“Mah-ning.”
Chickie Ruggerio’s South Boston vowels grate in his ear.
“It’s ‘Merico. Is Sally up?
“Oh boy, you two jerks have done it this time. Missed school, ruined your clothes, disobeyed the one teacher who’s trying to make something out of yous. The Principal gave me the whole story. Your mother, God love her, is gonna hear about this.”
The tirade finished, Chickie giggles. “Sally told me about Shit-the Pants stinking out the class. The canal must smell sweeter.”
Americo grimaces.
“Fatty laad ass paaked in that tiny desk!”
“Can I please talk to Sally?”
“No! You want to get my poor son in more trouble?"
“It’s important.”
“Everything’s important. Lemme see if the baastid’s up.”
He hears yelling in the background, then two minutes later, a hoarse whisper.
“Yeah?”
“I’m at Freddie’s.”
“Ain’t even 8:00 o’clock!”
“Come on man! I can't sleep!”
A long pause. “Who didja tell?” Sally hisses.
“Nobody. You?
“You gotta be kidding?”
“I’m serious.”
“Aw right, I’ll be in the park in 15 minutes.”
“The paaak? I don’t think so mister!” Chickie shouts in the background. “You’ve got chores to do.”
Americo crosses the sidewalk, then jukes and dodges—Frank Gifford shedding tacklers--through the stream of cars and trucks racing along 4th Avenue. Horns blare.
“Stupid bastid!” a driver shouts.
Americo grins. He’d been run over by a taxi on Flatbush Avenue a year ago trying to get to May’s Department Store on Fulton to buy a sweater for the class Christmas party. Lacerated his knee, busted his front tooth and missed the party. He’d spent the night in a ward in King’s County Hospital and remembered—or dreamed—his distraught father pacing outside the ward all night.
He was reckless. Americo'd throw himself down the concrete and steel steps to the RR subway station on Union Street, hands-free, cheap leather soles slipping, at the very edge of control, a misstep from pulverizing his skull. Late afternoons, he’d cling to the backs of returning Con Edison trucks, feet dangling behind the wheels, fingers inches from the gigantic spools of cable pulling at thier guy wires; jump across rooftops, a whisper away from falling. He couldn’t control himself.
His Keds hit the concrete and steel grating that divides Fourth Avenue into six eastbound and westbound lanes. Fifty feet below, the subway roars sending a blast of fetid air into his face. He races into Third Street Park, ducks through a hole in the fence. He walks across the softball field; broken glass glitters like diamonds, sneakers dangle from the batting cage, where a junkie nods by the fence near the third base line.
“Oye…Chico…Dame.”
“Fuck you!” He skirts the guy.
He stops, forces himself to walk back.
“Sorry man.” Americo drops a quarter in the guy’s outstretched hand.
A two story fieldstone house divided the park. Softball fields and handball courts on one side, wading pool, swings, monkey bars and a bocce ball court, on the other. Americo knows the building; a farmhouse restored by the WPA during the Depression. Among the dusty books in the basement of the Grand Army Plaza "ibrary, he’d found a reference to the place that dated it to 1699. A Dutchman,Claes Arentson Vechte, had built a dike system that allowed him to trap water at high tide, then float on a Gowanus tributary, harvest of oysters, row past Red Hook into the harbor and Manhattan beyond.
In August 1776, General George Washington, his Continental Army in parlous danger, detailed the 1st Maryland Regiment to hold the building against General William Howe’s swarming Hessian and Scottish Highlanders. Hold it they did, allowing the ragged Americans to flee across the Gowanus to Brooklyn Heights and then make their way across the fog-draped harbor into Manhattan, averting what might have been the first and final battle of the Revolutionary War—a rout. Americo knew the words Washington uttered as the battle raged:
“What brave fellows I must this day lose.”
Legend had it that soldiers' skeletons lay in a mass grave underneath the Red Devil Paints factory on Third Avenue. For all Americo knew that could be the work of Al Capone who grew up a few blocks away on Garfield Place. In 1960, he watched a group of odd-looking white people--WASPS from the Brooklyn Historical Society--dedicate a bronze bas-relief honoring the Marylanders. A few weeks later, Sonny the Indian tore the plaque from the farmhouse wall and sold it for scrap.
“Indians lived here first. Where’s their fucking plaque? Am I right?”
“Chief!” Honey pleaded, “You gonna bring the FBI on my head.”
“Scalp,” Sonny corrected.
Four mounting pins, long as railroad spikes, were still embedded in the wall. Americo walked over to the wall, grabbed the two top pins, placed his cheek against the cool, discolored stone to listen to history. History smelled of piss.
“Whataya humping the wall?”
Sally stood behind him.
“The Second Sorrowful Mystery,” Americo answers. “The Crucifixion.”
“Wrong again."
“Who gives a shit.”
Sally steps closer. “What happened to your face? You fall down the stais?”
“My father.”
“You musta deserved it, right?”
“Yeah right.” Americo feels tears spring to his eyes. “Like the baby?”
“What?”
“In the lot.”
“It ain’t a baby.”
“Bullshit!”
“It’s a fe-tus…”
“A what?”
“I talked to my sister Patty. It’s a baby that ain’t been born…taken
out of a girl’s stomach.
“What for?”
“To kill it you moron. Because the girl ain’t married or don’t want it or…"
“That’s murder.”
“No it ain’t,” Sally said uncertainly. “It’s like a business around here.”
“Fuck you saying?”
“Abortion…It stops a girl from being pregnant.”
"Who does?"
"I don't know!"
Americo’s mind races. "They killed him and threw him away like a piece of garbage.”
“You can’t kill it if it ain’t born!”Sally argues.
“It moved.” Americo hesitates. “It was born. Got a soul and ain’t been baptized.”
“I know,” Sally mumbles, surrendering whatever logic he’d amassed. “Don’t get no crazy ideas about calling the cops. Not in this neighborhood. Right?”
“Cops?” Americo sniffs “Those fucks probably in on it.”
He feels the idea grip him. A thing tied to saints and martyrs, to years of catechism and World War II stories in his head. A desire to be courageous and decent. To be, in the words of a song his mother would sing when he was a little boy, a “stout-hearted man.”
After a moment, he says, “We go to the church. We get holy water and shit and we baptize the baby, give it a name and the last rites. Catechism says you can do it when it’s dead. You and me, we bury it. Not right for him to be out there all alone.”
“We can do that,” Sally say softly. He looks at Americo, waiting for another crazy idea.“We don’t tell nobody, right?”
“Right.”
"I mean it!"
Americo is thinking of something that happened years before, a phrase he’d seen typed on his father's union's insurance form.
“Spontaneous abortion.”
He’d looked the words up in the library. He kept the knowledge to himself along with the image of Gloria crying and crying, his aunts snarling at his father. The mumbled apologies and unfulfilled promises. He remembered Aunt Lucy driving him and the twins to Spumoni Gardens for pizza when they weren’t hungry. Part of him died with the baby sister he never knew. Now he promises to find out who killed this baby. Man or woman, cop, gangster or priest. Doesn't matter. Like Gawain and Galahad, he'd found a quest, a fell purpose to which he could dedicate himself.
At 3:00 P.M. Saturday, Sally and Americo walk out of Our Lady of Peace Church, a Coke bottle filled with holy water dunked out of the font and a test tube of Chrism, (“olive oil and balm blessed by the bishop on Holy Thurday”) a prayer book, Sally, an altar boy, had stolen from the sacristy. The bouquet of wilted flowers Americo borrowed from St. Anthony’s Chapel in the back of the church.
Sister Mary Dermott stops them at the top of the steps. Tall, austere, bloodless, the polar opposite of Malachy who resembles Sgt. Biff O’Reilly on Rin-Tin-Tin. Dermott’s pale blue eyes, magnified by rimless eyeglasses, bore into Americo.
“Have you made your weekly Confession?
“Yes Sister,” Sally lies.
“No Sister,” Americo blurts
Sally gives him a murderous look.
Dermott glances at her watch. “March back in there. Father Masseo is still in the confessional.”
"Jerking off no doubt," Sally thinks.
A minute later, Americo kneels in the dark, overheated booth; it smells of polish and candle-wax.
“Bless me Father for I have sinned. It has been one week since my last Confession. These are my sins I cursed…I had impure thoughts five times. I…”
Americo shuts his mouth. He fidgets, waiting for the priest to pronounce a penance. Father Masseo's sour breath leaks past the violet perfume of Sen-Sen candy. Americo peers at the blurred figure behind the translucent fiberglass screen and feels himself sinking. A sheen of sweat spreads across his forehead.
The priest sits motionless. “Go on my son.”
“I hit my father…”
Silence, then,“A mortal sin The Fourth Commandment: ‘Honor thy Father and thy Mother.’”
“He was hurting my mother.”
Unseen, Masseo stirs, moves forward, interested in lurid gossip among the Italians.
“He kicked her!” Americo’s whisper is strangled.
“There are ways to handle…”
“I want him to die!”
“God forgive you.”
“Me?”
“He gave you life.”
“He killed my baby sister!” Americo shouts. "I remember now!"
Masseo struggles to rise in the cramped confessional. The middle door is halfway open when Sally slams it closed, the noise echoing like a gunshot in the empty church. Sally grabs Americo by his sweatshirt and pushes him toward the back of the church. Half-a-dozen black-clad crones turn to stare at the boys, rosaries dangling from their claws.
“Are you nuts?” Sally whispers “I heard what you said!”
The two run out of the church. Rubbing his left elbow, Masseo lumbers after them trrying to make sure he knew who they were.
Half-an-hour later, Sally and Americo lugging a spade from Honey’s backyard garden scuttles under the metal drums that enclosed the clearing. Neither boy notices Ernie peering at them from the fifth floor window of his building on the far edge of the lot.
"Fucking thieves!” he chortles. “And they didn’t call me!”
He swallows the last bite of his sandwich, grabs his blue Brooklyn Dodger jacket, stuffs a pack of Twinkies in his pocket and hurries down the stairs, a boulder rumbling down a mountainside.
The child lay arms outstretched, under the scarlet pillowcase.
Americo drives the shovel into the dirt; the blade glances off a chunk of concrete just below the surface, sending a shock through his funny bone. He moves a foot to the left and tries again. This time the shovel slices sinto the earth. He begins digging.
Sally kneels over the pillowcase, preparing to wrap it around the boy.
“Don’t cover his face,” Americo says. “We need to pour Holy Water on his forehead.”
“Come on!” Sally says.
A smell, sickly and sweet, assaults his nostrils. Sally jerks his head away. Americo drops the shovel, walks over. He kneels down. It takes all his will to lift the pillowcase. He grabs a corner, begin to tuck it under, then realizes he has to lift the thing. It squishes in his hands. Something sour races from his stomach into his throat. He gags, but holds on. Eyes averted, he begins wrapping the cloth, once, twice, around the head and body, till only the blackened face is visible. He’d seen pink-faced babies baptized in church, swaddled in white linen and Italian lace.
Gently, he lays the bundle against one of the barrels, then walks back to the grave. He's down a foot when the shovel clangs against something solid. He kneels and brushes the remaining dirt away with his hand. Concrete. A floor, he realizes, the remnants of some long-demolished shed or shack.
“Shit!”
He bangs away, striking sparks. He'll need a sledgehammer to break through.
“You think it's deep enough?”
Sally looks up. He' s pulling bottles from his knapsack, spreading them on a towel he’d grabbed from a clothesline in one of the yards next to the lot.
“There’s a floor,” Americo says.
He hears something, distinct from the muffled sounds of traffic on Third Avenue. He whirls, listening. An airliner drones overhead, cruciform against the sky.
“It’s deep enough!” pleads Sally. “We’ll cover it with rocks."
Americo puts down the shovel. He walks over, takes a breath, picks up the bundle, lays it in the crook of his left arm. He makes the Sign of the Cross
“O.K. Let’s get going.”
Sally mechanically crosses himself, then drops the missal back on the towel. He knows the words by heart. He steps forward, holding the Coke bottle in his right hand.
“I baptize you,” he hesitates. “Salvatore Vincent. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.”
He pours the water onto the tiny forehead. It runs off, soaking Americo’s forearm, baptizing him in the same flood. Sally’s hand trembles. Together, they sing a line from their favorite hymn
“Come holy night I hear the angels calling.”
“What else?”
“Extreme Unction,” Americo says.
“It’s already dead! I don’t know that prayer.”
“`I sign you with the chrism of salvation....’ Something like that. Then an Our Father…”
“'Merico, I can’t take no more of this!"
Sally is reaching for the oil when a rock clangs against the steel drums above their heads. Both boys scream. A second rock drops like a mortar shell at Americo’s feet. A moment later, they whirl as Ernie comes squeezing through the tunnel of barrels into the clearing.
“Mamones! What’d yous rob?”
He's laughing, rubbing his right thumb across the tips of his fingers, the sign of thievery. And then he sees what Americo is holding.
“Aggh! The fuck is that?”
He backs away, holding his hands in front of his face.
"A dead baby,” Sally says.“'Merico found it.”
“Schifosos! Its got germs. Yous’ll get sick!”
Ernie turns and gags, a milky stream of vomit, bits of salami and Twinkies clearly visible, shoot out of his mouth. The smell hits Sally. He drops the oil and begins puking. Americo stands there, the soft bundle in his arms, staring at the sky.
Ten minutes later it's finished. They hurry out of the lot, turn left on Carroll Street and stop to rest at one of the steel rails on the Carroll Street Bridge. The breeze off the stagnant green water is cool on their faces.
“You know it belongs to somebody,” Ernie says after a moment.
Sally and Americo stare at him. “What do you mean?” Sally asks not wanting an answer.
“Asshole, somebody put it there for a reason.”
“Somebody killed it!” Americo hisses.
“None of your fucking business!” Ernie says. “Yous a gonna get in big trouble.”
“Fuck the cops!”
“I ain’t talking about cops you morons!”
“What trouble?” says Sally, shooting Americo a nervous glance. “Over a little nigger kid?”
“It ain’t a nigger,” says Ernie. “You know it ain’t a nigger!”
Continued
Friday, April 16, 2010
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Gowanus Crossing/A Life Along the Canal Chapter 3
Americo pulled on rumpled Lee dungarees and a gray sweatshirt, grabbed his socks and sneakers, tiptoed past his parents' bedroom door. In the stairwell he smelled coffee and cigarettes. Joe, wherever he’d slept, if he'd slept, was up and on the prowl.
He listened for the rustle of a newspaper, the clatter of a coffee cup. He took a breath, came out of the enclosed stairwell darted for the bathroom, turned and braced his back against the flimsy door, planting his feet against the back edge of the tub, his wiry body a flexible, but unyielding barrier. He held the position for a minute waiting for his father’s shoulder to shiver the door. The tan phone sat incongruously in the tub. A plastic triptych of the Crucifixion was tacked to the outside of the door covering a gaping hole Joe had punched a year before while Americo and the twins cowered inside.
A cigarette butt floated in the toilet. Was Joe gone? Americo hesitated, then pulled the bathroom door open and ran through the living room for the front door—the Christmas bells jingling merrily.He twisted the lock, pulled it open and was on the street, bright morning sun flaring in his swollen eye. He pulled on his coat as he ran, knees pumping looking back until he'd reached Third Avenue. He spit a mouthful of blood onto the sidewalk and walked past Goldie’s Poultry Market. Ace the rooster strutted on the sidewalk, glaring at Americo. On the other side of Third Avenue, Victor the blacksmith, in a leather apron that looked like something from the Middle Ages, was pounding nails into the hoof of a swaybacked horse, the smell like burning fingernail clippings in the air.
Sometimes, Americo worked with Angeletti the peddler for tips and a bag of peaches or plums at the end of the day. He'd sit on the painted wooden wagon's tailgate, skinny arm clinging to a post, the scale swaying next to his head, the horse plodding amidst the cars and trucks, carrying him across a sea of cobblestones from one neighborhood to the next, listening to the peddler singing out in Neapolitan.
"E rook e rabe, pomodoro, ba-sil-ico.”
The song invariably drew crones and housewives in halter tops and shorts from the brownstones and tenements that lined the streets of South Brooklyn. Americo carried the bulging brown bags behind them, up endless steps, along darkened hallways, eager for a peek into life in the sweltering, tin-ceilinged apartments where black garbed nonnas sat by sleeping babies.
He walked to Third Street where a eastern tributary of the Gowanus--once connected by a series of ingenious dikes to a 17th century Dutch farmhouse--had been filled in with rubble. Nobody gave a shit.
Behind him, a car rumbled over the cobblestones. He whirled, then recognized his Aunt Lucy’s pink, 1955 Cadillac. He dashed into the street. She braked, wheels squealing. He walked around to the driver’s side, leaned in.
“Stupid bastard you wanna get run over!”
She paused, took in his bruised eye. Then lit a menthol cigarette, flipped the match under Americo’s chin.
“Whadda you up so early for?”
They both avoided mentioning his father.
“Nothing. Walking to the gas station to see Sally.”
“Too jerk-offs instead of one.”
Americo grinned. He loved his wild, foul-mouth aunt.
Lucy was dragging, her makeup runny, her bouffant ike wilted flowers. Americo’s eyes flicked past her to Rosemary Marcantonio, one of Monte's’ barmaids, asleep in the passenger seat, her skirt riding up her thighs.
“You just getting home?” It was all he could think to say.
“What are you a detective? Mind your f-ing business.”
“Your brother…”he began.
She glanced at the rearview mirror as if expecting Joe Guzzi to show up.“Psycho should have stayed in the Philippine with the cannibals.
She puffed on the cigarette. Rosemary groaned, shifted. Americo caught a flash of pink, the darker shadow at the crotch.
“Are you getting a good look?”
Americo blushed. Lucy reached over and tugged Anna’s skirt down.
“ It’s your mother’s fault you know. Marrying him. Miss High-Falutin.. She started to say more, then stopped. "I gotta go.”
She accelerated, then braked abruptly. "Listen, I gotta drop off Sleeping Beauty over here. Stay with me tonight if he’s still on the warpath. My Thomas and Lulu Belle like the crazy stories you tell them about the canal.”
“They're not stories. History.”
"Too much history around here," she said driving off
"Warpath!"
Americo thought of Sonny the Indian and laughed for the first time in days.
When Americo walked up, Freddie and Marty were sitting on vinyl-covered kitchen chairs in front of their dilapidated Texaco station, eating bologna sandwiches smeared with mustard the color of baby shit and sipping chocolate milk out of half-pint containers. Smoky Robinson & the Miracles’ Tears of A Clown echoed tinnily from the cracked plastic radio at their feet. They wore greasy coveralls and thick work shoes. Their hands and particularly the fingernails cracked and crusted from too many oil changes, but the hair on their narrow heads was spectacular, dyed rust red, processed into ringlets like gypsy coins, wrapped in blue and red cowboy bandannas.
“My maaaan!” Marty croaked.
He squinted at Americo, then poked Freddie with his elbow. “What’s wrong with my man's eye? Walk into a door again? Best get some bigger glasses.”
“Or a softer door," Freddie grinned.
“Sally here?”
“Sally took the day off. Say he ain’t feeling well,” said Freddie.
"Sheeiit!” said Marty.
The roar of a V-8 engine, then the squeal of brakes shatters the quiet. A white Pontiac Grand Prix jumps the curb, the chassis bottoming against the concrete.
Americo groans. Shakey Manzo and his 17-year-old kid brother Boy-Boy, roar up to the pumps, radio blasting "Sherry" by the Four Seasons. Boy-Boy is at the wheel, jittery Amerco would bet, with amphetamines.
“Yo! Melanzani!"
He bangs the outside of the door with his fist. "Yous jigabos wanna go for registrations?”
“No way!” Marty grins. “You white boys too fast.”
Freddie gets up and pumps the gas. When he reaches over to wipe the windshield, Boy-Boy floors the car. Freddie jumps back, barely avoids being thrown over the hood. The driver's side mirror catches his elbow, hard. The Pontiac fishtails crazily across Third Avenue and disappears
“Crazy motherfucker!” Marty shouts, the mock friendliness dropping like a mask. "Why am I paying off these guineas! This shit ain't 'posed to happen!"
How’s the Twister?” Americo manages. He can't think of anything else to say.
“Sherry baby my ass,” Marty growls.
Freddie walks back to his chair rubbing his elbow. He turns his face away from Americo.
The Twister, a ‘55 Chevy coupe tricked out with a 409 cubic inch engine, twin four-barrel Holley carburetors, Isky roller cams, and high-compression pistons, sat in a back bay of the garage. The car had fiberglass fenders and a chrome straight axle that jacked the front end up so preposterously high Freddie had to use a stool to climb in and out. Americo loved that stool, loved the Chevy and its grey suit of primer far more than the Electra 225s and Continentals that gleamed like Christmas tinsel outside Monte's.
He associated the Twister with freedom, with beach boys and surfer girls, with California—a candy apple culture that he could glimpse darkly through the screen of his television, that reverberated over the airwaves, a New World Americo could not comprehend, yet believed in, and lusted after. He walked into the garage, grabbed a rag and began polishing the engine’s chromed air cleaners and valve covers, then spotted the phone on the wall.
He dialed Sally’s number, HY9-9870.
Continued
He listened for the rustle of a newspaper, the clatter of a coffee cup. He took a breath, came out of the enclosed stairwell darted for the bathroom, turned and braced his back against the flimsy door, planting his feet against the back edge of the tub, his wiry body a flexible, but unyielding barrier. He held the position for a minute waiting for his father’s shoulder to shiver the door. The tan phone sat incongruously in the tub. A plastic triptych of the Crucifixion was tacked to the outside of the door covering a gaping hole Joe had punched a year before while Americo and the twins cowered inside.
A cigarette butt floated in the toilet. Was Joe gone? Americo hesitated, then pulled the bathroom door open and ran through the living room for the front door—the Christmas bells jingling merrily.He twisted the lock, pulled it open and was on the street, bright morning sun flaring in his swollen eye. He pulled on his coat as he ran, knees pumping looking back until he'd reached Third Avenue. He spit a mouthful of blood onto the sidewalk and walked past Goldie’s Poultry Market. Ace the rooster strutted on the sidewalk, glaring at Americo. On the other side of Third Avenue, Victor the blacksmith, in a leather apron that looked like something from the Middle Ages, was pounding nails into the hoof of a swaybacked horse, the smell like burning fingernail clippings in the air.
Sometimes, Americo worked with Angeletti the peddler for tips and a bag of peaches or plums at the end of the day. He'd sit on the painted wooden wagon's tailgate, skinny arm clinging to a post, the scale swaying next to his head, the horse plodding amidst the cars and trucks, carrying him across a sea of cobblestones from one neighborhood to the next, listening to the peddler singing out in Neapolitan.
"E rook e rabe, pomodoro, ba-sil-ico.”
The song invariably drew crones and housewives in halter tops and shorts from the brownstones and tenements that lined the streets of South Brooklyn. Americo carried the bulging brown bags behind them, up endless steps, along darkened hallways, eager for a peek into life in the sweltering, tin-ceilinged apartments where black garbed nonnas sat by sleeping babies.
He walked to Third Street where a eastern tributary of the Gowanus--once connected by a series of ingenious dikes to a 17th century Dutch farmhouse--had been filled in with rubble. Nobody gave a shit.
Behind him, a car rumbled over the cobblestones. He whirled, then recognized his Aunt Lucy’s pink, 1955 Cadillac. He dashed into the street. She braked, wheels squealing. He walked around to the driver’s side, leaned in.
“Stupid bastard you wanna get run over!”
She paused, took in his bruised eye. Then lit a menthol cigarette, flipped the match under Americo’s chin.
“Whadda you up so early for?”
They both avoided mentioning his father.
“Nothing. Walking to the gas station to see Sally.”
“Too jerk-offs instead of one.”
Americo grinned. He loved his wild, foul-mouth aunt.
Lucy was dragging, her makeup runny, her bouffant ike wilted flowers. Americo’s eyes flicked past her to Rosemary Marcantonio, one of Monte's’ barmaids, asleep in the passenger seat, her skirt riding up her thighs.
“You just getting home?” It was all he could think to say.
“What are you a detective? Mind your f-ing business.”
“Your brother…”he began.
She glanced at the rearview mirror as if expecting Joe Guzzi to show up.“Psycho should have stayed in the Philippine with the cannibals.
She puffed on the cigarette. Rosemary groaned, shifted. Americo caught a flash of pink, the darker shadow at the crotch.
“Are you getting a good look?”
Americo blushed. Lucy reached over and tugged Anna’s skirt down.
“ It’s your mother’s fault you know. Marrying him. Miss High-Falutin.. She started to say more, then stopped. "I gotta go.”
She accelerated, then braked abruptly. "Listen, I gotta drop off Sleeping Beauty over here. Stay with me tonight if he’s still on the warpath. My Thomas and Lulu Belle like the crazy stories you tell them about the canal.”
“They're not stories. History.”
"Too much history around here," she said driving off
"Warpath!"
Americo thought of Sonny the Indian and laughed for the first time in days.
When Americo walked up, Freddie and Marty were sitting on vinyl-covered kitchen chairs in front of their dilapidated Texaco station, eating bologna sandwiches smeared with mustard the color of baby shit and sipping chocolate milk out of half-pint containers. Smoky Robinson & the Miracles’ Tears of A Clown echoed tinnily from the cracked plastic radio at their feet. They wore greasy coveralls and thick work shoes. Their hands and particularly the fingernails cracked and crusted from too many oil changes, but the hair on their narrow heads was spectacular, dyed rust red, processed into ringlets like gypsy coins, wrapped in blue and red cowboy bandannas.
“My maaaan!” Marty croaked.
He squinted at Americo, then poked Freddie with his elbow. “What’s wrong with my man's eye? Walk into a door again? Best get some bigger glasses.”
“Or a softer door," Freddie grinned.
“Sally here?”
“Sally took the day off. Say he ain’t feeling well,” said Freddie.
"Sheeiit!” said Marty.
The roar of a V-8 engine, then the squeal of brakes shatters the quiet. A white Pontiac Grand Prix jumps the curb, the chassis bottoming against the concrete.
Americo groans. Shakey Manzo and his 17-year-old kid brother Boy-Boy, roar up to the pumps, radio blasting "Sherry" by the Four Seasons. Boy-Boy is at the wheel, jittery Amerco would bet, with amphetamines.
“Yo! Melanzani!"
He bangs the outside of the door with his fist. "Yous jigabos wanna go for registrations?”
“No way!” Marty grins. “You white boys too fast.”
Freddie gets up and pumps the gas. When he reaches over to wipe the windshield, Boy-Boy floors the car. Freddie jumps back, barely avoids being thrown over the hood. The driver's side mirror catches his elbow, hard. The Pontiac fishtails crazily across Third Avenue and disappears
“Crazy motherfucker!” Marty shouts, the mock friendliness dropping like a mask. "Why am I paying off these guineas! This shit ain't 'posed to happen!"
How’s the Twister?” Americo manages. He can't think of anything else to say.
“Sherry baby my ass,” Marty growls.
Freddie walks back to his chair rubbing his elbow. He turns his face away from Americo.
The Twister, a ‘55 Chevy coupe tricked out with a 409 cubic inch engine, twin four-barrel Holley carburetors, Isky roller cams, and high-compression pistons, sat in a back bay of the garage. The car had fiberglass fenders and a chrome straight axle that jacked the front end up so preposterously high Freddie had to use a stool to climb in and out. Americo loved that stool, loved the Chevy and its grey suit of primer far more than the Electra 225s and Continentals that gleamed like Christmas tinsel outside Monte's.
He associated the Twister with freedom, with beach boys and surfer girls, with California—a candy apple culture that he could glimpse darkly through the screen of his television, that reverberated over the airwaves, a New World Americo could not comprehend, yet believed in, and lusted after. He walked into the garage, grabbed a rag and began polishing the engine’s chromed air cleaners and valve covers, then spotted the phone on the wall.
He dialed Sally’s number, HY9-9870.
Continued
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Easter on the Gowanus Canal 1960
My brothers and I would get new suits my mother Gloria would purchase "on time" at the Mays' Department Store on Fulton Street. Abraham & Strauss was far beyond her reach. On the corner of Third Avenue and Carroll Street, hundreds of lilies and and beribboned potted plants would magically appear for sale, for our moms and equally important, our grandparents in Holy Cross cemetery. We'd visit them after church in my dad's 1956 green on green Coupe de Ville, as if they were still part of the family.
The same bookies and loan sharks--Jerry Lang, the Goose, Michael Romanelli--who would bleed the neighborhood during the week, now sold us bright flowers on Easter.
My father, the bull-necked longshoreman, would hand each of his four sons chocolate bunnies and Easter eggs, then retreat to our tiny kitchen with my mom to prepare the afternoon feast. They'd create magnificent seven-course meals with one decent knife and a few pots and pan. Strangely enough, my father was the more delicate cook, lavishing endless time stuffing a mushroom, an artichoke, on sprinkling just the right amount of oregano on a baked clam. His antipasto was a work of art, so good, most people forgot there were six more courses ahead..
My brother Thomas, the animal lover, would invariably show up with a duckling or rabbit. He set up food and water and straw bedding for his pets. In a day or two, the "water rats" that surged from the canal would slaughter the hapless creatures, often without a trace.
Relatives would show up all morning carrying string-tied boxes of pastries from Cioffi's on Union near Columbia Street. The lines would be out the door. Smart folks would go while mass was in session to beat most of the crowds. A canolli cost 20 cents. Cioffi's was rumored to be the place that Sinatra ordered his pastry when he was in NYC...I thought that was pretty cool. Now I suspect Arthur Avenue, Little Italy and Bensonhurst all boasted Sinatra's favorite pastry store.
After dinner, I'd watch traffic on Third Avenue, making for Atlantic Avenue and the Brooklyn Bridge. Manhattan might have been another world....
The same bookies and loan sharks--Jerry Lang, the Goose, Michael Romanelli--who would bleed the neighborhood during the week, now sold us bright flowers on Easter.
My father, the bull-necked longshoreman, would hand each of his four sons chocolate bunnies and Easter eggs, then retreat to our tiny kitchen with my mom to prepare the afternoon feast. They'd create magnificent seven-course meals with one decent knife and a few pots and pan. Strangely enough, my father was the more delicate cook, lavishing endless time stuffing a mushroom, an artichoke, on sprinkling just the right amount of oregano on a baked clam. His antipasto was a work of art, so good, most people forgot there were six more courses ahead..
My brother Thomas, the animal lover, would invariably show up with a duckling or rabbit. He set up food and water and straw bedding for his pets. In a day or two, the "water rats" that surged from the canal would slaughter the hapless creatures, often without a trace.
Relatives would show up all morning carrying string-tied boxes of pastries from Cioffi's on Union near Columbia Street. The lines would be out the door. Smart folks would go while mass was in session to beat most of the crowds. A canolli cost 20 cents. Cioffi's was rumored to be the place that Sinatra ordered his pastry when he was in NYC...I thought that was pretty cool. Now I suspect Arthur Avenue, Little Italy and Bensonhurst all boasted Sinatra's favorite pastry store.
After dinner, I'd watch traffic on Third Avenue, making for Atlantic Avenue and the Brooklyn Bridge. Manhattan might have been another world....
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Decatur, Alabama. I'm the guy with the curly black hair. Whenever I see the hype about the threat of the tea parties, I remind myself that things once seem a lot hairer, and the country still moved forward. Then the media was not a 24 X 7 echo chamber, functioning to exaggerate and hype rather than providing context and clarity.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Gowanus Crossing/A Life Along the Canal Chapter 2
Chapter 2
That evening, Americo entered the apartment as if there were land mines under the linoleum. Sometimes a slamming door was enough to trigger his father's anger. His twin brothers, Joey and Tommy, were curled like kittens on the parlor floor watching television, the dinner table, already set in the cramped dining room.
"Where's Daddy?"
His brothers, engrossed in the finale of the Mickey Mouse Club song, ignored him.
"....K-E-Y."
"WHY? BECAUSE WE LIKE YOU!"
Americo stared at Annette Funicello's breasts jiggling under her white turtleneck.
"M-O-U-S-E!" Tommy belted out the letters like a cabaret singer.
"You stink ‘Merico," said Joey wrinkling his nose. "Like the canal."
“You too.”
His mother was in the kitchen stirring a pot of boiling pasta.
"I'm home Ma," he yelled and darted for the stairs to stash his ruined pants.
"Almost 6:00 o'clock! Why so late?"
"I helped Sister clean the classroom."
"Why always you?"
" She says I’ll be a janitor someday."
"Don’t mind her! Go get washed."
In the upstairs bathroom, he scrubbed his pants with Ivory soap hoping to get the grease out, smearing the sink wit black streaks. He poured Ajax on the knees, then some of his father's Old Spice aftershave and scrubbed some more. Frustrated, he rolled the pants up, tied the legs into a double knot and stuffed them onto the top shelf of the hall closet behind unopened bottles of Anisette, Creme de Menthe and Four Roses whiskey, gifts from Christmases past.
He was on the couch reading a Superman comic when his father pounded on the door, making the Christmas bells, they used for a knocker, dance. Tommy let out a yelp.
Joe Guzzi didn't have a key to his own house. In his world, wife and kids were always home, dinner always on the table. Joey and Tommy ran to pull the door open. Americo stood up. Joe stood in the doorway in and army fatigue jacket and blue watch cap, his face wind-burned and raw. He carried yellow rawhide gloves and wooden-handled steel hooks, the tools of his trade, hung off his shoulder like epaulets. Tommy and Joey stood around him yelping like puppies.
"What did you bring us Daddy! Whatja bring!"
Gloria came up behind them wiping her hands on her apron, as eager as the kids. Americo, grinning like an idiot, felt himself drawn into the old routine. Joe unzipped his jacket. It was stiff, crackly with cold. Nothing. Joey and Tommy moaned. Americo could smell the salt tang of the Atlantic Ocean on his father. Tommy pulled at the thick army sweater Joe wore underneath his jacket. Dutch chocolates--dozens of tiny Easter eggs wrapped in brightly-colored aluminum foil, cascaded to the floor. Tommy and Joey squealed, then scrambled to pick up the candy. Gloria kneeling beside them.
"A Dutch merchant docked yesterday," said Joe. "A couple of crates slid off the draft and busted." Americo knew not to question good fortune. Every kid in the neighborhood would have bellyaches from chocolate tomorrow Joe reached into his jacket and handed Americo a brown paper bag.
"Go ahead guy. It's for you. I traded for it with Mikey Bats. His gang was working the Number One hatch. Different stuff."
Americo opened the bag. He pulled out a pair of hand-carved wooden shoes. A miniature Dutch village was painted in blue and yellow and red onto the tops of the shoes. Americo could even make out a blond boy and girl holding hands. The girl held a bunch of tulips.
"I figured you'd go for that."
"Thanks Dad."
Americo reached up to kiss his father's cheek. It was bristly, cold as ice in the overheated apartment.
"Let me carry the hooks. I'll be careful." He turned and hung the tools in the closet under the stairs. Gloria scrambled to collect the chocolate from the twins who were stuffing Easter eggs into their mouths.
Friday was payday. When his sons groaned at the piselli and pasta, hard-boiled eggs and tuna fish Gloria, a devout Catholic, had prepared, Joe ordered a pizza from Lenny's on Fifth Avenue. Half-an-hour later, Americo was gorging himself on pepperoni pizza, washed down with cream soda and chocolate.
After dinner, he called Sally. The line was busy, busy, busy.
At 10:00 P.M., feverish and shivery, Americo crawled upstairs, climbed into the lumpy bed beside his sleeping brothers. Joey was rolled up, a mummy in the thin chenille bedspread. Americo unwrapped him, covered Thomas's frail, milk-white body and lay back. He could hear his parents downstairs going through bills, could smell Joe’s Lucky Strikes burning one after another. He decided he'd tell his father what they’d found in the lot first thing in the morning. Despite his racing thoughts, he fell asleep.
"’Merico....’Merico, wake up! Please wake up! "
He was jolted from some dark and terrible dream. "Wha...What?"
Thomas was frantically tugging at his arm. Half-asleep, Americo sent him flying with a forearm.
"What?"
"PLEASE!" They're fighting!”
The shouts, echoing in the narrow stairwell, cleared the sleep from his eyes. The crazed voice deafening, obscene, familiar.
"You fucking cunt! I told you not to spend no more money!"
This was his other father, the father hated. Americo leaped out of bed and ran down the hall. Joey, stood trembling in his underwear at the top of the steps. The stairwell was enclosed in wood-paneling, a dark vertiginous tunnel where the beast raged. He plunged down the stairs, his bare feet slipping, almost falling, catching himself on the banister, the twins racing behind him.
He saw a chair tumbling over...heard his father roaring...his mother mouthing the familiar plea, "Don't let the neighbors hear!"...the squeal of the table legs over linoleum as his father shoved it, trying to pin Gloria against the dining room wall...Coffee cups and ashtrays crashing to the floor.
"Stop it!...Leave her alone!"
Gloria turned toward her children, tried to cover where he'd torn her blouse, and in that moment, Joe was on her, slapping her, pulling her hair, smashing her head against the wall. Gloria raked him with her nails, leaving loody streaks on his cheeks
"Look what you did to me!"
Americo stood frozen, tears streaming from his eyes.
"Please!" He tried to scream. It came out a whimper.
"Daddy Please!"
Thomas and Joey raced past him, wailing. Thomas grabbed his father's legs and Joe shook him off like a dog. Joey was trying to embrace his parents as if he could stop them with a little boy’s love. Gloria was sobbing her helplessness and shame. Joe slapped her again, screaming,
"You fucking cunt!"
Americo felt himself moving. He saw himself come between his parents. Saw himself tear his father away from his mother. He saw Joe fly backward into the kitchen crash into the washing machine. And go down. Americo heard his own heart pounding in the awful silence. Then, almost a whisper: "You hit your father?"
This was a battle for which Americo would never be ready. He turned and faced him. His father was 5'9", 19o lbs. He squared his shoulders, and dropped his hands as Joe charged. The first punch, a short, brutal left, caught Americo in the stomach. He crumpled, gasping, careful to keep his hands by his side. The second, a roundhouse right to the top of his head, knocked him to the linoleum floor.
"You fucking hit your father!"
Joe, still wearing the heavy work shoes, kicked Americo, who only loved him, in the ribs. Gloria and the kids shrieked. There was a roaring in Americo's ears. Dazed, he tried to cover his head, gasping at the pain, tasting blood where he'd bitten through his lip. Yet, in some dark and secret place, Americo knew he'd won. He'd diverted his father's rage. And a part of him, floating beyond the reach of thetattoo of kicks and punches, a part of him was happy.
"I'm calling the cops!" Gloria screamed rushing for the phone by the bathroom door. Joe tore it out of her hands and threw it into the bathtub. In the moment, Americo was up, his brothers holding him, moving him toward the stairs. His father lunged again, but the attack was half-hearted, the storm passing. Americo was in the tunnel ascending. He heard his mother and father cursing each other, heard his own sobs ,and then Thomas' trembling wail: "I hate you! I hope you die!”
A rooster crowed. Americo jolted awake. Gray light seeped past the thick curtains draped over the windows. He watched his brothers sleeping, their pumping hearts already healing, he knew preparing to love their father again.
"Not this time," Americo thought. "Not now."
Continued
That evening, Americo entered the apartment as if there were land mines under the linoleum. Sometimes a slamming door was enough to trigger his father's anger. His twin brothers, Joey and Tommy, were curled like kittens on the parlor floor watching television, the dinner table, already set in the cramped dining room.
"Where's Daddy?"
His brothers, engrossed in the finale of the Mickey Mouse Club song, ignored him.
"....K-E-Y."
"WHY? BECAUSE WE LIKE YOU!"
Americo stared at Annette Funicello's breasts jiggling under her white turtleneck.
"M-O-U-S-E!" Tommy belted out the letters like a cabaret singer.
"You stink ‘Merico," said Joey wrinkling his nose. "Like the canal."
“You too.”
His mother was in the kitchen stirring a pot of boiling pasta.
"I'm home Ma," he yelled and darted for the stairs to stash his ruined pants.
"Almost 6:00 o'clock! Why so late?"
"I helped Sister clean the classroom."
"Why always you?"
" She says I’ll be a janitor someday."
"Don’t mind her! Go get washed."
In the upstairs bathroom, he scrubbed his pants with Ivory soap hoping to get the grease out, smearing the sink wit black streaks. He poured Ajax on the knees, then some of his father's Old Spice aftershave and scrubbed some more. Frustrated, he rolled the pants up, tied the legs into a double knot and stuffed them onto the top shelf of the hall closet behind unopened bottles of Anisette, Creme de Menthe and Four Roses whiskey, gifts from Christmases past.
He was on the couch reading a Superman comic when his father pounded on the door, making the Christmas bells, they used for a knocker, dance. Tommy let out a yelp.
Joe Guzzi didn't have a key to his own house. In his world, wife and kids were always home, dinner always on the table. Joey and Tommy ran to pull the door open. Americo stood up. Joe stood in the doorway in and army fatigue jacket and blue watch cap, his face wind-burned and raw. He carried yellow rawhide gloves and wooden-handled steel hooks, the tools of his trade, hung off his shoulder like epaulets. Tommy and Joey stood around him yelping like puppies.
"What did you bring us Daddy! Whatja bring!"
Gloria came up behind them wiping her hands on her apron, as eager as the kids. Americo, grinning like an idiot, felt himself drawn into the old routine. Joe unzipped his jacket. It was stiff, crackly with cold. Nothing. Joey and Tommy moaned. Americo could smell the salt tang of the Atlantic Ocean on his father. Tommy pulled at the thick army sweater Joe wore underneath his jacket. Dutch chocolates--dozens of tiny Easter eggs wrapped in brightly-colored aluminum foil, cascaded to the floor. Tommy and Joey squealed, then scrambled to pick up the candy. Gloria kneeling beside them.
"A Dutch merchant docked yesterday," said Joe. "A couple of crates slid off the draft and busted." Americo knew not to question good fortune. Every kid in the neighborhood would have bellyaches from chocolate tomorrow Joe reached into his jacket and handed Americo a brown paper bag.
"Go ahead guy. It's for you. I traded for it with Mikey Bats. His gang was working the Number One hatch. Different stuff."
Americo opened the bag. He pulled out a pair of hand-carved wooden shoes. A miniature Dutch village was painted in blue and yellow and red onto the tops of the shoes. Americo could even make out a blond boy and girl holding hands. The girl held a bunch of tulips.
"I figured you'd go for that."
"Thanks Dad."
Americo reached up to kiss his father's cheek. It was bristly, cold as ice in the overheated apartment.
"Let me carry the hooks. I'll be careful." He turned and hung the tools in the closet under the stairs. Gloria scrambled to collect the chocolate from the twins who were stuffing Easter eggs into their mouths.
Friday was payday. When his sons groaned at the piselli and pasta, hard-boiled eggs and tuna fish Gloria, a devout Catholic, had prepared, Joe ordered a pizza from Lenny's on Fifth Avenue. Half-an-hour later, Americo was gorging himself on pepperoni pizza, washed down with cream soda and chocolate.
After dinner, he called Sally. The line was busy, busy, busy.
At 10:00 P.M., feverish and shivery, Americo crawled upstairs, climbed into the lumpy bed beside his sleeping brothers. Joey was rolled up, a mummy in the thin chenille bedspread. Americo unwrapped him, covered Thomas's frail, milk-white body and lay back. He could hear his parents downstairs going through bills, could smell Joe’s Lucky Strikes burning one after another. He decided he'd tell his father what they’d found in the lot first thing in the morning. Despite his racing thoughts, he fell asleep.
"’Merico....’Merico, wake up! Please wake up! "
He was jolted from some dark and terrible dream. "Wha...What?"
Thomas was frantically tugging at his arm. Half-asleep, Americo sent him flying with a forearm.
"What?"
"PLEASE!" They're fighting!”
The shouts, echoing in the narrow stairwell, cleared the sleep from his eyes. The crazed voice deafening, obscene, familiar.
"You fucking cunt! I told you not to spend no more money!"
This was his other father, the father hated. Americo leaped out of bed and ran down the hall. Joey, stood trembling in his underwear at the top of the steps. The stairwell was enclosed in wood-paneling, a dark vertiginous tunnel where the beast raged. He plunged down the stairs, his bare feet slipping, almost falling, catching himself on the banister, the twins racing behind him.
He saw a chair tumbling over...heard his father roaring...his mother mouthing the familiar plea, "Don't let the neighbors hear!"...the squeal of the table legs over linoleum as his father shoved it, trying to pin Gloria against the dining room wall...Coffee cups and ashtrays crashing to the floor.
"Stop it!...Leave her alone!"
Gloria turned toward her children, tried to cover where he'd torn her blouse, and in that moment, Joe was on her, slapping her, pulling her hair, smashing her head against the wall. Gloria raked him with her nails, leaving loody streaks on his cheeks
"Look what you did to me!"
Americo stood frozen, tears streaming from his eyes.
"Please!" He tried to scream. It came out a whimper.
"Daddy Please!"
Thomas and Joey raced past him, wailing. Thomas grabbed his father's legs and Joe shook him off like a dog. Joey was trying to embrace his parents as if he could stop them with a little boy’s love. Gloria was sobbing her helplessness and shame. Joe slapped her again, screaming,
"You fucking cunt!"
Americo felt himself moving. He saw himself come between his parents. Saw himself tear his father away from his mother. He saw Joe fly backward into the kitchen crash into the washing machine. And go down. Americo heard his own heart pounding in the awful silence. Then, almost a whisper: "You hit your father?"
This was a battle for which Americo would never be ready. He turned and faced him. His father was 5'9", 19o lbs. He squared his shoulders, and dropped his hands as Joe charged. The first punch, a short, brutal left, caught Americo in the stomach. He crumpled, gasping, careful to keep his hands by his side. The second, a roundhouse right to the top of his head, knocked him to the linoleum floor.
"You fucking hit your father!"
Joe, still wearing the heavy work shoes, kicked Americo, who only loved him, in the ribs. Gloria and the kids shrieked. There was a roaring in Americo's ears. Dazed, he tried to cover his head, gasping at the pain, tasting blood where he'd bitten through his lip. Yet, in some dark and secret place, Americo knew he'd won. He'd diverted his father's rage. And a part of him, floating beyond the reach of thetattoo of kicks and punches, a part of him was happy.
"I'm calling the cops!" Gloria screamed rushing for the phone by the bathroom door. Joe tore it out of her hands and threw it into the bathtub. In the moment, Americo was up, his brothers holding him, moving him toward the stairs. His father lunged again, but the attack was half-hearted, the storm passing. Americo was in the tunnel ascending. He heard his mother and father cursing each other, heard his own sobs ,and then Thomas' trembling wail: "I hate you! I hope you die!”
A rooster crowed. Americo jolted awake. Gray light seeped past the thick curtains draped over the windows. He watched his brothers sleeping, their pumping hearts already healing, he knew preparing to love their father again.
"Not this time," Americo thought. "Not now."
Continued
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Gowanus Crossing/A Life Along the Canal Chapter 1
PROLOGUE
A pestilent and stinking Nile, the Gowanus flows through the neighborhood, defiles it with stench and disease and dark secrets. In the decades ahead, many of those who’d grown-up near the stream would be dead or dying of an epidemic of cancers and birth defects long after they’d escaped to the ranch houses and stick-tree suburbs of Long Island and New Jersey; an epidemic veiled by other plagues—violence, AIDS abandonment and addiction—visited on South Brooklyn.
In the 1960s, the canal is poisoned womb … grave … open sewer. These things and more: it is a barrier that keeps the surrounding neighborhoods isolated from the rest of New York City, keeps them insular, with a fierce identity and demarcated borders.
The Gowanus has a history—unknown in the neighborhood--that in other places would be noteworthy. George Washington’s army clashed with the British along its banks. Its tides, rhythmic and regular, impose order on the chaotic lives that cling precariously to its banks. At flood, it carries the faraway scent of ocean; moonlit, a glimmer of primordial beauty.
Chapter 1
"In nomine Patris et Filio et Spiritu Sanctus."
"A-men."
Sister Mary Malachy crosses herself as she intones the prayer. She thrusts her prognathous jaw forward, an Inquisitor ready to swoop down on the budding apostates in her charge. She tugs at the baggy sleeve of her brown habit, taps the Timex watch on her thick wrist three times. Across her scarred desk, 35 eighth graders shift to attention, ink-stained hands reaching for their rosaries.
She studies them—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 their frayed white shirts and clip-on ties, beneath the pleated skirts and Peter Pan collars, they 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 the pleasures of the flesh. Pain is another matter. She will spare no effort driving her charges 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, Jenny Wilson inhales—her ripening breasts strain against her blouse--and announces the Second Sorrowful Mystery.
An aisle away, Americo Guzzi hunches over his catechism penciling a dove, the representation of the Holy Spirit, shitting on the head of Pope Pius XII. He stiffens, a feral creature sensing a predator’s approach. He counts heads.
"...Ten...eleven...twelve...Shit!"
It’s his turn to proclaim the next mystery. “The Third Sorrowful Mystery,” he mouths, prompting his brain to supply the answer. He waits. Nothing comes. Ascensions. Assumptions. Redemptions. Heaven is a cheap furniture store. Mysteries swim in his head. Malachy will have him scrubbing the church basement, the labyrinth where the hunchback monk Masseo lurks among the broken statues of martyrs and serpents.
Three more Hail Marys ratchet by. Americo cranks his head left, coughs, then whispers, "What's the Third Mystery?"
Sally looks at him. "Ya mother's box.”
"Don't fool around!"
"Her canary."
Ernie snorts, the sound among the murmurs loud as a breaching whale. Malachy's wimpled head rotates. Americo ducks, disappearing, he imagines, like Jonah into the belly of the Leviathan.
"Come on. Please!" he whispers.
The nun fills the aisle between the rows of bolted-down desks. She advances, seeming to sniff the air. Sally hunches over his beads,a monk lost in divine rapture.
"Hail Mary full of grace...” A drone four seats in front of Americo.
“Shit!”
He clenches his rosary. A tiny window in the crucifix reveals a bone chip floating in holy water like a carpenter's level. He clenches the holy bone. "Please Jesus…I'll …" He hesitates “I won't….”
A vision of Jenny blossoms in his head, plaid uniform skirt pulled up revealing coltish thighs, a darker shadow beneath her white cotton panties.
“I can’t, ” Americo sighs.
He steadies himself for the charge. Instinctively, his hand rises to the faded purple bruise under his left eye.
In the corner by the whistling radiators, Cacasotte stirs. The bolts holding his overburdened desk to the polished oak floor groan in protest. Malachy looks at him, a creature unfazed by Salvation’s promise or Darwin's heretical exigencies; a bag of guts, corruption and decay. Stained tie, frayed white shirt, grey work pants straining against elephantine buttocks like sausage casing; a mockery of all that is pure, clean, Christ-like. Friar Masseo 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.
An oak pointer materializes in her hand.
Cacasotte’s internal clock is chiming noon. He’ll feed at his mother’s Third Avenue diner, waddle home, root into his unmade bed. At 5:30 P.M., the Mouseketeers’ theme will stir him, and then only briefly, to masturbation. He raises his slobber-streaked face, squints, then lolls his tongue at Jenny Wilcox, a willowy German stranded by the flood tide of emigration out of South Brooklyn.
He lifts his haunch and farts. No discrete blast, but a barrage, a lament from his bowels that derails the Holy Rosary and wreathes the classroom in silence. The putrid fallout stops Malachy as she’s about to pull Americo from his seat. Rows of students surge forward, surfers riding a wave, coughing, pretend gagging, holding their throats. Shrieking, they sweep past Americo, past Malachy, out the front door of the classroom.
The lunch bell clangs. Americo stands, locks eyes with Malachy.
“The Third Sorrowful Mystery!” he shouts, slapping Sally’s still bowed head. “The Crowning With Thorns!”
He dodges right, dashes forward and out the door. He flies down the metal steps, out of the building, dodges a patrol boy and the thundering trucks onThird Avenue, races down Carroll Street past his house, past Jimmy the Morgue’s idling Buick Electra, past Monte’s Venetian Room, and Crusader Candles not stopping until gasping, he reaches the grey rail of the bridge crossing the Gowanus Canal.
In Monte’s, Sonny the Indian sips brown whiskey, watching Americo race down the sidewalk, feinting garbage cans, gangly body struggling to keep up with brain.
“Give Cochise here a drink.”
The voice grates against Sonny’s ears. He roots around in his pocket, pops two aspirin into his mouth, sips his drink. Further down the bar, Shaky Manzo is counting $20 dollar bills from a paper bag.
“....15....16 hundred!”
Snapping each bill like a playing card.
“All right!...Red, do me a favor, turn on the television.”
“Fuck that,” grunts Sonny. “Television is for morons.”
“On or off?” The bartender shrugs.
Shaky looks up. “You say something chief?”
“Cocksucker is what I said.”
“What?” Shaky is on his feet.
At his table along the mirrored wall, Honey is studying the Daily Racing Form. “You! Sit the fuck down!” he yells. “And you. Can I get a minute’s peace? What’s bothering you now?
“This fuckin’ retard for openers.”
Shaky brings his palm to his mouth, two, three times, pantomiming a cartoon Indian. He sits back down, picks up a Daily News from the bar, flips it open, turns the pages noisily.
Television. War-painted braves dead because they’re too noisy or too slow with the white man. Falling off their ponies. The Mohawk, Jay Silverheels, living in Bensonhurst, speaking Apache. “Kemo sabe,” Sonny broods. I'll give you Kemo sabe! He glares at Shaky, the idiot's lips moving, working the cartoons.
Sonny stares at the long mirror above the bar, lifts his chin. Whose face is it? What purpose the obsidian stare, the bunched muscles and tendons of the formidable jaw? The questions chase themselves behind his impassive eyes. After a moment he grunts, “Whiskey.”
“You got it.”
Winded, Americo walks back up Carroll Street. The night before, he’d seen a woman in red pants, kneeling, like a supplicant at the Communion rail, on the canal bank. Shaky had caught him staring at her bobbing head. At the Grand Army Plaza Library, another woman, this one with a face like parchment, had shown Americo sketches that depicted the Gowanus River in the 1600s. Apple trees flourished along it banks. Gowanus oysters were renowned for their size and abundance. He’d described these wonders to Ernie and Sally.
"Go fuck yourself!" they shouted.
Engulfed in a fragrant cloud of sautéing garlic and simmering tomatoes, he drifts off into history.
Crack! A slap off the back of his head ends his meditation.
Honey and Ernie are standing in front of Monte's. Honey, holding a thick Cuban cigar, is grinning. Sonny is to his left, Easter Island in a leather trench coat.
“Daydreaming, you mope?” says Honey.
Americo blinks. "What?"
“You hungry?”
“Nah, I’m fasting.”
“It ain’t Lent. Think them priests fast? Bullshit.”
“Fasting makes you think better. In India ...”
“Sonny’s an Indian. He don’t fast.”
“What happened to your face?” Sonny shakes his head in despair, then continues, “Your father go to work on you again?”
Americo shrugs, says nothing. He looks at Ernie. “You ready?"
“Yous better smarten up, Honey says. “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 Scratch Sheet this afternoon. Don't forget like last time."
"I won’t,” says Americo.
"That Irish twat busting your balls?"
"She hates us," says Americo.
"She hates ‘Merico ‘cause he's smart,” Ernie says.
"I ain’t smart!"
Americo tilts his head. The two boys begin inching away.
“Where yous a going?" Honey jerks his finger. "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. ("A baby tyrannosaurus!" Americo riffs, then bites his tongue to keep from laughing.)
"They got water rats this big. All kinds of shit. Yous a gonna get rabies. Something happens, I'll give you the rest! I’m telling yous, stay outta dere!"
Shaky walks out of the restaurant, greasy pompadour afloat on his pockmarked face.
Yo, you got a call. Carmine.”
“The fuck he wants now?” Honey groans.
“How things went.”
"Tell him we got the money.”
“He wants to talk to you.”
“More fucking bullshit.” Honey sighs.
He and Sonny walk into Monte’s leaving Shaky standing there. Ernie stage whispers to Americo, “Looks like a dog shit on his head.”
Americo giggles.
Shaky turns, shoots him a look. “Homo, whatta you looking at this time?”
Americo reddens. “Nothing. I ...”
“Jerk-offs, I’ll go to work on both of yous. Don’t think your uncle can stop me. I’m a made guy.”
“We’re talking about school,” says Ernie. “Ever hear of it?”
Shaky pulls a wad of bills out of his pants. “School is for jerk-offs.”
Ernie grabs his balls, “Fageddaboutit!”
The boys cut between a row of parked cars, then make for the Carroll Street Bridge, a rusting architectural jewel the city has ignored for 50 years. Twenty yards from the water, it hits them—“Perfume Lagoon”—raw sewage, chemical spills, oil from sunken barges and abandoned cars, garbage, feces, bloated carcasses of dead dogs and cats floating on the tide.
On the bank, Sally and Rocco are stripping branches off sumac trees growing on the canal bank. Rocco, short and dark, is dressed like the accountant he'll never be, tweed overcoat, wool pants and polished shoes, white shirt stiff with starch, blue, clip-on tie held in place by a fake pearl.
Americo pulls a fishing rod from the weeds, a 5 & 10 cent store reproduction of the ones he’d seen in Field & Stream. He ties a length of clothesline, a sinker and an enormous hook to the rod.
"Friday," he says. "Fishing’s gonna be good."
"Sunday morning's the best," says Ernie.
Sally finishes stripping leaves from his branch and runs to the 10-foot diameter concrete pipe that carries waste from neighborhood toilets directly into the canal.
"Thanks for helping me out!" Americo calls after him.
"Swear to God, I dont know the fucking mystery!”
"Swear to God," Americo minces.
"Screw you!"
"Got one!" Rocco yells.
"That’s mines!" shouts Ernie. "Slipped away."
As the boys look on, Rocco pulls an eight-inch condom from the water.
"All right! Sally says. "Whitefish!"
Putrescent water splashes Rocco’s overcoat as he manipulates the dripping tube onto a tire. Seven condoms, Tuesday’s catch, shrivel in the sun.
"Two points," Rocco says.
"No," says Sally pulling a notebook from his pocket. "Two is a French tickler. One point."
"I got two of em!" screams Ernie lifting a grease-smeared branch from the water.
"Your mamma was busy!" Sally says. He walks over, inspects Ernie’s catch. A dead cat floats in the water. At first, the stench is overpowering, but they get used to it.
For the next ten minutes, the boys concentrate, keen as fly fishermen on a Colorado stream. Americo spots a rubber being discharged ( “released”) downstream.
He plucks it out of the water, is about to yell when he notices Sally bent over his notebook tallying scores. Americo circles behind him. The rubber looks exactly like the calamari tubes his father stuffs and sautées in tomato sauce.Ernie sees him coming, backs away. Americo creeps closer, closer, and lays the dripping condom on Sally's shoulder.
"Somebody I want you to meet," he says.
Sally looks up. What?”
Americo throws down his rod and darts away.
"Eccch! Sciafuso!" Ernie shouts. "Disgusting!"
"What?" Sally whirls once, twice, like a dog chasing his tail.
The condom leaves a snail track on the shiny coat.
Americo is already 30 feet away, running among piles of concrete slag and bricks heading for the path that winds through the salvage yard and out onto the street. Sally who owns the Catholic School 60-yard dash record, throws the raincoat at Rocco and chases after him.
"My new coat! My mother will kill you!"
Americo climbs a towering mound of rubble. He whirls, gives Sally, 20 feet below the finger. "The First Sorrowful Mystery!" he screams. “Your stupid coat!"
He leaps, loses his footing and tumbles down the other side. Scrambles to his feet, ducks behind a pile of trash, then accelerates toward a hole in the fence. He trips as he vaults over a roll of linoleum, almost regains his balance, then falls hard in front of a mountain of metal drums piled near the fence. Instinctively, he burrows 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 the metallic womb like a funeral knell. One o’clock. Americo crawls deeper, imagining a pirate cave formed by the rusty drums, forgetting about school and the rats in the lots. He finds himself in a 20-foot clearing surrounded by orange drums leaching powdery yellow crystals. He stands up, examines his grease-stained pants and looks around.
A brown shopping bag rests against one of the drums. Americo walks closer, picks up the bag, disappointed at how light it feels. Drug addicts burglarizing the trucking companies alongside the canal often hid swag in the lots. Americo would steal from the thieves, Robin Hood, grabbing leather handbags, perfume and shoes. A pillowcase is stuffed inside the bag. Americo pulls it out. It’s stained a dark, clotty red.
"Jesus!"
He pushes the bag away from him with both hands. The October wind, heavy with salt from the harbor, cuts through his thin jacket. He sniffles, wipes his nose on his sleeve, half-tucks his shirt in. Acrid smoke—tires burning in the salvage yard, chokes the air. He looks up over the barrels, sees the sun reflected in the windows of Ernie’s apartment building, reminds himself he’s barely 50 yards from his own backyard. Gloria, his mother is in the kitchen doing dishes, getting ready for supper.
He walks back to the bag, steps on the edge of the pillowcase, then kicks. The bloody cloth unravels, a chicken flies out.
“Ha!” Americo laughs, a dry bark that surprises him.
He steps 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. It moves. The hand clenches and unclenches.
"Ahhh!"
He turns, flies through the tunnel of barrels, bile rising in his throat.
He’s trying not to gag when Sally leaps onto his back. Americo falls to his knees, gasping. He spins wildly, legs pin-wheeling. In a second, Sally is kneeling on his chest, pinning his arms back.
"Stop! ... Please stop!"
Sally holds a dried condom ready to rub into his face.
"Please!"
"Come on,” Sally relents. “Crybaby."
Americo hyperventilating, points at the barrels. After a moment, the two boys crawl into the small clearing, stand over the thing. Americo picks it up, cradles it in his forearm. Sally looks at him like he's crazy. He feels the icy body shudder and grow still. He lays it back on the ground
"It was alive.”
They stare at each other then turn away. Sally throws the pillowcase over it.
"Don't say nothing to nobody. Right?”
"I don't know," Americo mumbles, "this is...a sin."
To be continued
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Losing Mom Part III
Returning to New York had always been a joy for me. This time it was a rite of passage. I had come as a son seeking his mother; instead, I found myself in an empty, memory-haunted house, the head of a family heading for disaster.
Once again, I found myself emotionally, but not practically prepared for crisis. Gregory, who had been supporting Mom since my father's death, was unemployed. Joseph was in a rehab program. Bills were piled up; the mortgage and property taxes hadn't been paid. My parents had managed family finances out of an old shoe box in which they kept payment books, canceled checks, etc. Mom's hospital costs were already in the tens of thousands of dollars and surging daily. Though well-insured, she still owed thousands from her previous surgeries. Our resources essentially consisted of her small savings account, a $2,000 life insurance policy and the modest row house we'd grown up in. Determined to keep the house and our family intact, I found myself worrying about losing both every day.
At the hospital, Mom was being maintained on heavy doses of morphine and little else. We asked that the dosage be cut back and discovered the pain had diminished. Other problems had developed: her feet and ankles had begun to swell with fluid; she couldn't swallow without choking. Her only sustenance was the intravenous solution that dripped slowly into her arms. Every day, untouched containers of soup, pasta, fruit, toast, eggs, Jell-O, tea, lined her window sill.
After ten days, she was finally transfered to Methodist Hospital's third floor cancer ward for chemotherapy. Each day, I'd imagine the runaway cells inexorably growing, approaching some critical mass.
"Do you think this can really help me?" she asked.
"Please, Mom I said, "there's nothing else we can do."
I'd half-convinced myself the harmless-looking liquids in the clear plastic bags above her bed could work some miracle. They were powerful cytotoxins that would kill any fast-growing cells in her body: she would lose her hair, develop sores in her mouth and the lining of her stomach, experience nausea or worse. On Friday night, she was given a cocktail of painkillers and anti-nausea drugs to prepare her for her first treatment.
I arrived early Saturday morning carrying coffee and a newspaper, eager for some hopeful sign. A nurse stopped me outside the room to ask whether Mrs. Coppola should be revived if she went into cardiac arrest. I rushed past her to find Mom semi-conscious, gasping for breath. A nurse was suctioning her throat with a vacuum device. The anti-nausea drugs had supressed the gag reflex that allowed her to clear phlegm: she was drowning in front of my eyes. We stared silently at each other. Half-a-dozen other patients were in distress; the nurse passed the vacuum tube and saline solution to me and left.
Mom revived, survived the first round of treatment. By then, she'd seen herself in a mirror and asked for Father Louis DeTommaso, her pastor. We all took communion together around her bed. Another lifelong image was seared into my consciousness. My relatives had begun placing religious pictures by her bed, alongside those of her grandchildren, Justin, Gabrielle Pia, and Thomas. Her brother Sonny and his wife Madeleine, postponed their annual winter trip to Florida.
In the cancer ward, some patients slept constantly; others never. One woman, suffering from both lymphoma and Alzheimer's disease shrieked through the night. Many of the patients smoked constantly. One of Mom's roomates, a woman apparently without family or friends to support her, endured three days of chemotherapy and then was preparing to make her way home alone. Gloria ordered me to drive her home. She had Greg give $10 to another, indigent patient.
Despite the high tech medicines and the decency of the caregivers, the ward was not a place to inspire hope. Half-a-block away on Seventh Avenue, the shops were ablaze with lights and Christmas decorations; men hawked Christmas trees on the sidewalks while carols played over tinny speakers. Our house, always bright and filled with people at Christmas time, was dark and empty.
Greg and I stayed in shifts. Our relatives visited regularly but we kept the haunted hours. Other families kept similar vigils; many of the "children" were my age. Two brothers, both in their 40s, had flown in from Florida at Thanksgiving to care for their mother. A month later, they were still there "trying to get Mom home for Christmas." At the other end of the scale was the daughter who publicly berated her dying mother for all the "trouble and expense" she was causing. The woman's last months would be spoent shuttling between cancer ward and nursing home.
Three days before Christmas, I asked Mom's permission to return to Atlanta to spend time with my children. She insisted I go.
"I'm okay, I've got plenty of company."
Holidays were important in our family, heralded by huge dinners my parents would spend days preparing. I sensed she was passing on the tradition to me. As I was leaving for the airport, torn between my responsibilites as both father and son, she handed me money for gifts and Christmas cards for Gaby and Thomas. Inside, she'd written,
"Grandma will love you always."
A patient died Christmas Eve. Three days after Christmas, a surgeon had cut into my mother's abdomen attempting to install a feeding tube directly into her stomach. He failed. He told us her liver was so enlarged with tumor, he couldn't find her stomach. A tiny tube he attached to her small intestine pulled free and Mom refused to have it reinstalled.
On New Year's Day, a 43-year-old woman whose husband and daughters had kept a lonely vigil in the room across from us died of brain cancer. Their wails echoed through the ward.
At noon on Saturday Jan. 5th, Gloria was discharged from Methodist Hospital. The plan was to get her out of the grim ward environment for a week, after which she'd return for three days of chemotherapy. Visiting nurses and home healthcare workers would help us manage.
I spent that morning at home scrubbing the floors and putting everything in order. Over the last year, Gregory had renovated the ground flooer of our dilapidated, 100-year-old row house, ripped out walls, exposed brick, installed new appliances, windows, even parquet floors.
While Mom was hospitalized, he had her dingy bedroom redone all sunshine and bright colors. I'd dumped the worn-out bedroom and living room suites, bouth new sofas and a bed--charged it all--framed and hung pictures of my brother Thomas and the grandchildren alongside her photograph of Pope Paul VI. My mother had spent her entire adult life living in that rundown house. The renovation was Greg's final gift to her.
On the sidewalk outside the hospital, she couldn't walk four steps to the car without gasping. The painful swelling that had begun in her feet by now had bloated her legs. When I'd massaged them, imprints of my fingers remained in her flesh. She couldn't have weighed more than 80 lbs. Her face was grey, her lips pulling back from ther teeth.
"It's so beautiful," she whispered as Greg carried her into the house. "So beautiful."
A neighbor had prepared lentil soup and run it through a blender for her. She couldn't eat. (At the hospital, she'd ordered her cousin Millie to eat the food I'd leave "...so Vincent wouldn't worry." ) She spent the day exhausted on a BarcaLounger we'd borrowed from a neighbor. On Sunday, a visiting nurse noted Mom's systolic blood pressure had dropped below 90; she looked at me oddly when I announced I had gotten Gloria to eat two full tablespoons of oatmeal. A medical reporter, I refused to acknowledge any medical information. It had come down to "...what God wants."
Sunday night, Greg carried Mom upstairs to her bedroom, the stairway as insurmountable to her as Mount Everest. It took six pillows to put her at ease and still she couldn't sleep. She called to me in the middle of the night. I lay awake next door in the narrow room that had been mine as a teenager.
"Vincent, my back...I can't get comfortable any more."
I adjusted her pillows for the 10th time.,
"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm not letting you sleep. I'm sorry I made you come up here so far from the kids."
I clung to the iron rail of her new bed. An enormous chasm stretches between the living and the dying, a gap love cannot bridge. I wanted to hurl myself across it. "Mom," I said, "There's nowhere else in the world I want to be." I realize now that I had been granted a precious moment. A chance to say those special things we feel for those we love but so rarely do A chance to say goodbye.
"Mom, I want you to know that you've been the best mother any son could have. I want you to know that whatever is good and special in me has come from you."
She lay there staring.
I was blinded by tears. "Mom, You know that I can't change this. I can't change what's happening to you. You know if would if I could."
"I know that," she whispered. "I know."
Monday morning, her blood pressure continued to drop.
"Vincent," she said, "I don't feel good Maybe I should go back to the hospital."
I didn't want her to die surrounded by gaping strangers in a crowded emergency room or wind up lifeless on an respirator. "Okay, Mom. Let's wait a little bit." I knew what choice I was making. The hospital had an arrangement for bypassing admitting procedures on the cancer ward. After a while, it became too much Greg drove to the hospital to find the head nurse. I was upstairs when Angela, a family friend, shrieked, "Vinny, come down! Something's happening!"
Mom had pitched forward in the chair. She'd grabbed Angela's hand She wasn't breathing. I pinched her nostrils and began breathing into her mouth. It was the first time I'd ever kissed my mother on the lips.
"Breathe Mom. Please, Mom breathe! Don't die!"
Somehow she heard me and delayed her passing. She came back, but only for a moment. Her last breath passed into my mouth. Later, Josie Stuto, our octogenarian Italian neighbor across the street would tell me this was a special gift.
I was aware of Greg kneeling beside me sobbing. I won't cry," he'd said, "until there's no hope." There were no open beds at the hospital. Angela dialed 911. Half-a-dozen police officers and EMTs piled thorugh our front door, pushing us aside. Mom lay on her back, her pajama top open as a team worked to defibrilate her. Her ribs and collar bones protruded It was the only time I'd ever seen her undressed.
At that moment, our brother Joseph walked in. He never got his chance to say a last goodbye, make amends, and tell her he loved her. Of course, Gloria knew that. Her last thoughts were of him.
As I write this, the tulips and irises I'd planted in the yard that last fall are beginning to blossom. I was going to surprise Gloria with them. Her favorite outfits and a few pieces of jewelry were given to family and friends, the rest donated to the poor. I would have kept everything exactly as it was. But life goes on. Her passing left a hole in my life into which I hoped would flow all the kindness she represented...
Sometimes, I wonder what might have happened if Alzheimer's had been the diagnosis instead of cancer...if those intense and devastating 10 weeks had stretched into 10 years. And I wonder about the road ahead for me.
I write these words as the opening post to Gowanus Crossing a memoir of lives unfolded on the fatal banks of Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal. Remember how I'd assured myself that the cancer that killed Gloria's sisters had somehow inoculated my mother against the disease. In fact, my Aunt Mary, another of her sisters, and two of her brothers, Sonny and Tony, would all die of cancer. They grew up in a house on the corner of Carroll and Nevins streets, since demolished, a few hundred feet from the canal. As a boy, I remember the poisonous green tides flooding the cellar, my uncles wading into the noisome water to clear the drains.
Ours is just one story of a hundred families in a forgotten neighborhood. My hope is that neighborhood and its people will live again on these pages.
I remember wise guys dumping medical and other wastes into the canal. It was cheaper for their corporate customers than loading the toxic material on a barge and ferrying it out to sea. The deals no doubt done in Monte's Venetian Room, a restaurant across from our house. I couldn't afford to eat there until I was in my thirties.
As a boy, I played pirate on half-sunken barges, climbed a mountain of metal barrels filled with industrial chemicals. A king, I held "magic" turquoise crystals and golden powders in my hands when the containers spilled open. I remember raw sewage from our toilets passing straight into the water through a stone conduit alongside the Carroll Street Bridge.
Last month, the EPA declared the canal--now eagerly eyed by a new generation of developers and self-styled urban pioneers--a Superfund site.
Once again, I found myself emotionally, but not practically prepared for crisis. Gregory, who had been supporting Mom since my father's death, was unemployed. Joseph was in a rehab program. Bills were piled up; the mortgage and property taxes hadn't been paid. My parents had managed family finances out of an old shoe box in which they kept payment books, canceled checks, etc. Mom's hospital costs were already in the tens of thousands of dollars and surging daily. Though well-insured, she still owed thousands from her previous surgeries. Our resources essentially consisted of her small savings account, a $2,000 life insurance policy and the modest row house we'd grown up in. Determined to keep the house and our family intact, I found myself worrying about losing both every day.
At the hospital, Mom was being maintained on heavy doses of morphine and little else. We asked that the dosage be cut back and discovered the pain had diminished. Other problems had developed: her feet and ankles had begun to swell with fluid; she couldn't swallow without choking. Her only sustenance was the intravenous solution that dripped slowly into her arms. Every day, untouched containers of soup, pasta, fruit, toast, eggs, Jell-O, tea, lined her window sill.
After ten days, she was finally transfered to Methodist Hospital's third floor cancer ward for chemotherapy. Each day, I'd imagine the runaway cells inexorably growing, approaching some critical mass.
"Do you think this can really help me?" she asked.
"Please, Mom I said, "there's nothing else we can do."
I'd half-convinced myself the harmless-looking liquids in the clear plastic bags above her bed could work some miracle. They were powerful cytotoxins that would kill any fast-growing cells in her body: she would lose her hair, develop sores in her mouth and the lining of her stomach, experience nausea or worse. On Friday night, she was given a cocktail of painkillers and anti-nausea drugs to prepare her for her first treatment.
I arrived early Saturday morning carrying coffee and a newspaper, eager for some hopeful sign. A nurse stopped me outside the room to ask whether Mrs. Coppola should be revived if she went into cardiac arrest. I rushed past her to find Mom semi-conscious, gasping for breath. A nurse was suctioning her throat with a vacuum device. The anti-nausea drugs had supressed the gag reflex that allowed her to clear phlegm: she was drowning in front of my eyes. We stared silently at each other. Half-a-dozen other patients were in distress; the nurse passed the vacuum tube and saline solution to me and left.
Mom revived, survived the first round of treatment. By then, she'd seen herself in a mirror and asked for Father Louis DeTommaso, her pastor. We all took communion together around her bed. Another lifelong image was seared into my consciousness. My relatives had begun placing religious pictures by her bed, alongside those of her grandchildren, Justin, Gabrielle Pia, and Thomas. Her brother Sonny and his wife Madeleine, postponed their annual winter trip to Florida.
In the cancer ward, some patients slept constantly; others never. One woman, suffering from both lymphoma and Alzheimer's disease shrieked through the night. Many of the patients smoked constantly. One of Mom's roomates, a woman apparently without family or friends to support her, endured three days of chemotherapy and then was preparing to make her way home alone. Gloria ordered me to drive her home. She had Greg give $10 to another, indigent patient.
Despite the high tech medicines and the decency of the caregivers, the ward was not a place to inspire hope. Half-a-block away on Seventh Avenue, the shops were ablaze with lights and Christmas decorations; men hawked Christmas trees on the sidewalks while carols played over tinny speakers. Our house, always bright and filled with people at Christmas time, was dark and empty.
Greg and I stayed in shifts. Our relatives visited regularly but we kept the haunted hours. Other families kept similar vigils; many of the "children" were my age. Two brothers, both in their 40s, had flown in from Florida at Thanksgiving to care for their mother. A month later, they were still there "trying to get Mom home for Christmas." At the other end of the scale was the daughter who publicly berated her dying mother for all the "trouble and expense" she was causing. The woman's last months would be spoent shuttling between cancer ward and nursing home.
Three days before Christmas, I asked Mom's permission to return to Atlanta to spend time with my children. She insisted I go.
"I'm okay, I've got plenty of company."
Holidays were important in our family, heralded by huge dinners my parents would spend days preparing. I sensed she was passing on the tradition to me. As I was leaving for the airport, torn between my responsibilites as both father and son, she handed me money for gifts and Christmas cards for Gaby and Thomas. Inside, she'd written,
"Grandma will love you always."
A patient died Christmas Eve. Three days after Christmas, a surgeon had cut into my mother's abdomen attempting to install a feeding tube directly into her stomach. He failed. He told us her liver was so enlarged with tumor, he couldn't find her stomach. A tiny tube he attached to her small intestine pulled free and Mom refused to have it reinstalled.
On New Year's Day, a 43-year-old woman whose husband and daughters had kept a lonely vigil in the room across from us died of brain cancer. Their wails echoed through the ward.
At noon on Saturday Jan. 5th, Gloria was discharged from Methodist Hospital. The plan was to get her out of the grim ward environment for a week, after which she'd return for three days of chemotherapy. Visiting nurses and home healthcare workers would help us manage.
I spent that morning at home scrubbing the floors and putting everything in order. Over the last year, Gregory had renovated the ground flooer of our dilapidated, 100-year-old row house, ripped out walls, exposed brick, installed new appliances, windows, even parquet floors.
While Mom was hospitalized, he had her dingy bedroom redone all sunshine and bright colors. I'd dumped the worn-out bedroom and living room suites, bouth new sofas and a bed--charged it all--framed and hung pictures of my brother Thomas and the grandchildren alongside her photograph of Pope Paul VI. My mother had spent her entire adult life living in that rundown house. The renovation was Greg's final gift to her.
On the sidewalk outside the hospital, she couldn't walk four steps to the car without gasping. The painful swelling that had begun in her feet by now had bloated her legs. When I'd massaged them, imprints of my fingers remained in her flesh. She couldn't have weighed more than 80 lbs. Her face was grey, her lips pulling back from ther teeth.
"It's so beautiful," she whispered as Greg carried her into the house. "So beautiful."
A neighbor had prepared lentil soup and run it through a blender for her. She couldn't eat. (At the hospital, she'd ordered her cousin Millie to eat the food I'd leave "...so Vincent wouldn't worry." ) She spent the day exhausted on a BarcaLounger we'd borrowed from a neighbor. On Sunday, a visiting nurse noted Mom's systolic blood pressure had dropped below 90; she looked at me oddly when I announced I had gotten Gloria to eat two full tablespoons of oatmeal. A medical reporter, I refused to acknowledge any medical information. It had come down to "...what God wants."
Sunday night, Greg carried Mom upstairs to her bedroom, the stairway as insurmountable to her as Mount Everest. It took six pillows to put her at ease and still she couldn't sleep. She called to me in the middle of the night. I lay awake next door in the narrow room that had been mine as a teenager.
"Vincent, my back...I can't get comfortable any more."
I adjusted her pillows for the 10th time.,
"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm not letting you sleep. I'm sorry I made you come up here so far from the kids."
I clung to the iron rail of her new bed. An enormous chasm stretches between the living and the dying, a gap love cannot bridge. I wanted to hurl myself across it. "Mom," I said, "There's nowhere else in the world I want to be." I realize now that I had been granted a precious moment. A chance to say those special things we feel for those we love but so rarely do A chance to say goodbye.
"Mom, I want you to know that you've been the best mother any son could have. I want you to know that whatever is good and special in me has come from you."
She lay there staring.
I was blinded by tears. "Mom, You know that I can't change this. I can't change what's happening to you. You know if would if I could."
"I know that," she whispered. "I know."
Monday morning, her blood pressure continued to drop.
"Vincent," she said, "I don't feel good Maybe I should go back to the hospital."
I didn't want her to die surrounded by gaping strangers in a crowded emergency room or wind up lifeless on an respirator. "Okay, Mom. Let's wait a little bit." I knew what choice I was making. The hospital had an arrangement for bypassing admitting procedures on the cancer ward. After a while, it became too much Greg drove to the hospital to find the head nurse. I was upstairs when Angela, a family friend, shrieked, "Vinny, come down! Something's happening!"
Mom had pitched forward in the chair. She'd grabbed Angela's hand She wasn't breathing. I pinched her nostrils and began breathing into her mouth. It was the first time I'd ever kissed my mother on the lips.
"Breathe Mom. Please, Mom breathe! Don't die!"
Somehow she heard me and delayed her passing. She came back, but only for a moment. Her last breath passed into my mouth. Later, Josie Stuto, our octogenarian Italian neighbor across the street would tell me this was a special gift.
I was aware of Greg kneeling beside me sobbing. I won't cry," he'd said, "until there's no hope." There were no open beds at the hospital. Angela dialed 911. Half-a-dozen police officers and EMTs piled thorugh our front door, pushing us aside. Mom lay on her back, her pajama top open as a team worked to defibrilate her. Her ribs and collar bones protruded It was the only time I'd ever seen her undressed.
At that moment, our brother Joseph walked in. He never got his chance to say a last goodbye, make amends, and tell her he loved her. Of course, Gloria knew that. Her last thoughts were of him.
As I write this, the tulips and irises I'd planted in the yard that last fall are beginning to blossom. I was going to surprise Gloria with them. Her favorite outfits and a few pieces of jewelry were given to family and friends, the rest donated to the poor. I would have kept everything exactly as it was. But life goes on. Her passing left a hole in my life into which I hoped would flow all the kindness she represented...
Sometimes, I wonder what might have happened if Alzheimer's had been the diagnosis instead of cancer...if those intense and devastating 10 weeks had stretched into 10 years. And I wonder about the road ahead for me.
I write these words as the opening post to Gowanus Crossing a memoir of lives unfolded on the fatal banks of Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal. Remember how I'd assured myself that the cancer that killed Gloria's sisters had somehow inoculated my mother against the disease. In fact, my Aunt Mary, another of her sisters, and two of her brothers, Sonny and Tony, would all die of cancer. They grew up in a house on the corner of Carroll and Nevins streets, since demolished, a few hundred feet from the canal. As a boy, I remember the poisonous green tides flooding the cellar, my uncles wading into the noisome water to clear the drains.
Ours is just one story of a hundred families in a forgotten neighborhood. My hope is that neighborhood and its people will live again on these pages.
I remember wise guys dumping medical and other wastes into the canal. It was cheaper for their corporate customers than loading the toxic material on a barge and ferrying it out to sea. The deals no doubt done in Monte's Venetian Room, a restaurant across from our house. I couldn't afford to eat there until I was in my thirties.
As a boy, I played pirate on half-sunken barges, climbed a mountain of metal barrels filled with industrial chemicals. A king, I held "magic" turquoise crystals and golden powders in my hands when the containers spilled open. I remember raw sewage from our toilets passing straight into the water through a stone conduit alongside the Carroll Street Bridge.
Last month, the EPA declared the canal--now eagerly eyed by a new generation of developers and self-styled urban pioneers--a Superfund site.
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