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?