Where Have You Gone Melvin Maldonado?

The double doors swing open like the gaping mouth at the entrance to Steeplechase Park and I’m swept into a maelstrom of shouts, shrieks, bells, buzzers, kids flirting, teasing, threatening, senses assaulted by a kaleidoscope of adolescent fashion and tropical perfume infiltrated by the smell of reheating beef patties, greasy fries, and sour milk. Students are racing up the down staircases, overwhelming hall monitors waving frantically and ineffectually as Mumbai traffic cops. Enrico Fermi Junior High School, Bushwick, Brooklyn, early 1970s. This Bushwick is not the hipster hive it is today. It’s raw, rough, in “transition.” A few years later, a few blocks away on Knickerbocker Avenue, mob boss Carmine Galante is assassinated after a leisurely lunch and cigar on the patio of his fave restaurant.

I head, crisp new NYC teacher’s license in my tan briefcase, for the principal’s office, uncomfortable in my new green suit bought “on time” with my mother’s Abraham & Straus card. I’m the first in my extended family to aspire to such a position, and Gloria, my mother, is so proud. But even in Brooklyn, my ‘dese and dose’ Gowanus accent gives folks pause. I want to do well. I want to connect with students, inspire them as books and reading inspired me. “Gladly would he learn and gladly teach,” is my mantra. Instead of the principal, I meet the dean, like many of these guys, a short, bull-necked Phys Ed teacher who thinks a Chaucer goes under a coffee cup. He flicks at my paperwork with his thumb, looks me over—I’m a big guy, 6’ 1”, 200 lbs.—and grunts, “You start after lunch.”

“I...I guess.” 

Substitutes face other faculty members’ worst day every day. We do this for about $5 an hour, less the price of subway fare and a cafeteria lunch. The administrators know this, the teacher mysteriously laid low by a 24-hour virus—who happens to be facing five English-as-a-Second Language classes in a row—knows it, and the kids, be they Albanian hell raisers, vatos locos from Aguadilla or wiseguy wannabees from Bensonhurst—surely know it.

I don’t know it.

This will be a recurring theme in my life: eager but unprepared; broke but already blowing my $40 day’s pay. I make my way down to the cafeteria. Teachers in wide ties and plaid cardigan sweaters sit off to one side like freaks in a carnival sideshow, many working on the baked fish special. Too nervous to eat, I push a cup of green Jello around with a plastic spoon.. After lunch, the dean appears and escorts me to a third floor classroom. Like the Red Sea parting before Moses, students scramble out of his way, shrugging off jeans jackets decorated with forbidden gang colors, snatching fedoras, watch caps and Afro picks off their heads

“Is there a lesson plan?” I ask as we stand outside the door. 

In a perfect world, teachers are supposed to prepare a detailed road map for substitutes to follow, thus ensuring continuity of learning. He looks at me as if I’m speaking Chinese.

“Let’s see what we got here.”

He opens the door. A classroom full of shouting 14-year-olds falls silent as a refectory in a Trappist monastery.

“Melvin, get to your seat,” the dean says. “NOW!”

Melvin is a character, a recurring nightmare I’ll meet again and again in my five years in the New York City public school system. This particular Melvin is short, skinny, loud, hyperactive, top of the line ADD candidate in today’s schools. In a very few minutes, Melvin (why are so many Puerto Ricans named Melvin?) will do his best get me fired—and possibly imprisoned.

The intercom crackles. The dean, needed elsewhere, vanishes. I have 45 minutes to fill on this first day of the rest of my professional life. A wall of sound, maddening, unstoppable, assaults my ears. My “teaching materials” consist of a few dozen raggedy copies of Junior Scholastic magazine, the crossword puzzles filled in, pages torn or covered in crude drawings and misspelled obscenities. I pass them out. The kids groan and toss them in the air. The seating plan is useless—I don’t know anyone but Melvin and he’s back chattering away in Spanish to a girl bursting out of her clothes in full post-pubescent flower.

I decide to write a few vocabulary words on the “blackboard”—this is Brooklyn before the great cultural awakening —and run a drill. The words come from an endless list—English and Latin—I was forced to memorize in Catholic schools where the halls were silent as the Callixtus catacomb. I’m reaching for a piece of chalk when first spitball hits me in the back of my head; others zip past, sticking and then dripping down to the board like snail smears. This accompanied by a chorus of giggles and shrieks of “Oh snap!” I know if I turn around, Melvin and the other perpetrators will appear as innocent as Raphael’s angels, but the odd thing is I find this hilarious funny, like watching a character on “Happy Days,” or “Welcome Back Kotter.” I’m trapped in the funhouse of my own sense of humor.

“Please copy these words into your notebooks,” I say projecting gravitas.

A dozen students, mostly girls in the front row, set to work. I risk turning my back to the snipers and add a few more words. My plan is to “elicit”—an important word in pedagogy—definitions from the students, discuss and refine. This, I’ve been told in otherwise useless education class, is how real learning takes place. I sit down at the desk, flip through the red plastic folder of Delaney cards (a system of miniature individualized index cards used to tracl attendance, etc.) looking for this bastard Melvin’s last name.  Amazingly, the noise subsides for a few minutes.

And suddenly, it builds into a devastating chorus of panicked shouts.

“Melvin!   Melvin!  Melvin!” 

I look up. Students are out of their seats screaming and pointing.

“MELVIN!!!”

I jump up. One of the unscreened classroom windows—it seems wide as a barn door—is open.

“He fell out the window? Jumped? On my first day! I haven’t even filled out my paperwork. What do I do?”

Nothing. I’m paralyzed.

Another round of screams, this echoing from down the hall. I imagine Melvin in his thin red turtleneck and grey and black checked pants smeared on the concrete three stories below. I see tonight’s tabloid headlines, “Teacher Dawdles Student Falls To Death.”

Gloria reads the Daily News and Mirror.

 A pounding on the classroom door. I stagger over. A teacher I remember eating baked fish in the cafeteria staring at me wordlessly. Melvin’s left ear is pinched between his thumb and forefinger, high and hard enough so that the boy—grinning (!)—is standing on his tiptoes. While my back was turned, Melvin apparently decided to climb out the window as a joke and inched backwards, his sneakers barely gripping the tiny ledge, 50 feet to the next classroom, where he was spotted and hauled in like a mackerel.

The bell rings and my students vanish, Melvin skipping down the hall not a care in the world.

 I’ve got another class in five minutes.

Somehow, I survive the semester at Enrico Fermi. In winter for fun, our students form a firing squad across narrow Starr Street and pound their hapless teachers with snowballs as we exit the building. One day, another substitute, John McDonagh, and I have had enough of the daily gauntlet. We fire back and sure enough, I bloody one particularly annoying kid’s nose with a chunk of ice. I’m called into the principal’s office for a disciplinary hearing.  By then, Melvin and his hermanos recognize my blue Alfa Romeo and fearing reprisals, I’m forced to park farther and farther away from the building. I’m up to ten blocks when I hear of an opening for an English teacher in a leafy junior high in solidly middleclass Bensonhurst, a position as rare and unlikely as a white whale.

Wounds That Will Not Heal

 "I was 13 when I wrote “A Battered War Helmet.” My assignment was to bring an inanimate object to life and create a backstory. Sister Mary Malachy called it “a personified autobiography,” a phrase from a world far beyond the Gowanus Canal. I spent afternoons working on it on the scarred kitchen table of our three-room apartment above a candy store on Third Avenue and Carroll Street, ignoring the squeals of my kid brothers, the blare of the Mouseketeers on Channel 7, and praying I’d be spared one of my father’s violent squalls when he got home from work. I wrote in ballpoint, on loose-leaf paper, inspired by a John Wayne movie, "Sands of Iwo Jima" that had moved me. I’d polished it so many times I choked up when I read it.
I handed it in to Sister Mary Malachy and awaited her response.
And waited some more.
Waiting defined school life in those days. Hours ticking slowly from the first bell to lunch hour, the rosary recited aloud each morning, me trying to remember its confounding “mysteries,” waiting on long lines in the school yard hoping just to brush Jean's arm as we made our way back into the building, the interminable church services—extended on Catholic holidays—where attendance was taken on Sundays; vast expanses of time, veritable deserts to a thirsting young boy, extending from January to the release of summer in late June.
At 13, I still believed in the cascading prayers we recited each morning, in the “... forgiveness of sins…the resurrection of the body… life everlasting…” Miracles, martyrs, saints and torment. But part of me longed, in the words of a Nelson Eddy song Gloria sang to me when I was a little boy to be a “stout-hearted man.” A stand-up guy.
From my assigned seat in the back of the class with the dunces—Ernie, Pasqual Viscardi, Anthony Fishy—I waited for Malachy to appear lugging her brass-buckled black leather schoolbag, eager for the telltale bulge of marked papers. One morning, there it was. Time crawled… catechism…math…rote vocabulary drills, the rosary. It was almost lunchtime when Malachy reached into the bag and pulled out a sheaf of papers. I smirked at the chicken pox smear that was somebody else’s essay.
“I have your papers,” she began. “Some students worked hard and turned in excellent papers. “The rest of you, the vulgarians,” she looked up balefully, “handed in stuff and nonsense. You know who you are.”
I sat on the edge of my seat as she handed out the “A” papers. “Cireno, Cucciaro…. D’Alessio, Dilorenzo…”
What about Coppo...?
“Mancuso, Mulia, Victor.” Then the “B's” and “C’s. “Di Pippo, Garrison, Henry, Palermo, Perez, Sessa, Wilcox.”
By the time Malachy got to the wise guys, troublemakers and losers, “….Bacotti, Benevento, Bashinelli, Paulino, Prosciutto, Romano, Viscardi…” I knew something was very wrong.
She handed Ernie Palmieri his paper with a nod of approval. Tall, dark, green-eyed, already an industrious guy, he'd emigrated from Italy with his parents, brothers and sisters. He was working in a pork store, a salumeria, on Fifth Ave. between Carroll and President Streets where the fragrance of Parmigiano Reggiano, olives and cheese and parsley sausage wafted out onto the sidewalk
Palmieri, who sat next to me by the radiators, grinned, waggled his hand, pinching thumb and forefinger together as if to say, “This American stuff, no problem!”
This American stuff: Ernie would die in Vietnam in 1967.
It hit me. Best for last! Malachy was saving the best paper, my “Battered War Helmet” for the finale, the piece de resistance had I known the phrase.
“Coppola, up here.”
“Yes Sister.”
I bolted out of my seat, Sgt. Stryker charging up Mount Suribachi. All her slights, insults and cruelty instantly forgotten.
She was standing alongside her oak desk, holding my story, the fluorescent light glinting off her rimless glasses rendering her pale eyes opaque. Grinning, I held my hand out, half-turning to face the class, so I never saw it coming. A sweeping right hand that knocked me against the blackboard. Then, the billowing sleeves of her brown habit flying, she pounced on me with a flurry of slaps I was too stunned to parry. To my shame, tears sprung from my eyes in front of the class. In front of Jean.
"Sister....?"
“This!” she roared to my stunned classmates, “is what happens to plagiarists!”
I didn't even know the word.
I was 13 when I wrote that first story. I never wrote another until I was 28.
***
That year, Malachy encouraged Salvatore Mulia, Dominick D’Alessio, Rosalie, Dilorenzo and a handful of other students to apply to Catholic high schools, institutions that had the power by some marvelous alchemy to lift wayward, working class students onto the path to success. For me, Malachy predicted I’d make “headlines,”not the scholarly, scientific, philanthropic or humanitarian recognition that teachers hope for in promising students, but screaming, 3-inch, Richard Speck-style headlines that appeared in the Daily News.
***
I studied, trekking up to the public library on 6th Avenue in leafy Park Slope to sit surrounded by goofballs in black framed eyeglasses and homosexuals whose fluttering eyebrows and nods signaled availability. I tried to read. I didn’t know what to read so I also read all the paperbacks on the rack at the newsstand at Fourth Ave. and Union Street, convinced sci-fi, bodice-rippers and tales of murderous Mau-Mau were literature. I read milk containers, matchbook covers, comics, whatever floated in front of me.
You earned admission to a Catholic high school by taking the “Cooperative Test,” a kind of Roman Catholic SAT that measured language, reasoning and math skills. You marked your top five choices on the application, and depending on your scores, you’d be accepted, rejected or dumped onto a waiting list. Making three schools was notable, four outstanding. I didn’t know anyone who’d made five.
Failing had consequences. Manual Training, the local high school, prepped students for “manual” labor. Since renamed John Jay, it was infested by gangbangers and thugs. In Gowanus, Manual was the fast track to Riker’s Island and I was a legacy student. My cousin JuJu had pushed a piano out the window of the music room while passing through; his brothers, Jimmy Psycho, Popeye Anthony and Richie Mell, were outrageous miscreants, even for the blackboard jungle era.
Catholic high schools were transformative places: St. Francis Prep remade strapping Irish boys--their immigrant fathers worked as subway sandhogs into Notre Dame football linemen; Power Memorial’s coach Lou Donahue’s casual racism helped transform Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor into Muslim superstar Kareem Abdul Jabbar. Bishop Loughlin was incubating Rudy Giuliani whose father had been sent to Sing Sing for armed robbery; La Salle, a Jesuit military academy in the heart of Manhattan, educated future Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Its “7th Ave. Subway Commandos” would fatten the rolls in Vietnam. St. Augustine, a diocesan school whose tuition was underwritten by the Brooklyn parishes produced New York Governor Hugh Carey. The schools, staffed by often brutal monks, literally pounded the gifted poor into teachers, doctors, lawyers and stockbrokers, and left a trail of scarred and broken kids in their wake.
I took the Cooperative Test on a Saturday, needle-sharp No. 2 pencils in hand, careful to keep my answers to the multiple choice questions within the little circles. The waiting began. Over the next six weeks, I’d race home for lunch where Gloria would serve her three school-age sons pork and beans and fried eggs, sopped up with Italian bread delivered to our door at 15 cents a loaf.
“Ma, the mailman come?”
“Yes.”
“Any mail?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“Jesus.”
“Mom, it’s important.”
Our mailman, a black guy nicknamed “Brownie,” dwelt within the magic circle of the neighborhood. No one, not the most desperate junkie dared mess with him. Brownie was perfectly tailored for our neighborhood: he managed NOT to deliver overdue rent, car payments, subpoenas and IRS notices—marking them “Return to Sender.” At Christmas, he’d reap his rewards.
The morning arrived. Word spread that the Cooperative Test results were in. I raced home dodging the lisping patrol boy who worked the corner of Third Ave. and Carroll Street, dodging trucks and tractor trailers. I ducked down the three concrete steps to our basement apartment, shouldered the hollow plywood front door like Sam Huff, sent the red ribbon of sleigh bells we used as a doorbell, jangling.
Gloria was standing there, a sheaf of business letters in her hand. There were five—St. Augustine, Brooklyn Prep, Xaverian, Saint Leonard’s and St. Francis Prep, typed and sealed in starch-white envelopes
I mumbled a prayer and tore them open.
Five schools. I’d made five schools!
I stumbled back outside. Gloria put her arms around me. “I’m so proud!” She was 38-years-old and loved her sons more than life. “Your father called this morning. He’s telling all the men in the gang.” I looked down. Tommy and Joey were clinging to my legs. We spun round on the sidewalk.
“Five schools."
Fat Rosie lumbered across Carroll Street her flowered mu-mu billowing like an Arab dhow. Rosie spent her mornings sitting under an awning with her name emblazoned on it crocheting hats; her afternoon’s taking numbers from the Puerto Rican factory workers in Industry City. Emo, her boyfriend, a man with a serious gambling problem, had just been found hanging on a meat hook in Bensonhurst. Rosie insisted she didn’t want anything but his stuffed animal as a remembrance. Turned out she believed Emo had hidden $50,000 hidden inside. Rosie kissed me, smearing white lipstick on my cheek. She took my hand, stuck a $10 bill into my palm. “
Glad somebody in this neighborhood ain’t a fucking moron!”
Across the street, Ernie was standing next to Uncle Honey.
“How did you do?” I asked.
“Made St. Leonard’s!”
“You gotta watch them fag priests!” said Honey. “How’d you do?”
“I made…five.”
“Whoa!”
Honey peeled two twenties off a roll of bills, handed them to us. "Congratulations. Yous two’ll get an education. Yous won’t have to break your ass every day like me.”
Ernie pumped his closed fist three times as if masturbating. Honey laughed, amused at his own bullshit. He pretend slapped both of us.
“Get the fuck out of here.”
***
The line of students wavered outside the convent on Whitwell Place. Malachy was eating lunch on the convent’s brick porch, congratulating her eighth-graders as they came by. We joined the line. Sal was already on the porch. Behind him were Kathleen Victor and Dominick D’Alessio.
“I bet you did good.” Jean Wilcox appeared alongside me. She was tall as I was with blue eyes and wavy brown hair. I noticed the top two buttons of her uniform blouse were undone.
“Made all five schools!” Ernie blurted.
“Wow!” said Jean “That’s great”
I blushed.
“Give him a kiss!” Ernie chortled.
And she did. In front of the line of students, she put her hand gently around my neck and pulled me close.
“You know you're not like the rest of us,” she whispered.
I had never kissed, never touched a girl, never known the perfume of an adolescent female. I stood there, experiencing and trying to remember at the same time. The freckled Henry twins, Carolyn and Carol Ann, whistled. Malachy looked up and frowned. I stepped onto the porch where Sal, Rosalie Dilorenzo and D’Alessio, stood alongside the bulky, red-faced nun like courtiers.
She was eating baked fish, boiled potatoes and slices of a purple-red vegetable I hadn’t seen before. Beets.
“Ernest, for your poor mother’s sake,” Malachy said, “I hope some Christian school was willing to take on the burden of your education”
“St. Leonard’s did!” said Ernie.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Will wonders never cease.”
It would be a short-lived miracle. Ernie was thrown out of St. Leonard’s a year later for vandalizing a subway car. A pompadoured, 260 lb. 15-year-old wearing a distinctive green and yellow St. Leonard’s jacket was not hard to remember.
Malachy turned to me. I caught a whiff of her, pissy and sour beneath the starched brown habit, her breath rank with onions and boiled fish.
“Kathleen Victor, Mr. Mulia and Rosalie Dilorenzo were accepted by four high schools. Aren’t you proud of them? Do you see the rewards hard work can bring?”
Sal grinned, clasping his hands above his head like a prize fighter.
“I made five,” I said. “St. Augustine too. I’m gonna go there.”
Startled, Sal hesitated, then walked up, put his right hand behind my neck, shoved me affectionately. “All right!” he said.
“Good job Vinny.” This from Kathleen Victor, not one of Malachy’s pets.
I had a little speech prepared, thanking Malachy for being my teacher…that she was “tough but fair….” I opened my mouth. The nun put down her fork, shot a glance at Jean Wilcox and the Henry twins standing at the edge of the porch.
“You don’t deserve it Coppola,” she said. “I know you for the sneak and the cheat that you are.”
I flinched. This was worse than the beating she’d given me for my story.
“Sister!” Kathleen gasped.
I stood there, staring down at the table. A fly made its way across the checkered tablecloth.
“Excuse me.”
I turned. Jean stood at the top of the porch steps. I brushed past her, tripped on the steps, caught myself and began running, daring my ravaged heart to explode. Block after block I ran, past the old powerhouse, the junkyard with its barrels of toxic chemicals, slowing only when I crossed the Third Street Bridge over Gowanus Canal.
By then I was in another neighborhood.

GOLTEN’S YARD A CONEY ISLAND OF THE MIND

        
On the Gowanus, birdsong or the rhythmic shhhtik of a lawn sprinkler are alien things. At night, I listen for the low groan of foghorns in the harbor, watch shadows cast by the headlights of passing trucks dance across the ceiling, trace the occasional red flash of onrushing ambulances and firetrucks, and the relentless clanking of an invisible behemoth echoing across our backyards: the overhead crane in Golten’s Yard lifting marine boilers and diesel engines the size of freight cars.
Golten’s Yard runs like a spine from Third Avenue to the Gowanus, ribbed by our row houses on one side and Golten Marine, a WWII-era ship repair operation on the other. An artifact of a Brooklyn peopled by Scandinavian and German immigrants that existed before my Italian great grandfather and his seven sons arrived on the canal, in my mind, the beginning of time.
Scattered everywhere are the rusting hulks of ship engines and superstructures looming like disembodied dinosaurs over my head, fantastical machines with steel hatches, tunnels and ladders running in all directions. There are propulsion and navigation panels with needle dials and brass levers out of Jules Verne. Electrical transformers, acres of pipes, spools of wire, overturned barrels filled with glittering crystals and industrial chemicals. Cardboard boxes stuffed with trash, and sometimes unspeakable things.
On the Gowanus, there is one playground, on Degraw Street, but its kiddie pool is clogged with trash, rotting benches, overrun by nodding junkies. Prospect Park might as well be Jurassic Park and Red Hook Pool the Amazon.. I live in a world lifted—families, priests, culture, traditions and animosities intact--from the small towns and villages south of Naples and deposited on the banks of a poisoned waterway; it’s a cynical, riotous, often hilarious, place, three generations of families and their unruly kids, priests, and gangsters spilling all over each other. There are ghosts everywhere, and the feeling that momentous events, vague history and restless spirits hover just beyond my ken in this rundown, forgotten corner of motherless Brooklyn. The feeling that I live in a tribal village separate from the rest of NYC place among kindred people—alive to this day—transforms the poverty, violence, decay and dysfunction around me into savage joy.
I have no idea that in the 17th century, ingenious Dutch settlers built dikes and millponds on a pristine salt water estuary across the East River from Wall Street; no idea that George Washington clashed with the British the 18th century—his men fighting and dying in the ancient farmhouse on Fourth Avenue and Third Street where I play softball on a field glittering with broken glass. No idea that a rapacious19th Century railroad baron carved the Gowanus estuary, renowned for its oysters, into a bustling commercial waterway lined by gasworks, factories, coal yards, docks and slaughterhouses, the beginning of monumental pollution that defines Gowanus to this day.
No playgrounds, but I have Golten’s Yard, a Coney Island of danger and mischief big as a football field, admissible through a hole in the fence in Honey’s backyard. After school, on weekends, in summers, we disappear, dozens of us, like Alice through the looking glass, into a world where there are no adults, no rules, no cops, certainly no safety net. A three room shack on Third Avenue becomes a fort we assault and defend with homemade slingshots firing extruded rubber pellets that litter the ground, and then rocks and bolts, until bleeding and exhausted we collapse to the ground. We climb and crawl over the machines searching for swag neighborhood junkies—my cousin JuJu among them—steal from the freight depots and trucking companies alongside the canal. We unearth a box of expensive leather handbags—Gloria’s Mothers’ Day present—before the mariuoli (thieves) can return to fence it. Another day, we haul off an enormously heavy Carrier air conditioning unit, purely for the joy of pissing them off. And one time, we discover a bloody fetus wrapped in a towel, the handiwork of the neighborhood abortionist, dumped among the trash. (http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/…/fly-fishing-on-gowanu… )
We do this over and over until one morning the FBI corners us standing astounded before a 15-foot tower of cases of Del Monte pineapple juice. Hunting an interstate ring of hijackers, they bag a raggedy crew of a 15-year-olds. A kick in the ass and we’re gone.
A day comes when Golten Marine shuts down. The overhead crane that haunted my childhood goes silent. A single watchman—in my mind a German—is left behind to look after the premises, a gray, wooden structure, 50 yards long, walls lined with hundreds of small pane glass windows, so many it takes months to break them all. Sometimes, after school, I slip into the yard alone, climb a pile of scrap metal and spend 20 minutes sailing rocks through windows, working my way, like Clem Labine, up, down, sideways. I don’t know why I do this. Other boys are playing baseball, studying, taking piano lessons, walking girls home from school. I smash windows. Sure enough, the “German” strikes back, hooking up a scratchy recording—machine gun fire, bombs bursting, shouts and screams—to the foundry’s powerful PA system and blasts me off the mound.
It works once. When the watchman quits, packs of teens from other neighborhoods descend on Golten’s smashing, trashing, wilding. I spend days systematically driving a v-shaped steel beam—balanced on a horizontal cement-filled barrel—along the the bottom of a masonry wall; When the structure collapses I barely avoid being crushed. Someone else ties a thick braided ship’s line to the bottom of overhead crane and soon boys are leaping from the catwalk and sailing 20 feet above the rubble-covered concrete floor on the super swing…until it breaks. Ernesto Benevento, Sal and I are the first to reach the abandoned laboratory finding row upon row of gleaming beakers, test tubes, pipettes, sulfuric and hydrochloric acid, every kind of chemical in brown glass bottles. We grab what we can and stash it in the back of an abandoned truck for “experiments.” A few days later, I’m run over by a yellow taxi as I’m darting across Flatbush Avenue (near today’s Barclays Center) and have my knee smashed and my front teeth knocked out. I was trying to buy a WWII-vintage gas mask at an Army & Navy store;because I want to conduct my “research” safely. When I recover, we head straight to our “lab,” now illuminated by a kerosene lantern, and begin randomly mixing chemicals. Soon, the Pyrex beaker is glowing a hellish yellow and fulminating liquid spilling over the sides. My gas mask doesn’t work. I stagger out of the truck, gagging, vomiting, nearly asphyxiated.
The next Saturday morning, the three of us make our way down into Golten’s basement once again hunting for junkies’ swag. The power is out, so we roll newspapers into makeshift torches. Our torches burn brightly, illumination enough to show us we’re standing ankle deep in shit from the shattered toilets.
“Screw this!” I toss my torch seconds before it sets my sleeve on fire and head up the stairs. It’s lunchtime.
Half-an-hour later, I’m sitting in the kitchen eating a salami sandwich leaking Gulden’s mustard. I hear sirens in the distance. They grow louder and louder crescendoing in a deafening scream. Firetrucks racing along Third Avenue, past Carroll, then, silence.
“Jesus!”
Stomach churning, I get up from the table, walk to the front door, pull it open and look outside. A crowd is already gathered on the corner, the air pungent with acrid black smoke.
Golten’s, a block-long structure, is ablaze. Flames soar 100 feet in the air. Firemen, the same men I hit with eggs at our Election Night bonfire, are racing frantically to hook up hoses, break through the front door, into a cascading Niagara of fire to search for workers trapped inside.
I’ve burned down Golten’s Yard.

The Persimmon Tree

The tree dominates our yard, green, vital, limbs clawing above the grim, windowless, brick and cinderblock walls that enclose our house on three sides like a prison yard. A persimmon tree with shiny, two-tone leaves and fissured, rectangular bark that resembles alligator hide, planted by Vincenzo Coppola, my immigrant grandfather, long before I was born. Trees are rare things in Gowanus. On Carroll Street below Third Avenue, ours is the only house with a backyard tree. Johnny the Butcher has a pigeon coop; Joey DeSimone, his rose bushes; Honey, a wise guy, a circular blue swimming pool where I see him dunk Joey Heatherton. There are a few sickly sumac trees on the banks of the Gowanus. Gasping at the stench, we strip the leaves and slash ourselves with thin, whip-like branches. To see a tree, I have to walk six long, sloping blocks to Prospect Park.

My grandfather, a large and dour man, makes bad wine in the cellar. We have a peculiar relationship: He’d twist my cheek between his thumb and forefinger—“Come sie bello”—until I screamed; I’d hide rusty barrel hoops in his garden hoping he’d step on one. Somehow, he’d coax tomatoes, peppers, melons and squash from his tiny plot. Years later, under threat of a lawsuit brought a yuppie tenant I have this magical dirt analyzed by an environmental expert at Syracuse University. There’s enough lead and base metal to build a chemical weapon. The cost of hauling out and replacing the soil runs into tens of thousands of dollars. The rent barely covers the mortgage.

“Goddamn this canal,” I moan, “I’m screwed.”

“Probably not,” the scientist says, “all the yards in South Brooklyn are poisoned.”

Figs and grapes blossom in grandfather’s garden, but the persimmon tree is his pride and joy. As long as he lives—he’ll die of a heart attack working in his daughter’s Bensonhurst garden —the tree never bears fruit. Not once.  I’m his namesake and, sure enough, his obsession becomes mine.  Year after year, I’d wait for spring, watch the tree flower, but no pollination.  I discover persimmon trees are gender-specific. Judging by its skimpy stamens and overripe pistils, this was a girl tree, though, occasionally, it could switch sex like the morphodites (hermaphrodites) neighborhood mopes were always shouting about:

“What are you a fucking morphodite?

I hike up to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden on Washington Avenue, a dangerous place for a white Catholic school boy in the 1960s. I’m told that for a price a botanist will show up at our house with a ladder, and using what I imagine to be a giant bug sprayer, he’d attempt to pollinate our 60-foot tree. I can’t see this happening in my neighborhood. People already consider me odd. Besides, I don’t even know what a persimmon is. Then it turns out my grandmother had endured similar tribulations. Anna Falcone was a skilled, hardworking immigrant for whom the streets really were paved with gold. In one generation, she and her sister—a woman ugly as witch in a fairy tale—whom I only knew as “Zia” (Aunt), owned a seamstress shop, a grocery, a bar, two row houses—one I grew up in--an apartment building on Third Avenue and President Street and supposedly, a "palazzo" (palace) in Pagani, our ancestral hometown.

Her husband is the problem: either impotent, homosexual, or maybe a morphodite. The words in Neapolitan dialect are vague. Finocchio, for example, is fennel, but also “gay.” At the time, strapping, mascolino Vincenzo was living either in Argentina or Bahia, Brazil. A practical woman, Anna shed her husband, annulled her marriage and imported my grandfather like a sack of coffee beans. He wasn’t ambitious, but he got the job done. In ten years, he sired four daughters—Tessie, Rosanne, Frances, Lucy—and my father, Joe, born in 1924. Anna died when Joe was seventeen. I know my grandmother only as a faded signature on my father’s school records—I’d teach at the very high school he dropped out of—discovered in a dusty basement in Williamsburg. According to family legend, The Aunt, my grandmother’s business partner, demanded Vincenzo marry her. Of course, he refused. Don’t fairy tales always start this way? And the financial troubles that would haunt my family for the next sixty years began.

At the end of World II, The Aunt dispatched my grandfather to Pagani, 20 miles southeast of Naples, to collect back rent on the properties she now owned, a considerable sum. In effect, the money was frozen by Mussolini for a decade. I’d hear the story a thousand times growing up.  Vincenzo stayed and stayed, didn’t bother answering her letters. After eight months, he returned and announced the money, down to the last lira, was gone. He’d dared spurn her marriage proposal, now he’d pissed away her money? Her revenge was worthy of  a Medici. She disinherited Vincenzo, his offspring, my brothers and me. forever, and then went a step further: all the property, the businesses, the five-story apartment building, went to wily Mariuchella, a distant cousin brought from Italy years before as The Aunt’s maid. My parents, my three brothers and I spend the next 13 years crowded into a three-room flat above a candy store. (She charges us $35 dollars a month.) My mom had to do the laundry in the sink, pour buckets of water on rambunctious teenagers hanging out on the stoop so I could study. Next door, The Aunt lives in the corner apartment with a library, a piano and dining room. Gloria has to bring her bowls of spaghetti in tribute. Her adopted son, known in the neighborhood as “Professor Beans,” piles pasta on his plate, leaving my mother—pregnant with me—hungry. He says he has to feed his brain,

When Vincenzo passes away, we move around the corner to 474 Carroll Street, the persimmon tree in the backyard. On spring evenings, I’d lie beneath its thick branches, counting the airliners flying overhead, imagining other places, other people, other worlds.  

                                                            ***

In the spring of ’81, I’m among the reporters Newsweek dispatches to Rome to cover the papal assassination attempt, a very convoluted story. A Turk, a neo-fascist, perhaps unwittingly, is working for the Bulgarians who, in turn, are employed by the Soviets who want Pope John Paul II liquidated because he’d supported Lech Walenska and the Polish unions movement. I wind up in the bowels of the Italian legal system, in Tuscany with a Mossad agent who guides me to Ankara, Turkey. There, I interview Ugur Mumcu, a fearless journalist who’d be assassinated for his revelations. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-ugur-mumcu-1481231.html

My world had definitely opened up.  Aunt Tessie, one of Vincenzo’s daughters, happens to be in Rome that spring. In her 60s and feisty, Tessie speaks fluent Italian. I call her from my office near the Spanish Steps, rent a car and on a bright Sunday morning we’re off to Pagani to visit relatives we’d never met or barely knew existed. Pagani is no Tuscany. The streets are dirty, there’s  barbed wire strung on balconies. Shouting teenage punks hang out on the corners or buzz around on motorbikes looking to steal purses and gold chains.  It feels like home. Two of our octogenarian relatives: a woman medical doctor and her husband, Aeneas Falcone, a French teacher (a dubious professional choice in a town whose name literally translates as “Heathens”), live in an ancient apartment, one wall bisected by a gaping crack that looks like a lightning bolt—earthquake damage.  But the surprise, the real surprise comes when we walk across town to visit the Coppolas.

Of course, word had spread. Our relatives have gone out and no doubt blown a week’s budget to prepare a sumptuous Sunday dinner for us. Eighteen of them and more arriving by the minute. One very handsome guy is almost a double of my blond-haired brother Thomas—mystery solved. After a while, the room literally begins to buzz.  People are staring. A few are pointing at me.

“Vincenzo Coppola e qui ! Vincenzo Coppola e venuto! “ (Vincent Coppola is here!)

People begin to hug and embrace me, some with tears in their eyes. A man tells me my grandfather paid for his operation when he was a boy. “And now I can walk.” Another says Vincenzo gave him tuition for hairdressing school. He put food on another cousin’s table...and another and another. A man assures me my grandfather tried to get him legal papers so he could emigrate to the United States. It didn’t work out, but it’s okay. He never forgot. None of them ever forgot.

I was his namesake.

                                                            ***

Back in Brooklyn, I’m told a wise guy has bought the house next door—it had once belonged to The Aunt—as a gift for his aging mother. A neighborhood woman, she was bored living in his enormous Long Island mansion. She missed the Gowanus. All her friends live here. This is a ground-up restoration, no expense spared, though I suspect he got a break on labor.  Highly skilled workers and carpenters are there for months, disassembling the place brick by brick, then painstakingly installing imported marble and tile, a state-of the art kitchen, central air. What had been a dank cellar becomes a finished basement. The man is meticulous: an African-American craftsman arrives from the South to hand-carve the bannister on the winding staircase. The exterior, a modernist take on a classic Brownstone with enormous oval glass windows set like eyes in the façade. James Caan—who else?—arrives to donate the bronze lion’s head knocker staring balefully through wrought iron bars onto the sidewalk. In the backyard, a gazebo sprouts and our rusty chain-link fence is replaced by a tall brick wall, its top as sinuous as a sine curve. The house is beautiful as a Venetian palace, so outstanding on our ragtag street, it stops traffic. My mother tells  me dubious “telephone workers” and “gas company guys” are constantly trying to get into our cellar, no doubt to install wiretaps. She chases them away.

                                                            ***

In the mid-80s our family literally blows apart. My brother Thomas is in Milan hoping to work as a fashion model. Jo-Ann, a friend from Our Lady of Peace elementary school, tagged along, as did the millions of unknown viral particles replicating in his blood. Two years later, he’s dying of AIDS, his chiseled body and handsome features so disfigured by purple Kaposis Sarcoma lesions I cannot recognize him. Life is so random: Jo-Ann becomes Madonna’s make-up artist. My brother Joe is shooting heroin, an addiction that continues to this day. My father Joe has full-blown emphysema. My other sibling is in the hole to gangsters for tens of thousands of dollars in gambling debts. I leave my job at Newsweek and stumble into a disastrous second marriage. Gloria tries to care for all of us. The hoarseness she dismisses as stress, a precursor to the throat cancer that will soon kill her. She’d never smoked a cigarette in her life. After she suffers through a failed operation to save her vocal cords, I sit helpless watching her gasp and choke as fluid flows into her lungs. (http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/05/losing-mom.html)

 I’d make my way to the backyard to sit among the rose bushes I’d planted in Thomas’s memory. Many years after Vincenzo’s passing, the ugly cinderblock back walls are now covered in lush green moss like an enclosed English garden. The Persimmon towers above all, branches thick with glistening leaves overhanging the adjoining yards a like a canopy. One day when I arrive, the house is deathly silent. Gloria is at a doctor’s appointment. My father, a shadow of the tough-as-nails longshoreman I’d so loved and feared, sits drowsing on the living room couch, an oxygen mask covering the lower half of his face. The machine hisses and gurgles, a sound I’ve come to hate. I walk through the kitchen, pull open the back door and walk into the yard.

I stand there astonished.

 All that is left of the a persimmon tree is a blunt, blackened stump, its amputated lower branches like arms reaching to the heavens in shame and supplications. Everything, save for a carpet of rotting leaves is gone. Thomas’s rose garden has been crushed by falling branches. I feel tears streaming down my checks and then I see red. I charge back inside.

“Dad, what's  happened!  Who did this to our tree!  Who the fuck did this?”

He looks at me. I notice he’s crying behind the mask.  “The lady next door complained the leaves were falling in her yard.”

“Falling in her yard, so you cut Grandpa’s tree down?”

“I wouldn’t do that.  Honey sent a crew of guys with chainsaws.  I couldn’t stop them.” In the past, my father would have sent them running, wiseguys or no.

I stand there enraged, and suddenly, impotent.   A certain old lady picks up her phone and complains about dead leaves in her yard. It probably happens a thousand time a day in America, but not in Gowanus. Her wish is somebody’s command.  And 75 years of family history—my grandfather, my brother Thomas and his Easter rabbits and ducks, the July 4^th barbecues,  rose bushes and tomato plants, our  joys and tragedies, vanishes.

Eyes Closed Tightly

 On a bright winter’s afternoon, I’m crossing Third Avenue with half-a-dozen classmates, heading home after another empty school day in the suffocating string that encircles my life like a rosary. At exactly 3:41 P.M., the ground shakes; a wave of heat and pressure scatters us like pins in a bowling alley. My cheap tan schoolbag goes skittering across the pavement, followed, a few moments later, by an ear-splitting roar. Cars, trucks, the B-37 bus—passengers’ frightened faces pressed against windows— slam to a halt. When I can hear again, all around me people—Tony the Barber, Chitty the vegetable vendor, Dolly Romanelli from the bar on the corner—are yelling and pointing toward a billowing pillar of smoke and flame rising above Bush Terminal. Carroll Street begins to fill up, women and children pouring out of the row houses. Sirens wail in the distance.
I’m a parochial school kid at a moment when atomic war with godless Soviets lurks at the borders of my life. A few weeks earlier, I’d stared at tabloid pictures of Russian T-55 tanks rolling into Budapest, crushing freedom fighters, though I didn’t know what or where Hungary was. At Our Lady of Peace School, orange Air Raid Instructions—distributed by Con Edison—stare at me from the walls. There are regular air raid drills, nuns in flying brown and black habits shouting “Get under your desk! Cover exposed parts of your body! Close eyes tightly!” I’d seen “The Day the World Ended” with my friends at the Garfield Theater on Fifth Avenue; heard my older cousin JuJu Castaldo had sent a fire axe whistling through the screen during a Saturday matinee of “Them,” killing a monstrous twitching ant birthed by nuclear explosions in the western desert.
Standing on the corner, I watch stunned factory workers streaming along Third from Bush Terminal toward Atlantic Avenue, some bleeding, their clothes torn and covered in grime and soot, an eerie precursor to a tower looming half a lifetime away. And then a countermovement: My father, my cousin Jerry Pepe, my Uncle Sonny, other neighborhood longshoremen, hurrying in the opposite direction, toward the explosion.
Disaster struck two miles from my house on Bush Terminal’s 35th Street pier. Today, home to artists and effete fashion designers Bush Terminal in the 1950s was blue collar, the largest warehousing, manufacturing and shipping complex in the United States. (Everything about Brooklyn was outsized. Population-wise, it was the third largest city in the United States, bigger even than sprawling Los Angeles.)
On the pier that afternoon, dockworkers were using an oxyacetylene torch to cut away a steel pillar to access and repair a cargo crane. The 6,000 degree heat ignited burlap bags filled with highly inflammable foam rubber scrap stacked nearby. Armed with handheld extinguishers, the longshoremen were quickly driven back by billowing smoke and flame. When firemen arrived, burning rubber—scattered on the pier like a trail of birdseed—reached 37,000 lbs. of Cordeau Detonant, explosive detonating fuse no one seemed to know was there.
The devastating blast, the largest explosion in New York City history until 911, killed ten people, injured hundreds, shattered windows more than a mile away. Flying glass and metal shrapnel slicing through the thin air killed one person 1000 yards from ground zero. Miraculously, the full force of the explosion passed above the heads of firefighters on four FDNY boats racing to battle the blaze. Across the harbor in Manhattan’s financial district, buildings shook and rattled.
That Monday night, I snuck outside and ran to the newsstand on the corner of Fourth Avenue and Union, next door to the College Restaurant. Ignoring the New York Times, I grabbed 5-cent copies of the late editions of the Daily News and Daily Mirror, the only papers—except for the Morning Telegraph, the handicapper’s bible—my father read. When I got back, I found him, my uncle, my cousin Jerry, and two other neighborhood dockworkers, in our backyard. They were sitting at a picnic table, downing straight shots of Four Roses whiskey. Joe Coppola wasn’t a drinker.
“Dad, I got you the papers. The story is everywhere!”
“Get back in the house,” my father growled. “This ain’t for you.”
Disappointed, I passed through the dented screen door into our narrow kitchen, a place so cramped the washing machine was jammed next to the sink.
“Mom, what are they doing?”
“Never mind, go upstairs with your brothers.”
“Mom…”
“Go.”
I pounded up the narrow, enclosed staircase my father had rigged to connect the floors. Pushing Joey and Tommy out of the way, I ducked into my room, a mirror image of the downstairs’ kitchen, closing the door behind me. My window faced the backyard. I slid the sash open, eased my elbows above the whistling radiator, onto the rusting fire escape.
Under a naked lightbulb strung from a grape trellis, the men were gathered around a wooden bench. My uncle straddled the bench, his right leg bent sideways at the knee. A folded washcloth in his hand. Two guys grasped him by the shoulder. My cousin Jerry held a short, wooden-handled hammer.
“You ready?” Jerry said. He was a thin, hyperactive man, inveterate horseplayer, usually the butt of my Uncle Sonny’s outrageous jokes and laughing insults. Jerry, no slouch, never talked below a shout.
“Let’s get going,” Sonny said. He stuffed the washcloth in his mouth.
Jerry stood there, a long moment. I close my eyes tightly.
“Fuck this, I ain’t doing it.” Jerry said and stepped away. He handed the hammer to my father. Joe stepped forward, swung the hammer, a short, vicious arc, at my uncle’s knee. Sonny screamed, the burly men holding him in place. After a moment, he nodded. My father hit him again.
Terrified, I watched the men take turns smashing each other’s knees with the bloody hammer, their muffled moans driving me back into my dark room. These were men so much a part of my childhood. Uncle Sonny and Cousin Jerry showed up at our house every Saturday morning during the racing season, usually joined by my Uncle Sal Giordano, a NYPD detective at the 88th Precinct in Bedford Stuyvesant, just off the night shift. Gloria, my mom, would serve pots of strong coffee, enormous batches of scrambled ham and eggs, piping hot Italian bread, I’d fetch from Johnny Gallo’s Bakery. They’d argue, shout and curse, pore over the Scratch Sheet, calling each other imbeciles over every pick at Aqueduct that afternoon. To this day, these raucous mornings, when the world was young, and full of hope and possibility, remain the best in my life.
This terrible evening they were “making a case,” preparing to claim they’d been injured in the aftermath of the explosion. I’m sure the same thing was happening on every street bordering the Gowanus Canal. In the era before “containerization,” dockworkers probably made up 70 percent of the working population. In a few days, they’d appear limping at the mobbed-up ILA (International Longshoremen’s Association) clinic on Court and Union, or visit the sympathetic orthopedist who kept a Ferrari parked outside his brownstone office on 8th Avenue. He’d write a report. They’d contact their lawyers and file a lawsuit.
In a place where, as soldiers used to say, no one had a “pot to piss in, nor a window to toss it out,” everyone had a lawyer. Even me. Mine was Abraham L. whose office was across from Borough Hall. I don’t know if Abraham was a good lawyer, but he wore shiny suits and once gave me his tie. When I was hit by a taxi while crossing Flatbush Avenue—my knee twisted and lacerated, front teeth knocked out—he managed to lose. My parents had assured me my “case” would provide me “college money.”
Looking back at these men, all WWII combat veterans, not one of whom ever took advantage of the transformational GI Bill, most of whom died young from cigarettes and stress and hard drinking, I find myself asking, what level of alienation or desperation forces you to believe that crippling yourself for a few thousand dollars is the only career option you have?

An Easter Tale

 My mom was a great cook, but she couldn’t bake. Why would she with Cioffi’s just a few blocks past the Gowanus up on Union Street? 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, and other delicious pastries for $3.60, and still 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, happily risk damnation for a crunchy ricotta cream cannoli speckled with cintron.
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 I'd devour them washed down with glass after glass of cold milk.
However, I couldn’t get Pizza di Grano aka Pastiera di Grano, the traditional peasant pie made with sweet ricotta (think Italian cheese cake only denser) flecked with grain, lemon peel and candied citron 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 mother a tiny pizza grano wrapped in crinkly aluminum foil as an Easter gift. I don’t know if it was the rarity, the scarcity, or that the 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 brothers were gluttons.
Cioffi’s fell down. Their pizza grano looked all right 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 grano in Bensonhurst, on Court Street, in Little Italy; nothing compared with the old ladies creation. (By the way, what was grano? Where do you get it and what do you do with it? ) The nonne kept it in brown paper bags, but they weren’t talking.
There was always leftover struffoli, little bbs of fried dough dipped in honey and covered with sprinkles. I hated them.
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 was plenty of grain--they fed it to cows--but no Italians. Easters, I’d fly home to Brooklyn with my kids, Gaby and Thomas. Gloria saved me a sliver of her tiny pizza grano.
“Mom, just get the recipe.” I’d say grumbling and picking at the crumbs.
At the time. I had juice. We had a Rome bureau, a research library, no doubt 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!"
There was always leftover struffoli, little bbs of fried dough dipped in honey and covered with sprinkles. I hated them.
Life went on. In the 1980s, Thomas died of AIDS. My father died of emphysema. My surviving brothers descended into the hell of drugs 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 illness and its aftermath which you can read about on my blog below
At Gloria’s funeral, I sat there in front of her open casket trying to figure out how things had gone so wrong, so fast. I was still in my 30s and saw no way forward. At one point, an old woman hobbled up to me. I kissed her dry cheek, smelled the 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 the funeral.
It was written in Italian, in tiny script. It was the recipe for pizza grano. I read the first few lines, It began: “Under a full moon, soak the grain....”
I’ve never tried to make my own.


https://salernocapitale.wordpress.com/…/pastiera-nacque-pr…/


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

Reckless

Reckless
The entrance to the RR subway on Fourth and Union is vertiginous as a ski jump; trip and you crush your skull. Day after day, I  launch myself full-speed in the dim, grimy light, worn-out Thom McCann shoes clattering, barely gripping the steps’ steel edges. A hundred times, daring myself to fall; exhilarated but not knowing why. (The “slow” entrance, which I avoid, consists of two short, perpendicular stairways.) To a kid, Flatbush Avenue between Third and Fourth is wide as the Mississippi; taxis, buses, Daily News delivery trucks race to and from the Manhattan Bridge. I play human “chicken” feinting and dodging 10,000 pound trucks, just inches from their bumpers, right up until a Yellow cab sends me flying 20 feet, knocks my teeth out and lacerates my knee. Glad my Lee dungarees aren’t torn, but when I roll up my pants--the milky white bone of my femur and kneecap is exposed--I collapse on the asphalt, waking up in Kings County Hospital, my father, Joe, stalking the corridor.
I’d been en route to an Army & Navy store near Buddy Lee (the Barney's Boys' Town of Brooklyn) to buy a gas mask. Butchie Mulia, Fat Ernie and I had looted cases of hydrochloric acid and other toxic and, no doubt, explosive, chemicals, from the abandoned Golten Marine laboratory. We’re going to mix them randomly in the back of a truck as an “experiment.”
Gowanus is a reckless place. We’re teens without girls, few organized sports, or the pull of education or ambition. Our role models, “Junior” Persico, “Honey” Christiano, “Apples” McIntosh,” are reckless beyond imagining. On weekends, when kids in Great Neck and Greenwich—places I’ve never heard of—are on dates, we race, hearts pounding, through a gauntlet of red lights on Third Avenue under the Gowanus Expressway, “Joe Bo” Mongiello driving his white ’60 Pontiac Isley Brother’s “Shout” blasting. I grin, my new teeth flashing, until Joe attempts to stick his head between the spokes of the steering wheel. The other guys cheer.
It’s not our fault. It’s a reckless thing to go to the Fox theater on Flatbush Ave.: reckless to walk to the library in Park Slope. The gangbangers--Bishops and Apaches—surrounding St. Augustine H.S.don’t register that I, wearing a jacket and tie, am brutalized by thugs in clerical collars between rosaries. To me, Hook Pool is a shark tank. Of course, it’s very, very reckless for any male outsider to even pass through our mafia-run neighborhood
Some nights, P. a toupee-wearing 20-year-old, lines up his 65 Coupe Deauville on Carroll and Hoyt, stomps the gas, ignores the stop sign on Bond, hurdles across the Gowanus, up Carroll at 90 mph, kids playing on the sidewalk, runs the light on Third, past Our Lady of Peace Church, and barrels across the broad lanes of Fourth, showers of sparks erupting as the rear axle bottoms on an enormous dip. He barely keeps control. Months later, on the way back from a funeral, he’ll jump the guard rail of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway and plow head-on into a passenger car filled with people. I was in another car. I remember seeing a woman's bloody face protruding from a broken windshield.
One summer night (remember the song)," Honey’s backyard—where starlet Joey Heatherton, the Lindsay Lohan of her day, had been tossed fully clothed into the pool, Blaise, pear-shaped, with a thick black pompadour and baby-face, announces he’s going to the Capri Club, a bookie joint where dangerous men entertain their goomahs (“comares”) on Saturday nights. Blaise has decided he needs" a drink.
"Carroll Street is teeming; our apartments stifling, Monte’s Venetian Room is packed with suburban strangers. Three generations of families sit outside on lawn chairs, radios tuned to the Mets game, cranky babies in strollers, teen girls wearing white lipstick and tight jeans, wallyos (gualiones) on the corner heads rotating like radar dishes, looking for action that never comes. On the cobblestone street, Caddies and Electra convertibles from Court Street, the radios blasting “Rag Doll,” are backed up at the light.
Blaise is naked as St. Francis and the Pope.
He walks up the suddenly silent street, politely waits, dick-dangling, for the light to change Horns blare in protest. Curses erupt from outraged Puerto Rican drug dealers heading for the salsa clubs of Manhattan. The first giggles and obscene jokes ripple up and down the block.
“Stop that moron,” an Irish cop stuck five car lengths from the corner, yells.
Utterly calm, Blaise crosses Third Avenue. I’m reminded of a blissful martyr in a stained window. "Mack the Knife" blasts a warning from the Capri Club. Blaise turns right, walks past Tony’s Barber shop and into the mouth of the dragon Hit men and thieves momentarily stunned and speechless.
Two years later, in college I get word of a “reunion” in Prospect Park. The last reunions I attended ended in a gunfight at Plum Beach (my unarmed friends attack the shooter) and a riot at the Bay A Go-Go in Sheepshead Bay. This time we arrive at the top of a steep hill in the dead of night, lugging cases of beer, wine and a pharmacopoeia of illicit substances. As always, there are no girls.
Blaise arrives on crutches, leg in a plaster cast. At the end of a long evening , he jumps off the top of the hill and rolls howling fifty yards to the bottom. Of course, “Lenny Spares,” Joe Bo and the rest of the crew follow him.
I stay behind.