Halloween
On the Gowanus
The
RKO Prospect Theater was hosting a live Halloween Show, staffed no doubt by
rheumy alcoholic ushers dressed like Dracula. I’d seen them stringing
spider webs over the orchestra seats. Or maybe my grandfather’s tenant, Mrs. Mahoney,
who lived in a tiny stanzina and cursed
God aloud on Sunday mornings.I was 16, tall, lanky, with a big head. Joe, my father, was 40, shorter, but built like Sam Huff the result of decades unloading Black Diamond Line ships in Red Hook.
Enraged, Joe was worse than Frankenstein. Even the Goose and the other wise guys standing outside the Capri Club on Third Avenue were wary of him.
“No,” my father said. “You can’t go.”
“Dad!”
“Are you deaf?”
Savages roamed Fifth Ave., terra incognita in our mafia-controlled neighborhood: Golden Guineas, Bishops, Gents, Apaches, stoned on airplane glue and Tuinal, all making for the Prospect, their tight pants, white-lipsticked girls strutting alongside them. A week before, my cousin JuJu had hurled a fire axe during a screening of Them at the Garfield Theater. It whirled over my head piercing one of the outsized ants rampaging across the screen.
Halloween was stink bombs, chalk stockings, rotten eggs, cherry bombs, Tango screwdrivers and Twister wine.
“Can I at least go trick or treating?”
“Joe, let him go for an hour,” Gloria intervened.
“He’s got homework,”
“Ma!”
“You better be home by 10 o’clock.”
I was out the door, down the stairs, one of Joe’s sweat socks stuffed in my flannel shirt pocket, two thick cylinders of colored chalk and two eggs I’d hidden the hallway.
There were no treats in South Brooklyn. No cute ballerinas, pink Cinderellas, no Supermen in sagging tights. The hipsters who'd pollute the Gowanus with 'tude and snap brim fedoras were 40 years distant. Tricks were payback: rotten eggs smashed against the windows of the rectory and convent--Masseo, the friar in charge of the altar boys in Our Lady of Peace parish was a pervert, molesting boys behind his robes; Malachy, a Franciscan, her face the color of corned beef, her wimple wide as a sail, tormented and humiliated me; spray paint on Mariuchelle’s storefront window for the greasy meat and stale bread she served.;stink bombs in subway token booths; cherry bombs if we could catch cops from the 76th Precinct—who worked hand-in-hand with gangsters—cooping in the lot across from Monte’s Venetian Room.
Halloween was war. A gang from Bond Street took my cousin Anthony Popeye prisoner one year, tied him to a rotting beam and hung him, screaming, over the Gowanus Canal. We couldn’t get near him for hours. The scene reminded me of the sketch of Iroquois torturing Jesuits I found in my Catechism.
My guys were waiting. Using a brick, I pounded the chalk inside the sweat sock, more gravel than powder. I tried it out on a new car, Fat Rosie’s awning, Frankie Cag’s head. A sun-yellow cloud puffed in the air.
“Fuck it! Let’s go!”
Howling, we ran—a dozen of us—down President Street, socks whirling over our heads. We cornered five guys in front of Otto’s Social Club—Peter Lauro, Anthony Fisheye, Crazy Ralph, Louie the Fag, as I recall, and beat them mercilessly with our stockings. Wise guys dropped their gin rummy hands, came pouring out, and ducked back inside. We were wilding, a thing they understood.
Our prisoners, rubbing lumpy noses, and swollen eyes were handed chalk stockings. A punk who always got good grades, I felt the blood singing in my veins. We attacked Union Street, Sackett Street and the Puerto Ricans junkies nodding in the shadows of Degraw Street Park, a very dangerous place. All fell before us.
In a hour, I had dozens of ragged teens running beside me, pulling fire alarms, spilling trash cans, breaking off car antennas, smashing pumpkins, terrorizing the sissy boys coming out of the Prospect Theater’s fucked-up Halloween show, a ribbon of screaming cop cars trailing behind us.
And then it was 10:00 P.M. Like Cinderella, I had to go home.
