Summer on the Gowanus Parts I & II

Carroll Street is always teeming, the air thick with humidity and fumes belched from the trucks thundering along Third Avenue from the 29th Street piers. The gamblers, Jerry Pepe, Freddie Fish, Muzzy, among them, stand on the corner shouting, cursing, scratching their balls, arguing the day’s winners at Aqueduct or Belmont. Across the street, in front of the Capri Club, Mikey Romanelli and The Goose, dressed like undertakers in dark suits, hovere, ready to collect the bets, and later, collect the losers. They store the scribbled sheets in the steel blue U.S. Post Office mailbox next to the red fire alarm box on the corner. A safe place since no one trusts the Post Office after Americo Guzzi dropped a cherry bomb down the chute.
Next door, Chitty and Buffalo Manzo, grill sausage on a half-steel drum filled with charcoal, served with peppers and onions on Italian bread from Caputo's bakery, the intoxicating aroma wafting in the air. On the opposite corner, Rosinna serves homemade lemon ice so delicious truckers line up in front of her store for a nickel’s worth scooped into Dixie cup. At night, she lights a naked bulb above the side door of her store and fries 10-cent calzones in a vat of dirty oil while you wait. She's missing the tip of one of her fingers and the “surprise” is to find it in your calzone.
Further along Third toward First Street, clanging, as Victor the blacksmith, biceps bulging in an ancient leather vest, shoes horses belonging to Angioletti and the other fruit peddlers who sing out in Italian on their horse and wagons. ("E rook e' rob" for broccoli rabe)—another smell in the air, another sound adding to the cacophony: A one-eyed rooster who’s lost track of time, struts and crows all day in front of Goldie’s Live Poultry market.
Singsong, girls skip rope, play hopscotch on boxes chalked in pastels on the dirty sidewalk. We shout and curse, pitch pennies in front of John Sanseverino’s candy store, play kings against the wall of the Typhoon Air Conditioning Company, and occasionally, high-pressure, high-stakes stickball (The Goose pits “The Seven Battlers” against squads bankrolled by other wise guys). Games are played Sunday mornings on First Street. It never registers that the ancient brick wall that runs from Third Avenue to Whitwell Place is an artifact of Brooklyn’s first professional baseball stadium, Washington Park. I play outfield. A fly ball over your head and you have to keep running to Prospect Park. Wise guys are sore losers.
Church bells sing out the Angelus, Carvel trucks their maddening jingles. Fat Rosie, Baby Chick and the rest of the maldicenza (“mad-un-guins” to us) sit outside the sweltering apartments, gossiping nonstop and knitting beaded hats like the hens cackling by the guillotine during the French Revolution—never missing a thing.
On Saturday nights, Eddie Pole staggers down Carroll Street drunk, salary spent, his sons, Johnny Boy and Penguin, wife, and succulent daughters, Ginger and Cookie, take turns pulling his hair and pummeling him. One summer, my Uncle Punchy, a jealous guy, rams his candy store’s juke box out onto the sidewalk, sending “In the Still of the Night,” and other doo-wop faves spinning dizzily down toward the canal.
Anthony i-pazzo, Sally i pazzo (pronounced “ou-bots”and meaning crazy) Monduche, "Joe the Toe," Mrs. Mahoney (she curses God), assorted crazies, a dwarf (with an outsized penis) and other defectives—these are our family members—wander aimlessly and harmlessly through the streets
Sweltering, we have no pools, no sprinklers, no garden hoses.. Red Hook pool means risking your life to Puerto Rican gang-bangers who call themselves, Apaches.
We open the Johnny pump next to Monte’s Venetian Room, grab an empty 28 oz. can of Italian tomatoes—top and bottom removed, squat down behind the gushing hydrant hands cupped tightly around the can, and send a powerful spout of water jetting 30-40 feet in the air onto the far sidewalk Instantly, younger kids are in bathing suits, teenage girls wriggling in shorts and suddenly see-through blouses, guys knocked on their asses by the frigid blasts.
We wait, because ultimately, this is who we are, for the convertible Electra 225s and Caddys driven by wise guys in pale blue leisure suits from Court Street coming across the Carroll Street bridge. They slow down to a crawl, pull the cigars from their mouths, shoot warning, then murderous looks at us--and we fuckin’ drown them.
One night, Fat Ernie backs his 4-door '56 Olds right up to a gushing Johnny pump, slides down the rear door's power window. I'm crowded in the back seat with three other guys when a tsunami roars through the open window, knocking me senseless. Instantly, I'm underwater, drowning, panicked, fighting to open the door in a moving car on Union Street in the middle of May, then gushed like garbage onto the street.
The weeks before the Fourth of July 4th are skirmishes leading up to cataclysmic war. School is out; fireworks have begun flowing into the neighborhood from Chinatown (You’d buy a $5 “mat” from “chinks,” or Italians from Little Italy who are likely to mug you on Mott Street before you got to the train station), then by the truckload hauled in from Carolina by wise guys. Each day the explosions are more prolonged and intense—firecrackers give way to cherry bombs, torpedoes, ashcans, M-80s, rockets, helicopters, whistling “nigga-chasers” that race along the sidewalk before exploding.
On July 4th, Honey Christiano and his crew combine all the unsold fireworks into a day-long picnic and explosion fest. In all things, the wise guys are like murderous children. Fun is throwing a braided pack of exploding firecrackers in your face, a powerful ashcan into your car, aiming a blazing Roman candle through your open bedroom window. Of course we follow their lead. By 3 P.M., Carroll Street is ankle deep in exploded fireworks (little boys hunting for unexploded firecrackers, blowing off their fingertips) our ears ringing.
There's more. Nightfall sends barrages of  rockets into the overheated air. Buffalo Manzo takes a sizzling bottle rocket in the eye. Though blinded, he's ready next year. Honey, a master thief, somehow locates high explosive mortars destined for the Coney Island fireworks show. Intended for an offshore barge, Honey shoots off thousands of dollars worth on the corner of Third Avenue and Carroll. Somehow, no one is killed
Another year, he accesses a load of military flareguns—no doubt some poor Marine will come up short—and begins firing the multicolored exploding cartridges on parachutes onto our tarpaper roofs. I think it's great. The first thing I do when I arrive in Georgia in 1979, is buy a ton of legal fireworks. Somehow, it's not the same.

Tony Bennett On The Gowanus

For the last 20 years I've seen Tony Bennett interviewed 100 times about what he has learned, what it all means.  Here's what he taught me: I was 13 standing outside the frosted plate glass widow of Monte's Venetian Room near the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. Word had passed that TONY BENNETT was inside with "tree broads." I don't know who he is--well I would have recognized "I Left My Heart in San Francisco," constantly blasting out of the Capri Club where the wise guys hang out. I wait outside in the cold for two hours and don't know why. Now I do:  I wanted to taste this thing called fame  Finally, the man exits. Fat Ernie, JuJu, Philly Horse Teeth and the younger kids start chanting "Tony! Tony! Tony!" so I do too. He's wearing a beautiful black overcoat and has a giant f...ing nose. The chanting intensifies as his limo pulls up in front of the restaurant. "Tony! Tony!" As the car door opens Tony reaches into his pocket and throws and handful of nickels and dimes on the sidewalk. He ducks into the car, as the kids scramble for the coins. I start to, but stop when I see Tony watching us like  we're a bunch of monkeys. Philly, who would later die homeless and of AIDS, runs up and throws a flying kick at the limo's back fender as it moves off. He slips and falls on his skinny ass in the gutter.

The Gypsy King

The Goose stands outside Tony the Barber’s shop on Third Avenue staring as the ragged caravan bumps to the curb alongside 479 Carroll Street.
“The fuck is this?” he half-shouts.

Alongside him, Mikey Romanelli tugs at the beautifully tailored cuff of his white shirt and looks up. Half-a-dozen dusky women and raggedy children pile out of two sedans onto the sidewalk, the cars a patchwork of rust and unfinished bodywork. The lead car, a bronze ‘65 Cadillac in slightly better condition, stays idling at the curb.
“Spics,” says The Goose, short, squat and as easily ruffled as his avian namesake. “What are they doing in this neighborhood?”
“They ain’t Puerto Ricans,” says Mikey, staring over his bifocals. “Gypsies.”

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

.
Two women in long skirts, their necklaces strung with costume jewels and gold coins, stroll across Third Avenue, oblivious to the stares of Fat Rosie, the eagle-eyed neighborhood gossip, the bleached-haired crossing guard (“Butchie the Fag"), and the air horns of the tractor-trailers rumbling along the avenue. They walk into Luzeen’s grocery store, ignoring the baleful stares of the Italians.
“See that shit! They leave the little kids on the corner?" The Goose says concerned.. "They’re gonna get run over!”
“What are yous animals!” Louie Diamonds pipes up.
Romanelli frowns. “Eh, mind your business. They ain’t bothering nobody.”
The battered driver’s door of the bronze Caddy opens with a groan. The driver, a wiry 30-year-old in bellbottom jeans and flowered shirt, skips out, opens the back door, and stands back. An old man, bearded and wearing rumpled dress slacks and a wife-beater tee-shirt, steps onto the sidewalk. Like the Italians, he wears multiple rings and a thick gold chain and crucifix around his neck. He looks around, his gaze taking in the impeccably dressed Romanelli, and the half-dozen Italians wearing powder blue leisure suits, canary yellow shirt-jacs, black see-through silk shirts staring at his ragged entourage. He nods to Romanelli, and is joined by a plump bejeweled woman. They stroll regally past the tin garbage cans, through the battered front door of three story yellow brick apartment building
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Half-a-dozen dozen gypsies follow them into the vacant ground floor apartment. The kids are still on the sidewalk, uncertain as kittens. In better days, the apartment had been a doctor’s office, sitting catty-corner from the neighborhood’s sole attorney, Vincent P. Mangano, both long dead or fled to Bensonhurst.  A picture window facing Third Ave. has been bricked over with unpainted cinder-blocks, a prize fighter whose eyes have been battered shut.
The women exit the grocery store, eating cheap, white bread sandwiches. Third Avenue is wide; they don’t cross until every bite is consumed, ignoring the stares of the kids
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“Wait a minute," hisses The Goose. " They think they gonna live here? Are you fucking kidding me?”
I’m on the opposite sidewalk watching this unfold, drenched in sweat, compounding and Simonizing my first car, a piece-of-shit  black Triumph TR-4.  A familiar trickle of fear stirs in my gut.
And so, it began. A tribe of gypsies arrived in a place so tribal that a stranger could not cross the Gowanus Canal without being accosted, where young black men daring a glance from a car stopped at the red light on Carroll Street could be dragged out and beaten (the same awaited me if I dared walk three blocks to Degraw St. Park), where life and death authority radiated from the backroom of the Capri Club—50 feet from the mailbox—along with the sonorous tones of Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra.
No one acknowledged government—I can’t recall a single guy from Carroll Street who served in Vietnam—or the church (Father Mario hung out in Monte’s Venetian Room with the gangsters), or the cops from the 76^th Precinct who collected brown paper bags of money and provided free car service to a mad mafia assassin named “Apples” MacIntosh.
Yet, no one would ever think of harming “Brownie,” or the processed-haired brothers, Freddy and Marty, who ran the gas station on Third Street, or the half-dozen black men who worked for years at the paint factory alongside the canal. In the neighborhood, women, a pre-hippie guitarist, the alarming assortment of mental defectives, each with the tag pazzo (crazy) attached to their given names, were protected. They were insiders.
Gypsies were outsiders, eternal outsiders. Outside the law, but now within the grasp of dangerous men.







https://www.google.com/maps/@40.677128,-73.986471,3a,75y,33.8h,99.79t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1smgPYTBogH9EIy4V89GqrcA!2e0!6m1!1e1?hl=en




To be continued

Best of Gowanus Crossing  2012


http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/03/union-busting-for-mob.html

http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/04/my-cousin-richie.html

 http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/05/losing-mom.html

http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/05/lonesome-death-of-louie-fag.html

http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/05/fly-fishing-on-gowanus-canal-part-i.html

http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/08/wounds-that-will-not-heal-parts-i-ii.html

http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/02/garden-of-unearlhly-delights.html

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.