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.

Gowanus Crossing Reboot

 

Gowanus Crossing is a memoir of a life lived along Brooklyn's infamous Gowanus Canal. I grew up on Carroll Street across from Monte's Venetian Room, at the time a landmark red sauce restaurant that drew a never-ending mix of politicans, gangsters and celebrities--I fought viciously over a handful of change Tony Bennett scattered on the sidewalk one night. Monte's, half-a-block from the polluted canal, was the heart of an Italian enclave of dockworkers and shopkeepers emigrated from Salerno Province. Al Capone was born on Garfield Place, two blocks from my house. My world was shaped by the Irish nuns of Our Lady of Peace parish who saw themselves as missionaries and the Italians, vulgarians to be driven down the path to Salvation; counterbalanced by glittering mafiosi who represented wealth, success and stability in a chaotic world. No teenage boy could want better role models (nothing was forbidden); no adult worse. Gowanus Crossing is not another half-assed wise guy saga, or a story of escape from a destructive environment. Its what I find locked in my  heart all these years later. Part of me loved this world: the writer inside could embellish and lie and live in my head, burying the violence, cruelty and waste in the drama of it all; the innocent boy could not. I left South Brookyn in my twenties before the canal became a fashionable destination, and my family destroyed, but South Brooklyn never left me. Will not leave me. What follows in the 2012 blog posts is how it all came flooding back:

Prologue

A pestilent and stinking Nile, the Gowanus flows through the neighborhood, defiles it with stench and disease and dark secrets. In the decades ahead, many of us who’d grown-up near the stream would be dead or dying of an epidemic of cancers and birth defects long after we'd escaped to the ranch houses and stick-tree suburbs of Long Island and New Jersey; an epidemic veiled by other plagues—violence, AIDS, abandonment and addiction—visited on South Brooklyn.

In the 1960s, the canal is poisoned womb … grave … open sewer. These things and more: it is a barrier that keeps the surrounding neighborhoods isolated from the rest of New York City, keeps them insular, with a fierce identity and demarcated borders.

The Gowanus has a history—unknown in the neighborhood--that in other places would be noteworthy. George Washington’s army clashed with the British along its banks. Its tides, rhythmic and regular, impose order on the chaotic lives that cling precariously to its banks. At flood, it carries the faraway scent of ocean; moonlit, a glimmer of primordial beauty.

My Friend Ray Sharkey, Fallen Idol

“No more than a wisp of dust”

Ray Sharkey was the guy who got away…who fled the desolation that dragged so many of us into early graves. He ran but could not escape the plague within. The Ray I remember was half-Irish, with a long nose, sparkling eyes, pockmarked skin and voice like a rasp. He grew up in a row house on the dark side of the Gowanus in the shadow of the decaying Expressway near the Battery Tunnel. His father, a doorman, slipped out when Ray was five. His mother pampered him; his nonna sang to him in Italian. You can see shards of his Brooklyn childhood, glittering and brittle, in Taylor Hackford’s film, The Idolmaker.

Mornings, Ray and I would walk together up Union Street to all-boys St. Augustine High School on Park Place. Walked past the stoop where a Tuinal-enraged distant relative named “Boy-Boy” stabbed a Puerto Rican to death for playing a guitar. Heads back, shoulders rolling, we strolled, wearing our purple and white letterman’s sweaters with the big “A” sewn above the pocket. Letters, earned not on the field, court or track, but for selling indulgences, a practice that triggered the Protestant Reformation. We pestered the dry, doddering, sinless Episcopalians who still dominated Park Slope into giving us cash money in return for prayers, unnumbered and at unknown intervals like Swiss bank accounts for their salvation.  A $100 —my father earned less in a week unloading ships on the Red Hook piers—and the Christian Brothers named you a “Centurion.”

In a neighborhood where everyone—from Angioletti, the singsong fruit peddler, to the gamblers on the corner—shouted like performers in some sidewalk opera, Ray was a loudmouth. Intense, histrionic, given to breaking out in a quavering doo-wop falsetto at a moment’s notice. He was a few years younger than I and best friends with my brother Joey. Summers, Ray, Joey and a short, curly-haired, granite-jawed football player named Raymond Brocco, would head to Brighton Beach, slather themselves with baby oil and iodine; smoke, ingest and inhale every combination of alcohol and pharmaceutical, and roast themselves unconscious on teeny towels while trying to pick up Jewish girls from Ocean Parkway. I can still smell the salt tang and the sand cool under my feet in the boardwalk’s shade.  No question, Ray was part of the frantic, gang-bang, romantic-violent Gowanus mix— lost boys like my cousins JuJu, Jimmy Psycho, Popeye Anthony and Richie Mel—but he hung back, absorbed and observed, mined and mastered all the pain and hurt.
Or so I thought.

I now know that flight never means escape, and transcendence is not forever. A madness still sings in my veins. Ray never finished high school, never became a Centurion. He caught a performance of Hair in Manhattan—an alien place we called “the City”—and surely as Saul of Tarsus, knew his place. He plunged into acting with my handsome and doomed brother Thomas, studying with Uta Hagen at HB Studio. Had he read his Chaucer at Saint Augustine, Ray might have recognized the revelers in the Pardoner’s Tale determined to triumph over Death…might have recognized that Death manifests in seductive guises.

On a Sunday afternoon in the spring of ‘73, Ray showed up driving a 356 Porsche—maybe one of the sports cars Anthony Lips stole and swapped VIN numbers from wrecks rusting in Stuckey’s Staten Island salvage yard. The gualiones ("wallyos"--in dialect) gathered outside Monte’s restaurant, scratched their crotches, threw make-believe punches, laughed, dug the car. Ray basked in the attention. With him, a long-haired, bellbottomed Puerto Rican Golden Gloves champ named Chu-Chu Malave. No Sancho Panza he. My mother served platters of ravioli, meatballs, braciole, sausage, roast chicken, salad, cannoli from Cioffi’s on Union near Columbia Street. Old Man Stuto’s homemade wine flowed. Ray entertained us.  He begged Joey to come along (“Fuckin’ California, man!”) but my brother was already passing into the limbo he’d inhabit the rest of his life. Mom warned Ray to “be a good boy.” He laughed his crazy laugh.
And roared away.

I didn’t see Ray Sharkey for ten years. My world had changed. Somehow, I'd graduated from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. In 1982, Newsweek dispatched me to Los Angeles to write a profile of this hot new movie star. My colleague, David Friendly, put me up in the Beverly Hills Hotel. Ray had just won the Golden Globe award as Best Motion Picture Actor and critics were raving over his searing portrayal of impresario Bob Marcucci, the man who loosed Fabian and Frankie Avalon upon the world. Pauline Kael called him “the next Jimmy Cagney.” I never knew Cagney or Marcucci, but I recognized Ray Sharkey, the Ray who ached for recognition and respect, who, if you looked closely, leaked desperation like a sieve. I smiled at the clotheslined backyards of Gowanus tenements trying to pass for South Philly. No question, Ray’s nod to the old neighborhood.

“Where’s your brother?” he shouted when I arrived. “These neighborhood guys…they got a stupid apartment…they got a car…they’re fucking some girl on the side. That’s all there is to life? Tell him to get out here! I’ll give him a job. He stays with me! No problem.” He closed his fist and thrust his thumb in the air like a guarantee.

His life was changed, but not transcended. The Idolmaker was a box office disappointment. Still, Ray was living on the beach in Malibu. He’d dated the Italian actress Ornella Muti, far and away the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. He was living with a very good-looking blonde. “Mienca, her family owns Kellogg’s cereal!” he confided when we were alone, shaking his open hand like it was on fire. “You believe that shit?” He rode motorcycles with Stallone and Gary Busey. He wore a stupid bandanna to cover his thinning hair.  In a few years, TV audiences would know him as Sonny Steelgrave in Wiseguy. He’d make appearances on Miami Vice…on Crime Story, dozens of shows and movies.  He was only 29-years-old. He had 10 years to live.

“Yo, come with me,” he said before I could start our interview. This would be a pattern over the next days, my deadline clock tick-tick-ticking away. We drove, we ate Fatburgers, he bought a VCR—I’d never seen one—and showed me tapes of his work. His characters tended to be named “Vinnie.” I liked that. He’d finished Some Kind of Hero, a film about dysfunctional former POWs, co-starring , of all people, Richard Pryor. A POW camp, real or imagined, is hardly a therapeutic environment “Madonna! we spent a lot of time getting into character,” Ray allowed.

For three days, he danced, he deflected, he feinted and fell back on the old dese and dose tough guy clichés.  I didn’t have the heart or maybe the skill to press him. I had one brother dying of AIDS, another a junkie, a third an out-of-control gambler with wise guys hot on his trail. I wasn’t making such smart life choices myself. Really, what could I ask?  His manager, Herb Nanas, only saw blue skies. Giuseppe, his hairstylist, pronounced Ray “tanned and fit.” Other sources didn’t bother to return my calls. To me, Hollywood is a very hard nut to crack, far harder than the Pentagon, Washington or Wall Street.  My story was put on hold, indefinitely.  

“I always knew I would fall—big time,” Ray once said. By 1991, it was big time. Like so many peers and family members who’d come of age in the streets along the Gowanus, and with so much at his fingertips, Ray Sharkey had become a full-blown heroin addict. Not coke like everyone else in Hollywood. Heroin, straight out of the gutters and shooting galleries of Red Hook. Strung-out, trailing a string of arrests, ODs, car wrecks, failed rehabs, lies, lurid gossip, destroyed marriages. He burned through a million dollars that year, got busted in Vancouver and fired from an acting gig, the unforgivable sin a business willing to look every other way as long as you put asses in the seats. The impenetrable shield Hollywood extends over its own was cracking.

Ray wasn’t done yet. It was the Age of AIDS, not Aquarius. And Sharkey was an IV drug user. When an actress named Elena Monica, daughter of the comedian, Corbett Monica, filed an all-too-public lawsuit accusing Sharkey—who’d mysteriously had lost 40 lbs.—of infecting her with the AIDS virus in the course of a brief relationship, he had nowhere else to run. To his shame, he stayed in denial to the end—he could barely stand when Monica showed up to confront him--even after his manager revealed the truth. Shortly after, Ray returned to Brooklyn to die with his mother. Tough as nails, Cecelia shielded him to the very end. He passed away on June 11, 1993. Witnesses remember him as no more than “a wisp of dust.”

I was reminded of Ray Sharkey in the summer of 2012 when I’d volunteered to write the narration for a documentary being shot in Atlanta. The Narrator turned out to be Tovah Feldshuh who'd played Ray Sharkey’s love interest in his breakthrough film, The Idolmaker, thirty years before. Tovah is quite lovely and has had both a good life and a successful career, most recently the star of Golda’s Balcony, the longest running one-woman play in Broadway history. Of course, we talked about Ray. Tovah was one of those good-looking, well-bred Jewish girls Sharkey would have loved to seduce.

And I wondered once again why our lives insist on unfolding the way they do. Tovah is happily married, with a husband and grown children. She lives on Central Park West and grew up in affluent Scarsdale. Ray and I by the pestilent Gowanus, a Superfund site. Her father was an attorney. Ray’s absentee father a doorman; mine a dockworker given to violent rages. Is it destiny, nurture, nature (a chaos gene that selects for creativity and torment)? Or the fact we lived in a self-contained, through-the-looking-glass world where teachers, police, clergy, and other authority figues were corrupt or uncaring...and mafia guys our role models? It's all beyond my ken, save for the ache I feel when I remember Ray as he once was. As my brothers once were.  For all his brilliance—and there is no question that Ray was brilliant— Sharkey sleeps in a lonely grave in a forgotten town on Long Island.