The Gypsy King

The Goose stands outside Tony’s Barber’s shop on Third Avenue staring as the ragged caravan bumps to the curb alongside 479 Carroll Street.

“The fuck is this?”

Alongside him, Mikey Romanelli tugs at the beautifully tailored cuff of his suit jacket 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, sits 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. “They’re Gypsies.”

“Mariuolli.” the Goose grunts, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together. “Them people rob your fucking eyes out. What are they up to now?”

He turns 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, not even 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 flowing skirts, necks strung with costume jewels and gold coins, stroll across Third Avenue, oblivious to the baleful stare of Fat Rosie, the neighborhood gossip, the bark of a bleached-haired school crossing guard known to all as “Butchie the Fag,” and the air horns of a tractor-trailer rumbling along the avenue. They walk into Luzeen’s grocery store, ignoring the Italians.

“Look it that shit!” The Goose grumbles. “They leave the little kids standing on the corner. They a gonna get runned over!”

“What are yous animals!” shouts Louie Diamonds, one of the wannabe tough guys who circle The Goose like minnows.

Romanelli frowns. “Guaglione (wise guy)! Mind your business. They ain’t bothering nobody. They gonna get a sandwich or something.”

The driver’s door of the bronze Caddy opens with a groan. The driver, a wiry 30-year-old in orange bellbottoms, flowered shirt and Beatles’ haircut, 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 uncertainly onto the sidewalk. Like the Italians, he wears multiple rings and a thick gold chain and crucifix around his neck.

“Look at this fuckin’ guy,” The Goose mumbles. “King Shit.”

The old gypsy looks around, his gaze taking in the impeccably dressed Romanelli and the half-dozen guys sporting powder blue leisure suits, canary yellow shirt-jacs, black see-through silk shirts, glaring 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 four- story yellow brick apartment building. Half-a-dozen dozen gypsies follow them into the vacant ground floor apartment.

The kids are left on the sidewalk, uncertain as kittens.

“They ain’t gettin’ no sandwiches,” one of the Italians says.

In better days, the apartment had been Dr. Mangano’s office, sitting catty-corner from the neighborhood’s one other professional, attorney Vincent P. Rayola, both dead or fled to Bensonhurst. Two front windows facing Third Ave. have been bricked over with unpainted cinder-blocks, giving the appearance of a prize fighter whose eyes have been battered shut.

The women exit the grocery chewing Luzeen’s greasy15-cent calzones. Third Avenue is wide. They don’t cross until every bite is consumed, then walk into the apartment building.

“Wait a minute," hisses The Goose. His short arms shoot into the air, an ominous plea for justice. For the Goose, life is high drama and he’s always at center stage. "You think they gonna live here? Are yous kidding me?”

Three beefy thugs around him grunt in approval.

I’m standing on the opposite sidewalk watching the opera unfold, drenched in sweat, working on my first car, a piece-of-shit 1963 black Triumph TR-4.  An overlay of fear stirs in my gut as I listen to the chorus around the mailbox:

“They filthy.”

“They got germs.”

 "They get three wives.”

“Be careful they put a fuckin’ curse on you.”

“Fuggedabout it!”

And so, it begins. A tribe of gypsies arrived in Gowanus, a place so tribal a stranger cannot cross the canal without being accosted, where a black man daring to stare from a car stopped at the red light on Carroll Street would be dragged out and beaten, where authority resides in the dark recesses of the Capri Club—50 feet from The Goose’s mailbox office—masked by the sonorous tones of Dean Martin—“Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime”—blaring nonstop on the jukebox.
Law, politics, government, church are distant and unreal. Our pastor, Father Mario, hangs out with gangsters in Monte’s Venetian Room. Brother Masseo molests altar boys in the church basement while old ladies pray the rosary. Cops from the 76^th Precinct collect brown paper bags of money “for the Captain,” and provide free car service to a mad assassin named “Apples” Macintosh.
Yet there are magic circles in this topsy-turvy world. No one would harm “Brownie the Mailman,” who scribbles “Return to Sender” on unwanted mail, or the processed-haired brothers, Freddy and Marty, ace mechanics who run the gas station on Third Street, or the half-dozen black men who work at the John P. Carlson paint factory overlooking the canal. This protection extends to any young woman who passes through the neighborhood, to the longhaired guitarist who lives in the tenement across from Monte’s, an outsized assortment of cripples and mental defectives, each with the crazy tag pazzo (“Ou-botts”) attached to their names, even  to “Drunken Mahoney,” who lives in a tiny stanzina and curses God in a lilting brogue outraging Gloria, my sexy, church-going mom.
Gypsies are outsiders, eternal outsiders. Outside the law, and now within the reach of reckless men.
The Goose sends Sonny the Indian to visits the Fatatos, slumlords who own the gypsy’s tenement. Squat, with a face like Easter Island, Sonny gives the quivering brothers three days to clear them out. Sonny a Mohawk mobster, is not without precedent. Across the Gowanus, Joe Gallo employs Louie the Syrian and a midget wise guy named Armando.
“Don’t make me come back.”
The Gypsies won’t budge. The Fatatos run away.
Like Vietnam, a war of attrition is underway: curses and threats, eggs spattered against windows, then bottles, a busted windshield, punches thrown in the stairwell, a gun pressed to the temple of the old gypsy’s son. Like 'Nam, there isn’t much to threaten. A few sticks of furniture and cardboard boxes, ratty cars and unkempt children. No discernible family units, no rhythms or routines, save for the comings and goings of the young men who drive around Brooklyn doing bodywork out of the backs of their cars oblivious to tickets or the dire implications of parking in the wrong guy’s spot. No grocery shopping or cooking or crossing the street to Johnny the Butcher’s, no parading up and down the block, no dyed red hair piled up like bundles of snakes; only costume jewelry, stale sandwiches, chips and orange sodas, wrappers thrown in the gutter. Feral and unkempt, the kids beg or steal packs of Twinkies and Devil Dogs from John’s Candy store.
After a few weeks, Fat Rosie and Baby Chick, both bruisers, corner two gypsy girls.
“Why yous let the kids roam the streets?”
“What if they get hit by a car?”
“How come they ain’t in school...And they’re filthy!”
“What’s wrong with yous?”
Silence.
“Are yous stupid?:
Silence.
"What, yous don't talk English!”The women dart for the hallway door.“Go get your fucking husbands ya `who-as'!” Rosie bellows."I’ll give them the rest!”
The old man appears in the glass. I've been watching him. He’s treated with great deference: morning coffee is delivered into his hands, which he sips leaning against his Cadillac, but something else is going on... Sweating and haggard, he’s served lunch in the idling car, air-conditioner running. Afternoons, the young gypsies hand him wads of crumpled bills which he counts with trembling hands and shoves in his pocket, his eyes always on The Goose or his crew outside the Capri Club, as if pondering a diplomatic entreaty.
For days, I’ve been trying to unbolt the head from the Triumph’s 4-cylinder engine, a backbreaking, knuckle-busting job for a freshman English major working in the street with cheap tools. I look up, startled. The old Gypsy is standing across from me peering into the engine compartment.
“You don’t have the socket?”
“It broke...I’ve just got one bolt left.”
“Half-an-inch?” he ask squinting.
“Yeah...?”
Hacking phlegm onto the cobblestone street, he walks over to the Cadillac, reaches behind the seat and returns with a socket set. He hands it to me. I notice his shaking hands.“Thanks.”  I glance across Third Avenue, hoping The Goose doesn’t see this.
“Fuck them!” I mumble reaching for the tool I need.“
"No, you should show them respect."
"What? These guys?"
"You’re going to need a puller,” the gypsy says changing the subject.
“A what?”
“To break the gasket from the block. Kappi will show you.”
He walks away.
Saturday morning, Kappi, a guy about my age shows up with the tool. He edges me out of the way, jabbering nonstop in weirdly accented English—actually proper English—about cars and girls and the good pot he can sell me for cheap. Half-an-hour later the head is on the sidewalk ready to be dropped off at the machine shop.
“Make sure they grind the valve seats,” says wiping grease from what look like dress pants.
“Thanks man.”
"Thank my father.”
"Your father?"
“Thagar.”
Thagar?  What is this Beowulf?” I mumble.
“Uh?”
“Never mind. (How right I am.)
“In Romany, Thagar is “King.”
An odd friendship begins.  Another week and the Triumph is back on the road. On fall afternoons, Kappi and I eat salami sandwiches and drink Manhattan Special sodas on the factory stoop across from my house. A couple of times, top down, we drive to Nathan’s in Coney Island for hot dogs and try to pick up the wild Irish sisters—Daedre and Phaedra—sniffers of airplane glue, who hang out on Fourth Avenue and 12^th Street, and climb happily into the two-seater car. He’s a preposterous liar, but an infectious. entertaining one:

“So we’re fixing this fender in Valley Stream...Sunday and we run out of Bondo. Auto parts stores are closed, but we find a German deli and get two pounds of liverwurst. Shit stinks. We slap it on real smooth and then re-spray the fender. Lucky it’s getting dark! When the owner shows up, it looks real good, but his dog comes over and starts licking the wheel! `Oh man!” I’m trying to kick him away. We’d already got paid so we jump in the car and run away.”

“The fuck out of here!” I shout. Every one of his stories has to do with scamming or conning somebody, including me, but when you’re a lonely kid who knows nothing of the world and a guy who might as well be from outer space arrives on your doorstep and tells you stories of kings and schemes, and lives you can only imagine, you feel privileged. Nonetheless, where is he headed?  I sense the clock is ticking.
“Why are you guys still around that stupid apartment?” I ask.
He looks at me, disappointed. “It’s not so bad.”
I glance toward the knot of Italians horsing around outside the Capri Club. “They don’t want you here....Nobody does.
“Is that how you feel?” he asks.
“It’s not up to me,” I say. “You look the wrong way...maybe one of them is drunk or pissed off at his girlfriend...something terrible could happen. They don’t care about the law. Nothing!”
It's not up me either,” he says. “Thaygar decides.”
“He wants to live here? I can’t wait to get away...
“Stubborn. This... happened before.”
Winter is football season. The Goose and his boys are indoors, loan-sharking, taking reckless bets from insolvent gamblers, threatening them when they welch on the astronomical interest (and yet ask for more credit) too busy making money to pay attention to a band of gypsies.
One Saturday in November,  nine-year-old Jo-Jo Manzo, one of those ethereally beautiful  Italian boys who recall Botticelli angels, tugs on my sleeve. He points across Carroll Street street to a pink Spalding ball under a parked car, what we stickball players call a “Spaldini"
“Mister....”“Yeah, Jo-Jo?”
“Cross me the street.”Carroll is narrow but dangerous, parked cars lined up on each side, trucks rumbling up from the docks. I’ve been run over myself.
“Does your mother allow you...?”
If a grown-up …”
“You sure?”
“Cross me the fucking street!!”
I turn my back for a moment, and two minutes later Jo-Jo is rolling on the sidewalk screaming, trying to scratch the eyes out of a gypsy boy clutching the pink ball with both hands.
“I’ll kill you!” Jo-Jo screams. “That’s mines!”
“Fuck!”
A line of cars rushing to make the Third Avenue traffic light, trapps me on the curb. The neighborhood sociopath “Sally Fots,” rushes across Third Avenue, pulls the two kids apart. He smashes the skinny gypsy boy full in the face. The kid crumples, the ball rolls away. In a flash. a gypsy girl bounces off a car fender rushes at Sally, her long nails raking his face, and then another girl is on him, punching and scratching, and another, raking his face with a churchkey...the months of humiliation and shame and rage pouring out...the years...the lifetimes
Kappi and the other gypsy men rush over trying to pull them off  Sally. Too late. Across Third Avenue, the Capri Club emptying out.

Fly Fishing on the Gowanus Canal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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