For Vincenzo Coppola on Columbus Day.

My grandfather, Vincenzo Coppola, is long deceased. I’m named for him.
Growing up, I remembered Vincenzo as the guy who cost us our inheritance. Vincenzo was a fruit peddler. His wife, Anna, my grandmother, was a very astute businesswoman. Within 20 years of arriving in New York, she and her sister, known only as LA ZIA, “THE AUNT,” opened a dress shop, a grocery; they owned houses, a small apartment building, and a "palazzo" in Pagani, south of Naples, our hometown.
Anna, died in her forties, before I was born. As the story goes, THE AUNT, homely as a witch in a fairy tale, decided Vincenzo, a handsome, strapping man, should now marry her. He balked and the bad blood flowed across the generations.
After World War II, the Aunt sent Vincenzo to Italy to collect the rent on the property that had been accruing for a decade.
He sailed off and didn’t return for a year.
He arrived back in Brooklyn flat broke. The Aunt, who legally controlled everything, not only stripped Vincenzo, of his portion of the business, but kicked my father and his four sisters out of her will. We wound up living in a $35 a month apartment above a bar.
When The Aunt passed away, her assets went to a distant cousin, MARIUCHELLE who’d been brought over from Italy as a servant.
My whole life, I walked past OUR apartment building cussing my grandfather for blowing my inheritance.
###
In May 1981, I was part of a Newsweek team dispatched to Rome to cover the attempted assassination of John Paul II, the Polish Pope. I was in Italy for month. As it turned out, my Aunt Tessie, my father’s older sister, was visiting Rome as well. Tessie was fluent in Italian and had stayed in contact with our family.
“Why don’t we visit,” I suggested.
That Sunday morning, I rented a car and we drove south 135 miles to PAGANI. We spent an afternoon with our Italian relatives. An amazing experience The eldest of them was a medical doctor who lived with her husband, a French teacher named Aeneas Falcone in an apartment that might have been grand 100 years earlier. A living room wall split by an earthquake went unrepaired. I suspect there wasn't much demand for French in a town whose name translates as 'the Pagans." They showed us an old book with an illustration of our family tree. The branches ended abruptly with my grandparents’ immigration early in the 20th century.
I filled in the blanks.
Of course, there followed the Sunday afternoon feast. The pasta and braciole, sausage, roast chicken and stuffed artichokes, remarkably like the dinners I’d eaten my whole life on Sunday afternoons. These were people of modest means and I’m certain they spent a good part of their weekly budget on this dinner.
I can’t speak Italian, but the emotions that flowed were clear as a crystal stream:

That morning, I didn’t know these folk even existed except as half-remembered names from my childhood. And now we’re embracing and laughing and trying to make each other understood. Word had spread that we were in town. Cousin after cousin, distant relatives, family friends, showed up carrying boxes of pastry, bottles of wine and baskets of fruit.
Remember, I carry Vincenzo Coppola’s name.
At one point, a man in his forties came up and embraced me. He had tears in his eyes. “I was a little boy and I needed an operation," he said as Tessie translated. “And your grandfather paid for it. He saved my life.”
And then a woman told me Vincenzo gave her the money to open a beauty salon. And another whose tuition he’d paid….and another. He literally bought the food that kept these people from starving.
Yes, Vincenzo had spent the Aunt’s money---on good works. On his family, who were far needier than their American counterparts.
I never got to thank Vincenzo.
He died, as many old men in Brooklyn do, of a heart attack while shoveling snow. He was in his eighties. My memory of him remains a big, cranky old man who seemed to enjoy pinching my cheeks until I cried.
But that was not him.
Not at all.

The Persimmon Tree

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

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

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

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

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

“What are you a fucking morphodite?

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

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

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

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

                                                            ***

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

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

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

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

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

I was his namesake.

                                                            ***

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

                                                            ***

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

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

I stand there astonished.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wounds That Will Not Heal Parts I & II

I was 14 when I wrote my first story, “A Battered War Helmet.” I spent days working on it on the scarred kitchen table of our three room apartment, ignoring the squeals of my kid brothers, the blare of the Mouseketeers, praying I’d be spared one of my father’s violent squalls. I wrote in ballpoint, on loose-leaf paper, inspired mostly by a John Wayne movie, Sands of Iwo Jima, that moved me to tears. I handed it in to Sister Mary Malachy and awaited her response.  Then waited some more
At Our Lady of Peace School, Malachy encouraged her pets, Salvatore Mulia, Dominick D’Alessio and Rosalie, Dilorenzo, to attend academically strong Catholic high schools. As for me, she predicted I’d make “headlines.” Not in the scholarly, Wall Street or humanitarian way teachers hope for, but mad-dog criminal, Richard Speck, “Headless Body in Topless Bar”—style headlines from the New York Post and Daily News.  On a street swarming with guys like “Honey” Christiano, Hugh “Apples” McIntosh,  (see http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/03/union-busting-for-mob.html), Carmine “The Snake,” “Andrew Mush”  “Slush,”  “Jimmy the Morgue” “Jerry Half-and-Half” (so handsome he had to be “half” gay); a neighborhood where someone shouted, “There’s a dead nigger floating in the canal!” and two dozen of us rushed down Carroll Street as if a manatee had surfaced, such “headlines” were beyond my reach.
So I studied, hiking up to the public library on 6th Avenue and Eight St. to sit surrounded by goofballs in black framed eyeglasses and the occasional pervert), and try to read. I read all the paperbacks on the rack at the newsstand at Fourth Ave. and Union Street, convinced sci-fi, bodice-rippers and lurid tales of the Mau-Mau rebellion were high art. I read milk containers, match book covers, comic books.
In those days, you were admitted to a Catholic high school by taking the “Cooperative Test,” a kind of 8th grade SAT measuring language, reasoning and math skills. You marked your “top five” school choices on the application, and depending on your scores, you’d be accepted or rejected.  Making three schools was outstanding, four fantastic. No one made five.
I didn’t have much of a fallback. Manual Training (as in manual labor), our neighborhood public high school (since renamed John Jay H.S.), was infested by gangs, a fast track to a career as a garbage man, or denizen of Riker’s Island. In fact, I was a legacy student: JuJu, my cousin Richie’s older brother (http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/04/my-cousin-richie.html ), had famously pushed a piano out the window of the second story music room. 
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.  Over the next weeks, I’d race home for lunch where Gloria, my mom, would invariably serve me and my brothers, Joey and Thomas, pork and beans and fried eggs, sopped up with Gallo’s Italian bread delivered piping hot to our door for 15 cents a loaf.
“Ma, the mailman come?”
“Yes.”
“Any mail?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“Jesus.”
“Mom! It’s important.”
Our mailman was a black guy, nicknamed “Brownie.” He lived within the magic circle of the neighborhood. If you dared mess with Brownie—no one dared—the guys hanging outside the Capri Club would pound you to pulp. Brownie was an exceptional mailman: he managed not to deliver overdue bills, rent, car payments and mortgage notices—marking them “Return to Sender.” At Christmas, he’d reap enormous cash bonuses. One morning, word spread through Our Lady of Peace that the Cooperative Test results were in. I raced home dodging Butchie the Fag, the patrol boy who worked the corner of Third Ave. and Carroll Street, dodging trucks and tractor trailers en route to the Second Ave. piers. 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 letters in her hand. There were five—St. Augustine, Bishop Loughlin, Xaverian, Power Memorial and St. Francis Prep, typed and sealed in starch-white envelopes, the first grown-up mail I’d ever gotten. St. Francis Prep processed strapping Irish boys into Notre Dame football behemoths; Power Memorial had recruited Lew Alcindor, later Kareem Abdul Jabbar; Bishop Loughlin was honing the heart and mind of Rudy Giuliani, the diminutive, hyper-driven son of a one-time Brooklyn criminal; La Salle, a Jesuit military academy in the heart of Manhattan, educated Antonin Scalia. La Salle’s “7th Ave. Subway Commandos” would soon fatten the rolls in Vietnam. St. Augustine pounded the gifted poor into Latin scholars and over achievers.
I mumbled a prayer and tore them open. Five schools.  I’d made all five schools.
I stumbled back outside. Gloria wrapped 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 bragging to all the men in the gang.” I looked down. Tommy and Joey were clinging to my legs. We spun round and round on the sidewalk.
 “Five schools!”
Fat Rosie and Baby Chick lumbered across Carroll Street. The cousins spent their mornings sitting outside crocheting hats; their afternoon’s running numbers. They pounded and kissed me, smearing white lipstick on my cheek. Baby Chick, flowered mu-mu billowing like a sail, took my hand, stuck a $10 bill into my palm. “I’m glad somebody in this neighborhood ain’t a fucking moron!”
I couldn’t eat lunch.  Ernie was standing next to Honey outside Monte’s.
“How did you do?
“I made St. Leonard’s!”
 “Watch them fag priests!” said Honey. “How’d you do?”
“I made…five.” 
“Whoa!”
He peeled two twenties off a roll of bills. He 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. Honey laughed, amused at his own bullshit. He pretend-slapped both of us.
****
A line of students wavered outside the convent on Whitwell Place. Malachy was eating her lunch on the convent’s brick porch, congratulating 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 great.”
Jean Wilcox appeared behind me, smiling.  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.
“He made all five schools!” Ernie blurted.
“Wow!” said Jenny. “Cool!”
 I blushed.
“Give him a kiss!” giggled Ernie.
And she did. She walked right up to me in front of the line of students, put her hand around my neck and pulled me close.
“You’re special,” she whispered.
I had never kissed, never touched a girl, had never known the perfume of an adolescent female. I stood there, experiencing and trying to remember it, at the same time. The freckled Henry twins, Carolyn and Carol Ann, wolf-whistled. Malachy looked up and frowned. I stepped onto the porch Sal Mulia, Rosalie Dilorenzo and Kathleen Victor were standing around like courtiers.
The nun was eating baked fish, boiled potatoes and slices of  a purple-red vegetable I’d never seen before.
“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!” said Ernie.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” said Malachy. “A miracle.”
A short-lived miracle. Ernie would be thrown out of St. Leonard’s a year later for vandalizing a subway car. A 260 lb. leviathan wearing the distinctive green and yellow St. Leonard’s jacket was not hard to finger.
Malachy turned to me. I caught a whiff of her, pissy and sour beneath the starched brown habit, her breath rank with onions and 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.
 I had  a little speech prepared, thanking  Malachy for being my teacher…how she was  “tough but  fair….” I opened my mouth. The nun put down her fork, shot a glance at Jean Wilcox and the Henry wins 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.
“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, began running, daring my ravaged heart to explode in my chest. Block after block I ran, slowing only when I crossed the Third Street Bridge over Gowanus Canal.
By then I was in another neighborhood.
***
Part II
Time passed. I was 14. I still believed in the cascading prayers we recited each morning, “…the forgiveness of sins…the resurrection of the body… life everlasting…” Miracles, martyrs, saints, torment. (I couldn't shake the image--depicted in graphic detail in our Catechisms--of Isaac Jogues, having his fingernails torn off by pagan Mohawks.) I still longed, in the words of the Nelson Eddy song my mother sang to me when I was a little boy, to be a “stout-hearted man.”
Mornings, from my dunce’s seat in the back of the class, I waited for Malachy to appear lugging her brass-buckled black leather schoolbag, eager for the telltale bulge of marked papers. And one morning, it was there. Time crawled… catechism…math…rote vocabulary drills (they’d propel me through the SATs, GREs, into the Ivy League), the rosary and its myriad unfathomable mysteries (http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/05/fly-fishing-on-gowanus-canal-part-i.html). It was nearly lunchtime when Malachy reached into her bag and pulled out the sheaf of papers. I giggled at the chicken pox smear that was somebody else’s essay.
 “I have your personified autobiographies,” she began. (Personified autobiography, a phrase from a world far beyond the Gowanus Canal.
“Some students worked hard and turned 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 what had to be “A” papers:  “Cireno, Cucciaro…. D’Alessio, Dilorenzo…”
Whoa! What about Coppo...
 “Mancuso, Mulia, Victor.”  And then the “B’s” and “C’s: “Di Pippo, Garrison, Henry, Palermo, Perez, Sessa, Wilcox.” I tried an encouraging smilke at Jean; she must have missed it. 
When Malachy got to the donkeys, “…. Bacotti, Benevento, Bashinelli, Paulino, Prosciutto, Romano, Viscardi…” I knew something was dramatically 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
Ernie, who sat next to me by the radiator, grinned, waggled his hand, pinching thumb and forefinger together as if to say, “This American stuff, no problem!”
Then 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.  I’d worked on it for days, rewritten it so many times, I choked up when I read it, always a good sign.
 “Coppola, up here.”
 “Yes Sister!”
I bolted out of my seat, John Wayne charging up Mount Suribachi, all previous injustice forgotten.
She was standing alongside her oak desk, holding my story. The fluorescent light glinting off her rimless glasses rendered 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 cross that knocked me against the blackboard. The billowing sleeves of her brown Franciscan 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 entire class.
"Sister....?"
“This!” she roared to my stunned classmates, “is what happens to plagiarists!”
I didn't even know the word.
 I was 14 when I wrote that first story. I never wrote another until I was 28.
***
Years later, when the world had changed and I was yet to realize how childhood dreams can be both substantial and ephemeral, I encountered Ernie Palmieri in Washington, D.C.
I was a Newsweek reporter, staying at a fancy hotel, working on a story about women Vietnam vets. He was a name on the Wall.  Etched on Panel 13 E, Line 23 of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a helicopter crew chief killed on a rescue mission near Bien Hoa. http://rattler-firebird.org/vietnam/remembered/Ernest-Palmieri.html Ernie was 20 when he died. Today, his death is noted on the Internet for an uncaring world to ignore (even his battle buddies will soon be old men).  And the pain of seeing him this way carries me back yet again to the crucible that was a parochial school classroom. Ernie died on December 8, 1966. Sister Mary Malachy would have noted it was the feast of the Immaculate Conception. Ernie was wrong about the American stuff, another well meaning, innocent kid cast upon the Gowanus Canal's fatal shore.

My Cousin Richie Part III

When Analyze This premiers in 1999, I swear I spot my cousin Richie next to Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal. WTF! I track down his sister, Cousin Carol, in Brooklyn, and she proclaims him “a star!” (The whole family exaggerates.) “Richie got me on the set! Robert De Niro kissed me on the cheek!”
As “Jimmy Boots,” De Niro’s "dese and dose" bodyguard, Richie croaks just 16 lines (“What are you, some kind of moron?” among the most memorable), but like a viral vector, the 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 was parking 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…”  See(http://richardcastellano.tripod.com/interv.html). 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 didn’t. It 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 Esquire 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 citizenry, a scam so outlandish it would wind up a few years later on NPR’s “This American Life.”
(To be continued)

Shooting Uncle Otto

Shooting Uncle Otto
In the 1960s, Uncle Otto (“Zee-Tat-to” in our barbarous Neapolitan slang) ran the 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 the fast food joints of the neighborhood. There were three in a four block radius—Otto’s, the Capri Club on Third and Carroll, run by “The Goose,” and another on Fifth Avenue and Carroll. On weekends, college football games and Aqueduct races blared on Otto’s TV. Desperate, 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. We avoided my cousin Mariuchella, who skimped, in favor of my Aunt Lucy Giovanucci. Lucy had an odd sense of humor: she called her grocery customers “whores, cocksuckers and fuck-faces” as she sliced their sandwiches. She drove a pink ’56 Cadillac. Everyone 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 and walked outside onto the sidewalk. The guy seemed nervous, apologetic; Otto phlegmatic. The 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.
Another time, I was standing outside the club, when three or four of the worst neighborhood punks—my cousin “Popeye Anthony,” among them ran frantically up President Street. They’d been chased across the canal by at least 50 furious blacks—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.
One of the blacks, a teenager, was holding a rifle as he ran by. He stopped and saw me silhouetted against Otto’s picture window.  He raised the gun and aimed. I was five feet away. It took forever. An older black man ran up and slapped the gun out of the kid’s hand.  For the next hour, the mafia heard the grievances of the black men. It was like a powwow in a Western. I saw things that way.
Years later, when I was working as a reporter for Newsweek, I used to visit the “morgue,” where thousands of yellowing newspaper clips were stored—this was before everyone and everything was digitized. For fun, I’d read gangster clips to see whom I knew or recognized from the “old neighborhood.”  One story caught my eye.  The remains of four murder victims—suitably maimed and tortured—were being removed from the cellar of Uncle Otto’s candy store. 
The feds had simply looked in the wrong place.