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?