Despite his racing thoughts, he fell asleep.
"’Merico....’Merico, wake up! Please wake up! "
He was jolted from some dark and terrible dream. "Wha...What?"
Thomas was frantically tugging at his arm. Half-asleep, Americo sent him flying with a forearm.
"What?"
"PLEASE!" They're fighting!”
The shouts, echoing in the narrow stairwell, cleared the sleep from his eyes. The crazed voice deafening, obscene, familiar.
"You fucking cunt! I told you not to spend no more money!"
This was his other father, the father hated. Americo leaped out of bed and ran down the hall. Joey, stood trembling in his underwear at the top of the steps. The stairwell was enclosed in wood-paneling, a dark vertiginous tunnel where the beast raged. He plunged down the stairs, his bare feet slipping, almost falling, catching himself on the banister, the twins racing behind him.
He saw a chair tumbling over...heard his father roaring...his mother mouthing the familiar plea, "Don't let the neighbors hear!"...the squeal of the table legs over linoleum as his father shoved it, trying to pin Gloria against the dining room wall...Coffee cups and ashtrays crashing to the floor.
"Stop it!...Leave her alone!"
Gloria turned toward her children, tried to cover where he'd torn her blouse, and in that moment, Joe was on her, slapping her, pulling her hair, smashing her head against the wall. Gloria raked him with her nails, leaving loody streaks on his cheeks
"Look what you did to me!"
Americo stood frozen, tears streaming from his eyes.
"Please!" He tried to scream. It came out a whimper.
"Daddy Please!"
Thomas and Joey raced past him, wailing. Thomas grabbed his father's legs and Joe shook him off like a dog. Joey was trying to embrace his parents as if he could stop them with a little boy’s love. Gloria was sobbing her helplessness and shame. Joe slapped her again, screaming,
"You fucking cunt!"
Americo felt himself moving. He saw himself come between his parents. Saw himself tear his father away from his mother. He saw Joe fly backward into the kitchen crash into the washing machine. And go down. Americo heard his own heart pounding in the awful silence. Then, almost a whisper: "You hit your father?"
This was a battle for which Americo would never be ready. He turned and faced him. His father was 5'9", 19o lbs. He squared his shoulders, and dropped his hands as Joe charged. The first punch, a short, brutal left, caught Americo in the stomach. He crumpled, gasping, careful to keep his hands by his side. The second, a roundhouse right to the top of his head, knocked him to the linoleum floor.
"You fucking hit your father!"
Joe, still wearing the heavy work shoes, kicked Americo, who only loved him, in the ribs. Gloria and the kids shrieked. There was a roaring in Americo's ears. Dazed, he tried to cover his head, gasping at the pain, tasting blood where he'd bitten through his lip. Yet, in some dark and secret place, Americo knew he'd won. He'd diverted his father's rage. And a part of him, floating beyond the reach of thetattoo of kicks and punches, a part of him was happy.
"I'm calling the cops!" Gloria screamed rushing for the phone by the bathroom door. Joe tore it out of her hands and threw it into the bathtub. In the moment, Americo was up, his brothers holding him, moving him toward the stairs. His father lunged again, but the attack was half-hearted, the storm passing. Americo was in the tunnel ascending. He heard his mother and father cursing each other, heard his own sobs ,and then Thomas' trembling wail: "I hate you! I hope you die!”
A rooster crowed. Americo jolted awake. Gray light seeped past the thick curtains draped over the windows. He watched his brothers sleeping, their pumping hearts already healing, he knew preparing to love their father again.
"Not this time," Americo thought. "Not now."

Continued

Gowanus Crossing/A Life Along the Canal Chapter 1

PROLOGUE

A pestilent and stinking Nile, the Gowanus flows through the neighborhood, defiles it with stench and disease and dark secrets. In the decades ahead, many of those who’d grown-up near the stream would be dead or dying of an epidemic of cancers and birth defects long after they’d escaped to the ranch houses and stick-tree suburbs of Long Island and New Jersey; an epidemic veiled by other plagues—violence, AIDS abandonment and addiction—visited on South Brooklyn.

In the 1960s, the canal is poisoned womb … grave … open sewer. These things and more: it is a barrier that keeps the surrounding neighborhoods isolated from the rest of New York City, keeps them insular, with a fierce identity and demarcated borders.

The Gowanus has a history—unknown in the neighborhood--that in other places would be noteworthy. George Washington’s army clashed with the British along its banks. Its tides, rhythmic and regular, impose order on the chaotic lives that cling precariously to its banks. At flood, it carries the faraway scent of ocean; moonlit, a glimmer of primordial beauty.

Chapter 1

"In nomine Patris et Filio et Spiritu Sanctus."
"A-men."
Sister Mary Malachy crosses herself as she intones the prayer. She thrusts her prognathous jaw forward, an Inquisitor ready to swoop down on the budding apostates in her charge. She tugs at the baggy sleeve of her brown habit, taps the Timex watch on her thick wrist three times. Across her scarred desk, 35 eighth graders shift to attention, ink-stained hands reaching for their rosaries.
She studies them—ice blue eyes behind rimless glasses half-closed in feigned prayer--alert to every exhalation of breath, every shoe scuff, sigh and stomach rumble. Malachy knows that behind their frayed white shirts and clip-on ties, beneath the pleated skirts and Peter Pan collars, they dream only of stickball and lipstick, of stink bombs, dirty pictures, fireworks, rotten eggs; of Frankie Avalon, Ringalevio and Kick-the-Can. She knows the boys—the Italians--will touch the giggling girls in the darkness of the cloakroom, make them squeal in the crowded stairwells as they march from the schoolyard after lunch.
Malachy wears a wedding band signifying her marriage to Jesus Christ and her renunciation of the pleasures of the flesh. Pain is another matter. She will spare no effort driving her charges up the slippery slopes of Salvation. This is her purpose, the vocation that had carried her from the bottle green glens of Donegal to this vale of tears, this Golgotha called South Brooklyn.
She nods to a dark-skinned girl in a raveled green sweater in the fourth row, her mouth ripe and red as Original Sin.
"The First Sorrowful Mystery, The Crowning With Thorns," Rosa Perez begins. "Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name..."
The class murmurs the response, voices echoing down tiled corridors, merging with the morning prayers of other students like the drone of honeybees. The rosary continues, the “Hallowed be’s” and “Holy Ghosts” as dry as the husks of dead insects. In the fifth row, Jenny Wilson inhales—her ripening breasts strain against her blouse--and announces the Second Sorrowful Mystery.
An aisle away, Americo Guzzi hunches over his catechism penciling a dove, the representation of the Holy Spirit, shitting on the head of Pope Pius XII. He stiffens, a feral creature sensing a predator’s approach. He counts heads.
"...Ten...eleven...twelve...Shit!"
It’s his turn to proclaim the next mystery. “The Third Sorrowful Mystery,” he mouths, prompting his brain to supply the answer. He waits. Nothing comes. Ascensions. Assumptions. Redemptions. Heaven is a cheap furniture store. Mysteries swim in his head. Malachy will have him scrubbing the church basement, the labyrinth where the hunchback monk Masseo lurks among the broken statues of martyrs and serpents.
Three more Hail Marys ratchet by. Americo cranks his head left, coughs, then whispers, "What's the Third Mystery?"
Sally looks at him. "Ya mother's box.”
"Don't fool around!"
"Her canary."
Ernie snorts, the sound among the murmurs loud as a breaching whale. Malachy's wimpled head rotates. Americo ducks, disappearing, he imagines, like Jonah into the belly of the Leviathan.
"Come on. Please!" he whispers.
The nun fills the aisle between the rows of bolted-down desks. She advances, seeming to sniff the air. Sally hunches over his beads,a monk lost in divine rapture.
"Hail Mary full of grace...” A drone four seats in front of Americo.
“Shit!”
He clenches his rosary. A tiny window in the crucifix reveals a bone chip floating in holy water like a carpenter's level. He clenches the holy bone. "Please Jesus…I'll …" He hesitates “I won't….”
A vision of Jenny blossoms in his head, plaid uniform skirt pulled up revealing coltish thighs, a darker shadow beneath her white cotton panties.
“I can’t, ” Americo sighs.
He steadies himself for the charge. Instinctively, his hand rises to the faded purple bruise under his left eye.

In the corner by the whistling radiators, Cacasotte stirs. The bolts holding his overburdened desk to the polished oak floor groan in protest. Malachy looks at him, a creature unfazed by Salvation’s promise or Darwin's heretical exigencies; a bag of guts, corruption and decay. Stained tie, frayed white shirt, grey work pants straining against elephantine buttocks like sausage casing; a mockery of all that is pure, clean, Christ-like. Friar Masseo and the Franciscans of Our Lady of Peace Parish count the days until New York State law allows them to discharge “Shit-the-pants” like so much sewage into the gutter.
An oak pointer materializes in her hand.
Cacasotte’s internal clock is chiming noon. He’ll feed at his mother’s Third Avenue diner, waddle home, root into his unmade bed. At 5:30 P.M., the Mouseketeers’ theme will stir him, and then only briefly, to masturbation. He raises his slobber-streaked face, squints, then lolls his tongue at Jenny Wilcox, a willowy German stranded by the flood tide of emigration out of South Brooklyn.
He lifts his haunch and farts. No discrete blast, but a barrage, a lament from his bowels that derails the Holy Rosary and wreathes the classroom in silence. The putrid fallout stops Malachy as she’s about to pull Americo from his seat. Rows of students surge forward, surfers riding a wave, coughing, pretend gagging, holding their throats. Shrieking, they sweep past Americo, past Malachy, out the front door of the classroom.
The lunch bell clangs. Americo stands, locks eyes with Malachy.
“The Third Sorrowful Mystery!” he shouts, slapping Sally’s still bowed head. “The Crowning With Thorns!”
He dodges right, dashes forward and out the door. He flies down the metal steps, out of the building, dodges a patrol boy and the thundering trucks onThird Avenue, races down Carroll Street past his house, past Jimmy the Morgue’s idling Buick Electra, past Monte’s Venetian Room, and Crusader Candles not stopping until gasping, he reaches the grey rail of the bridge crossing the Gowanus Canal.

In Monte’s, Sonny the Indian sips brown whiskey, watching Americo race down the sidewalk, feinting garbage cans, gangly body struggling to keep up with brain.
“Give Cochise here a drink.”
The voice grates against Sonny’s ears. He roots around in his pocket, pops two aspirin into his mouth, sips his drink. Further down the bar, Shaky Manzo is counting $20 dollar bills from a paper bag.
“....15....16 hundred!”
Snapping each bill like a playing card.
“All right!...Red, do me a favor, turn on the television.”
“Fuck that,” grunts Sonny. “Television is for morons.”
“On or off?” The bartender shrugs.
Shaky looks up. “You say something chief?”
“Cocksucker is what I said.”
“What?” Shaky is on his feet.
At his table along the mirrored wall, Honey is studying the Daily Racing Form. “You! Sit the fuck down!” he yells. “And you. Can I get a minute’s peace? What’s bothering you now?
“This fuckin’ retard for openers.”
Shaky brings his palm to his mouth, two, three times, pantomiming a cartoon Indian. He sits back down, picks up a Daily News from the bar, flips it open, turns the pages noisily.
Television. War-painted braves dead because they’re too noisy or too slow with the white man. Falling off their ponies. The Mohawk, Jay Silverheels, living in Bensonhurst, speaking Apache. “Kemo sabe,” Sonny broods. I'll give you Kemo sabe! He glares at Shaky, the idiot's lips moving, working the cartoons.
Sonny stares at the long mirror above the bar, lifts his chin. Whose face is it? What purpose the obsidian stare, the bunched muscles and tendons of the formidable jaw? The questions chase themselves behind his impassive eyes. After a moment he grunts, “Whiskey.”
“You got it.”

Winded, Americo walks back up Carroll Street. The night before, he’d seen a woman in red pants, kneeling, like a supplicant at the Communion rail, on the canal bank. Shaky had caught him staring at her bobbing head. At the Grand Army Plaza Library, another woman, this one with a face like parchment, had shown Americo sketches that depicted the Gowanus River in the 1600s. Apple trees flourished along it banks. Gowanus oysters were renowned for their size and abundance. He’d described these wonders to Ernie and Sally.
"Go fuck yourself!" they shouted.
Engulfed in a fragrant cloud of sautéing garlic and simmering tomatoes, he drifts off into history.
Crack! A slap off the back of his head ends his meditation.
Honey and Ernie are standing in front of Monte's. Honey, holding a thick Cuban cigar, is grinning. Sonny is to his left, Easter Island in a leather trench coat.
“Daydreaming, you mope?” says Honey.
Americo blinks. "What?"
“You hungry?”
“Nah, I’m fasting.”
“It ain’t Lent. Think them priests fast? Bullshit.”
“Fasting makes you think better. In India ...”
“Sonny’s an Indian. He don’t fast.”
“What happened to your face?” Sonny shakes his head in despair, then continues, “Your father go to work on you again?”
Americo shrugs, says nothing. He looks at Ernie. “You ready?"
“Yous better smarten up, Honey says. “Yous ain’t kids no more.”
He waves his cigar, digs into his pocket and pulls out a thick roll. He peels off two $5 bills.
"Get some ice creams. You, bring me the News and the Scratch Sheet this afternoon. Don't forget like last time."
"I won’t,” says Americo.
"That Irish twat busting your balls?"
"She hates us," says Americo.
"She hates ‘Merico ‘cause he's smart,” Ernie says.
"I ain’t smart!"
Americo tilts his head. The two boys begin inching away.
“Where yous a going?" Honey jerks his finger. "School’s that way."
"We don't gotta be back till one o'clock."
“Stay away from that fucking canal." Honey spreads his stubby arms. ("A baby tyrannosaurus!" Americo riffs, then bites his tongue to keep from laughing.)
"They got water rats this big. All kinds of shit. Yous a gonna get rabies. Something happens, I'll give you the rest! I’m telling yous, stay outta dere!"
Shaky walks out of the restaurant, greasy pompadour afloat on his pockmarked face.
Yo, you got a call. Carmine.”
“The fuck he wants now?” Honey groans.
“How things went.”
"Tell him we got the money.”
“He wants to talk to you.”
“More fucking bullshit.” Honey sighs.
He and Sonny walk into Monte’s leaving Shaky standing there. Ernie stage whispers to Americo, “Looks like a dog shit on his head.”
Americo giggles.
Shaky turns, shoots him a look. “Homo, whatta you looking at this time?”
Americo reddens. “Nothing. I ...”
“Jerk-offs, I’ll go to work on both of yous. Don’t think your uncle can stop me. I’m a made guy.”
“We’re talking about school,” says Ernie. “Ever hear of it?”
Shaky pulls a wad of bills out of his pants. “School is for jerk-offs.”
Ernie grabs his balls, “Fageddaboutit!”

The boys cut between a row of parked cars, then make for the Carroll Street Bridge, a rusting architectural jewel the city has ignored for 50 years. Twenty yards from the water, it hits them—“Perfume Lagoon”—raw sewage, chemical spills, oil from sunken barges and abandoned cars, garbage, feces, bloated carcasses of dead dogs and cats floating on the tide.
On the bank, Sally and Rocco are stripping branches off sumac trees growing on the canal bank. Rocco, short and dark, is dressed like the accountant he'll never be, tweed overcoat, wool pants and polished shoes, white shirt stiff with starch, blue, clip-on tie held in place by a fake pearl.
Americo pulls a fishing rod from the weeds, a 5 & 10 cent store reproduction of the ones he’d seen in Field & Stream. He ties a length of clothesline, a sinker and an enormous hook to the rod.
"Friday," he says. "Fishing’s gonna be good."
"Sunday morning's the best," says Ernie.
Sally finishes stripping leaves from his branch and runs to the 10-foot diameter concrete pipe that carries waste from neighborhood toilets directly into the canal.
"Thanks for helping me out!" Americo calls after him.
"Swear to God, I dont know the fucking mystery!”
"Swear to God," Americo minces.
"Screw you!"
"Got one!" Rocco yells.
"That’s mines!" shouts Ernie. "Slipped away."
As the boys look on, Rocco pulls an eight-inch condom from the water.
"All right! Sally says. "Whitefish!"
Putrescent water splashes Rocco’s overcoat as he manipulates the dripping tube onto a tire. Seven condoms, Tuesday’s catch, shrivel in the sun.
"Two points," Rocco says.
"No," says Sally pulling a notebook from his pocket. "Two is a French tickler. One point."
"I got two of em!" screams Ernie lifting a grease-smeared branch from the water.
"Your mamma was busy!" Sally says. He walks over, inspects Ernie’s catch. A dead cat floats in the water. At first, the stench is overpowering, but they get used to it.
For the next ten minutes, the boys concentrate, keen as fly fishermen on a Colorado stream. Americo spots a rubber being discharged ( “released”) downstream.
He plucks it out of the water, is about to yell when he notices Sally bent over his notebook tallying scores. Americo circles behind him. The rubber looks exactly like the calamari tubes his father stuffs and sautées in tomato sauce.Ernie sees him coming, backs away. Americo creeps closer, closer, and lays the dripping condom on Sally's shoulder.
"Somebody I want you to meet," he says.
Sally looks up. What?”
Americo throws down his rod and darts away.
"Eccch! Sciafuso!" Ernie shouts. "Disgusting!"
"What?" Sally whirls once, twice, like a dog chasing his tail.
The condom leaves a snail track on the shiny coat.
Americo is already 30 feet away, running among piles of concrete slag and bricks heading for the path that winds through the salvage yard and out onto the street. Sally who owns the Catholic School 60-yard dash record, throws the raincoat at Rocco and chases after him.
"My new coat! My mother will kill you!"
Americo climbs a towering mound of rubble. He whirls, gives Sally, 20 feet below the finger. "The First Sorrowful Mystery!" he screams. “Your stupid coat!"
He leaps, loses his footing and tumbles down the other side. Scrambles to his feet, ducks behind a pile of trash, then accelerates toward a hole in the fence. He trips as he vaults over a roll of linoleum, almost regains his balance, then falls hard in front of a mountain of metal drums piled near the fence. Instinctively, he burrows between two barrels.
In the distance, the bells of Our Lady of Peace Church chime the Angelus, then ring the hour, a single note that reverberates in the metallic womb like a funeral knell. One o’clock. Americo crawls deeper, imagining a pirate cave formed by the rusty drums, forgetting about school and the rats in the lots. He finds himself in a 20-foot clearing surrounded by orange drums leaching powdery yellow crystals. He stands up, examines his grease-stained pants and looks around.
A brown shopping bag rests against one of the drums. Americo walks closer, picks up the bag, disappointed at how light it feels. Drug addicts burglarizing the trucking companies alongside the canal often hid swag in the lots. Americo would steal from the thieves, Robin Hood, grabbing leather handbags, perfume and shoes. A pillowcase is stuffed inside the bag. Americo pulls it out. It’s stained a dark, clotty red.
"Jesus!"
He pushes the bag away from him with both hands. The October wind, heavy with salt from the harbor, cuts through his thin jacket. He sniffles, wipes his nose on his sleeve, half-tucks his shirt in. Acrid smoke—tires burning in the salvage yard, chokes the air. He looks up over the barrels, sees the sun reflected in the windows of Ernie’s apartment building, reminds himself he’s barely 50 yards from his own backyard. Gloria, his mother is in the kitchen doing dishes, getting ready for supper.
He walks back to the bag, steps on the edge of the pillowcase, then kicks. The bloody cloth unravels, a chicken flies out.
“Ha!” Americo laughs, a dry bark that surprises him.
He steps closer. A tiny claw-like hand. Closer. A baby, smaller than a plucked chicken, blackened, smeared with blood and dirt. A naked, dark-haired boy, one arm reaching up to the empty sky. It moves. The hand clenches and unclenches.
"Ahhh!"
He turns, flies through the tunnel of barrels, bile rising in his throat.
He’s trying not to gag when Sally leaps onto his back. Americo falls to his knees, gasping. He spins wildly, legs pin-wheeling. In a second, Sally is kneeling on his chest, pinning his arms back.
"Stop! ... Please stop!"
Sally holds a dried condom ready to rub into his face.
"Please!"
"Come on,” Sally relents. “Crybaby."
Americo hyperventilating, points at the barrels. After a moment, the two boys crawl into the small clearing, stand over the thing. Americo picks it up, cradles it in his forearm. Sally looks at him like he's crazy. He feels the icy body shudder and grow still. He lays it back on the ground
"It was alive.”
They stare at each other then turn away. Sally throws the pillowcase over it.
"Don't say nothing to nobody. Right?”
"I don't know," Americo mumbles, "this is...a sin."

To be continued

Losing Mom Part III

Returning to New York had always been a joy for me. This time it was a rite of passage. I had come as a son seeking his mother; instead, I found myself in an empty, memory-haunted house, the head of a family heading for disaster.
Once again, I found myself emotionally, but not practically prepared for crisis. Gregory, who had been supporting Mom since my father's death, was unemployed. Joseph was in a rehab program. Bills were piled up; the mortgage and property taxes hadn't been paid. My parents had managed family finances out of an old shoe box in which they kept payment books, canceled checks, etc. Mom's hospital costs were already in the tens of thousands of dollars and surging daily. Though well-insured, she still owed thousands from her previous surgeries. Our resources essentially consisted of her small savings account, a $2,000 life insurance policy and the modest row house we'd grown up in. Determined to keep the house and our family intact, I found myself worrying about losing both every day.
At the hospital, Mom was being maintained on heavy doses of morphine and little else. We asked that the dosage be cut back and discovered the pain had diminished. Other problems had developed: her feet and ankles had begun to swell with fluid; she couldn't swallow without choking. Her only sustenance was the intravenous solution that dripped slowly into her arms. Every day, untouched containers of soup, pasta, fruit, toast, eggs, Jell-O, tea, lined her window sill.
After ten days, she was finally transfered to Methodist Hospital's third floor cancer ward for chemotherapy. Each day, I'd imagine the runaway cells inexorably growing, approaching some critical mass.
"Do you think this can really help me?" she asked.
"Please, Mom I said, "there's nothing else we can do."
I'd half-convinced myself the harmless-looking liquids in the clear plastic bags above her bed could work some miracle. They were powerful cytotoxins that would kill any fast-growing cells in her body: she would lose her hair, develop sores in her mouth and the lining of her stomach, experience nausea or worse. On Friday night, she was given a cocktail of painkillers and anti-nausea drugs to prepare her for her first treatment.
I arrived early Saturday morning carrying coffee and a newspaper, eager for some hopeful sign. A nurse stopped me outside the room to ask whether Mrs. Coppola should be revived if she went into cardiac arrest. I rushed past her to find Mom semi-conscious, gasping for breath. A nurse was suctioning her throat with a vacuum device. The anti-nausea drugs had supressed the gag reflex that allowed her to clear phlegm: she was drowning in front of my eyes. We stared silently at each other. Half-a-dozen other patients were in distress; the nurse passed the vacuum tube and saline solution to me and left.
Mom revived, survived the first round of treatment. By then, she'd seen herself in a mirror and asked for Father Louis DeTommaso, her pastor. We all took communion together around her bed. Another lifelong image was seared into my consciousness. My relatives had begun placing religious pictures by her bed, alongside those of her grandchildren, Justin, Gabrielle Pia, and Thomas. Her brother Sonny and his wife Madeleine, postponed their annual winter trip to Florida.
In the cancer ward, some patients slept constantly; others never. One woman, suffering from both lymphoma and Alzheimer's disease shrieked through the night. Many of the patients smoked constantly. One of Mom's roomates, a woman apparently without family or friends to support her, endured three days of chemotherapy and then was preparing to make her way home alone. Gloria ordered me to drive her home. She had Greg give $10 to another, indigent patient.
Despite the high tech medicines and the decency of the caregivers, the ward was not a place to inspire hope. Half-a-block away on Seventh Avenue, the shops were ablaze with lights and Christmas decorations; men hawked Christmas trees on the sidewalks while carols played over tinny speakers. Our house, always bright and filled with people at Christmas time, was dark and empty.
Greg and I stayed in shifts. Our relatives visited regularly but we kept the haunted hours. Other families kept similar vigils; many of the "children" were my age. Two brothers, both in their 40s, had flown in from Florida at Thanksgiving to care for their mother. A month later, they were still there "trying to get Mom home for Christmas." At the other end of the scale was the daughter who publicly berated her dying mother for all the "trouble and expense" she was causing. The woman's last months would be spoent shuttling between cancer ward and nursing home.
Three days before Christmas, I asked Mom's permission to return to Atlanta to spend time with my children. She insisted I go.
"I'm okay, I've got plenty of company."
Holidays were important in our family, heralded by huge dinners my parents would spend days preparing. I sensed she was passing on the tradition to me. As I was leaving for the airport, torn between my responsibilites as both father and son, she handed me money for gifts and Christmas cards for Gaby and Thomas. Inside, she'd written,
"Grandma will love you always."
A patient died Christmas Eve. Three days after Christmas, a surgeon had cut into my mother's abdomen attempting to install a feeding tube directly into her stomach. He failed. He told us her liver was so enlarged with tumor, he couldn't find her stomach. A tiny tube he attached to her small intestine pulled free and Mom refused to have it reinstalled.
On New Year's Day, a 43-year-old woman whose husband and daughters had kept a lonely vigil in the room across from us died of brain cancer. Their wails echoed through the ward.
At noon on Saturday Jan. 5th, Gloria was discharged from Methodist Hospital. The plan was to get her out of the grim ward environment for a week, after which she'd return for three days of chemotherapy. Visiting nurses and home healthcare workers would help us manage.
I spent that morning at home scrubbing the floors and putting everything in order. Over the last year, Gregory had renovated the ground flooer of our dilapidated, 100-year-old row house, ripped out walls, exposed brick, installed new appliances, windows, even parquet floors.
While Mom was hospitalized, he had her dingy bedroom redone all sunshine and bright colors. I'd dumped the worn-out bedroom and living room suites, bouth new sofas and a bed--charged it all--framed and hung pictures of my brother Thomas and the grandchildren alongside her photograph of Pope Paul VI. My mother had spent her entire adult life living in that rundown house. The renovation was Greg's final gift to her.
On the sidewalk outside the hospital, she couldn't walk four steps to the car without gasping. The painful swelling that had begun in her feet by now had bloated her legs. When I'd massaged them, imprints of my fingers remained in her flesh. She couldn't have weighed more than 80 lbs. Her face was grey, her lips pulling back from ther teeth.
"It's so beautiful," she whispered as Greg carried her into the house. "So beautiful."

A neighbor had prepared lentil soup and run it through a blender for her. She couldn't eat. (At the hospital, she'd ordered her cousin Millie to eat the food I'd leave "...so Vincent wouldn't worry." ) She spent the day exhausted on a BarcaLounger we'd borrowed from a neighbor. On Sunday, a visiting nurse noted Mom's systolic blood pressure had dropped below 90; she looked at me oddly when I announced I had gotten Gloria to eat two full tablespoons of oatmeal. A medical reporter, I refused to acknowledge any medical information. It had come down to "...what God wants."
Sunday night, Greg carried Mom upstairs to her bedroom, the stairway as insurmountable to her as Mount Everest. It took six pillows to put her at ease and still she couldn't sleep. She called to me in the middle of the night. I lay awake next door in the narrow room that had been mine as a teenager.
"Vincent, my back...I can't get comfortable any more."
I adjusted her pillows for the 10th time.,
"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm not letting you sleep. I'm sorry I made you come up here so far from the kids."
I clung to the iron rail of her new bed. An enormous chasm stretches between the living and the dying, a gap love cannot bridge. I wanted to hurl myself across it. "Mom," I said, "There's nowhere else in the world I want to be." I realize now that I had been granted a precious moment. A chance to say those special things we feel for those we love but so rarely do A chance to say goodbye.
"Mom, I want you to know that you've been the best mother any son could have. I want you to know that whatever is good and special in me has come from you."
She lay there staring.
I was blinded by tears. "Mom, You know that I can't change this. I can't change what's happening to you. You know if would if I could."
"I know that," she whispered. "I know."
Monday morning, her blood pressure continued to drop.
"Vincent," she said, "I don't feel good Maybe I should go back to the hospital."
I didn't want her to die surrounded by gaping strangers in a crowded emergency room or wind up lifeless on an respirator. "Okay, Mom. Let's wait a little bit." I knew what choice I was making. The hospital had an arrangement for bypassing admitting procedures on the cancer ward. After a while, it became too much Greg drove to the hospital to find the head nurse. I was upstairs when Angela, a family friend, shrieked, "Vinny, come down! Something's happening!"
Mom had pitched forward in the chair. She'd grabbed Angela's hand She wasn't breathing. I pinched her nostrils and began breathing into her mouth. It was the first time I'd ever kissed my mother on the lips.
"Breathe Mom. Please, Mom breathe! Don't die!"
Somehow she heard me and delayed her passing. She came back, but only for a moment. Her last breath passed into my mouth. Later, Josie Stuto, our octogenarian Italian neighbor across the street would tell me this was a special gift.
I was aware of Greg kneeling beside me sobbing. I won't cry," he'd said, "until there's no hope." There were no open beds at the hospital. Angela dialed 911. Half-a-dozen police officers and EMTs piled thorugh our front door, pushing us aside. Mom lay on her back, her pajama top open as a team worked to defibrilate her. Her ribs and collar bones protruded It was the only time I'd ever seen her undressed.
At that moment, our brother Joseph walked in. He never got his chance to say a last goodbye, make amends, and tell her he loved her. Of course, Gloria knew that. Her last thoughts were of him.
As I write this, the tulips and irises I'd planted in the yard that last fall are beginning to blossom. I was going to surprise Gloria with them. Her favorite outfits and a few pieces of jewelry were given to family and friends, the rest donated to the poor. I would have kept everything exactly as it was. But life goes on. Her passing left a hole in my life into which I hoped would flow all the kindness she represented...
Sometimes, I wonder what might have happened if Alzheimer's had been the diagnosis instead of cancer...if those intense and devastating 10 weeks had stretched into 10 years. And I wonder about the road ahead for me.

I write these words as the opening post to Gowanus Crossing a memoir of lives unfolded on the fatal banks of Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal. Remember how I'd assured myself that the cancer that killed Gloria's sisters had somehow inoculated my mother against the disease. In fact, my Aunt Mary, another of her sisters, and two of her brothers, Sonny and Tony, would all die of cancer. They grew up in a house on the corner of Carroll and Nevins streets, since demolished, a few hundred feet from the canal. As a boy, I remember the poisonous green tides flooding the cellar, my uncles wading into the noisome water to clear the drains.
Ours is just one story of a hundred families in a forgotten neighborhood. My hope is that neighborhood and its people will live again on these pages.
I remember wise guys dumping medical and other wastes into the canal. It was cheaper for their corporate customers than loading the toxic material on a barge and ferrying it out to sea. The deals no doubt done in Monte's Venetian Room, a restaurant across from our house. I couldn't afford to eat there until I was in my thirties.
As a boy, I played pirate on half-sunken barges, climbed a mountain of metal barrels filled with industrial chemicals. A king, I held "magic" turquoise crystals and golden powders in my hands when the containers spilled open. I remember raw sewage from our toilets passing straight into the water through a stone conduit alongside the Carroll Street Bridge.
Last month, the EPA declared the canal--now eagerly eyed by a new generation of developers and self-styled urban pioneers--a Superfund site.

Losing Mom Part II

Death came closer in 1982. My 28-year-old brother, Thomas, a struggling actor living in Greenwich Village, developed Kaposi's sarcoma, a skin cancer that signaled the onset of a disease that would become all too common, AIDS. Thomas returned home to die with his family. Gloria tried to save him with home cooking, prayer and a mother's love. Every day for a year, my father, Joseph, bucked Manhattan traffic in his old Cadillac, a raging bull on a mercy mission: getting his son to Sloan Kettering Memorial Hospital for treatment. They barely spoke, the issues were way too complicated, but one morning I found my father in the backyard shaking his fists at the heavens. "Why him? he demanded. Why him!"
Thomas died in the spring of 1985. I remember cherry blossoms and dogwood petals floating in the bright sunlight as we passed into Brooklyn's Green-Wood cemetary. I was forced to purchase his grave while he still lived.
That year, my father's chronic shortness of breath--the result of his smoking unfiltered cigarettes for 40 years--developed into full-blown emphysema. He grew afraid, a man who had seemed to thrive on shouting and turmoil, who as a foreman "down the piers" had terrorized deckhands and longshoremen with his furious temper and work ethic. At his funeral, half-a-dozen, gruff, gnarled men, old beyond their years, came up to me and said, "Your father worked like an animal!" It was the highest compliment they knew.
My father died over the telephone. My part played out in a series of long distance calls. It took five years and as many hospitalizations. I was in Atlanta those years, trying to put Thomas's death, the ruins of my first marriage, and a financially devastating career change behind me. I called often, trying to get him to let go of the oxygen bottles, the cigarettes and the sofa that defined his world.
At the time, I was married with two children, a demanding job, mounting bills. I lived far away. He had two other sons nearby. I constantly reminded myself of these things; it kept the guilt for the nightmare I knew was unfolding in Brooklyn at bay.
At age 64, my father couldn't walk 10 feet to the bathroom. He'd urinate into a milk carton. Gasping for air, he kept the windows wide open on January nights while my mother and Gregory shivered upstairs. At the same age, his father, my grandfather, had sat proudly at the head of a long table, surrounded by doting children and grandchildren. My great grandfather had lived at home well into his 90s.
Too many nights I knew my father had only the white noise of the television for company. Too many nights, his needs left my mother and brothers angry and exhausted. When I called, he would whimper, "I'm scared." He was a wonderful cook; sometimes, to distract him, I'd ask for one of his recipes, always endlessly complicated and detailed. He'd hand the phone to my mother. Once when I'd gone to far, he moaned a desperate, "Please!" After that, it became easier when he didn't feel like talking.
March 6 was a special day. My wife, an actress, had landed a television commercial. She seemed happy. (A month later, she would pack up and leave, our marriage over.) We picked up the kids and headed home to make dinner. The answering machine's red light was flashing angrily, five...six messages.
"Vincent, this is your brother Joseph. Daddy just died."
Again and again, each time the voice choked with panic.
"Vincent, Daddy just died. Please call! Vincent, please! Vincent, Daddy's dead. He's lying on the floor!"

Thanksgiving marked the third time my mother's cancer had recurred in three years, despite all assurances that the massive neck surgeries and larynx reconstruction she'd endured had been successful. "No evidence of tumor," the lab reports had read, but each time renegade clusters of epithelial cells had escaped detection. The four months she'd spent recuperating in the crowded wards of Mount Sinai Hospital and her permanent inability to drink liquids or swallow most solid foods (we'd sit silent and helpless at the dinner table watching her gasp and choke as fluid flowed into her lungs) were a terrible price, but--we told ourselves--she could speak and she would live.
Twice before, my response had been optimistic and aggressive--read the literature, roust the experts, get second and third opinions, find the best hospital, the latest treatment, listen to the anecdotes of miraculous turnabouts everyone seems to volunteer. This time, the machinery of hope shut down. I could neither think nor act. I made one call, to Dr. Sanford Matthews, my kids' pediatrician. I wanted medical advice; Sandy tried to comfort me. Then came a telephone conversation with my mother.
"I can't understand what's happening," her voice in a morphine haze. "I went shopping last Wednesday. I was fine. I walked all over the Avenue."
"I love you mom. I love you so much."
I spent Thanksgiving weekend lost on familiar streets, alone though surrounded by friends who cared for me, beyond of the reach of arms that would comfort me. "We all have to go through this," someone whispered. "It's part of life." Even so, in my car, I howled the injustice, the unfairness of it into the night. I raged. I cried and hated myself for crying; each tear was an acknowledgement that she was dying.
By Monday, I'd come to a decision. I was going to New York and I would stay however long it took...two weeks, a month...a year. This was my personal choice and I attach no moral certitude to it. Everyone makes his own. This woman had given me life; she made my well being her life's work. She'd sung to me as a child. In our toughest times, seeing me shamed by cardboard stuffed inside my worn-out sneakers, she'd risked my father's wrath to buy me new ones. She still cooked my favorite dishes, still pressed money on me when I was broke. She loved her sons and grandchildren more than herself.
The bond between us was fierce. I'd never, as I'd promised, taken her to Florida, Los Angeles or the Vatican. Never become rich or famous... never danced with her at my wedding. She never cared. Last autumn, swept by some strange prescience, I'd taken six weeks off from work and traveled to New York to write, sleep in my old room, be her son again.
This would be my time to comfort her and stand with her at the fading of the light. If pain and tragedy were my mother's lot, I wanted my share. Something else was at work. The dying can give precious gifts to the living clarity... perspective... priority. This would be my last opportunity to give back something; the last time in this life I would ever be a son, the child of a living person.
In some ways, my position was special. Given the circumstances, easier than it would be for most people. My children were young, and, after the breakup of my second marriage, they were living most of the time with their mothers; my expenses modest. A support system of family and friends was in place in Brooklyn. I was not bound by corporate dicta that typically make no provision for extended leave or other support in times of family crisis...that make it simpler for employees who are substance abusers to get help than for caregivers to provide it. Journalism for all its prickly edge is a sympathetic business. My boss told me to do what I had to do. We'd worry about it later. I was a reporter; experience, no matter how painful or personal, was the raw material of my craft.
"If God wants me, then I'm not afraid," Gloria always told us. Whatever God wants..." was a phrase I grew up with. I'd never seen her without her rosary beads. She supported an endless stream of church-related charities with $5 donations, yet could curse a blue streak, held grudges and always wanted the latest gossip. She attended services three times a week at Our Lady of Peace Church, one of the last devoted churchgoers in what had once been a thriving parish. As a child, it had been my job to stir the tomato sauce on Sunday mornings during the hour she was at mass. She always sat in the same pew, "Gloria's row," her friends called it. Over the last few years, I'd begun attending mass with her whenever I was in town.
She always wore high heels to church. Young women had always marveled at my mother's figure. In the three years, since her first operation, she'd lost 40 pounds, suffered disfiguring scars and complained she "looked like a skeleton." Greg, always loyal, still called her "Tubsy."She still wore those high heels. Awash in memories in the nearly empty old old church I'd look at her and tears would flow.
She pretended not to notice.

(Continued)

Losing Mom Part I

Looking back, it seems I'd waited my whole life for the call. It came late in the night, the Friday after Thanksgiving, my brother Greg telling me our mother had been rushed by ambulance to Brooklyn's Methodist Hospital in terrible pain. The "backache" she'd barely mentioned when the kids and I had called on Thanksgiving Day would turn out to be an enormous tumor mass--squamous cell carcinoma--that had invaded her lungs and swollen her liver three times it normal size.
The call came three days after my 43rd birthday. Like so many other babyboomers, I was living a life vastly different from my parents; living it far from the blue collar enclave in Brooklyn where I'd grown up. Twelve years earlier, my job had carried me to Atlanta, a way station I'd imagined, on the way to the top; like so many others I stayed and stayed. My children, years of friendship and struggle were here. My brothers, my childhood friends, the house I'd grown up in, the streets I'd roamed, were 1000 miles away and fading, becoming stratified under layers of more recent experience. Recently, I'd noticed my memories had begun to outnumber my real-life interactions "back home."
Gloria had turned 66 a few weeks earlier. Since adolescence, I'd been telling myself how lucky I was to have young parents, how I wouldn't have to worry about losing them until my own mortality had begun to weigh upon me, until the needs of my children forced me to relinquish any enduring claim to childhood.
Those illusions were shattered in my mid-30s when emphysema debilitated my father, quickly transforming a man whose life had been marked by stubborn self-reliance into a frightened and helpless child. My father's illness set into motion that cycle of dread and responsibility we must all pass through when our parents become too old, too poor, or to sick to care for themselves. In my case, the struggle, though searing, would end early. For tens of millions of my generation with careers and families of their own, it is fully underway--an enduring burden that will affect every aspect of their lives.
There is much irony in the Me Generation having to slow down. Much irony and so little time for introspection and self-examination. The years draw quickly upon us; the oldest among us are already gray, with children grown. The parents many of us rebelled so fiercely against have become our dependents, threats to our vaunted freedom only in the demands they make. If they loved and cherished us, we are about to learn that requiting their love, no matter how deep our devotion, can be painful and demanding; a task that can stretch a childhood's length in fact. If our childhood memories are unhappy and escape-driven, we may again find ourselves trapped and bitter. Too many of our parents have nowhere else to turn; the responsibility is ours.
We live in a culture where youth is exalted. It has proved an idiot king. The elderly have been banished from the public arena, their appearance deemed unsightly, aging itself unseemly. Their needs, save for the failing machinery of Social Security and its concomitant programs, removed from the public agenda.
We've held Death at arms's length; dying, for must of us, is real the way a DVD is "real." We imagine a sterile process occurring in white rooms behind closed doors to other people. Now that it has begun to stalk our parents, we will become intimate with death and dying. And well we should. Death has edged one generation closer to us.
As if awakening from childhood's untroubled sleep, we hear the whispers of our friends and peers--whispers only until we are affected--the coworker's father with Alzheimer's disease...another whose father developed and died of cancer in the span of a few weeks...yet another raising the issue old folks so often dread, institutionalization...the realization that strikes a neighbor after her regular commute back home to Virginia, that roles have somehow been reversed: her parents need more and more support; they are losing their ability to play Mama and Daddy for her. "It's the hardest thing in the world," she says, "and it happened so quickly."
I was the eldest son in what had been a poor family. I was well-educated. Through my 30s, like millions of other babyboomers, I'd steadilly climbed the career ladder, started a family of my own, bought into the notion that my generation was unique and special in history. Then divorce, and a series of reversals had abruptly knocked away 15 years of stability. In what is now a familiar pattern, I found myself at least spiritually returning to the nest...turning to Mom and Dad for comfort and support. In varying degrees, my three brothers did the same. Yet, I'd always considered myself responsible for my parents' well-being, still bound by traditions that that in one generation seemed to have gone from being the right thing, the expected thing, the American way if you will, to some impractical folkway practiced only by recently arrived immigrants.
Looking back, I realize I'd taken absolutely no concrete steps to support these notions. Like so many of my generation, I had avoided talking with them about any possibility of planning for their aging. My parents were still young, and I was full of myself. I imagined my life full of drama and tempestuousness. Living it was a full-time job. My parents accepted that. They were of a generation that lived through their children. They'd had four sons to keep them busy. They'd never left the street they were born on and never cared to. The likelihood of either or both of them moving to Atlanta in a crisis was nil. In neither of my unhappy marriages would there have been a place for my folks. Among many Italian-Americans, extended families are viable; a nursing home would have been out of the question.
When things began to to wrong--for example, my father, in taking early retirement, had neglected to check off a clause that would continue pension payments to my mother in the event of his death--I could offer little more than concern and guilt. My feelings were real, but they wouldn't have put food on the table.
Death had come early in our extended family. Aunt Dolly, my mother's elder sister, died of breast cancer in her early forties. Aunt Marguerite, a younger sister, succumbed to cancer in her 50s. "Not three," I'd told myself "Three sisters couldn't get cancer." I was younger then. Later, shadowed by the ironies and disappointments that seem more than anything to mark our passage into adulthood. I knew the clock was ticking for Gloria.

(Continued)