Common Sense, Gowanus Version

Many of the neighborhood men--Joe Coppola, among them--who lived by the Gowanus in the ‘50’s and ‘60s worked “down the docks.” My father spent 30 killing years unloading ships at the Black Diamond Lines pier at the “foot of Court Street,” dirty, dangerous, brutal work, straight out of “On the Waterfront": gangsters, crooked union (International Longshoremen’s Assoc.) and all the rest.
Joe had dropped out of school, was drafted and fought in the P...acific in the terrible battle for Peleliu Island. Unlike the millions and millions of veterans who used the GI Bill to advance into the middle class, my father, intelligent, broad-shouldered and handsome as a Roman centurion, retreated to the piers.
He worked so relentlessly the men in his “gang” called him “the animal” in Italian. High praise. Even the wise guys left him alone when he refused to take money from the omnipresent loan sharks. (Want to know more about him, see http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/…/dutch-shoes-and-dead-…)
“I do this so yous guys can have a better life,” he’d tell his four sons. (I was the only one who listened.) In our family, my uncle, Sonny Giordano, and my big, bruising cousins, Jimmy and John Pomarico had broken the pattern and joined the NYPD. When I made it to Saint Augustine high school, they’d approach me with heartfelt career advice:
“Vinny, become a sanitation worker. They got a great union. The work ain’t dangerous. You can retire at 40.”
Looking back, they may have been right. At the time, I didn’t aspire to be a garbage man, particularly in a neighborhood where the canal and the back lots, teemed with feral dogs, tail-less cats and rats. So I studied hard and harder. My mind opened up to new ideas and horizons. It was the 1960s.
Of course, this pissed off my father. Every time we argued politics or anything else actually—disagreements soon became shouting matches and slapping matches with me on the losing end.
“You’re smart all right!” Joe would shout. “But you ain’t got common sense! Everything you know is from books!” This from a guy who spent 40 hours a week "studying" the Racing Form.
My erudite uncles, "Joe Turf" and "Punchy" Giordano, agreed with this assessment.
Like an asshole, I accepted this. For the next 10 years, I went out of my way to do manual labor—unloading trucks, working in food processing,, gasket and candle factories, taking shady jobs from the neighborhood gangsters to prove I had “common sense.”
Looking back, I came to realize, doesn’t all knowledge come from books?