Election Night: A Bonfire of the Vanities

Halloween over, we raced to the next great ritual, the Election Day bonfire. At 14, I don’t think I knew the name of the president of the United States. It didn’t come up much. Not until Kennedy ran and the Irish bishops and parish nuns were in a dither getting out the vote. I knew the mayor—a crumbling pie factory on Fourth Avenue, bore his name—Wagner. We’d buy damaged pies for a nickel and smash them, sticky lemon and pineapple, in each other’s faces. To me, the governor’s name, Rockefeller, was so alien it might have been a petroglyph.  Across the East River, Manhattan glimmered, unreachable, insubstantial.  

Built over Carroll Street’s ancient cobblestones the bonfire was a tradition that predated the black-clad women simmering tomato sauce on Sunday mornings or i pazzi, the crazy people, wandering our streets. Unlike so much in our circumscribed world, it had very American feel to it, Bull Moose Party…Boss Tweed…Salem’s incandescent witches. We raided Chitty’s fruit and vegetable store for orange crates and wooden bushel baskets, then Cambie’s Trucking, pulling splintery wooden pallets from the bays of tractor trailers. We went door-to-door demanding fragrant wine barrels. cracked linoleum and unwanted furniture. As the frenzy built, we’d literally pull wooden cellar doors off their hinges

Jerry Lang, Honey Christiano and Jackie Carr, abetted us, winking as we dragged busted folding chairs and card tables from the Glory Social and Capri Club on Third Avenue. The wise guys were, in all things, irresponsible: perfect negative role models. We were lost boys bucking against all societal restraints. In the decades ahead, we’d die of cancer and birth defects even if we’d escaped to the ranch houses and stick-tree suburbs of Long Island and New Jersey. We’d die of  other plagues—violence, AIDS, abandonment and addiction—visited on South Brooklyn.

I lived outside the United States. No one gave a fuck about voting. Every election my father would announce—as if he’d unearthed a kernel of infinite wisdom—“No matter who wins, I still gotta go to work in the morning.”
We competed against kids from President and Union Streets, and the alien territories across the Gowanus, for the biggest, most out-of-control blaze we could manage. Preempting us, the Fire Department, sent raiding parties to haul away our hidden stores of planks and beams. We met them with barrages of eggs and rotten fruit, letting fly as we darted in and out of the empty lots across from Monte’s Venetian Room
If they caught you, firefighters, burly Irishmen from Bay Ridge and Flatbush, would beat the shit of you. The same gangsters cheered them on. But they couldn’t be everywhere. At dusk on Election Night, we emerged like crazed rats from hallways, cellars and alleys, lugging wood, stacks of newspapers and plastic gallons of gas, turpentine, paint. Darting, whirling, teenaged Maxes from Where the Wild Things Are. My buddy, Americo Guzzi, hammered the outsized brass nut on the fire hydrant, deforming and disabling it. Skinny kids, Joe Bo and Philly Horse Teeth, scrambled like beetles up the pile, now three stories high and 40 feet across No one, not even the adults, seemed to register that almost all the houses on Carroll Street were made of wood,sheathed in tarpaper and flammable shingles.
By 9:00 P.M., alarms were sounding everywhere. Sirens blared, fire trucks careened around corners. On the fire escapes younger kids readied volleys of eggs. Honey, 46-years-old and just out of prison, tossed a wooden torch—wrapped with rags soaked in gasoline—onto the pile. In seconds, it exploded, turning night into day. I was too close. I felt the combustion’s blast. A wave of intense heat sucked the air out of my lungs.
“Holy shit!”
 I ducked behind a parked car, half-blinded by smoke, gasping, grinning, watching Jeannie Wilcox, Amy Gallo, my cousin Clementine, a handful of other cute girls in pink lipstick, leather jackets, tight jeans, as they stood transfixed. The heat washed over them, sensual. I could see that. They ignored me.
The flames were so high all the telephone wires on the street were melting and burning. Embers were floating delicately over tar paper roofs. We’d showed those other street punks.
“Where the fuck is the Fire Department?”  Someone roared, the spell broken.
When they arrived, the “Johnny pump” was broken. There was no water pressure in the pipes. To impress Jean I stood up, let fly with my last egg.
“Fuck you guys!”
“Grab that little cocksucker!”
 I ducked and ran into the alley next to Honey’s house, a big guy in a yellow rubber suit closing fast. Convinced I could dodge him, I cut, slipped, and rammed my head into a cinderblock wall.