A Rising Tide Sinks All

No one in New York City gave a damn about the Gowanus Canal for 50 years, even as my old neighborhood was devastated by a host of bizarre cancers and other illnesses. Now, with the arrival of a new species of speculator and upbeat urban shit-ologist, the thumbnail-long Gowanus gets more notice than the Amazon River. The question this morning is whether Hurricane Sandy will raise a plague of boils and frogs along the quayside--including Carroll Street where I grew up. Here's the answer: Incomprehensible as it seems, the canal was a luxuriant stream in pre-Revolutionary War Brooklyn. Industrialization in the 19th Century transformed the tidal creek and its oyster beds and dredged the Gowanus. Then came an era of leaking oil and coal barges, dumped chemical wastes and the occasional mafia hit. Nonetheless, the area from Bond Street to Fourth Avenue is still a flood plain, hence all the banging and pile-driving for the new Whole Foods on Third Avenue and Third Street. (see http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/05/fly-fishing-on-gowanus-canal-part-i.html )
When the tide rises, all the basements will flood with every manner of pollutant and carcinogen. My Grandmother Clementina's house stood on the corner of Nevins and Carroll. I remember my uncles Sonny and Tony having to plunge into four feet of shit and oil in the cellar to clear the drains after a heavy rain. After a lifetime of this, my mom and six of her seven brothers and sisters all developed and died of cancer. The bigger question: What will the much ballyhooed EPA clean-up of this newest Superfund site unleash?

Gowanus Crossing Reboot

 

Gowanus Crossing is a memoir of a life lived along Brooklyn's infamous Gowanus Canal. I grew up on Carroll Street across from Monte's Venetian Room, at the time a landmark red sauce restaurant that drew a never-ending mix of politicans, gangsters and celebrities--I fought viciously over a handful of change Tony Bennett scattered on the sidewalk one night. Monte's, half-a-block from the polluted canal, was the heart of an Italian enclave of dockworkers and shopkeepers emigrated from Salerno Province. Al Capone was born on Garfield Place, two blocks from my house. My world was shaped by the Irish nuns of Our Lady of Peace parish who saw themselves as missionaries and the Italians, vulgarians to be driven down the path to Salvation; counterbalanced by glittering mafiosi who represented wealth, success and stability in a chaotic world. No teenage boy could want better role models (nothing was forbidden); no adult worse. Gowanus Crossing is not another half-assed wise guy saga, or a story of escape from a destructive environment. Its what I find locked in my  heart all these years later. Part of me loved this world: the writer inside could embellish and lie and live in my head, burying the violence, cruelty and waste in the drama of it all; the innocent boy could not. I left South Brookyn in my twenties before the canal became a fashionable destination, and my family destroyed, but South Brooklyn never left me. Will not leave me. What follows in the 2012 blog posts is how it all came flooding back:

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 us who’d grown-up near the stream would be dead or dying of an epidemic of cancers and birth defects long after we'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.

My Friend Ray Sharkey, Fallen Idol

“No more than a wisp of dust”

Ray Sharkey was the guy who got away…who fled the desolation that dragged so many of us into early graves. He ran but could not escape the plague within. The Ray I remember was half-Irish, with a long nose, sparkling eyes, pockmarked skin and voice like a rasp. He grew up in a row house on the dark side of the Gowanus in the shadow of the decaying Expressway near the Battery Tunnel. His father, a doorman, slipped out when Ray was five. His mother pampered him; his nonna sang to him in Italian. You can see shards of his Brooklyn childhood, glittering and brittle, in Taylor Hackford’s film, The Idolmaker.

Mornings, Ray and I would walk together up Union Street to all-boys St. Augustine High School on Park Place. Walked past the stoop where a Tuinal-enraged distant relative named “Boy-Boy” stabbed a Puerto Rican to death for playing a guitar. Heads back, shoulders rolling, we strolled, wearing our purple and white letterman’s sweaters with the big “A” sewn above the pocket. Letters, earned not on the field, court or track, but for selling indulgences, a practice that triggered the Protestant Reformation. We pestered the dry, doddering, sinless Episcopalians who still dominated Park Slope into giving us cash money in return for prayers, unnumbered and at unknown intervals like Swiss bank accounts for their salvation.  A $100 —my father earned less in a week unloading ships on the Red Hook piers—and the Christian Brothers named you a “Centurion.”

In a neighborhood where everyone—from Angioletti, the singsong fruit peddler, to the gamblers on the corner—shouted like performers in some sidewalk opera, Ray was a loudmouth. Intense, histrionic, given to breaking out in a quavering doo-wop falsetto at a moment’s notice. He was a few years younger than I and best friends with my brother Joey. Summers, Ray, Joey and a short, curly-haired, granite-jawed football player named Raymond Brocco, would head to Brighton Beach, slather themselves with baby oil and iodine; smoke, ingest and inhale every combination of alcohol and pharmaceutical, and roast themselves unconscious on teeny towels while trying to pick up Jewish girls from Ocean Parkway. I can still smell the salt tang and the sand cool under my feet in the boardwalk’s shade.  No question, Ray was part of the frantic, gang-bang, romantic-violent Gowanus mix— lost boys like my cousins JuJu, Jimmy Psycho, Popeye Anthony and Richie Mel—but he hung back, absorbed and observed, mined and mastered all the pain and hurt.
Or so I thought.

I now know that flight never means escape, and transcendence is not forever. A madness still sings in my veins. Ray never finished high school, never became a Centurion. He caught a performance of Hair in Manhattan—an alien place we called “the City”—and surely as Saul of Tarsus, knew his place. He plunged into acting with my handsome and doomed brother Thomas, studying with Uta Hagen at HB Studio. Had he read his Chaucer at Saint Augustine, Ray might have recognized the revelers in the Pardoner’s Tale determined to triumph over Death…might have recognized that Death manifests in seductive guises.

On a Sunday afternoon in the spring of ‘73, Ray showed up driving a 356 Porsche—maybe one of the sports cars Anthony Lips stole and swapped VIN numbers from wrecks rusting in Stuckey’s Staten Island salvage yard. The gualiones ("wallyos"--in dialect) gathered outside Monte’s restaurant, scratched their crotches, threw make-believe punches, laughed, dug the car. Ray basked in the attention. With him, a long-haired, bellbottomed Puerto Rican Golden Gloves champ named Chu-Chu Malave. No Sancho Panza he. My mother served platters of ravioli, meatballs, braciole, sausage, roast chicken, salad, cannoli from Cioffi’s on Union near Columbia Street. Old Man Stuto’s homemade wine flowed. Ray entertained us.  He begged Joey to come along (“Fuckin’ California, man!”) but my brother was already passing into the limbo he’d inhabit the rest of his life. Mom warned Ray to “be a good boy.” He laughed his crazy laugh.
And roared away.

I didn’t see Ray Sharkey for ten years. My world had changed. Somehow, I'd graduated from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. In 1982, Newsweek dispatched me to Los Angeles to write a profile of this hot new movie star. My colleague, David Friendly, put me up in the Beverly Hills Hotel. Ray had just won the Golden Globe award as Best Motion Picture Actor and critics were raving over his searing portrayal of impresario Bob Marcucci, the man who loosed Fabian and Frankie Avalon upon the world. Pauline Kael called him “the next Jimmy Cagney.” I never knew Cagney or Marcucci, but I recognized Ray Sharkey, the Ray who ached for recognition and respect, who, if you looked closely, leaked desperation like a sieve. I smiled at the clotheslined backyards of Gowanus tenements trying to pass for South Philly. No question, Ray’s nod to the old neighborhood.

“Where’s your brother?” he shouted when I arrived. “These neighborhood guys…they got a stupid apartment…they got a car…they’re fucking some girl on the side. That’s all there is to life? Tell him to get out here! I’ll give him a job. He stays with me! No problem.” He closed his fist and thrust his thumb in the air like a guarantee.

His life was changed, but not transcended. The Idolmaker was a box office disappointment. Still, Ray was living on the beach in Malibu. He’d dated the Italian actress Ornella Muti, far and away the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. He was living with a very good-looking blonde. “Mienca, her family owns Kellogg’s cereal!” he confided when we were alone, shaking his open hand like it was on fire. “You believe that shit?” He rode motorcycles with Stallone and Gary Busey. He wore a stupid bandanna to cover his thinning hair.  In a few years, TV audiences would know him as Sonny Steelgrave in Wiseguy. He’d make appearances on Miami Vice…on Crime Story, dozens of shows and movies.  He was only 29-years-old. He had 10 years to live.

“Yo, come with me,” he said before I could start our interview. This would be a pattern over the next days, my deadline clock tick-tick-ticking away. We drove, we ate Fatburgers, he bought a VCR—I’d never seen one—and showed me tapes of his work. His characters tended to be named “Vinnie.” I liked that. He’d finished Some Kind of Hero, a film about dysfunctional former POWs, co-starring , of all people, Richard Pryor. A POW camp, real or imagined, is hardly a therapeutic environment “Madonna! we spent a lot of time getting into character,” Ray allowed.

For three days, he danced, he deflected, he feinted and fell back on the old dese and dose tough guy clichés.  I didn’t have the heart or maybe the skill to press him. I had one brother dying of AIDS, another a junkie, a third an out-of-control gambler with wise guys hot on his trail. I wasn’t making such smart life choices myself. Really, what could I ask?  His manager, Herb Nanas, only saw blue skies. Giuseppe, his hairstylist, pronounced Ray “tanned and fit.” Other sources didn’t bother to return my calls. To me, Hollywood is a very hard nut to crack, far harder than the Pentagon, Washington or Wall Street.  My story was put on hold, indefinitely.  

“I always knew I would fall—big time,” Ray once said. By 1991, it was big time. Like so many peers and family members who’d come of age in the streets along the Gowanus, and with so much at his fingertips, Ray Sharkey had become a full-blown heroin addict. Not coke like everyone else in Hollywood. Heroin, straight out of the gutters and shooting galleries of Red Hook. Strung-out, trailing a string of arrests, ODs, car wrecks, failed rehabs, lies, lurid gossip, destroyed marriages. He burned through a million dollars that year, got busted in Vancouver and fired from an acting gig, the unforgivable sin a business willing to look every other way as long as you put asses in the seats. The impenetrable shield Hollywood extends over its own was cracking.

Ray wasn’t done yet. It was the Age of AIDS, not Aquarius. And Sharkey was an IV drug user. When an actress named Elena Monica, daughter of the comedian, Corbett Monica, filed an all-too-public lawsuit accusing Sharkey—who’d mysteriously had lost 40 lbs.—of infecting her with the AIDS virus in the course of a brief relationship, he had nowhere else to run. To his shame, he stayed in denial to the end—he could barely stand when Monica showed up to confront him--even after his manager revealed the truth. Shortly after, Ray returned to Brooklyn to die with his mother. Tough as nails, Cecelia shielded him to the very end. He passed away on June 11, 1993. Witnesses remember him as no more than “a wisp of dust.”

I was reminded of Ray Sharkey in the summer of 2012 when I’d volunteered to write the narration for a documentary being shot in Atlanta. The Narrator turned out to be Tovah Feldshuh who'd played Ray Sharkey’s love interest in his breakthrough film, The Idolmaker, thirty years before. Tovah is quite lovely and has had both a good life and a successful career, most recently the star of Golda’s Balcony, the longest running one-woman play in Broadway history. Of course, we talked about Ray. Tovah was one of those good-looking, well-bred Jewish girls Sharkey would have loved to seduce.

And I wondered once again why our lives insist on unfolding the way they do. Tovah is happily married, with a husband and grown children. She lives on Central Park West and grew up in affluent Scarsdale. Ray and I by the pestilent Gowanus, a Superfund site. Her father was an attorney. Ray’s absentee father a doorman; mine a dockworker given to violent rages. Is it destiny, nurture, nature (a chaos gene that selects for creativity and torment)? Or the fact we lived in a self-contained, through-the-looking-glass world where teachers, police, clergy, and other authority figues were corrupt or uncaring...and mafia guys our role models? It's all beyond my ken, save for the ache I feel when I remember Ray as he once was. As my brothers once were.  For all his brilliance—and there is no question that Ray was brilliant— Sharkey sleeps in a lonely grave in a forgotten town on Long Island.

Best of Gowanus Crossing  2012


http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/03/union-busting-for-mob.html

http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/04/my-cousin-richie.html

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

http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/05/lonesome-death-of-louie-fag.html

http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/05/fly-fishing-on-gowanus-canal-part-i.html

http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/08/wounds-that-will-not-heal-parts-i-ii.html

http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/02/garden-of-unearlhly-delights.html

Wounds That Will Not Heal Parts I & II

I was 14 when I wrote my first story, “A Battered War Helmet.” I spent days working on it on the scarred kitchen table of our three room apartment, ignoring the squeals of my kid brothers, the blare of the Mouseketeers, praying I’d be spared one of my father’s violent squalls. I wrote in ballpoint, on loose-leaf paper, inspired mostly by a John Wayne movie, Sands of Iwo Jima, that moved me to tears. I handed it in to Sister Mary Malachy and awaited her response.  Then waited some more
At Our Lady of Peace School, Malachy encouraged her pets, Salvatore Mulia, Dominick D’Alessio and Rosalie, Dilorenzo, to attend academically strong Catholic high schools. As for me, she predicted I’d make “headlines.” Not in the scholarly, Wall Street or humanitarian way teachers hope for, but mad-dog criminal, Richard Speck, “Headless Body in Topless Bar”—style headlines from the New York Post and Daily News.  On a street swarming with guys like “Honey” Christiano, Hugh “Apples” McIntosh,  (see http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/03/union-busting-for-mob.html), Carmine “The Snake,” “Andrew Mush”  “Slush,”  “Jimmy the Morgue” “Jerry Half-and-Half” (so handsome he had to be “half” gay); a neighborhood where someone shouted, “There’s a dead nigger floating in the canal!” and two dozen of us rushed down Carroll Street as if a manatee had surfaced, such “headlines” were beyond my reach.
So I studied, hiking up to the public library on 6th Avenue and Eight St. to sit surrounded by goofballs in black framed eyeglasses and the occasional pervert), and try to read. I read all the paperbacks on the rack at the newsstand at Fourth Ave. and Union Street, convinced sci-fi, bodice-rippers and lurid tales of the Mau-Mau rebellion were high art. I read milk containers, match book covers, comic books.
In those days, you were admitted to a Catholic high school by taking the “Cooperative Test,” a kind of 8th grade SAT measuring language, reasoning and math skills. You marked your “top five” school choices on the application, and depending on your scores, you’d be accepted or rejected.  Making three schools was outstanding, four fantastic. No one made five.
I didn’t have much of a fallback. Manual Training (as in manual labor), our neighborhood public high school (since renamed John Jay H.S.), was infested by gangs, a fast track to a career as a garbage man, or denizen of Riker’s Island. In fact, I was a legacy student: JuJu, my cousin Richie’s older brother (http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/04/my-cousin-richie.html ), had famously pushed a piano out the window of the second story music room. 
I took the Cooperative Test on a Saturday, needle-sharp No. 2 pencils in hand, careful to keep my answers to the multiple choice questions within the little circles.  Over the next weeks, I’d race home for lunch where Gloria, my mom, would invariably serve me and my brothers, Joey and Thomas, pork and beans and fried eggs, sopped up with Gallo’s Italian bread delivered piping hot to our door for 15 cents a loaf.
“Ma, the mailman come?”
“Yes.”
“Any mail?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“Jesus.”
“Mom! It’s important.”
Our mailman was a black guy, nicknamed “Brownie.” He lived within the magic circle of the neighborhood. If you dared mess with Brownie—no one dared—the guys hanging outside the Capri Club would pound you to pulp. Brownie was an exceptional mailman: he managed not to deliver overdue bills, rent, car payments and mortgage notices—marking them “Return to Sender.” At Christmas, he’d reap enormous cash bonuses. One morning, word spread through Our Lady of Peace that the Cooperative Test results were in. I raced home dodging Butchie the Fag, the patrol boy who worked the corner of Third Ave. and Carroll Street, dodging trucks and tractor trailers en route to the Second Ave. piers. I ducked down the three concrete steps to our basement apartment, shouldered the hollow plywood front door like Sam Huff, sent the red ribbon of sleigh bells we used as a doorbell, jangling.
Gloria was standing there, a sheaf of letters in her hand. There were five—St. Augustine, Bishop Loughlin, Xaverian, Power Memorial and St. Francis Prep, typed and sealed in starch-white envelopes, the first grown-up mail I’d ever gotten. St. Francis Prep processed strapping Irish boys into Notre Dame football behemoths; Power Memorial had recruited Lew Alcindor, later Kareem Abdul Jabbar; Bishop Loughlin was honing the heart and mind of Rudy Giuliani, the diminutive, hyper-driven son of a one-time Brooklyn criminal; La Salle, a Jesuit military academy in the heart of Manhattan, educated Antonin Scalia. La Salle’s “7th Ave. Subway Commandos” would soon fatten the rolls in Vietnam. St. Augustine pounded the gifted poor into Latin scholars and over achievers.
I mumbled a prayer and tore them open. Five schools.  I’d made all five schools.
I stumbled back outside. Gloria wrapped her arms around me. “I’m so proud!” She was 38-years-old and loved her sons more than life. “Your father called this morning. He’s bragging to all the men in the gang.” I looked down. Tommy and Joey were clinging to my legs. We spun round and round on the sidewalk.
 “Five schools!”
Fat Rosie and Baby Chick lumbered across Carroll Street. The cousins spent their mornings sitting outside crocheting hats; their afternoon’s running numbers. They pounded and kissed me, smearing white lipstick on my cheek. Baby Chick, flowered mu-mu billowing like a sail, took my hand, stuck a $10 bill into my palm. “I’m glad somebody in this neighborhood ain’t a fucking moron!”
I couldn’t eat lunch.  Ernie was standing next to Honey outside Monte’s.
“How did you do?
“I made St. Leonard’s!”
 “Watch them fag priests!” said Honey. “How’d you do?”
“I made…five.” 
“Whoa!”
He peeled two twenties off a roll of bills. He handed them to us. “Congratulations. Yous two’ll get an education. Yous won’t have to break your ass every day like me.” Ernie pumped his closed fist three times. Honey laughed, amused at his own bullshit. He pretend-slapped both of us.
****
A line of students wavered outside the convent on Whitwell Place. Malachy was eating her lunch on the convent’s brick porch, congratulating eighth-graders as they came by. We joined the line. Sal was already on the porch. Behind him were Kathleen Victor and Dominick D’Alessio.
“I bet you did great.”
Jean Wilcox appeared behind me, smiling.  She was tall as I was with blue eyes and wavy brown hair. I noticed the top two buttons of her uniform blouse were undone.
“He made all five schools!” Ernie blurted.
“Wow!” said Jenny. “Cool!”
 I blushed.
“Give him a kiss!” giggled Ernie.
And she did. She walked right up to me in front of the line of students, put her hand around my neck and pulled me close.
“You’re special,” she whispered.
I had never kissed, never touched a girl, had never known the perfume of an adolescent female. I stood there, experiencing and trying to remember it, at the same time. The freckled Henry twins, Carolyn and Carol Ann, wolf-whistled. Malachy looked up and frowned. I stepped onto the porch Sal Mulia, Rosalie Dilorenzo and Kathleen Victor were standing around like courtiers.
The nun was eating baked fish, boiled potatoes and slices of  a purple-red vegetable I’d never seen before.
“Ernest, for your poor mother’s sake,” Malachy said, “I hope some Christian school was willing to take on the burden of your education”
“St. Leonard’s!” said Ernie.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” said Malachy. “A miracle.”
A short-lived miracle. Ernie would be thrown out of St. Leonard’s a year later for vandalizing a subway car. A 260 lb. leviathan wearing the distinctive green and yellow St. Leonard’s jacket was not hard to finger.
Malachy turned to me. I caught a whiff of her, pissy and sour beneath the starched brown habit, her breath rank with onions and fish.
“Kathleen Victor, Mr. Mulia and Rosalie Dilorenzo were accepted by four high schools. Aren’t you proud of them? Do you see the rewards hard work can bring?” Sal grinned, clasping his hands above his head like a prize fighter.
“I made five,” I said. “St. Augustine too. I’m gonna go there.”
Startled, Sal hesitated, then walked up, put his right hand behind my neck, shoved me affectionately.“All right!” he said.
“Good job Vinny.” This from Kathleen.
 I had  a little speech prepared, thanking  Malachy for being my teacher…how she was  “tough but  fair….” I opened my mouth. The nun put down her fork, shot a glance at Jean Wilcox and the Henry wins standing at the edge of the porch.
“You don’t deserve it Coppola,” she said. “I know you for the sneak and the cheat that you are.”
I flinched.
“Sister!” Kathleen gasped.
I stood there, staring down at the table. A fly made its way across the checkered tablecloth.
“Excuse me.”
I turned. Jean stood at the top of the porch steps. I brushed past her, tripped on the steps, caught myself, began running, daring my ravaged heart to explode in my chest. Block after block I ran, slowing only when I crossed the Third Street Bridge over Gowanus Canal.
By then I was in another neighborhood.
***
Part II
Time passed. I was 14. I still believed in the cascading prayers we recited each morning, “…the forgiveness of sins…the resurrection of the body… life everlasting…” Miracles, martyrs, saints, torment. (I couldn't shake the image--depicted in graphic detail in our Catechisms--of Isaac Jogues, having his fingernails torn off by pagan Mohawks.) I still longed, in the words of the Nelson Eddy song my mother sang to me when I was a little boy, to be a “stout-hearted man.”
Mornings, from my dunce’s seat in the back of the class, I waited for Malachy to appear lugging her brass-buckled black leather schoolbag, eager for the telltale bulge of marked papers. And one morning, it was there. Time crawled… catechism…math…rote vocabulary drills (they’d propel me through the SATs, GREs, into the Ivy League), the rosary and its myriad unfathomable mysteries (http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/05/fly-fishing-on-gowanus-canal-part-i.html). It was nearly lunchtime when Malachy reached into her bag and pulled out the sheaf of papers. I giggled at the chicken pox smear that was somebody else’s essay.
 “I have your personified autobiographies,” she began. (Personified autobiography, a phrase from a world far beyond the Gowanus Canal.
“Some students worked hard and turned excellent papers. “The rest of you, the vulgarians,” she looked up balefully, “handed in stuff and nonsense. You know who you are.”

 I sat on the edge of my seat as she handed out what had to be “A” papers:  “Cireno, Cucciaro…. D’Alessio, Dilorenzo…”
Whoa! What about Coppo...
 “Mancuso, Mulia, Victor.”  And then the “B’s” and “C’s: “Di Pippo, Garrison, Henry, Palermo, Perez, Sessa, Wilcox.” I tried an encouraging smilke at Jean; she must have missed it. 
When Malachy got to the donkeys, “…. Bacotti, Benevento, Bashinelli, Paulino, Prosciutto, Romano, Viscardi…” I knew something was dramatically wrong.
 She handed Ernie Palmieri his paper with a nod of approval. Tall, dark, green-eyed, already an industrious guy, he'd emigrated from Italy with his parents, brothers and sisters. He was working in a pork store, a salumeria, on Fifth Ave. between Carroll and President Streets where the fragrance of  Parmigiano Reggiano, olives and cheese and parsley sausage wafted out onto the sidewalk
Ernie, who sat next to me by the radiator, grinned, waggled his hand, pinching thumb and forefinger together as if to say, “This American stuff, no problem!”
Then it hit me: Best for last! Malachy was saving the best paper, my “Battered War Helmet” for the finale, the piece de resistance had I known the phrase.  I’d worked on it for days, rewritten it so many times, I choked up when I read it, always a good sign.
 “Coppola, up here.”
 “Yes Sister!”
I bolted out of my seat, John Wayne charging up Mount Suribachi, all previous injustice forgotten.
She was standing alongside her oak desk, holding my story. The fluorescent light glinting off her rimless glasses rendered her pale eyes opaque.
Grinning, I held my hand out, half-turning to face the class, so I  never saw it coming. A sweeping right cross that knocked me against the blackboard. The billowing sleeves of her brown Franciscan habit flying, she pounced on me with a flurry of slaps I was too stunned to parry. To my shame, tears sprung from my eyes. In front of the entire class.
"Sister....?"
“This!” she roared to my stunned classmates, “is what happens to plagiarists!”
I didn't even know the word.
 I was 14 when I wrote that first story. I never wrote another until I was 28.
***
Years later, when the world had changed and I was yet to realize how childhood dreams can be both substantial and ephemeral, I encountered Ernie Palmieri in Washington, D.C.
I was a Newsweek reporter, staying at a fancy hotel, working on a story about women Vietnam vets. He was a name on the Wall.  Etched on Panel 13 E, Line 23 of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a helicopter crew chief killed on a rescue mission near Bien Hoa. http://rattler-firebird.org/vietnam/remembered/Ernest-Palmieri.html Ernie was 20 when he died. Today, his death is noted on the Internet for an uncaring world to ignore (even his battle buddies will soon be old men).  And the pain of seeing him this way carries me back yet again to the crucible that was a parochial school classroom. Ernie died on December 8, 1966. Sister Mary Malachy would have noted it was the feast of the Immaculate Conception. Ernie was wrong about the American stuff, another well meaning, innocent kid cast upon the Gowanus Canal's fatal shore.

Wounds That Will Not Heal Part I

I was 14 when I wrote my first story, “A Battered War Helmet.” I spent days working on it on the scarred kitchen table of our three room apartment, ignoring the squeals of my kid brothers, the blare of the Mouseketeers, praying I’d be spared one of my father’s violent squalls. I wrote in ballpoint, on loose-leaf paper, inspired mostly by a John Wayne movie, Sands of Iwo Jima, that moved me to tears. I handed it in to Sister Mary Malachy and awaited her response.  Then waited some more...

At Our Lady of Peace School, Malachy encouraged her pets, Salvatore Mulia, Kathleen Victor, Dominick D’Alessio and Rosalie, Dilorenzo, to attend academically strong Catholic high schools. As for me, she predicted I’d make “headlines.” Not in the scholarly, corporate or humanitarian way teachers hope for, but mad-dog, criminal, Richard Speck, “Headless Body in Topless Bar”—style headlines familiar from the New York Post and Daily News. On a street swarming with guys like “Honey” Christiano, “Apples” McIntosh,  (see http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/03/union-busting-for-mob.html), Carmine “The Snake,” “Andrew Mush”  “Slush,”  “Jimmy the Morgue” “Jerry Half-and-Half” (so handsome he had to be “half” gay), a neighborhood where someone shouted, “There’s a dead nigger floating in the canal!” and two dozen of us rushed down Carroll Street as if a manatee had surfaced, such “headlines” were beyond my reach.
So I studied, hiking up to the public library on 6th Avenue and Eight Street. I'd sit surrounded by goofballs in black framed eyeglasses and the occasional pervert, and try to read. I read all the paperbacks on the rack at the newsstand at Fourth Ave. and Union Street, convinced sci-fi, bodice-rippers and lurid tales of the Mau-Mau rebellion were high art. I read milk containers, match book covers, comic books.
In those days, you were admitted to a Catholic high school by taking the “Cooperative Test,” a kind of 8th grade SAT measuring language, reasoning and math skills. You marked your “top five” school choices on the application, and, depending on your scores, (and maybe whom you knew) you’d be accepted or rejected.  Making three schools was outstanding, four fantastic. No one made five.
I didn’t have much of a fallback. Manual Training (think manual labor), our local public high school (since renamed John Jay), was infested by gangs, and a fast track to a career as a garbage man, or denizen of Riker’s Island. In fact, I was a legacy student: JuJu, my cousin Richie’s older brother (http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/04/my-cousin-richie.html ), had famously pushed a piano out the window of the second story music room.
 
I took the Cooperative Test on a Saturday, needle-sharp No. 2 pencils in hand, careful to keep my answers to the multiple choice questions within the little circles.  Over the next weeks, I’d race home for lunch where Gloria, my mom, would invariably serve me and my brothers, Joey and Thomas, pork and beans and fried eggs, and Johnny Gallo’s Italian bread delivered fresh-baked to our door for 15 cents a loaf.
“Ma, the mailman come?”
“Yes.”
“Any mail?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“Jesus.”
“Mom! It’s important.”
Our mailman was a black guy nicknamed “Brownie.” He lived within the magic circle of the neighborhood. If you dared mess with Brownie—no one did—the wise guys hanging outside the Capri Club would pound you to pulp. Brownie was an exceptional mailman: he managed not to deliver overdue bills, rent, car payments and mortgage notices—marking them “Return to Sender.” At Christmas, he’d reap serious cash bonuses.
One morning, word spread through Our Lady of Peace that the Cooperative Test results were in. I raced home dodging Butchie the Fag, the patrol boy who worked the corner of Third Ave. and Carroll Street, barely avoiding trucks and tractor trailers rumbling toward the Second Ave. piers. I ducked down the three concrete steps to our basement apartment, shouldered the hollow plywood front door like Sam Huff, sent the red ribbon of sleigh bells we used as a doorbell, jangling.
Gloria was standing there grinning, a sheaf of letters in her hand. There were five—St. Augustine, Bishop Loughlin, Xaverian, Power Memorial and St. Francis Prep, typed and sealed in starch-white envelopes, the first grown-up mail I’d ever gotten. St. Francis Prep processed strapping Irish boys into Notre Dame football behemoths; Power Memorial had recruited Lew Alcindor, later Kareem Abdul Jabbar; Bishop Loughlin was honing the heart and mind of Rudy Giuliani, the diminutive, hyper-driven son of a one-time Brooklyn criminal; La Salle, a Jesuit military academy in the heart of Manhattan, educated Antonin Scalia. La Salle’s “7th Ave. Subway Commandos” would soon fatten the rolls of KIA in Vietnam. St. Augustine pounded the gifted poor into Latin scholars and overachievers. Governor Hugh Carey was an Augustine grad.
I mumbled a fake prayer and tore them open.
Five schools.  I’d made all five schools.
I stumbled back outside. Gloria followed, wrapping her arms around me.
“I’m so proud!”
 She was 38-years-old and loved her sons more than life. “Your father called this morning. He’s bragging to all the men in the gang.”
"How....?"
 I looked down. Tommy and Joey were clinging to my legs. We spun round and round on the sidewalk.
 “Five schools!”
Fat Rosie and Baby Chick lumbered across Carroll Street. The cousins spent their mornings sitting outside crocheting hats; their afternoons running numbers. They pounded and kissed me, smearing white lipstick on my cheek. Baby Chick, flowered mu-mu billowing like a sail, took my hand, stuck a $10 bill into my palm. “I’m glad somebody in this neighborhood ain’t a fucking moron!”
I couldn’t eat lunch. Down the street, Ernie was standing next to Honey outside Monte’s Venetian Room.
“How did you do?
“I made St. Leonard’s!”
"Good for you."
 “Watch them fag priests!” said Honey. “How’d you do?”
“I made…five.” 
“Whoa!”
He peeled two twenties off a roll of bills. He handed them to us. “Congratulations. Yous two’ll get an education. Yous won’t have to break your ass every day like me.”
Ernie pumped his closed fist three times. Honey laughed, amused at his own bullshit. He pretend-slapped both of us.
****
A line of students wavered outside the convent on Whitwell Place. Malachy was eating her lunch on the brick porch, congratulating eighth-graders as they came by. We joined the line. Sal was already on the porch. Behind him were Kathleen Victor and Rosalie.
“I bet you did great.”
Jean Wilcox appeared behind me, smiling.  She was tall as I was with blue eyes and wavy brown hair. I noticed the top two buttons of her uniform blouse were undone.
“He made all five schools!” Ernie blurted.
“Wow!” said Jean. “Cool!”
 I blushed.
“Give him a kiss!” giggled Ernie.
And she did. She walked right up to me in front of the line of students, put her hand around my neck and pulled me close.
“You’re special,” she whispered.
I had never kissed, never touched a girl, had never known the intoxicating perfume of adolescence. I stood there, experiencing and trying to remember it, at the same time. The freckled Henry twins, Carolyn and Carol Ann, wolf-whistled. Malachy looked up and frowned. I stepped onto the porch. Sal, Rosalie Dilorenzo and Kathleen were standing around like courtiers.
The nun was eating baked fish, boiled potatoes and slices of  a purple-red vegetable I’d never seen before.
“Ernest, for your poor mother’s sake,” Malachy said, “I hope some Christian school was willing to take on the burden of your education”
“St. Leonard’s!” said Ernie.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” said Malachy. “A miracle.”
A short-lived miracle. Ernie would be thrown out of St. Leonard’s a year later for vandalizing a subway car. A 260 lb. leviathan wearing the distinctive green and yellow St. Leonard’s jacket was not hard to finger.
Malachy turned to me. I caught a whiff of her, pissy and sour beneath the starched brown habit, her breath rank with onions and fish.
“Kathleen Victor, Mr. Mulia and Rosalie Dilorenzo were accepted by four high schools. Aren’t you proud of them? Do you see the rewards hard work can bring?”
Sal grinned, clasping his hands above his head like a prize fighter.
“I made five,” I said. “St. Augustine too. I’m gonna go there.”
Startled, Sal hesitated, then walked up, put his right hand behind my neck, shoved me affectionately.
“All right!” he said.
“Good job Vinny.” This from Kathleen.
 I had  a little speech prepared, thanking  Malachy for being my teacher…how she was “tough but  fair….” I opened my mouth. The nun put down her fork, shot a malevolent glance at Jean Wilcox and the Henry twins standing at the edge of the porch.
“You don’t deserve it Coppola,” she said. “I know you for the sneak and the cheat that you are.”
I flinched.
“Sister!” Kathleen gasped.
I stood, staring down at the table. A fly made its way across the checkered tablecloth.
“Excuse me.”
I turned. Jean stood at the top of the steps. I brushed past her, tripped, caught myself, began running, daring my ravaged heart to explode in my chest. Block after block I ran, slowing only when I crossed the Third Street Bridge over Gowanus Canal.
By then I was in another neighborhood.
(to be continued)

Fly-Fishing on the Gowanus (Conclusion)

We dart between a row of parked cars, then head for the Carroll Street Bridge, a rare and decaying architectural jewel. Twenty yards from the water, it hits you, a wretched blend of raw sewage, chemical spills, oil from sunken barges and abandoned cars, garbage, feces, grease, bloated carcasses of dead dogs floating in and out on the tide.
How bad does it stink? In the 1960s, you could drive a car at speed down Carroll Street from Hoyt, accelerate, windows-closed, over the 100 foot-wide waterway—and gag.
We cut left alongside the John P. Carlson ink factory. On the bank, Sal and Rocco Cucchiaro are already stripping thin, whip-like branches from the sumac trees that somehow thrive on the canal bank. Short and dark-complexioned, Rocco’s mother dresses him like the accountant he'll never be: tweed overcoat, wool pants, polished shoes, white shirt stiff with starch, blue tie held in place by a fake pearl.
I pull my rod from the weeds. A McCrory’s five-and-dime reproduction of the ones I see in Field and Stream. (I sense a larger world out there that I desperately want to be part of so I cultivate mail-order hobbies: stamp and coin collections, a rock collection (mostly shards of industrial glass and brick fragments I mistake for quartz and feldspar, bright chemical crystals scavenged from the Golten Marine Company’s abandoned plant near the canal. Red plastic rockets powered by compressed air and water, obviously designed for kids with cornfields. I wait a month for them to arrive in the mail; one launch and the thing disappears over the rooftops.
 I tie on a sinker and outsized hook. "High tide. Fishing’s gonna be good."
"Sunday morning's the best," adds Ernie.
Sal finishes stripping his branch and runs to the 10-foot diameter stone culvert that carries waste from our toilets and sewers directly into the water. (In 2010, the EPA declares the canal a Superfund site. By then, my mom, her three sisters and two of her brothers are dead of cancer. (See http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/05/losing-mom.html) He reaches down and begins trolling. Rocco picks a spot alongside a half-sunken barge smeared with oil and grease. Ernie elbows in front of him
"Thanks for helping me…You jerk!”
"Swear to God,” Sal mumbles. “I don’t know the stupid mystery!”
"`Swear to God,’" I mince. "Some friend."
"Screw you."
"Got one!" This from Rocco.
"That’s mines!" says Ernie. “Slippery bastids!"
Rocco hauls an eight-inch condom from the water.
"All right!” Sal says. "Whitefish!"
Putrescent water splashes Rocco’s pants as he manipulates the dripping tube—reminds me of my father’s stuffed calamari—onto a tire. Seven fly-buzzed condoms, Tuesday’s catch, shrivel in the sun.
"I got two!" shouts Ernie lifting his branch from the water.
"Your mamma was busy!" Sal says.
I watch a dead cat float by in the water; wary of the outsized rats that scamper along the canal’s rotting banks and pylons. For the next ten minutes, we concentrate keen as fly fishermen on a Colorado stream. Finally, I spot a rubber discharged (“released”) from the culvert. I carefully pluck it out of the water. Sal is bent over examining the catch of the day. I circle. Ernie sees me, backs away. I put a finger to my lips, creep closer, closer, and lay the dripping thing on Sal's shoulder.
"Somebody I want you to meet…”
He looks up. Wha…?”
I throw down my fishing rod, dart away.
"Eccch! Sciafuso!" Ernie points.
"What!"
Sal whirls once, twice, a dog chasing its tail. The condom leaves a snail track on his coat. By then, I’m 30-feet away, giggling like an imbecile, running among the piles of concrete slag and bricks heading for a path that winds through a salvage yard and out onto Carroll Street.
Sal, a track star, throws his raincoat at Rocco. "My mother will kill me!"
I climb a towering mound of garbage, turn and give him the finger. "The First Sorrowful Mystery," I scream, “your fucked-up coat!"
I lose my footing, skitter down the other side. Scramble to my feet, duck behind another pile of trash, accelerate toward a hole in the fence maybe 100 feet away. I trip over a roll of discarded linoleum, almost regain my balance—there’s broken glass, rebar, cinderblocks scattered like a minefield—then fall hard in front of a mountain of blue metal drums piled along the fence.
“Ah!”
Instinctively, I burrow between two barrels.
In the distance, the bells of Our Lady of Peace Church chime the Angelus, then ring the hour, a single note that reverberates in my metal womb like a funeral knell. One o’clock. I crawl deeper, imagining a pirate cave formed by the rusting drums, instantly forgetting about school and rats and packs of feral dogs. I find myself in a small clearing surrounded by drums leaching powdery yellow crystals. I stand up; notice my grease-stained school pants. Ruined.
“Shit!”
A brown paper bag rests against one of the drums. Curious, I walk closer, reach down and pick up it up, disappointed at how light it feels. (Neighborhood junkies who burglarize Cambie’s Trucking and other canal-side companies often hide their swag in the lots that are our fiefdoms. Like Robin Hood, we steal from thieves, expropriating expensive handbags, perfume, shoes, for our mothers. One time, we find a Carrier air-conditioning unit still in its packing crate.) A pillowcase is stuffed inside the bag. I pull it out. Stained a dark, clotty red.
"Jesus!" I fling the bag away with both hands.
The October wind, heavy with salt from the harbor, cuts through my thin jacket. I sniffle, wipe my nose on my sleeve. Acrid smoke—truck tires constantly burning in Smoky Joe’s junkyard next door, chokes the air. I look up, see the sun reflected in the back windows of a tenement; remind myself I’m only 50 yards from my own yard. My mother Gloria is in the kitchen doing dishes, getting ready for supper. I walk over to the pilowcase, step on the edge, and kick. The bloody cloth unravels.
A chicken flies out.
“Ha!” A dry bark that surprises me.
I step closer. A tiny claw-like hand. Closer. A baby, smaller than a plucked chicken, blackened, smeared with blood and dirt. A naked, dark-haired boy, one arm reaching up to the empty sky.
"Ahhh!"
I turn and duck back through the tunnel of barrels, bile rising in my throat. I’m trying not to gag when Sal leaps on my back. I fall to the ground gasping, spinning wildly, legs pinwheeling. In a second, he’s kneeling on my chest, forcing my arms back.
"Stop!”
He’s holding a dried condom ready to rub in my face.
"Please stop!"
"Fucking baby cry.” Sal says relenting. “You ruined my coat…”
***
We crawl together into the clearing and stand over the thing. I want to pick the child up and cradle it in my forearm. Or tell myself I want to. Sal looks at me like I’m crazy. And I am. I feel the tiny body shudder, but I’m the one trembling.
"He was alive.”
Sal tries to cover it with the pillowcase. Fails.
"We don't say nothing to nobody. Right?”
"I don't know. This is...this is a sin."

A rock clangs against the steel drums. We both scream. A second stone lands at my feet. A moment later, Ernie squeezes into the clearing.
 “Ya two mamones!  What’d yous steal?”
He’s laughing, rubbing his right thumb across the tip of his forefinger, the Neapolitan sign for a thief. And then he sees.
“Aggh! The fuck is that?”
 He backs away, holding his hands in front of his face.
 “We found it.”
 “Sciefusos! It’s got germs. You’ll get sick…”
A stream of vomit, bits of Monte’s pasta and pastry visible, shoots out of Ernie’s mouth.
***
Ten minutes later, we walk out of the lot, chilled, smeared with grime, two hours late for school. The crazed Malachy no doubt waiting to torment me. She'd put chewing gum in girls' hair.  Spell "O-b-e-d-i-e-n-c-e on my knuckles with a thick oak pointer that whistled as it cut through the air.

Halfway up the block Ernie says:
"You know it belongs to somebody?”
“Whaddya mean?”
“Somebody got rid of it…on purpose.”
“Threw a baby away?”
He looks at us like we’re idiots. “It ain’t a baby.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s a…a fetal. My sister Lucille is in nursing school. I saw these pictures…”
“Of what?”
“A fetal. A baby that ain’t been born…taken out of a girl’s stomach.
“Get out of here!”
“What for?”
“Because the girl ain’t married or don’t want it or…”
“That’s murder.”
Ernie shoots me a furious look. “Don’t say that! It’s like a business…Yous could get us a lot of trouble. I ain’t kidding.”
 “Fuck the cops!”
 “I ain’t talking about cops you moron!”  
“What trouble?” I ask, glancing at Sal. “Over some little nigger baby?”
 “It ain’t a nigger!” Ernie shouts. “Yous know it ain’t a nigger!”

We did know, and I’d like to say it didn’t matter. Limbo mattered. (“A place where souls remain that cannot enter heaven.”) Limbo is located on the border of Hell, a fitting definition for the Gowanus. Baptism mattered. Extreme Unction mattered. Justice mattered. But as I was to learn, it's easy to lose your way and threaten those you love best in such headlong pursuit.

See: http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/05/fly-fishing-on-gowanus-canal-part-i.html