Carroll Street is always teeming, the air thick with humidity and fumes belched from the trucks thundering along Third Avenue from the 29th Street piers. The gamblers, Jerry Pepe, Freddie Fish, Muzzy, among them, stand on the corner shouting, cursing, scratching their balls, arguing the day’s winners at Aqueduct or Belmont. Across the street, in front of the Capri Club, Mikey Romanelli and The Goose, dressed like undertakers in dark suits, hovere, ready to collect the bets, and later, collect the losers. They store the scribbled sheets in the steel blue U.S. Post Office mailbox next to the red fire alarm box on the corner. A safe place since no one trusts the Post Office after Americo Guzzi dropped a cherry bomb down the chute.
Next door, Chitty and Buffalo Manzo, grill sausage on a half-steel drum filled with charcoal, served with peppers and onions on Italian bread from Caputo's bakery, the intoxicating aroma wafting in the air. On the opposite corner, Rosinna serves homemade lemon ice so delicious truckers line up in front of her store for a nickel’s worth scooped into Dixie cup. At night, she lights a naked bulb above the side door of her store and fries 10-cent calzones in a vat of dirty oil while you wait. She's missing the tip of one of her fingers and the “surprise” is to find it in your calzone.
Further along Third toward First Street, clanging, as Victor the blacksmith, biceps bulging in an ancient leather vest, shoes horses belonging to Angioletti and the other fruit peddlers who sing out in Italian on their horse and wagons. ("E rook e' rob" for broccoli rabe)—another smell in the air, another sound adding to the cacophony: A one-eyed rooster who’s lost track of time, struts and crows all day in front of Goldie’s Live Poultry market.
Singsong, girls skip rope, play hopscotch on boxes chalked in pastels on the dirty sidewalk. We shout and curse, pitch pennies in front of John Sanseverino’s candy store, play kings against the wall of the Typhoon Air Conditioning Company, and occasionally, high-pressure, high-stakes stickball (The Goose pits “The Seven Battlers” against squads bankrolled by other wise guys). Games are played Sunday mornings on First Street. It never registers that the ancient brick wall that runs from Third Avenue to Whitwell Place is an artifact of Brooklyn’s first professional baseball stadium, Washington Park. I play outfield. A fly ball over your head and you have to keep running to Prospect Park. Wise guys are sore losers.
Church bells sing out the Angelus, Carvel trucks their maddening jingles. Fat Rosie, Baby Chick and the rest of the maldicenza (“mad-un-guins” to us) sit outside the sweltering apartments, gossiping nonstop and knitting beaded hats like the hens cackling by the guillotine during the French Revolution—never missing a thing.
On Saturday nights, Eddie Pole staggers down Carroll Street drunk, salary spent, his sons, Johnny Boy and Penguin, wife, and succulent daughters, Ginger and Cookie, take turns pulling his hair and pummeling him. One summer, my Uncle Punchy, a jealous guy, rams his candy store’s juke box out onto the sidewalk, sending “In the Still of the Night,” and other doo-wop faves spinning dizzily down toward the canal.
Anthony i-pazzo, Sally i pazzo (pronounced “ou-bots”and meaning crazy) Monduche, "Joe the Toe," Mrs. Mahoney (she curses God), assorted crazies, a dwarf (with an outsized penis) and other defectives—these are our family members—wander aimlessly and harmlessly through the streets
Sweltering, we have no pools, no sprinklers, no garden hoses.. Red Hook pool means risking your life to Puerto Rican gang-bangers who call themselves, Apaches.
We open the Johnny pump next to Monte’s Venetian Room, grab an empty 28 oz. can of Italian tomatoes—top and bottom removed, squat down behind the gushing hydrant hands cupped tightly around the can, and send a powerful spout of water jetting 30-40 feet in the air onto the far sidewalk Instantly, younger kids are in bathing suits, teenage girls wriggling in shorts and suddenly see-through blouses, guys knocked on their asses by the frigid blasts.
We wait, because ultimately, this is who we are, for the convertible Electra 225s and Caddys driven by wise guys in pale blue leisure suits from Court Street coming across the Carroll Street bridge. They slow down to a crawl, pull the cigars from their mouths, shoot warning, then murderous looks at us--and we fuckin’ drown them.
One night, Fat Ernie backs his 4-door '56 Olds right up to a gushing Johnny pump, slides down the rear door's power window. I'm crowded in the back seat with three other guys when a tsunami roars through the open window, knocking me senseless. Instantly, I'm underwater, drowning, panicked, fighting to open the door in a moving car on Union Street in the middle of May, then gushed like garbage onto the street.
The weeks before the Fourth of July 4th are skirmishes leading up to cataclysmic war. School is out; fireworks have begun flowing into the neighborhood from Chinatown (You’d buy a $5 “mat” from “chinks,” or Italians from Little Italy who are likely to mug you on Mott Street before you got to the train station), then by the truckload hauled in from Carolina by wise guys. Each day the explosions are more prolonged and intense—firecrackers give way to cherry bombs, torpedoes, ashcans, M-80s, rockets, helicopters, whistling “nigga-chasers” that race along the sidewalk before exploding.
On July 4th, Honey Christiano and his crew combine all the unsold fireworks into a day-long picnic and explosion fest. In all things, the wise guys are like murderous children. Fun is throwing a braided pack of exploding firecrackers in your face, a powerful ashcan into your car, aiming a blazing Roman candle through your open bedroom window. Of course we follow their lead. By 3 P.M., Carroll Street is ankle deep in exploded fireworks (little boys hunting for unexploded firecrackers, blowing off their fingertips) our ears ringing.
There's more. Nightfall sends barrages of rockets into the overheated air. Buffalo Manzo takes a sizzling bottle rocket in the eye. Though blinded, he's ready next year. Honey, a master thief, somehow locates high explosive mortars destined for the Coney Island fireworks show. Intended for an offshore barge, Honey shoots off thousands of dollars worth on the corner of Third Avenue and Carroll. Somehow, no one is killed
Another year, he accesses a load of military flareguns—no doubt some poor Marine will come up short—and begins firing the multicolored exploding cartridges on parachutes onto our tarpaper roofs. I think it's great. The first thing I do when I arrive in Georgia in 1979, is buy a ton of legal fireworks. Somehow, it's not the same.
