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.

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.

The Gypsy King

The Goose stands outside Tony’s Barber’s shop on Third Avenue staring as the ragged caravan bumps to the curb alongside 479 Carroll Street.

“The fuck is this?”

Alongside him, Mikey Romanelli tugs at the beautifully tailored cuff of his suit jacket and looks up. Half-a-dozen dusky women and raggedy children pile out of two sedans onto the sidewalk, the cars a patchwork of rust and unfinished bodywork. The lead car, a bronze ‘65 Cadillac in slightly better condition, sits idling at the curb.

“Spics?” says The Goose, short, squat and as easily ruffled as his avian namesake. “What are they doing in this neighborhood?”

“They ain’t Puerto Ricans,” says Mikey, staring over his bifocals. “They’re Gypsies.”

“Mariuolli.” the Goose grunts, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together. “Them people rob your fucking eyes out. What are they up to now?”

He turns back to the scribbled sheets of paper his numbers runners have hidden in the graffiti-covered U.S. Postal Service mailbox in front of the barber shop. Nobody, not even the mailman, is allowed to use the mailbox, and for spite, the more reckless of my friends throw lighted matchbooks down the chute.

Two women in flowing skirts, necks strung with costume jewels and gold coins, stroll across Third Avenue, oblivious to the baleful stare of Fat Rosie, the neighborhood gossip, the bark of a bleached-haired school crossing guard known to all as “Butchie the Fag,” and the air horns of a tractor-trailer rumbling along the avenue. They walk into Luzeen’s grocery store, ignoring the Italians.

“Look it that shit!” The Goose grumbles. “They leave the little kids standing on the corner. They a gonna get runned over!”

“What are yous animals!” shouts Louie Diamonds, one of the wannabe tough guys who circle The Goose like minnows.

Romanelli frowns. “Guaglione (wise guy)! Mind your business. They ain’t bothering nobody. They gonna get a sandwich or something.”

The driver’s door of the bronze Caddy opens with a groan. The driver, a wiry 30-year-old in orange bellbottoms, flowered shirt and Beatles’ haircut, skips out, opens the back door, and stands back. An old man, bearded and wearing rumpled dress slacks and a wife-beater tee-shirt, steps uncertainly onto the sidewalk. Like the Italians, he wears multiple rings and a thick gold chain and crucifix around his neck.

“Look at this fuckin’ guy,” The Goose mumbles. “King Shit.”

The old gypsy looks around, his gaze taking in the impeccably dressed Romanelli and the half-dozen guys sporting powder blue leisure suits, canary yellow shirt-jacs, black see-through silk shirts, glaring at his ragged entourage. He nods to Romanelli and is joined by a plump bejeweled woman. They stroll regally past the tin garbage cans, through the battered front door of four- story yellow brick apartment building. Half-a-dozen dozen gypsies follow them into the vacant ground floor apartment.

The kids are left on the sidewalk, uncertain as kittens.

“They ain’t gettin’ no sandwiches,” one of the Italians says.

In better days, the apartment had been Dr. Mangano’s office, sitting catty-corner from the neighborhood’s one other professional, attorney Vincent P. Rayola, both dead or fled to Bensonhurst. Two front windows facing Third Ave. have been bricked over with unpainted cinder-blocks, giving the appearance of a prize fighter whose eyes have been battered shut.

The women exit the grocery chewing Luzeen’s greasy15-cent calzones. Third Avenue is wide. They don’t cross until every bite is consumed, then walk into the apartment building.

“Wait a minute," hisses The Goose. His short arms shoot into the air, an ominous plea for justice. For the Goose, life is high drama and he’s always at center stage. "You think they gonna live here? Are yous kidding me?”

Three beefy thugs around him grunt in approval.

I’m standing on the opposite sidewalk watching the opera unfold, drenched in sweat, working on my first car, a piece-of-shit 1963 black Triumph TR-4.  An overlay of fear stirs in my gut as I listen to the chorus around the mailbox:

“They filthy.”

“They got germs.”

 "They get three wives.”

“Be careful they put a fuckin’ curse on you.”

“Fuggedabout it!”

And so, it begins. A tribe of gypsies arrived in Gowanus, a place so tribal a stranger cannot cross the canal without being accosted, where a black man daring to stare from a car stopped at the red light on Carroll Street would be dragged out and beaten, where authority resides in the dark recesses of the Capri Club—50 feet from The Goose’s mailbox office—masked by the sonorous tones of Dean Martin—“Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime”—blaring nonstop on the jukebox.
Law, politics, government, church are distant and unreal. Our pastor, Father Mario, hangs out with gangsters in Monte’s Venetian Room. Brother Masseo molests altar boys in the church basement while old ladies pray the rosary. Cops from the 76^th Precinct collect brown paper bags of money “for the Captain,” and provide free car service to a mad assassin named “Apples” Macintosh.
Yet there are magic circles in this topsy-turvy world. No one would harm “Brownie the Mailman,” who scribbles “Return to Sender” on unwanted mail, or the processed-haired brothers, Freddy and Marty, ace mechanics who run the gas station on Third Street, or the half-dozen black men who work at the John P. Carlson paint factory overlooking the canal. This protection extends to any young woman who passes through the neighborhood, to the longhaired guitarist who lives in the tenement across from Monte’s, an outsized assortment of cripples and mental defectives, each with the crazy tag pazzo (“Ou-botts”) attached to their names, even  to “Drunken Mahoney,” who lives in a tiny stanzina and curses God in a lilting brogue outraging Gloria, my sexy, church-going mom.
Gypsies are outsiders, eternal outsiders. Outside the law, and now within the reach of reckless men.
The Goose sends Sonny the Indian to visits the Fatatos, slumlords who own the gypsy’s tenement. Squat, with a face like Easter Island, Sonny gives the quivering brothers three days to clear them out. Sonny a Mohawk mobster, is not without precedent. Across the Gowanus, Joe Gallo employs Louie the Syrian and a midget wise guy named Armando.
“Don’t make me come back.”
The Gypsies won’t budge. The Fatatos run away.
Like Vietnam, a war of attrition is underway: curses and threats, eggs spattered against windows, then bottles, a busted windshield, punches thrown in the stairwell, a gun pressed to the temple of the old gypsy’s son. Like 'Nam, there isn’t much to threaten. A few sticks of furniture and cardboard boxes, ratty cars and unkempt children. No discernible family units, no rhythms or routines, save for the comings and goings of the young men who drive around Brooklyn doing bodywork out of the backs of their cars oblivious to tickets or the dire implications of parking in the wrong guy’s spot. No grocery shopping or cooking or crossing the street to Johnny the Butcher’s, no parading up and down the block, no dyed red hair piled up like bundles of snakes; only costume jewelry, stale sandwiches, chips and orange sodas, wrappers thrown in the gutter. Feral and unkempt, the kids beg or steal packs of Twinkies and Devil Dogs from John’s Candy store.
After a few weeks, Fat Rosie and Baby Chick, both bruisers, corner two gypsy girls.
“Why yous let the kids roam the streets?”
“What if they get hit by a car?”
“How come they ain’t in school...And they’re filthy!”
“What’s wrong with yous?”
Silence.
“Are yous stupid?:
Silence.
"What, yous don't talk English!”The women dart for the hallway door.“Go get your fucking husbands ya `who-as'!” Rosie bellows."I’ll give them the rest!”
The old man appears in the glass. I've been watching him. He’s treated with great deference: morning coffee is delivered into his hands, which he sips leaning against his Cadillac, but something else is going on... Sweating and haggard, he’s served lunch in the idling car, air-conditioner running. Afternoons, the young gypsies hand him wads of crumpled bills which he counts with trembling hands and shoves in his pocket, his eyes always on The Goose or his crew outside the Capri Club, as if pondering a diplomatic entreaty.
For days, I’ve been trying to unbolt the head from the Triumph’s 4-cylinder engine, a backbreaking, knuckle-busting job for a freshman English major working in the street with cheap tools. I look up, startled. The old Gypsy is standing across from me peering into the engine compartment.
“You don’t have the socket?”
“It broke...I’ve just got one bolt left.”
“Half-an-inch?” he ask squinting.
“Yeah...?”
Hacking phlegm onto the cobblestone street, he walks over to the Cadillac, reaches behind the seat and returns with a socket set. He hands it to me. I notice his shaking hands.“Thanks.”  I glance across Third Avenue, hoping The Goose doesn’t see this.
“Fuck them!” I mumble reaching for the tool I need.“
"No, you should show them respect."
"What? These guys?"
"You’re going to need a puller,” the gypsy says changing the subject.
“A what?”
“To break the gasket from the block. Kappi will show you.”
He walks away.
Saturday morning, Kappi, a guy about my age shows up with the tool. He edges me out of the way, jabbering nonstop in weirdly accented English—actually proper English—about cars and girls and the good pot he can sell me for cheap. Half-an-hour later the head is on the sidewalk ready to be dropped off at the machine shop.
“Make sure they grind the valve seats,” says wiping grease from what look like dress pants.
“Thanks man.”
"Thank my father.”
"Your father?"
“Thagar.”
Thagar?  What is this Beowulf?” I mumble.
“Uh?”
“Never mind. (How right I am.)
“In Romany, Thagar is “King.”
An odd friendship begins.  Another week and the Triumph is back on the road. On fall afternoons, Kappi and I eat salami sandwiches and drink Manhattan Special sodas on the factory stoop across from my house. A couple of times, top down, we drive to Nathan’s in Coney Island for hot dogs and try to pick up the wild Irish sisters—Daedre and Phaedra—sniffers of airplane glue, who hang out on Fourth Avenue and 12^th Street, and climb happily into the two-seater car. He’s a preposterous liar, but an infectious. entertaining one:

“So we’re fixing this fender in Valley Stream...Sunday and we run out of Bondo. Auto parts stores are closed, but we find a German deli and get two pounds of liverwurst. Shit stinks. We slap it on real smooth and then re-spray the fender. Lucky it’s getting dark! When the owner shows up, it looks real good, but his dog comes over and starts licking the wheel! `Oh man!” I’m trying to kick him away. We’d already got paid so we jump in the car and run away.”

“The fuck out of here!” I shout. Every one of his stories has to do with scamming or conning somebody, including me, but when you’re a lonely kid who knows nothing of the world and a guy who might as well be from outer space arrives on your doorstep and tells you stories of kings and schemes, and lives you can only imagine, you feel privileged. Nonetheless, where is he headed?  I sense the clock is ticking.
“Why are you guys still around that stupid apartment?” I ask.
He looks at me, disappointed. “It’s not so bad.”
I glance toward the knot of Italians horsing around outside the Capri Club. “They don’t want you here....Nobody does.
“Is that how you feel?” he asks.
“It’s not up to me,” I say. “You look the wrong way...maybe one of them is drunk or pissed off at his girlfriend...something terrible could happen. They don’t care about the law. Nothing!”
It's not up me either,” he says. “Thaygar decides.”
“He wants to live here? I can’t wait to get away...
“Stubborn. This... happened before.”
Winter is football season. The Goose and his boys are indoors, loan-sharking, taking reckless bets from insolvent gamblers, threatening them when they welch on the astronomical interest (and yet ask for more credit) too busy making money to pay attention to a band of gypsies.
One Saturday in November,  nine-year-old Jo-Jo Manzo, one of those ethereally beautiful  Italian boys who recall Botticelli angels, tugs on my sleeve. He points across Carroll Street street to a pink Spalding ball under a parked car, what we stickball players call a “Spaldini"
“Mister....”“Yeah, Jo-Jo?”
“Cross me the street.”Carroll is narrow but dangerous, parked cars lined up on each side, trucks rumbling up from the docks. I’ve been run over myself.
“Does your mother allow you...?”
If a grown-up …”
“You sure?”
“Cross me the fucking street!!”
I turn my back for a moment, and two minutes later Jo-Jo is rolling on the sidewalk screaming, trying to scratch the eyes out of a gypsy boy clutching the pink ball with both hands.
“I’ll kill you!” Jo-Jo screams. “That’s mines!”
“Fuck!”
A line of cars rushing to make the Third Avenue traffic light, trapps me on the curb. The neighborhood sociopath “Sally Fots,” rushes across Third Avenue, pulls the two kids apart. He smashes the skinny gypsy boy full in the face. The kid crumples, the ball rolls away. In a flash. a gypsy girl bounces off a car fender rushes at Sally, her long nails raking his face, and then another girl is on him, punching and scratching, and another, raking his face with a churchkey...the months of humiliation and shame and rage pouring out...the years...the lifetimes
Kappi and the other gypsy men rush over trying to pull them off  Sally. Too late. Across Third Avenue, the Capri Club emptying out.