A Rising Tide Sinks All

No one in New York City gave a damn about the Gowanus Canal for 50 years, even as my old neighborhood was devastated by a host of bizarre cancers and other illnesses. Now, with the arrival of a new species of speculator and upbeat urban shit-ologist, the thumbnail-long Gowanus gets more notice than the Amazon River. The question this morning is whether Hurricane Sandy will raise a plague of boils and frogs along the quayside--including Carroll Street where I grew up. Here's the answer: Incomprehensible as it seems, the canal was a luxuriant stream in pre-Revolutionary War Brooklyn. Industrialization in the 19th Century transformed the tidal creek and its oyster beds and dredged the Gowanus. Then came an era of leaking oil and coal barges, dumped chemical wastes and the occasional mafia hit. Nonetheless, the area from Bond Street to Fourth Avenue is still a flood plain, hence all the banging and pile-driving for the new Whole Foods on Third Avenue and Third Street. (see http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/05/fly-fishing-on-gowanus-canal-part-i.html )
When the tide rises, all the basements will flood with every manner of pollutant and carcinogen. My Grandmother Clementina's house stood on the corner of Nevins and Carroll. I remember my uncles Sonny and Tony having to plunge into four feet of shit and oil in the cellar to clear the drains after a heavy rain. After a lifetime of this, my mom and six of her seven brothers and sisters all developed and died of cancer. The bigger question: What will the much ballyhooed EPA clean-up of this newest Superfund site unleash?

Gowanus Crossing Reboot

 

Gowanus Crossing is a memoir of a life lived along Brooklyn's infamous Gowanus Canal. I grew up on Carroll Street across from Monte's Venetian Room, at the time a landmark red sauce restaurant that drew a never-ending mix of politicans, gangsters and celebrities--I fought viciously over a handful of change Tony Bennett scattered on the sidewalk one night. Monte's, half-a-block from the polluted canal, was the heart of an Italian enclave of dockworkers and shopkeepers emigrated from Salerno Province. Al Capone was born on Garfield Place, two blocks from my house. My world was shaped by the Irish nuns of Our Lady of Peace parish who saw themselves as missionaries and the Italians, vulgarians to be driven down the path to Salvation; counterbalanced by glittering mafiosi who represented wealth, success and stability in a chaotic world. No teenage boy could want better role models (nothing was forbidden); no adult worse. Gowanus Crossing is not another half-assed wise guy saga, or a story of escape from a destructive environment. Its what I find locked in my  heart all these years later. Part of me loved this world: the writer inside could embellish and lie and live in my head, burying the violence, cruelty and waste in the drama of it all; the innocent boy could not. I left South Brookyn in my twenties before the canal became a fashionable destination, and my family destroyed, but South Brooklyn never left me. Will not leave me. What follows in the 2012 blog posts is how it all came flooding back:

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 us who’d grown-up near the stream would be dead or dying of an epidemic of cancers and birth defects long after we'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.

My Friend Ray Sharkey, Fallen Idol

“No more than a wisp of dust”

Ray Sharkey was the guy who got away…who fled the desolation that dragged so many of us into early graves. He ran but could not escape the plague within. The Ray I remember was half-Irish, with a long nose, sparkling eyes, pockmarked skin and voice like a rasp. He grew up in a row house on the dark side of the Gowanus in the shadow of the decaying Expressway near the Battery Tunnel. His father, a doorman, slipped out when Ray was five. His mother pampered him; his nonna sang to him in Italian. You can see shards of his Brooklyn childhood, glittering and brittle, in Taylor Hackford’s film, The Idolmaker.

Mornings, Ray and I would walk together up Union Street to all-boys St. Augustine High School on Park Place. Walked past the stoop where a Tuinal-enraged distant relative named “Boy-Boy” stabbed a Puerto Rican to death for playing a guitar. Heads back, shoulders rolling, we strolled, wearing our purple and white letterman’s sweaters with the big “A” sewn above the pocket. Letters, earned not on the field, court or track, but for selling indulgences, a practice that triggered the Protestant Reformation. We pestered the dry, doddering, sinless Episcopalians who still dominated Park Slope into giving us cash money in return for prayers, unnumbered and at unknown intervals like Swiss bank accounts for their salvation.  A $100 —my father earned less in a week unloading ships on the Red Hook piers—and the Christian Brothers named you a “Centurion.”

In a neighborhood where everyone—from Angioletti, the singsong fruit peddler, to the gamblers on the corner—shouted like performers in some sidewalk opera, Ray was a loudmouth. Intense, histrionic, given to breaking out in a quavering doo-wop falsetto at a moment’s notice. He was a few years younger than I and best friends with my brother Joey. Summers, Ray, Joey and a short, curly-haired, granite-jawed football player named Raymond Brocco, would head to Brighton Beach, slather themselves with baby oil and iodine; smoke, ingest and inhale every combination of alcohol and pharmaceutical, and roast themselves unconscious on teeny towels while trying to pick up Jewish girls from Ocean Parkway. I can still smell the salt tang and the sand cool under my feet in the boardwalk’s shade.  No question, Ray was part of the frantic, gang-bang, romantic-violent Gowanus mix— lost boys like my cousins JuJu, Jimmy Psycho, Popeye Anthony and Richie Mel—but he hung back, absorbed and observed, mined and mastered all the pain and hurt.
Or so I thought.

I now know that flight never means escape, and transcendence is not forever. A madness still sings in my veins. Ray never finished high school, never became a Centurion. He caught a performance of Hair in Manhattan—an alien place we called “the City”—and surely as Saul of Tarsus, knew his place. He plunged into acting with my handsome and doomed brother Thomas, studying with Uta Hagen at HB Studio. Had he read his Chaucer at Saint Augustine, Ray might have recognized the revelers in the Pardoner’s Tale determined to triumph over Death…might have recognized that Death manifests in seductive guises.

On a Sunday afternoon in the spring of ‘73, Ray showed up driving a 356 Porsche—maybe one of the sports cars Anthony Lips stole and swapped VIN numbers from wrecks rusting in Stuckey’s Staten Island salvage yard. The gualiones ("wallyos"--in dialect) gathered outside Monte’s restaurant, scratched their crotches, threw make-believe punches, laughed, dug the car. Ray basked in the attention. With him, a long-haired, bellbottomed Puerto Rican Golden Gloves champ named Chu-Chu Malave. No Sancho Panza he. My mother served platters of ravioli, meatballs, braciole, sausage, roast chicken, salad, cannoli from Cioffi’s on Union near Columbia Street. Old Man Stuto’s homemade wine flowed. Ray entertained us.  He begged Joey to come along (“Fuckin’ California, man!”) but my brother was already passing into the limbo he’d inhabit the rest of his life. Mom warned Ray to “be a good boy.” He laughed his crazy laugh.
And roared away.

I didn’t see Ray Sharkey for ten years. My world had changed. Somehow, I'd graduated from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. In 1982, Newsweek dispatched me to Los Angeles to write a profile of this hot new movie star. My colleague, David Friendly, put me up in the Beverly Hills Hotel. Ray had just won the Golden Globe award as Best Motion Picture Actor and critics were raving over his searing portrayal of impresario Bob Marcucci, the man who loosed Fabian and Frankie Avalon upon the world. Pauline Kael called him “the next Jimmy Cagney.” I never knew Cagney or Marcucci, but I recognized Ray Sharkey, the Ray who ached for recognition and respect, who, if you looked closely, leaked desperation like a sieve. I smiled at the clotheslined backyards of Gowanus tenements trying to pass for South Philly. No question, Ray’s nod to the old neighborhood.

“Where’s your brother?” he shouted when I arrived. “These neighborhood guys…they got a stupid apartment…they got a car…they’re fucking some girl on the side. That’s all there is to life? Tell him to get out here! I’ll give him a job. He stays with me! No problem.” He closed his fist and thrust his thumb in the air like a guarantee.

His life was changed, but not transcended. The Idolmaker was a box office disappointment. Still, Ray was living on the beach in Malibu. He’d dated the Italian actress Ornella Muti, far and away the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. He was living with a very good-looking blonde. “Mienca, her family owns Kellogg’s cereal!” he confided when we were alone, shaking his open hand like it was on fire. “You believe that shit?” He rode motorcycles with Stallone and Gary Busey. He wore a stupid bandanna to cover his thinning hair.  In a few years, TV audiences would know him as Sonny Steelgrave in Wiseguy. He’d make appearances on Miami Vice…on Crime Story, dozens of shows and movies.  He was only 29-years-old. He had 10 years to live.

“Yo, come with me,” he said before I could start our interview. This would be a pattern over the next days, my deadline clock tick-tick-ticking away. We drove, we ate Fatburgers, he bought a VCR—I’d never seen one—and showed me tapes of his work. His characters tended to be named “Vinnie.” I liked that. He’d finished Some Kind of Hero, a film about dysfunctional former POWs, co-starring , of all people, Richard Pryor. A POW camp, real or imagined, is hardly a therapeutic environment “Madonna! we spent a lot of time getting into character,” Ray allowed.

For three days, he danced, he deflected, he feinted and fell back on the old dese and dose tough guy clichés.  I didn’t have the heart or maybe the skill to press him. I had one brother dying of AIDS, another a junkie, a third an out-of-control gambler with wise guys hot on his trail. I wasn’t making such smart life choices myself. Really, what could I ask?  His manager, Herb Nanas, only saw blue skies. Giuseppe, his hairstylist, pronounced Ray “tanned and fit.” Other sources didn’t bother to return my calls. To me, Hollywood is a very hard nut to crack, far harder than the Pentagon, Washington or Wall Street.  My story was put on hold, indefinitely.  

“I always knew I would fall—big time,” Ray once said. By 1991, it was big time. Like so many peers and family members who’d come of age in the streets along the Gowanus, and with so much at his fingertips, Ray Sharkey had become a full-blown heroin addict. Not coke like everyone else in Hollywood. Heroin, straight out of the gutters and shooting galleries of Red Hook. Strung-out, trailing a string of arrests, ODs, car wrecks, failed rehabs, lies, lurid gossip, destroyed marriages. He burned through a million dollars that year, got busted in Vancouver and fired from an acting gig, the unforgivable sin a business willing to look every other way as long as you put asses in the seats. The impenetrable shield Hollywood extends over its own was cracking.

Ray wasn’t done yet. It was the Age of AIDS, not Aquarius. And Sharkey was an IV drug user. When an actress named Elena Monica, daughter of the comedian, Corbett Monica, filed an all-too-public lawsuit accusing Sharkey—who’d mysteriously had lost 40 lbs.—of infecting her with the AIDS virus in the course of a brief relationship, he had nowhere else to run. To his shame, he stayed in denial to the end—he could barely stand when Monica showed up to confront him--even after his manager revealed the truth. Shortly after, Ray returned to Brooklyn to die with his mother. Tough as nails, Cecelia shielded him to the very end. He passed away on June 11, 1993. Witnesses remember him as no more than “a wisp of dust.”

I was reminded of Ray Sharkey in the summer of 2012 when I’d volunteered to write the narration for a documentary being shot in Atlanta. The Narrator turned out to be Tovah Feldshuh who'd played Ray Sharkey’s love interest in his breakthrough film, The Idolmaker, thirty years before. Tovah is quite lovely and has had both a good life and a successful career, most recently the star of Golda’s Balcony, the longest running one-woman play in Broadway history. Of course, we talked about Ray. Tovah was one of those good-looking, well-bred Jewish girls Sharkey would have loved to seduce.

And I wondered once again why our lives insist on unfolding the way they do. Tovah is happily married, with a husband and grown children. She lives on Central Park West and grew up in affluent Scarsdale. Ray and I by the pestilent Gowanus, a Superfund site. Her father was an attorney. Ray’s absentee father a doorman; mine a dockworker given to violent rages. Is it destiny, nurture, nature (a chaos gene that selects for creativity and torment)? Or the fact we lived in a self-contained, through-the-looking-glass world where teachers, police, clergy, and other authority figues were corrupt or uncaring...and mafia guys our role models? It's all beyond my ken, save for the ache I feel when I remember Ray as he once was. As my brothers once were.  For all his brilliance—and there is no question that Ray was brilliant— Sharkey sleeps in a lonely grave in a forgotten town on Long Island.

Best of Gowanus Crossing  2012


http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/03/union-busting-for-mob.html

http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/04/my-cousin-richie.html

 http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/05/losing-mom.html

http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/05/lonesome-death-of-louie-fag.html

http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/05/fly-fishing-on-gowanus-canal-part-i.html

http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/08/wounds-that-will-not-heal-parts-i-ii.html

http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/02/garden-of-unearlhly-delights.html

Wounds That Will Not Heal Parts I & II

I was 14 when I wrote my first story, “A Battered War Helmet.” I spent days working on it on the scarred kitchen table of our three room apartment, ignoring the squeals of my kid brothers, the blare of the Mouseketeers, praying I’d be spared one of my father’s violent squalls. I wrote in ballpoint, on loose-leaf paper, inspired mostly by a John Wayne movie, Sands of Iwo Jima, that moved me to tears. I handed it in to Sister Mary Malachy and awaited her response.  Then waited some more
At Our Lady of Peace School, Malachy encouraged her pets, Salvatore Mulia, Dominick D’Alessio and Rosalie, Dilorenzo, to attend academically strong Catholic high schools. As for me, she predicted I’d make “headlines.” Not in the scholarly, Wall Street or humanitarian way teachers hope for, but mad-dog criminal, Richard Speck, “Headless Body in Topless Bar”—style headlines from the New York Post and Daily News.  On a street swarming with guys like “Honey” Christiano, Hugh “Apples” McIntosh,  (see http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/03/union-busting-for-mob.html), Carmine “The Snake,” “Andrew Mush”  “Slush,”  “Jimmy the Morgue” “Jerry Half-and-Half” (so handsome he had to be “half” gay); a neighborhood where someone shouted, “There’s a dead nigger floating in the canal!” and two dozen of us rushed down Carroll Street as if a manatee had surfaced, such “headlines” were beyond my reach.
So I studied, hiking up to the public library on 6th Avenue and Eight St. to sit surrounded by goofballs in black framed eyeglasses and the occasional pervert), and try to read. I read all the paperbacks on the rack at the newsstand at Fourth Ave. and Union Street, convinced sci-fi, bodice-rippers and lurid tales of the Mau-Mau rebellion were high art. I read milk containers, match book covers, comic books.
In those days, you were admitted to a Catholic high school by taking the “Cooperative Test,” a kind of 8th grade SAT measuring language, reasoning and math skills. You marked your “top five” school choices on the application, and depending on your scores, you’d be accepted or rejected.  Making three schools was outstanding, four fantastic. No one made five.
I didn’t have much of a fallback. Manual Training (as in manual labor), our neighborhood public high school (since renamed John Jay H.S.), was infested by gangs, a fast track to a career as a garbage man, or denizen of Riker’s Island. In fact, I was a legacy student: JuJu, my cousin Richie’s older brother (http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/04/my-cousin-richie.html ), had famously pushed a piano out the window of the second story music room. 
I took the Cooperative Test on a Saturday, needle-sharp No. 2 pencils in hand, careful to keep my answers to the multiple choice questions within the little circles.  Over the next weeks, I’d race home for lunch where Gloria, my mom, would invariably serve me and my brothers, Joey and Thomas, pork and beans and fried eggs, sopped up with Gallo’s Italian bread delivered piping hot to our door for 15 cents a loaf.
“Ma, the mailman come?”
“Yes.”
“Any mail?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“Jesus.”
“Mom! It’s important.”
Our mailman was a black guy, nicknamed “Brownie.” He lived within the magic circle of the neighborhood. If you dared mess with Brownie—no one dared—the guys hanging outside the Capri Club would pound you to pulp. Brownie was an exceptional mailman: he managed not to deliver overdue bills, rent, car payments and mortgage notices—marking them “Return to Sender.” At Christmas, he’d reap enormous cash bonuses. One morning, word spread through Our Lady of Peace that the Cooperative Test results were in. I raced home dodging Butchie the Fag, the patrol boy who worked the corner of Third Ave. and Carroll Street, dodging trucks and tractor trailers en route to the Second Ave. piers. I ducked down the three concrete steps to our basement apartment, shouldered the hollow plywood front door like Sam Huff, sent the red ribbon of sleigh bells we used as a doorbell, jangling.
Gloria was standing there, a sheaf of letters in her hand. There were five—St. Augustine, Bishop Loughlin, Xaverian, Power Memorial and St. Francis Prep, typed and sealed in starch-white envelopes, the first grown-up mail I’d ever gotten. St. Francis Prep processed strapping Irish boys into Notre Dame football behemoths; Power Memorial had recruited Lew Alcindor, later Kareem Abdul Jabbar; Bishop Loughlin was honing the heart and mind of Rudy Giuliani, the diminutive, hyper-driven son of a one-time Brooklyn criminal; La Salle, a Jesuit military academy in the heart of Manhattan, educated Antonin Scalia. La Salle’s “7th Ave. Subway Commandos” would soon fatten the rolls in Vietnam. St. Augustine pounded the gifted poor into Latin scholars and over achievers.
I mumbled a prayer and tore them open. Five schools.  I’d made all five schools.
I stumbled back outside. Gloria wrapped her arms around me. “I’m so proud!” She was 38-years-old and loved her sons more than life. “Your father called this morning. He’s bragging to all the men in the gang.” I looked down. Tommy and Joey were clinging to my legs. We spun round and round on the sidewalk.
 “Five schools!”
Fat Rosie and Baby Chick lumbered across Carroll Street. The cousins spent their mornings sitting outside crocheting hats; their afternoon’s running numbers. They pounded and kissed me, smearing white lipstick on my cheek. Baby Chick, flowered mu-mu billowing like a sail, took my hand, stuck a $10 bill into my palm. “I’m glad somebody in this neighborhood ain’t a fucking moron!”
I couldn’t eat lunch.  Ernie was standing next to Honey outside Monte’s.
“How did you do?
“I made St. Leonard’s!”
 “Watch them fag priests!” said Honey. “How’d you do?”
“I made…five.” 
“Whoa!”
He peeled two twenties off a roll of bills. He handed them to us. “Congratulations. Yous two’ll get an education. Yous won’t have to break your ass every day like me.” Ernie pumped his closed fist three times. Honey laughed, amused at his own bullshit. He pretend-slapped both of us.
****
A line of students wavered outside the convent on Whitwell Place. Malachy was eating her lunch on the convent’s brick porch, congratulating eighth-graders as they came by. We joined the line. Sal was already on the porch. Behind him were Kathleen Victor and Dominick D’Alessio.
“I bet you did great.”
Jean Wilcox appeared behind me, smiling.  She was tall as I was with blue eyes and wavy brown hair. I noticed the top two buttons of her uniform blouse were undone.
“He made all five schools!” Ernie blurted.
“Wow!” said Jenny. “Cool!”
 I blushed.
“Give him a kiss!” giggled Ernie.
And she did. She walked right up to me in front of the line of students, put her hand around my neck and pulled me close.
“You’re special,” she whispered.
I had never kissed, never touched a girl, had never known the perfume of an adolescent female. I stood there, experiencing and trying to remember it, at the same time. The freckled Henry twins, Carolyn and Carol Ann, wolf-whistled. Malachy looked up and frowned. I stepped onto the porch Sal Mulia, Rosalie Dilorenzo and Kathleen Victor were standing around like courtiers.
The nun was eating baked fish, boiled potatoes and slices of  a purple-red vegetable I’d never seen before.
“Ernest, for your poor mother’s sake,” Malachy said, “I hope some Christian school was willing to take on the burden of your education”
“St. Leonard’s!” said Ernie.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” said Malachy. “A miracle.”
A short-lived miracle. Ernie would be thrown out of St. Leonard’s a year later for vandalizing a subway car. A 260 lb. leviathan wearing the distinctive green and yellow St. Leonard’s jacket was not hard to finger.
Malachy turned to me. I caught a whiff of her, pissy and sour beneath the starched brown habit, her breath rank with onions and fish.
“Kathleen Victor, Mr. Mulia and Rosalie Dilorenzo were accepted by four high schools. Aren’t you proud of them? Do you see the rewards hard work can bring?” Sal grinned, clasping his hands above his head like a prize fighter.
“I made five,” I said. “St. Augustine too. I’m gonna go there.”
Startled, Sal hesitated, then walked up, put his right hand behind my neck, shoved me affectionately.“All right!” he said.
“Good job Vinny.” This from Kathleen.
 I had  a little speech prepared, thanking  Malachy for being my teacher…how she was  “tough but  fair….” I opened my mouth. The nun put down her fork, shot a glance at Jean Wilcox and the Henry wins standing at the edge of the porch.
“You don’t deserve it Coppola,” she said. “I know you for the sneak and the cheat that you are.”
I flinched.
“Sister!” Kathleen gasped.
I stood there, staring down at the table. A fly made its way across the checkered tablecloth.
“Excuse me.”
I turned. Jean stood at the top of the porch steps. I brushed past her, tripped on the steps, caught myself, began running, daring my ravaged heart to explode in my chest. Block after block I ran, slowing only when I crossed the Third Street Bridge over Gowanus Canal.
By then I was in another neighborhood.
***
Part II
Time passed. I was 14. I still believed in the cascading prayers we recited each morning, “…the forgiveness of sins…the resurrection of the body… life everlasting…” Miracles, martyrs, saints, torment. (I couldn't shake the image--depicted in graphic detail in our Catechisms--of Isaac Jogues, having his fingernails torn off by pagan Mohawks.) I still longed, in the words of the Nelson Eddy song my mother sang to me when I was a little boy, to be a “stout-hearted man.”
Mornings, from my dunce’s seat in the back of the class, I waited for Malachy to appear lugging her brass-buckled black leather schoolbag, eager for the telltale bulge of marked papers. And one morning, it was there. Time crawled… catechism…math…rote vocabulary drills (they’d propel me through the SATs, GREs, into the Ivy League), the rosary and its myriad unfathomable mysteries (http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/05/fly-fishing-on-gowanus-canal-part-i.html). It was nearly lunchtime when Malachy reached into her bag and pulled out the sheaf of papers. I giggled at the chicken pox smear that was somebody else’s essay.
 “I have your personified autobiographies,” she began. (Personified autobiography, a phrase from a world far beyond the Gowanus Canal.
“Some students worked hard and turned excellent papers. “The rest of you, the vulgarians,” she looked up balefully, “handed in stuff and nonsense. You know who you are.”

 I sat on the edge of my seat as she handed out what had to be “A” papers:  “Cireno, Cucciaro…. D’Alessio, Dilorenzo…”
Whoa! What about Coppo...
 “Mancuso, Mulia, Victor.”  And then the “B’s” and “C’s: “Di Pippo, Garrison, Henry, Palermo, Perez, Sessa, Wilcox.” I tried an encouraging smilke at Jean; she must have missed it. 
When Malachy got to the donkeys, “…. Bacotti, Benevento, Bashinelli, Paulino, Prosciutto, Romano, Viscardi…” I knew something was dramatically wrong.
 She handed Ernie Palmieri his paper with a nod of approval. Tall, dark, green-eyed, already an industrious guy, he'd emigrated from Italy with his parents, brothers and sisters. He was working in a pork store, a salumeria, on Fifth Ave. between Carroll and President Streets where the fragrance of  Parmigiano Reggiano, olives and cheese and parsley sausage wafted out onto the sidewalk
Ernie, who sat next to me by the radiator, grinned, waggled his hand, pinching thumb and forefinger together as if to say, “This American stuff, no problem!”
Then it hit me: Best for last! Malachy was saving the best paper, my “Battered War Helmet” for the finale, the piece de resistance had I known the phrase.  I’d worked on it for days, rewritten it so many times, I choked up when I read it, always a good sign.
 “Coppola, up here.”
 “Yes Sister!”
I bolted out of my seat, John Wayne charging up Mount Suribachi, all previous injustice forgotten.
She was standing alongside her oak desk, holding my story. The fluorescent light glinting off her rimless glasses rendered her pale eyes opaque.
Grinning, I held my hand out, half-turning to face the class, so I  never saw it coming. A sweeping right cross that knocked me against the blackboard. The billowing sleeves of her brown Franciscan habit flying, she pounced on me with a flurry of slaps I was too stunned to parry. To my shame, tears sprung from my eyes. In front of the entire class.
"Sister....?"
“This!” she roared to my stunned classmates, “is what happens to plagiarists!”
I didn't even know the word.
 I was 14 when I wrote that first story. I never wrote another until I was 28.
***
Years later, when the world had changed and I was yet to realize how childhood dreams can be both substantial and ephemeral, I encountered Ernie Palmieri in Washington, D.C.
I was a Newsweek reporter, staying at a fancy hotel, working on a story about women Vietnam vets. He was a name on the Wall.  Etched on Panel 13 E, Line 23 of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a helicopter crew chief killed on a rescue mission near Bien Hoa. http://rattler-firebird.org/vietnam/remembered/Ernest-Palmieri.html Ernie was 20 when he died. Today, his death is noted on the Internet for an uncaring world to ignore (even his battle buddies will soon be old men).  And the pain of seeing him this way carries me back yet again to the crucible that was a parochial school classroom. Ernie died on December 8, 1966. Sister Mary Malachy would have noted it was the feast of the Immaculate Conception. Ernie was wrong about the American stuff, another well meaning, innocent kid cast upon the Gowanus Canal's fatal shore.

Wounds That Will Not Heal Part I

I was 14 when I wrote my first story, “A Battered War Helmet.” I spent days working on it on the scarred kitchen table of our three room apartment, ignoring the squeals of my kid brothers, the blare of the Mouseketeers, praying I’d be spared one of my father’s violent squalls. I wrote in ballpoint, on loose-leaf paper, inspired mostly by a John Wayne movie, Sands of Iwo Jima, that moved me to tears. I handed it in to Sister Mary Malachy and awaited her response.  Then waited some more...

At Our Lady of Peace School, Malachy encouraged her pets, Salvatore Mulia, Kathleen Victor, Dominick D’Alessio and Rosalie, Dilorenzo, to attend academically strong Catholic high schools. As for me, she predicted I’d make “headlines.” Not in the scholarly, corporate or humanitarian way teachers hope for, but mad-dog, criminal, Richard Speck, “Headless Body in Topless Bar”—style headlines familiar from the New York Post and Daily News. On a street swarming with guys like “Honey” Christiano, “Apples” McIntosh,  (see http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/03/union-busting-for-mob.html), Carmine “The Snake,” “Andrew Mush”  “Slush,”  “Jimmy the Morgue” “Jerry Half-and-Half” (so handsome he had to be “half” gay), a neighborhood where someone shouted, “There’s a dead nigger floating in the canal!” and two dozen of us rushed down Carroll Street as if a manatee had surfaced, such “headlines” were beyond my reach.
So I studied, hiking up to the public library on 6th Avenue and Eight Street. I'd sit surrounded by goofballs in black framed eyeglasses and the occasional pervert, and try to read. I read all the paperbacks on the rack at the newsstand at Fourth Ave. and Union Street, convinced sci-fi, bodice-rippers and lurid tales of the Mau-Mau rebellion were high art. I read milk containers, match book covers, comic books.
In those days, you were admitted to a Catholic high school by taking the “Cooperative Test,” a kind of 8th grade SAT measuring language, reasoning and math skills. You marked your “top five” school choices on the application, and, depending on your scores, (and maybe whom you knew) you’d be accepted or rejected.  Making three schools was outstanding, four fantastic. No one made five.
I didn’t have much of a fallback. Manual Training (think manual labor), our local public high school (since renamed John Jay), was infested by gangs, and a fast track to a career as a garbage man, or denizen of Riker’s Island. In fact, I was a legacy student: JuJu, my cousin Richie’s older brother (http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/04/my-cousin-richie.html ), had famously pushed a piano out the window of the second story music room.
 
I took the Cooperative Test on a Saturday, needle-sharp No. 2 pencils in hand, careful to keep my answers to the multiple choice questions within the little circles.  Over the next weeks, I’d race home for lunch where Gloria, my mom, would invariably serve me and my brothers, Joey and Thomas, pork and beans and fried eggs, and Johnny Gallo’s Italian bread delivered fresh-baked to our door for 15 cents a loaf.
“Ma, the mailman come?”
“Yes.”
“Any mail?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“Jesus.”
“Mom! It’s important.”
Our mailman was a black guy nicknamed “Brownie.” He lived within the magic circle of the neighborhood. If you dared mess with Brownie—no one did—the wise guys hanging outside the Capri Club would pound you to pulp. Brownie was an exceptional mailman: he managed not to deliver overdue bills, rent, car payments and mortgage notices—marking them “Return to Sender.” At Christmas, he’d reap serious cash bonuses.
One morning, word spread through Our Lady of Peace that the Cooperative Test results were in. I raced home dodging Butchie the Fag, the patrol boy who worked the corner of Third Ave. and Carroll Street, barely avoiding trucks and tractor trailers rumbling toward the Second Ave. piers. I ducked down the three concrete steps to our basement apartment, shouldered the hollow plywood front door like Sam Huff, sent the red ribbon of sleigh bells we used as a doorbell, jangling.
Gloria was standing there grinning, a sheaf of letters in her hand. There were five—St. Augustine, Bishop Loughlin, Xaverian, Power Memorial and St. Francis Prep, typed and sealed in starch-white envelopes, the first grown-up mail I’d ever gotten. St. Francis Prep processed strapping Irish boys into Notre Dame football behemoths; Power Memorial had recruited Lew Alcindor, later Kareem Abdul Jabbar; Bishop Loughlin was honing the heart and mind of Rudy Giuliani, the diminutive, hyper-driven son of a one-time Brooklyn criminal; La Salle, a Jesuit military academy in the heart of Manhattan, educated Antonin Scalia. La Salle’s “7th Ave. Subway Commandos” would soon fatten the rolls of KIA in Vietnam. St. Augustine pounded the gifted poor into Latin scholars and overachievers. Governor Hugh Carey was an Augustine grad.
I mumbled a fake prayer and tore them open.
Five schools.  I’d made all five schools.
I stumbled back outside. Gloria followed, wrapping her arms around me.
“I’m so proud!”
 She was 38-years-old and loved her sons more than life. “Your father called this morning. He’s bragging to all the men in the gang.”
"How....?"
 I looked down. Tommy and Joey were clinging to my legs. We spun round and round on the sidewalk.
 “Five schools!”
Fat Rosie and Baby Chick lumbered across Carroll Street. The cousins spent their mornings sitting outside crocheting hats; their afternoons running numbers. They pounded and kissed me, smearing white lipstick on my cheek. Baby Chick, flowered mu-mu billowing like a sail, took my hand, stuck a $10 bill into my palm. “I’m glad somebody in this neighborhood ain’t a fucking moron!”
I couldn’t eat lunch. Down the street, Ernie was standing next to Honey outside Monte’s Venetian Room.
“How did you do?
“I made St. Leonard’s!”
"Good for you."
 “Watch them fag priests!” said Honey. “How’d you do?”
“I made…five.” 
“Whoa!”
He peeled two twenties off a roll of bills. He handed them to us. “Congratulations. Yous two’ll get an education. Yous won’t have to break your ass every day like me.”
Ernie pumped his closed fist three times. Honey laughed, amused at his own bullshit. He pretend-slapped both of us.
****
A line of students wavered outside the convent on Whitwell Place. Malachy was eating her lunch on the brick porch, congratulating eighth-graders as they came by. We joined the line. Sal was already on the porch. Behind him were Kathleen Victor and Rosalie.
“I bet you did great.”
Jean Wilcox appeared behind me, smiling.  She was tall as I was with blue eyes and wavy brown hair. I noticed the top two buttons of her uniform blouse were undone.
“He made all five schools!” Ernie blurted.
“Wow!” said Jean. “Cool!”
 I blushed.
“Give him a kiss!” giggled Ernie.
And she did. She walked right up to me in front of the line of students, put her hand around my neck and pulled me close.
“You’re special,” she whispered.
I had never kissed, never touched a girl, had never known the intoxicating perfume of adolescence. I stood there, experiencing and trying to remember it, at the same time. The freckled Henry twins, Carolyn and Carol Ann, wolf-whistled. Malachy looked up and frowned. I stepped onto the porch. Sal, Rosalie Dilorenzo and Kathleen were standing around like courtiers.
The nun was eating baked fish, boiled potatoes and slices of  a purple-red vegetable I’d never seen before.
“Ernest, for your poor mother’s sake,” Malachy said, “I hope some Christian school was willing to take on the burden of your education”
“St. Leonard’s!” said Ernie.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” said Malachy. “A miracle.”
A short-lived miracle. Ernie would be thrown out of St. Leonard’s a year later for vandalizing a subway car. A 260 lb. leviathan wearing the distinctive green and yellow St. Leonard’s jacket was not hard to finger.
Malachy turned to me. I caught a whiff of her, pissy and sour beneath the starched brown habit, her breath rank with onions and fish.
“Kathleen Victor, Mr. Mulia and Rosalie Dilorenzo were accepted by four high schools. Aren’t you proud of them? Do you see the rewards hard work can bring?”
Sal grinned, clasping his hands above his head like a prize fighter.
“I made five,” I said. “St. Augustine too. I’m gonna go there.”
Startled, Sal hesitated, then walked up, put his right hand behind my neck, shoved me affectionately.
“All right!” he said.
“Good job Vinny.” This from Kathleen.
 I had  a little speech prepared, thanking  Malachy for being my teacher…how she was “tough but  fair….” I opened my mouth. The nun put down her fork, shot a malevolent glance at Jean Wilcox and the Henry twins standing at the edge of the porch.
“You don’t deserve it Coppola,” she said. “I know you for the sneak and the cheat that you are.”
I flinched.
“Sister!” Kathleen gasped.
I stood, staring down at the table. A fly made its way across the checkered tablecloth.
“Excuse me.”
I turned. Jean stood at the top of the steps. I brushed past her, tripped, caught myself, began running, daring my ravaged heart to explode in my chest. Block after block I ran, slowing only when I crossed the Third Street Bridge over Gowanus Canal.
By then I was in another neighborhood.
(to be continued)

Fly-Fishing on the Gowanus (Conclusion)

We dart between a row of parked cars, then head for the Carroll Street Bridge, a rare and decaying architectural jewel. Twenty yards from the water, it hits you, a wretched blend of raw sewage, chemical spills, oil from sunken barges and abandoned cars, garbage, feces, grease, bloated carcasses of dead dogs floating in and out on the tide.
How bad does it stink? In the 1960s, you could drive a car at speed down Carroll Street from Hoyt, accelerate, windows-closed, over the 100 foot-wide waterway—and gag.
We cut left alongside the John P. Carlson ink factory. On the bank, Sal and Rocco Cucchiaro are already stripping thin, whip-like branches from the sumac trees that somehow thrive on the canal bank. Short and dark-complexioned, Rocco’s mother dresses him like the accountant he'll never be: tweed overcoat, wool pants, polished shoes, white shirt stiff with starch, blue tie held in place by a fake pearl.
I pull my rod from the weeds. A McCrory’s five-and-dime reproduction of the ones I see in Field and Stream. (I sense a larger world out there that I desperately want to be part of so I cultivate mail-order hobbies: stamp and coin collections, a rock collection (mostly shards of industrial glass and brick fragments I mistake for quartz and feldspar, bright chemical crystals scavenged from the Golten Marine Company’s abandoned plant near the canal. Red plastic rockets powered by compressed air and water, obviously designed for kids with cornfields. I wait a month for them to arrive in the mail; one launch and the thing disappears over the rooftops.
 I tie on a sinker and outsized hook. "High tide. Fishing’s gonna be good."
"Sunday morning's the best," adds Ernie.
Sal finishes stripping his branch and runs to the 10-foot diameter stone culvert that carries waste from our toilets and sewers directly into the water. (In 2010, the EPA declares the canal a Superfund site. By then, my mom, her three sisters and two of her brothers are dead of cancer. (See http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/05/losing-mom.html) He reaches down and begins trolling. Rocco picks a spot alongside a half-sunken barge smeared with oil and grease. Ernie elbows in front of him
"Thanks for helping me…You jerk!”
"Swear to God,” Sal mumbles. “I don’t know the stupid mystery!”
"`Swear to God,’" I mince. "Some friend."
"Screw you."
"Got one!" This from Rocco.
"That’s mines!" says Ernie. “Slippery bastids!"
Rocco hauls an eight-inch condom from the water.
"All right!” Sal says. "Whitefish!"
Putrescent water splashes Rocco’s pants as he manipulates the dripping tube—reminds me of my father’s stuffed calamari—onto a tire. Seven fly-buzzed condoms, Tuesday’s catch, shrivel in the sun.
"I got two!" shouts Ernie lifting his branch from the water.
"Your mamma was busy!" Sal says.
I watch a dead cat float by in the water; wary of the outsized rats that scamper along the canal’s rotting banks and pylons. For the next ten minutes, we concentrate keen as fly fishermen on a Colorado stream. Finally, I spot a rubber discharged (“released”) from the culvert. I carefully pluck it out of the water. Sal is bent over examining the catch of the day. I circle. Ernie sees me, backs away. I put a finger to my lips, creep closer, closer, and lay the dripping thing on Sal's shoulder.
"Somebody I want you to meet…”
He looks up. Wha…?”
I throw down my fishing rod, dart away.
"Eccch! Sciafuso!" Ernie points.
"What!"
Sal whirls once, twice, a dog chasing its tail. The condom leaves a snail track on his coat. By then, I’m 30-feet away, giggling like an imbecile, running among the piles of concrete slag and bricks heading for a path that winds through a salvage yard and out onto Carroll Street.
Sal, a track star, throws his raincoat at Rocco. "My mother will kill me!"
I climb a towering mound of garbage, turn and give him the finger. "The First Sorrowful Mystery," I scream, “your fucked-up coat!"
I lose my footing, skitter down the other side. Scramble to my feet, duck behind another pile of trash, accelerate toward a hole in the fence maybe 100 feet away. I trip over a roll of discarded linoleum, almost regain my balance—there’s broken glass, rebar, cinderblocks scattered like a minefield—then fall hard in front of a mountain of blue metal drums piled along the fence.
“Ah!”
Instinctively, I burrow 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 my metal womb like a funeral knell. One o’clock. I crawl deeper, imagining a pirate cave formed by the rusting drums, instantly forgetting about school and rats and packs of feral dogs. I find myself in a small clearing surrounded by drums leaching powdery yellow crystals. I stand up; notice my grease-stained school pants. Ruined.
“Shit!”
A brown paper bag rests against one of the drums. Curious, I walk closer, reach down and pick up it up, disappointed at how light it feels. (Neighborhood junkies who burglarize Cambie’s Trucking and other canal-side companies often hide their swag in the lots that are our fiefdoms. Like Robin Hood, we steal from thieves, expropriating expensive handbags, perfume, shoes, for our mothers. One time, we find a Carrier air-conditioning unit still in its packing crate.) A pillowcase is stuffed inside the bag. I pull it out. Stained a dark, clotty red.
"Jesus!" I fling the bag away with both hands.
The October wind, heavy with salt from the harbor, cuts through my thin jacket. I sniffle, wipe my nose on my sleeve. Acrid smoke—truck tires constantly burning in Smoky Joe’s junkyard next door, chokes the air. I look up, see the sun reflected in the back windows of a tenement; remind myself I’m only 50 yards from my own yard. My mother Gloria is in the kitchen doing dishes, getting ready for supper. I walk over to the pilowcase, step on the edge, and kick. The bloody cloth unravels.
A chicken flies out.
“Ha!” A dry bark that surprises me.
I step 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.
"Ahhh!"
I turn and duck back through the tunnel of barrels, bile rising in my throat. I’m trying not to gag when Sal leaps on my back. I fall to the ground gasping, spinning wildly, legs pinwheeling. In a second, he’s kneeling on my chest, forcing my arms back.
"Stop!”
He’s holding a dried condom ready to rub in my face.
"Please stop!"
"Fucking baby cry.” Sal says relenting. “You ruined my coat…”
***
We crawl together into the clearing and stand over the thing. I want to pick the child up and cradle it in my forearm. Or tell myself I want to. Sal looks at me like I’m crazy. And I am. I feel the tiny body shudder, but I’m the one trembling.
"He was alive.”
Sal tries to cover it with the pillowcase. Fails.
"We don't say nothing to nobody. Right?”
"I don't know. This is...this is a sin."

A rock clangs against the steel drums. We both scream. A second stone lands at my feet. A moment later, Ernie squeezes into the clearing.
 “Ya two mamones!  What’d yous steal?”
He’s laughing, rubbing his right thumb across the tip of his forefinger, the Neapolitan sign for a thief. And then he sees.
“Aggh! The fuck is that?”
 He backs away, holding his hands in front of his face.
 “We found it.”
 “Sciefusos! It’s got germs. You’ll get sick…”
A stream of vomit, bits of Monte’s pasta and pastry visible, shoots out of Ernie’s mouth.
***
Ten minutes later, we walk out of the lot, chilled, smeared with grime, two hours late for school. The crazed Malachy no doubt waiting to torment me. She'd put chewing gum in girls' hair.  Spell "O-b-e-d-i-e-n-c-e on my knuckles with a thick oak pointer that whistled as it cut through the air.

Halfway up the block Ernie says:
"You know it belongs to somebody?”
“Whaddya mean?”
“Somebody got rid of it…on purpose.”
“Threw a baby away?”
He looks at us like we’re idiots. “It ain’t a baby.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s a…a fetal. My sister Lucille is in nursing school. I saw these pictures…”
“Of what?”
“A fetal. A baby that ain’t been born…taken out of a girl’s stomach.
“Get out of here!”
“What for?”
“Because the girl ain’t married or don’t want it or…”
“That’s murder.”
Ernie shoots me a furious look. “Don’t say that! It’s like a business…Yous could get us a lot of trouble. I ain’t kidding.”
 “Fuck the cops!”
 “I ain’t talking about cops you moron!”  
“What trouble?” I ask, glancing at Sal. “Over some little nigger baby?”
 “It ain’t a nigger!” Ernie shouts. “Yous know it ain’t a nigger!”

We did know, and I’d like to say it didn’t matter. Limbo mattered. (“A place where souls remain that cannot enter heaven.”) Limbo is located on the border of Hell, a fitting definition for the Gowanus. Baptism mattered. Extreme Unction mattered. Justice mattered. But as I was to learn, it's easy to lose your way and threaten those you love best in such headlong pursuit.

See: http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/05/fly-fishing-on-gowanus-canal-part-i.html

Fly-Fishing on the Gowanus Canal Part I

"In nomine Patris et Filio et Spiritu Sanctus."
"A-men."
Sister Mary Malachy crosses herself as she intones the prayer; thrusts her prognathous jaw forward, an Inquisitor ready to swoop down on the budding apostates in her charge. She tugs at the sleeve of her brown habit, taps the Timex watch on her thick wrist. Across her desk, 35 eighth graders shift to attention, ink-stained fingers reaching for rosaries.
She studies us—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 our frayed white shirts and clip-on ties, beneath the pleated skirts and Peter Pan collars, we 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 pleasure. Pain is another matter. She will spare no effort driving us 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, Jean W. inhales—her ripening breasts strain against her blouse—and announces the Second Sorrowful Mystery.
An aisle away, I hunch over my Catechism penciling a dove, the representation of the Holy Ghost, shitting on the head of Pope Pius XII. A feral creature, I sense a predator’s approach. I count heads.
"...Ten...eleven...twelve...shit!"
It’s my turn to proclaim the next mystery.
“The Third Sorrowful Mystery?” I mouth the question, prompting my brain to supply an answer. Nothing.
Ascensions. Assumptions. Redemptions.
Heaven sounds like a cheap furniture store. Mysteries swim in my head. Malachy will have me scrubbing the church basement, the labyrinth where Brother Masseo lurks among the broken statues of martyrs and serpents. Three more Hail Marys ratchet by. I crank my head left, cough, then whisper,
"What's the Third Mystery?"
"Ya mother's box,” Sal Mulia replies.
"Don't fool around!"
"Her canary."
Ernie Benevento snorts, the sound among the murmurs loud as a breaching whale. Malachy's wimpled head rotates. I duck, disappearing, I imagine, like Jonah into the belly of the Leviathan.
"Come on. Please!"
The nun fills the aisle between the rows of bolted-down desks. She advances, seeming to sniff the air. Sal hunches over his beads, a monk lost in divine rapture.
"Hail Mary full of grace...” A drone four seats in front of me.
“Shit!”
I squeeze my Italian rosary. A tiny window in the crucifix reveals a bone chip floating in holy water like a carpenter's level. I clench the holy bone.
"Please Jesus…I'll …" I hesitate “I won't….”
A vision of Jean blossoms in my head, plaid uniform skirt inching up, revealing her coltish thighs. I sigh, steady myself for the charge. Instinctively, my hand rises to the fading purple bruise under my left eye.
In the corner by the whistling radiators, Tommy “Cacasotte” Manzo stirs. The bolts holding his desk to the polished oak floor squeal in protest. Malachy looks at him, a creature unfazed by Salvation’s promise or Darwin's exigencies; a bag of guts, corruption and decay. Stained tie, frayed white shirt, grey work pants straining against his buttocks like sausage casing; a mockery of all that is pure, clean, Christ-like.
Father Mario 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.
A round oak pointer materializes in Malachy’s hand.
Tommy’s internal clock is chiming noon. He’ll feed at his mother Margherita’s (pronounced in our barbarous dialect, “Ma-ga-la’s”) Third Avenue diner, waddle home, root into his unmade bed. At 5:30 P.M., the Mouseketeers’ theme will stir him, no doubt, to masturbation. He raises his slobber-streaked face, squints, lolls his tongue at Jean, a willowy German stranded by the ebb tide of emigration out of South Brooklyn.
He lifts his ass and farts. A barrage, a lament from his bowels that derails the Holy Rosary and wreathes the classroom in silence. The fallout stops Malachy as she’s about to pull me from my seat. Rows of students surge forward, surfers riding a wave, coughing, pretend gagging, holding their throats. Shrieking, they sweep past me, past Malachy, out the front door.
The lunch bell clangs. I stand, lock eyes with her.
“The Third Sorrowful Mystery!” I shout slapping Sal’s still bowed head. “The Crowning With Thorns!”
I swivel right, dash forward and out the door. I fly down the metal steps, out the building, dodge Butchie the Fag, the patrol boy captain, and the thundering trucks on Third Avenue, race down Carroll Street past my house, past Jimmy the Morgue’s idling Buick Electra, past Monte’s and the Crusader Candle Company not stopping until gasping I reach the grey rail of the bridge crossing the Gowanus Canal. I feel the pale sun on my face.
    ****
In Monte’s, Sonny the Indian sips brown whiskey, watches me race down the sidewalk, feinting garbage cans, gangly body struggling to keep up with my brain.
He stares at the long mirror above the bar, lifts his chin. Whose face is it? What purpose the bunched muscles and tendons of the formidable jaw? The questions chase themselves behind his impassive eyes.
After a moment he grunts, “Whiskey.”
Fifteen minutes later, I walk back up Carroll Street. At the Grand Army Plaza Library, a Protestant woman with a face like parchment had shown me sketches depicting the Gowanus River in the 1600s, apple trees flourishing along its banks, Gowanus oysters renowned for their size and abundance. I’d described these wonders to Ernie and Sal.
"Go fuck yourself!" they shouted.
Engulfed in the cloud of sautéing garlic and simmering tomatoes emanating from Monte’s lunchtime rush, I float above the cobblestone street, imagining green and verdant hills rolling past  what is now Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill, to the Heights above the harbor. 17th Century ships at anchor bobbing in the sunlight at the foot of Wall Street.
Crack!
A slap off the back of my head ends my meditation. Honey and Ernie, his nephew, are standing in front of Monte's. Holding a thick Cuban cigar, Honey is grinning. Sonny is to his left, Easter Island in a leather trench coat.
“Daydreaming you mope?” says Honey.
 "What?"
“You hungry? Go inside. Red'll make you a sandwich.”
“No. I’m fasting.”
“It ain’t Lent. Think them cocksucker priests fast? Bullshit.”
“Fasting makes you think better. In India..”
“Sonny’s an Indian. He don’t fast.”
Sonny says nothing.
“What happened to your face? Your father go to work on you again?”
Uncomfortable, I look at Ernie. “You ready?"
“Yous better smarten up,” Honey warns. “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 Mirror. Don't forget like last time."
"I won’t. I promise." (I'm rich!)
"That Irish twat still giving yous trouble?"
"She hates us.”
"She hates Vinny ‘cause he's smart.”
"I ain’t smart!"
I tilt my head toward the bridge. We begin inching away.
“Where yous a going?" Honey jerks his finger toward Third Ave. "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.
"They got water rats this big. All kind a shit. Yous a ’gonna get rabies. Something happens, I'll give you the rest! Stay outta there!"
Shaky walks out of the restaurant, greasy pompadour afloat on his pockmarked face.
"Yo, you got a call. Carmine.”
“The fuck he want now?” Honey groans.
He and Sonny walk into Monte’s leaving Shaky standing there.
Ernie stage whispers. “Looks like a dog shit on his head.”
I giggle.
Shaky turns, shoots me a look. “Homo, whatta you looking at?”
 “Nothing. I ...”
“Jerk-offs, I’ll go to work on both of yous. You, you fat fuck, don’t think your uncle can stop me either.”
“We’re talking about school,” says Ernie. “Ever hear of it?”
Shaky pulls a wad of bills out of his pants pocket. “School is for jerk-offs.”
Ernie grabs his balls, “Fageddaboutit!”
(To be continued)

see: http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/05/fly-fishing-on-gowanus-conclusion.html

The Lonesome Death of Louie the Fag

 The car exploded, tires squealing, off the light at 6th Street and Third Avenue, racing parallel to the Gowanus Canal, flying over the bridge and past the light at Third Street, already accelerating past 50 mph. Most likely a supercar, a 396 Chevelle SS or Pontiac GTO—color and model blurred by velocity and the deafening roar of wide-open headers echoing off factory walls.

The driver, most likely escaped from the grimy Puerto Rican tenements on the far side of Hamilton Avenue, and doubtless animated—as I was—by poverty and rage and otherness, was racing toward the Williamsburg Bank, a phallic 37-story tombstone that loomed over South Brooklyn, its clock ticking our lives away. Approaching  Carroll Street, he would have been oblivious to the teeming sidewalks and crowded street corners shimmering in the heat, the little girls skipping rope on the cracked sidewalks. Certainly unaware of Louie the Fag who’d climbed wearily up the steps of the Union Street subway station, shrugged into a thin, black cotton jacket, and was walking along Fourth Avenue to President Street.

In the 1960s, ours was a community still trailing roots and tendrils plucked from the desolate triangle of crumbling villages southwest of Naples and deposited like weeds along the Gowanus’s pestilent banks: Nocera, Tramonti, Scafati, Pagani,  Eboli, a place so forlorn, legend has it, that Christ the Redeemer was stopped in his tracks.
Castellammare di Stabia was Al Capone’s ancestral home, but Capone, despite the Chicago pedigree, was born in Brooklyn, at 38 Garfield Place, two blocks from my house. For some reason I was very proud of this fact. And the bullet holes in the doorway of a long-shuttered bar on 4th Avenue where Frank ("Frankie Shots") Abbatemarco was...shot.
My Coppola and Falcone grandparents immigrated from Pagani; Al Pagano ran the local hardware store, keeping nails in wooden barrels sold by the pennyweight. Thirty first cousins lived within three blocks of my house. The Giordanos, my mother’s family, served Sunday dinner—spaghetti, meatballs, sausage, braciole, veal Parmigiana, the whole red sauce parade—on a long table on the sidewalk at the corner of Nevins and Carroll. I could practically ask the driver of an idling car to pass me some meatballs. Homemade wine, sweetened with peaches, was provided courtesy of old man Stuto for $3.00 a gallon.
After half-a-century in Brooklyn, the old extended families—Russo, Persico, Giordano, Lauro, Stuto, Barbella, Montemarano, Manzo, were so intertwined and intermarried as to be indistinguishable, a community bound by blood, ethnicity organized crime and distrust of anyone—priest, policeman, politician—beyond the canal banks, a magic circle, often irrational and ultraviolent, but tender and intensely protective of its own. Three certifiable psychotics, and two horribly inbred brothers—literally creatures from the canal’s black lagoon—wandered the streets with the suffix “-pazzo” (crazy) pinned like donkey’s tails, to their names. “Dent in the Head,” was another, cruel, by today’s standards, but a hilarious descriptor in dialect Italian. Mrs. Mahoney, my grandfather’s tenant, outraged the black-clad widows making Tuesday novenas at Our Lady of Peace Church by regularly“ cursing God” in her drunken brogue. Another woman heard the tap-tap-tapping of “niggers on the roof.” A Native American (“Sonny the Indian Boy” what else?) with a brooding, obsidian stare longed to be part of the Colombo crime family. He hurt his chances by getting drunk on Saturday nights and wrecking their Capri Club headquarters, then was idolized for enduring three days of torture by Joe Gallo’s rival faction. No one thought of institutionalizing them. These were our crazies: sons, daughters, brothers, mothers; woven, however dysfunctional, into the fabric of our daily lives. Psychiatrically speaking we were ahead of the curve.
 Louie the Fag was 10 years older than I and wore his salt and pepper hair cut short, Caesar-style. I sported a greasy pompadour. Louie worked a dead-end job in a department store on Fulton Street. He was gay, though the word didn’t yet exist. Not swishy, not a “fairy” as defined in those days. Two drag queens, Sarah and Sally, lisping and predatory hairdressers filled that bill. Another neighbor, “Butchie the Fag,” was captain of the patrol boys at Our Lady of Peace Elementary School. He had a flaming red streak in his hair. When I insulted him, Butchie beat the shit out of me in front of the Capri Club, in full view of half-a-dozen laughing wise guys. 
Louie was teased—who wasn’t?—not tormented. I read books so I was “Vinny the Boob.” A sociopath gangbanger from Fifth Avenue was “Vinny the Loon.” "Jimmy the Morgue" who worked the night shift at Kings County Hospital was an alleged necrophiliac. “Apples” McIntosh chopped people up.) Louie ate hero sandwiches with us in Otto’s candy store (See “Shooting Uncle Otto.”), played pinochle, brisk (briscola) and gin rummy with the guys, drove with us to Coney Island on summer nights for Nathan’s hot dogs. I never caught a sexual vibe from him, though I was certainly not privy to the inner man. He lived with his mother, had nieces and nephews, was Jerry Castaldo’s, (aka “Alibi Ike”) best friend (My Cousin Richie’s older brother). Louie was from the neighborhood. That, more than sexual orientation, defined him. It sounds naïve, but Louie was liberated long before the 1969 Stonewall riots, and dwelt, however uncomfortably, inside the magic circle.

 The machine, thundering past First Street was now something monstrous, a reanimated thing from a Stephen King novel, over-revving engine snarling, exhaust thundering, front end leaping as the driver, hunched over the metalflake steering wheel, shifted into fourth gear. Buffalo Manzo, grilling Italian sausages on a steel drum cut in half with a torch, would have looked up as the wave of sound engulfed him. Dean Martin blasting from the juke box on the sidewalk outside the Capri Club was drowned out. The gamblers gathered around a parked car, strained to hear the results from Aqueduct. On Carroll Street, the light in front of Tony’s Barber Shop gleamed green. By then, Louie would have reached Romanelli’s Funeral Home at the corner of President and Third Avenue. He might have glanced at the newly installed stop light at the intersection.

I said I sounded “naïve,” talking about tolerance in such a macho culture. But I’m not. My younger brother Thomas, handsome as a movie star, dreamed of being an actor. (To this day, his photograph stops young women in their tracks when they visit my house.) Gay, he contracted AIDS in 1982, manifested as Kaposis Sarcoma, a terribly disfiguring and invasive skin cancer. He returned to Carroll Street to die. He was only 28. My mother fed and bathed and comforted him for a year; my father, a tough dockworker, drove him to Sloan-Kettering Memorial Hospital three times a week for an alpha interferon infusion. When love and prayer could not sustain him, he had to be moved from Carroll Street to the Mother Cabrini Hospice on East 19th Street in Manhattan. I remember it was the morning the Vietnam Memorial was dedicated in lower Manhattan. I remember Thomas a week from a terrible death, telling me to make sure to give the EMTs a great tip. I remember buying his grave while he still lived.
As we waited for that final ambulance, my mother, Gloria, noticed a dozen neighborhood women, gathered outside our house.
“Those bitches,” she hissed, “won’t even let my son die in peace.”
 I, too, grew up on Carroll Street. My father was helpless crippled by emphysema. I bolted out the front door to fucking pound these women to a pulp. When I reached the sidewalk, there they were—Phyllis Hubela, Josie and Rosie Stuto, Millie Pepe, Margaret Barbella, Carmella Persico, half a dozen others.
All of them sobbing.
All of them rushing to embrace me.

In 2012, on a Sunday morning, you might spot a solitary helmeted biker wending his way from Carroll Gardens, across the 125-year old Carroll Street Bridge (operated by a complex pulley and rail mechanism, the oldest functioning “retractile” bridge in the U.S.) up a deserted Carroll Street, past Monte’s Venetian Room and Our Lady of Peace Church (my father’s among the names inscribed on the parish’s World War II Memorial), across Fourth Avenue and up the hill into Park Slope.
 In the 1970s, however, the neighborhood was teeming. On Sunday mornings, the smell of simmering tomato sauce wafting from every house; women—my mother Gloria first and foremost in her high heels and tight dresses—and school kids glumly making their way to church where attendance was taken by a brutal Franciscan nun who called herself Sister Mary Malachy. On Easter mornings, dozens of potted lilies miraculously appeared on the sidewalk in front of the Capri Club, to be purchased and carried to the Green-Wood or Holy Cross cemeteries. For me, the line between the living and the dead was always thin as gossamer. My grandmother, Anna Coppola, existed only as a name on a tombstone.  I would meet her decades later when I taught at the high school my father dropped out of, her spidery signature buried in a long-forgotten file in the basement of Automotive High School on Bedford Avenue. In the records, Italians were not listed as “White.”

When Louie reached the corner of President and Third that fatal Saturday afternoon, I was halfway down President leaning against a car outside Otto’s Candy Store joking with my friend Peter Lauro and the guys (see http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/03/shooting-uncle-otto.html). My three brothers were no doubt scattered in the schoolyards and empty lots canalside that were our playgrounds. Gloria would have finished her grocery shopping at Spinner’s supermarket on “the Avenue.” That was Fifth Avenue before the stretch between Flatbush and Third Street came to resemble Dresden 1945. (The street has come back yet again, now bustling with hipsters, wine bars and upscale trattorias like Al Di La.

My father, a longshoreman like most neighborhood men, was working late at the Black Diamond Lines pier in Red Hook. Women, young and old, were sitting outside their houses on vinyl and chrome kitchen chairs, some rocking baby carriages, others knitting the sequined hats commissioned by an enterprising wholesaler named Jennie Pentangelo from Nevins Street. Teenage girls—corpse-white lipstick was the style and it drove me wild—were sitting in halters and tight shorts on the stoops, listening to AM radio and discussing boys other than me. Younger boys, darting in and out between parked cars, teasing and punching and yelling idiotic shit.
Unlike the sepulchral streets above 6th Avenue, noise a was constant on Third Ave: bellowing tractor-trailers making their way to Atlantic Avenue from the piers; the B-37 bus, all squealing brakes and diesel fumes, often with fatalistic Puerto Rican kids hitching on the back bumpers, clinging by their fingernails, exhaust fumes blowing in their faces; the Four Seasons shrieking “Rag Doll” from Johnny Di Mucci’s yellow Electra 225 convertible; black gangbangers with do-rags and lye-based straighteners plastering their heads blasting soul music from eggplant-colored Caddies; the singsong Italian of Angioletti the fruit peddler; Con Edison trucks hauling groaning spools of cable (chopped my cousin Juju’s fingers right off when he hitched a ride); the loudmouths and “handicappers” on the corners shouting and cursing over losing bets, trying to avoid the all-seeing eye of the bookie we called “the Goose.”

The driver was doing at least 100 mph when he passed the Glory Social Club, roughly 150 feet-per-second. If the light on President Street had blinked red he didn’t see it, couldn’t react, or jammed the gas petal to the floor and ran right fucking through it. At that instant, Louie had one second to live. I imagine him stepping off the curb, maybe spotting his mom walking up President Street, the hint of a smile forming on his lips. Parked cars blinding him to approaching Death.
Perhaps he was thinking of nothing at all.

Half-a-block away I heard thunder echoing off the cars lined bumper-to-bumper along Third Ave, a roar, a snarl and then a sickening sound like no other (Years later, when an old man in pajamas jumped out the 20th floor window of a Brooklyn Heights hotel and landed 10 feet in front of me, someone described the impact as "a watermelon thrown off a tall ladder onto a marble slab"). I whirled toward the sound—we all did—and saw a figure soaring, soaring over the arm of the light pole as cleanly as a kicked field goal. But for that sound, it could have been a straw man, old jeans and a stuffed shirt made during the World Series and hung from lampposts to deride the Yankees.
The car never even slowed, it blew past Union Street and was gone. When I reached to the corner, 20 people were already gathered in a wobbly circle, and more coming. The body was slumped face-down. A viscous corona leaking around the skull, black chinos half-pulled down from the impact, the obscenity of death. A minute went by, seemed like an hour; no one dared approach the lonely lifeless thing on the asphalt. No one wanted to claim it for their own. Then women began shrieking out names.
“Richie…”
 “Oh Jesus, it’s Louie!”
  I stepped closer. Closer still. My dear friend Peter Lauro, who’d die way too young himself, seized my arm in his iron grip. His face was all wrong.
 “Come on,” he said, “let’s get the fuck out of here.”
 “Peter….”
 I couldn’t finish. Thick salt and pepper hair…black cotton jacket…the scuffed work shoes, the blood. My father. I pulled away, ran the short block to Carroll Street, turned right, heart pounding, dodged cars, burst through our unlocked door—the ribbon of Christmas bells that served as our doorbell jangling.
“Mom?” 
No answer.
“Mom!”
She was gone. I jerked open the closet door and began tearing through coats and jackets and blouses. My father’s black jacket was missing. Shouting, I ran in and out of neighbors’ houses, up and down creaking staircases. No answer, no Gloria, no one home.
 Sobbing, I walked slowly back to President Street. I had to keep my brothers away. A siren wailed in the distance. I burst through the magic circle, now a bulwark against the outside world. It was deathly quiet.
Louie’s mother was kneeling by his side. Attempting to shield him, she turned his head.

Losing Mom

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 I’d 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 baby boomers, 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. 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 hard work and self-reliance into a frightened, 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. The years draw quickly upon us; the oldest among us with grandchildren 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've held Death at arms' length. 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 is edging 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 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 baby boomers, I'd steadily 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.  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  Italian-Americans, extended families are still viable; a nursing home would have been out of the question.
When things began to go 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 mark our passage into adulthood, I knew the clock was ticking for Gloria.
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, Joe, 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 Cemetery. 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 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 too 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 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 or her 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.  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. (After eight weeks, he fired me.)
"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 church I'd look at her and tears would flow.
She pretended not to notice.
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. Another brother was in rehab. 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 transferred 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 suppressed 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 roommates, 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 spent 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 responsibilities 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 floor 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, bought 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 a 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 90 lbs. Her face was grey, her lips pulling back from her 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 Barca-Lounger 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 our cousin Millie shrieked, "Vinny, come down! Something's happening!"
Mom had pitched forward in the chair. She'd grabbed Millie’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 through our front door, pushing us aside. Mom lay on her back, her pajama top open as a team worked to defibrillate 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.
When I wrote this, the tulips and irises I'd planted in the yard that last fall were 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.
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 Gowanus 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. Most neighborhood people couldn’t afford to eat there. 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 year, the EPA declared the canal--now eagerly eyed by a new generation of developers and self-styled urban pioneers--a Superfund site.