In 1971, I moved to a walk-up on Hicks and Pineapple
Streets in Brooklyn Heights. The rent, as I recall, was $145 a month, a stretch
for a 23-year-old substitute teaching in Williamsburg. On Carroll Street, my
father Joe, the dockworker in whom love and rage forever warred, erupted when I
announced I was leaving our family’s cramped row house by the Gowanus. I
departed under a volley of curses and threats: “Don’t fuckin’ ever come back!”
The bad Joe loved his family even as he splintered it.
He’d lost his mom as a teen, was immediately drafted and thrown into the
hellhole that was Peleliu Island. Knowing these things, I clung to the illusion
that the violence and rage, and the never-ending money problems would wash away
like the tides. We’d be a “normal family." The good Joe slaved down the sweltering
holds of cargo ships for decades to put me through college and all four of his
sons through Catholic school. But Good Joe couldn’t hold it together against the
darkness seeping into our souls like Gowanus sludge.
Skipping out the door, I never thought to help out. I still feel the shame of it. I was working in
Williamsburg, mostly at all-boys Automotive High, the vocational school Joe had
dropped out of. I found his records in a
dusty file cabinet in the basement and discovered the NYC public school system
system classified my father “non-white.”
In the 1970s,
Williamsburg was carved into Balkanized enclaves—Hassidic Jew, Puerto Rican, Italian,
Irish, Pole, African-American, Junkie. You’d get knifed walking to the annual
teacher’s luncheon at Peter Luger’s steak house the under the Williamsburg
Bridge. I didn’t, but I played hooky one Friday, and one of my students,
Alphonse Presley, a sweet kid up from the South, got stabbed by the white
junkies who haunted McCarron Park. He nearly died.
Brooklyn Heights was another world, a warren
of pre-Civil War townhouses and Episcopalian churches, so far removed from the
teeming tenements of Brooklyn it could have been London’s Mayfair district. The
Heights was home to White Anglo Saxon Protestants, a rara avis in the outer boroughs. Truman Capote and Henry Miller had lived
there. Norman Mailer lived there, his brownstone overlooking the Promenade and
New York harbor. There was a mincing population of middle-aged, pre-liberation
gay men—and the predators they inevitably attracted.
My Hicks Street apartment was on the dark side, in the
long shadow of St. George. The hotel had tumbled so precipitously into
SRO/welfare status you could buy cuchifritos
at the newsstand, and incubate titers of infection in the pool. A Gilded
Age barber shop persisted. A shave, hot towel, neck message and a dousing with cheap
fragrance cost $3.00. The barbers were old and tremblyl, the tiles cracked and pitted, the
towels frayed.
Bruno Rubeo lived down the street with a cat named
Shelob and a hippie girlfriend, Claire. At the time, he was selling handmade
pizza out of a converted postal van truck in Red Hook, anticipating the food
truck madness by 40 years. Bruno would become Hollywood famous (“Platoon,” “Driving
Miss Daisy”), live in an Umbrian palazzo, marry a sweet Mexican beauty, die way
before his time. He was my best friend.
I met a red-haired Sicilian named Marguerite at a rock
club in Bay Ridge. She lived in a four-story limestone townhouse overlooking
the Soldiers and Sailors Arch in Grand Army Plaza. Her parents were doctors;
her father had a family coat-of-arms mounted on the wall, not something I saw a
lot of in Brooklyn. He told me I wasn’t “right” for his daughter; she told me
she’d spent her 17th birthday at an orgy on Staten Island.
I was pursuing a M.A in medieval literature at
Brooklyn College—hoping to convince myself I was an academic type—wading through Piers Plowman and the Faerie Queene, taking arcane linguistics courses, my Brooklyn accent
so thick my professors grimaced and classmates giggled when I answered a
question. I’d spend my afternoons
reading on the Promenade in the shadow of Mailer’s brownstone, fending off a
different variety of fairy queen. Just a mile from my Gowanus neighborhood, I
was lonely, isolated, didn’t fit in.
And soon enough, I was broke. Demand for my substitute
teaching skills thinned spectacularly when one of my students, the class clown,
climbed out the window of our third floor classroom at Enrico Fermi Junior High,
inching his way along a narrow sill to the next classroom. Kids screamed and howled,
but howling was normal when you were a substitute. Blissfully unaware,
I kept scrawling whatever nonsense the regular teacher had left on the
blackboard until my next door colleague banged at my door dragging Carlos by
his ear.
Fall turned to winter, the Promenade emptied, bitter winds
howled off the harbor. My 4th floor walk-up faced the brick wall of
a faded residential hotel on Pineapple Street. (Heights streets come in a
variety of flavors—Cranberry Orange, Pineapple.) On Christmas Eve morning, my
brother, “Joe Bear,” stops by, equally broke, trying to figure out how to buy
gifts for our parents and younger brothers, Thomas and Gregory. We turn the corner to Pineapple where my puke green 1965 Corvair, a shit box that
burned more oil than gasoline was parked.
Sometimes, Brooklyn Heights is so still and isolated
you can forget where you are. And find yourself totally alone in the middle of
New York City.
As we're walking toward Willow Street, a large object hurtles into the sidewalk ten feet in front of us, narrowly missing the spiked iron fence running alongside the hotel.
As we're walking toward Willow Street, a large object hurtles into the sidewalk ten feet in front of us, narrowly missing the spiked iron fence running alongside the hotel.
Thunk!
“What the fuck!” Joe screams.
I’m speechless and breathless, but somewhere I sense
it’s the sound a watermelon might make thrown to the ground from a very tall
ladder.
I look up to the top floors of the hotel, then down at
the object.
“A fucking dummy!” I shout, walking closer. I’m
starting to grin at our foolishness. A
fucking trick!
“Joe it’s a dummy! These cocksuckers...”
This all happens in milliseconds, my synapses leaping
from connection to connection... On Carroll Street we’d make dummies during the
World Series, hanging the Yankees or Mets or Dodgers in effigy from telephone
wires that zigzagged from one side of the street to the other...the “cocksuckers”
are the students from Long Island University who I remember live in a dorm on
one of the hotel’s upper floors.
“Motherfuckers!” Joe shouts, pointing up.
There’s nobody there. A window curtain streams in the wind like banner/
I move closer. The dummy is wearing blue
pajamas, sitting on its ass, legs stretched toward he curb, head hunched
between its knees.
“Assholes,” I flash, “even sprinkling ketchup to
make it look real.” Actually, I'm impressed.
Three feet
away, I bend down; a tingle of vertigo stirs in my skull. The pajama top has
slid up, the pants down, the ass exposed and obscene. The thing has grey hair. So many
details! The lower back is split wide horizontally...there’s thick red gore and
filaments white tissue splattered everywhere. One foot away, I’m reaching down
to touch....
“Vincent, what are you doing!” Joe screams. “It’s a
man!”
A man.
A lonely old man living in an SRO hotel who grows despondent
at Christmas time and jumps to his death. Of course it’s a man! The holidays
are prime time for suicide...Or maybe he was thrown out the window? Murdered for his few possessions?
Or did he try to hit us?
“This fucking prick.”
This conversation goes on for two minutes inside my
head. I look up. Joe and I are all alone on a dead quiet street with an
exploded corpse shielded from the world by a line of parked cars....my car.
Finally Joe flags down a passing cab There’s fire station, a block or so away,
on Middagh Street.
The driver speeds off.
At that moment, bizarre as it sounds, a man in a maroon
dressing gown appears at the door of a townhouse across Pineapple street. He’s
holding a steaming cup of coffee, maybe looking to retrieve his Wall Street Journal.
“Is there a problem?” he asks.
“Mister, you don’t want to come over here,” Joe
manages.
“How do you mean?” The guy crosses the street.
“Mister....”
He passes in front of my Corvair. Glances down, spills he coffee and
throws up.
I hear sirens in the distance.
“Joe, I don’t wanna stay here.”
"Fuck this."
An hour later, we walk back down the street. An idling
police car, an ambulance, maybe somebody from the fire station. The dead man is
gone. A guy in a cheap suit—the hotel manager-- is bitching to the cops about all
the problems and paperwork the old guy is causing him.
A Department of
Sanitation street sweeper, an enormous machine with two circular brushes stands by
idling, waiting to mount the curb.
“We’re leaving.” Joe calls to the driver and points to
our Corvair. He motions me to pull out.
I walk to the driver’s side, unlock the door.
"Jesus."
The hood, passenger side fender and windshield are smeared with clots
of blood and tissue. It so bad I have to drive across Montague Street with my head out the window. Joe gets in. We head for the car wash on Atlantic Avenue. The
Corvair looks like its been driven through an abattoir.
At the car wash, no problem.
They wave me right on through.
They wave me right on through.