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.

Shooting Uncle Otto

Shooting Uncle Otto
In the 1960s, Uncle Otto (“Zio-Tat-to” in our Neapolitan slang) ran a candy store on President Street below Third Avenue. Candy was stale and cigarettes cheap, smuggled tax-free from North Carolina. I was fifteen, a Catholic school boy studying Latin and thinking about girls and college. My friends and I, useful dolts, played cards in Otto’s back room—usually briscola—while Otto took bets from the numbers runners and gamblers—my godfather, “Blubber Head” among them—who hurried in and out.
Bookie joints were like fast food joints in the neighborhood. There were three in a four block radius—Otto’s, the Capri Club on Third and Carroll, run by “The Goose” and Mikey Romanelli, and another on Fifth Avenue and Carroll. More on Court Street, but that was another neighborhood. On weekends, college football games and Aqueduct races blared on Otto’s TV. Eager, soon-to-be fearful gamblers shouted and cursed in English and Italian. We were kids. We’d order oversized hero sandwiches stuffed with Genoa salami, provolone, tomatoes, olive oil and hot peppers on bread still warm from Gallo’s bakery, Manhattan Special coffee sodas which we'd bring into Otto's. We avoided my cousin Mariuchella, who ran a dingy grocery on Third and President who skimped, in favor of my Aunt Lucy Giovanucci who worked in "Farmer Jones' grocery on Carroll. Lucy called her grocery customers “whores, cocksuckers and fuck-faces” as she sliced sandwiches. They loved it. She had red hair and drove a pink ’56 Cadillac. I loved Lucy.
Uncle Otto dressed in a suit every day, well-cut, muted blue or brown. He wore glasses, a white shirt and tie, and never spoke above a whisper, on or off the phone. He might have been an insurance agent. One Saturday, half-a-dozen FBI agents came charging into the candy store. Otto wasn’t around and the feds, to their chagrin, found themselves rousting six teenage boys eating meatball sandwiches. They pushed us around. I felt like I was part of the civil rights movement.
A day came when a guy I didn’t recognize walked into the store, maybe from Court Street or faraway Bensonhurst. He and Uncle Otto talked. Otto looked at us for a moment, nodded to the stranger, and they walked outside onto the sidewalk. The guy seemed nervous, apologetic; Otto phlegmatic. Conversation ended when he pulled out a revolver and shot Otto in the chest. Otto’s glasses flew across the pavement. I saw the red smear of blood slowly spreading across the front of his pure white shirt. There was no coup de grace. The guy fired once and walked away. He had an unpleasant job to do and had done it. No need for heroics.
Another time, I was standing outside the club, when three or four of the worst neighborhood punks—Sally Fots and my cousin “Popeye Anthony,” among them ran frantically up President Street. They were beingchased across the gowanus canal by at least 50 furious black guys—ranging in age from 15 to 50, who streamed out of the Gowanus House projects on Bond and Wyckoff Streets—the same buildings described a generation later by Jonathan Lethem in "Motherless Brooklyn."
One of the blacks, a teenager, was holding a rifle as he ran by. A rifle on a Saturday afternoon with kids skipping rope, and mothers returning from shopping at Spinners on Fifth Ave. He stopped and saw me silhouetted against Otto’s picture window. He raised the gun and aimed. I was five feet away. This took forever. An older black man ran up and slapped the gun out of the kid’s hand, then slapped him. Everything stopped. For the next hour, the wiseguys,heard the grievances of the black men, like a powwow in a Western.
The treat was short-lived. Later that summer I was standing on the corner of Third and Carroll when half-a-dozen Italian kids, maybe 10 or 12 rain skipping and chortling gleefully up the street shouting
"There's a dead nigger in the canal!"
Years later, working as a reporter for Newsweek, I used to visit our “morgue,” where thousands of yellowing newspaper clips were indexed and stored—this was before everything was digitized and put online. I’d read gangster clips to see whom I knew or recognized from the “neighborhood.” One day a story caught my eye: the remains of four murdered wiseguys—appropriately maimed and tortured—were being removed from the cellar of Uncle Otto’s candy store.
Like the dead guys, the feds had simply been at the right place at the wrong time.

Wounds That Will Not Heal

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

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

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

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.

My Father, Myself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                 * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(To be continued)

Gowanus Crossing Memoir Prologue

                                                                    PROLOGUE

A pestilent and stinking Nile, the Gowanus flows through the neighborhood, defiles it with stench and disease and dark secrets. In the decades ahead, many of those who’d grown-up near the stream would be dead or dying of an epidemic of cancers and birth defects long after they’d escaped to the ranch houses and stick-tree suburbs of Long Island and New Jersey; an epidemic veiled by other plagues—violence, AIDS abandonment and addiction—visited on South Brooklyn.
In the 1960s, the canal is poisoned womb … grave … open sewer. These things and more: it is a barrier that keeps the surrounding neighborhoods isolated from the rest of New York City, keeps them insular, with a fierce identity and demarcated borders.
The Gowanus has a history—unknown in the neighborhood--that in other places would be noteworthy. George Washington’s army clashed with the British along its banks. Its tides, rhythmic and regular, impose order on the chaotic lives that cling precariously to its banks. At flood, it carries the faraway scent of ocean; moonlit, a glimmer of primordial beauty.

Gowanus Crossing/A Life Along the Canal Chapter 4

“Mah-ning.”
Chickie Ruggerio’s South Boston vowels grate in his ear.
“It’s ‘Merico. Is Sally up?
“Oh boy, you two jerks have done it this time. Missed school, ruined your clothes, disobeyed the one teacher who’s trying to make something out of yous. The Principal gave me the whole story. Your mother, God love her, is gonna hear about this.”
The tirade finished, Chickie giggles. “Sally told me about Shit-the Pants stinking out the class. The canal must smell sweeter.”
Americo grimaces.
“Fatty laad ass paaked in that tiny desk!”
“Can I please talk to Sally?”
“No! You want to get my poor son in more trouble?"
“It’s important.”
“Everything’s important. Lemme see if the baastid’s up.”
He hears yelling in the background, then two minutes later, a hoarse whisper.
“Yeah?”
“I’m at Freddie’s.”
“Ain’t even 8:00 o’clock!”
“Come on man! I can't sleep!”
A long pause. “Who didja tell?” Sally hisses.
“Nobody. You?
“You gotta be kidding?”
“I’m serious.”
“Aw right, I’ll be in the park in 15 minutes.”
“The paaak? I don’t think so mister!” Chickie shouts in the background. “You’ve got chores to do.”

Americo crosses the sidewalk, then jukes and dodges—Frank Gifford shedding tacklers--through the stream of cars and trucks racing along 4th Avenue. Horns blare.
“Stupid bastid!” a driver shouts.
Americo grins. He’d been run over by a taxi on Flatbush Avenue a year ago trying to get to May’s Department Store on Fulton to buy a sweater for the class Christmas party. Lacerated his knee, busted his front tooth and missed the party. He’d spent the night in a ward in King’s County Hospital and remembered—or dreamed—his distraught father pacing outside the ward all night.
He was reckless. Americo'd throw himself down the concrete and steel steps to the RR subway station on Union Street, hands-free, cheap leather soles slipping, at the very edge of control, a misstep from pulverizing his skull. Late afternoons, he’d cling to the backs of returning Con Edison trucks, feet dangling behind the wheels, fingers inches from the gigantic spools of cable pulling at thier guy wires; jump across rooftops, a whisper away from falling. He couldn’t control himself.
His Keds hit the concrete and steel grating that divides Fourth Avenue into six eastbound and westbound lanes. Fifty feet below, the subway roars sending a blast of fetid air into his face. He races into Third Street Park, ducks through a hole in the fence. He walks across the softball field;  broken glass glitters like diamonds, sneakers dangle from the batting cage, where a junkie nods by the fence near the third base line.
“Oye…Chico…Dame.”
“Fuck you!” He skirts the guy.
He stops, forces himself to walk back.
“Sorry man.” Americo drops a quarter in the guy’s outstretched hand.

A two story fieldstone house divided the park. Softball fields and handball courts on one side, wading pool, swings, monkey bars and a bocce ball court, on the other. Americo knows the building; a farmhouse restored by the WPA during the Depression. Among the dusty books in the basement of the Grand Army Plaza "ibrary, he’d found a reference to the place that dated it to 1699.  A Dutchman,Claes Arentson Vechte, had built a dike system that allowed him to trap water at high tide, then float on a Gowanus tributary, harvest of oysters, row past Red Hook into the harbor and Manhattan beyond.
In August 1776, General George Washington, his Continental Army in parlous danger, detailed the 1st Maryland Regiment to hold the building against General William Howe’s swarming Hessian and Scottish Highlanders. Hold it they did, allowing the ragged Americans to flee across the Gowanus to Brooklyn Heights and then make their way across the fog-draped harbor into Manhattan, averting what might have been the first and final battle of the Revolutionary War—a rout. Americo knew the words Washington uttered as the battle raged:
“What brave fellows I must this day lose.”
Legend had it that soldiers' skeletons lay in a mass grave underneath the Red Devil Paints factory on Third Avenue. For all Americo knew that could be the work of Al Capone who grew up a few blocks away on Garfield Place. In 1960, he watched a group of odd-looking white people--WASPS from the Brooklyn Historical Society--dedicate a bronze bas-relief honoring the Marylanders. A few weeks later, Sonny the Indian tore the plaque from the farmhouse wall and sold it for scrap.
“Indians lived here first. Where’s their fucking plaque? Am I right?”
“Chief!” Honey pleaded, “You gonna bring the FBI on my head.”
“Scalp,” Sonny corrected.
Four mounting pins, long as railroad spikes, were still embedded in the wall. Americo walked over to the wall, grabbed the two top pins, placed his cheek against the cool, discolored stone to listen to history. History smelled of piss.
“Whataya humping the wall?”
Sally stood behind him.
“The Second Sorrowful Mystery,” Americo answers. “The Crucifixion.”
“Wrong again."
“Who gives a shit.”
Sally steps closer. “What happened to your face? You fall down the stais?”
“My father.”
“You  musta deserved it, right?”
“Yeah right.” Americo feels tears spring to his eyes. “Like the baby?”
“What?”
“In the lot.”
“It ain’t a baby.”
“Bullshit!”
“It’s a fe-tus…”
“A what?”
“I talked to my sister Patty. It’s a baby that ain’t been born…taken
out of a girl’s stomach.
“What for?”
“To kill it you moron. Because the girl ain’t married or don’t want it or…"
“That’s murder.”
“No it ain’t,” Sally said uncertainly. “It’s like a business around here.”
“Fuck you saying?”
“Abortion…It stops a girl from being pregnant.”
"Who does?"
"I don't know!"
Americo’s mind races. "They killed him and threw him away like a piece of garbage.”
“You can’t kill it if it ain’t born!”Sally argues.
“It moved.” Americo hesitates. “It was born. Got a soul and ain’t been baptized.”
“I know,” Sally mumbles, surrendering whatever logic he’d amassed. “Don’t get no crazy ideas about calling the cops. Not in this neighborhood. Right?”
“Cops?” Americo sniffs “Those fucks probably in on it.”

He feels the idea grip him. A thing tied to saints and martyrs, to years of catechism and World War II stories in his head. A desire to be courageous and decent. To be, in the words of a song his mother would sing when he was a little boy, a “stout-hearted man.”
After a moment, he says, “We go to the church. We get holy water and shit and we baptize the baby, give it a name and the last rites. Catechism says you can do it when it’s dead. You and me, we bury it. Not right for him to be out there all alone.”
“We can do that,” Sally say softly. He looks at Americo, waiting for another crazy idea.“We don’t tell nobody, right?”
“Right.”
"I mean it!"
Americo is thinking of something that happened years before, a phrase he’d seen typed on his father's union's insurance form.
“Spontaneous abortion.”
He’d looked the words up in the library. He kept the knowledge to himself along with the image of Gloria crying and crying, his aunts snarling at his father. The mumbled apologies and unfulfilled promises. He remembered Aunt Lucy driving him and the twins to Spumoni Gardens for pizza when they weren’t hungry. Part of him died with the baby sister he never knew. Now he promises to find out who killed this baby. Man or woman, cop, gangster or priest. Doesn't matter. Like Gawain and Galahad, he'd found a quest, a fell purpose to which he could dedicate himself.
At 3:00 P.M. Saturday, Sally and Americo walk out of Our Lady of Peace Church, a Coke bottle  filled with holy water dunked out of the font and a test tube of Chrism, (“olive oil and balm blessed by the bishop on Holy Thurday”) a prayer book, Sally, an altar boy, had stolen from the sacristy. The bouquet of wilted flowers Americo borrowed from St. Anthony’s Chapel in the back of the church.
Sister Mary Dermott stops them at the top of the steps. Tall, austere, bloodless, the polar opposite of Malachy who resembles Sgt. Biff O’Reilly on Rin-Tin-Tin. Dermott’s pale blue eyes, magnified by rimless eyeglasses, bore into Americo.
“Have you made your weekly Confession?
“Yes Sister,” Sally lies.
“No Sister,” Americo blurts
Sally gives him a murderous look.
Dermott glances at her watch. “March back in there. Father Masseo is still in the confessional.”
"Jerking off no doubt," Sally thinks.
A minute later, Americo kneels in the dark, overheated booth; it smells of polish and candle-wax.
“Bless me Father for I have sinned. It has been one week since my last Confession. These are my sins I cursed…I had impure thoughts five times. I…”
Americo shuts his mouth. He fidgets, waiting for the priest to pronounce a penance. Father Masseo's sour breath leaks past the violet perfume of Sen-Sen candy. Americo peers at the blurred figure behind the translucent fiberglass screen and feels himself sinking. A sheen of sweat spreads across his forehead.
The priest sits motionless. “Go on my son.”
“I hit my father…”
Silence, then,“A mortal sin The Fourth Commandment: ‘Honor thy Father and thy Mother.’”
“He was hurting my mother.”
Unseen, Masseo stirs, moves forward, interested in lurid gossip among the Italians.
“He kicked her!” Americo’s whisper is strangled.
“There are ways to handle…”
“I want him to die!”
“God forgive you.”
“Me?”
“He gave you life.”
“He killed my baby sister!” Americo shouts. "I remember now!"
Masseo struggles to rise in the cramped confessional. The middle door is halfway open when Sally slams it closed, the noise echoing like a gunshot in the empty church. Sally grabs Americo by his sweatshirt and pushes him toward the back of the church. Half-a-dozen black-clad crones turn to stare at the boys, rosaries dangling from their claws.
“Are you nuts?” Sally whispers “I heard what you said!”
The two run out of the church. Rubbing his left elbow, Masseo lumbers after them trrying to make sure he knew who they were.

Half-an-hour later, Sally and Americo lugging a spade from Honey’s backyard garden scuttles under the metal drums that enclosed the clearing. Neither boy notices Ernie peering at them from the fifth floor window of his building on the far edge of the lot.
"Fucking thieves!” he chortles. “And they didn’t call me!”
 He swallows the last bite of his sandwich, grabs his blue Brooklyn Dodger jacket, stuffs a pack of Twinkies in his pocket and hurries down the stairs, a boulder rumbling down a mountainside.

The child  lay arms outstretched, under the scarlet pillowcase.
Americo drives the shovel into the dirt; the blade glances off a chunk of concrete just below the surface, sending a shock through his funny bone. He moves a foot to the left and tries again. This time the shovel slices sinto the earth. He begins digging.
Sally kneels over the pillowcase, preparing to wrap it around the boy.
“Don’t cover his face,” Americo says. “We need to pour Holy Water on his forehead.”
“Come on!” Sally says.
A smell, sickly and sweet, assaults his nostrils. Sally jerks his head away. Americo drops the shovel, walks over. He kneels down. It takes all his will to lift the pillowcase. He grabs a corner, begin to tuck it under, then realizes he has to lift the thing. It squishes in his hands. Something sour races from his stomach into his throat. He gags, but holds on. Eyes averted, he begins wrapping the cloth, once, twice, around the head and body, till only the blackened face is visible. He’d seen pink-faced babies baptized in church, swaddled in white linen and Italian lace.
Gently, he lays the bundle against one of the barrels, then walks back to the grave. He's down a foot when the shovel clangs against something solid. He kneels and brushes the remaining dirt away with his hand. Concrete. A floor, he realizes, the remnants of some long-demolished shed or shack.
“Shit!”
He bangs away, striking sparks. He'll need a sledgehammer to break through.
“You think it's deep enough?”
Sally looks up. He' s pulling bottles from his knapsack, spreading them on a towel he’d grabbed from a clothesline in one of the yards next to the lot.
“There’s a floor,” Americo says.
He hears something, distinct from the muffled sounds of traffic on Third Avenue. He whirls, listening. An airliner drones overhead, cruciform against the sky.
“It’s deep enough!” pleads Sally. “We’ll cover it with rocks."
Americo puts down the shovel. He walks over, takes a breath, picks up the bundle, lays it in the crook of his left arm. He makes the Sign of the Cross
“O.K. Let’s get going.”
Sally mechanically crosses himself, then drops the missal back on the towel. He knows the words by heart. He steps forward, holding the Coke bottle in his right hand.
“I baptize you,” he hesitates. “Salvatore Vincent. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.”
He pours the water onto the tiny forehead. It runs off, soaking Americo’s forearm, baptizing him in the same flood. Sally’s hand trembles. Together, they sing a line from their favorite hymn
“Come holy night I hear the angels calling.”
“What else?”
“Extreme Unction,” Americo says.
“It’s already dead! I don’t know that prayer.”
“`I sign you with the chrism of salvation....’ Something like that. Then an Our Father…”
“'Merico, I can’t take no more of this!"
Sally is reaching for the oil when a rock clangs against the steel drums above their heads. Both boys scream. A second rock drops like a mortar shell at Americo’s feet. A moment later, they whirl as Ernie comes squeezing  through the tunnel of barrels into the clearing.
“Mamones! What’d yous rob?”
He's laughing, rubbing his right thumb across the tips of his fingers, the sign of thievery. And then he sees what Americo is holding.
“Aggh! The fuck is that?”
He backs away, holding his hands in front of his face.
"A dead baby,” Sally says.“'Merico  found it.”
“Schifosos! Its got germs. Yous’ll get sick!”
Ernie turns and gags, a milky stream of vomit, bits of salami and Twinkies clearly visible, shoot out of his mouth. The smell hits Sally. He drops the oil and begins puking. Americo stands there, the soft bundle in his arms, staring at the sky.
Ten minutes later it's  finished. They hurry out of the lot, turn left on Carroll Street and stop to rest at one of the steel rails on the Carroll Street Bridge. The breeze off the stagnant green water is cool on their faces.
“You know it belongs to somebody,” Ernie says after a moment.
Sally and Americo stare at him. “What do you mean?” Sally asks not wanting an answer.
“Asshole, somebody put it there for a reason.”
“Somebody killed it!” Americo hisses.
“None of your fucking business!” Ernie says. “Yous a gonna get in big trouble.”
“Fuck the cops!”
“I ain’t talking about cops you morons!”
“What trouble?” says Sally, shooting Americo a nervous glance. “Over a little nigger kid?”
“It ain’t a nigger,” says Ernie. “You know it ain’t a nigger!”

Continued