Dutch Shoes And Dead Babies

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

 

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
.
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
.
“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

The Jordan Brothers, Stout-Hearted Men

 When I was a child, Gloria, my mother, would sing to me and tell stories of my grandfather Jim Jordan, a pro boxer, and his six brothers. Born “Giordano” in the impoverished Mezzogiorno region of Italy, these were big, burly men, lumberjacks, (the reason why as a 6’ 1” and 190 lb. teenager, I towered over the Italian shrimps in my neighborhood).
The Giordanos had a rambunctious, expansive sense of themselves, long since diluted in me and my Americanized cousins. They’d arrived , flat-broke, in South Brooklyn on the Gowanus Canal at the turn of the century. Within 10 years, two had joined the NYPD and were Mayor Fioriello Laguardia’s personal bodyguards Two others strongmen and pro wrestlers who toured the ethnic enclaves of the East Coast and Midwest as the mad Russian and a bone-breaking Sicilian, a ruse that came to a bad end when from the mat, the “Russian” whispered to his brother in Sicilian, “Shithead, you’re hurting me!” Real Sicilians were in the front row.
My grandfather, insanely jealous, but otherwise righteous, is remembered for dangling a man over the rail of the Gowanus. The guy had dared tip his cap and say, “Buongiorno’ to my grandmother, Clementina.
When Gloria told me the 10-year-old me, her uncle Frank Jordan and the brothers organized their own annual, costumed Thanksgiving Parade and rode through the cobblestone streets of South Brooklyn—now overrun by an infestation of fedora-wearing hipster ass-wipes—on horseback, I balked. I admit I did.
All these years later, my cousin Lorraine (Giordano) Garrison comes up with a photo from the 1922 Brooklyn Standard newspaper. It’s all true and all these folks are long gone, their lives and stories unremarked, but sometimes when I return to Carroll Street and stare over the turgid, toxic green waters of the Gowanus, I remember a line from the odd lullaby my mother used to sing: “Give me some men who are stout-hearted men…” And I see my grandfather, bull-necked big-nosed, muscles rippling, holding a guy over the canal, I know exactly who that person would be.


The Seven Giordano Brothers:

Shooting Uncle Otto

In the 1960s, Uncle Otto (“Z- Da-do” in our 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 gin rummy or the Italian briscola—while Otto kept track of the numbers runners and gamblers—my godfather, “Blubber Head,” among them—who hurried in and out.

Bookie parlors were the fast food joints of the neighborhood. There were four in a three block radius—Otto’s, the Capri and Glory Social clubs on Third and Carroll (run by “The Goose,”) and a very dangerous one on Fifth Avenue off Carroll Street. "Runners" had different territories. "Jimmy the Morgue" covered his place of employment, the Kings County morgue in Bed-Sty. And of course, everyone knew he had sex with corpses. "Fat Rosie" collected bets from Puerto Rican workers in the factories at Bush Terminal'," a manufacturing complex on 3rd Avenue near the Brooklyn piers.(A gigantic "Industrial City" billboard was painted on the first building, a primitive version of Star Wars' famous scroll. At age 7, I'd try to read it all the way down on the Tuesday evenings my father drove his '56 Caddy along the Gowanus Parkway to Coney Island for Nathan's hot dogs, fries, orangeade and fireworks. Never could finish. See image below.)
On weekends, football games, Belmont 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 hero sandwiches stuffed with ham, 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 a whacky sense of humor: she berated her regular customers as “whores, cocksuckers and fuck-faces” as she filled their orders. They loved it. She drove a pink ’56 Cadillac and was the kindest person I knew. Like my parents, she'd endure a lifetime of tragedy.
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 four teenagers eating meatball sandwiches. ("Who sold you that beer?")They pushed us around. Looked here and there, left.
A day came when a guy I didn’t recognize walked into the store, maybe from Court Street or Bensonhurst. He and Uncle Otto talked. Otto looked at us for a moment, nodded toward the front door and walked outside. The guy seemed nervous; Otto phlegmatic. The conversation ended when he pulled out a revolver and shot Otto apologetically in the chest. Otto’s glasses flew across the pavement. I saw the red smear of blood slowly spreading across the front of his 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. Message delivered.
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 50 furious blacks 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 kids was holding a rifle. He ran by, stopped and saw me silhouetted against Otto’s picture window.  He raised the gun. I was five feet away. It took forever. An older man ran up and slapped the gun out of the kid’s hand.  For the next hour, the wise guys heard the honest grievances of the black men. This was a time when whistling fireworks were labeled "ni__er-chasers," and the occasional African-American corpse floated down the Canal like something out of Huckleberry Finn.

The talk was like a powwow in a Western. I saw things that way. Years later, when I was working  for Newsweek, I used to visit the “morgue,” where thousands of yellowing newspaper clips were stored. I’d read gangster stories to see whom I knew or recognized from the “old neighborhood.”  One story caught my eye.  The remains of four murder victims—maimed and tortured—were being removed from the cellar of Uncle Otto’s candy store.
Way back when the Feds had arrived, knowing too little, too late.

Good Friday on the Gowanus

The nuns advised us that on Good Friday all activities--stoop ball, stick ball, Kings, head-slapping, car-fender sitting, etc.--had to stop between the hours of noon and 3 pm the time Jesus spent on the cross. And we did faithfully, except for the one time Augie Aversano, an actual devout Catholic was granted his deepest desire, we tied him--rope rather than nails--to the wrought iron fence outside Our Lady of Peace Church and left him, as they say, hanging.