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

The Lonesome Death of Louie the Fag

 The car exploded, tires squealing, off the light at 6th Street and Third Avenue, racing parallel to the Gowanus Canal, flying over the bridge and past the light at Third Street, already accelerating past 50 mph. Most likely a supercar, a 396 Chevelle SS or Pontiac GTO—color and model blurred by velocity and the deafening roar of wide-open headers echoing off factory walls.

The driver, most likely escaped from the grimy Puerto Rican tenements on the far side of Hamilton Avenue, and doubtless animated—as I was—by poverty and rage and otherness, was racing toward the Williamsburg Bank, a phallic 37-story tombstone that loomed over South Brooklyn, its clock ticking our lives away. Approaching  Carroll Street, he would have been oblivious to the teeming sidewalks and crowded street corners shimmering in the heat, the little girls skipping rope on the cracked sidewalks. Certainly unaware of Louie the Fag who’d climbed wearily up the steps of the Union Street subway station, shrugged into a thin, black cotton jacket, and was walking along Fourth Avenue to President Street.

In the 1960s, ours was a community still trailing roots and tendrils plucked from the desolate triangle of crumbling villages southwest of Naples and deposited like weeds along the Gowanus’s pestilent banks: Nocera, Tramonti, Scafati, Pagani,  Eboli, a place so forlorn, legend has it, that Christ the Redeemer was stopped in his tracks.
Castellammare di Stabia was Al Capone’s ancestral home, but Capone, despite the Chicago pedigree, was born in Brooklyn, at 38 Garfield Place, two blocks from my house. For some reason I was very proud of this fact. And the bullet holes in the doorway of a long-shuttered bar on 4th Avenue where Frank ("Frankie Shots") Abbatemarco was...shot.
My Coppola and Falcone grandparents immigrated from Pagani; Al Pagano ran the local hardware store, keeping nails in wooden barrels sold by the pennyweight. Thirty first cousins lived within three blocks of my house. The Giordanos, my mother’s family, served Sunday dinner—spaghetti, meatballs, sausage, braciole, veal Parmigiana, the whole red sauce parade—on a long table on the sidewalk at the corner of Nevins and Carroll. I could practically ask the driver of an idling car to pass me some meatballs. Homemade wine, sweetened with peaches, was provided courtesy of old man Stuto for $3.00 a gallon.
After half-a-century in Brooklyn, the old extended families—Russo, Persico, Giordano, Lauro, Stuto, Barbella, Montemarano, Manzo, were so intertwined and intermarried as to be indistinguishable, a community bound by blood, ethnicity organized crime and distrust of anyone—priest, policeman, politician—beyond the canal banks, a magic circle, often irrational and ultraviolent, but tender and intensely protective of its own. Three certifiable psychotics, and two horribly inbred brothers—literally creatures from the canal’s black lagoon—wandered the streets with the suffix “-pazzo” (crazy) pinned like donkey’s tails, to their names. “Dent in the Head,” was another, cruel, by today’s standards, but a hilarious descriptor in dialect Italian. Mrs. Mahoney, my grandfather’s tenant, outraged the black-clad widows making Tuesday novenas at Our Lady of Peace Church by regularly“ cursing God” in her drunken brogue. Another woman heard the tap-tap-tapping of “niggers on the roof.” A Native American (“Sonny the Indian Boy” what else?) with a brooding, obsidian stare longed to be part of the Colombo crime family. He hurt his chances by getting drunk on Saturday nights and wrecking their Capri Club headquarters, then was idolized for enduring three days of torture by Joe Gallo’s rival faction. No one thought of institutionalizing them. These were our crazies: sons, daughters, brothers, mothers; woven, however dysfunctional, into the fabric of our daily lives. Psychiatrically speaking we were ahead of the curve.
 Louie the Fag was 10 years older than I and wore his salt and pepper hair cut short, Caesar-style. I sported a greasy pompadour. Louie worked a dead-end job in a department store on Fulton Street. He was gay, though the word didn’t yet exist. Not swishy, not a “fairy” as defined in those days. Two drag queens, Sarah and Sally, lisping and predatory hairdressers filled that bill. Another neighbor, “Butchie the Fag,” was captain of the patrol boys at Our Lady of Peace Elementary School. He had a flaming red streak in his hair. When I insulted him, Butchie beat the shit out of me in front of the Capri Club, in full view of half-a-dozen laughing wise guys. 
Louie was teased—who wasn’t?—not tormented. I read books so I was “Vinny the Boob.” A sociopath gangbanger from Fifth Avenue was “Vinny the Loon.” "Jimmy the Morgue" who worked the night shift at Kings County Hospital was an alleged necrophiliac. “Apples” McIntosh chopped people up.) Louie ate hero sandwiches with us in Otto’s candy store (See “Shooting Uncle Otto.”), played pinochle, brisk (briscola) and gin rummy with the guys, drove with us to Coney Island on summer nights for Nathan’s hot dogs. I never caught a sexual vibe from him, though I was certainly not privy to the inner man. He lived with his mother, had nieces and nephews, was Jerry Castaldo’s, (aka “Alibi Ike”) best friend (My Cousin Richie’s older brother). Louie was from the neighborhood. That, more than sexual orientation, defined him. It sounds naïve, but Louie was liberated long before the 1969 Stonewall riots, and dwelt, however uncomfortably, inside the magic circle.

 The machine, thundering past First Street was now something monstrous, a reanimated thing from a Stephen King novel, over-revving engine snarling, exhaust thundering, front end leaping as the driver, hunched over the metalflake steering wheel, shifted into fourth gear. Buffalo Manzo, grilling Italian sausages on a steel drum cut in half with a torch, would have looked up as the wave of sound engulfed him. Dean Martin blasting from the juke box on the sidewalk outside the Capri Club was drowned out. The gamblers gathered around a parked car, strained to hear the results from Aqueduct. On Carroll Street, the light in front of Tony’s Barber Shop gleamed green. By then, Louie would have reached Romanelli’s Funeral Home at the corner of President and Third Avenue. He might have glanced at the newly installed stop light at the intersection.

I said I sounded “naïve,” talking about tolerance in such a macho culture. But I’m not. My younger brother Thomas, handsome as a movie star, dreamed of being an actor. (To this day, his photograph stops young women in their tracks when they visit my house.) Gay, he contracted AIDS in 1982, manifested as Kaposis Sarcoma, a terribly disfiguring and invasive skin cancer. He returned to Carroll Street to die. He was only 28. My mother fed and bathed and comforted him for a year; my father, a tough dockworker, drove him to Sloan-Kettering Memorial Hospital three times a week for an alpha interferon infusion. When love and prayer could not sustain him, he had to be moved from Carroll Street to the Mother Cabrini Hospice on East 19th Street in Manhattan. I remember it was the morning the Vietnam Memorial was dedicated in lower Manhattan. I remember Thomas a week from a terrible death, telling me to make sure to give the EMTs a great tip. I remember buying his grave while he still lived.
As we waited for that final ambulance, my mother, Gloria, noticed a dozen neighborhood women, gathered outside our house.
“Those bitches,” she hissed, “won’t even let my son die in peace.”
 I, too, grew up on Carroll Street. My father was helpless crippled by emphysema. I bolted out the front door to fucking pound these women to a pulp. When I reached the sidewalk, there they were—Phyllis Hubela, Josie and Rosie Stuto, Millie Pepe, Margaret Barbella, Carmella Persico, half a dozen others.
All of them sobbing.
All of them rushing to embrace me.

In 2012, on a Sunday morning, you might spot a solitary helmeted biker wending his way from Carroll Gardens, across the 125-year old Carroll Street Bridge (operated by a complex pulley and rail mechanism, the oldest functioning “retractile” bridge in the U.S.) up a deserted Carroll Street, past Monte’s Venetian Room and Our Lady of Peace Church (my father’s among the names inscribed on the parish’s World War II Memorial), across Fourth Avenue and up the hill into Park Slope.
 In the 1970s, however, the neighborhood was teeming. On Sunday mornings, the smell of simmering tomato sauce wafting from every house; women—my mother Gloria first and foremost in her high heels and tight dresses—and school kids glumly making their way to church where attendance was taken by a brutal Franciscan nun who called herself Sister Mary Malachy. On Easter mornings, dozens of potted lilies miraculously appeared on the sidewalk in front of the Capri Club, to be purchased and carried to the Green-Wood or Holy Cross cemeteries. For me, the line between the living and the dead was always thin as gossamer. My grandmother, Anna Coppola, existed only as a name on a tombstone.  I would meet her decades later when I taught at the high school my father dropped out of, her spidery signature buried in a long-forgotten file in the basement of Automotive High School on Bedford Avenue. In the records, Italians were not listed as “White.”

When Louie reached the corner of President and Third that fatal Saturday afternoon, I was halfway down President leaning against a car outside Otto’s Candy Store joking with my friend Peter Lauro and the guys (see http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/03/shooting-uncle-otto.html). My three brothers were no doubt scattered in the schoolyards and empty lots canalside that were our playgrounds. Gloria would have finished her grocery shopping at Spinner’s supermarket on “the Avenue.” That was Fifth Avenue before the stretch between Flatbush and Third Street came to resemble Dresden 1945. (The street has come back yet again, now bustling with hipsters, wine bars and upscale trattorias like Al Di La.

My father, a longshoreman like most neighborhood men, was working late at the Black Diamond Lines pier in Red Hook. Women, young and old, were sitting outside their houses on vinyl and chrome kitchen chairs, some rocking baby carriages, others knitting the sequined hats commissioned by an enterprising wholesaler named Jennie Pentangelo from Nevins Street. Teenage girls—corpse-white lipstick was the style and it drove me wild—were sitting in halters and tight shorts on the stoops, listening to AM radio and discussing boys other than me. Younger boys, darting in and out between parked cars, teasing and punching and yelling idiotic shit.
Unlike the sepulchral streets above 6th Avenue, noise a was constant on Third Ave: bellowing tractor-trailers making their way to Atlantic Avenue from the piers; the B-37 bus, all squealing brakes and diesel fumes, often with fatalistic Puerto Rican kids hitching on the back bumpers, clinging by their fingernails, exhaust fumes blowing in their faces; the Four Seasons shrieking “Rag Doll” from Johnny Di Mucci’s yellow Electra 225 convertible; black gangbangers with do-rags and lye-based straighteners plastering their heads blasting soul music from eggplant-colored Caddies; the singsong Italian of Angioletti the fruit peddler; Con Edison trucks hauling groaning spools of cable (chopped my cousin Juju’s fingers right off when he hitched a ride); the loudmouths and “handicappers” on the corners shouting and cursing over losing bets, trying to avoid the all-seeing eye of the bookie we called “the Goose.”

The driver was doing at least 100 mph when he passed the Glory Social Club, roughly 150 feet-per-second. If the light on President Street had blinked red he didn’t see it, couldn’t react, or jammed the gas petal to the floor and ran right fucking through it. At that instant, Louie had one second to live. I imagine him stepping off the curb, maybe spotting his mom walking up President Street, the hint of a smile forming on his lips. Parked cars blinding him to approaching Death.
Perhaps he was thinking of nothing at all.

Half-a-block away I heard thunder echoing off the cars lined bumper-to-bumper along Third Ave, a roar, a snarl and then a sickening sound like no other (Years later, when an old man in pajamas jumped out the 20th floor window of a Brooklyn Heights hotel and landed 10 feet in front of me, someone described the impact as "a watermelon thrown off a tall ladder onto a marble slab"). I whirled toward the sound—we all did—and saw a figure soaring, soaring over the arm of the light pole as cleanly as a kicked field goal. But for that sound, it could have been a straw man, old jeans and a stuffed shirt made during the World Series and hung from lampposts to deride the Yankees.
The car never even slowed, it blew past Union Street and was gone. When I reached to the corner, 20 people were already gathered in a wobbly circle, and more coming. The body was slumped face-down. A viscous corona leaking around the skull, black chinos half-pulled down from the impact, the obscenity of death. A minute went by, seemed like an hour; no one dared approach the lonely lifeless thing on the asphalt. No one wanted to claim it for their own. Then women began shrieking out names.
“Richie…”
 “Oh Jesus, it’s Louie!”
  I stepped closer. Closer still. My dear friend Peter Lauro, who’d die way too young himself, seized my arm in his iron grip. His face was all wrong.
 “Come on,” he said, “let’s get the fuck out of here.”
 “Peter….”
 I couldn’t finish. Thick salt and pepper hair…black cotton jacket…the scuffed work shoes, the blood. My father. I pulled away, ran the short block to Carroll Street, turned right, heart pounding, dodged cars, burst through our unlocked door—the ribbon of Christmas bells that served as our doorbell jangling.
“Mom?” 
No answer.
“Mom!”
She was gone. I jerked open the closet door and began tearing through coats and jackets and blouses. My father’s black jacket was missing. Shouting, I ran in and out of neighbors’ houses, up and down creaking staircases. No answer, no Gloria, no one home.
 Sobbing, I walked slowly back to President Street. I had to keep my brothers away. A siren wailed in the distance. I burst through the magic circle, now a bulwark against the outside world. It was deathly quiet.
Louie’s mother was kneeling by his side. Attempting to shield him, she turned his head.

Losing Mom

Looking back, it seems I'd waited my whole life for the call. It came late in the night, the Friday after Thanksgiving, my brother Greg telling me our mother had been rushed by ambulance to Brooklyn's Methodist Hospital in terrible pain. The "backache" she'd barely mentioned when I’d called on Thanksgiving Day would turn out to be an enormous tumor mass--squamous cell carcinoma--that had invaded her lungs and swollen her liver three times it normal size.
The call came three days after my 43rd birthday. Like so many other baby boomers, I was living a life vastly different from my parents; living it far from the blue collar enclave in Brooklyn where I'd grown up. Twelve years earlier, my job had carried me to Atlanta, a way station I'd imagined, on the way to the top; like so many others I stayed and stayed. My children, years of friendship and struggle were here. My brothers, my childhood friends, the house I'd grown up in, the streets I'd roamed, were 1000 miles away and fading, becoming stratified under layers of more recent experience. I'd noticed my memories had begun to outnumber my real-life interactions "back home."
Gloria had turned 66 a few weeks earlier. Since adolescence, I'd been telling myself how lucky I was to have young parents, how I wouldn't have to worry about losing them until my own mortality had begun to weigh upon me, until the needs of my children forced me to relinquish any enduring claim to childhood.
Those illusions were shattered in my mid-30s when emphysema debilitated my father, quickly transforming a man whose life had been marked by hard work and self-reliance into a frightened, helpless child. My father's illness set into motion that cycle of dread and responsibility we must all pass through when our parents become too old, too poor, or to sick to care for themselves. In my case, the struggle, though searing, would end early. For tens of millions of my generation with careers and families of their own, it is fully underway--an enduring burden that will affect every aspect of their lives.
There is much irony in the Me Generation having to slow down. Much irony and so little time. The years draw quickly upon us; the oldest among us with grandchildren grown. The parents many of us rebelled so fiercely against have become our dependents, threats to our vaunted freedom only in the demands they make. If they loved and cherished us, we are about to learn that requiting their love, no matter how deep our devotion, can be painful and demanding; a task that can stretch a childhood's length in fact. If our childhood memories are unhappy and escape-driven, we may again find ourselves trapped and bitter. Too many of our parents have nowhere else to turn; the responsibility is ours.
We've held Death at arms' length. We imagine a sterile process occurring in white rooms behind closed doors to other people. Now that it has begun to stalk our parents, we will become intimate with death and dying. And well we should. Death is edging closer to us. As if awakening from childhood's untroubled sleep, we hear the whispers of our friends and peers--whispers only until we are affected--the coworker's father with Alzheimer's disease...another whose father developed and died of cancer in the span of a few weeks...yet another raising the issue old folks so often dread, institutionalization...the realization that strikes a neighbor after her commute back home to Virginia, that roles have somehow been reversed: her parents need more and more support; they are losing their ability to play Mama and Daddy for her. "It's the hardest thing in the world," she says, "and it happened so quickly."
I was the eldest son in what had been a poor family. I was well-educated. Through my 30s, like millions of other baby boomers, I'd steadily climbed the career ladder, started a family of my own, bought into the notion that my generation was unique and special in history. Then divorce, and a series of reversals had abruptly knocked away 15 years of stability. In what is now a familiar pattern, I found myself at least spiritually returning to the nest...turning to Mom and Dad for comfort and support. In varying degrees, my three brothers did the same.  I'd always considered myself responsible for my parents' well-being, still bound by traditions that that in one generation seemed to have gone from being the right thing, the expected thing, the American way if you will, to some impractical folkway practiced only by recently arrived immigrants.
Looking back, I realize I'd taken absolutely no concrete steps to support these notions. Like so many of my generation, I had avoided talking with them about any possibility of planning for their aging. My parents were still young, and I was full of myself. I imagined my life full of drama and tempestuousness. Living it was a full-time job. My parents accepted that. They were of a generation that lived through their children. They'd had four sons to keep them busy. They'd never left the street they were born on and never cared to. The likelihood of either or both of them moving to Atlanta in a crisis was nil. In neither of my unhappy marriages would there have been a place for my folks. Among  Italian-Americans, extended families are still viable; a nursing home would have been out of the question.
When things began to go wrong--for example, my father, in taking early retirement, had neglected to check off a clause that would continue pension payments to my mother in the event of his death--I could offer little more than concern and guilt. My feelings were real, but they wouldn't have put food on the table.
Death had come early in our extended family. Aunt Dolly, my mother's elder sister, died of breast cancer in her early forties. Aunt Marguerite, a younger sister, succumbed to cancer in her 50s. "Not three," I'd told myself.  "Three sisters couldn't get cancer." I was younger then. Later, shadowed by the ironies and disappointments that mark our passage into adulthood, I knew the clock was ticking for Gloria.
Death came closer in 1982. My 28-year-old brother, Thomas, a struggling actor living in Greenwich Village, developed Kaposi's sarcoma, a skin cancer that signaled the onset of a disease that would become all too common, AIDS. Thomas returned home to die with his family. Gloria tried to save him with home cooking, prayer and a mother's love. Every day for a year, my father, Joe, bucked Manhattan traffic in his old Cadillac, a raging bull on a mercy mission: getting his son to Sloan Kettering Memorial Hospital for treatment. They barely spoke, the issues were way too complicated, but one morning I found my father in the backyard shaking his fists at the heavens.
"Why him?” he demanded. Why him!"
Thomas died in the spring of 1985. I remember cherry blossoms and dogwood petals floating in the bright sunlight as we passed into Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery. I was forced to purchase his grave while he still lived.
That year, my father's chronic shortness of breath--the result of his smoking unfiltered cigarettes for 40 years--developed into full-blown emphysema. He grew afraid, a man who had seemed to thrive on shouting and turmoil, who as a foreman "down the piers" had terrorized deckhands and longshoremen with his furious temper and work ethic. At his funeral, half-a-dozen, gruff, gnarled men, old beyond their years, came up to me and said, "Your father worked like an animal!" It was the highest compliment they knew.
My father died over the telephone. My part played out in a series of long distance calls. It took five years and as many hospitalizations. I was in Atlanta those years, trying to put Thomas's death, the ruins of my first marriage, and a financially devastating career change behind me. I called often, trying to get him to let go of the oxygen bottles, the cigarettes and the sofa that defined his world.
At the time, I was married with two children, a demanding job, mounting bills. I lived far away. He had two other sons nearby. I constantly reminded myself of these things; it kept the guilt for the nightmare I knew was unfolding in Brooklyn at bay.
At age 64, my father couldn't walk 10 feet to the bathroom. He'd urinate into a milk carton. Gasping for air, he kept the windows wide open on January nights while my mother shivered upstairs. At the same age, his father, my grandfather, had sat proudly at the head of a long table, surrounded by doting children and grandchildren. My great grandfather had lived at home well into his 90s.
Too many nights I knew my father had only the white noise of the television for company. Too many nights, his needs left my mother and brothers angry and exhausted. When I called, he would whimper, "I'm scared." He was a wonderful cook; sometimes, to distract him, I'd ask for one of his recipes, always endlessly complicated and detailed. He'd hand the phone to my mother. Once when I'd gone too far, he moaned a desperate, "Please!" After that, it became easier when he didn't feel like talking.
March 6 was a special day. My wife, an actress, had landed a television commercial. She seemed happy. (A month later, she would pack up and leave; our marriage over.) We picked up the kids and headed home to make dinner. The answering machine's red light was flashing angrily, five...six messages.
"Vincent, this is your brother Joseph. Daddy just died."
Again and again, each time the voice choked with panic.
"Vincent, Daddy just died. Please call! Vincent, please! Vincent, Daddy's dead. He's lying on the floor!"
Thanksgiving marked the third time my mother's cancer had recurred in three years, despite all assurances that the massive neck surgeries and larynx reconstruction she'd endured had been successful. "No evidence of tumor," the lab reports had read, but each time renegade clusters of epithelial cells had escaped detection. The four months she'd spent recuperating in the crowded wards of Mount Sinai Hospital and her permanent inability to drink liquids or swallow most solid foods (we'd sit silent and helpless at the dinner table watching her gasp and choke as fluid flowed into her lungs) were a terrible price, but--we told ourselves--she could speak and she would live.
Twice before, my response had been optimistic and aggressive--read the literature, roust the experts, get second and third opinions, find the best hospital, the latest treatment, listen to the anecdotes of miraculous turnabouts everyone seems to volunteer. This time, the machinery of hope shut down. I could neither think nor act. I made one call, to Dr. Sanford Matthews, my kids' pediatrician. I wanted medical advice; Sandy tried to comfort me. Then came a telephone conversation with my mother.
"I can't understand what's happening," her voice a morphine haze. "I went shopping last Wednesday. I was fine. I walked all over the Avenue."
"I love you Mom. I love you so much."
I spent Thanksgiving weekend lost on familiar streets, alone though surrounded by friends who cared for me, beyond of the reach of arms that would comfort me. "We all have to go through this," someone whispered. "It's part of life." Even so, in my car, I howled the injustice, the unfairness of it into the night. I raged. I cried and hated myself for crying; each tear was an acknowledgement that she was dying.
By Monday, I'd come to a decision. I was going to New York and I would stay however long it took...two weeks, a month...a year. This was my personal choice and I attach no moral certitude to it. Everyone makes his or her own. This woman had given me life; she made my well being her life's work. She'd sung to me as a child. In our toughest times, seeing me shamed by cardboard stuffed inside my worn-out sneakers, she'd risked my father's wrath to buy me new ones. She still cooked my favorite dishes, still pressed money on me when I was broke. She loved her sons and grandchildren more than herself.
The bond between us was fierce. I'd never, as I'd promised, taken her to Florida, Los Angeles or the Vatican. Never become rich or famous... never danced with her at my wedding. She never cared. Last autumn, swept by some strange prescience, I'd taken six weeks off from work and traveled to New York to write, sleep in my old room, be her son again.
This would be my time to comfort her and stand with her at the fading of the light. If pain and tragedy were my mother's lot, I wanted my share. Something else was at work. The dying can give precious gifts to the living clarity... perspective... priority. This would be my last opportunity to give back something; the last time in this life I would ever be a son, the child of a living person.
In some ways, my position was special.  My children were young, and, after the breakup of my second marriage, they were living most of the time with their mothers; my expenses modest. A support system of family and friends was in place in Brooklyn. I was not bound by corporate dicta that typically make no provision for extended leave or other support in times of family crisis...that make it simpler for employees who are substance abusers to get help than for caregivers to provide it. Journalism for all its prickly edge is a sympathetic business. My boss told me to do what I had to do. We'd worry about it later. (After eight weeks, he fired me.)
"If God wants me, then I'm not afraid," Gloria always told us. Whatever God wants..." was a phrase I grew up with. I'd never seen her without her rosary beads. She supported an endless stream of church-related charities with $5 donations, yet could curse a blue streak, held grudges and always wanted the latest gossip. She attended services three times a week at Our Lady of Peace Church, one of the last devoted churchgoers in what had once been a thriving parish. As a child, it had been my job to stir the tomato sauce on Sunday mornings during the hour she was at mass. She always sat in the same pew, "Gloria's row," her friends called it. Over the last few years, I'd begun attending mass with her whenever I was in town.
She always wore high heels to church. Young women had always marveled at my mother's figure. In the three years, since her first operation, she'd lost 40 pounds, suffered disfiguring scars and complained she "looked like a skeleton." Greg, always loyal, still called her "Tubsy."She still wore those high heels. Awash in memories in the nearly empty old church I'd look at her and tears would flow.
She pretended not to notice.
Returning to New York had always been a joy for me. This time it was a rite of passage. I had come as a son seeking his mother; instead, I found myself in an empty, memory-haunted house, the head of a family heading for disaster. Once again, I found myself emotionally, but not practically prepared for crisis. Gregory, who had been supporting Mom since my father's death, was unemployed. Another brother was in rehab. Bills were piled up; the mortgage and property taxes hadn't been paid. My parents had managed family finances out of an old shoe box in which they kept payment books, canceled checks, etc. Mom's hospital costs were already in the tens of thousands of dollars and surging daily. Though well-insured, she still owed thousands from her previous surgeries. Our resources essentially consisted of her small savings account, a $2,000 life insurance policy and the modest row house we'd grown up in. Determined to keep the house and our family intact, I found myself worrying about losing both every day.
At the hospital, Mom was being maintained on heavy doses of morphine and little else. We asked that the dosage be cut back and discovered the pain had diminished. Other problems had developed: her feet and ankles had begun to swell with fluid; she couldn't swallow without choking. Her only sustenance was the intravenous solution that dripped slowly into her arms. Every day, untouched containers of soup, pasta, fruit, toast, eggs, Jell-O, tea, lined her window sill.
After ten days, she was finally transferred to Methodist Hospital's third floor cancer ward for chemotherapy. Each day, I'd imagine the runaway cells inexorably growing, approaching some critical mass.
"Do you think this can really help me?" she asked.
"Please Mom,” I said, "there's nothing else we can do."
I'd half-convinced myself the harmless-looking liquids in the clear plastic bags above her bed could work some miracle. They were powerful cytotoxins that would kill any fast-growing cells in her body: she would lose her hair, develop sores in her mouth and the lining of her stomach, experience nausea or worse. On Friday night, she was given a cocktail of painkillers and anti-nausea drugs to prepare her for her first treatment.
I arrived early Saturday morning carrying coffee and a newspaper, eager for some hopeful sign. A nurse stopped me outside the room to ask whether Mrs. Coppola should be revived if she went into cardiac arrest. I rushed past her to find Mom semi-conscious, gasping for breath. A nurse was suctioning her throat with a vacuum device. The anti-nausea drugs had suppressed the gag reflex that allowed her to clear phlegm: she was drowning in front of my eyes. We stared silently at each other. Half-a-dozen other patients were in distress; the nurse passed the vacuum tube and saline solution to me and left.
Mom revived, survived the first round of treatment. By then, she'd seen herself in a mirror and asked for Father Louis DeTommaso, her pastor. We all took communion together around her bed. Another lifelong image was seared into my consciousness. My relatives had begun placing religious pictures by her bed, alongside those of her grandchildren, Justin, Gabrielle Pia, and Thomas. Her brother Sonny and his wife Madeleine, postponed their annual winter trip to Florida.
In the cancer ward, some patients slept constantly; others never. One woman, suffering from both lymphoma and Alzheimer's disease shrieked through the night. Many of the patients smoked constantly. One of Mom's roommates, a woman apparently without family or friends to support her, endured three days of chemotherapy and then was preparing to make her way home alone. Gloria ordered me to drive her home. She had Greg give $10 to another, indigent patient.
Despite the high tech medicines and the decency of the caregivers, the ward was not a place to inspire hope. Half-a-block away on Seventh Avenue, the shops were ablaze with lights and Christmas decorations; men hawked Christmas trees on the sidewalks while carols played over tinny speakers. Our house, always bright and filled with people at Christmas time, was dark and empty.
Greg and I stayed in shifts. Our relatives visited regularly but we kept the haunted hours. Other families kept similar vigils; many of the "children" were my age. Two brothers, both in their 40s, had flown in from Florida at Thanksgiving to care for their mother. A month later, they were still there "trying to get Mom home for Christmas." At the other end of the scale was the daughter who publicly berated her dying mother for all the "trouble and expense" she was causing. The woman's last months would be spent shuttling between cancer ward and nursing home.
Three days before Christmas, I asked Mom's permission to return to Atlanta to spend time with my children. She insisted I go.
"I'm okay, I've got plenty of company."
Holidays were important in our family, heralded by huge dinners my parents would spend days preparing. I sensed she was passing on the tradition to me. As I was leaving for the airport, torn between my responsibilities as both father and son, she handed me money for gifts and Christmas cards for Gaby and Thomas. Inside, she'd written,
"Grandma will love you always."
A patient died Christmas Eve. Three days after Christmas, a surgeon had cut into my mother's abdomen attempting to install a feeding tube directly into her stomach. He failed. He told us her liver was so enlarged with tumor, he couldn't find her stomach. A tiny tube he attached to her small intestine pulled free and Mom refused to have it reinstalled.
On New Year's Day, a 43-year-old woman whose husband and daughters had kept a lonely vigil in the room across from us died of brain cancer. Their wails echoed through the ward. At noon on Saturday Jan. 5th, Gloria was discharged from Methodist Hospital. The plan was to get her out of the grim ward environment for a week, after which she'd return for three days of chemotherapy. Visiting nurses and home healthcare workers would help us manage.
I spent that morning at home scrubbing the floors and putting everything in order. Over the last year, Gregory had renovated the ground floor of our dilapidated, 100-year-old row house, ripped out walls, exposed brick, installed new appliances, windows, even parquet floors.
While Mom was hospitalized, he had her dingy bedroom redone all sunshine and bright colors. I'd dumped the worn-out bedroom and living room suites, bought new sofas and a bed--charged it all--framed and hung pictures of my brother Thomas and the grandchildren alongside her photograph of Pope Paul VI. My mother had spent her entire adult life living in that rundown house. The renovation was a final gift to her.
On the sidewalk outside the hospital, she couldn't walk four steps to the car without gasping. The painful swelling that had begun in her feet by now had bloated her legs. When I'd massaged them, imprints of my fingers remained in her flesh. She couldn't have weighed more than 90 lbs. Her face was grey, her lips pulling back from her teeth.
"It's so beautiful," she whispered as Greg carried her into the house. "So beautiful."
A neighbor had prepared lentil soup and run it through a blender for her. She couldn't eat. (At the hospital, she'd ordered her cousin Millie to eat the food I'd leave "...so Vincent wouldn't worry.") She spent the day exhausted on a Barca-Lounger we'd borrowed from a neighbor. On Sunday, a visiting nurse noted Mom's systolic blood pressure had dropped below 90; she looked at me oddly when I announced I had gotten Gloria to eat two full tablespoons of oatmeal. A medical reporter, I refused to acknowledge any medical information. It had come down to "...what God wants."
Sunday night, Greg carried Mom upstairs to her bedroom, the stairway as insurmountable to her as Mount Everest. It took six pillows to put her at ease and still she couldn't sleep. She called to me in the middle of the night. I lay awake next door in the narrow room that had been mine as a teenager.
"Vincent, my back...I can't get comfortable any more."
I adjusted her pillows for the 10th time.,
"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm not letting you sleep. I'm sorry I made you come up here so far from the kids."
I clung to the iron rail of her new bed. An enormous chasm stretches between the living and the dying, a gap love cannot bridge. I wanted to hurl myself across it. "Mom," I said, "There's nowhere else in the world I want to be." I realize now that I had been granted a precious moment. A chance to say those special things we feel for those we love but so rarely do. A chance to say goodbye.
"Mom, I want you to know that you've been the best mother any son could have. I want you to know that whatever is good and special in me has come from you."
She lay there staring.
I was blinded by tears. "Mom, You know that I can't change this. I can't change what's happening to you. You know if would if I could."
"I know that," she whispered. "I know."
Monday morning, her blood pressure continued to drop.
"Vincent," she said, "I don't feel good Maybe I should go back to the hospital."
I didn't want her to die surrounded by gaping strangers in a crowded emergency room or wind up lifeless on an respirator. "Okay, Mom. Let's wait a little bit." I knew what choice I was making. The hospital had an arrangement for bypassing admitting procedures on the cancer ward. After a while, it became too much Greg drove to the hospital to find the head nurse. I was upstairs when our cousin Millie shrieked, "Vinny, come down! Something's happening!"
Mom had pitched forward in the chair. She'd grabbed Millie’s hand She wasn't breathing. I pinched her nostrils and began breathing into her mouth. It was the first time I'd ever kissed my mother on the lips.
"Breathe Mom. Please, Mom breathe! Don't die!"
Somehow she heard me and delayed her passing. She came back, but only for a moment. Her last breath passed into my mouth. Later, Josie Stuto, our octogenarian Italian neighbor across the street would tell me this was a special gift.
I was aware of Greg kneeling beside me sobbing. I won't cry," he'd said, "until there's no hope." There were no open beds at the hospital. Angela dialed 911. Half-a-dozen police officers and EMTs piled through our front door, pushing us aside. Mom lay on her back, her pajama top open as a team worked to defibrillate her. Her ribs and collar bones protruded It was the only time I'd ever seen her undressed.
At that moment, our brother Joseph walked in. He never got his chance to say a last goodbye, make amends, and tell her he loved her. Of course, Gloria knew that. Her last thoughts were of him.
When I wrote this, the tulips and irises I'd planted in the yard that last fall were beginning to blossom. I was going to surprise Gloria with them. Her favorite outfits and a few pieces of jewelry were given to family and friends, the rest donated to the poor. I would have kept everything exactly as it was. But life goes on. Her passing left a hole in my life into which I hoped would flow all the kindness she represented...
Sometimes, I wonder what might have happened if Alzheimer's had been the diagnosis instead of cancer...if those intense and devastating 10 weeks had stretched into 10 years. And I wonder about the road ahead.
Remember how I'd assured myself that the cancer that killed Gloria's sisters had somehow inoculated my mother against the disease. In fact, my Aunt Mary, another of her sisters, and two of her brothers, Sonny and Tony, would all die of cancer. They grew up in a house on the corner of Carroll and Nevins streets, since demolished, a few hundred feet from the Gowanus Canal. As a boy, I remember the poisonous green tides flooding the cellar, my uncles wading into the noisome water to clear the drains.
Ours is just one story of a hundred families in a forgotten neighborhood. My hope is that neighborhood and its people will live again on these pages.
I remember wise guys dumping medical and other wastes into the canal. It was cheaper for their corporate customers than loading the toxic material on a barge and ferrying it out to sea, the deals no doubt done in Monte's Venetian Room, a restaurant across from our house. Most neighborhood people couldn’t afford to eat there. As a boy, I played pirate on half-sunken barges, climbed a mountain of metal barrels filled with industrial chemicals. A king, I held "magic" turquoise crystals and golden powders in my hands when the containers spilled open. I remember raw sewage from our toilets passing straight into the water through a stone conduit alongside the Carroll Street Bridge.
Last year, the EPA declared the canal--now eagerly eyed by a new generation of developers and self-styled urban pioneers--a Superfund site.

My Cousin Richie Conclusion

Richie arrives in upstate New York in the spring of 1999, a few months after Analyze This opens in 2500 theaters. (The film would go on to gross more than $100 million.) I know this because I tracked him down. (“Cousin Vin! Where you been?") Jocelyne, in a breathy French accent invites me to their First Annual Narrowsberg International Film Festival. (WTF!)  My cousin is now become Jean Paul Belmondo?
A thousand miles away, I feel the old, mad Richie virus singing in my blood. (Surely, he’d find a place for me, his cousin, in the festival.) I fight it off, instead profiling another mad actor, Eric Roberts then living along the Hudson River.
Richie appears in Narrowsberg, a flyspeck along a bend of the Delware River. He arrives draped in black leather with a bodyguard named “Mondo” and a black Cadillac like one of Boccaccio’s shimmering young nobles in the Decameron. More likely, the plague-bearer in “Masque of the Red Death.”
Sixteen spoken lines and he opens the “Richard Castellano School of Acting.” Forty-two people sign on. Sixteen lines and the merchants and an ill-starred chicken farmer named Borg are convinced their hamlet will become “the Sundance of the East.” Sixteen lines and Richie announces he is starring in a gangster movie—Four Deadly Reasons—to be shot, for some unfathomable reason, in Narrowsberg. A good citizen, he wants to include local actors and investors.
A lord, he struts, lapels flying like F-16s, down Main Street, shouting at everyone he meets, playfully shoulder-punching stolid burghers like they’re goombahs (compares).
“What is it?” he demands as if he cared.
His life an open book, mostly fiction: the gas station he told me he’d robbed is now an armored car. (In a courtroom, he will shrink it a shoe store.) He has “$2 million stashed away.” He’s killed people and danced away from “ten contracts” on his life. By the Gowanus Canal, these fantasies would have been dismissed with a knowing grin, a playful “slap in the head.” On the Delaware, they’re intoxicating, an opportunity, unspoken, "to wet their beaks in the champagne fountain of celebrity.
Mornings, he storms into the Chatterbox Café on Main Street and announces he's buying everyone breakfast, then breezes out without paying. He brings in crews of “walyos” (guaglioni, affectionate Neapolitan slang for street corner guys) from NYC to people his movie. He scatters checks to wide-eyed vendors like rice at a Bensonhurst wedding. John Borg, the chicken farmer, turns out to be a cinephile. Richie "casts" him as a “Marshall Dillon-type” character.  Borg lives in a double-wide trailer; he invests $154,000, hardly chicken feed.
Time passes, seasons change; checks bounce like cherry blossoms, then falling snow. A year later, in August 2000, Four Deadly Reasons is screened for the people of Narrowsberg. Richie is nowhere to be seen. This screening is later described on This American Life (see link below) as “…a hastily produced, 15-minute montage of scenes from the movie. It was like a porn film without the sex scenes—awkward dialogue, noodly soundtrack, gratuitous use of bikinis and double entendres, and, most offensive, no scenes with people from Narrowsburg” (italics added).
What next unfolds is best described in a series of articles that ran in the Sullivan County Democrat  over the next two years (http://www.sc-democrat.com/archives/2000/news/08August/11/niiff.htm). In short, Richie’s dizzy trajectory is blunted. He's hit with four felony counts out of a cornucopia of extravagant malfeasance; named as defendant in at least 16 civil suits involving rental cars, equipment, meals, disgruntled actors. Even Mondo turns on him. Richie is forced to get a restraining order against his own bodyguard, certainly a first in the industry. Then his own attorney sues him.
The alleged felonies involve a scheme to secure SAG cards for aspiring actors (“Cousin Vin, I got the money!”),essentially the same con he’d successfully pulled with real wise guys in Brooklyn. Gangsters are more likely to dispose than depose you.
On trial in Sullivan County Court, he chews scenery like Al Pacino in And Justice For All, constantly interuppting the proceedings, speechifying ignoring threats of contempt from the bench. (My brother Joe, no angel, concludes “Richie thinks the judge is a director.”) Ultimately, he plea-bargains, agreeing to restitution and a year in county jail, but doesn't appear for sentencing.
Reports circulate that he’d been found naked on the Verrazano Bridge about to commit suicide. (I don’t know what movie that was.) He's arrested walking “half-naked” in Manhattan and hauled off to Bellevue Hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. He claims he’s “taken too many shots to the head as a professional fighter.” (!) He checks into drug rehab, buying 90 more days of freedom. In Narrowsburg, folks are pulling their hair out, forget The Sopranos, this is straight out of Huck Finn.
Richie finally appears in court appropriately costumed in orange jumpsuit and shackles. Nonplussed,  he asks Sullivan County Judge Frank J. La Buda to do him a "personal favor" and knock three months off his sentence. His daughter is getting married on Staten Island. “Can’t you find it in your heart to let me go to my daughter’s wedding?”
“This is not Let’s Make a Deal!” La Buda snaps.
Meanwhile, farmer and naïf, John Borg, who’d lost his life savings, is parading outside the courthouse with a hand-lettered sign reading “Hang ‘Em High!” Borg apparently couldn’t resist a final cinematic flourish.
Some of the money that dribbles into Narrowsburg over the next months to cover Richie’s $12,000 restitution ("investors" are out of luck) costs consists of $20 money orders, suggesting that our family and his old neighborhood friends didn’t forsake Richie once his star had dimmed.
                                                                 ****
The world changed on September 11th 2001. Richie didn’t. 
The 7th edition of the “Queens International Film Festival” kicks-off in winter of 2009. Its founder and executive director is none other than Jocelyne Castellano (aka Jocelyne Castaldo-Castellano, Maria Jocelyne Castellano, Marie-Helene Rousseau and Marie Rousseau). Year after year, it turns out, festival vendors and exhibitors from Connecticut to Texas are stiffed on fees and equipment rentals, perchance even hot dog sales. When projectionist James Hill threatens to take his grievance to the media, a gravelly voice hisses over his phone: “I know you’re a smart guy and you’ll understand what I’m telling you between the lines: You won’t talk to nobody!”
By now, you can guess what movie that line is from: My Cousin Richie.
Like AIDS or Ebola, the virus that's responsible for either my cousin's genius or his criminality may be dormant, waiting for a suitable host to begin replicating madly. In 2012, one of Richie and Jocelyne’s myriad victims, a Brooklyn-based filmmaker named Dan Nuxoll (Rooftop Films), remains totally convinced the couple will make one hell of a documentary.
Rest assured Dan, Richie will find you.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/173/transcript

Part I http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/04/my-cousin-richie.html
Part II  http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/04/my-cousin-richie-part-ii.html
Part III http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/04/my-cousin-richie-part-iii.html
Part IV  http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/04/my-cousin-richie-conclusion.html

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)

My Cousin Richie Part II

Years pass before I see Cousin Richie again. Out of jail, he’s now pursuing a career as a prize fighter. It turns out our family has a long boxing history. One of my earliest memories is a tabloid photo of my maternal grandfather, club fighter “Jim Jordan,” standing, thick arms raised in triumph, over a battered black man named “Preacher” something or other. The caption is typical of the era: “Negro’s Prayers No Help Against Jordan Onslaught.” All seven Jordan (Giordano) brothers were outsized men. Two were pro-wrestlers in the 1930s, one supposedly a “Russian.” In Chicago, an astute fan heard this Russian hiss in Neapolitan dialect—“Take it easy! Goddamn it! You’re hurting me!”—and the jig was up. My grandfather had big hopes for his eldest son, but my Uncle Tony’s nickname (“Punchy”) said it all.
Richie is holding court in Snooky’s Pub on Seventh Ave., surrounded by a gaggle of intrigued women. (Think Johnny Boy in Scorsese’s Mean Streets.) The same girls, braless and casually available I, with my droopy mustache and faded jeans, my teaching job, my books and bullshit, could not get my hands on. This is post-hippie era Park Slope. The communes of the mid-‘60s—one of them, the four-story brownstone at 16 Polhemus Place could be had for $60,000 if you could find a banker willing to write a mortgage—are passing away like the elvish people in Lord of the Rings, replaced by armada of arrogant wargs pushing Peg Perego prams, assuming nothing and no one existed before they’d arrived on scene.
 Trim, blond hair cut unfashionably short, nose suitably broken, Richie spots me at the front of the bar. “What is it Cousin Vin! Get over here!”
 “Here we go,” I sigh.
 “This is my cousin. He’s a school teacher.”
Instantly, the women’s eyes glaze over. With a ninth grade education, and a fourth grade writing style, Richie had spent two years writing his prison memoirs; in longhand, on spiral tablets, in multi-colored ink that had arrived at my apartment every few months.
“Cuz!” he'd suggested. “Polish this up a little. You know how. We split the money.” 
 A blizzard of misspelling, cliché, and repetition. I couldn’t say this the few times he’d called me to check on our “investment.” But Richie is nothing but resilient. To my delight, he’s surrendered his literary aspirations along with his orange jumpsuit.
“Cuz, I’m fighting next week in Sheepshead Bay,” he crows, shooting jabs in all directions. “I’m gonna kill this fuckin’ guy. Am I right ladies?”
The women instantly perk up.
 “Cuz, got get some drinks. I’ll get yous all front row seats.”
The fight was actually staged at a street festival near Emmons Avenue. Tickets were free and Richie was knocked out in the first round. A dying swan, nose streaming.
“Cuz, I’m bleeding!”
   *****
Fast forward. I’d flown up from Atlanta to visit my mother. I'm crossing Third Avenue—the Carroll Street Bridge and the Gowanus Canal glimmer in the summer haze—when Richie spots me.
“Help me Cousin Vin!” he rasps. “They’re gonna kill me!”
He was clinging to the iron rail fence of a rundown apartment building on the corner. A sedan idled at the curb. Two guys were grabbing at his arms. I didn’t know them, but I’d grown up with the third guy, Chuckie R, a capo in the Colombo family—see my “Union-busting With the Mob” blog post—run from prison by Carroll Street’s own Carmine “Junior" Persico. Chuckie had been a serious, thoughtful guy; never intimidating, always interested in my career as a journalist in the American South. Our parents had been friends growing up. It seemed to me Chuckie had had the misfortune of being born into a particularly ill-starred and oft-targeted mafia family. Today he’s serving life in prison on a RICO conspiracy with a dozen of his cousins and uncles.
“Cousin Vin!” Richie shouts frantically.
 By now, Fat Rosie and Carroll Street’s other resident gossipmongers are all eagerly watching.
“Vinny,” Chuckie pleads, “Would you get this fuckin moron to shut up?”
“They’re gonna kill me. Don’t let them take me!”
“Nobody’s gonna hurt you!”  Chuckie hisses.
“Richie shut up!” I plead “It’s okay.”
All I want to do is visit my mom. Once again, I'm caught in his mad web. Any moment, I knew Gloria would be out the door, charging up the street to our rescue. (It had happened before when my brother Thomas who was gay, beat the shit out of Michael Romanelli, a bigshot bookie's punkass son.) Chuckie takes me aside. It turns out that, while jailed, Richie repeatedly claimed to have numerous connections among the correction officers and administrative staff of a particular prison in upstate New York. He was so well-connected, he insisted, that for a few thousand dollars, he could guarantee that some wise guy’s son, nephew, father or cousin would be provided exceptional treatment and perks—the best jobs, free access to food parcels, choice of cellmates, books, who knows what. An offer they couldn’t refuse. With generations of family members being incarcerated at a dizzying pace, it was a perfect, though wildly insane scam. This didn’t stop Richie from collecting tens of thousands of dollars and then disappearing.
Now the word is out. Another family, perhaps a splinter of the Colombo family in Bensonhurst or Howard Beach, has put a hit on Richie. All this was patiently explained to me as if what I thought counted. I don’t understand this world or its arcane rules, but my cousin—certainly no made-man—was under the protection of the Persico faction. It’s a very long story, maybe going all the way back to his father, (“Uncle Fat”) who as a young man was crippled by a Southern scab driving a tractor trailer into a dockworkers’ picket line. Uncle Fat made the most of his martyrdom. He’d limp into supermarkets on Fifth Avenue, pack his cart with steaks and beer and groceries for his wife and offspring, then threaten any hapless proprietor who dared to hand him a bill with his cane, shouting,
“Let them pay!” And they did, for years.
Richie was simply going to a meeting.After which, some outsized thug would doubtless “throw him a beating.” The phrase demonstrates how absolutely unimportant one’s wellbeing is in the grand scheme, what the Alcoholics Anonymous types label “powerlessness.” But Richie would live to rise again. And, of course, he did.
(Continued. See Part III )

My Cousin Richie Part I

 I of V

I fly up for a family wedding held in one of the glittery Bensonhurst halls Italian-Americans love. Think “Le Grand,” “Il Paradiso,” “The Palace.” "Kubla Khan?" (“That sunny dome! Those caves of ice!”) Big band; Brobdignagian feast followed by “Venetian Hour,” preceded by “Cocktail Hour,” topped off by a flaming post-midnight breakfast. My sister-in-law has a tuxedo for four-year-old Thomas and a personal stylist to do 12-year-old Gaby’s hair. Having been married by a justice of the peace with a “Here Comes Da Judge” sign on his desk, I marvel at all the splendor. Unknown to me, the groom  had quit the job I’d gotten him at Newsweek and was now a bookie. Unknown to his Armani-clad bosses—seated at their own gangster table near the kiddie table—he was a crazed gambler.
When I step out of my limo, all my female cousins are screaming, “He’s coming!!”
“Who?”
“He’s starring in a new movie with Robert DeNiro!”
“Who is?”
“Cousin Richie! Richie Castellano!”
That’s odd. Richard Castellano, who played the portly “Clemenza” in The Godfather (“Leave the gun; take the cannoli”), had died 10-years before. At that moment, one of the shrieking teenagers thrust a glossy headshot at me. Sure enough, the cutline proclaimed “Richard Castellano,” but the broken-nosed visage smiling at me was my cousin Richie, “Richie Mel.” Everyone knew that.
                                                           *****
One of the last times I’d seen Richie, I was living on Fifth Street (above 8th Avenue to connoisseurs of Park Slope). Teaching English at Automotive High School in Williamsburg. That morning, I was unlocking my car when I heard a hoarse shout.
“Cuz! You gotta help me!”
I looked up. “Hey Richie. What’s up?”
“Cuz! I’m begging ya!”
Everyone in Brooklyn shouted. All day, all the time, as if they really were players fretting and strutting on some invisible stage. The rest of us were scenery for them to chew.
“What’s wrong?”
“Cuz, they say I robbed a gas station!”
“What?”
“I’m innocent. I swear to my mother! They saying I shot a guy…with a shotgun!”
“Get outta here!”
“Fuckin’ cops! You know how they lie!”
I did know. Ten years before, I'd made the mistake of getting drunk on Tango, bottled rutgut vodka and orange.  I was swept up in a dragnet--there had been a street gang murder that night--and dragged into the 78th precinct where a two cops took turns beating me for hours hoping for a confession. They were disappointed when the real killer was caught and marched in. By way of apology, an Irish cop walked me outside, punched me in the stomach and threw me down the concrete steps.
Richie paused as if to find his mark. “Cuz, you’re an educated guy. You went to college. I’m stupid! You gotta help me. I know I did some things, but I’m innocent this time. I got a wife…”
He choked back a sob.
“Maybe…maybe you could talk to Uncle Sonny.” (Our uncle, Sal Giordano, was an NYPD detective so straight he was known in the neighborhood as “Elliot Ness.”)
“Uncle Sonny knows people.”
“I could call him.”
I knew Uncle Sonny's first impulse would be to strangle Richie. For years, he and his wayward brothers—“JuJu,” “Jimmy Psycho,” and “Popeye Anthony”—had been the bane of Sonny's existence. (Another brother, despite his nickname, "Alibi Ike," somehow went on to lead a blameless life, serving in the Air Force, building a successful career, supporting a loving wife and family.)
“Maybe you can write a letter to the prosecutor," Richie added. "I was thinking the Bishop too. You know my sister Carol works in Our Lady of Peace rectory. She cooks for the priests…Cuz, I’m really scared.”
“What’s his name?”
"Who?"
"The bishop!"
“Fuck I know.”
I’d always felt Richie and his brothers—all smart, engaging, personable guys--were a photographic negative of my family. Or victims of some mysterious curse. The curse of growing up by the Gowanus Canal. Three of my brothers had graduated from college; none of us had ever been in trouble (all this would change). I felt guilty; I’d committed the sin of hard work and ambition.
“I’m fucking innocent!” he sobbed.
“Come on. It’s okay." I gave him a pretend hug. "Nothing’s going to happen. I promise. When I get home from work, come by. We’ll eat. I’ll help you. Ok?"
This was the Vietnam War era; the Watergate era; the Berrigan Brothers…injustice, civil rights
“You mean it Cuz?”
“Sure…But I gotta get to work now.”
“No problem. I don’t want to bother you. I know you’re a busy guy. Responsibilites.”
As I was tossing my briefcase—stuffed with papers I’d spent half the night marking--into my green Karmann Ghia, Richie called out again.
“Cuz...”
I sighed and stood up. The tears were gone. He was grinning. I stared as he pulled a greasy wad of bills from his pants’ pocket. Hundreds of dollars. He fanned it in front of my face.
“Cuz,” he said. “But I got the money!”
He couldn’t resist. He had to let me know he thought I was an idiot.

Part II  http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/04/my-cousin-richie-part-ii.html
Part III http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/04/my-cousin-richie-part-iii.html
Conclusion   http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/04/my-cousin-richie-conclusion.html