Summer on the Gowanus

Carroll Street was always teeming, the air thick with humidity and fumes belched from the trucks thundering along Third Avenue from the 29th Street piers.
The gamblers, Jerry Pep, Freddie Fish, Muzzy, among them stood on the corner shouting, cursing scratching their balls, arguing the day’s winners at Aqueduct or Belmont. Across the street, in front of the Capri Club, Mikey Romanelli and The Goose, dressed like undertakers in dark suits, hovered, ready to collect the bets, and later, collect the losers. They stored the scribbled sheets in the steel blue U.S. Post Office mailbox next to the red fire alarm box on the corner. A safe place since no one trusted the Post Office after Americo Guzzi dropped a cherry bomb down the chute.
Next door, Chitty and Buffalo Manzo, grilled sausage on a half-steel drum filled with charcoal, served with peppers and onions on Italian bread from Gallo’s bakery, the intoxicating aroma wafting in the air On the opposite corner, Rosinna served homemade lemon ice so delicious, truckers would line up in front of her store for a nickel’s worth scooped into Dixie cup. At night she lit a naked bulb above the side door of her store and fried 10-cent calzones in a vat of dirty oil while you waited. Further along Third toward First Street, Victor the blacksmith, biceps bulging in a medieval leather vest, shoed horses belonging to Angeletti and the other fruit peddlers who sang out in Italian on their horse and wagons. ("E rook e' rob" for broccoli rab) Another smell in the air, another sound adding to the cacophony: A one-eyed rooster who’d lost track of time, crowed all day in front of Goldie’s Live Poultry market.
Singsong, the girls skipped rope, played hopscotch on boxes chalked in pastels on the dirty sidewalk. We shouted and cursed, pitched pennies in front of John Sanseverino’s candy store, played kings against the wall of the Typhoon Air Conditioning Company, and high-pressure, high-stakes stickball (The Goose would pit our team against squads bankrolled by other wise guys) on First Street, never realizing the ancient brick wall that ran from Third Avenue to Whitwell Place was an artifact of Brooklyn’s first professional baseball stadium, Washington Park.
I played outfield. A towering fly ball over your head meant you had to keep running and running--toward Prospect Park, to escape your owners' wrath. I'll take Steinbrenner any day.
(to be continued)

The Virgin, She Wrote Me A Letter

“Give me a ticket for an airoplane
I ain't got time to take no fast train..."


"The world is ending.”
“No way!” I blurt.
Doodling on my scarred oak desk, counting minutes until the clang of the lunch bell, I look up. Sister Mary Malachy’s ice-blue eyes lock on me with the soulless glare of a circling shark Only Malachy would see the earth splintering into cosmic dust as a good thing.
And me still a virgin.
She reaches into her bulky brown habit and pulls out her rosary.
“Let us now pray to the Immaculate Heart of Mary for forgiveness.”
Forgiveness? I didn’t do anything!
I inch my head slowly to left. This primordial nightmare disguised as a nun will slap and beat and spell “OBEDIENCE” on both my hands” with her oak pointer even as South Brooklyn sinks into the abyss and the Gowanus Canal spews condoms and brimstone into the sky.
“Sally,” I hiss to the boy in the frayed white shirt sitting alongside me, “What did she just say?”
He leans closer to his desk, then rotates his forefinger against his temple.
“Lei e pazza! (She’s crazy!).” It comes out, “Ou Botts!”
She is crazy, but nobody cares or knows enough to care. Not my mother, Gloria, who treates the Irish nuns of Our Lady of Peace parish as the wives of Christ. (They wear gold wedding bands to reinforce their impregnable position.)
For two days, afloat in that simmering stew of science, history, religion, myth, Mariolatry and madness that is Catholic elementary school education in 1950s’ Brooklyn, Malachy had held me riveted She’d described the bloodcurdling fingernail-pulling torment of St Isaac Jogues at the hands of the Mohawks and other blood-soaked, but glorious New World martyrs. Now for a change of pace she's promised to reveal the miracle of the “Three Letters of Fatima.”
A miracle, it turns out, I definitely can do without.
“In the spring of 1917, the Virgin Mary appeared,” Malachy announced to our dead-quiet class, “to three young Portuguese shepherds. Not to the Cardinal or the Bishop in his worldly finery, but three humble peasants."
Instantly, my mind rockets into overdrive. What was The Virgin Mary wearing? Probably powder blue. All I had were statutes, dusty prints and stained glass to compare? What did she look like, sound like? Did she appear, disappear and descend from the clouds? All these Ascensions, Assumptions, Redemptions, made heaven sound like a cheap furniture store. I begin to ponder all the possibilities.
“....Our Blessed Mother then gave three envelopes to the shepherds...Each contained a prophecy.” 
What does heavenly paper feel like? Does it have a watermark? What kind of ink? I bet purple. What did her fingers feel like?
What's in the freaking letters!
Malachy grew solemn. Even the dopes in our class—Fat Ernie Benevento, Pasquale Viscardi, Anthony “Fisheye” Paulino, Eugene Bashinelli—were riveted.
The first letter was a vision of Hell.
Malachy picks up a book from her desk: “A great sea of fire which seemed to be under the earth. Plunged in this fire were demons and souls in human form, like transparent burning embers, all blackened or burnished bronze floating about in the conflagration.”
Fuck that!.
“`Pray...Pray...Pray for forgiveness,’” Malachy warns.
“Forgiveness?  Shit, I’m 15-years-old,  Never kissed a girl or coveted my neighbor's (Tommy Caccasotte ("Shit the Pants'") wife.
“What else did Our Lady say?” This from Kathleen Victor, dark-skinned, smart, but impudent, a natural target for Malachy’s ire.
“The second letter foretells World War I and II.”
“We coulda stopped Hitler before he got started? Oh man! That ain't right." This from Fat Ernie whose father died in WWII.
“What about Letter Three?” I raise my hand, shouting before Malachy can start back on the rosary.
“The Third Prophecy, given by Our Lady of Fatima to the shepherd girl, Lucia dos Santos.... (Malachy pauses for effect) “...was carried from Portugal to the Pope in Rome two years ago.
Okay... Pope, Rome, What else?
“It will be opened in 1960.”
Next year! Way too soon! I haven’t even traveled outside Brooklyn...
“Do we know anything else Sister?”
Straining at the bolts that hold my desk to the oak floor I’m thinking `Hell?’ `World War I?’ `World War II?’ `Pray for Forgiveness?’ This is gonna be really bad news. I know the Russians have ICBMs with atomic warheads...The Chinese are happily plotting godless murder and mayhem. The Daily News reports legions of "bearded bums" are on the move in Cuba...
“Pope Pius XII took one look at the Third Letter,” Malachy announces.
“Ah ha! So what did he say?”
Very, very long pause. "His Holiness said nothing. He fell to his knees and began sobbing.”
Sobbing WTF!
“We don't know whether these were tears of joy or sorrow."
What! Let me guess. For the next two years I scour the news, TV, church newspapers for word of The Letter. Not a whisper. I couldn't stop thinking about it.  Kennedy getting shot, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Khrushchev banging his shoe at the U.N. didn't help one bit.
Five years pass, and ten and twenty. I wake up one day and I'm an adult.
By then so many bad things had happened to me, who cared about a letter?

A Slice of Pizza di Grano

Gloria could cook, but she couldn't bake.
Why would she with Cioffi’s just a few blocks past the Gowanus on Union Street? On Carroll Street, everything had to be bigger than life: Cioffi’s was not just a great Neapolitan/Sicilian bakery, it was “the pastry store where Sinatra (`Frank' to us) ordered his cannoli and sfogliatella whenever he was in New York.” On Sunday mornings, if you were willing to stand on line halfway to Columbia Street, you could get a dozen Napoleons, Sfinge, Pasta Ciotte, “With the Cross” Baba au Rhum, Napoleons, and other delights for $3.60. And have change leftover for a small bag of pignoli cookies. As a teen, I had this down to a science. I’d arrive at Cioffi’s on the half-hour when everyone else was in church, and risk damnation for a crunchy ricotta cream cannoli speckled with cintron or chocolate chips
On March 19th, St Joseph’s Day, Cioffi’s turned out fabulous Zeppole di San Giuseppe. My father was a Joe and our scattered relatives were obligated to gift him boxes of zeppoles (fried dough topped with custard. a sour cherry and powdered sugar) from pastry stores all over Brooklyn, which I would devour with glass after glass of cold milk until I threw up.
However, I couldn’t get Pizza di Grano aka Pastiera di Grano, a traditional peasant pie made with sweet ricotta (think Italian cheese cake only denser) flecked with grain, lemon peel and candied citron. These were baked by a handful of neighborhood Italian ladies only at Eastertime. On Sunday morning, one of them—I don’t recall whom—Baby-Doll Stuto, Angie Pepe, Maggie Christiano—would show up after mass and bring ,my mother a pizza di grano wrapped in crinkly aluminum foil as an Easter gift. I don’t know if it was the rarity, the scarcity, or that the friggin’ pie just tasted so good, but I became obsessed with pizza di grano, a problem because Gloria loved sweets and Joey, Tommy and Greg, my three brothers, were gluttons.
Even Cioffi’s fell down. Their pizza di grano looked all right, with a checkerboard of dough strips on top, but tasted “commercial,” as if it had been baked and shoved out on the counter without love or respect. Easters came and went; I hunted pizza di grano in Bensonhurst, on Court Street, in Little Italy; nothing compared with the old ladies’ magical creation. (By the way, what the hell was grano (grain)? Where do you get it in Brooklyn, and what do you do with it? ) I’d heard they kept it in in brown paper bags, but they weren’t talking.
They were always dressed in black, always in mourning for some family member, always doing seasonal things, canning tomatoes over boiling pots in backyards, stringing hot peppers to dry in the sun, making novenas.
Life moved on. By some miracle, I was hired as a Newsweek reporter and worked briefly in London, Boston, New York and ultimately, Atlanta, where there apparently was plenty of grain, but no Italians. Most Easters, I’d fly home to Brooklyn where Gloria somehow saved me a sliver of her pizza di grano.
“Mom, just get me the recipe.” I’d say grumbling and picking at the crumbs.
I worked for Newsweek. I had all power. We had a Rome bureau, an extensive research library, access to Julia Child, the best chefs....
“They won’t give it to me.”
“What?”
“I asked them. They won’t give it to me.”
“Who?”
“Never mind.”
“Mom!”
"It's a secret."
Life went on. In the 1980s, Thomas died of AIDS. My father died of emphysema. Joseph and Gregory descended into the hell of drugging and gambling. The Gowanus was taking its toll of us, as it did every neighborhood family. I was not spared, but the worst, by far the worst, was Gloria’s cancer which you can read about—I still cannot—Losing Mom--on my blog. At Gloria’s funeral, I sat there in front of her open casket trying to figure out how things had gone so terribly wrong, so fast. I was still in my 30s. At one point, an old woman hobbled up to me. I kissed her dry cheek, smelled her old lady perfume. She pressed an envelope into my hand.
“Il Posto (The Mail),” I thought. The traditional offering of money to help defray funeral expenses, a holdover from our immigrant days. I stuffed the envelope into my jacket pocket.
I found it a few days later after Gloria’s funeral. I opened it. It was written in Italian, in tiny script on yellowed paper. It was the recipe for pizza di grano. I read the first few lines, It began: “Under a full moon, soak the grain....”
I’ve never tried to make my own. 

Death Comes Calling

In 1971, I moved to a walk-up on Hicks and Pineapple Streets in Brooklyn Heights. The rent, as I recall, was $145 a month, a stretch for a 23-year-old substitute teaching in Williamsburg. On Carroll Street, my father Joe, the dockworker in whom love and rage forever warred, erupted when I announced I was leaving our family’s cramped row house by the Gowanus. I departed under a volley of curses and threats: “Don’t fuckin’ ever come back!”

The bad Joe loved his family even as he splintered it. He’d lost his mom as a teen, was immediately drafted and thrown into the hellhole that was Peleliu Island. Knowing these things, I clung to the illusion that the violence and rage, and the never-ending money problems would wash away like the tides. We’d be a “normal family."  The good Joe slaved down the sweltering holds of cargo ships for decades to put me through college and all four of his sons through Catholic school. But Good Joe couldn’t hold it together against the darkness seeping into our souls like Gowanus sludge.

Skipping out the door, I never thought to help out.  I still feel the shame of it. I was working in Williamsburg, mostly at all-boys Automotive High, the vocational school Joe had dropped out of.  I found his records in a dusty file cabinet in the basement and discovered the NYC public school system system classified my father “non-white.”

In the 1970s, Williamsburg was carved into Balkanized enclaves—Hassidic Jew, Puerto Rican, Italian, Irish, Pole, African-American, Junkie. You’d get knifed walking to the annual teacher’s luncheon at Peter Luger’s steak house the under the Williamsburg Bridge. I didn’t, but I played hooky one Friday, and one of my students, Alphonse Presley, a sweet kid up from the South, got stabbed by the white junkies who haunted McCarron Park. He nearly died.

Brooklyn Heights was another world, a warren of pre-Civil War townhouses and Episcopalian churches, so far removed from the teeming tenements of Brooklyn it could have been London’s Mayfair district. The Heights was home to White Anglo Saxon Protestants, a rara avis in the outer boroughs.  Truman Capote and Henry Miller had lived there. Norman Mailer lived there, his brownstone overlooking the Promenade and New York harbor. There was a mincing population of middle-aged, pre-liberation gay men—and the predators they inevitably attracted.

My Hicks Street apartment was on the dark side, in the long shadow of St. George. The hotel had tumbled so precipitously into SRO/welfare status you could buy cuchifritos at the newsstand, and incubate titers of infection in the pool. A Gilded Age barber shop persisted. A shave, hot towel, neck message and a dousing with cheap fragrance cost $3.00. The barbers were old and tremblyl, the tiles cracked and pitted, the towels frayed.

Bruno Rubeo lived down the street with a cat named Shelob and a hippie girlfriend, Claire. At the time, he was selling handmade pizza out of a converted postal van truck in Red Hook, anticipating the food truck madness by 40 years. Bruno would become Hollywood famous (“Platoon,” “Driving Miss Daisy”), live in an Umbrian palazzo, marry a sweet Mexican beauty, die way before his time. He was my best friend.

I met a red-haired Sicilian named Marguerite at a rock club in Bay Ridge. She lived in a four-story limestone townhouse overlooking the Soldiers and Sailors Arch in Grand Army Plaza. Her parents were doctors; her father had a family coat-of-arms mounted on the wall, not something I saw a lot of in Brooklyn. He told me I wasn’t “right” for his daughter; she told me she’d spent her 17^th birthday at an orgy on Staten Island.

I was pursuing a M.A in medieval literature at Brooklyn College—hoping to convince myself I was an academic type—wading through Piers Plowman and the Faerie Queene, taking arcane linguistics courses, my Brooklyn accent so thick my professors grimaced and classmates giggled when I answered a question.  I’d spend my afternoons reading on the Promenade in the shadow of Mailer’s brownstone, fending off a different variety of fairy queen. Just a mile from my Gowanus neighborhood, I was lonely, isolated, didn’t fit in.

And soon enough, I was broke. Demand for my substitute teaching skills thinned spectacularly when one of my students, the class clown, climbed out the window of our third floor classroom at Enrico Fermi Junior High, inching his way along a narrow sill to the next classroom. Kids screamed and howled, but howling was normal when you were a substitute. Blissfully unaware, I kept scrawling whatever nonsense the regular teacher had left on the blackboard until my next door colleague banged at my door dragging Carlos by his ear.

Fall turned to winter, the Promenade emptied, bitter winds howled off the harbor. My 4^th floor walk-up faced the brick wall of a faded residential hotel on Pineapple Street. (Heights streets come in a variety of flavors—Cranberry Orange, Pineapple.) On Christmas Eve morning, my brother, “Joe Bear,” stops by, equally broke, trying to figure out how to buy gifts for our parents and younger brothers, Thomas and Gregory. We turn the corner to Pineapple where my puke green 1965 Corvair, a shit box that burned more oil than gasoline was parked.

Sometimes, Brooklyn Heights is so still and isolated you can forget where you are. And find yourself totally alone in the middle of New York City.
As we're walking toward Willow Street, a large object hurtles into the sidewalk ten feet in front of us, narrowly missing the spiked iron fence running alongside the hotel.

Thunk!  

“What the fuck!” Joe screams.

I’m speechless and breathless, but somewhere I sense it’s the sound a watermelon might make thrown to the ground from a very tall ladder.

I look up to the top floors of the hotel, then down at the object.

“A fucking dummy!” I shout, walking closer. I’m starting to grin at our foolishness.  A fucking trick!

“Joe it’s a dummy! These cocksuckers...”

This all happens in milliseconds, my synapses leaping from connection to connection... On Carroll Street we’d make dummies during the World Series, hanging the Yankees or Mets or Dodgers in effigy from telephone wires that zigzagged from one side of the street to the other...the “cocksuckers” are the students from Long Island University who I remember live in a dorm on one of the hotel’s upper floors.

“Motherfuckers!” Joe shouts, pointing up.

There’s nobody there. A window curtain streams in the wind like banner/

I move closer. The dummy is wearing blue pajamas, sitting on its ass, legs stretched toward he curb, head hunched between its knees.

“Assholes,” I flash, “even sprinkling ketchup to make it look real.” Actually, I'm impressed.

Three feet away, I bend down; a tingle of vertigo stirs in my skull. The pajama top has slid up, the pants down, the ass exposed and obscene. The thing has grey hair. So many details! The lower back is split wide horizontally...there’s thick red gore and filaments white tissue splattered everywhere. One foot away, I’m reaching down to touch....

“Vincent, what are you doing!” Joe screams. “It’s a man!”

A man.

A lonely old man living in an SRO hotel who grows despondent at Christmas time and jumps to his death. Of course it’s a man! The holidays are prime time for suicide...Or maybe he was thrown out the window?  Murdered for his few possessions?

Or did he try to hit us?

“This fucking prick.”

This conversation goes on for two minutes inside my head. I look up. Joe and I are all alone on a dead quiet street with an exploded corpse shielded from the world by a line of parked cars....my car. Finally Joe flags down a passing cab There’s fire station, a block or so away, on Middagh Street.

The driver speeds off.

At that moment, bizarre as it sounds, a man in a maroon dressing gown appears at the door of a townhouse across Pineapple street. He’s holding a steaming cup of coffee, maybe looking to retrieve his Wall Street Journal.

“Is there a problem?” he asks.

“Mister, you don’t want to come over here,” Joe manages.

“How do you mean?” The guy crosses the street.

“Mister....”

He passes in front of my Corvair. Glances down, spills he coffee and throws up.

I hear sirens in the distance.

“Joe, I don’t wanna stay here.”

"Fuck this."

An hour later, we walk back down the street. An idling police car, an ambulance, maybe somebody from the fire station. The dead man is gone. A guy in a cheap suit—the hotel manager-- is bitching to the cops about all the problems and paperwork the old guy is causing him.

A Department of Sanitation street sweeper, an enormous machine with two circular brushes stands by idling, waiting to mount the curb.

“We’re leaving.” Joe calls to the driver and points to our Corvair. He motions me to pull out.

I walk to the driver’s side, unlock the door.

"Jesus."

The hood, passenger side fender and windshield are smeared with clots of blood and tissue. It so bad I have to drive across Montague Street with my head out the window. Joe gets in. We head for the car wash on Atlantic Avenue. The Corvair looks like its been driven through an abattoir.

At the car wash, no problem.
They wave me right on through.

 

Tony Bennett On The Gowanus

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

Election Night on the Gowanus

An Election Night bonfire, built over Carroll Street’s cobblestones was a tradition predating the black-clad Italian women simmering tomato sauce on Sunday mornings or i pazzi, the crazies wandering our streets. It had very American feel to it, Bull Moose Party…Boss Tweed…Salem’s witches. We teenagers raided Chitty’s fruit store for orange crates and wooden bushel baskets, then Cambie’s Trucking, pulling splintery wooden pallets from the bays of tractor trailers. We went door-to-door begging fragrant wine barrels from homemade wine presses,..cracked linoleum and unwanted furniture. As the frenzy built, we’d literally pull wooden cellar doors off their hinges
At 13, I'm not sure I knew the name of the President. Not until Kennedy. I knew the mayor—a pie factory on Fourth Avenue, bore his name—Wagner. Buy damaged pies for a nickel and smash them, sticky lemon and pineapple, in each other’s faces. The name Rockefeller, was so alien it might have been a petroglyph.  Across the East River, Manhattan glimmered, unreachable, insubstantial. 
Wise guys Jerry Lang, Honey Christiano and Jackie Carr, abetted us, winking as we dragged busted folding chairs and card tables from the Glory Social and Capri Clubs on Third Avenue. They were, in all things, irresponsible. Perfect negative role model for lost boys bucking societal restraints.
No one cared about voting. My father would announce as if he’d unearthed a kernel of infinite wisdom—“No matter who wins, I gotta go to work in the morning.”
We competed against kids from President and Union Streets, and the alien territories across the Gowanus, for the biggest, most out-of-control blaze. Preempting us, the Fire Department, sent raiding parties to haul away our hidden stores of planks and beams. They were met with barrages of eggs and rotten fruit
If they caught you, these, burly Irishmen from Bay Ridge and Flatbush, They' d beat the shit of you. At dusk on Election Night, we emerged like crazed rats from hallways, cellars and alleys, lugging wood, stacks of newspapers and plastic gallons of gas, turpentine, paint. Darting, whirling, like Max from Where the Wild Things Are.Americo Guzzi, hammered the outsized brass nut on the fire hydrant, deforming and disabling it. The pile, grew three stories high and 40 feet across No one seemed to register that almost all the houses on Carroll Street were made of wood,sheathed in tarpaper and flammable shingles.
By 9:00 P.M., alarms were sounding everywhere. Sirens blared, fire trucks careened around corners. On the fire escapes younger kids readied volleys of eggs. Honey, 46-years-old, tossed a wooden torch—wrapped with rags soaked in gasoline—onto the pile. It exploded, turning night into day. I felt the combustion’s blast. A wave of intense heat sucked the air out of my lungs.
Holy shit!”
Half-blinded by smoke, gasping, grinning, I  watched Jeannie Wilcox, Amy Gallo, my cousin Clementine, cute girls in pink lipstick, leather jackets, tight jeans, as they stood transfixed. The heat washed over them, sensual. They ignored me.
All the telephone wires on the street were melting and burning. Embers were floating delicately over tar paper roofs.
“Where the hell is the Fire Department?”  Someone roared, the spell broken.
When they arrived, there was no water pressure in the pipes. I stood up, let fly with my last egg.
“Grab that little bastid!”
 I ducked and ran into the alley next to Honey’s house, a big guy in a yellow rubber suit closing fast. I cut, slipped, and rammed my head into the edge cinderblock wall. I've still got the "V" cut into my head.

Marathon Memories 1970

In 1976, the first NYC Marathon to encompass all five boroughs passed one block from my house on Carroll Street and Third Avenue in Brooklyn. Outside the Capri Club, The Goose and his crew of wise guys were busy taking football bets from the horde of degenerate gamblers wagering on Green Bay or the Giants. I ran up to them. "The greatest runners in the world are gonna pass by Fourth Avenue in 15 minutes!" I shouted, Yous should go see!" The response: "Who gives a shit! Go f**k yourself!"


Correction:  see Anonymous comments below. I was way off  remembering the NYC Marathon passing through Brooklyn in 1970. It was 1976 when  I stood on the corner as the runners passed along 4th Avenue for the first time.  As for Anonymous' s claim that 76th Precinct's reach ending at Bond Street that may be true, but the Colombo Family's reach and the cops' greed was much longer. Thanks Anonymous