Election Night on the Gowanus

 

An Election Night bonfire, built over Carroll Street’s cobblestones was a tradition predating the black-clad Italian women simmering tomato sauce on Sunday mornings or i pazzi, the crazies wandering our streets. It had very American feel to it, Bull Moose Party…Boss Tweed…Salem’s witches. We teenagers raided Chitty’s fruit store for orange crates and wooden bushel baskets, then Cambie’s Trucking, pulling splintery wooden pallets from the bays of tractor trailers. We went door-to-door begging fragrant wine barrels from homemade wine presses,..cracked linoleum and unwanted furniture. As the frenzy built, we’d literally pull wooden cellar doors off their hinges
At 13, I'm not sure I knew the name of the President. Not until Kennedy. I knew the mayor—a pie factory on Fourth Avenue, bore his name—Wagner. Buy damaged pies for a nickel and smash them, sticky lemon and pineapple, in each other’s faces. The name Rockefeller, was so alien it might have been a petroglyph.  Across the East River, Manhattan glimmered, unreachable, insubstantial. 
Wise guys Jerry Lang, Honey Christiano and Jackie Carr, abetted us, winking as we dragged busted folding chairs and card tables from the Glory Social and Capri Clubs on Third Avenue. They were, in all things, irresponsible. Perfect negative role model for lost boys bucking societal restraints.
No one cared about voting. My father would announce as if he’d unearthed a kernel of infinite wisdom—“No matter who wins, I gotta go to work in the morning.”
We competed against kids from President and Union Streets, and the alien territories across the Gowanus, for the biggest, most out-of-control blaze. Preempting us, the Fire Department, sent raiding parties to haul away our hidden stores of planks and beams. They were met with barrages of eggs and rotten fruit
If they caught you, these, burly Irishmen from Bay Ridge and Flatbush, They' d beat the shit of you. At dusk on Election Night, we emerged like crazed rats from hallways, cellars and alleys, lugging wood, stacks of newspapers and plastic gallons of gas, turpentine, paint. Darting, whirling, like Max from Where the Wild Things Are.Americo Guzzi, hammered the outsized brass nut on the fire hydrant, deforming and disabling it. The pile, grew three stories high and 40 feet across No one seemed to register that almost all the houses on Carroll Street were made of wood,sheathed in tarpaper and flammable shingles.
By 9:00 P.M., alarms were sounding everywhere. Sirens blared, fire trucks careened around corners. On the fire escapes younger kids readied volleys of eggs. Honey, 46-years-old, tossed a wooden torch—wrapped with rags soaked in gasoline—onto the pile. It exploded, turning night into day. I felt the combustion’s blast. A wave of intense heat sucked the air out of my lungs.
Holy shit!”
Half-blinded by smoke, gasping, grinning, I  watched Jeannie Wilcox, Amy Gallo, my cousin Clementine, cute girls in pink lipstick, leather jackets, tight jeans, as they stood transfixed. The heat washed over them, sensual. They ignored me.
All the telephone wires on the street were melting and burning. Embers were floating delicately over tar paper roofs.
“Where the hell is the Fire Department?”  Someone roared, the spell broken.
When they arrived, there was no water pressure in the pipes. I stood up, let fly with my last egg.
“Grab that little bastid!”
 I ducked and ran into the alley next to Honey’s house, a big guy in a yellow rubber suit closing fast. I cut, slipped, and rammed my head into the edge cinderblock wall. I've still got the "V" cut into my head

For Vincenzo Coppola on Columbus Day.

My grandfather, Vincenzo Coppola, is long deceased. I’m named for him.
Growing up, I remembered Vincenzo as the guy who cost us our inheritance. Vincenzo was a fruit peddler. His wife, Anna, my grandmother, was a very astute businesswoman. Within 20 years of arriving in New York, she and her sister, known only as LA ZIA, “THE AUNT,” opened a dress shop, a grocery; they owned houses, a small apartment building, and a "palazzo" in Pagani, south of Naples, our hometown.
Anna, died in her forties, before I was born. As the story goes, THE AUNT, homely as a witch in a fairy tale, decided Vincenzo, a handsome, strapping man, should now marry her. He balked and the bad blood flowed across the generations.
After World War II, the Aunt sent Vincenzo to Italy to collect the rent on the property that had been accruing for a decade.
He sailed off and didn’t return for a year.
He arrived back in Brooklyn flat broke. The Aunt, who legally controlled everything, not only stripped Vincenzo, of his portion of the business, but kicked my father and his four sisters out of her will. We wound up living in a $35 a month apartment above a bar.
When The Aunt passed away, her assets went to a distant cousin, MARIUCHELLE who’d been brought over from Italy as a servant.
My whole life, I walked past OUR apartment building cussing my grandfather for blowing my inheritance.
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In May 1981, I was part of a Newsweek team dispatched to Rome to cover the attempted assassination of John Paul II, the Polish Pope. I was in Italy for month. As it turned out, my Aunt Tessie, my father’s older sister, was visiting Rome as well. Tessie was fluent in Italian and had stayed in contact with our family.
“Why don’t we visit,” I suggested.
That Sunday morning, I rented a car and we drove south 135 miles to PAGANI. We spent an afternoon with our Italian relatives. An amazing experience The eldest of them was a medical doctor who lived with her husband, a French teacher named Aeneas Falcone in an apartment that might have been grand 100 years earlier. A living room wall split by an earthquake went unrepaired. I suspect there wasn't much demand for French in a town whose name translates as 'the Pagans." They showed us an old book with an illustration of our family tree. The branches ended abruptly with my grandparents’ immigration early in the 20th century.
I filled in the blanks.
Of course, there followed the Sunday afternoon feast. The pasta and braciole, sausage, roast chicken and stuffed artichokes, remarkably like the dinners I’d eaten my whole life on Sunday afternoons. These were people of modest means and I’m certain they spent a good part of their weekly budget on this dinner.
I can’t speak Italian, but the emotions that flowed were clear as a crystal stream:

That morning, I didn’t know these folk even existed except as half-remembered names from my childhood. And now we’re embracing and laughing and trying to make each other understood. Word had spread that we were in town. Cousin after cousin, distant relatives, family friends, showed up carrying boxes of pastry, bottles of wine and baskets of fruit.
Remember, I carry Vincenzo Coppola’s name.
At one point, a man in his forties came up and embraced me. He had tears in his eyes. “I was a little boy and I needed an operation," he said as Tessie translated. “And your grandfather paid for it. He saved my life.”
And then a woman told me Vincenzo gave her the money to open a beauty salon. And another whose tuition he’d paid….and another. He literally bought the food that kept these people from starving.
Yes, Vincenzo had spent the Aunt’s money---on good works. On his family, who were far needier than their American counterparts.
I never got to thank Vincenzo.
He died, as many old men in Brooklyn do, of a heart attack while shoveling snow. He was in his eighties. My memory of him remains a big, cranky old man who seemed to enjoy pinching my cheeks until I cried.
But that was not him.
Not at all.