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.