My Gowanus Memoir Coming Spring 2026

 Henry Holt Publisher

Available Amazon

GOLTEN’S YARD A CONEY ISLAND OF THE MIND

        
On the Gowanus, birdsong or the rhythmic shhhtik of a lawn sprinkler are alien things. At night, I listen for the low groan of foghorns in the harbor, watch shadows cast by the headlights of passing trucks dance across the ceiling, trace the occasional red flash of onrushing ambulances and firetrucks, and the relentless clanking of an invisible behemoth echoing across our backyards: the overhead crane in Golten’s Yard lifting marine boilers and diesel engines the size of freight cars.
Golten’s Yard runs like a spine from Third Avenue to the Gowanus, ribbed by our row houses on one side and Golten Marine, a WWII-era ship repair operation on the other. An artifact of a Brooklyn peopled by Scandinavian and German immigrants that existed before my Italian great grandfather and his seven sons arrived on the canal, in my mind, the beginning of time.
Scattered everywhere are the rusting hulks of ship engines and superstructures looming like disembodied dinosaurs over my head, fantastical machines with steel hatches, tunnels and ladders running in all directions. There are propulsion and navigation panels with needle dials and brass levers out of Jules Verne. Electrical transformers, acres of pipes, spools of wire, overturned barrels filled with glittering crystals and industrial chemicals. Cardboard boxes stuffed with trash, and sometimes unspeakable things.
On the Gowanus, there is one playground, on Degraw Street, but its kiddie pool is clogged with trash, rotting benches, overrun by nodding junkies. Prospect Park might as well be Jurassic Park and Red Hook Pool the Amazon.. I live in a world lifted—families, priests, culture, traditions and animosities intact--from the small towns and villages south of Naples and deposited on the banks of a poisoned waterway; it’s a cynical, riotous, often hilarious, place, three generations of families and their unruly kids, priests, and gangsters spilling all over each other. There are ghosts everywhere, and the feeling that momentous events, vague history and restless spirits hover just beyond my ken in this rundown, forgotten corner of motherless Brooklyn. The feeling that I live in a tribal village separate from the rest of NYC place among kindred people—alive to this day—transforms the poverty, violence, decay and dysfunction around me into savage joy.
I have no idea that in the 17th century, ingenious Dutch settlers built dikes and millponds on a pristine salt water estuary across the East River from Wall Street; no idea that George Washington clashed with the British the 18th century—his men fighting and dying in the ancient farmhouse on Fourth Avenue and Third Street where I play softball on a field glittering with broken glass. No idea that a rapacious19th Century railroad baron carved the Gowanus estuary, renowned for its oysters, into a bustling commercial waterway lined by gasworks, factories, coal yards, docks and slaughterhouses, the beginning of monumental pollution that defines Gowanus to this day.
No playgrounds, but I have Golten’s Yard, a Coney Island of danger and mischief big as a football field, admissible through a hole in the fence in Honey’s backyard. After school, on weekends, in summers, we disappear, dozens of us, like Alice through the looking glass, into a world where there are no adults, no rules, no cops, certainly no safety net. A three room shack on Third Avenue becomes a fort we assault and defend with homemade slingshots firing extruded rubber pellets that litter the ground, and then rocks and bolts, until bleeding and exhausted we collapse to the ground. We climb and crawl over the machines searching for swag neighborhood junkies—my cousin JuJu among them—steal from the freight depots and trucking companies alongside the canal. We unearth a box of expensive leather handbags—Gloria’s Mothers’ Day present—before the mariuoli (thieves) can return to fence it. Another day, we haul off an enormously heavy Carrier air conditioning unit, purely for the joy of pissing them off. And one time, we discover a bloody fetus wrapped in a towel, the handiwork of the neighborhood abortionist, dumped among the trash. (http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/…/fly-fishing-on-gowanu… )
We do this over and over until one morning the FBI corners us standing astounded before a 15-foot tower of cases of Del Monte pineapple juice. Hunting an interstate ring of hijackers, they bag a raggedy crew of a 15-year-olds. A kick in the ass and we’re gone.
A day comes when Golten Marine shuts down. The overhead crane that haunted my childhood goes silent. A single watchman—in my mind a German—is left behind to look after the premises, a gray, wooden structure, 50 yards long, walls lined with hundreds of small pane glass windows, so many it takes months to break them all. Sometimes, after school, I slip into the yard alone, climb a pile of scrap metal and spend 20 minutes sailing rocks through windows, working my way, like Clem Labine, up, down, sideways. I don’t know why I do this. Other boys are playing baseball, studying, taking piano lessons, walking girls home from school. I smash windows. Sure enough, the “German” strikes back, hooking up a scratchy recording—machine gun fire, bombs bursting, shouts and screams—to the foundry’s powerful PA system and blasts me off the mound.
It works once. When the watchman quits, packs of teens from other neighborhoods descend on Golten’s smashing, trashing, wilding. I spend days systematically driving a v-shaped steel beam—balanced on a horizontal cement-filled barrel—along the the bottom of a masonry wall; When the structure collapses I barely avoid being crushed. Someone else ties a thick braided ship’s line to the bottom of overhead crane and soon boys are leaping from the catwalk and sailing 20 feet above the rubble-covered concrete floor on the super swing…until it breaks. Ernesto Benevento, Sal and I are the first to reach the abandoned laboratory finding row upon row of gleaming beakers, test tubes, pipettes, sulfuric and hydrochloric acid, every kind of chemical in brown glass bottles. We grab what we can and stash it in the back of an abandoned truck for “experiments.” A few days later, I’m run over by a yellow taxi as I’m darting across Flatbush Avenue (near today’s Barclays Center) and have my knee smashed and my front teeth knocked out. I was trying to buy a WWII-vintage gas mask at an Army & Navy store;because I want to conduct my “research” safely. When I recover, we head straight to our “lab,” now illuminated by a kerosene lantern, and begin randomly mixing chemicals. Soon, the Pyrex beaker is glowing a hellish yellow and fulminating liquid spilling over the sides. My gas mask doesn’t work. I stagger out of the truck, gagging, vomiting, nearly asphyxiated.
The next Saturday morning, the three of us make our way down into Golten’s basement once again hunting for junkies’ swag. The power is out, so we roll newspapers into makeshift torches. Our torches burn brightly, illumination enough to show us we’re standing ankle deep in shit from the shattered toilets.
“Screw this!” I toss my torch seconds before it sets my sleeve on fire and head up the stairs. It’s lunchtime.
Half-an-hour later, I’m sitting in the kitchen eating a salami sandwich leaking Gulden’s mustard. I hear sirens in the distance. They grow louder and louder crescendoing in a deafening scream. Firetrucks racing along Third Avenue, past Carroll, then, silence.
“Jesus!”
Stomach churning, I get up from the table, walk to the front door, pull it open and look outside. A crowd is already gathered on the corner, the air pungent with acrid black smoke.
Golten’s, a block-long structure, is ablaze. Flames soar 100 feet in the air. Firemen, the same men I hit with eggs at our Election Night bonfire, are racing frantically to hook up hoses, break through the front door, into a cascading Niagara of fire to search for workers trapped inside.
I’ve burned down Golten’s Yard.

The Persimmon Tree

The tree dominates our yard, green, vital, limbs clawing above the grim, windowless, brick and cinderblock walls that enclose our house on three sides like a prison yard. A persimmon tree with shiny, two-tone leaves and fissured, rectangular bark that resembles alligator hide, planted by Vincenzo Coppola, my immigrant grandfather, long before I was born. Trees are rare things in Gowanus. On Carroll Street below Third Avenue, ours is the only house with a backyard tree. Johnny the Butcher has a pigeon coop; Joey DeSimone, his rose bushes; Honey, a wise guy, a circular blue swimming pool where I see him dunk Joey Heatherton. There are a few sickly sumac trees on the banks of the Gowanus. Gasping at the stench, we strip the leaves and slash ourselves with thin, whip-like branches. To see a tree, I have to walk six long, sloping blocks to Prospect Park.

My grandfather, a large and dour man, makes bad wine in the cellar. We have a peculiar relationship: He’d twist my cheek between his thumb and forefinger—“Come sie bello”—until I screamed; I’d hide rusty barrel hoops in his garden hoping he’d step on one. Somehow, he’d coax tomatoes, peppers, melons and squash from his tiny plot. Years later, under threat of a lawsuit brought a yuppie tenant I have this magical dirt analyzed by an environmental expert at Syracuse University. There’s enough lead and base metal to build a chemical weapon. The cost of hauling out and replacing the soil runs into tens of thousands of dollars. The rent barely covers the mortgage.

“Goddamn this canal,” I moan, “I’m screwed.”

“Probably not,” the scientist says, “all the yards in South Brooklyn are poisoned.”

Figs and grapes blossom in grandfather’s garden, but the persimmon tree is his pride and joy. As long as he lives—he’ll die of a heart attack working in his daughter’s Bensonhurst garden —the tree never bears fruit. Not once.  I’m his namesake and, sure enough, his obsession becomes mine.  Year after year, I’d wait for spring, watch the tree flower, but no pollination.  I discover persimmon trees are gender-specific. Judging by its skimpy stamens and overripe pistils, this was a girl tree, though, occasionally, it could switch sex like the morphodites (hermaphrodites) neighborhood mopes were always shouting about:

“What are you a fucking morphodite?

I hike up to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden on Washington Avenue, a dangerous place for a white Catholic school boy in the 1960s. I’m told that for a price a botanist will show up at our house with a ladder, and using what I imagine to be a giant bug sprayer, he’d attempt to pollinate our 60-foot tree. I can’t see this happening in my neighborhood. People already consider me odd. Besides, I don’t even know what a persimmon is. Then it turns out my grandmother had endured similar tribulations. Anna Falcone was a skilled, hardworking immigrant for whom the streets really were paved with gold. In one generation, she and her sister—a woman ugly as witch in a fairy tale—whom I only knew as “Zia” (Aunt), owned a seamstress shop, a grocery, a bar, two row houses—one I grew up in--an apartment building on Third Avenue and President Street and supposedly, a "palazzo" (palace) in Pagani, our ancestral hometown.

Her husband is the problem: either impotent, homosexual, or maybe a morphodite. The words in Neapolitan dialect are vague. Finocchio, for example, is fennel, but also “gay.” At the time, strapping, mascolino Vincenzo was living either in Argentina or Bahia, Brazil. A practical woman, Anna shed her husband, annulled her marriage and imported my grandfather like a sack of coffee beans. He wasn’t ambitious, but he got the job done. In ten years, he sired four daughters—Tessie, Rosanne, Frances, Lucy—and my father, Joe, born in 1924. Anna died when Joe was seventeen. I know my grandmother only as a faded signature on my father’s school records—I’d teach at the very high school he dropped out of—discovered in a dusty basement in Williamsburg. According to family legend, The Aunt, my grandmother’s business partner, demanded Vincenzo marry her. Of course, he refused. Don’t fairy tales always start this way? And the financial troubles that would haunt my family for the next sixty years began.

At the end of World II, The Aunt dispatched my grandfather to Pagani, 20 miles southeast of Naples, to collect back rent on the properties she now owned, a considerable sum. In effect, the money was frozen by Mussolini for a decade. I’d hear the story a thousand times growing up.  Vincenzo stayed and stayed, didn’t bother answering her letters. After eight months, he returned and announced the money, down to the last lira, was gone. He’d dared spurn her marriage proposal, now he’d pissed away her money? Her revenge was worthy of  a Medici. She disinherited Vincenzo, his offspring, my brothers and me. forever, and then went a step further: all the property, the businesses, the five-story apartment building, went to wily Mariuchella, a distant cousin brought from Italy years before as The Aunt’s maid. My parents, my three brothers and I spend the next 13 years crowded into a three-room flat above a candy store. (She charges us $35 dollars a month.) My mom had to do the laundry in the sink, pour buckets of water on rambunctious teenagers hanging out on the stoop so I could study. Next door, The Aunt lives in the corner apartment with a library, a piano and dining room. Gloria has to bring her bowls of spaghetti in tribute. Her adopted son, known in the neighborhood as “Professor Beans,” piles pasta on his plate, leaving my mother—pregnant with me—hungry. He says he has to feed his brain,

When Vincenzo passes away, we move around the corner to 474 Carroll Street, the persimmon tree in the backyard. On spring evenings, I’d lie beneath its thick branches, counting the airliners flying overhead, imagining other places, other people, other worlds.  

                                                            ***

In the spring of ’81, I’m among the reporters Newsweek dispatches to Rome to cover the papal assassination attempt, a very convoluted story. A Turk, a neo-fascist, perhaps unwittingly, is working for the Bulgarians who, in turn, are employed by the Soviets who want Pope John Paul II liquidated because he’d supported Lech Walenska and the Polish unions movement. I wind up in the bowels of the Italian legal system, in Tuscany with a Mossad agent who guides me to Ankara, Turkey. There, I interview Ugur Mumcu, a fearless journalist who’d be assassinated for his revelations. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-ugur-mumcu-1481231.html

My world had definitely opened up.  Aunt Tessie, one of Vincenzo’s daughters, happens to be in Rome that spring. In her 60s and feisty, Tessie speaks fluent Italian. I call her from my office near the Spanish Steps, rent a car and on a bright Sunday morning we’re off to Pagani to visit relatives we’d never met or barely knew existed. Pagani is no Tuscany. The streets are dirty, there’s  barbed wire strung on balconies. Shouting teenage punks hang out on the corners or buzz around on motorbikes looking to steal purses and gold chains.  It feels like home. Two of our octogenarian relatives: a woman medical doctor and her husband, Aeneas Falcone, a French teacher (a dubious professional choice in a town whose name literally translates as “Heathens”), live in an ancient apartment, one wall bisected by a gaping crack that looks like a lightning bolt—earthquake damage.  But the surprise, the real surprise comes when we walk across town to visit the Coppolas.

Of course, word had spread. Our relatives have gone out and no doubt blown a week’s budget to prepare a sumptuous Sunday dinner for us. Eighteen of them and more arriving by the minute. One very handsome guy is almost a double of my blond-haired brother Thomas—mystery solved. After a while, the room literally begins to buzz.  People are staring. A few are pointing at me.

“Vincenzo Coppola e qui ! Vincenzo Coppola e venuto! “ (Vincent Coppola is here!)

People begin to hug and embrace me, some with tears in their eyes. A man tells me my grandfather paid for his operation when he was a boy. “And now I can walk.” Another says Vincenzo gave him tuition for hairdressing school. He put food on another cousin’s table...and another and another. A man assures me my grandfather tried to get him legal papers so he could emigrate to the United States. It didn’t work out, but it’s okay. He never forgot. None of them ever forgot.

I was his namesake.

                                                            ***

Back in Brooklyn, I’m told a wise guy has bought the house next door—it had once belonged to The Aunt—as a gift for his aging mother. A neighborhood woman, she was bored living in his enormous Long Island mansion. She missed the Gowanus. All her friends live here. This is a ground-up restoration, no expense spared, though I suspect he got a break on labor.  Highly skilled workers and carpenters are there for months, disassembling the place brick by brick, then painstakingly installing imported marble and tile, a state-of the art kitchen, central air. What had been a dank cellar becomes a finished basement. The man is meticulous: an African-American craftsman arrives from the South to hand-carve the bannister on the winding staircase. The exterior, a modernist take on a classic Brownstone with enormous oval glass windows set like eyes in the façade. James Caan—who else?—arrives to donate the bronze lion’s head knocker staring balefully through wrought iron bars onto the sidewalk. In the backyard, a gazebo sprouts and our rusty chain-link fence is replaced by a tall brick wall, its top as sinuous as a sine curve. The house is beautiful as a Venetian palace, so outstanding on our ragtag street, it stops traffic. My mother tells  me dubious “telephone workers” and “gas company guys” are constantly trying to get into our cellar, no doubt to install wiretaps. She chases them away.

                                                            ***

In the mid-80s our family literally blows apart. My brother Thomas is in Milan hoping to work as a fashion model. Jo-Ann, a friend from Our Lady of Peace elementary school, tagged along, as did the millions of unknown viral particles replicating in his blood. Two years later, he’s dying of AIDS, his chiseled body and handsome features so disfigured by purple Kaposis Sarcoma lesions I cannot recognize him. Life is so random: Jo-Ann becomes Madonna’s make-up artist. My brother Joe is shooting heroin, an addiction that continues to this day. My father Joe has full-blown emphysema. My other sibling is in the hole to gangsters for tens of thousands of dollars in gambling debts. I leave my job at Newsweek and stumble into a disastrous second marriage. Gloria tries to care for all of us. The hoarseness she dismisses as stress, a precursor to the throat cancer that will soon kill her. She’d never smoked a cigarette in her life. After she suffers through a failed operation to save her vocal cords, I sit helpless watching her gasp and choke as fluid flows into her lungs. (http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/05/losing-mom.html)

 I’d make my way to the backyard to sit among the rose bushes I’d planted in Thomas’s memory. Many years after Vincenzo’s passing, the ugly cinderblock back walls are now covered in lush green moss like an enclosed English garden. The Persimmon towers above all, branches thick with glistening leaves overhanging the adjoining yards a like a canopy. One day when I arrive, the house is deathly silent. Gloria is at a doctor’s appointment. My father, a shadow of the tough-as-nails longshoreman I’d so loved and feared, sits drowsing on the living room couch, an oxygen mask covering the lower half of his face. The machine hisses and gurgles, a sound I’ve come to hate. I walk through the kitchen, pull open the back door and walk into the yard.

I stand there astonished.

 All that is left of the a persimmon tree is a blunt, blackened stump, its amputated lower branches like arms reaching to the heavens in shame and supplications. Everything, save for a carpet of rotting leaves is gone. Thomas’s rose garden has been crushed by falling branches. I feel tears streaming down my checks and then I see red. I charge back inside.

“Dad, what's  happened!  Who did this to our tree!  Who the fuck did this?”

He looks at me. I notice he’s crying behind the mask.  “The lady next door complained the leaves were falling in her yard.”

“Falling in her yard, so you cut Grandpa’s tree down?”

“I wouldn’t do that.  Honey sent a crew of guys with chainsaws.  I couldn’t stop them.” In the past, my father would have sent them running, wiseguys or no.

I stand there enraged, and suddenly, impotent.   A certain old lady picks up her phone and complains about dead leaves in her yard. It probably happens a thousand time a day in America, but not in Gowanus. Her wish is somebody’s command.  And 75 years of family history—my grandfather, my brother Thomas and his Easter rabbits and ducks, the July 4^th barbecues,  rose bushes and tomato plants, our  joys and tragedies, vanishes.

Eyes Closed Tightly

 On a bright winter’s afternoon, I’m crossing Third Avenue with half-a-dozen classmates, heading home after another empty school day in the suffocating string that encircles my life like a rosary. At exactly 3:41 P.M., the ground shakes; a wave of heat and pressure scatters us like pins in a bowling alley. My cheap tan schoolbag goes skittering across the pavement, followed, a few moments later, by an ear-splitting roar. Cars, trucks, the B-37 bus—passengers’ frightened faces pressed against windows— slam to a halt. When I can hear again, all around me people—Tony the Barber, Chitty the vegetable vendor, Dolly Romanelli from the bar on the corner—are yelling and pointing toward a billowing pillar of smoke and flame rising above Bush Terminal. Carroll Street begins to fill up, women and children pouring out of the row houses. Sirens wail in the distance.
I’m a parochial school kid at a moment when atomic war with godless Soviets lurks at the borders of my life. A few weeks earlier, I’d stared at tabloid pictures of Russian T-55 tanks rolling into Budapest, crushing freedom fighters, though I didn’t know what or where Hungary was. At Our Lady of Peace School, orange Air Raid Instructions—distributed by Con Edison—stare at me from the walls. There are regular air raid drills, nuns in flying brown and black habits shouting “Get under your desk! Cover exposed parts of your body! Close eyes tightly!” I’d seen “The Day the World Ended” with my friends at the Garfield Theater on Fifth Avenue; heard my older cousin JuJu Castaldo had sent a fire axe whistling through the screen during a Saturday matinee of “Them,” killing a monstrous twitching ant birthed by nuclear explosions in the western desert.
Standing on the corner, I watch stunned factory workers streaming along Third from Bush Terminal toward Atlantic Avenue, some bleeding, their clothes torn and covered in grime and soot, an eerie precursor to a tower looming half a lifetime away. And then a countermovement: My father, my cousin Jerry Pepe, my Uncle Sonny, other neighborhood longshoremen, hurrying in the opposite direction, toward the explosion.
Disaster struck two miles from my house on Bush Terminal’s 35th Street pier. Today, home to artists and effete fashion designers Bush Terminal in the 1950s was blue collar, the largest warehousing, manufacturing and shipping complex in the United States. (Everything about Brooklyn was outsized. Population-wise, it was the third largest city in the United States, bigger even than sprawling Los Angeles.)
On the pier that afternoon, dockworkers were using an oxyacetylene torch to cut away a steel pillar to access and repair a cargo crane. The 6,000 degree heat ignited burlap bags filled with highly inflammable foam rubber scrap stacked nearby. Armed with handheld extinguishers, the longshoremen were quickly driven back by billowing smoke and flame. When firemen arrived, burning rubber—scattered on the pier like a trail of birdseed—reached 37,000 lbs. of Cordeau Detonant, explosive detonating fuse no one seemed to know was there.
The devastating blast, the largest explosion in New York City history until 911, killed ten people, injured hundreds, shattered windows more than a mile away. Flying glass and metal shrapnel slicing through the thin air killed one person 1000 yards from ground zero. Miraculously, the full force of the explosion passed above the heads of firefighters on four FDNY boats racing to battle the blaze. Across the harbor in Manhattan’s financial district, buildings shook and rattled.
That Monday night, I snuck outside and ran to the newsstand on the corner of Fourth Avenue and Union, next door to the College Restaurant. Ignoring the New York Times, I grabbed 5-cent copies of the late editions of the Daily News and Daily Mirror, the only papers—except for the Morning Telegraph, the handicapper’s bible—my father read. When I got back, I found him, my uncle, my cousin Jerry, and two other neighborhood dockworkers, in our backyard. They were sitting at a picnic table, downing straight shots of Four Roses whiskey. Joe Coppola wasn’t a drinker.
“Dad, I got you the papers. The story is everywhere!”
“Get back in the house,” my father growled. “This ain’t for you.”
Disappointed, I passed through the dented screen door into our narrow kitchen, a place so cramped the washing machine was jammed next to the sink.
“Mom, what are they doing?”
“Never mind, go upstairs with your brothers.”
“Mom…”
“Go.”
I pounded up the narrow, enclosed staircase my father had rigged to connect the floors. Pushing Joey and Tommy out of the way, I ducked into my room, a mirror image of the downstairs’ kitchen, closing the door behind me. My window faced the backyard. I slid the sash open, eased my elbows above the whistling radiator, onto the rusting fire escape.
Under a naked lightbulb strung from a grape trellis, the men were gathered around a wooden bench. My uncle straddled the bench, his right leg bent sideways at the knee. A folded washcloth in his hand. Two guys grasped him by the shoulder. My cousin Jerry held a short, wooden-handled hammer.
“You ready?” Jerry said. He was a thin, hyperactive man, inveterate horseplayer, usually the butt of my Uncle Sonny’s outrageous jokes and laughing insults. Jerry, no slouch, never talked below a shout.
“Let’s get going,” Sonny said. He stuffed the washcloth in his mouth.
Jerry stood there, a long moment. I close my eyes tightly.
“Fuck this, I ain’t doing it.” Jerry said and stepped away. He handed the hammer to my father. Joe stepped forward, swung the hammer, a short, vicious arc, at my uncle’s knee. Sonny screamed, the burly men holding him in place. After a moment, he nodded. My father hit him again.
Terrified, I watched the men take turns smashing each other’s knees with the bloody hammer, their muffled moans driving me back into my dark room. These were men so much a part of my childhood. Uncle Sonny and Cousin Jerry showed up at our house every Saturday morning during the racing season, usually joined by my Uncle Sal Giordano, a NYPD detective at the 88th Precinct in Bedford Stuyvesant, just off the night shift. Gloria, my mom, would serve pots of strong coffee, enormous batches of scrambled ham and eggs, piping hot Italian bread, I’d fetch from Johnny Gallo’s Bakery. They’d argue, shout and curse, pore over the Scratch Sheet, calling each other imbeciles over every pick at Aqueduct that afternoon. To this day, these raucous mornings, when the world was young, and full of hope and possibility, remain the best in my life.
This terrible evening they were “making a case,” preparing to claim they’d been injured in the aftermath of the explosion. I’m sure the same thing was happening on every street bordering the Gowanus Canal. In the era before “containerization,” dockworkers probably made up 70 percent of the working population. In a few days, they’d appear limping at the mobbed-up ILA (International Longshoremen’s Association) clinic on Court and Union, or visit the sympathetic orthopedist who kept a Ferrari parked outside his brownstone office on 8th Avenue. He’d write a report. They’d contact their lawyers and file a lawsuit.
In a place where, as soldiers used to say, no one had a “pot to piss in, nor a window to toss it out,” everyone had a lawyer. Even me. Mine was Abraham L. whose office was across from Borough Hall. I don’t know if Abraham was a good lawyer, but he wore shiny suits and once gave me his tie. When I was hit by a taxi while crossing Flatbush Avenue—my knee twisted and lacerated, front teeth knocked out—he managed to lose. My parents had assured me my “case” would provide me “college money.”
Looking back at these men, all WWII combat veterans, not one of whom ever took advantage of the transformational GI Bill, most of whom died young from cigarettes and stress and hard drinking, I find myself asking, what level of alienation or desperation forces you to believe that crippling yourself for a few thousand dollars is the only career option you have?

Dutch Shoes and Dead Babies

 Late on a winter’s afternoon spent among the greasy truck bodies and rusting marine engines scattered on the banks of the Gowanus Canal, I enter the apartment carefully as if there are land mines under the linoleum. Sometimes, a slamming door is enough to trigger my father's rage. Ernie, Sal and I had been hunting for swag hidden by the neighborhood drug addicts—my cousin Jimmy Psycho among them—in Golten’s Yard. We found something else, a thing for which I had no words. My corduroy school pants are smeared with grease. In our meager household, money for another pair will not be easy to come by. Joey and Tommy are curled on the parlor floor watching television, the dinner table, already set in the cramped dining room."
Where's Daddy?"
Engrossed in the finale of the Mickey Mouse Club, they ignore me. "....K-E-Y."
"WHY? BECAUSE WE LIKE YOU!"
I stare at Annette Funicello's breasts jiggling under her white turtleneck.
"M-O-U-S-E!" Tommy belts out the letters like a cabaret singer.
You stink!" says Joey wrinkling his nose. "Like the canal."
“You too!”
Gloria is in the kitchen stirring a boiling pot of Ronzoni spaghetti.
"I'm home Ma," I yell and dart for the stairs hoping to stash my ruined pants.
"Almost 6:00 o'clock. Why so late?"
"I... helped Sister Malachy clean the classroom."
"Why always you?"
"She says I’ll make a great janitor."
"Don’t mind her! Go get washed."
In the upstairs bathroom, I scrub the pants with Ivory Soap hoping to get the grease out, instead smearing the sink with black streaks. I pour Ajax on my knees, then some of Joe’s Old Spice aftershave and scrub some more. Frustrated, I roll the pants up, tie the legs into a double knot and throw them to the back of the top shelf of the hall closet behind unopened bottles of Anisette, Creme de Menthe and Four Roses whiskey, gifts from Christmases past.
I’m on the couch pretending to read a Superman comic when my father pounds on the door, making the Christmas bells, we use for a knocker, dance. Tommy lets out a yelp.
Joe doesn’t have a key to his own house. In his world, wife and kids are always home, dinner always on the table.
Joey and Tommy run to pull the door open. I get up. Joe looms in the doorway in an army fatigue jacket and blue watch cap, his face wind-burned and raw. He carries yellow rawhide gloves. Two wooden-handled steel hooks, the tools of his trade, hang off his shoulder like epaulets. Tommy and Joey prance around him yelping like puppies.
"What did you bring us Daddy! Whatja bring!"
Gloria comes up behind us wiping her hands on her apron, eager as the kids. I feel myself drawn into the familiar routine. Joe unzips his jacket. It’s stiff, crackly with cold. Nothing. Joey and Tommy moan. I smell the salt tang of the Atlantic on my father. Tommy pulls at the thick army sweater he wears underneath his jacket. Dozens of tiny Easter eggs wrapped in brightly-colored aluminum foil cascade to the floor. Tommy and Joey squeal, and scramble to grab the candy. Gloria kneels beside them, pushing them away. “Yous haven’t eaten yet!”
"A Dutch merchant docked yesterday," says Joe. "A couple of crates slid off the draft and busted." I know not to question s good fortune. Every kid in the neighborhood will have a bellyache tomorrow. Joe reaches into his jacket and hands me a brown paper bag.
"This is for you. I traded Frankie Masters for it. His gang is working the number one hatch."
I open the bag and pull out a pair of hand-carved wooden shoes. A miniature Dutch farmhouse is carved and painted in blue, yellow and red on the tops of the shoes. I can make out a blond boy and girl holding hands. The girl holds a bunch of tulips.
"Figured you'd go for that."
“Thanks Dad.”
Brooklyn was settled by the Dutch. There’s a crumbling farmhouse still standing in the devastated, needle park on Fourth Avenue and Third Streets. In the 1600s, a merchant had built a series a canals and locks that floated him into New York harbor, neatly as an Uber.
I reach up to kiss my father's cheek. Bristly, cold as ice in the overheated apartment.
"Let me carry the hooks!” I ask.
“Be careful."
I hang the tools in the closet under the stairs. Gloria is scrambling to snatch the chocolate from Joey and Tommy who are shriekig and stuffing Easter eggs into their mouths.
Friday is payday. When we groan at the piselli and pasta, hard-boiled eggs and tuna fish our devout Catholic mom has prepared, Joe orders a pizza from Lenny's on Fifth and Prospect Avenues. Half-an-hour later, I’m gorging m on pepperoni pizza, washed down with Hoffman’s Cream Soda and chocolate.
After dinner, I call Sally. The line is busy, busy, busy. We’d found an unspeakable thing in the lots, a fetus swaddled in a bloody towel I didn’t know the word at the time or the fact that the wise guys were running an abortion mill on Carroll Street.
At 10:00 P.M., feverish and shivery, I crawl upstairs and climb into the lumpy bed beside my sleeping brothers. The radiators are whistling. Joey is rolled up, a mummy in the thin chenille bedspread. I unwrap him, cover Thomas's frail, milk-white body and lay back. I can hear my parents downstairs going through bills and smell Joe’s Lucky Strikes burning one after another like a fuse. I decide to tell my father what we’d found in the lot in the morning. Despite my racing thoughts, I fall asleep.
"Vinny, wake up! Please wake up!"
I’m jolted from some dark and terrible dream. "Wha...What?"
Tommy is frantically tugging at my arm. Half-asleep, I send him flying with a forearm.
"What!” I hiss.
"PLEASE!" They're fighting!”
The shouts echoing in the narrow stairwell clear the sleep from my eyes. The crazed voice is deafening, obscene, familiar.
"You fucking cunt! I told you not to spend no more money!"
This is my other father, the father I hate. I leap out of bed and run down the hall. Joey stands trembling in his underwear at the top of the steps. The stairwell is enclosed in wood-paneling, a dark vertiginous tunnel. I plunge down the stairs, bare feet slipping, almost falling, catching myself on the banister, my kid brothers tumbling behind me.
I see a chair go flying...hear my father roaring...my mother mouthing the familiar plea, "Don't let the neighbors hear!"...the squeal of table legs over linoleum as my father shoves it, trying to pin Gloria against the dining room wall...Coffee cups, bills and ashtrays come crashing to the floor.
"Stop it! Leave her alone!"
Gloria turns toward us, tries to cover where he'd torn her blouse, and in that moment, Joe is on her, slapping, pulling her hair, pushing her head against the wall. Gloria rakes him with her nails, carving bloody streaks on his cheeks.
"Look what you did to me!" he shouts.
I’m frozen, tears streaming from my eyes.
"Please!" I try to scream. It comes out a whimper.
"Daddy Please!"
Thomas and Joey race past me wailing. Thomas, always so brave, grabs my father's legs. Joe shakes him off like a rag doll. Joey is trying to hug my parents as if a little boy’s love could stop the horror. Gloria is sobbing in helplessness and shame. Joe slaps at her again, screaming, cursing our family’s dead in Italian.
I feel myself moving. I see myself come between my parents, tear my father away from my mother. See Joe fly backward into the kitchen, crash into the washing machine and go down. My heart pounding in the awful silence. Then, almost a whisper: "You hit your father?"
This is a battle for which I’m still not ready. I turn and face him. My father is 190 lbs. of muscle and fulminating rage. On the docks the Sicilians call him the “animale.” I square my shoulders and drop my hands. Joe charges The first punch, a short, left, catches me in the stomach. I crumple, careful to keep my hands by my side. The second punch, a roundhouse right to the top of my head, knocks me to the linoleum floor.
“You hit your father."
Still wearing the heavy work shoes, he kicks me who only loves him. Gloria and the kids shriek. A roaring in my ears. Dazed, I try to cover my head, gasping at the pain, tasting blood where I’ve bitten through my lip. Yet, in some dark and secret place, I know I’ve won. I’ve diverted my father's rage, and some part of me, floating beyond the reach of the kicks and punches, is happy.
"I'm calling the cops!" Gloria screams reaching for the phone by the bathroom door. Joe tears it out of her hands and throws it into the bathtub. In that moment, I’m up, my brothers holding me, moving me toward the stairs. My father lunges again, but the attack is half-hearted, the storm already passing. I’m in the tunnel ascending. I hear my mother cursing him, hear his sobs. And Thomas's trembling wail: "I hate you! I hope you die!”
A rooster crows I jolt awake. Gray light seeps past the thick curtains draped over the windows. I watch my brothers sleeping, their trembling hearts already healing, preparing to love our father again.

My Cousin Richie

I fly up for my brother's wedding held in one of the glittery Bensonhurst halls Italian-Americans love. Big band;  feasting followed by “Venetian Hour,” preceded by “Cocktail Hour,” topped off by a flaming post-midnight breakfast. My sister-in-law has a tuxedo for four-year-old Thomas and a personal stylist to do 12-year-old Gaby’s hair. Having been married by a justice of the peace with a “Here Comes Da Judge” sign on his desk, I marvel at all the splendor. Unknown to me, the groom had quit the job I’d gotten him at Newsweek and was now a bookie. Unknown to his Armani-clad bosses—seated at their own gangster table near the kiddie table—he was a crazed gambler.
When I step out of my limo, all my female cousins are screaming, “He’s coming!!”
“Who?”
“He’s starring in a new movie with Robert DeNiro!”
“Who?”
“Cousin Richie! Richie Castellano!”
That’s odd. Richard Castellano, who played the portly “Clemenza” in The Godfather (“Leave the gun; take the cannoli”), had died 10-years before. At that moment, one of the shrieking teenagers thrust a glossy headshot at me. Sure enough, the cutline proclaimed “Richard Castellano,” but the broken-nosed visage smiling at me was my cousin Richie, “Richie Mel.”
Everyone knew that. Or so I thought.
*****
One of the last times I’d seen Richie, I was living on Fifth Street (above 8th Avenue to connoisseurs of Park Slope). Teaching English at Automotive High School in Williamsburg. That morning, I was unlocking my car when I heard a hoarse shout.
“Cuz! You gotta help me!”
I looked up. “Hey Richie. What’s up?”
“Cuz! I’m begging ya!”
Everyone in South Brooklyn shouted. All day, all the time, as if they really were players fretting and strutting on some invisible stage. The rest of us were scenery for them to chew.
“What’s wrong?”
“Cuz, they say I robbed a gas station!”
“What?”
“I’m innocent. I swear to my mother! They saying I shot a guy…with a shotgun!”
“Get outta here!”
“Fuckin’ cops! You know how they lie!”
I did know. Ten years before, I'd made the mistake of getting drunk on Tango, pre-bottled rutgut vodka and orange juice. A very bad choice for a Catholic high school boy. I was swept up in a dragnet--there had been a street gang murder that night--and dragged into the 78th precinct where a two cops took turns beating me for hours hoping for a confession. They were disappointed when the real killer was caught and marched in. By way of apology, an Irish cop walked me outside, punched me in the stomach and threw me down the concrete steps.
Richie paused as if to find his mark. “Cuz, you’re an educated guy. You went to college. I’m stupid! You gotta help me. I know I did some things, but I’m innocent this time. I got a wife…”
He choked back a sob. “Maybe…maybe you could talk to Uncle Sonny.” (Our uncle, Sal Giordano, was an NYPD detective so straight he was known in the neighborhood as “Elliot Ness.”) “Uncle Sonny knows people.”
“I could call him.”
I knew Uncle Sonny's first impulse would be to strangle Richie. For years, he and his wayward brothers—“JuJu,” “Jimmy Psycho,” and “Popeye Anthony”—had been the bane of Sonny's existence. (Another Castaldo brother, despite his nickname, "Alibi Ike," went on to lead a blameless life, serving in the Air Force, building a successful career, supporting a wife and family.)
“Maybe you can write a letter to the prosecutor," Richie added. "I was thinking the bishop too. You know my sister Carol works in Our Lady of Peace rectory. She cooks for the priests…Cuz, I’m really scared.”
“What’s his name?”
"Who?"
"The bishop."
“Fuck I know.”
I’d always felt Richie and his brothers—all smart, engaging, personable guys--were a photographic negative of my family. Or victims of some mysterious curse. The curse of growing up by the Gowanus Canal. Three of my brothers had graduated from college; none of us had ever been in trouble (all this would change). I felt guilty; I’d committed the sin of hard work and ambition.
“I’m fucking innocent!” he sobbed.
“Come on. It’s okay." I gave him a pretend hug. "Nothing’s going to happen. I promise. When I get home from work, come by. We’ll eat. I’ll help you. Ok?"
This was the Vietnam War era; the Watergate era; the Berrigan Brothers…injustice, civil rights
“You mean it Cuz?”
“Sure…But I gotta get to work now.”
“No problem. I don’t want to bother you. I know you’re a busy guy. Responsibilites.”
As I was tossing my briefcase—stuffed with papers I’d spent half the night marking--into my green Karmann Ghia, Richie called out again.
“Cuz...”
I sighed and stood up. The tears were gone. He was grinning. I stared as he pulled a greasy wad of bills from his pants’ pocket. Hundreds of dollars. He fanned it in front of my face.
“Cuz,” he said. “But I got the money!”
He couldn’t resist. He had to let me know he thought I was an idiot.
***
Years pass before I see Cousin Richie again. Out of jail, he’s now pursuing a career as a prize fighter. It turns out our family has a long boxing history. One of my earliest memories is a tabloid photo of my maternal grandfather, club fighter “Jim Jordan,” standing, thick arms raised in triumph, over a battered black man named “Preacher” something or other. The caption is typical of the era: “Negro’s Prayers No Help Against Jordan Onslaught.” All seven Jordan (Giordano) brothers, lumberjacks in Itay, were outsized men. Two were pro-wrestlers in the 1930s, one supposedly a “Russian.” In Chicago, an astute fan heard this Russian hiss in Neapolitan dialect to his brother—“Take it easy! Goddamn it! You’re hurting me!”—and the jig was up. My grandfather had big hopes for his eldest son, but my Uncle Tony’s nickname (“Punchy”) said it all.
Richie is holding court in Snooky’s Pub on Seventh Ave., surrounded by a gaggle of intrigued women. (Think Johnny Boy in Scorsese’s Mean Streets.) The same girls, braless and casually available I, with my droopy mustache and faded jeans, my teaching job, my books and bullshit, could not get my hands on. This is post-hippie era Park Slope. The communes of the mid-‘60s—one of them, the four-story brownstone at 16 Polhemus Place could be had for $60,000 if you could find a banker willing to write a mortgage—are passing away like the elvish people in Lord of the Rings, replaced by armada of arrogant Gen X'ers pushing Peg Perego prams, assuming nothing and no one existed before they’d arrived on scene.
Trim, blond hair cut unfashionably short, nose suitably broken, Richie spots me at the front of the bar. “What is it Cousin Vin! Get over here!”
“Here we go,” I think
“This is my cousin. He’s a school teacher.”
Instantly, the women’s eyes glaze over. With a ninth grade education, and a fourth grade writing style, Richie had spent two years writing his prison memoirs; in longhand, on spiral tablets, in multi-colored ink that had arrived at my apartment every few months.
“Cuz!” he'd suggested. “Polish this up a little. You know how. We split the money!”
A blizzard of misspelling, cliché, and repetition. I couldn’t say this the few times he’d called me to check on our “investment.” But Richie is nothing but resilient. To my relief, he’s surrendered his literary aspirations along with his orange jumpsuit.
“Cuz, I’m fighting next week in Sheepshead Bay,” he crows, shooting jabs in all directions. “I’m gonna kill this fuckin’ guy. Am I right ladies?”
The women instantly perk up.
“Cuz, get these girls some drinks. I’ll get yous all front row seats.”
The fight was actually staged at a street festival near Emmons Avenue. Tickets were free and Richie was knocked out in the first round. A dying swan, nose streaming.
“Cuz, I’m bleeding!”
****
Fast forward. I’ve flown up from Atlanta to visit my mother. I'm crossing Third Avenue—the Carroll Street Bridge and the Gowanus Canal glimmer in the summer haze—when Richie spots me.
“Help me Cousin Vin!” he rasps. “They’re gonna kill me!”
He was clinging to the iron rail fence of a rundown apartment building on the corner. A sedan idled at the curb. Two guys were grabbing at his arms. I didn’t know them, but I’d grown up with the third guy, Chuckie R, a capo in the Colombo family run from prison by Carroll Street’s own Carmine “Junior" Persico. Chuckie had been a serious, thoughtful guy; never intimidating, always interested in my career as a journalist in the American South. Our parents had been friends growing up. It seemed to me Chuckie had had the misfortune of being born into a particularly ill-starred and oft-targeted mafia family. Today he’s serving life in prison on a RICO conspiracy with a dozen of his cousins and uncles.
“Cousin Vin!” Richie shouts frantically.
By now, Fat Rosie and Carroll Street’s other resident gossip mongers are all eagerly watching.
“Vinny,” Chuckie says, “Get this fuckin moron to shut up.”
“They’re gonna kill me. Don’t let them take me!”
“Nobody’s gonna hurt you!” Chuckie hisses.
“Richie shut up!” I plead “It’s okay.”
All I want to do is visit my mom. Once again, I'm caught in his mad web. Any moment, I knew Gloria would be out the door, charging up the street to our rescue. (It had happened before when my brother Thomas who was gay, beat the hell out of Michael Romanelli, a bigshot bookie's son.) Chuckie takes me aside. It turns out that, while jailed, Richie repeatedly claimed to have numerous connections among the correction officers and administrative staff of a particular prison in upstate New York. He was so well-connected, he insisted, that for a few thousand dollars, he could guarantee that some wise guy’s son, nephew, father or cousin would be provided exceptional treatment and perks—the best jobs, free access to food parcels, choice of cellmates, books, who knows what. An offer they couldn’t refuse. With generations of family members being incarcerated at a dizzying pace, it was a perfect, though wildly reckless scam. Richie collected thousands of dollars and then disappeared.
Now he's was back and the word was out. Another family, perhaps a murderous splinter of the Colombo family in Bensonhurst or Howard Beach, has put a contract on Richie. All this was patiently explained to me as if what I thought counted. I don’t understand this world or its arcane rules, but my cousin—certainly no made-man—was under the protection of the Persico faction.
That’s a very long story, maybe going all the way back to his father, (“Uncle Fat”) who as a young man was crippled by a Southern scab driving a tractor-trailer into a dockworkers’ picket line. Uncle Fat made the most of his martyrdom. He’d limp into supermarkets on Fifth Avenue, pack his cart with steaks and beer and groceries for his wife and offspring, then threaten any hapless proprietor who dared to hand him a bill with his cane, shouting,
“Let them pay!” And they did, for years.
Richie was simply going to a meeting; get a talking to, after which, some outsized lug would doubtless “throw him a beating.” The phrase demonstrates how absolutely unimportant one’s well being is in the grand scheme. I guess what the Alcoholics Anonymous types mean by “powerlessness.” But Richie would live to rise again.
And, of course, he did.
***
When Analyze This premiers in 1999, I swear I spot him next to Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal. WTF! I track down his sister Carol in Brooklyn, and she proclaims him “a star!” (The whole family exaggerates.) “Richie got me on the set! Robert De Niro kissed me.” (Approximate translation: “Fuck you Vinny and your college education!”)
As “Jimmy Boots,” De Niro’s "dese and dose" bodyguard, Richie croaks just 16 lines (“What are you, some kind of moron?” among the more memorable), but like a viral vector, exposure is more than enough for him to infect an exponentially bigger—and much more naïve—population than a Park Slope bar or the streets along the Gowanus Canal.
I’d spent time in Hollywood—most journalists think about it—I’d seen the throngs of unemployed young actors clustered Sunday mornings in Studio City, futilely comparing notes and filching casting calls. You want Italian? I met dozens: New York-Italian, Chicago-Italian, San Francisco-Italian, blueblood Italians from Rome and Milan; artistic, handsome, beautiful, stupid, charming, effeminate, dangerous, talented Italians—Chazz Palminteri had parked cars!—none of them going anywhere. And here was Richie, strutting and fretting, giving advice and television interviews, fabricating madly: “….. I come from a big family with mob connections. When I was a kid I saw people killed... by the time I was 12 or 13 years old I was an alcoholic. That was the only life I ever knew, the only thing... So I was a street guy, a bank robber (N.B. gas station becomes bank; bank will become shoe store). And in order to survive, one of the skills you got to develop is acting. I been shot, beaten to a pulp with lead pipes, you name it, at various times in my past life—I’ve even been pronounced DOA one time when they took me to hospital. Altogether I survived ten contracts on my life – ten…” . His claim about being dead might be true. What Richie didn’t say, what I recall, is that he overdosed, probably on Tuinals or Seconals, and his brother, Popeye Anthony, an ambulance driver, found him on President Street.
Richie now had an agent; he had a website; he was organizing a film festival. He had a French wife!
I sure didn’t. This was too much.
Richie was no longer a cousin, or a “colorful” Gowanus character. Richard Castellano, ne Castaldo, was a story. At Newsweek, my editor Terry McDonell had me spend a month with the Rolling Stones; at Men’s Journal he’d ordered me to Hanoi after I mentioned a popular disco named “Apocalypse Now.” (He made me eat snakes.) At Esquire, he’d sent me to the New Mexican desert to find Jimmy Baca, a mad Apache poet who’d taught himself to read in prison and held Wallace Stevens’s chair at Yale. (He made me eat mushrooms.) But Terry was no longer at Esquire—he’d temporarily been banished to a fishing magazine—and the new editor, a baldy suburbanite, didn’t know me or care about Richie. This was a shame, because Richie and his new wife, Jocelyne Castellano, aka Jocelyne Castaldo-Castellano, aka Maria Jocelyne Castellano, aka Marie-Helene Rousseau aka Marie Rousseau (the “aka's" are significant), had moved to bucolic Narrowsberg, N.Y., and were plotting to rip off the entire county.
Richie arrived in upstate New York in the spring of 1999, a few months after Analyze This opens in 2500 theaters. (The film would go on to gross more than $100 million.) I know this because I tracked him down. (“Cousin Vin! Where you been?") Jocelyne, in a breathy French accent invites me to their First Annual Narrowsberg International Film Festival. (WTF!) My cousin is now become Jean Paul Belmondo?
A thousand miles away, I feel the old, mad Richie virus singing in my blood. (Surely, he’d find a place for me, his cousin, in the festival.) I fight it off, instead profiling another mad actor, Eric Roberts then living along the Hudson River.
Richie appears in Narrowsberg, a flyspeck along a bend of the Delware River. He arrives draped in black leather with a bodyguard named “Mondo” and a black Cadillac like one of Boccaccio’s shimmering young nobles in the Decameron. Actually, the plague-bearer in “Masque of the Red Death.”
Sixteen spoken lines and he opens the “Richard Castellano School of Acting.” Forty-two people sign on. Sixteen lines and the merchants and an ill-starred chicken farmer named Borg are convinced their hamlet will become “the Sundance of the East.” Sixteen lines and Richie announces he is starring in a gangster movie—Four Deadly Reasons—to be shot, for some unfathomable reason, in Narrowsberg. A good citizen, he wants to include local actors and investors. A lord, he struts, lapels flying like F-16s, down Main Street, shouting at everyone he meets, playfully shoulder-punching stolid burghers like they’re goombahs.
“What is it?” he demands of everyone, but only he does the talking.
His life isan open book, mostly fiction: the gas station he told me he’d robbed is now an armored car. (The next time he's arrested, he will shrink it a shoe store.) He has “$2 million stashed away.” He’s killed people and danced away from “ten contracts” on his life. By the Gowanus, these fantasies would have been dismissed with a knowing grin, a playful “slap in the head,'" or a knowing "Get the fuck out of here.!" In Narrowsburg, they’re intoxicating, an opportunity, unspoken, "to wet their beaks in the champagne fountain of celebrity.
Mornings, he storms into the Chatterbox Café on Main Street and announces he's buying everyone breakfast, then breezes out without paying. He brings in crews of “walyos” (guaglioni, affectionate Neapolitan slang for street corner guys) from NYC to people his movie. He scatters checks to wide-eyed vendors like rice at an Itallian wedding. John Borg, the chicken farmer, turns out to be a cinephile. Richie "casts" him as a “Marshall Dillon-type” character. Borg lives in a double-wide trailer; he invests $154,000.
Time passes, seasons change; checks bounce like cherry blossoms, then falling leaves, then a blizzard. A year later, in August 2000, Four Deadly Reasons is screened for the people of Narrowsberg. Richie is nowhere to be seen. This screening is later described on PBS' This American Life as “…a hastily produced, 15-minute montage of scenes from the movie. It's a porn film without sex scenes—awkward dialogue, noodly soundtrack, gratuitous use of bikinis and double entendres, and, most outrageously, no scenes with people from Narrowsburg..
What next unfolds is best described in a series of articles that ran in the Sullivan County Democrat over the following two years. In short, Richie’s dizzy trajectory is blunted. He's charged with four felony counts out of a cornucopia of extravagant malfeasance; named as defendant in at least 16 civil suits involving rental cars, equipment, meals, disgruntled actors. Even Mondo turns on him. Richie has a restraining order against his own bodyguard, certainly. Then his own attorney sues him.
The alleged felonies involve a scheme to secure SAG cards for aspiring actors (“Cousin Vin, I got the money!”),essentially the same con he’d successfully pulled with real wise guys . In Brooklyn at this point the gangsters are more likely to dispose than depose him.
On trial in Sullivan County Court, he chews scenery, constantly interuppting the proceedings, speechifying, ignoring threats of contempt from the bench. (My brother Joey, no angel, tells me, “Richie thinks the judge is a director.”) Ultimately, he plea-bargains, agreeing to restitution and a year in county jail. Of course, he doesn't appear for sentencing.
Reports circulate that he’d been found naked on the Verrazano Bridge about to commit suicide. (I don’t know what movie that was.) He's arrested walking “half-naked” in Manhattan and hauled off to Bellevue Hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. He claims he’s “taken too many shots to the head as a professional fighter.” (!) He checks into drug rehab, buying 90 more days of freedom. In Narrowsburg, folks are pulling their hair out.
Richie finally appears in court appropriately costumed in orange jumpsuit and shackles. Nonplussed, he asks Sullivan County Judge Frank J. La Buda to do him a "personal favor" and knock three months off his sentence. His daughter is getting married on Staten Island. “Can’t you find it in your heart to let me go to my daughter’s wedding?”
“This is not Let’s Make a Deal!” La Buda snaps.
Meanwhile, farmer and naïf, John Borg, who’d lost his life savings, is parading outside the courthouse with a hand-lettered sign reading “Hang ‘Em High!” Borg apparently couldn’t resist a final cinematic flourish.
Some of the money that dribbles into Narrowsburg over the next months covers Richie’s $12,000 restitution. The mone consists mostlyl of $20 money orders, suggesting that our family and his old neighborhood didn’t forsake Richie once his star had dimmed.
****
The world changed on September 11th 2001. Richie didn’t.
The 7th edition of the “Queens International Film Festival” kicks-off in winter of 2009. Its founder and executive director is none other than Jocelyne Castellano (aka Jocelyne Castaldo-Castellano, Maria Jocelyne Castellano, Marie-Helene Rousseau and Marie Rousseau). Year after year, it turns out, festival vendors and exhibitors from Connecticut to Texas are stiffed on fees and equipment rentals, perchance even hot dog sales. When projectionist James Hill threatens to take his grievance to the media, a gravelly voice hisses over his phone: “I know you’re a smart guy and you’ll understand what I’m telling you between the lines: You won’t talk to nobody!”
By now, you can guess what movie that line is from: My Cousin Richie.
Like Ebola, the virus that's responsible for my cousin's genius and his criminality may be dormant, waiting for a suitable host to begin replicating madly. In 2012, one of Richie and Jocelyne’s myriad victims, a Brooklyn-based filmmaker named Dan Nuxoll contacts me. He remains totally convinced the couple will make one hell of a documentary.
Rest assured Dan

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 Oldest Guy In the Gym

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

A Christmas Carol

In 1971, I move to a walk-up on Hicks and Pineapple Streets in Brooklyn Heights. The rent, as I recall, was $149 a month, a stretch for a 23-year-old substitute teaching in Williamsburg. On Carroll Street, my father Joe, the dockworker in whom love and rage forever warred, erupted when I announced I was leaving our family’s cramped row house by the Gowanus. I depart under a volley of curses and threats: “Don’t fuckin’ ever come back!”


The bad Joe loved his family even as he splintered it. He’d lost his mom as a teen, was immediately drafted and thrown into the hellhole that was Peleliu Island. Knowing these things, I cling to the illusion that the violence and rage, and the never-ending money problems would wash away like the tides. We’d be a “normal family."  The good Joe slaved down the sweltering holds of cargo ships for decades to put me through college and all four of his sons through Catholic school. But Good Joe couldn’t hold it together against the darkness seeping into our souls like Gowanus sludge.


Skipping out the door, I never thought to help out.  I still feel the shame of it. I was working at mostly at all-boys Automotive High, the vocational school Joe had dropped out of.  I found his records in a dusty file cabinet in the basement and discovered the NYC public school system classified my father “non-white.”


In the 1970s, Williamsburg was carved into Balkanized enclaves—Hassidic Jew, Puerto Rican, Italian, Irish, Pole, African-American, Junkie. You’d get knifed walking to the annual teacher’s luncheon at Peter Luger’s steak house the under the Williamsburg Bridge. I didn’t, but I played hooky one Friday, and one of my students, Alphonse Presley, a sweet kid up from the South, got stabbed by the white junkies who haunted McCarron Park. He nearly died.


Brooklyn Heights was another world, a warren of pre-Civil War townhouses and Episcopalian churches, so far removed from the teeming tenements of Brooklyn it could have been London’s Mayfair district. The Heights was home to White Anglo Saxon Protestants, a rara avis in the outer boroughs.  Truman Capote and Henry Miller had lived there. Norman Mailer lived there, his brownstone overlooking the Promenade and New York harbor. There was a mincing population of middle-aged, pre-liberation gay men—and the predators they inevitably attracted.


My Hicks Street apartment was on the dark side, in the long shadow of St. George. The hotel had tumbled so precipitously into SRO/welfare status you could buy cuchifritos at the newsstand, and incubate titers of infection in the pool. A Gilded Age barber shop persisted. A shave, hot towel, neck message and a dousing with cheap fragrance cost $3.00. The barbers were old and trembly, the tiles cracked and pitted, the towels frayed.


Bruno Rubeo lived down the street with a cat named Shelob and a hippie girlfriend, Claire. At the time, he was selling handmade pizza out of a converted postal van in Red Hook, anticipating the food truck madness by 40 years. Bruno would become Hollywood famous (“Platoon,” “Driving Miss Daisy”), live in an Umbrian palazzo, marry a sweet Mexican beauty, die way before his time. He was my best friend.


I met a red-haired Sicilian named Marguerite at a rock club in Bay Ridge. She lived in a four-story limestone townhouse overlooking the Soldiers and Sailors Arch in Grand Army Plaza. Her parents were doctors; her father had a family coat-of-arms mounted on the wall, not something I saw a lot of in Brooklyn. He told me I wasn’t “right” for his daughter; she told me she’d spent her 17^th birthday at an orgy on Staten Island.


I was pursuing a M.A in medieval literature at Brooklyn College—hoping to convince myself I was an academic type—wading through Piers Plowman and the Faerie Queene, taking arcane linguistics courses, my Brooklyn accent so thick my professors grimaced and classmates giggled when I answered a question.  I’d spend my afternoons reading on the Promenade in the shadow of Mailer’s brownstone, fending off a different variety of fairy queen. Just a mile from my Gowanus neighborhood, I was lonely, isolated, didn’t fit in.


And soon enough, I was broke. Demand for my substitute teaching skills thinned spectacularly when one of my students, the class clown, climbed out the window of our third floor classroom at Enrico Fermi Junior High, inching his way along a narrow sill to the next classroom. Kids screamed and howled, but howling was normal when you were a substitute. Blissfully unaware, I kept scrawling whatever nonsense the regular teacher had left on the blackboard until my next door colleague banged at my door dragging Carlos by his ear.


Fall turned to winter, the Promenade emptied, bitter winds howled off the harbor. My 4^th floor walk-up faced the brick wall of a faded residential hotel on Pineapple Street. (Heights streets come in a variety of flavors—Cranberry Orange, Pineapple.) On Christmas Eve morning, my brother, “Joe Bear,” stops by, equally broke, trying to figure out how to buy gifts for our parents and younger brothers, Thomas and Gregory. We turn the corner to Pineapple where my puke green 1965 Corvair, a shit box that burned more oil than gasoline was parked.


Sometimes, Brooklyn Heights is so still and isolated you can forget where you are. And find yourself totally alone in the middle of New York City.
As we're walking toward Willow Street, a large object hurtles into the sidewalk ten feet in front of us, narrowly missing the spiked iron fence running alongside the hotel.
Thunk!
“What the fuck!” Joe screams.


I’m speechless and breathless, but somewhere I sense it’s the sound a watermelon might make thrown to the ground from a very tall ladder.


I look up to the top floors of the hotel, then down at the object.


“A fucking dummy!” I shout, walking closer. I’m starting to grin at our foolishness.  A fucking trick!


“Joe it’s a dummy! These cocksuckers...”


This all happens in milliseconds, my synapses leaping from connection to connection... On Carroll Street we’d make dummies during the World Series, hanging the Yankees or Mets or Dodgers in effigy from telephone wires that zigzagged from one side of the street to the other...the “cocksuckers” are the students from Long Island University who I remember live in a dorm on one of the hotel’s upper floors.


“Motherfuckers!” Joe shouts, pointing up.


There’s nobody there. A window curtain streams in the wind like banner/


I move closer. The dummy is wearing blue pajamas, sitting on its ass, legs stretched toward he curb, head hunched between its knees.


“Assholes,” I flash, “even sprinkling ketchup to make it look real.” Actually, I'm impressed.


Three feet away, I bend down; a tingle of vertigo stirs in my skull. The pajama top has slid up, the pants down, the ass exposed and obscene. The thing has grey hair. So many details! The lower back is split wide horizontally...there’s thick red gore and filaments white tissue splattered everywhere. One foot away, I’m reaching down to touch....


“Vincent, what are you doing!” Joe screams. “It’s a man!”


A man.


A lonely old man living in an SRO hotel who grows despondent at Christmas time and jumps to his death. Of course it’s a man! The holidays are prime time for suicide...Or maybe he was thrown out the window?  Murdered for his few possessions?


Or did he intentionally try to hit us?


“This fucking prick!”


A suicide bomber way ahead of his time? This conversation goes on for two minutes inside my head. I look up. Joe and I are all alone on a dead quiet street with an exploded corpse shielded from the world by a line of parked cars....my car. Finally Joe flags down a passing cab. There’s a fire station, a block or so away, on Middagh Street. As I learn much later, my high school buddy Steve King is on duty there. A lifetime later , King will witness the bodies plummeting from the World Trade Center.


The driver speeds off.


At that moment, bizarre as it sounds, a man in a maroon dressing gown appears at the door of a townhouse across Pineapple Street. He’s holding a steaming cup of coffee, maybe looking to retrieve his Wall Street Journal.


“Is there a problem?” he asks.


“Mister, don’t come over here,” Joe manages.


“How do you mean?” The guy crosses the street.


“Mister....”


He passes in front of my Corvair. Glances down, spills his coffee and throws up.


I hear sirens in the distance.


“Joe, I don’t wanna stay here.”


"Fuck this."


An hour later, we walk back down the street. There’s an idling police car, an ambulance, maybe somebody from the fire station. The dead man is gone. A guy in a cheap suit—the hotel manager-- is bitching to the cops about all the problems and paperwork the old guy is causing him.


A Department of Sanitation street sweeper, an enormous machine with two circular brushes stands by idling, waiting to mount the curb.


“We’re leaving.” Joe calls to the driver and points to our Corvair. He motions me to pull out.


I walk to the driver’s side, unlock the door.


"Jesus."


The hood, passenger side fender and windshield are smeared with clots of blood and soft tissue. It so bad I have to drive across Montague Street with my head out the window. We head for the car wash on Atlantic Avenue. The Corvair looks like it has been driven through an abattoir.


We get to the car wash, no problem.


They wave me right on through!

 

 

Summer on the Gowanus Parts I & II

Carroll Street is 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 Pepe, Freddie Fish, Muzzy, among them, stand 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, hovere, ready to collect the bets, and later, collect the losers. They store 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 trusts the Post Office after Americo Guzzi dropped a cherry bomb down the chute.
Next door, Chitty and Buffalo Manzo, grill sausage on a half-steel drum filled with charcoal, served with peppers and onions on Italian bread from Caputo's bakery, the intoxicating aroma wafting in the air. On the opposite corner, Rosinna serves homemade lemon ice so delicious truckers line up in front of her store for a nickel’s worth scooped into Dixie cup. At night, she lights a naked bulb above the side door of her store and fries 10-cent calzones in a vat of dirty oil while you wait. She's missing the tip of one of her fingers and the “surprise” is to find it in your calzone.
Further along Third toward First Street, clanging, as Victor the blacksmith, biceps bulging in an ancient leather vest, shoes horses belonging to Angioletti and the other fruit peddlers who sing out in Italian on their horse and wagons. ("E rook e' rob" for broccoli rabe)—another smell in the air, another sound adding to the cacophony: A one-eyed rooster who’s lost track of time, struts and crows all day in front of Goldie’s Live Poultry market.
Singsong, girls skip rope, play hopscotch on boxes chalked in pastels on the dirty sidewalk. We shout and curse, pitch pennies in front of John Sanseverino’s candy store, play kings against the wall of the Typhoon Air Conditioning Company, and occasionally, high-pressure, high-stakes stickball (The Goose pits “The Seven Battlers” against squads bankrolled by other wise guys). Games are played Sunday mornings on First Street. It never registers that the ancient brick wall that runs from Third Avenue to Whitwell Place is an artifact of Brooklyn’s first professional baseball stadium, Washington Park. I play outfield. A fly ball over your head and you have to keep running to Prospect Park. Wise guys are sore losers.
Church bells sing out the Angelus, Carvel trucks their maddening jingles. Fat Rosie, Baby Chick and the rest of the maldicenza (“mad-un-guins” to us) sit outside the sweltering apartments, gossiping nonstop and knitting beaded hats like the hens cackling by the guillotine during the French Revolution—never missing a thing.
On Saturday nights, Eddie Pole staggers down Carroll Street drunk, salary spent, his sons, Johnny Boy and Penguin, wife, and succulent daughters, Ginger and Cookie, take turns pulling his hair and pummeling him. One summer, my Uncle Punchy, a jealous guy, rams his candy store’s juke box out onto the sidewalk, sending “In the Still of the Night,” and other doo-wop faves spinning dizzily down toward the canal.
Anthony i-pazzo, Sally i pazzo (pronounced “ou-bots”and meaning crazy) Monduche, "Joe the Toe," Mrs. Mahoney (she curses God), assorted crazies, a dwarf (with an outsized penis) and other defectives—these are our family members—wander aimlessly and harmlessly through the streets
Sweltering, we have no pools, no sprinklers, no garden hoses.. Red Hook pool means risking your life to Puerto Rican gang-bangers who call themselves, Apaches.
We open the Johnny pump next to Monte’s Venetian Room, grab an empty 28 oz. can of Italian tomatoes—top and bottom removed, squat down behind the gushing hydrant hands cupped tightly around the can, and send a powerful spout of water jetting 30-40 feet in the air onto the far sidewalk Instantly, younger kids are in bathing suits, teenage girls wriggling in shorts and suddenly see-through blouses, guys knocked on their asses by the frigid blasts.
We wait, because ultimately, this is who we are, for the convertible Electra 225s and Caddys driven by wise guys in pale blue leisure suits from Court Street coming across the Carroll Street bridge. They slow down to a crawl, pull the cigars from their mouths, shoot warning, then murderous looks at us--and we fuckin’ drown them.
One night, Fat Ernie backs his 4-door '56 Olds right up to a gushing Johnny pump, slides down the rear door's power window. I'm crowded in the back seat with three other guys when a tsunami roars through the open window, knocking me senseless. Instantly, I'm underwater, drowning, panicked, fighting to open the door in a moving car on Union Street in the middle of May, then gushed like garbage onto the street.
The weeks before the Fourth of July 4th are skirmishes leading up to cataclysmic war. School is out; fireworks have begun flowing into the neighborhood from Chinatown (You’d buy a $5 “mat” from “chinks,” or Italians from Little Italy who are likely to mug you on Mott Street before you got to the train station), then by the truckload hauled in from Carolina by wise guys. Each day the explosions are more prolonged and intense—firecrackers give way to cherry bombs, torpedoes, ashcans, M-80s, rockets, helicopters, whistling “nigga-chasers” that race along the sidewalk before exploding.
On July 4th, Honey Christiano and his crew combine all the unsold fireworks into a day-long picnic and explosion fest. In all things, the wise guys are like murderous children. Fun is throwing a braided pack of exploding firecrackers in your face, a powerful ashcan into your car, aiming a blazing Roman candle through your open bedroom window. Of course we follow their lead. By 3 P.M., Carroll Street is ankle deep in exploded fireworks (little boys hunting for unexploded firecrackers, blowing off their fingertips) our ears ringing.
There's more. Nightfall sends barrages of  rockets into the overheated air. Buffalo Manzo takes a sizzling bottle rocket in the eye. Though blinded, he's ready next year. Honey, a master thief, somehow locates high explosive mortars destined for the Coney Island fireworks show. Intended for an offshore barge, Honey shoots off thousands of dollars worth on the corner of Third Avenue and Carroll. Somehow, no one is killed
Another year, he accesses a load of military flareguns—no doubt some poor Marine will come up short—and begins firing the multicolored exploding cartridges on parachutes onto our tarpaper roofs. I think it's great. The first thing I do when I arrive in Georgia in 1979, is buy a ton of legal fireworks. Somehow, it's not the same.

A Slice of Pizza di Grano

Gloria could cook, but she couldn't bake.
Why would she with Cioffi’s just a few blocks past the Gowanus on Union Street? On Carroll Street, everything had to be bigger than life: Cioffi’s was not just a great Neapolitan/Sicilian bakery, it was “the pastry store where Sinatra (`Frank' to us) ordered his cannoli and sfogliatella whenever he was in New York.” On Sunday mornings, if you were willing to stand on line halfway to Columbia Street, you could get a dozen Napoleons, Sfinge, Pasta Ciotte, “With the Cross” Baba au Rhum, Napoleons, and other delights for $3.60. And have change leftover for a small bag of pignoli cookies. As a teen, I had this down to a science. I’d arrive at Cioffi’s on the half-hour when everyone else was in church, and risk damnation for a crunchy ricotta cream cannoli speckled with cintron or chocolate chips
On March 19th, St Joseph’s Day, Cioffi’s turned out fabulous Zeppole di San Giuseppe. My father was a Joe and our scattered relatives were obligated to gift him boxes of zeppoles (fried dough topped with custard. a sour cherry and powdered sugar) from pastry stores all over Brooklyn, which I would devour with glass after glass of cold milk until I threw up.
However, I couldn’t get Pizza di Grano aka Pastiera di Grano, a traditional peasant pie made with sweet ricotta (think Italian cheese cake only denser) flecked with grain, lemon peel and candied citron. These were baked by a handful of neighborhood Italian ladies only at Eastertime. On Sunday morning, one of them—I don’t recall whom—Baby-Doll Stuto, Angie Pepe, Maggie Christiano—would show up after mass and bring ,my mother a pizza di grano wrapped in crinkly aluminum foil as an Easter gift. I don’t know if it was the rarity, the scarcity, or that the friggin’ pie just tasted so good, but I became obsessed with pizza di grano, a problem because Gloria loved sweets and Joey, Tommy and Greg, my three brothers, were gluttons.
Even Cioffi’s fell down. Their pizza di grano looked all right, with a checkerboard of dough strips on top, but tasted “commercial,” as if it had been baked and shoved out on the counter without love or respect. Easters came and went; I hunted pizza di grano in Bensonhurst, on Court Street, in Little Italy; nothing compared with the old ladies’ magical creation. (By the way, what the hell was grano (grain)? Where do you get it in Brooklyn, and what do you do with it? ) I’d heard they kept it in in brown paper bags, but they weren’t talking.
They were always dressed in black, always in mourning for some family member, always doing seasonal things, canning tomatoes over boiling pots in backyards, stringing hot peppers to dry in the sun, making novenas.
Life moved on. By some miracle, I was hired as a Newsweek reporter and worked briefly in London, Boston, New York and ultimately, Atlanta, where there apparently was plenty of grain, but no Italians. Most Easters, I’d fly home to Brooklyn where Gloria somehow saved me a sliver of her pizza di grano.
“Mom, just get me the recipe.” I’d say grumbling and picking at the crumbs.
I worked for Newsweek. I had all power. We had a Rome bureau, an extensive research library, access to Julia Child, the best chefs....
“They won’t give it to me.”
“What?”
“I asked them. They won’t give it to me.”
“Who?”
“Never mind.”
“Mom!”
"It's a secret."
Life went on. In the 1980s, Thomas died of AIDS. My father died of emphysema. Joseph and Gregory descended into the hell of drugging and gambling. The Gowanus was taking its toll of us, as it did every neighborhood family. I was not spared, but the worst, by far the worst, was Gloria’s cancer which you can read about—I still cannot—Losing Mom--on my blog. At Gloria’s funeral, I sat there in front of her open casket trying to figure out how things had gone so terribly wrong, so fast. I was still in my 30s. At one point, an old woman hobbled up to me. I kissed her dry cheek, smelled her old lady perfume. She pressed an envelope into my hand.
“Il Posto (The Mail),” I thought. The traditional offering of money to help defray funeral expenses, a holdover from our immigrant days. I stuffed the envelope into my jacket pocket.
I found it a few days later after Gloria’s funeral. I opened it. It was written in Italian, in tiny script on yellowed paper. It was the recipe for pizza di grano. I read the first few lines, It began: “Under a full moon, soak the grain....”
I’ve never tried to make my own.