Gowanus Crossing/A Life Along the Canal Chapter 4

“Mah-ning.”
Chickie Ruggerio’s South Boston vowels grate in his ear.
“It’s ‘Merico. Is Sally up?
“Oh boy, you two jerks have done it this time. Missed school, ruined your clothes, disobeyed the one teacher who’s trying to make something out of yous. The Principal gave me the whole story. Your mother, God love her, is gonna hear about this.”
The tirade finished, Chickie giggles. “Sally told me about Shit-the Pants stinking out the class. The canal must smell sweeter.”
Americo grimaces.
“Fatty laad ass paaked in that tiny desk!”
“Can I please talk to Sally?”
“No! You want to get my poor son in more trouble?"
“It’s important.”
“Everything’s important. Lemme see if the baastid’s up.”
He hears yelling in the background, then two minutes later, a hoarse whisper.
“Yeah?”
“I’m at Freddie’s.”
“Ain’t even 8:00 o’clock!”
“Come on man! I can't sleep!”
A long pause. “Who didja tell?” Sally hisses.
“Nobody. You?
“You gotta be kidding?”
“I’m serious.”
“Aw right, I’ll be in the park in 15 minutes.”
“The paaak? I don’t think so mister!” Chickie shouts in the background. “You’ve got chores to do.”

Americo crosses the sidewalk, then jukes and dodges—Frank Gifford shedding tacklers--through the stream of cars and trucks racing along 4th Avenue. Horns blare.
“Stupid bastid!” a driver shouts.
Americo grins. He’d been run over by a taxi on Flatbush Avenue a year ago trying to get to May’s Department Store on Fulton to buy a sweater for the class Christmas party. Lacerated his knee, busted his front tooth and missed the party. He’d spent the night in a ward in King’s County Hospital and remembered—or dreamed—his distraught father pacing outside the ward all night.
He was reckless. Americo'd throw himself down the concrete and steel steps to the RR subway station on Union Street, hands-free, cheap leather soles slipping, at the very edge of control, a misstep from pulverizing his skull. Late afternoons, he’d cling to the backs of returning Con Edison trucks, feet dangling behind the wheels, fingers inches from the gigantic spools of cable pulling at thier guy wires; jump across rooftops, a whisper away from falling. He couldn’t control himself.
His Keds hit the concrete and steel grating that divides Fourth Avenue into six eastbound and westbound lanes. Fifty feet below, the subway roars sending a blast of fetid air into his face. He races into Third Street Park, ducks through a hole in the fence. He walks across the softball field;  broken glass glitters like diamonds, sneakers dangle from the batting cage, where a junkie nods by the fence near the third base line.
“Oye…Chico…Dame.”
“Fuck you!” He skirts the guy.
He stops, forces himself to walk back.
“Sorry man.” Americo drops a quarter in the guy’s outstretched hand.

A two story fieldstone house divided the park. Softball fields and handball courts on one side, wading pool, swings, monkey bars and a bocce ball court, on the other. Americo knows the building; a farmhouse restored by the WPA during the Depression. Among the dusty books in the basement of the Grand Army Plaza "ibrary, he’d found a reference to the place that dated it to 1699.  A Dutchman,Claes Arentson Vechte, had built a dike system that allowed him to trap water at high tide, then float on a Gowanus tributary, harvest of oysters, row past Red Hook into the harbor and Manhattan beyond.
In August 1776, General George Washington, his Continental Army in parlous danger, detailed the 1st Maryland Regiment to hold the building against General William Howe’s swarming Hessian and Scottish Highlanders. Hold it they did, allowing the ragged Americans to flee across the Gowanus to Brooklyn Heights and then make their way across the fog-draped harbor into Manhattan, averting what might have been the first and final battle of the Revolutionary War—a rout. Americo knew the words Washington uttered as the battle raged:
“What brave fellows I must this day lose.”
Legend had it that soldiers' skeletons lay in a mass grave underneath the Red Devil Paints factory on Third Avenue. For all Americo knew that could be the work of Al Capone who grew up a few blocks away on Garfield Place. In 1960, he watched a group of odd-looking white people--WASPS from the Brooklyn Historical Society--dedicate a bronze bas-relief honoring the Marylanders. A few weeks later, Sonny the Indian tore the plaque from the farmhouse wall and sold it for scrap.
“Indians lived here first. Where’s their fucking plaque? Am I right?”
“Chief!” Honey pleaded, “You gonna bring the FBI on my head.”
“Scalp,” Sonny corrected.
Four mounting pins, long as railroad spikes, were still embedded in the wall. Americo walked over to the wall, grabbed the two top pins, placed his cheek against the cool, discolored stone to listen to history. History smelled of piss.
“Whataya humping the wall?”
Sally stood behind him.
“The Second Sorrowful Mystery,” Americo answers. “The Crucifixion.”
“Wrong again."
“Who gives a shit.”
Sally steps closer. “What happened to your face? You fall down the stais?”
“My father.”
“You  musta deserved it, right?”
“Yeah right.” Americo feels tears spring to his eyes. “Like the baby?”
“What?”
“In the lot.”
“It ain’t a baby.”
“Bullshit!”
“It’s a fe-tus…”
“A what?”
“I talked to my sister Patty. It’s a baby that ain’t been born…taken
out of a girl’s stomach.
“What for?”
“To kill it you moron. Because the girl ain’t married or don’t want it or…"
“That’s murder.”
“No it ain’t,” Sally said uncertainly. “It’s like a business around here.”
“Fuck you saying?”
“Abortion…It stops a girl from being pregnant.”
"Who does?"
"I don't know!"
Americo’s mind races. "They killed him and threw him away like a piece of garbage.”
“You can’t kill it if it ain’t born!”Sally argues.
“It moved.” Americo hesitates. “It was born. Got a soul and ain’t been baptized.”
“I know,” Sally mumbles, surrendering whatever logic he’d amassed. “Don’t get no crazy ideas about calling the cops. Not in this neighborhood. Right?”
“Cops?” Americo sniffs “Those fucks probably in on it.”

He feels the idea grip him. A thing tied to saints and martyrs, to years of catechism and World War II stories in his head. A desire to be courageous and decent. To be, in the words of a song his mother would sing when he was a little boy, a “stout-hearted man.”
After a moment, he says, “We go to the church. We get holy water and shit and we baptize the baby, give it a name and the last rites. Catechism says you can do it when it’s dead. You and me, we bury it. Not right for him to be out there all alone.”
“We can do that,” Sally say softly. He looks at Americo, waiting for another crazy idea.“We don’t tell nobody, right?”
“Right.”
"I mean it!"
Americo is thinking of something that happened years before, a phrase he’d seen typed on his father's union's insurance form.
“Spontaneous abortion.”
He’d looked the words up in the library. He kept the knowledge to himself along with the image of Gloria crying and crying, his aunts snarling at his father. The mumbled apologies and unfulfilled promises. He remembered Aunt Lucy driving him and the twins to Spumoni Gardens for pizza when they weren’t hungry. Part of him died with the baby sister he never knew. Now he promises to find out who killed this baby. Man or woman, cop, gangster or priest. Doesn't matter. Like Gawain and Galahad, he'd found a quest, a fell purpose to which he could dedicate himself.
At 3:00 P.M. Saturday, Sally and Americo walk out of Our Lady of Peace Church, a Coke bottle  filled with holy water dunked out of the font and a test tube of Chrism, (“olive oil and balm blessed by the bishop on Holy Thurday”) a prayer book, Sally, an altar boy, had stolen from the sacristy. The bouquet of wilted flowers Americo borrowed from St. Anthony’s Chapel in the back of the church.
Sister Mary Dermott stops them at the top of the steps. Tall, austere, bloodless, the polar opposite of Malachy who resembles Sgt. Biff O’Reilly on Rin-Tin-Tin. Dermott’s pale blue eyes, magnified by rimless eyeglasses, bore into Americo.
“Have you made your weekly Confession?
“Yes Sister,” Sally lies.
“No Sister,” Americo blurts
Sally gives him a murderous look.
Dermott glances at her watch. “March back in there. Father Masseo is still in the confessional.”
"Jerking off no doubt," Sally thinks.
A minute later, Americo kneels in the dark, overheated booth; it smells of polish and candle-wax.
“Bless me Father for I have sinned. It has been one week since my last Confession. These are my sins I cursed…I had impure thoughts five times. I…”
Americo shuts his mouth. He fidgets, waiting for the priest to pronounce a penance. Father Masseo's sour breath leaks past the violet perfume of Sen-Sen candy. Americo peers at the blurred figure behind the translucent fiberglass screen and feels himself sinking. A sheen of sweat spreads across his forehead.
The priest sits motionless. “Go on my son.”
“I hit my father…”
Silence, then,“A mortal sin The Fourth Commandment: ‘Honor thy Father and thy Mother.’”
“He was hurting my mother.”
Unseen, Masseo stirs, moves forward, interested in lurid gossip among the Italians.
“He kicked her!” Americo’s whisper is strangled.
“There are ways to handle…”
“I want him to die!”
“God forgive you.”
“Me?”
“He gave you life.”
“He killed my baby sister!” Americo shouts. "I remember now!"
Masseo struggles to rise in the cramped confessional. The middle door is halfway open when Sally slams it closed, the noise echoing like a gunshot in the empty church. Sally grabs Americo by his sweatshirt and pushes him toward the back of the church. Half-a-dozen black-clad crones turn to stare at the boys, rosaries dangling from their claws.
“Are you nuts?” Sally whispers “I heard what you said!”
The two run out of the church. Rubbing his left elbow, Masseo lumbers after them trrying to make sure he knew who they were.

Half-an-hour later, Sally and Americo lugging a spade from Honey’s backyard garden scuttles under the metal drums that enclosed the clearing. Neither boy notices Ernie peering at them from the fifth floor window of his building on the far edge of the lot.
"Fucking thieves!” he chortles. “And they didn’t call me!”
 He swallows the last bite of his sandwich, grabs his blue Brooklyn Dodger jacket, stuffs a pack of Twinkies in his pocket and hurries down the stairs, a boulder rumbling down a mountainside.

The child  lay arms outstretched, under the scarlet pillowcase.
Americo drives the shovel into the dirt; the blade glances off a chunk of concrete just below the surface, sending a shock through his funny bone. He moves a foot to the left and tries again. This time the shovel slices sinto the earth. He begins digging.
Sally kneels over the pillowcase, preparing to wrap it around the boy.
“Don’t cover his face,” Americo says. “We need to pour Holy Water on his forehead.”
“Come on!” Sally says.
A smell, sickly and sweet, assaults his nostrils. Sally jerks his head away. Americo drops the shovel, walks over. He kneels down. It takes all his will to lift the pillowcase. He grabs a corner, begin to tuck it under, then realizes he has to lift the thing. It squishes in his hands. Something sour races from his stomach into his throat. He gags, but holds on. Eyes averted, he begins wrapping the cloth, once, twice, around the head and body, till only the blackened face is visible. He’d seen pink-faced babies baptized in church, swaddled in white linen and Italian lace.
Gently, he lays the bundle against one of the barrels, then walks back to the grave. He's down a foot when the shovel clangs against something solid. He kneels and brushes the remaining dirt away with his hand. Concrete. A floor, he realizes, the remnants of some long-demolished shed or shack.
“Shit!”
He bangs away, striking sparks. He'll need a sledgehammer to break through.
“You think it's deep enough?”
Sally looks up. He' s pulling bottles from his knapsack, spreading them on a towel he’d grabbed from a clothesline in one of the yards next to the lot.
“There’s a floor,” Americo says.
He hears something, distinct from the muffled sounds of traffic on Third Avenue. He whirls, listening. An airliner drones overhead, cruciform against the sky.
“It’s deep enough!” pleads Sally. “We’ll cover it with rocks."
Americo puts down the shovel. He walks over, takes a breath, picks up the bundle, lays it in the crook of his left arm. He makes the Sign of the Cross
“O.K. Let’s get going.”
Sally mechanically crosses himself, then drops the missal back on the towel. He knows the words by heart. He steps forward, holding the Coke bottle in his right hand.
“I baptize you,” he hesitates. “Salvatore Vincent. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.”
He pours the water onto the tiny forehead. It runs off, soaking Americo’s forearm, baptizing him in the same flood. Sally’s hand trembles. Together, they sing a line from their favorite hymn
“Come holy night I hear the angels calling.”
“What else?”
“Extreme Unction,” Americo says.
“It’s already dead! I don’t know that prayer.”
“`I sign you with the chrism of salvation....’ Something like that. Then an Our Father…”
“'Merico, I can’t take no more of this!"
Sally is reaching for the oil when a rock clangs against the steel drums above their heads. Both boys scream. A second rock drops like a mortar shell at Americo’s feet. A moment later, they whirl as Ernie comes squeezing  through the tunnel of barrels into the clearing.
“Mamones! What’d yous rob?”
He's laughing, rubbing his right thumb across the tips of his fingers, the sign of thievery. And then he sees what Americo is holding.
“Aggh! The fuck is that?”
He backs away, holding his hands in front of his face.
"A dead baby,” Sally says.“'Merico  found it.”
“Schifosos! Its got germs. Yous’ll get sick!”
Ernie turns and gags, a milky stream of vomit, bits of salami and Twinkies clearly visible, shoot out of his mouth. The smell hits Sally. He drops the oil and begins puking. Americo stands there, the soft bundle in his arms, staring at the sky.
Ten minutes later it's  finished. They hurry out of the lot, turn left on Carroll Street and stop to rest at one of the steel rails on the Carroll Street Bridge. The breeze off the stagnant green water is cool on their faces.
“You know it belongs to somebody,” Ernie says after a moment.
Sally and Americo stare at him. “What do you mean?” Sally asks not wanting an answer.
“Asshole, somebody put it there for a reason.”
“Somebody killed it!” Americo hisses.
“None of your fucking business!” Ernie says. “Yous a gonna get in big trouble.”
“Fuck the cops!”
“I ain’t talking about cops you morons!”
“What trouble?” says Sally, shooting Americo a nervous glance. “Over a little nigger kid?”
“It ain’t a nigger,” says Ernie. “You know it ain’t a nigger!”

Continued

Gowanus Crossing/A Life Along the Canal Chapter 3

Americo pulled on rumpled Lee dungarees and a gray sweatshirt, grabbed his socks and sneakers, tiptoed past his parents' bedroom door. In the stairwell he smelled coffee and cigarettes. Joe, wherever he’d slept, if he'd slept, was up and on the prowl.
He listened for the rustle of a newspaper, the clatter of a coffee cup. He took a breath, came out of the enclosed stairwell darted for the bathroom, turned and braced his back against the flimsy door, planting his feet against the back edge of the tub, his wiry body a flexible, but unyielding barrier. He held the position for a minute waiting for his father’s shoulder to shiver the door. The tan phone sat incongruously in the tub. A plastic triptych of the Crucifixion was tacked to the outside of the door covering a gaping hole Joe had punched a year before while Americo and the twins cowered inside.
A cigarette butt floated in the toilet. Was Joe gone? Americo hesitated, then pulled the bathroom door open and ran through the living room for the front door—the Christmas bells jingling merrily.He twisted the lock, pulled it open and was on the street, bright morning sun flaring in his swollen eye. He pulled on his coat as he ran, knees pumping looking back until he'd reached Third Avenue. He spit a mouthful of blood onto the sidewalk and walked past Goldie’s Poultry Market. Ace the rooster strutted on the sidewalk, glaring at Americo. On the other side of Third Avenue, Victor the blacksmith, in a leather apron that looked like something from the Middle Ages, was pounding nails into the hoof of a swaybacked horse, the smell like burning fingernail clippings in the air.
Sometimes, Americo worked with Angeletti the peddler for tips and a bag of peaches or plums at the end of the day. He'd sit on the painted wooden wagon's tailgate, skinny arm clinging to a post, the scale swaying next to his head, the horse plodding amidst the cars and trucks, carrying him across a sea of cobblestones from one neighborhood to the next, listening to the peddler singing out in Neapolitan.
"E rook e rabe, pomodoro, ba-sil-ico.”
The song invariably drew crones and housewives in halter tops and shorts from the brownstones and tenements that lined the streets of South Brooklyn. Americo carried the bulging brown bags behind them, up endless steps, along darkened hallways, eager for a peek into life in the sweltering, tin-ceilinged apartments where black garbed nonnas sat by sleeping babies.
He walked to Third Street where a eastern tributary of the Gowanus--once connected by a series of ingenious dikes to a 17th century Dutch farmhouse--had been filled in with rubble. Nobody gave a shit.
Behind him, a car rumbled over the cobblestones. He whirled, then recognized his Aunt Lucy’s pink, 1955 Cadillac. He dashed into the street. She braked, wheels squealing. He walked around to the driver’s side, leaned in.
“Stupid bastard you wanna get run over!”
She paused, took in his bruised eye. Then lit a menthol cigarette, flipped the match under Americo’s chin.
“Whadda you up so early for?”
They both avoided mentioning his father.
“Nothing. Walking to the gas station to see Sally.”
“Too jerk-offs instead of one.”
Americo grinned. He loved his wild, foul-mouth aunt.
Lucy was dragging, her makeup runny, her bouffant ike wilted flowers. Americo’s eyes flicked past her to Rosemary Marcantonio, one of Monte's’ barmaids, asleep in the passenger seat, her skirt riding up her thighs.
“You just getting home?” It was all he could think to say.
“What are you a detective? Mind your f-ing business.”
“Your brother…”he began.
She glanced at the rearview mirror as if expecting Joe Guzzi to show up.“Psycho should have stayed in the Philippine with the cannibals.
She puffed on the cigarette. Rosemary groaned, shifted. Americo caught a flash of pink, the darker shadow at the crotch.
“Are you getting a good look?”
Americo blushed. Lucy reached over and tugged Anna’s skirt down.
“ It’s your mother’s fault you know. Marrying him. Miss High-Falutin.. She started to say more, then stopped. "I gotta go.”
She accelerated, then braked abruptly. "Listen, I gotta drop off Sleeping Beauty over here. Stay with me  tonight if he’s still on the warpath. My Thomas and Lulu Belle like the crazy stories you tell them about the canal.”
“They're not stories. History.”
"Too much history around here," she said driving off
"Warpath!"
Americo thought of Sonny the Indian and laughed for the first time in days.

When Americo walked up, Freddie and Marty were sitting on vinyl-covered kitchen chairs in front of their dilapidated Texaco station, eating bologna sandwiches smeared with mustard the color of baby shit and sipping chocolate milk out of half-pint containers. Smoky Robinson & the Miracles’ Tears of A Clown echoed tinnily from the cracked plastic radio at their feet. They wore greasy coveralls and thick work shoes. Their hands and particularly the fingernails cracked and crusted from too many oil changes, but the hair on their narrow heads was spectacular, dyed rust red, processed into ringlets like gypsy coins, wrapped in blue and red cowboy bandannas.
“My maaaan!” Marty croaked.
 He squinted at Americo, then poked Freddie with his elbow. “What’s wrong with my man's eye? Walk into a door again? Best get some bigger glasses.”
“Or a softer door," Freddie grinned.
“Sally here?”
“Sally took the day off. Say he ain’t feeling well,” said Freddie.
"Sheeiit!” said Marty.
The roar of a V-8 engine, then the squeal of brakes shatters the quiet. A white Pontiac Grand Prix jumps the curb, the chassis bottoming against the concrete.
 Americo groans. Shakey Manzo and his 17-year-old kid brother Boy-Boy, roar up to the pumps, radio blasting "Sherry" by the Four Seasons. Boy-Boy is at the wheel, jittery Amerco would bet, with amphetamines.
“Yo! Melanzani!"
He bangs the outside of the door with his fist. "Yous jigabos wanna go for registrations?”
“No way!” Marty grins. “You white boys too fast.”
Freddie gets up and pumps the gas. When he reaches over to wipe the windshield, Boy-Boy floors the car. Freddie jumps back, barely avoids being thrown over the hood. The driver's side mirror catches his elbow, hard. The Pontiac fishtails crazily across Third Avenue and disappears
“Crazy motherfucker!” Marty shouts, the mock friendliness dropping like a mask. "Why am I paying off these guineas! This shit ain't 'posed to happen!"
How’s the Twister?” Americo manages. He can't think of anything else to say.
“Sherry baby my ass,” Marty growls.
Freddie walks back to his chair rubbing his elbow. He turns his face away from Americo.
The Twister, a ‘55 Chevy coupe tricked out with a 409 cubic inch engine, twin four-barrel Holley carburetors, Isky roller cams, and high-compression pistons, sat in a back bay of the garage. The car had fiberglass fenders and a chrome straight axle that jacked the front end up so preposterously high Freddie had to use a stool to climb in and out. Americo loved that stool, loved the Chevy and its grey suit of primer far more than the Electra 225s and Continentals that gleamed like Christmas tinsel outside Monte's.
He associated the Twister with freedom, with beach boys and surfer girls, with California—a candy apple culture that he could glimpse darkly through the screen of his television, that reverberated over the airwaves, a New World Americo could not comprehend, yet believed in, and lusted after. He walked into the garage, grabbed a rag and began polishing the engine’s chromed air cleaners and valve covers, then spotted the phone on the wall.
He dialed Sally’s number, HY9-9870.

Continued

Easter on the Gowanus Canal 1960

My brothers and I would get new suits my mother Gloria would purchase "on time" at the Mays' Department Store on Fulton Street. Abraham & Strauss was far beyond her reach.  On the corner of Third Avenue and Carroll Street, hundreds of lilies and  and beribboned potted plants would magically appear for sale, for our moms and equally important, our grandparents in Holy Cross cemetery. We'd visit them after church in my dad's 1956 green on green Coupe de Ville, as if they were still part of the family.
The same bookies and loan sharks--Jerry Lang, the Goose, Michael  Romanelli--who would bleed the neighborhood during the week, now sold us bright flowers on Easter.
My father, the bull-necked longshoreman, would hand each of his four sons chocolate bunnies and Easter eggs, then retreat to our tiny kitchen with my mom to prepare the afternoon feast. They'd create magnificent seven-course meals with one decent knife and a few pots and pan. Strangely enough, my father was the more delicate cook, lavishing endless time stuffing a mushroom, an artichoke, on sprinkling just the right amount of oregano on a baked clam. His antipasto was a work of art, so good, most people forgot there were six more courses ahead..
My brother Thomas, the animal lover, would invariably show up with a duckling or rabbit. He set up food and water and straw bedding for his pets. In a day or two, the "water rats" that surged from the canal would slaughter the hapless creatures, often without a trace.
Relatives would show up all morning carrying string-tied boxes of pastries from Cioffi's on Union near Columbia Street. The lines would be out the door. Smart folks would go while mass was in session to beat most of the crowds. A canolli cost 20 cents. Cioffi's was rumored to be the place that Sinatra ordered his pastry when he was in NYC...I thought that was pretty cool. Now I suspect Arthur Avenue, Little Italy and Bensonhurst all boasted Sinatra's favorite pastry store.
After dinner, I'd watch traffic on Third Avenue, making for Atlantic Avenue and the Brooklyn Bridge. Manhattan might have been another world....

Decatur, Alabama. I'm the guy with the curly black hair. Whenever I see the hype about the threat of the tea parties, I remind myself that things once seem a lot hairer, and the country still moved forward. Then the media was not a 24 X 7 echo chamber, functioning to exaggerate and hype rather than providing context and clarity.