The Persimmon Tree

The tree dominates our yard, green, vital, limbs clawing above the grim, windowless, brick and cinderblock walls that enclose our house on three sides like a prison yard. A persimmon tree with shiny, two-tone leaves and fissured, rectangular bark that resembles alligator hide, planted by Vincenzo Coppola, my immigrant grandfather, long before I was born. Trees are rare things in Gowanus. On Carroll Street below Third Avenue, ours is the only house with a backyard tree. Johnny the Butcher has a pigeon coop; Joey DeSimone, his rose bushes; Honey, a wise guy, a circular blue swimming pool where I see him dunk Joey Heatherton. There are a few sickly sumac trees on the banks of the Gowanus. Gasping at the stench, we strip the leaves and slash ourselves with thin, whip-like branches. To see a tree, I have to walk six long, sloping blocks to Prospect Park.

My grandfather, a large and dour man, makes bad wine in the cellar. We have a peculiar relationship: He’d twist my cheek between his thumb and forefinger—“Come sie bello”—until I screamed; I’d hide rusty barrel hoops in his garden hoping he’d step on one. Somehow, he’d coax tomatoes, peppers, melons and squash from his tiny plot. Years later, under threat of a lawsuit brought a yuppie tenant I have this magical dirt analyzed by an environmental expert at Syracuse University. There’s enough lead and base metal to build a chemical weapon. The cost of hauling out and replacing the soil runs into tens of thousands of dollars. The rent barely covers the mortgage.

“Goddamn this canal,” I moan, “I’m screwed.”

“Probably not,” the scientist says, “all the yards in South Brooklyn are poisoned.”

Figs and grapes blossom in grandfather’s garden, but the persimmon tree is his pride and joy. As long as he lives—he’ll die of a heart attack working in his daughter’s Bensonhurst garden —the tree never bears fruit. Not once.  I’m his namesake and, sure enough, his obsession becomes mine.  Year after year, I’d wait for spring, watch the tree flower, but no pollination.  I discover persimmon trees are gender-specific. Judging by its skimpy stamens and overripe pistils, this was a girl tree, though, occasionally, it could switch sex like the morphodites (hermaphrodites) neighborhood mopes were always shouting about:

“What are you a fucking morphodite?

I hike up to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden on Washington Avenue, a dangerous place for a white Catholic school boy in the 1960s. I’m told that for a price a botanist will show up at our house with a ladder, and using what I imagine to be a giant bug sprayer, he’d attempt to pollinate our 60-foot tree. I can’t see this happening in my neighborhood. People already consider me odd. Besides, I don’t even know what a persimmon is. Then it turns out my grandmother had endured similar tribulations. Anna Falcone was a skilled, hardworking immigrant for whom the streets really were paved with gold. In one generation, she and her sister—a woman ugly as witch in a fairy tale—whom I only knew as “Zia” (Aunt), owned a seamstress shop, a grocery, a bar, two row houses—one I grew up in--an apartment building on Third Avenue and President Street and supposedly, a "palazzo" (palace) in Pagani, our ancestral hometown.

Her husband is the problem: either impotent, homosexual, or maybe a morphodite. The words in Neapolitan dialect are vague. Finocchio, for example, is fennel, but also “gay.” At the time, strapping, mascolino Vincenzo was living either in Argentina or Bahia, Brazil. A practical woman, Anna shed her husband, annulled her marriage and imported my grandfather like a sack of coffee beans. He wasn’t ambitious, but he got the job done. In ten years, he sired four daughters—Tessie, Rosanne, Frances, Lucy—and my father, Joe, born in 1924. Anna died when Joe was seventeen. I know my grandmother only as a faded signature on my father’s school records—I’d teach at the very high school he dropped out of—discovered in a dusty basement in Williamsburg. According to family legend, The Aunt, my grandmother’s business partner, demanded Vincenzo marry her. Of course, he refused. Don’t fairy tales always start this way? And the financial troubles that would haunt my family for the next sixty years began.

At the end of World II, The Aunt dispatched my grandfather to Pagani, 20 miles southeast of Naples, to collect back rent on the properties she now owned, a considerable sum. In effect, the money was frozen by Mussolini for a decade. I’d hear the story a thousand times growing up.  Vincenzo stayed and stayed, didn’t bother answering her letters. After eight months, he returned and announced the money, down to the last lira, was gone. He’d dared spurn her marriage proposal, now he’d pissed away her money? Her revenge was worthy of  a Medici. She disinherited Vincenzo, his offspring, my brothers and me. forever, and then went a step further: all the property, the businesses, the five-story apartment building, went to wily Mariuchella, a distant cousin brought from Italy years before as The Aunt’s maid. My parents, my three brothers and I spend the next 13 years crowded into a three-room flat above a candy store. (She charges us $35 dollars a month.) My mom had to do the laundry in the sink, pour buckets of water on rambunctious teenagers hanging out on the stoop so I could study. Next door, The Aunt lives in the corner apartment with a library, a piano and dining room. Gloria has to bring her bowls of spaghetti in tribute. Her adopted son, known in the neighborhood as “Professor Beans,” piles pasta on his plate, leaving my mother—pregnant with me—hungry. He says he has to feed his brain,

When Vincenzo passes away, we move around the corner to 474 Carroll Street, the persimmon tree in the backyard. On spring evenings, I’d lie beneath its thick branches, counting the airliners flying overhead, imagining other places, other people, other worlds.  

                                                            ***

In the spring of ’81, I’m among the reporters Newsweek dispatches to Rome to cover the papal assassination attempt, a very convoluted story. A Turk, a neo-fascist, perhaps unwittingly, is working for the Bulgarians who, in turn, are employed by the Soviets who want Pope John Paul II liquidated because he’d supported Lech Walenska and the Polish unions movement. I wind up in the bowels of the Italian legal system, in Tuscany with a Mossad agent who guides me to Ankara, Turkey. There, I interview Ugur Mumcu, a fearless journalist who’d be assassinated for his revelations. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-ugur-mumcu-1481231.html

My world had definitely opened up.  Aunt Tessie, one of Vincenzo’s daughters, happens to be in Rome that spring. In her 60s and feisty, Tessie speaks fluent Italian. I call her from my office near the Spanish Steps, rent a car and on a bright Sunday morning we’re off to Pagani to visit relatives we’d never met or barely knew existed. Pagani is no Tuscany. The streets are dirty, there’s  barbed wire strung on balconies. Shouting teenage punks hang out on the corners or buzz around on motorbikes looking to steal purses and gold chains.  It feels like home. Two of our octogenarian relatives: a woman medical doctor and her husband, Aeneas Falcone, a French teacher (a dubious professional choice in a town whose name literally translates as “Heathens”), live in an ancient apartment, one wall bisected by a gaping crack that looks like a lightning bolt—earthquake damage.  But the surprise, the real surprise comes when we walk across town to visit the Coppolas.

Of course, word had spread. Our relatives have gone out and no doubt blown a week’s budget to prepare a sumptuous Sunday dinner for us. Eighteen of them and more arriving by the minute. One very handsome guy is almost a double of my blond-haired brother Thomas—mystery solved. After a while, the room literally begins to buzz.  People are staring. A few are pointing at me.

“Vincenzo Coppola e qui ! Vincenzo Coppola e venuto! “ (Vincent Coppola is here!)

People begin to hug and embrace me, some with tears in their eyes. A man tells me my grandfather paid for his operation when he was a boy. “And now I can walk.” Another says Vincenzo gave him tuition for hairdressing school. He put food on another cousin’s table...and another and another. A man assures me my grandfather tried to get him legal papers so he could emigrate to the United States. It didn’t work out, but it’s okay. He never forgot. None of them ever forgot.

I was his namesake.

                                                            ***

Back in Brooklyn, I’m told a wise guy has bought the house next door—it had once belonged to The Aunt—as a gift for his aging mother. A neighborhood woman, she was bored living in his enormous Long Island mansion. She missed the Gowanus. All her friends live here. This is a ground-up restoration, no expense spared, though I suspect he got a break on labor.  Highly skilled workers and carpenters are there for months, disassembling the place brick by brick, then painstakingly installing imported marble and tile, a state-of the art kitchen, central air. What had been a dank cellar becomes a finished basement. The man is meticulous: an African-American craftsman arrives from the South to hand-carve the bannister on the winding staircase. The exterior, a modernist take on a classic Brownstone with enormous oval glass windows set like eyes in the façade. James Caan—who else?—arrives to donate the bronze lion’s head knocker staring balefully through wrought iron bars onto the sidewalk. In the backyard, a gazebo sprouts and our rusty chain-link fence is replaced by a tall brick wall, its top as sinuous as a sine curve. The house is beautiful as a Venetian palace, so outstanding on our ragtag street, it stops traffic. My mother tells  me dubious “telephone workers” and “gas company guys” are constantly trying to get into our cellar, no doubt to install wiretaps. She chases them away.

                                                            ***

In the mid-80s our family literally blows apart. My brother Thomas is in Milan hoping to work as a fashion model. Jo-Ann, a friend from Our Lady of Peace elementary school, tagged along, as did the millions of unknown viral particles replicating in his blood. Two years later, he’s dying of AIDS, his chiseled body and handsome features so disfigured by purple Kaposis Sarcoma lesions I cannot recognize him. Life is so random: Jo-Ann becomes Madonna’s make-up artist. My brother Joe is shooting heroin, an addiction that continues to this day. My father Joe has full-blown emphysema. My other sibling is in the hole to gangsters for tens of thousands of dollars in gambling debts. I leave my job at Newsweek and stumble into a disastrous second marriage. Gloria tries to care for all of us. The hoarseness she dismisses as stress, a precursor to the throat cancer that will soon kill her. She’d never smoked a cigarette in her life. After she suffers through a failed operation to save her vocal cords, I sit helpless watching her gasp and choke as fluid flows into her lungs. (http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/05/losing-mom.html)

 I’d make my way to the backyard to sit among the rose bushes I’d planted in Thomas’s memory. Many years after Vincenzo’s passing, the ugly cinderblock back walls are now covered in lush green moss like an enclosed English garden. The Persimmon towers above all, branches thick with glistening leaves overhanging the adjoining yards a like a canopy. One day when I arrive, the house is deathly silent. Gloria is at a doctor’s appointment. My father, a shadow of the tough-as-nails longshoreman I’d so loved and feared, sits drowsing on the living room couch, an oxygen mask covering the lower half of his face. The machine hisses and gurgles, a sound I’ve come to hate. I walk through the kitchen, pull open the back door and walk into the yard.

I stand there astonished.

 All that is left of the a persimmon tree is a blunt, blackened stump, its amputated lower branches like arms reaching to the heavens in shame and supplications. Everything, save for a carpet of rotting leaves is gone. Thomas’s rose garden has been crushed by falling branches. I feel tears streaming down my checks and then I see red. I charge back inside.

“Dad, what's  happened!  Who did this to our tree!  Who the fuck did this?”

He looks at me. I notice he’s crying behind the mask.  “The lady next door complained the leaves were falling in her yard.”

“Falling in her yard, so you cut Grandpa’s tree down?”

“I wouldn’t do that.  Honey sent a crew of guys with chainsaws.  I couldn’t stop them.” In the past, my father would have sent them running, wiseguys or no.

I stand there enraged, and suddenly, impotent.   A certain old lady picks up her phone and complains about dead leaves in her yard. It probably happens a thousand time a day in America, but not in Gowanus. Her wish is somebody’s command.  And 75 years of family history—my grandfather, my brother Thomas and his Easter rabbits and ducks, the July 4^th barbecues,  rose bushes and tomato plants, our  joys and tragedies, vanishes.

Eyes Closed Tightly

 On a bright winter’s afternoon, I’m crossing Third Avenue with half-a-dozen classmates, heading home after another empty school day in the suffocating string that encircles my life like a rosary. At exactly 3:41 P.M., the ground shakes; a wave of heat and pressure scatters us like pins in a bowling alley. My cheap tan schoolbag goes skittering across the pavement, followed, a few moments later, by an ear-splitting roar. Cars, trucks, the B-37 bus—passengers’ frightened faces pressed against windows— slam to a halt. When I can hear again, all around me people—Tony the Barber, Chitty the vegetable vendor, Dolly Romanelli from the bar on the corner—are yelling and pointing toward a billowing pillar of smoke and flame rising above Bush Terminal. Carroll Street begins to fill up, women and children pouring out of the row houses. Sirens wail in the distance.
I’m a parochial school kid at a moment when atomic war with godless Soviets lurks at the borders of my life. A few weeks earlier, I’d stared at tabloid pictures of Russian T-55 tanks rolling into Budapest, crushing freedom fighters, though I didn’t know what or where Hungary was. At Our Lady of Peace School, orange Air Raid Instructions—distributed by Con Edison—stare at me from the walls. There are regular air raid drills, nuns in flying brown and black habits shouting “Get under your desk! Cover exposed parts of your body! Close eyes tightly!” I’d seen “The Day the World Ended” with my friends at the Garfield Theater on Fifth Avenue; heard my older cousin JuJu Castaldo had sent a fire axe whistling through the screen during a Saturday matinee of “Them,” killing a monstrous twitching ant birthed by nuclear explosions in the western desert.
Standing on the corner, I watch stunned factory workers streaming along Third from Bush Terminal toward Atlantic Avenue, some bleeding, their clothes torn and covered in grime and soot, an eerie precursor to a tower looming half a lifetime away. And then a countermovement: My father, my cousin Jerry Pepe, my Uncle Sonny, other neighborhood longshoremen, hurrying in the opposite direction, toward the explosion.
Disaster struck two miles from my house on Bush Terminal’s 35th Street pier. Today, home to artists and effete fashion designers Bush Terminal in the 1950s was blue collar, the largest warehousing, manufacturing and shipping complex in the United States. (Everything about Brooklyn was outsized. Population-wise, it was the third largest city in the United States, bigger even than sprawling Los Angeles.)
On the pier that afternoon, dockworkers were using an oxyacetylene torch to cut away a steel pillar to access and repair a cargo crane. The 6,000 degree heat ignited burlap bags filled with highly inflammable foam rubber scrap stacked nearby. Armed with handheld extinguishers, the longshoremen were quickly driven back by billowing smoke and flame. When firemen arrived, burning rubber—scattered on the pier like a trail of birdseed—reached 37,000 lbs. of Cordeau Detonant, explosive detonating fuse no one seemed to know was there.
The devastating blast, the largest explosion in New York City history until 911, killed ten people, injured hundreds, shattered windows more than a mile away. Flying glass and metal shrapnel slicing through the thin air killed one person 1000 yards from ground zero. Miraculously, the full force of the explosion passed above the heads of firefighters on four FDNY boats racing to battle the blaze. Across the harbor in Manhattan’s financial district, buildings shook and rattled.
That Monday night, I snuck outside and ran to the newsstand on the corner of Fourth Avenue and Union, next door to the College Restaurant. Ignoring the New York Times, I grabbed 5-cent copies of the late editions of the Daily News and Daily Mirror, the only papers—except for the Morning Telegraph, the handicapper’s bible—my father read. When I got back, I found him, my uncle, my cousin Jerry, and two other neighborhood dockworkers, in our backyard. They were sitting at a picnic table, downing straight shots of Four Roses whiskey. Joe Coppola wasn’t a drinker.
“Dad, I got you the papers. The story is everywhere!”
“Get back in the house,” my father growled. “This ain’t for you.”
Disappointed, I passed through the dented screen door into our narrow kitchen, a place so cramped the washing machine was jammed next to the sink.
“Mom, what are they doing?”
“Never mind, go upstairs with your brothers.”
“Mom…”
“Go.”
I pounded up the narrow, enclosed staircase my father had rigged to connect the floors. Pushing Joey and Tommy out of the way, I ducked into my room, a mirror image of the downstairs’ kitchen, closing the door behind me. My window faced the backyard. I slid the sash open, eased my elbows above the whistling radiator, onto the rusting fire escape.
Under a naked lightbulb strung from a grape trellis, the men were gathered around a wooden bench. My uncle straddled the bench, his right leg bent sideways at the knee. A folded washcloth in his hand. Two guys grasped him by the shoulder. My cousin Jerry held a short, wooden-handled hammer.
“You ready?” Jerry said. He was a thin, hyperactive man, inveterate horseplayer, usually the butt of my Uncle Sonny’s outrageous jokes and laughing insults. Jerry, no slouch, never talked below a shout.
“Let’s get going,” Sonny said. He stuffed the washcloth in his mouth.
Jerry stood there, a long moment. I close my eyes tightly.
“Fuck this, I ain’t doing it.” Jerry said and stepped away. He handed the hammer to my father. Joe stepped forward, swung the hammer, a short, vicious arc, at my uncle’s knee. Sonny screamed, the burly men holding him in place. After a moment, he nodded. My father hit him again.
Terrified, I watched the men take turns smashing each other’s knees with the bloody hammer, their muffled moans driving me back into my dark room. These were men so much a part of my childhood. Uncle Sonny and Cousin Jerry showed up at our house every Saturday morning during the racing season, usually joined by my Uncle Sal Giordano, a NYPD detective at the 88th Precinct in Bedford Stuyvesant, just off the night shift. Gloria, my mom, would serve pots of strong coffee, enormous batches of scrambled ham and eggs, piping hot Italian bread, I’d fetch from Johnny Gallo’s Bakery. They’d argue, shout and curse, pore over the Scratch Sheet, calling each other imbeciles over every pick at Aqueduct that afternoon. To this day, these raucous mornings, when the world was young, and full of hope and possibility, remain the best in my life.
This terrible evening they were “making a case,” preparing to claim they’d been injured in the aftermath of the explosion. I’m sure the same thing was happening on every street bordering the Gowanus Canal. In the era before “containerization,” dockworkers probably made up 70 percent of the working population. In a few days, they’d appear limping at the mobbed-up ILA (International Longshoremen’s Association) clinic on Court and Union, or visit the sympathetic orthopedist who kept a Ferrari parked outside his brownstone office on 8th Avenue. He’d write a report. They’d contact their lawyers and file a lawsuit.
In a place where, as soldiers used to say, no one had a “pot to piss in, nor a window to toss it out,” everyone had a lawyer. Even me. Mine was Abraham L. whose office was across from Borough Hall. I don’t know if Abraham was a good lawyer, but he wore shiny suits and once gave me his tie. When I was hit by a taxi while crossing Flatbush Avenue—my knee twisted and lacerated, front teeth knocked out—he managed to lose. My parents had assured me my “case” would provide me “college money.”
Looking back at these men, all WWII combat veterans, not one of whom ever took advantage of the transformational GI Bill, most of whom died young from cigarettes and stress and hard drinking, I find myself asking, what level of alienation or desperation forces you to believe that crippling yourself for a few thousand dollars is the only career option you have?

An Easter Tale

 My mom was a great cook, but she couldn’t bake. Why would she with Cioffi’s just a few blocks past the Gowanus up on Union Street? Cioffi’s was not just a great Neapolitan/Sicilian bakery; it was “the pastry store where Sinatra (“Frank” to us) ordered his cannoli and sfogliatella whenever he was in New York.”
On Sunday mornings, if you were willing to stand "on line" halfway to Columbia Street, you could get a dozen Napoleons, Sfinge, Pasta Ciotte, “With the Cross,” Baba au Rhum, and other delicious pastries for $3.60, and still have change leftover for a small bag of pignoli cookies. As a teen, I had this down to a science. I’d arrive at Cioffi’s on the half-hour when everyone else was in church, happily risk damnation for a crunchy ricotta cream cannoli speckled with cintron.
On March 19th, St Joseph’s Day, Cioffi’s turned out fabulous Zeppole di San Giuseppe. My father was a Joe and our scattered relatives were obligated to gift him boxes of zeppoles (fried dough topped with custard. a sour cherry and powdered sugar) from pastry stores all over Brooklyn I'd devour them washed down with glass after glass of cold milk.
However, I couldn’t get Pizza di Grano aka Pastiera di Grano, the traditional peasant pie made with sweet ricotta (think Italian cheese cake only denser) flecked with grain, lemon peel and candied citron baked by a handful of neighborhood Italian ladies only at Eastertime. On Sunday morning, one of them—I don’t recall whom—Baby-Doll Stuto, Angie Pepe, Maggie Christiano—would show up after mass and bring mother a tiny pizza grano wrapped in crinkly aluminum foil as an Easter gift. I don’t know if it was the rarity, the scarcity, or that the pie just tasted so good, but I became obsessed with pizza di grano, a problem because Gloria loved sweets and Joey, Tommy and Greg, my brothers were gluttons.
Cioffi’s fell down. Their pizza grano looked all right but tasted “commercial,” as if it had been baked and shoved out on the counter without love or respect. Easters came and went; I hunted pizza grano in Bensonhurst, on Court Street, in Little Italy; nothing compared with the old ladies creation. (By the way, what was grano? Where do you get it and what do you do with it? ) The nonne kept it in brown paper bags, but they weren’t talking.
There was always leftover struffoli, little bbs of fried dough dipped in honey and covered with sprinkles. I hated them.
Life moved on. By some miracle, I was hired as a Newsweek reporter and worked briefly in London, Boston, New York and ultimately, Atlanta, where there was plenty of grain--they fed it to cows--but no Italians. Easters, I’d fly home to Brooklyn with my kids, Gaby and Thomas. Gloria saved me a sliver of her tiny pizza grano.
“Mom, just get the recipe.” I’d say grumbling and picking at the crumbs.
At the time. I had juice. We had a Rome bureau, a research library, no doubt access to Julia Child, the best chefs....
“They won’t give it to me.”
“What?”
“I asked them. They won’t give it to me.”
“Who?”
“Never mind.”
“Mom!"
There was always leftover struffoli, little bbs of fried dough dipped in honey and covered with sprinkles. I hated them.
Life went on. In the 1980s, Thomas died of AIDS. My father died of emphysema. My surviving brothers descended into the hell of drugs and gambling. The Gowanus was taking its toll of us, as it did every neighborhood family. I was not spared, but the worst, by far the worst, was Gloria’s illness and its aftermath which you can read about on my blog below
At Gloria’s funeral, I sat there in front of her open casket trying to figure out how things had gone so wrong, so fast. I was still in my 30s and saw no way forward. At one point, an old woman hobbled up to me. I kissed her dry cheek, smelled the old lady perfume. She pressed an envelope into my hand.
“Il Posto (The Mail),” I thought. The traditional offering of money to help defray funeral expenses, a holdover from our immigrant days. I stuffed the envelope into my jacket pocket. I found it a few days later after the funeral.
It was written in Italian, in tiny script. It was the recipe for pizza grano. I read the first few lines, It began: “Under a full moon, soak the grain....”
I’ve never tried to make my own.


https://salernocapitale.wordpress.com/…/pastiera-nacque-pr…/


http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/05/losing-mom.html

Reckless

Reckless
The entrance to the RR subway on Fourth and Union is vertiginous as a ski jump; trip and you crush your skull. Day after day, I  launch myself full-speed in the dim, grimy light, worn-out Thom McCann shoes clattering, barely gripping the steps’ steel edges. A hundred times, daring myself to fall; exhilarated but not knowing why. (The “slow” entrance, which I avoid, consists of two short, perpendicular stairways.) To a kid, Flatbush Avenue between Third and Fourth is wide as the Mississippi; taxis, buses, Daily News delivery trucks race to and from the Manhattan Bridge. I play human “chicken” feinting and dodging 10,000 pound trucks, just inches from their bumpers, right up until a Yellow cab sends me flying 20 feet, knocks my teeth out and lacerates my knee. Glad my Lee dungarees aren’t torn, but when I roll up my pants--the milky white bone of my femur and kneecap is exposed--I collapse on the asphalt, waking up in Kings County Hospital, my father, Joe, stalking the corridor.
I’d been en route to an Army & Navy store near Buddy Lee (the Barney's Boys' Town of Brooklyn) to buy a gas mask. Butchie Mulia, Fat Ernie and I had looted cases of hydrochloric acid and other toxic and, no doubt, explosive, chemicals, from the abandoned Golten Marine laboratory. We’re going to mix them randomly in the back of a truck as an “experiment.”
Gowanus is a reckless place. We’re teens without girls, few organized sports, or the pull of education or ambition. Our role models, “Junior” Persico, “Honey” Christiano, “Apples” McIntosh,” are reckless beyond imagining. On weekends, when kids in Great Neck and Greenwich—places I’ve never heard of—are on dates, we race, hearts pounding, through a gauntlet of red lights on Third Avenue under the Gowanus Expressway, “Joe Bo” Mongiello driving his white ’60 Pontiac Isley Brother’s “Shout” blasting. I grin, my new teeth flashing, until Joe attempts to stick his head between the spokes of the steering wheel. The other guys cheer.
It’s not our fault. It’s a reckless thing to go to the Fox theater on Flatbush Ave.: reckless to walk to the library in Park Slope. The gangbangers--Bishops and Apaches—surrounding St. Augustine H.S.don’t register that I, wearing a jacket and tie, am brutalized by thugs in clerical collars between rosaries. To me, Hook Pool is a shark tank. Of course, it’s very, very reckless for any male outsider to even pass through our mafia-run neighborhood
Some nights, P. a toupee-wearing 20-year-old, lines up his 65 Coupe Deauville on Carroll and Hoyt, stomps the gas, ignores the stop sign on Bond, hurdles across the Gowanus, up Carroll at 90 mph, kids playing on the sidewalk, runs the light on Third, past Our Lady of Peace Church, and barrels across the broad lanes of Fourth, showers of sparks erupting as the rear axle bottoms on an enormous dip. He barely keeps control. Months later, on the way back from a funeral, he’ll jump the guard rail of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway and plow head-on into a passenger car filled with people. I was in another car. I remember seeing a woman's bloody face protruding from a broken windshield.
One summer night (remember the song)," Honey’s backyard—where starlet Joey Heatherton, the Lindsay Lohan of her day, had been tossed fully clothed into the pool, Blaise, pear-shaped, with a thick black pompadour and baby-face, announces he’s going to the Capri Club, a bookie joint where dangerous men entertain their goomahs (“comares”) on Saturday nights. Blaise has decided he needs" a drink.
"Carroll Street is teeming; our apartments stifling, Monte’s Venetian Room is packed with suburban strangers. Three generations of families sit outside on lawn chairs, radios tuned to the Mets game, cranky babies in strollers, teen girls wearing white lipstick and tight jeans, wallyos (gualiones) on the corner heads rotating like radar dishes, looking for action that never comes. On the cobblestone street, Caddies and Electra convertibles from Court Street, the radios blasting “Rag Doll,” are backed up at the light.
Blaise is naked as St. Francis and the Pope.
He walks up the suddenly silent street, politely waits, dick-dangling, for the light to change Horns blare in protest. Curses erupt from outraged Puerto Rican drug dealers heading for the salsa clubs of Manhattan. The first giggles and obscene jokes ripple up and down the block.
“Stop that moron,” an Irish cop stuck five car lengths from the corner, yells.
Utterly calm, Blaise crosses Third Avenue. I’m reminded of a blissful martyr in a stained window. "Mack the Knife" blasts a warning from the Capri Club. Blaise turns right, walks past Tony’s Barber shop and into the mouth of the dragon Hit men and thieves momentarily stunned and speechless.
Two years later, in college I get word of a “reunion” in Prospect Park. The last reunions I attended ended in a gunfight at Plum Beach (my unarmed friends attack the shooter) and a riot at the Bay A Go-Go in Sheepshead Bay. This time we arrive at the top of a steep hill in the dead of night, lugging cases of beer, wine and a pharmacopoeia of illicit substances. As always, there are no girls.
Blaise arrives on crutches, leg in a plaster cast. At the end of a long evening , he jumps off the top of the hill and rolls howling fifty yards to the bottom. Of course, “Lenny Spares,” Joe Bo and the rest of the crew follow him.
I stay behind.

Dutch Shoes and Dead Babies

 Late on a winter’s afternoon spent among the greasy truck bodies and rusting marine engines scattered on the banks of the Gowanus Canal, I enter the apartment carefully as if there are land mines under the linoleum. Sometimes, a slamming door is enough to trigger my father's rage. Ernie, Sal and I had been hunting for swag hidden by the neighborhood drug addicts—my cousin Jimmy Psycho among them—in Golten’s Yard. We found something else, a thing for which I had no words. My corduroy school pants are smeared with grease. In our meager household, money for another pair will not be easy to come by. Joey and Tommy are curled on the parlor floor watching television, the dinner table, already set in the cramped dining room."
Where's Daddy?"
Engrossed in the finale of the Mickey Mouse Club, they ignore me. "....K-E-Y."
"WHY? BECAUSE WE LIKE YOU!"
I stare at Annette Funicello's breasts jiggling under her white turtleneck.
"M-O-U-S-E!" Tommy belts out the letters like a cabaret singer.
You stink!" says Joey wrinkling his nose. "Like the canal."
“You too!”
Gloria is in the kitchen stirring a boiling pot of Ronzoni spaghetti.
"I'm home Ma," I yell and dart for the stairs hoping to stash my ruined pants.
"Almost 6:00 o'clock. Why so late?"
"I... helped Sister Malachy clean the classroom."
"Why always you?"
"She says I’ll make a great janitor."
"Don’t mind her! Go get washed."
In the upstairs bathroom, I scrub the pants with Ivory Soap hoping to get the grease out, instead smearing the sink with black streaks. I pour Ajax on my knees, then some of Joe’s Old Spice aftershave and scrub some more. Frustrated, I roll the pants up, tie the legs into a double knot and throw them to the back of the top shelf of the hall closet behind unopened bottles of Anisette, Creme de Menthe and Four Roses whiskey, gifts from Christmases past.
I’m on the couch pretending to read a Superman comic when my father pounds on the door, making the Christmas bells, we use for a knocker, dance. Tommy lets out a yelp.
Joe doesn’t have a key to his own house. In his world, wife and kids are always home, dinner always on the table.
Joey and Tommy run to pull the door open. I get up. Joe looms in the doorway in an army fatigue jacket and blue watch cap, his face wind-burned and raw. He carries yellow rawhide gloves. Two wooden-handled steel hooks, the tools of his trade, hang off his shoulder like epaulets. Tommy and Joey prance around him yelping like puppies.
"What did you bring us Daddy! Whatja bring!"
Gloria comes up behind us wiping her hands on her apron, eager as the kids. I feel myself drawn into the familiar routine. Joe unzips his jacket. It’s stiff, crackly with cold. Nothing. Joey and Tommy moan. I smell the salt tang of the Atlantic on my father. Tommy pulls at the thick army sweater he wears underneath his jacket. Dozens of tiny Easter eggs wrapped in brightly-colored aluminum foil cascade to the floor. Tommy and Joey squeal, and scramble to grab the candy. Gloria kneels beside them, pushing them away. “Yous haven’t eaten yet!”
"A Dutch merchant docked yesterday," says Joe. "A couple of crates slid off the draft and busted." I know not to question s good fortune. Every kid in the neighborhood will have a bellyache tomorrow. Joe reaches into his jacket and hands me a brown paper bag.
"This is for you. I traded Frankie Masters for it. His gang is working the number one hatch."
I open the bag and pull out a pair of hand-carved wooden shoes. A miniature Dutch farmhouse is carved and painted in blue, yellow and red on the tops of the shoes. I can make out a blond boy and girl holding hands. The girl holds a bunch of tulips.
"Figured you'd go for that."
“Thanks Dad.”
Brooklyn was settled by the Dutch. There’s a crumbling farmhouse still standing in the devastated, needle park on Fourth Avenue and Third Streets. In the 1600s, a merchant had built a series a canals and locks that floated him into New York harbor, neatly as an Uber.
I reach up to kiss my father's cheek. Bristly, cold as ice in the overheated apartment.
"Let me carry the hooks!” I ask.
“Be careful."
I hang the tools in the closet under the stairs. Gloria is scrambling to snatch the chocolate from Joey and Tommy who are shriekig and stuffing Easter eggs into their mouths.
Friday is payday. When we groan at the piselli and pasta, hard-boiled eggs and tuna fish our devout Catholic mom has prepared, Joe orders a pizza from Lenny's on Fifth and Prospect Avenues. Half-an-hour later, I’m gorging m on pepperoni pizza, washed down with Hoffman’s Cream Soda and chocolate.
After dinner, I call Sally. The line is busy, busy, busy. We’d found an unspeakable thing in the lots, a fetus swaddled in a bloody towel I didn’t know the word at the time or the fact that the wise guys were running an abortion mill on Carroll Street.
At 10:00 P.M., feverish and shivery, I crawl upstairs and climb into the lumpy bed beside my sleeping brothers. The radiators are whistling. Joey is rolled up, a mummy in the thin chenille bedspread. I unwrap him, cover Thomas's frail, milk-white body and lay back. I can hear my parents downstairs going through bills and smell Joe’s Lucky Strikes burning one after another like a fuse. I decide to tell my father what we’d found in the lot in the morning. Despite my racing thoughts, I fall asleep.
"Vinny, wake up! Please wake up!"
I’m jolted from some dark and terrible dream. "Wha...What?"
Tommy is frantically tugging at my arm. Half-asleep, I send him flying with a forearm.
"What!” I hiss.
"PLEASE!" They're fighting!”
The shouts echoing in the narrow stairwell clear the sleep from my eyes. The crazed voice is deafening, obscene, familiar.
"You fucking cunt! I told you not to spend no more money!"
This is my other father, the father I hate. I leap out of bed and run down the hall. Joey stands trembling in his underwear at the top of the steps. The stairwell is enclosed in wood-paneling, a dark vertiginous tunnel. I plunge down the stairs, bare feet slipping, almost falling, catching myself on the banister, my kid brothers tumbling behind me.
I see a chair go flying...hear my father roaring...my mother mouthing the familiar plea, "Don't let the neighbors hear!"...the squeal of table legs over linoleum as my father shoves it, trying to pin Gloria against the dining room wall...Coffee cups, bills and ashtrays come crashing to the floor.
"Stop it! Leave her alone!"
Gloria turns toward us, tries to cover where he'd torn her blouse, and in that moment, Joe is on her, slapping, pulling her hair, pushing her head against the wall. Gloria rakes him with her nails, carving bloody streaks on his cheeks.
"Look what you did to me!" he shouts.
I’m frozen, tears streaming from my eyes.
"Please!" I try to scream. It comes out a whimper.
"Daddy Please!"
Thomas and Joey race past me wailing. Thomas, always so brave, grabs my father's legs. Joe shakes him off like a rag doll. Joey is trying to hug my parents as if a little boy’s love could stop the horror. Gloria is sobbing in helplessness and shame. Joe slaps at her again, screaming, cursing our family’s dead in Italian.
I feel myself moving. I see myself come between my parents, tear my father away from my mother. See Joe fly backward into the kitchen, crash into the washing machine and go down. My heart pounding in the awful silence. Then, almost a whisper: "You hit your father?"
This is a battle for which I’m still not ready. I turn and face him. My father is 190 lbs. of muscle and fulminating rage. On the docks the Sicilians call him the “animale.” I square my shoulders and drop my hands. Joe charges The first punch, a short, left, catches me in the stomach. I crumple, careful to keep my hands by my side. The second punch, a roundhouse right to the top of my head, knocks me to the linoleum floor.
“You hit your father."
Still wearing the heavy work shoes, he kicks me who only loves him. Gloria and the kids shriek. A roaring in my ears. Dazed, I try to cover my head, gasping at the pain, tasting blood where I’ve bitten through my lip. Yet, in some dark and secret place, I know I’ve won. I’ve diverted my father's rage, and some part of me, floating beyond the reach of the kicks and punches, is happy.
"I'm calling the cops!" Gloria screams reaching for the phone by the bathroom door. Joe tears it out of her hands and throws it into the bathtub. In that moment, I’m up, my brothers holding me, moving me toward the stairs. My father lunges again, but the attack is half-hearted, the storm already passing. I’m in the tunnel ascending. I hear my mother cursing him, hear his sobs. And Thomas's trembling wail: "I hate you! I hope you die!”
A rooster crows I jolt awake. Gray light seeps past the thick curtains draped over the windows. I watch my brothers sleeping, their trembling hearts already healing, preparing to love our father again.