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.
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.
