Fly-Fishing on the Gowanus Canal Part I

"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 looks 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 buttocks 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. He’ll feed at his mother Margherita’s (pronounced in our barbarous 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, no doubt, 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 captain, 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, 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. At the Grand Army Plaza Library, a Protestant 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!" they shouted.
Engulfed in the cloud of sautéing garlic and simmering tomatoes emanating from Monte’s lunchtime rush, 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 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.
“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 either.”
“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!”
(To be continued)

see: http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/05/fly-fishing-on-gowanus-conclusion.html

Union-busting for the Mob (Part IV Conclusion)

An hour later, we left, trucks fully loaded and drove, maybe via the Cross Bronx Expressway—I don’t recall and wouldn’t have recognized it--to a much larger facility, a tan, brick warehouse surrounded by tall chain-link fencing. As we approached, my driver flicked away his cigarette and rolled up his window.
“Make sure it’s locked.”
“What?” 
“The fuckin’ door! That's what!”
I looked up. A much larger picket line, maybe 40 strikers blocked the gate to the warehouse. A couple  were pointing at our truck. Shouting. Someone had alerted them. Two NYPD squad cars were angle- parked, bubble gum machines flashing, against the curb. A beefy red-faced sergeant and a couple of patrol guys were yelling and shoving, trying to restrain a suddenly angry mob.
My guilt was instantly transformed to fear, queasy and visceral. My door wouldn’t lock. The push-button latch mechanism was gone. I stared at the bleak little hole were the button should have been.
“Here!” The driver threw me a length of clothesline.
“Where did he get that?” I thought.
“Tie it!”
To do that, I had to lower the window, which barely cranked, and anchor it to...what? I remembered two knots—square knot and sheet bend—from my Boy Scout days.
“Tie the fucking thing!”
I fumbled around, wrapping the rope around the pillar of the vent window.
“Throw it over here!”
He grabbed for it, pulled it taut, wrapped it around his door handle, all the while driving. Then he pulled a short length of pipe wrapped in electrical tape, seemingly out of the air, laid it across his lap. I had a paperback in my pocket.
At that moment, McIntosh’s car glided in front of us. He got out, casual as a lord, and strolled over to an unmarked police car—I’d completely missed it—parked across from the pickets. A police lieutenant, tall, very Irish-looking—in those days most cops were—got out. In full view of the Puerto Rican and black union men, the two began to chat like old friends, soon laughing and smirking. They stepped out of my line of vision. I didn’t see what happened after that.
Despite the GQ blazer and preposterous yachting cap, or maybe because of it, McIntosh cut a fearsome figure. In Brooklyn terms, he didn’t give a fuck; for the law, for cops, for unions or factory owners, for fashion, for himself (according to press reports he wore a size 52 suit, carried an ice pick, drove himself to the hospital after being shot in the groin, half-strangled rogue mob boss Joey Gallo), and especially not for society. Years later, he died a terrible death, broken and sick in prison. He certainly wouldn’t give a fuck for me, but looking back, I suspect that as a “college boy” from a very rough neighborhood,” I triggered a certain curiosity—think a bug pinned to a piece of Styrofoam, in the man.
How rough was my neighborhood?  Years later, armed with an Ivy League degree and working for Newsweek, I’d stop by at a bar on the corner of Madison and 49th called The Cowboy. Conversation was often dominated by columnist Pete Axthelm (a notorious gambler, now deceased) and a sportswriter named Peter Bonventre. The bartender fawned over them; he ignored me. My buddy, Dave Friendly, and I were usually too stressed out writing what seemed impossibly difficult stories, to care. One day, noticing my name on a credit card, asked, thebored bartender asked where I was from. “Third Avenue and Carroll Street,” I said. “Near Monte’s Venetian Room.” He asked a few questions. I mentioned unmentionable names. From that moment on, whenever I walked in, he’d find a way to announce, “Vince is from the roughest neighborhood in the city I ain’t shitting!” Go figure.

The police lieutenant gave a signal and the unmarked car drove off. The patrol cars left. It was us—the mob—against the union. McIntosh and a couple of his thugs strode up to the gate. Hand in his pocket, he stared hard at the protest leader, said no doubt, something terrible. The man hesitated; his face crumbled; he backed off. The picket line collapsed as we roared through. I remember of all those men, only one, a borracho (“drunk”) had the courage to step forward and curse us in Spanish. His friends dragged him safety
There it was: Jewish factory owners hiring Italian gangsters, using Irish cops, to break the poor. The end of my affair with the mob.
Inside, our truck was offloaded by scabs driving forklifts. As we waited for the rest of them to come through, I sat down by myself on a pile of cardboard and tried to read. I couldn’t focus. When I looked up, McIntosh was standing in front of me. A book was a curious thing.
“Mustache!” he said after a moment, “you like this kind of work, right?”  I had the oddest sensation that my answer mattered to him.
“Yeah. Thank you.”
 He peeled off a wad of bills and handed them to me.  I shoved the money into my pocket. When I checked, it was $200.
“See you tomorrow bright and early,” he chirped and walked away.
Next morning my mother, a fearless woman, walked down Carroll Street to Honey’s house.
“My Vinny is sick,” she said. “He ain’t working today.”

Union-busting for the Mob Part III

Our caravan drove along Third Avenue to Atlantic, turned left past the shit-brown Ex-Lax factory, and the first bloom of yuppie antique shops elbowing the Sahadi Brothers and other venerable Arab trading companies— they perfumed the air with nutmeg, turmeric and cardamom—out of the neighborhood. Past the bleak 10-story Brooklyn House of Detention and onto Cadman Plaza and the Brooklyn Bridge. I sat folded like a ventriloquist dummy in the back seat while McIntosh went giddily on and on about banging cocktail waitresses—I knew one of them—his rapt audience hanging on to every word.
 I had no idea where we were going or what doing but was not willing play Starbuck to this Ahab. We bumped off the FDR near the Willis Avenue Bridge—the crumbled Bronx as alien as Hanoi to me—and into a shabby truck rental operation. McIntosh got out, stretched and pulled a wad of bills from his pants pocket. The three cars behind us nosed into parking spots. A deal for four “straight jobs” (medium-sized trucks) had been arranged; no paper changed hands, no one asked to see my driver’s license. We divided into pairs, driver and helper.
“You, ride with me,” a slight, sallow-faced driver (think John Cazale) ordered, tapping me on the shoulder.
 I figured I’d be doing most of the heavy lifting. I was walking to his truck when another guy, rugged-looking (think James Caan)—and about my size, said, “He’s with me.” The first driver backed off, shooting me a dirty look. I opened the passenger door, its hinges shrieked, and climbed aboard. I tossed my book on the seat. I forget the driver’s name and he never asked mine. (James Caan, whose father was supposedly a bookie in Queens, often showed up on Carroll Street. When a Colombo family capo—whose name I still hesitate to mention—built a Venetian-style townhouse for his mother next to my parents’ house, Caan gifted him with an enormous brass lion’s head knocker, which, I suspect, is still there.)
Twenty minutes later, we were rumbling behind McIntosh’s big sedan, bumping up, down and across Bruckner Boulevard, the Grand Concourse, Morris Avenue, lost. It was 11:00 A.M. on a day that threatened to go on forever. Many pay phone calls later, we pulled up at our destination, a manufacturer of metal office furniture. I relaxed. I could muscle desks and chairs. Through the truck’s grimy windshield, I noticed a crowd of Puerto Rican men and women milling in front of the factory. To me, New York City was an overlay of races and ethnicities, most of them alien.
It was a picket line.
My father was a laborer, a member of the International Longshoremen’s Association; a diehard union guy who'd spent 35 years in the rat-infested holds of ships so I could attend college.
McIntosh got out. The union pickets with their sad cardboard placards looked at him nervously. Ignoring them, he swaggered up to a white guy wearing a shirt and tie, one of the factory owners. A discussion ensued. The terms of the deal were changing.The white guy, clearly nervous, handed a roll of bills to McIntosh, who counted it and stuffed the money into his pocket. He nodded, and the retractable steel gates of the shipping dock shrieked to life.
Doffing his yachting cap, McIntosh strolled up to my driver’s door.
“Fuck these Jews!” he said.
I reached for the door handle.
“What do you need me to do?” I asked my driver.
“You don’t do nothing. They do it!”
One by one, the forklifts came out and loaded our trucks.
I could not bear to look at the men on the picket line.
(to be continued)