A Slice of Pizza di Grano

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

Death Comes Calling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thunk!  

“What the fuck!” Joe screams.

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

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

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

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

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

“Motherfuckers!” Joe shouts, pointing up.

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

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

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

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

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

A man.

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

Or did he try to hit us?

“This fucking prick.”

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

The driver speeds off.

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

“Is there a problem?” he asks.

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

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

“Mister....”

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

I hear sirens in the distance.

“Joe, I don’t wanna stay here.”

"Fuck this."

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

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

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

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

"Jesus."

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

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

 

Tony Bennett On The Gowanus

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

Election Night on the Gowanus

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

Marathon Memories 1970

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


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

The Gypsy King

The Goose stands outside Tony’s Barber’s shop on Third Avenue staring as the ragged caravan bumps to the curb alongside 479 Carroll Street.

“The fuck is this?”

Alongside him, Mikey Romanelli tugs at the beautifully tailored cuff of his suit jacket and looks up. Half-a-dozen dusky women and raggedy children pile out of two sedans onto the sidewalk, the cars a patchwork of rust and unfinished bodywork. The lead car, a bronze ‘65 Cadillac in slightly better condition, sits idling at the curb.

“Spics?” says The Goose, short, squat and as easily ruffled as his avian namesake. “What are they doing in this neighborhood?”

“They ain’t Puerto Ricans,” says Mikey, staring over his bifocals. “They’re Gypsies.”

“Mariuolli.” the Goose grunts, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together. “Them people rob your fucking eyes out. What are they up to now?”

He turns back to the scribbled sheets of paper his numbers runners have hidden in the graffiti-covered U.S. Postal Service mailbox in front of the barber shop. Nobody, not even the mailman, is allowed to use the mailbox, and for spite, the more reckless of my friends throw lighted matchbooks down the chute.

Two women in flowing skirts, necks strung with costume jewels and gold coins, stroll across Third Avenue, oblivious to the baleful stare of Fat Rosie, the neighborhood gossip, the bark of a bleached-haired school crossing guard known to all as “Butchie the Fag,” and the air horns of a tractor-trailer rumbling along the avenue. They walk into Luzeen’s grocery store, ignoring the Italians.

“Look it that shit!” The Goose grumbles. “They leave the little kids standing on the corner. They a gonna get runned over!”

“What are yous animals!” shouts Louie Diamonds, one of the wannabe tough guys who circle The Goose like minnows.

Romanelli frowns. “Guaglione (wise guy)! Mind your business. They ain’t bothering nobody. They gonna get a sandwich or something.”

The driver’s door of the bronze Caddy opens with a groan. The driver, a wiry 30-year-old in orange bellbottoms, flowered shirt and Beatles’ haircut, skips out, opens the back door, and stands back. An old man, bearded and wearing rumpled dress slacks and a wife-beater tee-shirt, steps uncertainly onto the sidewalk. Like the Italians, he wears multiple rings and a thick gold chain and crucifix around his neck.

“Look at this fuckin’ guy,” The Goose mumbles. “King Shit.”

The old gypsy looks around, his gaze taking in the impeccably dressed Romanelli and the half-dozen guys sporting powder blue leisure suits, canary yellow shirt-jacs, black see-through silk shirts, glaring at his ragged entourage. He nods to Romanelli and is joined by a plump bejeweled woman. They stroll regally past the tin garbage cans, through the battered front door of four- story yellow brick apartment building. Half-a-dozen dozen gypsies follow them into the vacant ground floor apartment.

The kids are left on the sidewalk, uncertain as kittens.

“They ain’t gettin’ no sandwiches,” one of the Italians says.

In better days, the apartment had been Dr. Mangano’s office, sitting catty-corner from the neighborhood’s one other professional, attorney Vincent P. Rayola, both dead or fled to Bensonhurst. Two front windows facing Third Ave. have been bricked over with unpainted cinder-blocks, giving the appearance of a prize fighter whose eyes have been battered shut.

The women exit the grocery chewing Luzeen’s greasy15-cent calzones. Third Avenue is wide. They don’t cross until every bite is consumed, then walk into the apartment building.

“Wait a minute," hisses The Goose. His short arms shoot into the air, an ominous plea for justice. For the Goose, life is high drama and he’s always at center stage. "You think they gonna live here? Are yous kidding me?”

Three beefy thugs around him grunt in approval.

I’m standing on the opposite sidewalk watching the opera unfold, drenched in sweat, working on my first car, a piece-of-shit 1963 black Triumph TR-4.  An overlay of fear stirs in my gut as I listen to the chorus around the mailbox:

“They filthy.”

“They got germs.”

 "They get three wives.”

“Be careful they put a fuckin’ curse on you.”

“Fuggedabout it!”

And so, it begins. A tribe of gypsies arrived in Gowanus, a place so tribal a stranger cannot cross the canal without being accosted, where a black man daring to stare from a car stopped at the red light on Carroll Street would be dragged out and beaten, where authority resides in the dark recesses of the Capri Club—50 feet from The Goose’s mailbox office—masked by the sonorous tones of Dean Martin—“Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime”—blaring nonstop on the jukebox.
Law, politics, government, church are distant and unreal. Our pastor, Father Mario, hangs out with gangsters in Monte’s Venetian Room. Brother Masseo molests altar boys in the church basement while old ladies pray the rosary. Cops from the 76^th Precinct collect brown paper bags of money “for the Captain,” and provide free car service to a mad assassin named “Apples” Macintosh.
Yet there are magic circles in this topsy-turvy world. No one would harm “Brownie the Mailman,” who scribbles “Return to Sender” on unwanted mail, or the processed-haired brothers, Freddy and Marty, ace mechanics who run the gas station on Third Street, or the half-dozen black men who work at the John P. Carlson paint factory overlooking the canal. This protection extends to any young woman who passes through the neighborhood, to the longhaired guitarist who lives in the tenement across from Monte’s, an outsized assortment of cripples and mental defectives, each with the crazy tag pazzo (“Ou-botts”) attached to their names, even  to “Drunken Mahoney,” who lives in a tiny stanzina and curses God in a lilting brogue outraging Gloria, my sexy, church-going mom.
Gypsies are outsiders, eternal outsiders. Outside the law, and now within the reach of reckless men.
The Goose sends Sonny the Indian to visits the Fatatos, slumlords who own the gypsy’s tenement. Squat, with a face like Easter Island, Sonny gives the quivering brothers three days to clear them out. Sonny a Mohawk mobster, is not without precedent. Across the Gowanus, Joe Gallo employs Louie the Syrian and a midget wise guy named Armando.
“Don’t make me come back.”
The Gypsies won’t budge. The Fatatos run away.
Like Vietnam, a war of attrition is underway: curses and threats, eggs spattered against windows, then bottles, a busted windshield, punches thrown in the stairwell, a gun pressed to the temple of the old gypsy’s son. Like 'Nam, there isn’t much to threaten. A few sticks of furniture and cardboard boxes, ratty cars and unkempt children. No discernible family units, no rhythms or routines, save for the comings and goings of the young men who drive around Brooklyn doing bodywork out of the backs of their cars oblivious to tickets or the dire implications of parking in the wrong guy’s spot. No grocery shopping or cooking or crossing the street to Johnny the Butcher’s, no parading up and down the block, no dyed red hair piled up like bundles of snakes; only costume jewelry, stale sandwiches, chips and orange sodas, wrappers thrown in the gutter. Feral and unkempt, the kids beg or steal packs of Twinkies and Devil Dogs from John’s Candy store.
After a few weeks, Fat Rosie and Baby Chick, both bruisers, corner two gypsy girls.
“Why yous let the kids roam the streets?”
“What if they get hit by a car?”
“How come they ain’t in school...And they’re filthy!”
“What’s wrong with yous?”
Silence.
“Are yous stupid?:
Silence.
"What, yous don't talk English!”The women dart for the hallway door.“Go get your fucking husbands ya `who-as'!” Rosie bellows."I’ll give them the rest!”
The old man appears in the glass. I've been watching him. He’s treated with great deference: morning coffee is delivered into his hands, which he sips leaning against his Cadillac, but something else is going on... Sweating and haggard, he’s served lunch in the idling car, air-conditioner running. Afternoons, the young gypsies hand him wads of crumpled bills which he counts with trembling hands and shoves in his pocket, his eyes always on The Goose or his crew outside the Capri Club, as if pondering a diplomatic entreaty.
For days, I’ve been trying to unbolt the head from the Triumph’s 4-cylinder engine, a backbreaking, knuckle-busting job for a freshman English major working in the street with cheap tools. I look up, startled. The old Gypsy is standing across from me peering into the engine compartment.
“You don’t have the socket?”
“It broke...I’ve just got one bolt left.”
“Half-an-inch?” he ask squinting.
“Yeah...?”
Hacking phlegm onto the cobblestone street, he walks over to the Cadillac, reaches behind the seat and returns with a socket set. He hands it to me. I notice his shaking hands.“Thanks.”  I glance across Third Avenue, hoping The Goose doesn’t see this.
“Fuck them!” I mumble reaching for the tool I need.“
"No, you should show them respect."
"What? These guys?"
"You’re going to need a puller,” the gypsy says changing the subject.
“A what?”
“To break the gasket from the block. Kappi will show you.”
He walks away.
Saturday morning, Kappi, a guy about my age shows up with the tool. He edges me out of the way, jabbering nonstop in weirdly accented English—actually proper English—about cars and girls and the good pot he can sell me for cheap. Half-an-hour later the head is on the sidewalk ready to be dropped off at the machine shop.
“Make sure they grind the valve seats,” says wiping grease from what look like dress pants.
“Thanks man.”
"Thank my father.”
"Your father?"
“Thagar.”
Thagar?  What is this Beowulf?” I mumble.
“Uh?”
“Never mind. (How right I am.)
“In Romany, Thagar is “King.”
An odd friendship begins.  Another week and the Triumph is back on the road. On fall afternoons, Kappi and I eat salami sandwiches and drink Manhattan Special sodas on the factory stoop across from my house. A couple of times, top down, we drive to Nathan’s in Coney Island for hot dogs and try to pick up the wild Irish sisters—Daedre and Phaedra—sniffers of airplane glue, who hang out on Fourth Avenue and 12^th Street, and climb happily into the two-seater car. He’s a preposterous liar, but an infectious. entertaining one:

“So we’re fixing this fender in Valley Stream...Sunday and we run out of Bondo. Auto parts stores are closed, but we find a German deli and get two pounds of liverwurst. Shit stinks. We slap it on real smooth and then re-spray the fender. Lucky it’s getting dark! When the owner shows up, it looks real good, but his dog comes over and starts licking the wheel! `Oh man!” I’m trying to kick him away. We’d already got paid so we jump in the car and run away.”

“The fuck out of here!” I shout. Every one of his stories has to do with scamming or conning somebody, including me, but when you’re a lonely kid who knows nothing of the world and a guy who might as well be from outer space arrives on your doorstep and tells you stories of kings and schemes, and lives you can only imagine, you feel privileged. Nonetheless, where is he headed?  I sense the clock is ticking.
“Why are you guys still around that stupid apartment?” I ask.
He looks at me, disappointed. “It’s not so bad.”
I glance toward the knot of Italians horsing around outside the Capri Club. “They don’t want you here....Nobody does.
“Is that how you feel?” he asks.
“It’s not up to me,” I say. “You look the wrong way...maybe one of them is drunk or pissed off at his girlfriend...something terrible could happen. They don’t care about the law. Nothing!”
It's not up me either,” he says. “Thaygar decides.”
“He wants to live here? I can’t wait to get away...
“Stubborn. This... happened before.”
Winter is football season. The Goose and his boys are indoors, loan-sharking, taking reckless bets from insolvent gamblers, threatening them when they welch on the astronomical interest (and yet ask for more credit) too busy making money to pay attention to a band of gypsies.
One Saturday in November,  nine-year-old Jo-Jo Manzo, one of those ethereally beautiful  Italian boys who recall Botticelli angels, tugs on my sleeve. He points across Carroll Street street to a pink Spalding ball under a parked car, what we stickball players call a “Spaldini"
“Mister....”“Yeah, Jo-Jo?”
“Cross me the street.”Carroll is narrow but dangerous, parked cars lined up on each side, trucks rumbling up from the docks. I’ve been run over myself.
“Does your mother allow you...?”
If a grown-up …”
“You sure?”
“Cross me the fucking street!!”
I turn my back for a moment, and two minutes later Jo-Jo is rolling on the sidewalk screaming, trying to scratch the eyes out of a gypsy boy clutching the pink ball with both hands.
“I’ll kill you!” Jo-Jo screams. “That’s mines!”
“Fuck!”
A line of cars rushing to make the Third Avenue traffic light, trapps me on the curb. The neighborhood sociopath “Sally Fots,” rushes across Third Avenue, pulls the two kids apart. He smashes the skinny gypsy boy full in the face. The kid crumples, the ball rolls away. In a flash. a gypsy girl bounces off a car fender rushes at Sally, her long nails raking his face, and then another girl is on him, punching and scratching, and another, raking his face with a churchkey...the months of humiliation and shame and rage pouring out...the years...the lifetimes
Kappi and the other gypsy men rush over trying to pull them off  Sally. Too late. Across Third Avenue, the Capri Club emptying out.