A Rising Tide Sinks All

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

Gowanus Crossing Reboot

 

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

Prologue

A pestilent and stinking Nile, the Gowanus flows through the neighborhood, defiles it with stench and disease and dark secrets. In the decades ahead, many of us who’d grown-up near the stream would be dead or dying of an epidemic of cancers and birth defects long after we'd escaped to the ranch houses and stick-tree suburbs of Long Island and New Jersey; an epidemic veiled by other plagues—violence, AIDS, abandonment and addiction—visited on South Brooklyn.

In the 1960s, the canal is poisoned womb … grave … open sewer. These things and more: it is a barrier that keeps the surrounding neighborhoods isolated from the rest of New York City, keeps them insular, with a fierce identity and demarcated borders.

The Gowanus has a history—unknown in the neighborhood--that in other places would be noteworthy. George Washington’s army clashed with the British along its banks. Its tides, rhythmic and regular, impose order on the chaotic lives that cling precariously to its banks. At flood, it carries the faraway scent of ocean; moonlit, a glimmer of primordial beauty.

My Friend Ray Sharkey, Fallen Idol

“No more than a wisp of dust”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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