Friday, May 25, 2012

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

Monday, May 21, 2012

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

Thursday, May 17, 2012

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.

Friday, May 11, 2012

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.