My Gowanus Memoir Coming Spring 2026

 Henry Holt Publisher

Available Amazon

Where Have You Gone Melvin Maldonado?

The double doors swing open like the gaping mouth at the entrance to Steeplechase Park and I’m swept into a maelstrom of shouts, shrieks, bells, buzzers, kids flirting, teasing, threatening, senses assaulted by a kaleidoscope of adolescent fashion and tropical perfume infiltrated by the smell of reheating beef patties, greasy fries, and sour milk. Students are racing up the down staircases, overwhelming hall monitors waving frantically and ineffectually as Mumbai traffic cops. Enrico Fermi Junior High School, Bushwick, Brooklyn, early 1970s. This Bushwick is not the hipster hive it is today. It’s raw, rough, in “transition.” A few years later, a few blocks away on Knickerbocker Avenue, mob boss Carmine Galante is assassinated after a leisurely lunch and cigar on the patio of his fave restaurant.

I head, crisp new NYC teacher’s license in my tan briefcase, for the principal’s office, uncomfortable in my new green suit bought “on time” with my mother’s Abraham & Straus card. I’m the first in my extended family to aspire to such a position, and Gloria, my mother, is so proud. But even in Brooklyn, my ‘dese and dose’ Gowanus accent gives folks pause. I want to do well. I want to connect with students, inspire them as books and reading inspired me. “Gladly would he learn and gladly teach,” is my mantra. Instead of the principal, I meet the dean, like many of these guys, a short, bull-necked Phys Ed teacher who thinks a Chaucer goes under a coffee cup. He flicks at my paperwork with his thumb, looks me over—I’m a big guy, 6’ 1”, 200 lbs.—and grunts, “You start after lunch.”

“I...I guess.” 

Substitutes face other faculty members’ worst day every day. We do this for about $5 an hour, less the price of subway fare and a cafeteria lunch. The administrators know this, the teacher mysteriously laid low by a 24-hour virus—who happens to be facing five English-as-a-Second Language classes in a row—knows it, and the kids, be they Albanian hell raisers, vatos locos from Aguadilla or wiseguy wannabees from Bensonhurst—surely know it.

I don’t know it.

This will be a recurring theme in my life: eager but unprepared; broke but already blowing my $40 day’s pay. I make my way down to the cafeteria. Teachers in wide ties and plaid cardigan sweaters sit off to one side like freaks in a carnival sideshow, many working on the baked fish special. Too nervous to eat, I push a cup of green Jello around with a plastic spoon.. After lunch, the dean appears and escorts me to a third floor classroom. Like the Red Sea parting before Moses, students scramble out of his way, shrugging off jeans jackets decorated with forbidden gang colors, snatching fedoras, watch caps and Afro picks off their heads

“Is there a lesson plan?” I ask as we stand outside the door. 

In a perfect world, teachers are supposed to prepare a detailed road map for substitutes to follow, thus ensuring continuity of learning. He looks at me as if I’m speaking Chinese.

“Let’s see what we got here.”

He opens the door. A classroom full of shouting 14-year-olds falls silent as a refectory in a Trappist monastery.

“Melvin, get to your seat,” the dean says. “NOW!”

Melvin is a character, a recurring nightmare I’ll meet again and again in my five years in the New York City public school system. This particular Melvin is short, skinny, loud, hyperactive, top of the line ADD candidate in today’s schools. In a very few minutes, Melvin (why are so many Puerto Ricans named Melvin?) will do his best get me fired—and possibly imprisoned.

The intercom crackles. The dean, needed elsewhere, vanishes. I have 45 minutes to fill on this first day of the rest of my professional life. A wall of sound, maddening, unstoppable, assaults my ears. My “teaching materials” consist of a few dozen raggedy copies of Junior Scholastic magazine, the crossword puzzles filled in, pages torn or covered in crude drawings and misspelled obscenities. I pass them out. The kids groan and toss them in the air. The seating plan is useless—I don’t know anyone but Melvin and he’s back chattering away in Spanish to a girl bursting out of her clothes in full post-pubescent flower.

I decide to write a few vocabulary words on the “blackboard”—this is Brooklyn before the great cultural awakening —and run a drill. The words come from an endless list—English and Latin—I was forced to memorize in Catholic schools where the halls were silent as the Callixtus catacomb. I’m reaching for a piece of chalk when first spitball hits me in the back of my head; others zip past, sticking and then dripping down to the board like snail smears. This accompanied by a chorus of giggles and shrieks of “Oh snap!” I know if I turn around, Melvin and the other perpetrators will appear as innocent as Raphael’s angels, but the odd thing is I find this hilarious funny, like watching a character on “Happy Days,” or “Welcome Back Kotter.” I’m trapped in the funhouse of my own sense of humor.

“Please copy these words into your notebooks,” I say projecting gravitas.

A dozen students, mostly girls in the front row, set to work. I risk turning my back to the snipers and add a few more words. My plan is to “elicit”—an important word in pedagogy—definitions from the students, discuss and refine. This, I’ve been told in otherwise useless education class, is how real learning takes place. I sit down at the desk, flip through the red plastic folder of Delaney cards (a system of miniature individualized index cards used to tracl attendance, etc.) looking for this bastard Melvin’s last name.  Amazingly, the noise subsides for a few minutes.

And suddenly, it builds into a devastating chorus of panicked shouts.

“Melvin!   Melvin!  Melvin!” 

I look up. Students are out of their seats screaming and pointing.

“MELVIN!!!”

I jump up. One of the unscreened classroom windows—it seems wide as a barn door—is open.

“He fell out the window? Jumped? On my first day! I haven’t even filled out my paperwork. What do I do?”

Nothing. I’m paralyzed.

Another round of screams, this echoing from down the hall. I imagine Melvin in his thin red turtleneck and grey and black checked pants smeared on the concrete three stories below. I see tonight’s tabloid headlines, “Teacher Dawdles Student Falls To Death.”

Gloria reads the Daily News and Mirror.

 A pounding on the classroom door. I stagger over. A teacher I remember eating baked fish in the cafeteria staring at me wordlessly. Melvin’s left ear is pinched between his thumb and forefinger, high and hard enough so that the boy—grinning (!)—is standing on his tiptoes. While my back was turned, Melvin apparently decided to climb out the window as a joke and inched backwards, his sneakers barely gripping the tiny ledge, 50 feet to the next classroom, where he was spotted and hauled in like a mackerel.

The bell rings and my students vanish, Melvin skipping down the hall not a care in the world.

 I’ve got another class in five minutes.

Somehow, I survive the semester at Enrico Fermi. In winter for fun, our students form a firing squad across narrow Starr Street and pound their hapless teachers with snowballs as we exit the building. One day, another substitute, John McDonagh, and I have had enough of the daily gauntlet. We fire back and sure enough, I bloody one particularly annoying kid’s nose with a chunk of ice. I’m called into the principal’s office for a disciplinary hearing.  By then, Melvin and his hermanos recognize my blue Alfa Romeo and fearing reprisals, I’m forced to park farther and farther away from the building. I’m up to ten blocks when I hear of an opening for an English teacher in a leafy junior high in solidly middleclass Bensonhurst, a position as rare and unlikely as a white whale.

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?

The Oldest Guy In the Gym

 Is me. Wondering why, I return always to the past. A teenager, I remember standing on the corner of Third Ave and Carroll Street watching the cars flash by heading for this mysterious and unknowable island, Manhattan...remember being on the corner of Fourth and Carroll in 1976 as the first runners in the NYC Marathon swept by (The other Italians in the neighborhood could care less)....remember staring at the towers of Midtown from my classroom window, teaching in Williamsburg...working in the Columbia J-School library the weekend class ended, watching the frisbees sail by the window....winning the fellowship that landed me in the U.K. and a job at Newsweek.. I remember so many nights on Madison Ave and Peachtree Street, the last guy in the skyscraper. Now it's the gym rebuilding after being sick. And it seems like my whole life has been about becoming...and never arriving.

My Father, Myself

 Haloed in darkness, Joe appears in the doorway, rugged, wind-burned face impossibly handsome, watch cap and olive drab fatigue jacket stiff from the Red Hook piers’ icy spray. My brothers and I surge forward, press our cheeks against our father’s, his cold passing into our little boy warmth. I remove the wooden- handled longshoreman’s hooks slung over his shoulder, a squire receiving his knight’s sword.

There were days when he’d unzip that jacket and dozens of tinseled chocolate Easter eggs would cascade to the cracked linoleum floor…Dutch van Houten orange chocolate bars rich beyond imagining…treasures from a busted crate in the hold of a freighter that would never reach the chocolatiers of Manhattan. We’d scramble madly while Gloria tried to keep us from stuffing ourselves. He gave me a pair of wooden shoes with a yellow-haired Dutch boy carved on them and a silver coin he’d found stuck to a bale of rubber from Honduras.

Once, for the Christmas Eve feste dei sette pesce (“feast of the seven fishes”), live lobsters, two or three, scuttling inside his jacket that sent us squealing. They lived in our bathtub for days, until he simmered them in tomato sauce and stuffed and baked their tails with garlic and parsley and breadcrumbs. On Valentine’s Day, Joe would invariably arrive home laden with lacy pink Barricini hearts for his wife and each of his four sons. He was still doing this when I was 17-years-old; I was still looking forward to it. He loved us beyond measure, of that I have no doubt, but his love could be searing and destructive as a furnace blast.

We ate on a pink and grey aluminum Formica table in the dingy apartment—five of us, three rooms, one of them a kitchen—above a candy store on Third Avenue and Carroll Streets, almost always pasta, called macaroni, sometimes dressed-up with peas (“peas and bast… in Gloria’s ragged dialect), or a 35-cent slice of Polly-O ricotta from my cousin, “Farmer Jones’s” grocery. More often than not, that 35 cents was entered into a schoolboy’s tablet kept under the counter to be collected later. We were that poor.

And never knew it.  I look back now and I see my mother stuffing thin cardboard from a Brillo box to cover the hole in my sneakers.

 “Jeez, Mom, it’s red, white and blue! Everyone's gonna see,”

See her sneaking me her Abraham and Strauss credit card so I could buy a new shirt for a Sweet 16 party. I bought an iridescent green/orange guayabera and sweated right through it.

                                 * * * *

In 1960s, along the cobblestone streets around the Gowanus Canal, Italian peddlers still sold produce from horse and wagons; Victor the blacksmith clanged away across from our apartment, scenting the air with singed horsehide. Jewish merchants knocked on doors selling thread, fabric, ribbon and life insurance like it was the shtetl. A sailor up from the docks strolled up Carroll street with a parrot on his shoulder, selling bird whistles that didn't work. On the corners wise guys in silk shirts and featherweight shoes lounged against ’59 Caddies and Electra 225s, hustling their balls, pockets stuffed with cash. We couldn't pay the phone bill.

My father was downwardly mobile at a time when millions of other WWII combat vets were using the GI Bill to leapfrog into the middle class. He was intelligent, commanded respect and worked like a dog his whole life. He chose soul-killing work in the rank holds of Black Diamond Line ships. Worked under 2,000 lb. drafts that could tip and crush a man to jelly. He wouldn’t gamble or borrow money from the loan sharks and bookies infesting the Brooklyn piers thick as rats, and would never be promoted to shop steward or checker or handed a no-show job.

I realize now he’d made a choice--perhaps it was made for him in the in the  bloody jungles of Peleliu Island, 1944—that ultimately destroyed him long before his time and sent his sons plunging into chaos and despair. It tears my heart to this day.

As a boy, fresh prince among four sisters, he’d had a pony, a cowboy suit and twin six-shooters. His mother, Anna Falcone, and her rapacious sister, Alfonsina, known  to me only as Zia, (“The Aunt”)—were seamstresses, entrepreneurs who decades before I was born were opening shops, accumulating real estate all over the neighborhood, and a palazzo—(a term greatly exaggerated when I saw it) in our ancestral home of Pagani, a town destroyed by Hannibal and Spartacus, and more recently overrun by pierced junkies on motor scooters plundering the  gold chains of any turista dumb enough to wander through

Anna Coppola died of cancer when my father was 18. I would meet her 30 years later when I was teaching English at Automotive H.S. in Williamsburg, the trade school my father dropped out of. In a dusty basement file cabinet amidst broken desks and tattered pennants, I found his academic records, an assessment of his hygiene and his race (“non-white”) and my long-dead grandmother’s ghostly signature.

He was drafted soon after, serving with the 81^st Infantry Division’s 710^th Tank Battalion. In the fall of 1944, my father, a tank driver, went ashore with the 1^st Marines on Peleliu Island in the western Pacific, part of the bloodiest and most reckless amphibious assault in U.S military history. His tank was nicknamed “Lucky 13.” He only spoke of what happened on Peleliu one time, about his friend, an Italian kid named Michael Valentino.

On October 18^th, Valentino’s tank, “Flying Home,” was tasked to support a Marine unit pinned down by the Japanese. En route, the tank struck an improvised mine, most likely a buried aerial bomb, and exploded, killing all but one of its five-man crew and a Marine captain--today buried in Marietta, Ga. a few miles from my home--serving as a guide.

“Lucky 13” was the lead tank in the rescue mission. Japanese snipers kept up a blistering fire as my father slithered through a hatch in the bottom of his Sherman M4 tank into the crocodile-infested mangroves. He was supposed to run a cable to the still-burning tank and tow it out of the field of fire. He couldn’t do it and heard the screams of Valentino and his platoon members as they burned alive. He was 20-years old. Those screams would echo through his life to the point that my mother, my brothers and I felt we were trapped in the inferno.

A few weeks later the Marines, who’d suffered 9500 casualties, arrived at my father’s bivouac and executed a prisoner my father had befriended—one of the few Japanese soldiers to surrender—in front of his eyes.

“Fucking sergeant marched him into the surf—the kid understood what was happening—and shot him in the back of the head.”

(To be continued)