Wounds That Will Not Heal

"I'm glad somebody in this neighborhood ain’t a fucking moron!”

I was 13 when I wrote “A Battered War Helmet.” My assignment was to bring an inanimate object to life and create a backstory. Sister Mary Malachy called it “a personified autobiography,” a phrase from a world far beyond the Gowanus Canal. I spent afternoons working on it on the scarred kitchen table of our three-room apartment above a candy store on Third Avenue and Carroll Street, ignoring the squeals of my kid brothers, the blare of the Mouseketeers on Channel 7, and praying I’d be spared one of my father’s violent squalls when he got home from work. I wrote in ballpoint, on loose-leaf paper, inspired by a John Wayne movie, "Sands of Iwo Jima" that had moved me. I’d polished it so many times I choked up when I read it.
I handed it in to Sister Mary Malachy and awaited her response.
And waited some more.
Waiting defined school life in those days. Hours ticking slowly from the first bell to lunch hour, the rosary recited aloud each morning, me trying to remember its confounding “mysteries,” waiting on long lines in the school yard hoping just to brush Jean's arm as we made our way back into the building, the interminable church services—extended on Catholic holidays—where attendance was taken on Sundays; vast expanses of time, veritable deserts to a thirsting young boy, extending from January to the release of summer in late June.
At 13, I still believed in the cascading prayers we recited each morning, in the “... forgiveness of sins…the resurrection of the body… life everlasting…” Miracles, martyrs, saints and torment. But part of me longed, in the words of a Nelson Eddy song Gloria sang to me when I was a little boy to be a “stout-hearted man.” A stand-up guy.
From my assigned seat in the back of the class with the dunces—Ernie, Pasqual Viscardi, Anthony Fishy—I waited for Malachy to appear lugging her brass-buckled black leather schoolbag, eager for the telltale bulge of marked papers. One morning, there it was. Time crawled… catechism…math…rote vocabulary drills, the rosary. It was almost lunchtime when Malachy reached into the bag and pulled out a sheaf of papers. I smirked at the chicken pox smear that was somebody else’s essay.
“I have your papers,” she began. “Some students worked hard and turned in excellent papers. “The rest of you, the vulgarians,” she looked up balefully, “handed in stuff and nonsense. You know who you are.”
I sat on the edge of my seat as she handed out the “A” papers.  “Cireno, Cucciaro…. D’Alessio, Dilorenzo…”
What about Coppo...?
“Mancuso, Mulia, Victor.” Then the “B's” and “C’s. “Di Pippo, Garrison, Henry, Palermo, Perez, Sessa, Wilcox.”
By the time Malachy got to the wise guys, troublemakers and losers, “….Bacotti, Benevento, Bashinelli, Paulino, Prosciutto, Romano, Viscardi…” I knew something was very wrong.
She handed Ernie Palmieri his paper with a nod of approval. Tall, dark, green-eyed, already an industrious guy, he'd emigrated from Italy with his parents, brothers and sisters. He was working in a pork store, a salumeria, on Fifth Ave. between Carroll and President Streets where the fragrance of Parmigiano Reggiano, olives and cheese and parsley sausage wafted out onto the sidewalk
Palmieri, who sat next to me by the radiators, grinned, waggled his hand, pinching thumb and forefinger together as if to say, “This American stuff, no problem!”
This American stuff:  Ernie would die in Vietnam in 1967.
It hit me. Best for last! Malachy was saving the best paper, my “Battered War Helmet” for the finale, the piece de resistance had I known the phrase.
“Coppola, up here.”
“Yes Sister.”
I bolted out of my seat, Sgt. Stryker John charging up Mount Suribachi. All her slights, insults and cruelty instantly forgotten.
She was standing alongside her oak desk, holding my story, the fluorescent light glinting off her rimless glasses rendering her pale eyes opaque. Grinning, I held my hand out, half-turning to face the class, so I never saw it coming. A sweeping right hand that knocked me against the blackboard. Then, the billowing sleeves of her brown habit flying, she pounced on me with a flurry of slaps I was too stunned to parry. To my shame, tears sprung from my eyes in front of the class. In front of Jean.
"Sister....?"
“This!” she roared to my stunned classmates, “is what happens to plagiarists!”
I didn't even know the word.
I was 13 when I wrote that first story. I never wrote another until I was 28.
***
That year, Malachy encouraged Salvatore Mulia, Dominick D’Alessio, Rosalie, Dilorenzo and a handful of other students to apply to Catholic high schools, institutions that had the power by some marvelous alchemy to lift wayward, working class students onto the path to success. For me, Malachy predicted I’d make “headlines,”not the scholarly, scientific, philanthropic or humanitarian recognition that teachers hope for in promising students, but screaming, 3-inch, Richard Speck-style headlines that appeared in the Daily News.
***
I studied, trekking up to the public library on 6th Avenue in leafy Park Slope to sit surrounded by goofballs in black framed eyeglasses and homosexuals whose fluttering eyebrows and nods signaled availability. I tried to read. I didn’t know what to read so I also read all the paperbacks on the rack at the newsstand at Fourth Ave. and Union Street, convinced sci-fi, bodice-rippers and tales of murderous Mau-Mau were literature. I read milk containers, matchbook covers, comics, whatever floated in front of me.
You earned admission to a Catholic high school by taking the “Cooperative Test,” a kind of Roman Catholic SAT that measured language, reasoning and math skills. You marked your top five choices on the application, and depending on your scores, you’d be accepted, rejected or dumped onto a waiting list. Making three schools was notable, four outstanding. I didn’t know anyone who’d made five.
Failing had consequences. Manual Training, the local high school, prepped students for “manual” labor. Since renamed John Jay, it was infested by gangbangers and thugs. In Gowanus, Manual was the fast track to Riker’s Island and I was a legacy student. My cousin JuJu had pushed a piano out the window of the music room while passing through; his brothers, Jimmy Psycho, Popeye Anthony and Richie Mell, were outrageous miscreants, even for the blackboard jungle era.
Catholic high schools were transformative places: St. Francis Prep remade strapping Irish boys--their immigrant fathers worked as subway sandhogs into Notre Dame football linemen; Power Memorial’s coach Lou Donahue’s casual racism helped transform Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor into Muslim superstar Kareem Abdul Jabbar. Bishop Loughlin was incubating Rudy Giuliani whose father had been sent to Sing Sing for armed robbery; La Salle, a Jesuit military academy in the heart of Manhattan, educated future Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Its “7th Ave. Subway Commandos” would fatten the rolls in Vietnam. St. Augustine, a diocesan school whose tuition was underwritten by the Brooklyn parishes produced New York Governor Hugh Carey. The schools, staffed by often brutal monks, literally pounded the gifted poor into teachers, doctors, lawyers and stockbrokers, and left a trail of scarred and broken kids in their wake.
I took the Cooperative Test on a Saturday, needle-sharp No. 2 pencils in hand, careful to keep my answers to the multiple choice questions within the little circles. The waiting began. Over the next six weeks, I’d race home for lunch where Gloria would serve her three school-age sons pork and beans and fried eggs, sopped up with Italian bread delivered to our door at 15 cents a loaf.
“Ma, the mailman come?”
“Yes.”
“Any mail?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“Jesus.”
“Mom, it’s important.”
Our mailman, a black guy nicknamed “Brownie,” dwelt within the magic circle of the neighborhood. No one, not the most desperate junkie dared mess with him. Brownie was perfectly tailored for our neighborhood: he managed NOT to deliver overdue rent, car payments, subpoenas and IRS notices—marking them “Return to Sender.” At Christmas, he’d reap his rewards.
The morning arrived. Word spread that the Cooperative Test results were in. I raced home dodging the lisping patrol boy who worked the corner of Third Ave. and Carroll Street, dodging trucks and tractor trailers. I ducked down the three concrete steps to our basement apartment, shouldered the hollow plywood front door like Sam Huff, sent the red ribbon of sleigh bells we used as a doorbell, jangling.
Gloria was standing there, a sheaf of business letters in her hand. There were five—St. Augustine, Brooklyn Prep, Xaverian, Saint Leonard’s and St. Francis Prep, typed and sealed in starch-white envelopes
I mumbled a prayer and tore them open.
Five schools. I’d made five schools!
I stumbled back outside. Gloria put her arms around me. “I’m so proud!” She was 38-years-old and loved her sons more than life. “Your father called this morning. He’s telling all the men in the gang.” I looked down. Tommy and Joey were clinging to my legs. We spun round on the sidewalk.
“Five schools”
Fat Rosie lum/bered across Carroll Street her flowered mu-mu billowing like a sail. Rosie spent her mornings sitting under an awning with her name emblazoned on it crocheting hats; her afternoon’s taking numbers from the Puerto Rican factory workers in Industry City. Emo, her boyfriend, a man with a serious gambling problem, had just been found hanging on a meat hook in Bensonhurst. Rosie insisted she didn’t want anything but his stuffed animal as a remembrance. Turned out she believed Emo had hidden $50,000 hidden inside. Rosie kissed me, smearing white lipstick on my cheek. She took my hand, stuck a $10 bill into my palm. “
Glad somebody in this neighborhood ain’t a fucking moron!”
Across the street, Ernie was standing next to Uncle Honey.
“How did you do?” I asked.
“Made St. Leonard’s!”
“You gotta watch them fag priests!” said Honey. “How’d you do?”
“I made…five.”
“Whoa!”
Honey peeled two twenties off a roll of bills, handed them to us. "Congratulations. Yous two’ll get an education. Yous won’t have to break your ass every day like me.”
Ernie pumped his closed fist three times as if masturbating. Honey laughed, amused at his own bullshit. He pretend slapped both of us.
“Get the fuck out of here.”
***
The line of students wavered outside the convent on Whitwell Place. Malachy was eating lunch on the convent’s brick porch, congratulating her eighth-graders as they came by. We joined the line. Sal was already on the porch. Behind him were Kathleen Victor and Dominick D’Alessio.
“I bet you did good.” Jean Wilcox appeared alongside me. She was tall as I was with blue eyes and wavy brown hair. I noticed the top two buttons of her uniform blouse were undone.
“Made all five schools!” Ernie blurted.
“Wow!” said Jean “That’s great”
I blushed.
“Give him a kiss!” Ernie chortled.
And she did. In front of the line of students, she put her hand gently around my neck and pulled me close.
“You know you're not like the rest of us,” she whispered.
I had never kissed, never touched a girl, never known the perfume of an adolescent female. I stood there, experiencing and trying to remember at the same time. The freckled Henry twins, Carolyn and Carol Ann, whistled. Malachy looked up and frowned. I stepped onto the porch where Sal, Rosalie Dilorenzo and D’Alessio, stood alongside the bulky, red-faced nun like courtiers.
She was eating baked fish, boiled potatoes and slices of a purple-red vegetable I hadn’t seen before. Beets.
“Ernest, for your poor mother’s sake,” Malachy said, “I hope some Christian school was willing to take on the burden of your education”
“St. Leonard’s did!” said Ernie.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Will wonders never cease.”
It would be a short-lived miracle. Ernie was thrown out of St. Leonard’s a year later for vandalizing a subway car. A pompadoured, 260 lb. 15-year-old wearing a distinctive green and yellow St. Leonard’s jacket was not hard to remember.
Malachy turned to me. I caught a whiff of her, pissy and sour beneath the starched brown habit, her breath rank with onions and boiled fish.
“Kathleen Victor, Mr. Mulia and Rosalie Dilorenzo were accepted by four high schools. Aren’t you proud of them? Do you see the rewards hard work can bring?”
Sal grinned, clasping his hands above his head like a prize fighter.
“I made five,” I said. “St. Augustine too. I’m gonna go there.”
Startled, Sal hesitated, then walked up, put his right hand behind my neck, shoved me affectionately. “All right!” he said.
“Good job Vinny.” This from Kathleen Victor, not one of Malachy’s pets.
I had a little speech prepared, thanking Malachy for being my teacher…that she was “tough but fair….” I opened my mouth. The nun put down her fork, shot a glance at Jean Wilcox and the Henry twins standing at the edge of the porch.
“You don’t deserve it Coppola,” she said. “I know you for the sneak and the cheat that you are.”
I flinched. This was worse than the beating she’d given me for my story.
“Sister!” Kathleen gasped.
I stood there, staring down at the table. A fly made its way across the checkered tablecloth.
“Excuse me.”
I turned. Jean stood at the top of the porch steps. I brushed past her, tripped on the steps, caught myself and began running, daring my ravaged heart to explode. Block after block I ran, past the old powerhouse, the junkyard with its barrels of toxic chemicals, slowing only when I crossed the Third Street Bridge over Gowanus Canal.
By then I was in another neighborhood.

For My Classmate on Memorial Day

Ernie Palmieri: I Hear You Singing In the Wire

Ernie Palmieri sat by the radiators in Sister Mary Malachy’s haunted classroom. I sat a few rows away in the dead zone in the back of the crowded room, reserved for misfits and troublemakers. Tall, with startling green eyes and coal black hair, Palmieri was no wiseguy. Quiet, easygoing, seemingly marking time, even in elementary school. He lived up Carroll Street toward Fifth Avenue; I lived down by the Gowanus Canal. He had two sisters, maybe twins, with that olive complexion you see in medieval frescoes and southern Italian farmsteads. He mostly avoided the nun’s wrath (seehttp://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/05/fly-fishing-on-gowanus-canal-part-i.html) waltzed stiffly with the rest of us in our overblown Christmas production to Verdi’s “La Donna e mobile” in the parish recreation center. My cousin JuJu and his thugs jeered and hooted in the darkened auditorium. And then Ernie was gone.
We were just 14-years-old.
I went to an all-boys Catholic high school in Park Slope. Wore ill-fitting jackets and ties every day. Endured more years of beating and bullying, this time by Christian Brothers. Learned things.
Ernie would have gone to Manual Training (now John Jay H.S). on Seventh Avenue. I don’t know if he graduated. Walking home from school, I’d see him behind the counter at Ben’s Pork Store, a salumeria on Fifth Ave near Carroll Street. The place was fragrant with Parmigiana Reggiano, marinating mushrooms, prosciutto, salamis and wheels of civiletta sausage, tastes and smells that intoxicate me to this day. Ernie is his white butchers apron, always smiling, sneaking me a hunk of soppresatta I couldn't afford.
I went to Brooklyn College. He and an older brother, Julio planned to open their own butcher shop in Bay Ridge. I had no idea who I was or what I wanted to do with my life. I remember being achingly lonely as the umbilical that bound me to the Gowanus began to rupture. War was on the horizon. We were 18-years old.
Ernie met a girl, Mary Lou Lobianco, planned to marry. When the call-ups began in earnest in 1965, I, native-born, couldn’t think of enough ways to avoid Vietnam. Ernie Palmieri, an American by choice, enlisted. After basic training, Ernie was assigned to the Army’s 71st Helicopter Assault Company, jockeying thin-skinned UH-1 Huey choppers into very bad places, inserting and extracting grunts, pulling out the wounded and dead.
I didn’t know any of this.Most people I knew didn't care. I was teaching English to mechanics at Automotive High in Williamsburg, a very different Williamsburg from today. I found my father’s records in the school basement. He’d made it past second year,then left to fight in the Pacific. On Carroll Street, we listened to doo-wop music, the Four Seasons, Young Rascals, Sinatra like the wise guys in the Capri Club. I was late coming to the Beatles and Stones but I remember, of all things, a country song about the war, not mocking or bitter, but devastating in its power to pierce me like a dagger and capture longing and loss of war:
“... Galveston, oh, Galveston,
I still hear your sea waves crashin’,
while I watch the cannons flashin'.
I clean my gun, and dream of Galveston.
...Is she waiting there for me,
On the beach where we used to run?I
I'd never run on a beach with a girl, but there was another song seemingly about a telephone lineman in Kansas. I understood that guy better than I knew myself.
I became a reporter. The war ended, but another was beginning. Out of concern, guilt or a need to make amends, the working class kid who missed the working class war, I began covering Vietnam veterans. I wrote the first story on women vets, skilled nurses, kids themselves, who tended the horribly wounded and comforted the dying—for Newsweek. One of these women, Lola McGourty, is still my friend 35 years later. I wrote a book, “Uneasy Warriors” about Vietnam’s Green Berets, JFKs own soldiers, elevated as heroes and then cast down in defeat. I went to Hanoi to visit an American vet who'd returned to assist children damaged by Agent Orange and the aftereffects of the conflict. I was there a month and found a new generation of Vietnamese. The posters in Hanoi now depicted B-52s dropping long strings of Coca-Cola, but the war was a distant memory. The young Vietnamese wanted iPhones and flat screens.
***
In Washington, D.C., I found Ernie Palmieri at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. He was waiting there for me on Panel 13E, Line 23. (see http://www.vvmf.org/Wall-of-Faces/39328/ERNEST-PALMIERI) Ernie was killed on December 8th 1967, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, on a rescue mission extracting soldiers who’d come under attack near Cu Chi, the site of a massive underground tunnel complex built by the Viet Cong that is now a major tourist destination in Vietnam. The bullet may have been fired by a sniper in a schoolhouse the choppers spared because there were kids playing outside the building.
Ernie’s parents, Rocco and Maria, were waiting at Penn Station to claim his body when it arrived from Delaware by train. If they were anything like my parents, a trip into Manhattan in the middle of the night, in itself would have been daunting. Specialist 4th Class Ernest Palmieri, the smiling kid who sat by the whistling radiators in Our Lady of Peace school, who made his First Communion in a white suit with me, who attended mass every Sunday—attendance was mandatory--is buried in Long Island National Cemetery.
The story doesn’t end there. On August 16, 2008, U.S. Army UH-1 helicopter (tail number 65-10068), Ernie’s chopper, arrived in tiny Mineral Wells, Texas where it was mounted on a steel pillar as one of the city’s National Vietnam War Museum exhibits. Four men from Ernie’s unit, the 71st Assault Helicopter Company, old men themselves, showed up to honor him. The museum provided free hot dogs for the first 500 attendees.
Even this was nearly a decade in the past. And yet, yesterday, when the media mentioned the death of Glenn Campbell, and inevitably began playing the haunting strains of Galveston and Wichita Lineman, Ernie came alive again, as I knew him so long ago, as I never knew myself, and the loss was such I thought my heart would burst with a grief that lain dormant for fifty years.




http://www.vvmf.org/Wall-of-Faces/39328/ERNEST-PALMIERI

The Virgin, She Wrote Me A Letter

“Give me a ticket for an airoplane
I ain't got time to take no fast train..."


"The world is ending.”
“No way!” I blurt.
Doodling on my scarred oak desk, counting minutes until the clang of the lunch bell, I look up. Sister Mary Malachy’s ice-blue eyes lock on me with the soulless glare of a circling shark Only Malachy would see the earth splintering into cosmic dust as a good thing.
And me still a virgin.
She reaches into her bulky brown habit and pulls out her rosary.
“Let us now pray to the Immaculate Heart of Mary for forgiveness.”
Forgiveness? I didn’t do anything!
I inch my head slowly to left. This primordial nightmare disguised as a nun will slap and beat and spell “OBEDIENCE” on both my hands” with her oak pointer even as South Brooklyn sinks into the abyss and the Gowanus Canal spews condoms and brimstone into the sky.
“Sally,” I hiss to the boy in the frayed white shirt sitting alongside me, “What did she just say?”
He leans closer to his desk, then rotates his forefinger against his temple.
“Lei e pazza! (She’s crazy!).” It comes out, “Ou Botts!”
She is crazy, but nobody cares or knows enough to care. Not my mother, Gloria, who treates the Irish nuns of Our Lady of Peace parish as the wives of Christ. (They wear gold wedding bands to reinforce their impregnable position.)
For two days, afloat in that simmering stew of science, history, religion, myth, Mariolatry and madness that is Catholic elementary school education in 1950s’ Brooklyn, Malachy had held me riveted She’d described the bloodcurdling fingernail-pulling torment of St Isaac Jogues at the hands of the Mohawks and other blood-soaked, but glorious New World martyrs. Now for a change of pace she's promised to reveal the miracle of the “Three Letters of Fatima.”
A miracle, it turns out, I definitely can do without.
“In the spring of 1917, the Virgin Mary appeared,” Malachy announced to our dead-quiet class, “to three young Portuguese shepherds. Not to the Cardinal or the Bishop in his worldly finery, but three humble peasants."
Instantly, my mind rockets into overdrive. What was The Virgin Mary wearing? Probably powder blue. All I had were statutes, dusty prints and stained glass to compare? What did she look like, sound like? Did she appear, disappear and descend from the clouds? All these Ascensions, Assumptions, Redemptions, made heaven sound like a cheap furniture store. I begin to ponder all the possibilities.
“....Our Blessed Mother then gave three envelopes to the shepherds...Each contained a prophecy.” 
What does heavenly paper feel like? Does it have a watermark? What kind of ink? I bet purple. What did her fingers feel like?
What's in the freaking letters!
Malachy grew solemn. Even the dopes in our class—Fat Ernie Benevento, Pasquale Viscardi, Anthony “Fisheye” Paulino, Eugene Bashinelli—were riveted.
The first letter was a vision of Hell.
Malachy picks up a book from her desk: “A great sea of fire which seemed to be under the earth. Plunged in this fire were demons and souls in human form, like transparent burning embers, all blackened or burnished bronze floating about in the conflagration.”
Fuck that!.
“`Pray...Pray...Pray for forgiveness,’” Malachy warns.
“Forgiveness?  Shit, I’m 15-years-old,  Never kissed a girl or coveted my neighbor's (Tommy Caccasotte ("Shit the Pants'") wife.
“What else did Our Lady say?” This from Kathleen Victor, dark-skinned, smart, but impudent, a natural target for Malachy’s ire.
“The second letter foretells World War I and II.”
“We coulda stopped Hitler before he got started? Oh man! That ain't right." This from Fat Ernie whose father died in WWII.
“What about Letter Three?” I raise my hand, shouting before Malachy can start back on the rosary.
“The Third Prophecy, given by Our Lady of Fatima to the shepherd girl, Lucia dos Santos.... (Malachy pauses for effect) “...was carried from Portugal to the Pope in Rome two years ago.
Okay... Pope, Rome, What else?
“It will be opened in 1960.”
Next year! Way too soon! I haven’t even traveled outside Brooklyn...
“Do we know anything else Sister?”
Straining at the bolts that hold my desk to the oak floor I’m thinking `Hell?’ `World War I?’ `World War II?’ `Pray for Forgiveness?’ This is gonna be really bad news. I know the Russians have ICBMs with atomic warheads...The Chinese are happily plotting godless murder and mayhem. The Daily News reports legions of "bearded bums" are on the move in Cuba...
“Pope Pius XII took one look at the Third Letter,” Malachy announces.
“Ah ha! So what did he say?”
Very, very long pause. "His Holiness said nothing. He fell to his knees and began sobbing.”
Sobbing WTF!
“We don't know whether these were tears of joy or sorrow."
What! Let me guess. For the next two years I scour the news, TV, church newspapers for word of The Letter. Not a whisper. I couldn't stop thinking about it.  Kennedy getting shot, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Khrushchev banging his shoe at the U.N. didn't help one bit.
Five years pass, and ten and twenty. I wake up one day and I'm an adult.
By then so many bad things had happened to me, who cared about a letter?

Fly Fishing on the Gowanus Canal

"In nomine Patris et Filio et Spiritu Sanctus."
"A-men."
Sister Mary Malachy crosses herself as she intones the prayer, thrusts her prognathous jaw forward, an Inquisitor ready to swoop down on the budding apostates in her charge. She tugs at the sleeve of her brown habit, taps the Timex watch on her thick wrist. Across her desk, 35 eighth graders shift to attention, ink-stained fingers reaching for rosaries.
She studies us—ice blue eyes behind rimless glasses half-closed in feigned prayer—alert to every exhalation of breath, every shoe scuff, sigh and stomach rumble. Malachy knows that behind our frayed white shirts and clip-on ties, beneath the pleated skirts and Peter Pan collars, we dream only of stickball and lipstick, of stink bombs, dirty pictures, fireworks, rotten eggs; of Frankie Avalon, Ringalevio and Kick-the-Can. She knows the boys—the Italians--will touch the giggling girls in the darkness of the cloakroom, make them squeal in the crowded stairwells as they march from the schoolyard after lunch.
Malachy wears a wedding band signifying her marriage to Jesus Christ and her renunciation of pleasure. Pain is another matter. She will spare no effort driving us up the slippery slopes of Salvation. This is her purpose, the vocation that had carried her from the bottle green glens of Donegal to this vale of tears, this Golgotha called South Brooklyn.
She nods to a dark-skinned girl in a raveled green sweater in the fourth row, her mouth ripe and red as Original Sin.
"The First Sorrowful Mystery, The Crowning with Thorns," Rosa Perez begins.
"Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name..."
The class murmurs the response, voices echoing down tiled corridors, merging with the morning prayers of other students like the drone of honeybees. The rosary continues, the “Hallowed be’s” and “Holy Ghosts” as dry as the husks of dead insects. In the fifth row, Jean W. inhales—her ripening breasts strain against her blouse—and announces the Second Sorrowful Mystery.
An aisle away, I hunch over my Catechism penciling a dove, the representation of the Holy Ghost, shitting on the head of Pope Pius XII. A feral creature, I sense a predator’s approach. I count heads.
"...Ten...eleven...twelve...shit!"
It’s my turn to proclaim the next mystery.
“The Third Sorrowful Mystery?” I mouth the question, prompting my brain to supply an answer. Nothing.
Ascensions. Assumptions. Redemptions.
Heaven sounds like a cheap furniture store. Mysteries swim in my head. Malachy will have me scrubbing the church basement, the labyrinth where Brother Masseo lurks among the broken statues of martyrs and serpents. Three more Hail Marys ratchet by. I crank my head left, cough, then whisper,
"What's the Third Mystery?"
"Ya mother's box,” Sal Mulia replies.
"Don't fool around!"
"Her canary."
Ernie Benevento snorts, the sound among the murmurs loud as a breaching whale. Malachy's wimpled head rotates. I duck, disappearing, I imagine, like Jonah into the belly of the Leviathan.
"Come on. Please!"
The nun fills the aisle between the rows of bolted-down desks. She advances, seeming to sniff the air. Sal hunches over his beads, a monk lost in divine rapture.
"Hail Mary full of grace...” A drone four seats in front of me.
“Shit!”
I squeeze my Italian rosary. A tiny window in the crucifix reveals a bone chip floating in holy water like a carpenter's level. I clench the holy bone.
"Please Jesus…I'll …" I hesitate “I won't….”
A vision of Jean blossoms in my head, plaid uniform skirt inching up, revealing her coltish thighs. I sigh, steady myself for the charge. Instinctively, my hand rises to the fading purple bruise under my left eye.
In the corner by the whistling radiators, Tommy “Cacasotte” Manzo stirs. The bolts holding his desk to the polished oak floor squeal in protest. Malachy sneers at him, a creature unfazed by Salvation’s promise or Darwin's exigencies; a bag of guts, corruption and decay. Stained tie, frayed white shirt, grey work pants straining against his ass like sausage casing; a mockery of all that is pure, clean, Christ-like.
Father Mario and the Franciscans of Our Lady of Peace Parish count the days until New York State law allows them to discharge “Shit-the-pants” like so much sewage into the gutter.
A round oak pointer materializes in Malachy’s hand.
Tommy’s internal clock is chiming noon. Soon he’ll eat at his mother Margherita’s (pronounced in our  dialect, “Ma-ga-la’s”) Third Avenue diner, waddle home, root into his unmade bed. At 5:30 P.M., the Mouseketeers’ theme will stir him to masturbation. He raises his slobber-streaked face, squints, lolls his tongue at Jean, a willowy German stranded by the ebb tide of emigration out of South Brooklyn.
He lifts his ass and farts. A barrage, a lament from his bowels that derails the Holy Rosary and wreathes the classroom in silence. The fallout stops Malachy as she’s about to pull me from my seat. Rows of students surge forward, surfers riding a wave, coughing, pretend gagging, holding their throats. Shrieking, they sweep past me, past Malachy, out the front door.
The lunch bell clangs. I stand, lock eyes with her.
“The Third Sorrowful Mystery!” I shout slapping Sal’s still bowed head. “The Crowning With Thorns!”
I swivel right, dash forward and out the door. I fly down the metal steps, out the building, dodge Butchie the Fag, the patrol boy, and the thundering trucks on Third Avenue, race down Carroll Street past my house, past Jimmy the Morgue’s idling Buick Electra, past Monte’s and the Crusader Candle Company not stopping until gasping I reach the grey rail of the bridge crossing the Gowanus Canal. I feel the pale sun on my face.
In Monte’s, Sonny the Indian sips brown whiskey, watches me race down the sidewalk, feinting garbage cans, my gangly body struggling to keep up with my brain.
He stares at the long mirror above the bar, lifts his chin. Whose face is it? What purpose the bunched muscles and tendons of the formidable jaw? The questions chase themselves behind his impassive eyes.
After a moment he grunts, “Whiskey.”
Fifteen minutes later, I walk back up Carroll Street.
A month ago, at the Grand Army Plaza Library, a woman with a face like parchment had shown me sketches depicting the Gowanus River in the 1600s, apple trees flourishing along its banks, Gowanus oysters renowned for their size and abundance.
 I’d described these wonders to Ernie and Sal.
"Go fuck yourself!"
Engulfed in the cloud of sautéing garlic and simmering tomatoes emanating from Monte’s Venetian Room, I float above the cobblestone street, imagining green and verdant hills rolling past  what is now Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill, to the Heights above the harbor. 17th Century ships at anchor bobbing in the sunlight at the foot of Wall Street.
Crack!
A slap off the back of my head ends my meditation. Honey and  Fat Ernie, his nephew, are standing in front of Monte's. Holding a thick Cuban cigar, Honey is grinning. Sonny is to his left, Easter Island in a leather trench coat. Shaky stands to his left glaring malevolently at me.
“Daydreaming you mope?” says Honey.
 "What?"
“You hungry? Go inside. Red'll make you a sandwich.”
“No. I’m fasting.”
“It ain’t Lent. Think them cocksucker priests fast? Bullshit.”
“Fasting makes you think better. In India...”
“Sonny’s an Indian. He don’t fast.”
Sonny says nothing.
“What happened to your face? Your father go to work on you again?”
Uncomfortable, I look at Ernie. “You ready?"
“Yous better smarten up,” Honey warns. “Yous ain’t kids no more.”
He waves his cigar, digs into his pocket and pulls out a thick roll. He peels off two $5 bills.
"Get some ice creams. You, bring me the News and the Mirror. Don't forget like last time."
"I won’t. I promise." (I'm rich!)
"That Irish twat still giving yous trouble?"
"She hates us.”
"She hates Vinny ‘cause he's smart.”
"I ain’t smart!"
I tilt my head toward the bridge. We begin inching away.
“Where yous a going?" Honey jerks his finger toward Third Ave. "School’s that way."
"We don't gotta be back till one o'clock."
“Stay away from that fucking canal!" Honey spreads his stubby arms.
"They got water rats this big. All kind a shit. Yous a ’gonna get rabies. Something happens, I'll give you the rest! Stay outta there!"
Shaky walks out of the restaurant, greasy pompadour afloat on his pockmarked face.
"Yo, you got a call. Carmine.”
“The fuck he want now?” Honey groans.
He and Sonny walk into Monte’s leaving Shaky standing there.
Ernie stage whispers. “Looks like a dog shit on his head.”
I giggle.
Shaky turns, shoots me a look. “Homo, whatta you looking at?”
 “Nothing. I ...”
“Jerk-offs, I’ll go to work on both of yous! You, you fat fuck, don’t think your uncle can stop me neither.”
“We’re talking about school,” says Ernie. “Ever hear of it?”
Shaky pulls a wad of bills out of his pants pocket. “School is for jerk-offs.”
Ernie grabs his balls, “Fageddaboutit!
***

We dart between a row of parked cars, then head for the Carroll Street Bridge, a rare and decaying architectural jewel. Twenty yards from the water, it hits you, a wretched blend of raw sewage, chemical spills, oil from sunken barges and abandoned cars, garbage, feces, grease, bloated carcasses of dogs floating in and out on the tide.
In the 1960s, you could drive a car at speed down Carroll Street from Hoyt, accelerate, windows-closed, over the 100 foot-wide waterway—and gag.  Now hipsters dream of sailing yachts and houseboats along its fatal shores.
cut left alongside the John P. Carlson ink factory. On the bank, Sal and Rocco Cucchiaro are already stripping thin, whip-like branches from the sumac trees that somehow thrive on the canal bank. Short and dark-complexioned, Rocco’s mother dresses him like the accountant he'll never be: tweed overcoat, wool pants, polished shoes, white shirt stiff with starch, blue tie held in place by a fake pearl. I pull my rod from the weeds. A McCrory’s five-and-dime reproduction of the ones I see in Field and Stream. (I sense a larger world out there that I want to be part of so I cultivate mail-order hobbies: stamp and coin collections, a rock collection—shards of industrial glass and brick fragments I mistake for quartz and feldspar, bright chemical crystals scavenged from the Golten Marine Company’s abandoned factory near the canal—red plastic rockets powered by compressed air and water, designed for kids in cornfields. A month until they arrive in the mail; one launch and they disappear over the rooftops.) I tie on a sinker and outsized hook. 

"High tide. Fishing’s gonna be good."
"Sunday morning's the best," adds Ernie.
Sal finishes stripping his branch and runs to the 10-foot diameter stone culvert that carries waste from our toilets and sewers directly into the water. (In 2010, the EPA declares the canal a Superfund site. By then, my mom, her three sisters and two of her brothers are dead of cancer. See http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/05/losing-mom.html) He reaches down and begins trolling. Rocco picks a spot alongside a half-sunken barge smeared with oil and grease. Ernie elbows in front of him
"Thanks for helping me…You jerk!” I tell sal
"Swear to God,” he mumbles. “I don’t know the stupid mystery!”
"`Swear to God,’" I mince. "Some friend."
"Screw you."
"Got one!" This from Rocco.
"That’s mines!" says Ernie. “Slippery bastids!"
Rocco hauls an eight-inch condom from the water.
"All right!” Sal says. "Whitefish!"
Putrescent water splashes Rocco’s pants as he manipulates the dripping tube onto a tire.  Nearby, seven fly-buzzed condoms, Tuesday’s catch, shrivel in the sun.
"I got two!" shouts Ernie lifting his branch from the water.
"Your mamma was busy!" Sal shouts.
I watch a dead cat float by in the water; all of us wary of the outsized rats that scamper along the canal’s rotting banks and pylons. For the next ten minutes, we concentrate keen as Robert Redford on a Colorado stream. Finally, I spot a rubber discharged (“released”) from the culvert. I carefully pluck it out of the water. Sal is bent over examining the catch of the day. I circle. Ernie sees me, backs away. I put a finger to my lips, creep closer, closer, and lay the dripping thing on Sal's shoulder.
"Somebody I want you to meet…”
He looks up. Wha…?”
I throw down my fishing rod, dart away.
"Eccch! Sciafuso!" Ernie points.
"What?"
Sal whirls once, twice, a dog chasing its tail. The condom leaves a snail track on his coat. By then, I’m 30-feet away, giggling, running among the piles of concrete slag and bricks heading for a path that winds through a salvage yard and back out onto Carroll Street.
Sal, a track star, throws his raincoat at Rocco. "My mother will kill me!"
I climb a towering mound of garbage, turn and give him the finger. "The First Sorrowful Mystery," I scream, “your fucked-up coat!"
I lose my footing, skitter down the other side. Scramble to my feet, duck behind another pile of trash, accelerate toward a hole in the fence  100 feet away. I trip over a roll of discarded linoleum, almost regain my balance—there’s broken glass, rebar, cinderblocks scattered like a minefield—then fall hard in front of a mountain of blue metal drums piled along the fence.
“Ah!”
Instinctively, I burrow between two barrels.
In the distance, the bells of Our Lady of Peace Church chime the Angelus, then ring the hour, a single note that reverberates in my metal womb like a funeral knell. One o’clock! I crawl deeper, imagining a pirate cave formed by the rusting drums, instantly forgetting about school and rats and packs of feral dogs. I find myself in a small clearing surrounded by drums leaching powdery yellow crystals. I stand up; notice my grease-stained school pants. Ruined.
“Shit!”
A brown paper bag rests against one of the drums. Curious, I walk closer, reach down and pick up it up, disappointed at how light it feels. (Neighborhood junkies who burglarize Cambie’s Trucking and other canal-side companies often hide their swag in the lots that are our fiefdoms. Like Robin Hood, we steal from thieves, expropriating expensive handbags, perfume, shoes, for our mothers. One time, we find a giant Carrier air-conditioning unit still in its packing crate.)

A pillowcase is stuffed inside the bag. I pull it out. Stained a dark, clotty red.
"Jesus!" I fling the bag away with both hands.
The October wind, heavy with salt from the harbor, cuts through my thin jacket. I sniffle, wipe my nose on my sleeve. Acrid smoke—truck tires constantly burning in Smoky Joe’s junkyard next door, chokes the air. I look up, see the sun reflected in the back windows of a tenement; remind myself I’m just 50 yards from our own backyard. Gloria is in the kitchen doing dishes, getting ready for supper. I walk over to the pillow case, step on the edge, and kick. The bloody cloth unravels.
Something flies out.
“Ha!” A dry bark that surprises me.
I step closer. A tiny claw-like hand. Closer. A baby, smaller than a plucked chicken, blackened, smeared with blood and dirt. A naked, dark-haired boy, one arm reaching up to the empty sky.
"Ahhh!"
I turn and duck back through the tunnel of barrels, bile rising in my throat. I’m trying not to gag when Sal leaps onto my back. I fall to the ground gasping, spinning wildly, legs pinwheeling. In a second, he’s kneeling on my chest, forcing my arms back.
"Stop!”
He’s holding a dried condom to rub in my face.
"Please stop!"
"Fucking baby cry.” Sal says relenting. “You ruined my coat…”
We crawl together into the clearing and stand over the thing. I want to pick the child up and cradle it in my forearm. Or tell myself I want to. Sal looks at me like I’m crazy. And I am. I feel the tiny body shudder, but I’m the one trembling.
"He was alive.”
Sal tries to cover it with the pillowcase. Fails.
"We don't say nothing to nobody. Right?” he says.
"I don't know. This is...this is a sin."

A rock clangs against the steel drums. We both scream. A second stone lands at my feet. A moment later, Ernie squeezes into the clearing.
 “Ya two mamones!  What’d yous steal?”
He’s laughing, rubbing his right thumb across the tip of his forefinger, the Neapolitan sign for a thief. And then he sees.
“Aggh! The fuck is that?”
 He backs away, holding his hands in front of his face.
 “We found it.”
 “Sciefusos! It’s got germs. You’ll get sick…”
A stream of vomit, bits of Monte’s pasta and pastry visible, shoot out of Ernie’s mouth.

Ten minutes later, we walk out of the lot, chilled, smeared with grime, two hours late for school. The crazed Malachy no doubt waiting to spell "O-b-e-d-i-e-n-c-e” on my knuckles with a thick oak pointer that whistles as it cut through the air.
Halfway up the block Ernie says:
"You know it belongs to somebody?”
“Whaddya mean?”
“Somebody got rid of it…on purpose.”
“Threw a baby away?”
He looks at us like we’re idiots. “It ain’t a baby.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s a…a fetal. My sister Lucille has these pictures…”
“Of what?”
“A fetal. A baby that ain’t been born…taken out of a girl’s stomach.
“Get out of here!”
“What for?”
“Because the girl ain’t married or don’t want it or…”
“That’s murder.”
Ernie shoots me a furious look. “Don’t say that! It’s like a business…Yous could get us a lot of trouble. I ain’t kidding.”
 “Fuck the cops!”
 “I ain’t talking about cops!”  
“What trouble?” I ask, glancing at Sal. “Over some little nigger baby?”
 “It ain’t a nigger!” Ernie shouts. “Yous know it ain’t a nigger!”
We did know, and I’d like to say it didn’t matter.

 Limbo mattered. (“A place where souls remain that cannot enter heaven.”) Limbo is located on the border of Hell, a working definition of the Gowanus neighborhood. Baptism mattered. Extreme Unction mattered. Justice mattered. 

But as I was to learn, it's easy to lose your way.

Good Friday on the Gowanus

The nuns advised us that on Good Friday all activities--stoop ball, stick ball, Kings, head-slapping, car-fender sitting, etc.--had to stop between the hours of noon and 3 pm the time Jesus spent on the cross. And we did faithfully, except for the one time Augie Aversano, an actual devout Catholic was granted his deepest desire, we tied him--rope rather than nails--to the wrought iron fence outside Our Lady of Peace Church and left him, as they say, hanging.

Halloween On The Gowanus

Halloween On the Gowanus

The RKO Prospect Theater was hosting a live Halloween Show, staffed no doubt by rheumy alcoholic ushers dressed like Dracula. I’d seen them stringing spider webs over the orchestra seats. Or maybe my grandfather’s tenant, Mrs. Mahoney, who lived in a tiny stanzina and cursed God aloud on Sunday mornings.
I was 16, tall, lanky, with a big head. Joe, my father, was 40, shorter, but built like Sam Huff the result of decades unloading Black Diamond Line ships in Red Hook.
Enraged, Joe was worse than Frankenstein. Even the Goose and the other wise guys standing outside the Capri Club on Third Avenue were wary of him.
“No,” my father said. “You can’t go.”
 “Dad!”
“Are you deaf?”
Savages roamed Fifth Ave., terra incognita in our mafia-controlled neighborhood: Golden Guineas, Bishops, Gents, Apaches, stoned on airplane glue and Tuinal, all making for the Prospect, their tight pants, white-lipsticked girls strutting alongside them. A week before, my cousin JuJu had hurled a fire axe during a screening of Them at the Garfield Theater. It whirled over my head piercing one of the outsized ants rampaging across the screen.
Halloween was stink bombs, chalk stockings, rotten eggs, cherry bombs, Tango screwdrivers and Twister wine.
“Can I at least go trick or treating?”
“Joe, let him go for an hour,” Gloria intervened.
“He’s got homework,”
“Ma!”
“You better be home by 10 o’clock.”
I was out the door, down the stairs, one of Joe’s sweat socks stuffed in my flannel shirt pocket, two thick cylinders of colored chalk and two eggs I’d hidden the hallway.
There were no treats in South Brooklyn. No cute ballerinas, pink Cinderellas, no Supermen in sagging tights. The hipsters who'd pollute the Gowanus with 'tude and snap brim fedoras were 40 years distant. Tricks were payback: rotten eggs smashed against the windows of the rectory and convent--Masseo, the friar in charge of the altar boys in Our Lady of Peace parish was a pervert, molesting boys behind his robes; Malachy, a Franciscan, her face the color of corned beef, her wimple wide as a sail, tormented and humiliated me; spray paint on Mariuchelle’s storefront window for the greasy meat and stale bread she served.;stink bombs in subway token booths; cherry bombs if we could catch cops from the 76^th  Precinct—who worked hand-in-hand with gangsters—cooping in the lot across from Monte’s Venetian Room.
Halloween was war. A gang from Bond Street took my cousin Anthony Popeye prisoner one year, tied him to a rotting beam and hung him, screaming, over the Gowanus Canal. We couldn’t get near him for hours. The scene reminded me of the sketch of Iroquois torturing Jesuits I found in my Catechism.
My guys were waiting. Using a brick, I pounded the chalk inside the sweat sock, more gravel than powder. I tried it out on a new car, Fat Rosie’s awning, Frankie Cag’s head.  A sun-yellow cloud puffed in the air.
“Fuck it! Let’s go!”
Howling, we ran—a dozen of us—down President Street, socks whirling over our heads. We cornered five guys in front of Otto’s Social Club—Peter Lauro, Anthony Fisheye, Crazy Ralph, Louie the Fag, as I recall, and beat them mercilessly with our stockings. Wise guys dropped their gin rummy hands, came pouring out, and ducked back inside. We were wilding, a thing they understood.
Our prisoners, rubbing lumpy noses, and swollen eyes were handed chalk stockings. A punk who always got good grades, I felt the blood singing in my veins. We attacked Union Street, Sackett Street and the Puerto Ricans junkies nodding in the shadows of Degraw Street Park, a very dangerous place. All fell before us.
In a hour, I had dozens of ragged teens running beside me, pulling fire alarms, spilling trash cans, breaking off car antennas, smashing pumpkins, terrorizing the sissy boys coming out of the Prospect Theater’s fucked-up Halloween show, a ribbon of screaming cop cars trailing behind us.
And then it was 10:00 P.M. Like Cinderella, I had to go home.

 

 

 

 

Fly-Fishing on the Gowanus Canal Part I

"In nomine Patris et Filio et Spiritu Sanctus."
"A-men."
Sister Mary Malachy crosses herself as she intones the prayer; thrusts her prognathous jaw forward, an Inquisitor ready to swoop down on the budding apostates in her charge. She tugs at the sleeve of her brown habit, taps the Timex watch on her thick wrist. Across her desk, 35 eighth graders shift to attention, ink-stained fingers reaching for rosaries.
She studies us—ice blue eyes behind rimless glasses half-closed in feigned prayer—alert to every exhalation of breath, every shoe scuff, sigh and stomach rumble. Malachy knows that behind our frayed white shirts and clip-on ties, beneath the pleated skirts and Peter Pan collars, we dream only of stickball and lipstick, of stink bombs, dirty pictures, fireworks, rotten eggs; of Frankie Avalon, Ringalevio and Kick-the-Can. She knows the boys—the Italians--will touch the giggling girls in the darkness of the cloakroom, make them squeal in the crowded stairwells as they march from the schoolyard after lunch.
Malachy wears a wedding band signifying her marriage to Jesus Christ and her renunciation of pleasure. Pain is another matter. She will spare no effort driving us up the slippery slopes of Salvation. This is her purpose, the vocation that had carried her from the bottle green glens of Donegal to this vale of tears, this Golgotha called South Brooklyn.
She nods to a dark-skinned girl in a raveled green sweater in the fourth row, her mouth ripe and red as Original Sin.
"The First Sorrowful Mystery, The Crowning with Thorns," Rosa Perez begins.
"Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name..."
The class murmurs the response, voices echoing down tiled corridors, merging with the morning prayers of other students like the drone of honeybees. The rosary continues, the “Hallowed be’s” and “Holy Ghosts” as dry as the husks of dead insects. In the fifth row, Jean W. inhales—her ripening breasts strain against her blouse—and announces the Second Sorrowful Mystery.
An aisle away, I hunch over my Catechism penciling a dove, the representation of the Holy Ghost, shitting on the head of Pope Pius XII. A feral creature, I sense a predator’s approach. I count heads.
"...Ten...eleven...twelve...shit!"
It’s my turn to proclaim the next mystery.
“The Third Sorrowful Mystery?” I mouth the question, prompting my brain to supply an answer. Nothing.
Ascensions. Assumptions. Redemptions.
Heaven sounds like a cheap furniture store. Mysteries swim in my head. Malachy will have me scrubbing the church basement, the labyrinth where Brother Masseo lurks among the broken statues of martyrs and serpents. Three more Hail Marys ratchet by. I crank my head left, cough, then whisper,
"What's the Third Mystery?"
"Ya mother's box,” Sal Mulia replies.
"Don't fool around!"
"Her canary."
Ernie Benevento snorts, the sound among the murmurs loud as a breaching whale. Malachy's wimpled head rotates. I duck, disappearing, I imagine, like Jonah into the belly of the Leviathan.
"Come on. Please!"
The nun fills the aisle between the rows of bolted-down desks. She advances, seeming to sniff the air. Sal hunches over his beads, a monk lost in divine rapture.
"Hail Mary full of grace...” A drone four seats in front of me.
“Shit!”
I squeeze my Italian rosary. A tiny window in the crucifix reveals a bone chip floating in holy water like a carpenter's level. I clench the holy bone.
"Please Jesus…I'll …" I hesitate “I won't….”
A vision of Jean blossoms in my head, plaid uniform skirt inching up, revealing her coltish thighs. I sigh, steady myself for the charge. Instinctively, my hand rises to the fading purple bruise under my left eye.
In the corner by the whistling radiators, Tommy “Cacasotte” Manzo stirs. The bolts holding his desk to the polished oak floor squeal in protest. Malachy looks at him, a creature unfazed by Salvation’s promise or Darwin's exigencies; a bag of guts, corruption and decay. Stained tie, frayed white shirt, grey work pants straining against his buttocks like sausage casing; a mockery of all that is pure, clean, Christ-like.
Father Mario and the Franciscans of Our Lady of Peace Parish count the days until New York State law allows them to discharge “Shit-the-pants” like so much sewage into the gutter.
A round oak pointer materializes in Malachy’s hand.
Tommy’s internal clock is chiming noon. He’ll feed at his mother Margherita’s (pronounced in our barbarous dialect, “Ma-ga-la’s”) Third Avenue diner, waddle home, root into his unmade bed. At 5:30 P.M., the Mouseketeers’ theme will stir him, no doubt, to masturbation. He raises his slobber-streaked face, squints, lolls his tongue at Jean, a willowy German stranded by the ebb tide of emigration out of South Brooklyn.
He lifts his ass and farts. A barrage, a lament from his bowels that derails the Holy Rosary and wreathes the classroom in silence. The fallout stops Malachy as she’s about to pull me from my seat. Rows of students surge forward, surfers riding a wave, coughing, pretend gagging, holding their throats. Shrieking, they sweep past me, past Malachy, out the front door.
The lunch bell clangs. I stand, lock eyes with her.
“The Third Sorrowful Mystery!” I shout slapping Sal’s still bowed head. “The Crowning With Thorns!”
I swivel right, dash forward and out the door. I fly down the metal steps, out the building, dodge Butchie the Fag, the patrol boy captain, and the thundering trucks on Third Avenue, race down Carroll Street past my house, past Jimmy the Morgue’s idling Buick Electra, past Monte’s and the Crusader Candle Company not stopping until gasping I reach the grey rail of the bridge crossing the Gowanus Canal. I feel the pale sun on my face.
    ****
In Monte’s, Sonny the Indian sips brown whiskey, watches me race down the sidewalk, feinting garbage cans, gangly body struggling to keep up with my brain.
He stares at the long mirror above the bar, lifts his chin. Whose face is it? What purpose the bunched muscles and tendons of the formidable jaw? The questions chase themselves behind his impassive eyes.
After a moment he grunts, “Whiskey.”
Fifteen minutes later, I walk back up Carroll Street. At the Grand Army Plaza Library, a Protestant woman with a face like parchment had shown me sketches depicting the Gowanus River in the 1600s, apple trees flourishing along its banks, Gowanus oysters renowned for their size and abundance. I’d described these wonders to Ernie and Sal.
"Go fuck yourself!" they shouted.
Engulfed in the cloud of sautéing garlic and simmering tomatoes emanating from Monte’s lunchtime rush, I float above the cobblestone street, imagining green and verdant hills rolling past  what is now Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill, to the Heights above the harbor. 17th Century ships at anchor bobbing in the sunlight at the foot of Wall Street.
Crack!
A slap off the back of my head ends my meditation. Honey and Ernie, his nephew, are standing in front of Monte's. Holding a thick Cuban cigar, Honey is grinning. Sonny is to his left, Easter Island in a leather trench coat.
“Daydreaming you mope?” says Honey.
 "What?"
“You hungry? Go inside. Red'll make you a sandwich.”
“No. I’m fasting.”
“It ain’t Lent. Think them cocksucker priests fast? Bullshit.”
“Fasting makes you think better. In India..”
“Sonny’s an Indian. He don’t fast.”
Sonny says nothing.
“What happened to your face? Your father go to work on you again?”
Uncomfortable, I look at Ernie. “You ready?"
“Yous better smarten up,” Honey warns. “Yous ain’t kids no more.”
He waves his cigar, digs into his pocket and pulls out a thick roll. He peels off two $5 bills.
"Get some ice creams. You, bring me the News and the Mirror. Don't forget like last time."
"I won’t. I promise." (I'm rich!)
"That Irish twat still giving yous trouble?"
"She hates us.”
"She hates Vinny ‘cause he's smart.”
"I ain’t smart!"
I tilt my head toward the bridge. We begin inching away.
“Where yous a going?" Honey jerks his finger toward Third Ave. "School’s that way."
"We don't gotta be back till one o'clock."
“Stay away from that fucking canal!" Honey spreads his stubby arms.
"They got water rats this big. All kind a shit. Yous a ’gonna get rabies. Something happens, I'll give you the rest! Stay outta there!"
Shaky walks out of the restaurant, greasy pompadour afloat on his pockmarked face.
"Yo, you got a call. Carmine.”
“The fuck he want now?” Honey groans.
He and Sonny walk into Monte’s leaving Shaky standing there.
Ernie stage whispers. “Looks like a dog shit on his head.”
I giggle.
Shaky turns, shoots me a look. “Homo, whatta you looking at?”
 “Nothing. I ...”
“Jerk-offs, I’ll go to work on both of yous. You, you fat fuck, don’t think your uncle can stop me either.”
“We’re talking about school,” says Ernie. “Ever hear of it?”
Shaky pulls a wad of bills out of his pants pocket. “School is for jerk-offs.”
Ernie grabs his balls, “Fageddaboutit!”
(To be continued)

see: http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/05/fly-fishing-on-gowanus-conclusion.html

Gowanus Crossing/A Life Along the Canal Chapter 5

On Monday, Americo shuffles into Malachy’s classroom, his mind whirling back to the lot and the dead ... He flashes on the filthy rubber dolls New York City sanitation men, for some stupid reason, tied to the radiators of their Mack trucks. No torsos, just the heads. He rubs the grease streaks on the corduroy pants he’d tried to clean. It was real, but already he couldn't picture it. An hour later, the nun orders him to stand in the dunce corner at the back of the classroom.
Punishment for behaving like a “vulgarian.”
At 11: 00 A.M. Malachy steps into the hall. Shouts and shrieks erupt all around him. Ernie fires a spitball, a strike that splats against his head. Another boy follows, then the rest. Americo stands there, Saint Stephen pierced by arrows, until the bombardment slows under the weight of his stillness.
Two rows away, Jenny Wilcox whispers.
"I take good notes. Can you read my writing?"
"I…I can't see that good."
Americo glances at the door and crosses quickly to Jenny's desk. He leans over, conscious of the perfume in her hair, the white satin brassiere strap visible under her blouse. He squints at the notebook. The letters, written in purple ink, are plump, elaborately curved, the lower case i's and j's dotted with circles and miniature hearts.
"I can read that easy. Thanks."
Conscious of his crooked front teeth, the worn-down heels on his shoes, the scrim of acne on his cheeks. Americo’s eyes flick to the door. Jenny scribbles in the margin of her book.
"Thanks for loaning me your records. Can you carry my record player for me this afternoon? It’s heavy!"
She’d lugged the boxy Victrola to class. Our Lady of Peace School had two portable record players and 18 classrooms. Malachy was preparing for the Christmas talent show. She wanted a dozen students waltzing gracefully around the stage while the rest hummed Rigoletto’s La Donna e Mobile in perfect harmony, and stalked the rehearsals in her black and brown habit. A Grim Reaper, slapping, punching and pulling hair.
"I...don't think..." Americo begins.
Jenny smiles, enjoying him squirm.
"PLEASE!!" she scribbles in big purple letters.
He wants to say yes.
Without knowing why, he blurts, "I can’t. I .... got to study.”
Hurt flashes in Jenny's blue eyes. Quickly overlaid with anger.
"I’ll get somebody else. You jerk!”
At 3:00 p.m., the dismissal bell clangs. Malachy waits until most of the students pass into the hall.
’Merico, Boy-Boy, ” she pronounces the names with repugnance. “Back to your desks."
Eboli, Naples, Sicily…Fiji, Mauritius, Borneo. What is the difference? The Archbishop needs missionaries not grammarians.
Boy-Boy—Shaky Manzo’s kid brother--slams down his books. A head shorter than Americo, Boy-Boy looks like Fabian with green eyes and long lashes. He wears mohair sweaters, pants with buckles in the back, leather jackets, featherweight shoes.
Malachy opens the storage closet, hands out brooms and dustpans.
"Preparation," she says, "for your futures."
Half-an-hour later, Boy-Boy throws down his broom andwalks out
“Fuck her!” he snarls.
Americo stands, cradling a broom, at the fifth-floor window. In the distance, the Gowanus is a sparkling green ribbon winding among the lofts and factories. He hears the squeals of the last departing students. Feels his distance from them. On the sidewalk, he picks out Jenny and Lorraine, their blonde pony tails trailing down the backs of green stadium coats. Jenny is lugging the record player. Lorraine carries her purse and school books.
He spots his cousin JuJu, black fedora squashed on his pumpkin head, sitting on a stoop across from the school. JuJu gets up, flicks his cigarette at a passing car, and hurries across the street. He turns and waves, crooked grin on his face. Boy-Boy hurries after him.
JuJu says something. Americo can see the fedora bobbing. Jenny shakes her head.
“No!”
JuJu flings out his arms in exasperation. Americo clenches his fists.
Now a third punk, a kid from President Street called “Catman” angles across the street cutting in front of the girls. JuJu struts alongside Jenny, hands in the pockets of his leather trench coat. Suddenly, he lunges for the record player's handle. Americo sees his fingers curl around Jenny's hand.
“Jerk!” Americo shouts
Lorraine begins pounding—not too hard, Americo notices—on JuJu’s broad back. He jerks the record player just as Jenny lets go. It crashes to the ground and pops open. 45 rpm records roll along the sidewalk. JuJu kneels to pick up the records. Catman follows a few disks as they rolled, like pitched pennies, down the sidewalk. He stomps a transparent yellow 45—Americo’s 1954 copy of "The Wind" by the Diablos.
“When the cool summer breeze sends a chill down my spine,
And I long for my love deep within...”

A white Grand Prix screeches to a halt. Shaky jumps out. He motions for Boy-Boy to get in the car. JuJu, hesitates then dodges, quick for his size. Shaky kicks at him, misses, then goes after Catman, who darts between two cars and escapes down the block. Shaky picks up Jenny’s record player—Americo can see him gesturing—and Boy-Boy and the two girls get into the car.
He pushes against his broom, moving up and down the narrow aisles, sweeping everything before him.
"Guzzi, are you deaf?"
Americo jerks around..
"No Sister."
“Just dumb. Clean the blackboards and out of my sight!"
Americo considers telling Malachy what he’d found. He'd felt the words hot in his throat all afternoon, afraid if he opened his mouth the secret would spill out. Yesterday, in church, Saint Luke’s parable of an infant "wrapped in swaddling clothes" had struck him like a blow. Only his was a shroud. He clamps his mouth shut, wipes the boards and runs out the door.

                                                           * * * * *
Five blocks away, Jenny Wilcox lies on her back in her rumpled bed staring at the photos taped to the cracked plaster ceiling. She places a stack of 45s on the record changer, then begins scribbling in her diary.
“Shaky’s car is so cool!! He’s really cute for an older guy!”
She can’t think of anything else to say and drops the book. Something is wrong with the record player. It’s broken, she thinks bleakly.
“‘Merico! You immature jerk!” He makes her so mad. She picks up the diary and scribbles, “You and your stupid books!”
She stretches and yawns. Five P.M.. Already dark. She switches on the radio.
"Murray the K” and his “swinging soiree,” was whispering about submarine race-watching. Spinning records, “red, hot and blue all the way.” A constellation of stars—Frankie Avalon, Fabian Forte, Paul Anka, Ricky Nelson, Tab Hunter, Frankie Valli—smile down at her. Jenny was sure the guys would dig her if they got to know her, but, like the song, they were.
“So near yet so far away.”
She imagines a hot date with Shaky. He did wear his hair just like Fabian. What would she wear? She’d order a lobster at the fancy place in Sheepshead Bay. How far would she go? Wouldn’t Lorraine be jealous!
The doorbell rings. She ignores it. Jehovah’s Witnesses. The lady upstairs complaining about her music. Boring. Jenny lived in a broken home, a world of frayed slips and graying underwear hidden beneath her brown Our Lady of Peace uniform. She hadn’t seen her father in ten years and kept seeing him in every older man walking along Fourth Avenue.
She’d thought about becoming a teacher, falling in love, building something together, but she was only sixteen (“The prettiest, loveliest girl I’ve ever seen.”), and was waiting for that special guy (“…The one with the wavy hair.…”) who would sweep her off her feet, take her from South Brooklyn to the city or Philadelphia, (“The kids in Bristol are sharp as a pistol.”) Even Memphis where Elvis was.
A key turns in the front door, ending her reverie. Dorothy Wilcox is working the afternoon shift at the Mrs. Wagner’s Pie Company and won’t be home until 8:00 P.M. This had to be Reynolds, her mom’s boyfriend, half-soused. Jenny jumps up, pushes the door to her room closed. Throws the latch.
“Jen you home?”
It’s Reynolds. Definitely.
“Shit.”
A moment later, she hears him piss loudly. The bathroom is next to her room. Doesn’t bother to flush., The door of the refrigerator opening; the clink of beer bottles, A cap skittering like a hockey puck into the sink. Reynolds smacking his lips.
Reynolds runs the coconut custard line at the pie factory. He’s kind of cute, with freckles and a shiny duck-tail haircut. Unfortunately, he front teeth that had come in sideways, almost perpendicular to the rest. He hissed when he spoke like a cartoon snake.
He stands outside her door.
“Your mother home?”
"You know she’s working late today.”
“I forgot.”
“Yeah right,” Jenny thinks.
“Want a beer?”
"No.”
A nonsense rhyme her father used to sing when he’d push her on the kiddie swings in Prospect Park flashes through her head.
“See-saw. Knock at the door.
Who’s there?
Grandpa.
What do you want?
A glass of beer.
Where’s your money?
In my pocket.
Where’s your pocket?
In my pants.
Where’s your pants?
I left ‘em home.
Get out of here. You dirty bum!”
Jenny feels like crying.
“Hey pussycat, brought you a present.”
He rattles the doorknob.
She jumps.
“I’m not dressed.”
Unconsciously, she smoothes the pink baby doll pajamas her mother had given her for Valentine’s Day. A moment later, Reynolds uses a butter knife to flip the latch open. He blinks, then grinned as his eyes adjusted to the light.
“Surprise!”
Reynolds is holding a blue jewelry box in his hand.
“I got this special for you at Mays’ on Fulton Street.”
“What about Mom?”
“Sheee’d want you to have it.” The snake hisses.
He sits on the edge of the bed a moment, then twists toward her, putting his hands under her shoulders, thumbs running over her breasts as he tries to lift and push her against the wall. His hands leave a slug’s trail of grime under her arms.
“ Move over! You’re hogging the bed.”
Jenny giggles, squirms away from him. Reynolds opens the box pulls out a silver chain. A jewel flashes in the lamplight.
Wow! Is that a diamond.
"Just like a diamond. Called a Marquisite.”
“It’s beautiful!. Thank you!”
She kisses him modestly on the cheek.
“Here let me put it on for you.”
Hot breath hissing like a radiator, Reynolds puts the necklace around Jenny’s neck. He reaches up and grabs a mirror from her dresser, holds it for her to see.
“Looks great!” .
She smiles, imagining it's Fabian's breath on her neck…Fabian’s hands in the mirror sliding under her pajama top
Reynolds drops the mirror, cups her breasts with his hands, buries his face in her hair, bites her neck with his sideways teeth. Jenny lay still, saying not a word as Reynolds plunges his blunt fingers into her pajama bottoms, rubs, then roughly strips her. Quickly, he’s out of his pants and boxer shorts, groaning as he spreads her long legs and mounts her.
Jenny clutches the necklace in her hand and stares at the ceiling. The stars smile down at her.

Gowanus Crossing/A Life Along the Canal Chapter 1

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 those who’d grown-up near the stream would be dead or dying of an epidemic of cancers and birth defects long after they’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.

Chapter 1

"In nomine Patris et Filio et Spiritu Sanctus."
"A-men."
Sister Mary Malachy crosses herself as she intones the prayer. She thrusts her prognathous jaw forward, an Inquisitor ready to swoop down on the budding apostates in her charge. She tugs at the baggy sleeve of her brown habit, taps the Timex watch on her thick wrist three times. Across her scarred desk, 35 eighth graders shift to attention, ink-stained hands reaching for their rosaries.
She studies them—ice blue eyes behind rimless glasses half-closed in feigned prayer--alert to every exhalation of breath, every shoe scuff, sigh and stomach rumble. Malachy knows that behind their frayed white shirts and clip-on ties, beneath the pleated skirts and Peter Pan collars, they dream only of stickball and lipstick, of stink bombs, dirty pictures, fireworks, rotten eggs; of Frankie Avalon, Ringalevio and Kick-the-Can. She knows the boys—the Italians--will touch the giggling girls in the darkness of the cloakroom, make them squeal in the crowded stairwells as they march from the schoolyard after lunch.
Malachy wears a wedding band signifying her marriage to Jesus Christ and her renunciation of the pleasures of the flesh. Pain is another matter. She will spare no effort driving her charges up the slippery slopes of Salvation. This is her purpose, the vocation that had carried her from the bottle green glens of Donegal to this vale of tears, this Golgotha called South Brooklyn.
She nods to a dark-skinned girl in a raveled green sweater in the fourth row, her mouth ripe and red as Original Sin.
"The First Sorrowful Mystery, The Crowning With Thorns," Rosa Perez begins. "Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name..."
The class murmurs the response, voices echoing down tiled corridors, merging with the morning prayers of other students like the drone of honeybees. The rosary continues, the “Hallowed be’s” and “Holy Ghosts” as dry as the husks of dead insects. In the fifth row, Jenny Wilson inhales—her ripening breasts strain against her blouse--and announces the Second Sorrowful Mystery.
An aisle away, Americo Guzzi hunches over his catechism penciling a dove, the representation of the Holy Spirit, shitting on the head of Pope Pius XII. He stiffens, a feral creature sensing a predator’s approach. He counts heads.
"...Ten...eleven...twelve...Shit!"
It’s his turn to proclaim the next mystery. “The Third Sorrowful Mystery,” he mouths, prompting his brain to supply the answer. He waits. Nothing comes. Ascensions. Assumptions. Redemptions. Heaven is a cheap furniture store. Mysteries swim in his head. Malachy will have him scrubbing the church basement, the labyrinth where the hunchback monk Masseo lurks among the broken statues of martyrs and serpents.
Three more Hail Marys ratchet by. Americo cranks his head left, coughs, then whispers, "What's the Third Mystery?"
Sally looks at him. "Ya mother's box.”
"Don't fool around!"
"Her canary."
Ernie snorts, the sound among the murmurs loud as a breaching whale. Malachy's wimpled head rotates. Americo ducks, disappearing, he imagines, like Jonah into the belly of the Leviathan.
"Come on. Please!" he whispers.
The nun fills the aisle between the rows of bolted-down desks. She advances, seeming to sniff the air. Sally hunches over his beads,a monk lost in divine rapture.
"Hail Mary full of grace...” A drone four seats in front of Americo.
“Shit!”
He clenches his rosary. A tiny window in the crucifix reveals a bone chip floating in holy water like a carpenter's level. He clenches the holy bone. "Please Jesus…I'll …" He hesitates “I won't….”
A vision of Jenny blossoms in his head, plaid uniform skirt pulled up revealing coltish thighs, a darker shadow beneath her white cotton panties.
“I can’t, ” Americo sighs.
He steadies himself for the charge. Instinctively, his hand rises to the faded purple bruise under his left eye.

In the corner by the whistling radiators, Cacasotte stirs. The bolts holding his overburdened desk to the polished oak floor groan in protest. Malachy looks at him, a creature unfazed by Salvation’s promise or Darwin's heretical exigencies; a bag of guts, corruption and decay. Stained tie, frayed white shirt, grey work pants straining against elephantine buttocks like sausage casing; a mockery of all that is pure, clean, Christ-like. Friar Masseo and the Franciscans of Our Lady of Peace Parish count the days until New York State law allows them to discharge “Shit-the-pants” like so much sewage into the gutter.
An oak pointer materializes in her hand.
Cacasotte’s internal clock is chiming noon. He’ll feed at his mother’s Third Avenue diner, waddle home, root into his unmade bed. At 5:30 P.M., the Mouseketeers’ theme will stir him, and then only briefly, to masturbation. He raises his slobber-streaked face, squints, then lolls his tongue at Jenny Wilcox, a willowy German stranded by the flood tide of emigration out of South Brooklyn.
He lifts his haunch and farts. No discrete blast, but a barrage, a lament from his bowels that derails the Holy Rosary and wreathes the classroom in silence. The putrid fallout stops Malachy as she’s about to pull Americo from his seat. Rows of students surge forward, surfers riding a wave, coughing, pretend gagging, holding their throats. Shrieking, they sweep past Americo, past Malachy, out the front door of the classroom.
The lunch bell clangs. Americo stands, locks eyes with Malachy.
“The Third Sorrowful Mystery!” he shouts, slapping Sally’s still bowed head. “The Crowning With Thorns!”
He dodges right, dashes forward and out the door. He flies down the metal steps, out of the building, dodges a patrol boy and the thundering trucks onThird Avenue, races down Carroll Street past his house, past Jimmy the Morgue’s idling Buick Electra, past Monte’s Venetian Room, and Crusader Candles not stopping until gasping, he reaches the grey rail of the bridge crossing the Gowanus Canal.

In Monte’s, Sonny the Indian sips brown whiskey, watching Americo race down the sidewalk, feinting garbage cans, gangly body struggling to keep up with brain.
“Give Cochise here a drink.”
The voice grates against Sonny’s ears. He roots around in his pocket, pops two aspirin into his mouth, sips his drink. Further down the bar, Shaky Manzo is counting $20 dollar bills from a paper bag.
“....15....16 hundred!”
Snapping each bill like a playing card.
“All right!...Red, do me a favor, turn on the television.”
“Fuck that,” grunts Sonny. “Television is for morons.”
“On or off?” The bartender shrugs.
Shaky looks up. “You say something chief?”
“Cocksucker is what I said.”
“What?” Shaky is on his feet.
At his table along the mirrored wall, Honey is studying the Daily Racing Form. “You! Sit the fuck down!” he yells. “And you. Can I get a minute’s peace? What’s bothering you now?
“This fuckin’ retard for openers.”
Shaky brings his palm to his mouth, two, three times, pantomiming a cartoon Indian. He sits back down, picks up a Daily News from the bar, flips it open, turns the pages noisily.
Television. War-painted braves dead because they’re too noisy or too slow with the white man. Falling off their ponies. The Mohawk, Jay Silverheels, living in Bensonhurst, speaking Apache. “Kemo sabe,” Sonny broods. I'll give you Kemo sabe! He glares at Shaky, the idiot's lips moving, working the cartoons.
Sonny stares at the long mirror above the bar, lifts his chin. Whose face is it? What purpose the obsidian stare, the bunched muscles and tendons of the formidable jaw? The questions chase themselves behind his impassive eyes. After a moment he grunts, “Whiskey.”
“You got it.”

Winded, Americo walks back up Carroll Street. The night before, he’d seen a woman in red pants, kneeling, like a supplicant at the Communion rail, on the canal bank. Shaky had caught him staring at her bobbing head. At the Grand Army Plaza Library, another woman, this one with a face like parchment, had shown Americo sketches that depicted the Gowanus River in the 1600s. Apple trees flourished along it banks. Gowanus oysters were renowned for their size and abundance. He’d described these wonders to Ernie and Sally.
"Go fuck yourself!" they shouted.
Engulfed in a fragrant cloud of sautéing garlic and simmering tomatoes, he drifts off into history.
Crack! A slap off the back of his head ends his meditation.
Honey and Ernie are standing in front of Monte's. Honey, holding a thick Cuban cigar, is grinning. Sonny is to his left, Easter Island in a leather trench coat.
“Daydreaming, you mope?” says Honey.
Americo blinks. "What?"
“You hungry?”
“Nah, I’m fasting.”
“It ain’t Lent. Think them priests fast? Bullshit.”
“Fasting makes you think better. In India ...”
“Sonny’s an Indian. He don’t fast.”
“What happened to your face?” Sonny shakes his head in despair, then continues, “Your father go to work on you again?”
Americo shrugs, says nothing. He looks at Ernie. “You ready?"
“Yous better smarten up, Honey says. “Yous ain’t kids no more.”
He waves his cigar, digs into his pocket and pulls out a thick roll. He peels off two $5 bills.
"Get some ice creams. You, bring me the News and the Scratch Sheet this afternoon. Don't forget like last time."
"I won’t,” says Americo.
"That Irish twat busting your balls?"
"She hates us," says Americo.
"She hates ‘Merico ‘cause he's smart,” Ernie says.
"I ain’t smart!"
Americo tilts his head. The two boys begin inching away.
“Where yous a going?" Honey jerks his finger. "School’s that way."
"We don't gotta be back till one o'clock."
“Stay away from that fucking canal." Honey spreads his stubby arms. ("A baby tyrannosaurus!" Americo riffs, then bites his tongue to keep from laughing.)
"They got water rats this big. All kinds of shit. Yous a gonna get rabies. Something happens, I'll give you the rest! I’m telling yous, stay outta dere!"
Shaky walks out of the restaurant, greasy pompadour afloat on his pockmarked face.
Yo, you got a call. Carmine.”
“The fuck he wants now?” Honey groans.
“How things went.”
"Tell him we got the money.”
“He wants to talk to you.”
“More fucking bullshit.” Honey sighs.
He and Sonny walk into Monte’s leaving Shaky standing there. Ernie stage whispers to Americo, “Looks like a dog shit on his head.”
Americo giggles.
Shaky turns, shoots him a look. “Homo, whatta you looking at this time?”
Americo reddens. “Nothing. I ...”
“Jerk-offs, I’ll go to work on both of yous. Don’t think your uncle can stop me. I’m a made guy.”
“We’re talking about school,” says Ernie. “Ever hear of it?”
Shaky pulls a wad of bills out of his pants. “School is for jerk-offs.”
Ernie grabs his balls, “Fageddaboutit!”

The boys cut between a row of parked cars, then make for the Carroll Street Bridge, a rusting architectural jewel the city has ignored for 50 years. Twenty yards from the water, it hits them—“Perfume Lagoon”—raw sewage, chemical spills, oil from sunken barges and abandoned cars, garbage, feces, bloated carcasses of dead dogs and cats floating on the tide.
On the bank, Sally and Rocco are stripping branches off sumac trees growing on the canal bank. Rocco, short and dark, is dressed like the accountant he'll never be, tweed overcoat, wool pants and polished shoes, white shirt stiff with starch, blue, clip-on tie held in place by a fake pearl.
Americo pulls a fishing rod from the weeds, a 5 & 10 cent store reproduction of the ones he’d seen in Field & Stream. He ties a length of clothesline, a sinker and an enormous hook to the rod.
"Friday," he says. "Fishing’s gonna be good."
"Sunday morning's the best," says Ernie.
Sally finishes stripping leaves from his branch and runs to the 10-foot diameter concrete pipe that carries waste from neighborhood toilets directly into the canal.
"Thanks for helping me out!" Americo calls after him.
"Swear to God, I dont know the fucking mystery!”
"Swear to God," Americo minces.
"Screw you!"
"Got one!" Rocco yells.
"That’s mines!" shouts Ernie. "Slipped away."
As the boys look on, Rocco pulls an eight-inch condom from the water.
"All right! Sally says. "Whitefish!"
Putrescent water splashes Rocco’s overcoat as he manipulates the dripping tube onto a tire. Seven condoms, Tuesday’s catch, shrivel in the sun.
"Two points," Rocco says.
"No," says Sally pulling a notebook from his pocket. "Two is a French tickler. One point."
"I got two of em!" screams Ernie lifting a grease-smeared branch from the water.
"Your mamma was busy!" Sally says. He walks over, inspects Ernie’s catch. A dead cat floats in the water. At first, the stench is overpowering, but they get used to it.
For the next ten minutes, the boys concentrate, keen as fly fishermen on a Colorado stream. Americo spots a rubber being discharged ( “released”) downstream.
He plucks it out of the water, is about to yell when he notices Sally bent over his notebook tallying scores. Americo circles behind him. The rubber looks exactly like the calamari tubes his father stuffs and sautées in tomato sauce.Ernie sees him coming, backs away. Americo creeps closer, closer, and lays the dripping condom on Sally's shoulder.
"Somebody I want you to meet," he says.
Sally looks up. What?”
Americo throws down his rod and darts away.
"Eccch! Sciafuso!" Ernie shouts. "Disgusting!"
"What?" Sally whirls once, twice, like a dog chasing his tail.
The condom leaves a snail track on the shiny coat.
Americo is already 30 feet away, running among piles of concrete slag and bricks heading for the path that winds through the salvage yard and out onto the street. Sally who owns the Catholic School 60-yard dash record, throws the raincoat at Rocco and chases after him.
"My new coat! My mother will kill you!"
Americo climbs a towering mound of rubble. He whirls, gives Sally, 20 feet below the finger. "The First Sorrowful Mystery!" he screams. “Your stupid coat!"
He leaps, loses his footing and tumbles down the other side. Scrambles to his feet, ducks behind a pile of trash, then accelerates toward a hole in the fence. He trips as he vaults over a roll of linoleum, almost regains his balance, then falls hard in front of a mountain of metal drums piled near the fence. Instinctively, he burrows between two barrels.
In the distance, the bells of Our Lady of Peace Church chime the Angelus, then ring the hour, a single note that reverberates in the metallic womb like a funeral knell. One o’clock. Americo crawls deeper, imagining a pirate cave formed by the rusty drums, forgetting about school and the rats in the lots. He finds himself in a 20-foot clearing surrounded by orange drums leaching powdery yellow crystals. He stands up, examines his grease-stained pants and looks around.
A brown shopping bag rests against one of the drums. Americo walks closer, picks up the bag, disappointed at how light it feels. Drug addicts burglarizing the trucking companies alongside the canal often hid swag in the lots. Americo would steal from the thieves, Robin Hood, grabbing leather handbags, perfume and shoes. A pillowcase is stuffed inside the bag. Americo pulls it out. It’s stained a dark, clotty red.
"Jesus!"
He pushes the bag away from him with both hands. The October wind, heavy with salt from the harbor, cuts through his thin jacket. He sniffles, wipes his nose on his sleeve, half-tucks his shirt in. Acrid smoke—tires burning in the salvage yard, chokes the air. He looks up over the barrels, sees the sun reflected in the windows of Ernie’s apartment building, reminds himself he’s barely 50 yards from his own backyard. Gloria, his mother is in the kitchen doing dishes, getting ready for supper.
He walks back to the bag, steps on the edge of the pillowcase, then kicks. The bloody cloth unravels, a chicken flies out.
“Ha!” Americo laughs, a dry bark that surprises him.
He steps closer. A tiny claw-like hand. Closer. A baby, smaller than a plucked chicken, blackened, smeared with blood and dirt. A naked, dark-haired boy, one arm reaching up to the empty sky. It moves. The hand clenches and unclenches.
"Ahhh!"
He turns, flies through the tunnel of barrels, bile rising in his throat.
He’s trying not to gag when Sally leaps onto his back. Americo falls to his knees, gasping. He spins wildly, legs pin-wheeling. In a second, Sally is kneeling on his chest, pinning his arms back.
"Stop! ... Please stop!"
Sally holds a dried condom ready to rub into his face.
"Please!"
"Come on,” Sally relents. “Crybaby."
Americo hyperventilating, points at the barrels. After a moment, the two boys crawl into the small clearing, stand over the thing. Americo picks it up, cradles it in his forearm. Sally looks at him like he's crazy. He feels the icy body shudder and grow still. He lays it back on the ground
"It was alive.”
They stare at each other then turn away. Sally throws the pillowcase over it.
"Don't say nothing to nobody. Right?”
"I don't know," Americo mumbles, "this is...a sin."

To be continued