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)
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)
