Wounds That Will Not Heal

 "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 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 lumbered across Carroll Street her flowered mu-mu billowing like an Arab dhow. 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.

Dutch Shoes and Dead Babies

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

Fly Fishing on the Gowanus Canal

"In nomine Patris et Filio et Spiritu Sanctus."
"A-men."
Sister Mary Malachy crosses herself as she intones the prayer, thrusts her prognathous jaw forward, an Inquisitor ready to swoop down on the budding apostates in her charge. She tugs at the sleeve of her brown habit, taps the Timex watch on her thick wrist. Across her desk, 35 eighth graders shift to attention, ink-stained fingers reaching for rosaries.
She studies us—ice blue eyes behind rimless glasses half-closed in feigned prayer—alert to every exhalation of breath, every shoe scuff, sigh and stomach rumble. Malachy knows that behind our frayed white shirts and clip-on ties, beneath the pleated skirts and Peter Pan collars, we dream only of stickball and lipstick, of stink bombs, dirty pictures, fireworks, rotten eggs; of Frankie Avalon, Ringalevio and Kick-the-Can. She knows the boys—the Italians--will touch the giggling girls in the darkness of the cloakroom, make them squeal in the crowded stairwells as they march from the schoolyard after lunch.
Malachy wears a wedding band signifying her marriage to Jesus Christ and her renunciation of pleasure. Pain is another matter. She will spare no effort driving us up the slippery slopes of Salvation. This is her purpose, the vocation that had carried her from the bottle green glens of Donegal to this vale of tears, this Golgotha called South Brooklyn.
She nods to a dark-skinned girl in a raveled green sweater in the fourth row, her mouth ripe and red as Original Sin.
"The First Sorrowful Mystery, The Crowning with Thorns," Rosa Perez begins.
"Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name..."
The class murmurs the response, voices echoing down tiled corridors, merging with the morning prayers of other students like the drone of honeybees. The rosary continues, the “Hallowed be’s” and “Holy Ghosts” as dry as the husks of dead insects. In the fifth row, Jean W. inhales—her ripening breasts strain against her blouse—and announces the Second Sorrowful Mystery.
An aisle away, I hunch over my Catechism penciling a dove, the representation of the Holy Ghost, shitting on the head of Pope Pius XII. A feral creature, I sense a predator’s approach. I count heads.
"...Ten...eleven...twelve...shit!"
It’s my turn to proclaim the next mystery.
“The Third Sorrowful Mystery?” I mouth the question, prompting my brain to supply an answer. Nothing.
Ascensions. Assumptions. Redemptions.
Heaven sounds like a cheap furniture store. Mysteries swim in my head. Malachy will have me scrubbing the church basement, the labyrinth where Brother Masseo lurks among the broken statues of martyrs and serpents. Three more Hail Marys ratchet by. I crank my head left, cough, then whisper,
"What's the Third Mystery?"
"Ya mother's box,” Sal Mulia replies.
"Don't fool around!"
"Her canary."
Ernie Benevento snorts, the sound among the murmurs loud as a breaching whale. Malachy's wimpled head rotates. I duck, disappearing, I imagine, like Jonah into the belly of the Leviathan.
"Come on. Please!"
The nun fills the aisle between the rows of bolted-down desks. She advances, seeming to sniff the air. Sal hunches over his beads, a monk lost in divine rapture.
"Hail Mary full of grace...” A drone four seats in front of me.
“Shit!”
I squeeze my Italian rosary. A tiny window in the crucifix reveals a bone chip floating in holy water like a carpenter's level. I clench the holy bone.
"Please Jesus…I'll …" I hesitate “I won't….”
A vision of Jean blossoms in my head, plaid uniform skirt inching up, revealing her coltish thighs. I sigh, steady myself for the charge. Instinctively, my hand rises to the fading purple bruise under my left eye.
In the corner by the whistling radiators, Tommy “Cacasotte” Manzo stirs. The bolts holding his desk to the polished oak floor squeal in protest. Malachy sneers at him, a creature unfazed by Salvation’s promise or Darwin's exigencies; a bag of guts, corruption and decay. Stained tie, frayed white shirt, grey work pants straining against his ass like sausage casing; a mockery of all that is pure, clean, Christ-like.
Father Mario and the Franciscans of Our Lady of Peace Parish count the days until New York State law allows them to discharge “Shit-the-pants” like so much sewage into the gutter.
A round oak pointer materializes in Malachy’s hand.
Tommy’s internal clock is chiming noon. Soon he’ll eat at his mother Margherita’s (pronounced in our  dialect, “Ma-ga-la’s”) Third Avenue diner, waddle home, root into his unmade bed. At 5:30 P.M., the Mouseketeers’ theme will stir him to masturbation. He raises his slobber-streaked face, squints, lolls his tongue at Jean, a willowy German stranded by the ebb tide of emigration out of South Brooklyn.
He lifts his ass and farts. A barrage, a lament from his bowels that derails the Holy Rosary and wreathes the classroom in silence. The fallout stops Malachy as she’s about to pull me from my seat. Rows of students surge forward, surfers riding a wave, coughing, pretend gagging, holding their throats. Shrieking, they sweep past me, past Malachy, out the front door.
The lunch bell clangs. I stand, lock eyes with her.
“The Third Sorrowful Mystery!” I shout slapping Sal’s still bowed head. “The Crowning With Thorns!”
I swivel right, dash forward and out the door. I fly down the metal steps, out the building, dodge Butchie the Fag, the patrol boy, and the thundering trucks on Third Avenue, race down Carroll Street past my house, past Jimmy the Morgue’s idling Buick Electra, past Monte’s and the Crusader Candle Company not stopping until gasping I reach the grey rail of the bridge crossing the Gowanus Canal. I feel the pale sun on my face.
In Monte’s, Sonny the Indian sips brown whiskey, watches me race down the sidewalk, feinting garbage cans, my gangly body struggling to keep up with my brain.
He stares at the long mirror above the bar, lifts his chin. Whose face is it? What purpose the bunched muscles and tendons of the formidable jaw? The questions chase themselves behind his impassive eyes.
After a moment he grunts, “Whiskey.”
Fifteen minutes later, I walk back up Carroll Street.
A month ago, at the Grand Army Plaza Library, a woman with a face like parchment had shown me sketches depicting the Gowanus River in the 1600s, apple trees flourishing along its banks, Gowanus oysters renowned for their size and abundance.
 I’d described these wonders to Ernie and Sal.
"Go fuck yourself!"
Engulfed in the cloud of sautéing garlic and simmering tomatoes emanating from Monte’s Venetian Room, I float above the cobblestone street, imagining green and verdant hills rolling past  what is now Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill, to the Heights above the harbor. 17th Century ships at anchor bobbing in the sunlight at the foot of Wall Street.
Crack!
A slap off the back of my head ends my meditation. Honey and  Fat Ernie, his nephew, are standing in front of Monte's. Holding a thick Cuban cigar, Honey is grinning. Sonny is to his left, Easter Island in a leather trench coat. Shaky stands to his left glaring malevolently at me.
“Daydreaming you mope?” says Honey.
 "What?"
“You hungry? Go inside. Red'll make you a sandwich.”
“No. I’m fasting.”
“It ain’t Lent. Think them cocksucker priests fast? Bullshit.”
“Fasting makes you think better. In India...”
“Sonny’s an Indian. He don’t fast.”
Sonny says nothing.
“What happened to your face? Your father go to work on you again?”
Uncomfortable, I look at Ernie. “You ready?"
“Yous better smarten up,” Honey warns. “Yous ain’t kids no more.”
He waves his cigar, digs into his pocket and pulls out a thick roll. He peels off two $5 bills.
"Get some ice creams. You, bring me the News and the Mirror. Don't forget like last time."
"I won’t. I promise." (I'm rich!)
"That Irish twat still giving yous trouble?"
"She hates us.”
"She hates Vinny ‘cause he's smart.”
"I ain’t smart!"
I tilt my head toward the bridge. We begin inching away.
“Where yous a going?" Honey jerks his finger toward Third Ave. "School’s that way."
"We don't gotta be back till one o'clock."
“Stay away from that fucking canal!" Honey spreads his stubby arms.
"They got water rats this big. All kind a shit. Yous a ’gonna get rabies. Something happens, I'll give you the rest! Stay outta there!"
Shaky walks out of the restaurant, greasy pompadour afloat on his pockmarked face.
"Yo, you got a call. Carmine.”
“The fuck he want now?” Honey groans.
He and Sonny walk into Monte’s leaving Shaky standing there.
Ernie stage whispers. “Looks like a dog shit on his head.”
I giggle.
Shaky turns, shoots me a look. “Homo, whatta you looking at?”
 “Nothing. I ...”
“Jerk-offs, I’ll go to work on both of yous! You, you fat fuck, don’t think your uncle can stop me neither.”
“We’re talking about school,” says Ernie. “Ever hear of it?”
Shaky pulls a wad of bills out of his pants pocket. “School is for jerk-offs.”
Ernie grabs his balls, “Fageddaboutit!
***

We dart between a row of parked cars, then head for the Carroll Street Bridge, a rare and decaying architectural jewel. Twenty yards from the water, it hits you, a wretched blend of raw sewage, chemical spills, oil from sunken barges and abandoned cars, garbage, feces, grease, bloated carcasses of dogs floating in and out on the tide.
In the 1960s, you could drive a car at speed down Carroll Street from Hoyt, accelerate, windows-closed, over the 100 foot-wide waterway—and gag.  Now hipsters dream of sailing yachts and houseboats along its fatal shores.
cut left alongside the John P. Carlson ink factory. On the bank, Sal and Rocco Cucchiaro are already stripping thin, whip-like branches from the sumac trees that somehow thrive on the canal bank. Short and dark-complexioned, Rocco’s mother dresses him like the accountant he'll never be: tweed overcoat, wool pants, polished shoes, white shirt stiff with starch, blue tie held in place by a fake pearl. I pull my rod from the weeds. A McCrory’s five-and-dime reproduction of the ones I see in Field and Stream. (I sense a larger world out there that I want to be part of so I cultivate mail-order hobbies: stamp and coin collections, a rock collection—shards of industrial glass and brick fragments I mistake for quartz and feldspar, bright chemical crystals scavenged from the Golten Marine Company’s abandoned factory near the canal—red plastic rockets powered by compressed air and water, designed for kids in cornfields. A month until they arrive in the mail; one launch and they disappear over the rooftops.) I tie on a sinker and outsized hook. 

"High tide. Fishing’s gonna be good."
"Sunday morning's the best," adds Ernie.
Sal finishes stripping his branch and runs to the 10-foot diameter stone culvert that carries waste from our toilets and sewers directly into the water. (In 2010, the EPA declares the canal a Superfund site. By then, my mom, her three sisters and two of her brothers are dead of cancer. See http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/05/losing-mom.html) He reaches down and begins trolling. Rocco picks a spot alongside a half-sunken barge smeared with oil and grease. Ernie elbows in front of him
"Thanks for helping me…You jerk!” I tell sal
"Swear to God,” he mumbles. “I don’t know the stupid mystery!”
"`Swear to God,’" I mince. "Some friend."
"Screw you."
"Got one!" This from Rocco.
"That’s mines!" says Ernie. “Slippery bastids!"
Rocco hauls an eight-inch condom from the water.
"All right!” Sal says. "Whitefish!"
Putrescent water splashes Rocco’s pants as he manipulates the dripping tube onto a tire.  Nearby, seven fly-buzzed condoms, Tuesday’s catch, shrivel in the sun.
"I got two!" shouts Ernie lifting his branch from the water.
"Your mamma was busy!" Sal shouts.
I watch a dead cat float by in the water; all of us wary of the outsized rats that scamper along the canal’s rotting banks and pylons. For the next ten minutes, we concentrate keen as Robert Redford on a Colorado stream. Finally, I spot a rubber discharged (“released”) from the culvert. I carefully pluck it out of the water. Sal is bent over examining the catch of the day. I circle. Ernie sees me, backs away. I put a finger to my lips, creep closer, closer, and lay the dripping thing on Sal's shoulder.
"Somebody I want you to meet…”
He looks up. Wha…?”
I throw down my fishing rod, dart away.
"Eccch! Sciafuso!" Ernie points.
"What?"
Sal whirls once, twice, a dog chasing its tail. The condom leaves a snail track on his coat. By then, I’m 30-feet away, giggling, running among the piles of concrete slag and bricks heading for a path that winds through a salvage yard and back out onto Carroll Street.
Sal, a track star, throws his raincoat at Rocco. "My mother will kill me!"
I climb a towering mound of garbage, turn and give him the finger. "The First Sorrowful Mystery," I scream, “your fucked-up coat!"
I lose my footing, skitter down the other side. Scramble to my feet, duck behind another pile of trash, accelerate toward a hole in the fence  100 feet away. I trip over a roll of discarded linoleum, almost regain my balance—there’s broken glass, rebar, cinderblocks scattered like a minefield—then fall hard in front of a mountain of blue metal drums piled along the fence.
“Ah!”
Instinctively, I burrow between two barrels.
In the distance, the bells of Our Lady of Peace Church chime the Angelus, then ring the hour, a single note that reverberates in my metal womb like a funeral knell. One o’clock! I crawl deeper, imagining a pirate cave formed by the rusting drums, instantly forgetting about school and rats and packs of feral dogs. I find myself in a small clearing surrounded by drums leaching powdery yellow crystals. I stand up; notice my grease-stained school pants. Ruined.
“Shit!”
A brown paper bag rests against one of the drums. Curious, I walk closer, reach down and pick up it up, disappointed at how light it feels. (Neighborhood junkies who burglarize Cambie’s Trucking and other canal-side companies often hide their swag in the lots that are our fiefdoms. Like Robin Hood, we steal from thieves, expropriating expensive handbags, perfume, shoes, for our mothers. One time, we find a giant Carrier air-conditioning unit still in its packing crate.)

A pillowcase is stuffed inside the bag. I pull it out. Stained a dark, clotty red.
"Jesus!" I fling the bag away with both hands.
The October wind, heavy with salt from the harbor, cuts through my thin jacket. I sniffle, wipe my nose on my sleeve. Acrid smoke—truck tires constantly burning in Smoky Joe’s junkyard next door, chokes the air. I look up, see the sun reflected in the back windows of a tenement; remind myself I’m just 50 yards from our own backyard. Gloria is in the kitchen doing dishes, getting ready for supper. I walk over to the pillow case, step on the edge, and kick. The bloody cloth unravels.
Something flies out.
“Ha!” A dry bark that surprises me.
I step closer. A tiny claw-like hand. Closer. A baby, smaller than a plucked chicken, blackened, smeared with blood and dirt. A naked, dark-haired boy, one arm reaching up to the empty sky.
"Ahhh!"
I turn and duck back through the tunnel of barrels, bile rising in my throat. I’m trying not to gag when Sal leaps onto my back. I fall to the ground gasping, spinning wildly, legs pinwheeling. In a second, he’s kneeling on my chest, forcing my arms back.
"Stop!”
He’s holding a dried condom to rub in my face.
"Please stop!"
"Fucking baby cry.” Sal says relenting. “You ruined my coat…”
We crawl together into the clearing and stand over the thing. I want to pick the child up and cradle it in my forearm. Or tell myself I want to. Sal looks at me like I’m crazy. And I am. I feel the tiny body shudder, but I’m the one trembling.
"He was alive.”
Sal tries to cover it with the pillowcase. Fails.
"We don't say nothing to nobody. Right?” he says.
"I don't know. This is...this is a sin."

A rock clangs against the steel drums. We both scream. A second stone lands at my feet. A moment later, Ernie squeezes into the clearing.
 “Ya two mamones!  What’d yous steal?”
He’s laughing, rubbing his right thumb across the tip of his forefinger, the Neapolitan sign for a thief. And then he sees.
“Aggh! The fuck is that?”
 He backs away, holding his hands in front of his face.
 “We found it.”
 “Sciefusos! It’s got germs. You’ll get sick…”
A stream of vomit, bits of Monte’s pasta and pastry visible, shoot out of Ernie’s mouth.

Ten minutes later, we walk out of the lot, chilled, smeared with grime, two hours late for school. The crazed Malachy no doubt waiting to spell "O-b-e-d-i-e-n-c-e” on my knuckles with a thick oak pointer that whistles as it cut through the air.
Halfway up the block Ernie says:
"You know it belongs to somebody?”
“Whaddya mean?”
“Somebody got rid of it…on purpose.”
“Threw a baby away?”
He looks at us like we’re idiots. “It ain’t a baby.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s a…a fetal. My sister Lucille has these pictures…”
“Of what?”
“A fetal. A baby that ain’t been born…taken out of a girl’s stomach.
“Get out of here!”
“What for?”
“Because the girl ain’t married or don’t want it or…”
“That’s murder.”
Ernie shoots me a furious look. “Don’t say that! It’s like a business…Yous could get us a lot of trouble. I ain’t kidding.”
 “Fuck the cops!”
 “I ain’t talking about cops!”  
“What trouble?” I ask, glancing at Sal. “Over some little nigger baby?”
 “It ain’t a nigger!” Ernie shouts. “Yous know it ain’t a nigger!”
We did know, and I’d like to say it didn’t matter.

 Limbo mattered. (“A place where souls remain that cannot enter heaven.”) Limbo is located on the border of Hell, a working definition of the Gowanus neighborhood. Baptism mattered. Extreme Unction mattered. Justice mattered. 

But as I was to learn, it's easy to lose your way.

Union-busting for the Mob Part II

 7:00 A.M. next morning, Gloria, my mom, fixed me a soft-boiled egg and toast for breakfast. (My first day on a new job.) My father was already on the docks—he’d kill me if he knew I what I was up to. I stuffed something preposterous—Moby Dick or Troilus and Criseyde into my back pocket. A knot of men had gathered in front of Monte’s smoking, sipping coffee from plastic cups. Skinny, wiry, jumpy guys looking either dangerous or stupid. Wannabes from outside the neighborhood, low-level thugs looking to make a day’s pay, settle a gambling debt or impress a wise guy. They flicked their cigarettes and stared at me—walrus mustache and longish hair—suspiciously.
I knew I wouldn’t be unloading cases of pineapple juice. I’d drawn an ethical line in my head about how much criminality I was willing to engage in for $40—though I hadn’t considered how to keep that line in front of me. I’d decided moving truckloads of stolen merchandise around New York City was an acceptable risk.
This was a world before The Godfather, Mean Streets, Donnie Brasco, et.al., exalted organized crime and romantic violence. To me, gangsters seemed great role models: adults who encouraged you to drink, smoke, watch dirty movies, who gave you the keys to their new Caddies and Lincolns, didn’t give a shit if you had a driver’s license, got drunk, gambled, fought, hung out with celebrities, flashed thick wads of money and flashier women. Shot off gigantic firework displays and allowed kids to build enormous bonfires in the middle of the street on Election Day, burning up all the phone lines in the neighborhood, then joined us in throwing eggs at responding firefighters. Our pastor, Father Mario, could often be found in Monte’s or the Capri Club with the bookies; many a time, I’d watched cops from the 76th Precinct on Union St. use patrol cars as taxis to ferry gangsters from Third Avenue to a bookie joint on Fifth and Carroll next to the funeral parlor (now reanimated as Café Moutarde). I’d seen cops walk out of the clubs stuffing brown bags of money into their uniform blouses.
In short, I was either naïve or way ahead of life’s curve.
Forty-five minutes later, McIntosh drove up. The grim, hulking figure from the night before was gone. This Apple was manic, jocular, dressed in a double-breasted blue blazer and a yachting cap with gold braid on the visor. No one questioned this fashion statement.
He circled his finger. Everyone got in their cars.
“Mustache,” he said to me. “Ride with us.”