My Father, Myself

 Haloed in darkness, Joe appears in the doorway, rugged, wind-burned face impossibly handsome, watch cap and olive drab fatigue jacket stiff from the Red Hook piers’ icy spray. My brothers and I surge forward, press our cheeks against our father’s, his cold passing into our little boy warmth. I remove the wooden- handled longshoreman’s hooks slung over his shoulder, a squire receiving his knight’s sword.

There were days when he’d unzip that jacket and dozens of tinseled chocolate Easter eggs would cascade to the cracked linoleum floor…Dutch van Houten orange chocolate bars rich beyond imagining…treasures from a busted crate in the hold of a freighter that would never reach the chocolatiers of Manhattan. We’d scramble madly while Gloria tried to keep us from stuffing ourselves. He gave me a pair of wooden shoes with a yellow-haired Dutch boy carved on them and a silver coin he’d found stuck to a bale of rubber from Honduras.

Once, for the Christmas Eve feste dei sette pesce (“feast of the seven fishes”), live lobsters, two or three, scuttling inside his jacket that sent us squealing. They lived in our bathtub for days, until he simmered them in tomato sauce and stuffed and baked their tails with garlic and parsley and breadcrumbs. On Valentine’s Day, Joe would invariably arrive home laden with lacy pink Barricini hearts for his wife and each of his four sons. He was still doing this when I was 17-years-old; I was still looking forward to it. He loved us beyond measure, of that I have no doubt, but his love could be searing and destructive as a furnace blast.

We ate on a pink and grey aluminum Formica table in the dingy apartment—five of us, three rooms, one of them a kitchen—above a candy store on Third Avenue and Carroll Streets, almost always pasta, called macaroni, sometimes dressed-up with peas (“peas and bast… in Gloria’s ragged dialect), or a 35-cent slice of Polly-O ricotta from my cousin, “Farmer Jones’s” grocery. More often than not, that 35 cents was entered into a schoolboy’s tablet kept under the counter to be collected later. We were that poor.

And never knew it.  I look back now and I see my mother stuffing thin cardboard from a Brillo box to cover the hole in my sneakers.

 “Jeez, Mom, it’s red, white and blue! Everyone's gonna see,”

See her sneaking me her Abraham and Strauss credit card so I could buy a new shirt for a Sweet 16 party. I bought an iridescent green/orange guayabera and sweated right through it.

                                 * * * *

In 1960s, along the cobblestone streets around the Gowanus Canal, Italian peddlers still sold produce from horse and wagons; Victor the blacksmith clanged away across from our apartment, scenting the air with singed horsehide. Jewish merchants knocked on doors selling thread, fabric, ribbon and life insurance like it was the shtetl. A sailor up from the docks strolled up Carroll street with a parrot on his shoulder, selling bird whistles that didn't work. On the corners wise guys in silk shirts and featherweight shoes lounged against ’59 Caddies and Electra 225s, hustling their balls, pockets stuffed with cash. We couldn't pay the phone bill.

My father was downwardly mobile at a time when millions of other WWII combat vets were using the GI Bill to leapfrog into the middle class. He was intelligent, commanded respect and worked like a dog his whole life. He chose soul-killing work in the rank holds of Black Diamond Line ships. Worked under 2,000 lb. drafts that could tip and crush a man to jelly. He wouldn’t gamble or borrow money from the loan sharks and bookies infesting the Brooklyn piers thick as rats, and would never be promoted to shop steward or checker or handed a no-show job.

I realize now he’d made a choice--perhaps it was made for him in the in the  bloody jungles of Peleliu Island, 1944—that ultimately destroyed him long before his time and sent his sons plunging into chaos and despair. It tears my heart to this day.

As a boy, fresh prince among four sisters, he’d had a pony, a cowboy suit and twin six-shooters. His mother, Anna Falcone, and her rapacious sister, Alfonsina, known  to me only as Zia, (“The Aunt”)—were seamstresses, entrepreneurs who decades before I was born were opening shops, accumulating real estate all over the neighborhood, and a palazzo—(a term greatly exaggerated when I saw it) in our ancestral home of Pagani, a town destroyed by Hannibal and Spartacus, and more recently overrun by pierced junkies on motor scooters plundering the  gold chains of any turista dumb enough to wander through

Anna Coppola died of cancer when my father was 18. I would meet her 30 years later when I was teaching English at Automotive H.S. in Williamsburg, the trade school my father dropped out of. In a dusty basement file cabinet amidst broken desks and tattered pennants, I found his academic records, an assessment of his hygiene and his race (“non-white”) and my long-dead grandmother’s ghostly signature.

He was drafted soon after, serving with the 81^st Infantry Division’s 710^th Tank Battalion. In the fall of 1944, my father, a tank driver, went ashore with the 1^st Marines on Peleliu Island in the western Pacific, part of the bloodiest and most reckless amphibious assault in U.S military history. His tank was nicknamed “Lucky 13.” He only spoke of what happened on Peleliu one time, about his friend, an Italian kid named Michael Valentino.

On October 18^th, Valentino’s tank, “Flying Home,” was tasked to support a Marine unit pinned down by the Japanese. En route, the tank struck an improvised mine, most likely a buried aerial bomb, and exploded, killing all but one of its five-man crew and a Marine captain--today buried in Marietta, Ga. a few miles from my home--serving as a guide.

“Lucky 13” was the lead tank in the rescue mission. Japanese snipers kept up a blistering fire as my father slithered through a hatch in the bottom of his Sherman M4 tank into the crocodile-infested mangroves. He was supposed to run a cable to the still-burning tank and tow it out of the field of fire. He couldn’t do it and heard the screams of Valentino and his platoon members as they burned alive. He was 20-years old. Those screams would echo through his life to the point that my mother, my brothers and I felt we were trapped in the inferno.

A few weeks later the Marines, who’d suffered 9500 casualties, arrived at my father’s bivouac and executed a prisoner my father had befriended—one of the few Japanese soldiers to surrender—in front of his eyes.

“Fucking sergeant marched him into the surf—the kid understood what was happening—and shot him in the back of the head.”

(To be continued)

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)