My Father, Myself

 Haloed in darkness, Joe appears in the doorway, rugged, wind-burned face impossibly handsome, watch cap and olive drab fatigue jacket stiff from the Red Hook piers’ icy spray. My brothers and I surge forward, press our cheeks against our father’s, his cold passing into our little boy warmth. I remove the wooden- handled longshoreman’s hooks slung over his shoulder, a squire receiving his knight’s sword.

There were days when he’d unzip that jacket and dozens of tinseled chocolate Easter eggs would cascade to the cracked linoleum floor…Dutch van Houten orange chocolate bars rich beyond imagining…treasures from a busted crate in the hold of a freighter that would never reach the chocolatiers of Manhattan. We’d scramble madly while Gloria tried to keep us from stuffing ourselves. He gave me a pair of wooden shoes with a yellow-haired Dutch boy carved on them and a silver coin he’d found stuck to a bale of rubber from Honduras.

Once, for the Christmas Eve feste dei sette pesce (“feast of the seven fishes”), live lobsters, two or three, scuttling inside his jacket that sent us squealing. They lived in our bathtub for days, until he simmered them in tomato sauce and stuffed and baked their tails with garlic and parsley and breadcrumbs. On Valentine’s Day, Joe would invariably arrive home laden with lacy pink Barricini hearts for his wife and each of his four sons. He was still doing this when I was 17-years-old; I was still looking forward to it. He loved us beyond measure, of that I have no doubt, but his love could be searing and destructive as a furnace blast.

We ate on a pink and grey aluminum Formica table in the dingy apartment—five of us, three rooms, one of them a kitchen—above a candy store on Third Avenue and Carroll Streets, almost always pasta, called macaroni, sometimes dressed-up with peas (“peas and bast… in Gloria’s ragged dialect), or a 35-cent slice of Polly-O ricotta from my cousin, “Farmer Jones’s” grocery. More often than not, that 35 cents was entered into a schoolboy’s tablet kept under the counter to be collected later. We were that poor.

And never knew it.  I look back now and I see my mother stuffing thin cardboard from a Brillo box to cover the hole in my sneakers.

 “Jeez, Mom, it’s red, white and blue! Everyone's gonna see,”

See her sneaking me her Abraham and Strauss credit card so I could buy a new shirt for a Sweet 16 party. I bought an iridescent green/orange guayabera and sweated right through it.

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In 1960s, along the cobblestone streets around the Gowanus Canal, Italian peddlers still sold produce from horse and wagons; Victor the blacksmith clanged away across from our apartment, scenting the air with singed horsehide. Jewish merchants knocked on doors selling thread, fabric, ribbon and life insurance like it was the shtetl. A sailor up from the docks strolled up Carroll street with a parrot on his shoulder, selling bird whistles that didn't work. On the corners wise guys in silk shirts and featherweight shoes lounged against ’59 Caddies and Electra 225s, hustling their balls, pockets stuffed with cash. We couldn't pay the phone bill.

My father was downwardly mobile at a time when millions of other WWII combat vets were using the GI Bill to leapfrog into the middle class. He was intelligent, commanded respect and worked like a dog his whole life. He chose soul-killing work in the rank holds of Black Diamond Line ships. Worked under 2,000 lb. drafts that could tip and crush a man to jelly. He wouldn’t gamble or borrow money from the loan sharks and bookies infesting the Brooklyn piers thick as rats, and would never be promoted to shop steward or checker or handed a no-show job.

I realize now he’d made a choice--perhaps it was made for him in the in the  bloody jungles of Peleliu Island, 1944—that ultimately destroyed him long before his time and sent his sons plunging into chaos and despair. It tears my heart to this day.

As a boy, fresh prince among four sisters, he’d had a pony, a cowboy suit and twin six-shooters. His mother, Anna Falcone, and her rapacious sister, Alfonsina, known  to me only as Zia, (“The Aunt”)—were seamstresses, entrepreneurs who decades before I was born were opening shops, accumulating real estate all over the neighborhood, and a palazzo—(a term greatly exaggerated when I saw it) in our ancestral home of Pagani, a town destroyed by Hannibal and Spartacus, and more recently overrun by pierced junkies on motor scooters plundering the  gold chains of any turista dumb enough to wander through

Anna Coppola died of cancer when my father was 18. I would meet her 30 years later when I was teaching English at Automotive H.S. in Williamsburg, the trade school my father dropped out of. In a dusty basement file cabinet amidst broken desks and tattered pennants, I found his academic records, an assessment of his hygiene and his race (“non-white”) and my long-dead grandmother’s ghostly signature.

He was drafted soon after, serving with the 81^st Infantry Division’s 710^th Tank Battalion. In the fall of 1944, my father, a tank driver, went ashore with the 1^st Marines on Peleliu Island in the western Pacific, part of the bloodiest and most reckless amphibious assault in U.S military history. His tank was nicknamed “Lucky 13.” He only spoke of what happened on Peleliu one time, about his friend, an Italian kid named Michael Valentino.

On October 18^th, Valentino’s tank, “Flying Home,” was tasked to support a Marine unit pinned down by the Japanese. En route, the tank struck an improvised mine, most likely a buried aerial bomb, and exploded, killing all but one of its five-man crew and a Marine captain--today buried in Marietta, Ga. a few miles from my home--serving as a guide.

“Lucky 13” was the lead tank in the rescue mission. Japanese snipers kept up a blistering fire as my father slithered through a hatch in the bottom of his Sherman M4 tank into the crocodile-infested mangroves. He was supposed to run a cable to the still-burning tank and tow it out of the field of fire. He couldn’t do it and heard the screams of Valentino and his platoon members as they burned alive. He was 20-years old. Those screams would echo through his life to the point that my mother, my brothers and I felt we were trapped in the inferno.

A few weeks later the Marines, who’d suffered 9500 casualties, arrived at my father’s bivouac and executed a prisoner my father had befriended—one of the few Japanese soldiers to surrender—in front of his eyes.

“Fucking sergeant marched him into the surf—the kid understood what was happening—and shot him in the back of the head.”

(To be continued)