Reckless

Reckless
The entrance to the RR subway on Fourth and Union is vertiginous as a ski jump; trip and you crush your skull. Day after day, I  launch myself full-speed in the dim, grimy light, worn-out Thom McCann shoes clattering, barely gripping the steps’ steel edges. A hundred times, daring myself to fall; exhilarated but not knowing why. (The “slow” entrance, which I avoid, consists of two short, perpendicular stairways.) To a kid, Flatbush Avenue between Third and Fourth is wide as the Mississippi; taxis, buses, Daily News delivery trucks race to and from the Manhattan Bridge. I play human “chicken” feinting and dodging 10,000 pound trucks, just inches from their bumpers, right up until a Yellow cab sends me flying 20 feet, knocks my teeth out and lacerates my knee. Glad my Lee dungarees aren’t torn, but when I roll up my pants--the milky white bone of my femur and kneecap is exposed--I collapse on the asphalt, waking up in Kings County Hospital, my father, Joe, stalking the corridor.
I’d been en route to an Army & Navy store near Buddy Lee (the Barney's Boys' Town of Brooklyn) to buy a gas mask. Butchie Mulia, Fat Ernie and I had looted cases of hydrochloric acid and other toxic and, no doubt, explosive, chemicals, from the abandoned Golten Marine laboratory. We’re going to mix them randomly in the back of a truck as an “experiment.”
Gowanus is a reckless place. We’re teens without girls, few organized sports, or the pull of education or ambition. Our role models, “Junior” Persico, “Honey” Christiano, “Apples” McIntosh,” are reckless beyond imagining. On weekends, when kids in Great Neck and Greenwich—places I’ve never heard of—are on dates, we race, hearts pounding, through a gauntlet of red lights on Third Avenue under the Gowanus Expressway, “Joe Bo” Mongiello driving his white ’60 Pontiac Isley Brother’s “Shout” blasting. I grin, my new teeth flashing, until Joe attempts to stick his head between the spokes of the steering wheel. The other guys cheer.
It’s not our fault. It’s a reckless thing to go to the Fox theater on Flatbush Ave.: reckless to walk to the library in Park Slope. The gangbangers--Bishops and Apaches—surrounding St. Augustine H.S.don’t register that I, wearing a jacket and tie, am brutalized by thugs in clerical collars between rosaries. To me, Hook Pool is a shark tank. Of course, it’s very, very reckless for any male outsider to even pass through our mafia-run neighborhood
Some nights, P. a toupee-wearing 20-year-old, lines up his 65 Coupe Deauville on Carroll and Hoyt, stomps the gas, ignores the stop sign on Bond, hurdles across the Gowanus, up Carroll at 90 mph, kids playing on the sidewalk, runs the light on Third, past Our Lady of Peace Church, and barrels across the broad lanes of Fourth, showers of sparks erupting as the rear axle bottoms on an enormous dip. He barely keeps control. Months later, on the way back from a funeral, he’ll jump the guard rail of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway and plow head-on into a passenger car filled with people. I was in another car. I remember seeing a woman's bloody face protruding from a broken windshield.
One summer night (remember the song)," Honey’s backyard—where starlet Joey Heatherton, the Lindsay Lohan of her day, had been tossed fully clothed into the pool, Blaise, pear-shaped, with a thick black pompadour and baby-face, announces he’s going to the Capri Club, a bookie joint where dangerous men entertain their goomahs (“comares”) on Saturday nights. Blaise has decided he needs" a drink.
"Carroll Street is teeming; our apartments stifling, Monte’s Venetian Room is packed with suburban strangers. Three generations of families sit outside on lawn chairs, radios tuned to the Mets game, cranky babies in strollers, teen girls wearing white lipstick and tight jeans, wallyos (gualiones) on the corner heads rotating like radar dishes, looking for action that never comes. On the cobblestone street, Caddies and Electra convertibles from Court Street, the radios blasting “Rag Doll,” are backed up at the light.
Blaise is naked as St. Francis and the Pope.
He walks up the suddenly silent street, politely waits, dick-dangling, for the light to change Horns blare in protest. Curses erupt from outraged Puerto Rican drug dealers heading for the salsa clubs of Manhattan. The first giggles and obscene jokes ripple up and down the block.
“Stop that moron,” an Irish cop stuck five car lengths from the corner, yells.
Utterly calm, Blaise crosses Third Avenue. I’m reminded of a blissful martyr in a stained window. "Mack the Knife" blasts a warning from the Capri Club. Blaise turns right, walks past Tony’s Barber shop and into the mouth of the dragon Hit men and thieves momentarily stunned and speechless.
Two years later, in college I get word of a “reunion” in Prospect Park. The last reunions I attended ended in a gunfight at Plum Beach (my unarmed friends attack the shooter) and a riot at the Bay A Go-Go in Sheepshead Bay. This time we arrive at the top of a steep hill in the dead of night, lugging cases of beer, wine and a pharmacopoeia of illicit substances. As always, there are no girls.
Blaise arrives on crutches, leg in a plaster cast. At the end of a long evening , he jumps off the top of the hill and rolls howling fifty yards to the bottom. Of course, “Lenny Spares,” Joe Bo and the rest of the crew follow him.
I stay behind.

Common Sense, Gowanus Version

Many of the neighborhood men--Joe Coppola, among them--who lived by the Gowanus in the ‘50’s and ‘60s worked “down the docks.” My father spent 30 killing years unloading ships at the Black Diamond Lines pier at the “foot of Court Street,” dirty, dangerous, brutal work, straight out of “On the Waterfront": gangsters, crooked union (International Longshoremen’s Assoc.) and all the rest.
Joe had dropped out of school, was drafted and fought in the P...acific in the terrible battle for Peleliu Island. Unlike the millions and millions of veterans who used the GI Bill to advance into the middle class, my father, intelligent, broad-shouldered and handsome as a Roman centurion, retreated to the piers.
He worked so relentlessly the men in his “gang” called him “the animal” in Italian. High praise. Even the wise guys left him alone when he refused to take money from the omnipresent loan sharks. (Want to know more about him, see http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/…/dutch-shoes-and-dead-…)
“I do this so yous guys can have a better life,” he’d tell his four sons. (I was the only one who listened.) In our family, my uncle, Sonny Giordano, and my big, bruising cousins, Jimmy and John Pomarico had broken the pattern and joined the NYPD. When I made it to Saint Augustine high school, they’d approach me with heartfelt career advice:
“Vinny, become a sanitation worker. They got a great union. The work ain’t dangerous. You can retire at 40.”
Looking back, they may have been right. At the time, I didn’t aspire to be a garbage man, particularly in a neighborhood where the canal and the back lots, teemed with feral dogs, tail-less cats and rats. So I studied hard and harder. My mind opened up to new ideas and horizons. It was the 1960s.
Of course, this pissed off my father. Every time we argued politics or anything else actually—disagreements soon became shouting matches and slapping matches with me on the losing end.
“You’re smart all right!” Joe would shout. “But you ain’t got common sense! Everything you know is from books!” This from a guy who spent 40 hours a week "studying" the Racing Form.
My erudite uncles, "Joe Turf" and "Punchy" Giordano, agreed with this assessment.
Like an asshole, I accepted this. For the next 10 years, I went out of my way to do manual labor—unloading trucks, working in food processing,, gasket and candle factories, taking shady jobs from the neighborhood gangsters to prove I had “common sense.”
Looking back, I came to realize, doesn’t all knowledge come from books?

Summer on the Gowanus

Carroll Street was always teeming, the air thick with humidity and fumes belched from the trucks thundering along Third Avenue from the 29th Street piers.
The gamblers, Jerry Pep, Freddie Fish, Muzzy, among them stood on the corner shouting, cursing scratching their balls, arguing the day’s winners at Aqueduct or Belmont. Across the street, in front of the Capri Club, Mikey Romanelli and The Goose, dressed like undertakers in dark suits, hovered, ready to collect the bets, and later, collect the losers. They stored the scribbled sheets in the steel blue U.S. Post Office mailbox next to the red fire alarm box on the corner. A safe place since no one trusted the Post Office after Americo Guzzi dropped a cherry bomb down the chute.
Next door, Chitty and Buffalo Manzo, grilled sausage on a half-steel drum filled with charcoal, served with peppers and onions on Italian bread from Gallo’s bakery, the intoxicating aroma wafting in the air On the opposite corner, Rosinna served homemade lemon ice so delicious, truckers would line up in front of her store for a nickel’s worth scooped into Dixie cup. At night she lit a naked bulb above the side door of her store and fried 10-cent calzones in a vat of dirty oil while you waited. Further along Third toward First Street, Victor the blacksmith, biceps bulging in a medieval leather vest, shoed horses belonging to Angeletti and the other fruit peddlers who sang out in Italian on their horse and wagons. ("E rook e' rob" for broccoli rab) Another smell in the air, another sound adding to the cacophony: A one-eyed rooster who’d lost track of time, crowed all day in front of Goldie’s Live Poultry market.
Singsong, the girls skipped rope, played hopscotch on boxes chalked in pastels on the dirty sidewalk. We shouted and cursed, pitched pennies in front of John Sanseverino’s candy store, played kings against the wall of the Typhoon Air Conditioning Company, and high-pressure, high-stakes stickball (The Goose would pit our team against squads bankrolled by other wise guys) on First Street, never realizing the ancient brick wall that ran from Third Avenue to Whitwell Place was an artifact of Brooklyn’s first professional baseball stadium, Washington Park.
I played outfield. A towering fly ball over your head meant you had to keep running and running--toward Prospect Park, to escape your owners' wrath. I'll take Steinbrenner any day.
(to be continued)

Tony Bennett On The Gowanus

For the last 20 years I've seen Tony Bennett interviewed 100 times about what he has learned, what it all means.  Here's what he taught me: I was 13 standing outside the frosted plate glass widow of Monte's Venetian Room near the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. Word had passed that TONY BENNETT was inside with "tree broads." I don't know who he is--well I would have recognized "I Left My Heart in San Francisco," constantly blasting out of the Capri Club where the wise guys hang out. I wait outside in the cold for two hours and don't know why. Now I do:  I wanted to taste this thing called fame  Finally, the man exits. Fat Ernie, JuJu, Philly Horse Teeth and the younger kids start chanting "Tony! Tony! Tony!" so I do too. He's wearing a beautiful black overcoat and has a giant f...ing nose. The chanting intensifies as his limo pulls up in front of the restaurant. "Tony! Tony!" As the car door opens Tony reaches into his pocket and throws and handful of nickels and dimes on the sidewalk. He ducks into the car, as the kids scramble for the coins. I start to, but stop when I see Tony watching us like  we're a bunch of monkeys. Philly, who would later die homeless and of AIDS, runs up and throws a flying kick at the limo's back fender as it moves off. He slips and falls on his skinny ass in the gutter.