Death Comes Calling

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 17^th 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 4^th 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.

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.