Stories

[gravesendstories]

Brooklyn Stories: Sfogliatelle and Old Men

I often see these middle aged (and older) Italian men hanging out at one of the last “real” Italian Bakery/Cafes in Brooklyn where I sometimes go to get my fix of old school Sfogliatelle. They are mostly retired, and have lived in Brooklyn for a long time, if not most of their lives; a part of their cultural makeup, a part of what still goes on in some small towns in Italy hangs on inside them, it’s a specifically male space — head space if you will. It’s maybe not so different from Moroccan men in their cafes, or Spanish men in the bar, or Irishmen hanging out in the local pub, etc. It’s almost like salmon going home to spawn — only there isn’t going to be a spawn, just a need to connect to an almost primordial social structure: To be with these like minded characters that hold on to a past and a sort of ancient rite of male bonding which has no other value but to know they are not alone and are cut from the same cloth. They are an odd bunch, really a dying breed. Nothing much goes on with these guys: they talk about their families, they bemoan some friend who is ill, or worse, they have committed some perceived offense toward them and have now shut them out. They talk soccer, politics (mostly of the conservative variety), the guy down the street who "had the balls" to sell his house to the Chinese, the sad decline of their once homogenous neighborhood — now dominated by Asians and Russians. If you walk within 6 feet of these guys you might get the scent of cologne — usually an odd, old-school Italian brand from their heyday like Pino Silvestre, but as you pass it might be augmented by the stale scent of tobacco breath and body odor. Some have taken to dying their hair because their once handsome, soccer field worthy looks have not held up with age — too many Marlboros and Cannolis I suppose. They stand around and look somewhat uncomfortable, while nursing their espressos with a dab of Sambuca, their fingers stained from years of smoking cigarettes down to the filter. All this posing will seem very peculiar to an outsider. But in the end, it’s all they’ve got left of their world — a world which they left long ago.

[gravesendstories]

Gravesend Chronicles #5: Nuns, Public School, and Obscenities

Until I was in the middle of 5th grade, I attended the “prestigious” private, catholic grammar school, St. Francis of Assisi, in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Brooklyn. Most of the teachers there were nuns, and they were often mean and brutal. They had no qualms taking a “problem child" (like me) to task with a wooden ruler, a yard stick, or by some novel use of the school's hardwood floors. Sometimes a nun would simply knock you sideways with the back of her hand. Any and all such instruments of torture were employed to instill obedience and conformity.

One of the nuns had a particularly harsh punishment for misbehavior: she'd send you to the back of the room and force you to kneel directly onto your hands on the above-mentioned hardwood floor — that is, kneeling with your knees on top of your hands, knuckles to the floor. This is what those few of us who weren’t so conformist would be subjected to. Try this sometime for even a few seconds and see how it feels. If you dared to move until the prescribed time of punishment had been met, you'd suffer even harsher punishment. Because of this, the entire student body was quietly terrified and super-restrained in their behavior at all times, for fear of undergoing one form or another of this corporal punishment.

When I finally transferred out of Catholic Hell to a more typical New York City public school, P.S. 177, at the corner of Avenue P and Dahill Road in Gravesend, there were several things I needed to get used to in this switch. For starters, the students had a more relaxed attitude about their behavior. Unlike at St. Francis, they weren’t terrified of their teachers. There were no nuns at P.S. 177. And what a relief that was. The teachers had a completely different mindset. Some of them were actually nice. (By contrast, a "nice" nun at St. Francis was virtually unheard- of.)

On one of my first days in this new environment, I was in the schoolyard at lunch break, where all the faces were new to me. Seeing how the kids here behaved was a shock. One of them was a loudmouth, every other word that came out of his mouth was some colorful obscenity. I listened to this in amazement and said to someone, “he’s going to get in trouble, isn’t he scared of the teachers? Because in Catholic school this wouldn't fly, and punishment for cursing would be severe. I was told, with a chuckle “nah, no one’s gonna do anything. What are you talking about anyway?”

Having spent five years in parochial grammar school made me think the world conformed to this strict code of behavior. But when I was introduced to a less cloistered environment, I realized things were very different. There was more “drama” in public school: Fights took place almost every day. Obscenities were commonplace. One kid liked to throw chairs out the window into the schoolyard when the teacher had her back to the class. The students here would act out in all sorts of ways.

Like Suzy, who was in my fifth-grade class. Suzy was a petite, pretty brunette with a ponytail. She wore colorful miniskirts and white go-go boots. To understand where she was coming from, you need to know that whenever our teacher left the classroom, it was pure pandemonium.

On one of these occasions, Suzy wanted some attention. She jumped onto the teacher’s desk, hiked up her skirt and pulled down her panties, revealing everything. Then she stood there, smiling beatifically, waiting. She waited until the whole class stopped its chaotic thrashing and reveled in the fact that she'd hypnotized every horny, dumbfounded little guy in the room. This happened within probably six seconds, and yet from that moment on, for weeks, it was all the boys in the class could talk about.

Suzy repeated this performance on at least one other occasion, but not long after, she up and diѕsappeared, and was never seen again. No one knew what happened to her, or why she left.

After Suzy was gone, Lori moved into center stage at P.S. 177. Unlike Suzy, Lori was not particularly attractive: She was mousy, chubby, with frizzy hair and a large round face. She had no girlfriends but somehow had lots of boyfriends -- or so it appeared.

Lori, you see, was not going to have a good time in school in any normal or traditional fashion. Friendship didn't come easy for Lori, so she simply bought her friends, hence, only boys. Where she got the money for this, we didn't know, but she'd ask boys to go fetch some item for her at the local stationary/hobby shop -- a place called “Carnival” -- or food from Luciano’s Pizzeria, just a block away.

Lori might want a toy, school supplies, or some sugary snack, any of which she could have easily gotten herself. She would pay boys handsomely to do this, often quite a sum considering we were all a bunch of nine-and ten-year-olds. So it went for a good half of the school-year, with several boys, myself included. We served as her hired errand boys. It became routine to approach Lori and see if she wanted something, so we could make a few dollars. Even when she *didn’t* want anything, she'd come up with something, just to get boys scurrying around her.

Of course, in time, the teachers, the principal, the parents all began asking questions. We were upfront about everything: These were just transactions, always initiated by Lori. We got paid for doing her a favor. We thought nothing of it, we'd done no wrong. The teachers, and Lori’s mother in particular, didn't quite see eye-to-eye with this view. She believed the boys had somehow coerced her daughter into these transactions. Worse, Lori denied ever having asked for favors and instead said that we'd pressured her into these exchanges. This was totally false. Lori was trying to save face in front of her mother as well as the rest of the school.

The whole operation was finally shut down. There were no more “favors” for money, and Lori spent some time away from school. When she returned, no mention was made of the previous activity. The boys were reprimanded, but mildly; after all, what did we really know about "transactions" at the age of ten?

Lori finished out her days in fifth grade with the rest of us, but the whispers and speculation about her never ended. Everyone in class looked at her as some sort of freak, especially since she had shifted blame away from herself and onto almost every boy in the class.

If Lori had been isolated before, she was now in exile. The following year she transferred to another school and was never seen again. Lori’s extreme need for companionship -- the kind that made others dependent on, or subservient to her -- this was a valuable lesson in childhood development. It took me a few years to realize just how sad Lori's life was -- at least as it was when we were all in the fifth grade.

(Much thanks to Watchpocket for great editing.)

[gravesendstories]

Gravesend Chronicles #7: This Is Not Cookie in Gravesend

I grew up in Gravesend Brooklyn in the sixties and seventies. It was — and remains — a very blue collar/working and middle class neighborhood. It has always attracted immigrants because it has relatively good housing stock and has plenty of public transportation options — good for poor and middle class immigrants who couldn’t afford a car. Prior to my family’s arrival there, it had been a mostly post- war, European expat community: lots of Italians, eastern European jews, and a mix Irish and some latinos. Today it’s switched over to mostly Chinese, Orthodox Jews, and expats from a variety of former Soviet satellite states. There are still a few remnants of the old Italian ‘hood, but most have long ago moved away to the burbs.

Recently, I’ve been spending some time there again to deal with my elderly and infirm mother. I take some walks around the old blocks I used to hang out on throughout the 1970s. I walked this one block where I spent a lot of time with friends and family. It was a real memory lane sort of situation for me. As I passed this one section of the block we lived on from about 1968 to 1975, a story from the early seventies came back to me. There was this woman who was known as “Cookie” — that was her nickname and everyone on the block called her that. She was probably in her mid-to-late thirties at the time, maybe 1973 or ’74, thereabout. I was 15 at the time.

Cookie was what one might call a “frowsy, slutty, housewife”. She was not particularly appealing, in fact she was cheap looking, slovenly, loud, overweight, and was more often than not wearing some ratty old housedress. Additionally, she was not very nice, and would often trash talk. As I recall she was married, but no one ever, or rarely saw her husband. On the rare occasions that she actually came down and went somewhere, she would dress somewhat provocatively, lots of make up, jewelry, high heels, plunging neckline tops, etc. She had a thing about talking to various people from her second floor apartment, mostly local gossip, and people could hear her half a block away. She liked to hang out of her window holding a martini glass or some other cocktail and yelling for someone to come get money from her for her cigarettes. She smoked a lot.

Here is where I eventually got involved. About once or twice a week, she would look out of the window and yell down to some teenager walking by if he (always a he) would go to the supermarket to get her 2 cartons of cigarettes. I don’t remember what her brand was, but likely Marlboro as that was the smoke of choice among the “serious” smokers in the ‘hood. One day it was my turn. She stopped me as I walked past her house and yelled at me from her window “hey you”! At this stage she didn’t know me by name, but she clearly had seen me around with some of the other boys on the block.

I was a confused kid during these years, not sure of what I wanted or where I was headed, and there were some risky moments I had to get past — your basic teenager. Anyway, Cookie calls me up to her apartment asking me to go fetch her some smokes. I complied with her orders because I understood what would happen: she would send me off to fetch her cigs, and upon returning with the cartons she would reward me handsomely for my effort with some cash. She had done this many times with many boys on the block, some of my friends in fact got in on this action for a while; it wasn’t hard work, wasn’t a long-winded ordeal, and there’d be some fresh bills in pocket to spend on records over at Korvettes or Titus Oaks Records, or maybe at the pizzeria. Sometimes she would tip as much as the cost of a carton of cigarettes — for a teen without a job, this was definitely a good deal.

Now, in the back of my mind there was another form of payment that I was wondering about: It wasn’t money, and some of the other boys talked about this in ways that only a teenage boy could conjure: crude, blunt, inexperienced, immature. I wondered about this and what and how it would happen, or IF it would happen. I did the cigarette run for her a few times, each time she gave me a little more money. Once she even stroked my face with a smile and said something, but I don’t recall what it was. Then suddenly it all stopped. I never found out about that thing and never got cartons of smokes for her again. Maybe I just wasn’t on the street at the right times. Maybe I wasn’t the right “type” for her, or she just didn’t like me enough in that way —who knows? And of course, my memory of it all is distorted and skewed from time and my own embellishments — memory has a way of doing that.

A year or so later she moved away and that was that. My “Summer of ’42” (it’s a movie, look it up) never happened. Just as well, it might not have been the great thing I had built up in my mind anyway. The real thing would come a couple of years later in high school with someone my own age. Now that is quite memorable, but a story for another day.

[gravesendstories]

Gravesend Chronicles #4: Youth, the ‘hood and Metaphysics

Gravesend Brooklyn in the nineteen-seventies was a tough place to grow up, but not an unpleasant one. Unlike the more popular Bay Ridge, Bensonhurst or Coney Island, all of which were right next door, Gravesend was less glamorous, less well known, and less important. It was -- and remains -- a working-or middle-class neighborhood, made up of immigrants from all over the map: Russian and Ukrainian expats, Chinese, Orthodox Jews, and today Latinos as well. When I was growing up there, it was mostly Italians, and Jews from eastern Europe who had escaped the Nazis. Most of my friends during junior-high and high school were one or the other: Italian-American or Jewish. We got along well, and the two cultures mixed and interacted in interesting ways, influencing one another: I learned Jewish and Yiddish insults and slang phrases from the Jewish kids (schmuck and putz were favorites), while they picked up lots of Italian street lingo and that very unique accent that places one in Brooklyn -- Aye!, how you doin'!, etc., along with plenty of cursing).

I've been revisiting the 'hood lately and there are lots of great remnants of the past, alongside recent changes like the many chain stores that have moved in, and the dwindling number of old-school specialty shops that used to line every block from Stillwell Avenue to Ocean Parkway, along Kings Highway and Avenue U. Unlike when I was growing up in this neighborhood, when at that time, as I’ve already mentioned above, Gravesend was almost entirely Italian and European Jews, today there are people from all different cultures. Even so, it has largely retained its working-class roots, and in that sense, is much the same as it was then.

Walking these streets made me rethink my own background: We were immigrants, we were working class. Both my parents worked. My mother was a seamstress in a sewing factory: it was hard work, low pay, and at the end of the day she'd come home and make dinner for my father, my sister and me.

My father worked in construction. He'd been a bricklayer and stone mason in Italy and later in Argentina. He built monuments and houses mostly -- hard, physical labor. I remember he worked six, sometimes seven days a week, but he was good at his craft and managed to save enough money to buy a house for us. It was actually possible in the seventies to be working class and still buy a house in Brooklyn. As I walked around the neighborhood, I could see the same faces, the same hard lives, the struggles the Moms and Dads have to go through every day.

I had a bunch friends on the street we lived on — Dahill Road. A few of them were very close friends, others more casual. For whatever reason, my immediate close friends were mostly Jews. This would make a major difference in my life well into the future. However, I also had a very few close Italian friends. The Italian kids were all from blue-collar backgrounds. Most of the families came from one or two generations back when the parents or grandparents came over post-war to try and make a decent life for themselves and their families.

Italy was a poor country all the way up until the 1960s when things began to change economically. Many of these kids had a lot of problems at home: abusive or absent Dads, Moms who had to work and weren't around much to give guidance or even basic sustenance to their kids, weak or non-existent parental guidance.

This would lead to difficulty in school, psychological and behavioral problems, and for many Italian kids, dropping out of school. Some got into crime, some of them died young, others eventually would straighten up. It's an old story that repeats over and over regardless of the culture. For me, this period was a sort of trial, if you will, because as a teen I was easily swayed, and often misguided.

Frankie (not his real name) was this hyper dude, a big guy with a generally sweet disposition -- if he liked you, that is, and if he wasn't having a meltdown. Frankie was a gifted mechanic, he could fix up or soup up a car like a pro. He couldn't have been more than seventeen at the time.

Frankie had a job working with a slightly older guy (we'll call him Max) who came from a wealthy family and did high-end work on expensive sports cars which he would then flip for a handsome profit. The thing was, Frankie did the actual work, but was paid peanuts, while Max was making out like a bandit off the deals. Eventually this work arrangement ended -- Frankie was too volatile to work with, and he realized he was getting screwed.

So, one afternoon around 1975 or '76, my friend Stan (not his real name) and I were on the street chatting about movies or books or whatever, when Frankie came along. Frankie immediately started chattering about a bunch of things at once, sort of all jumbled together. Who knows what drugs he was on at the time, but this wasn't unusual behavior for him.

Stan and I knew it was often tricky to navigate with Frankie and we would generally defer to whatever he wanted or wherever his mind was going. Frankie would bring up a subject that he heard on TV or a movie that he knew absolutely nothing about, but wanted to get his head around. On this particular afternoon Frankie was quite exercised about *metaphysics*.

How he'd latched onto metaphysics, we didn't know, but Frankie had a strong need to pose a particular question to Stan, who was a few years older, very smart, very savvy, and would more or less thoughtfully answer any question anyone might have for him -- Stan was a sort of genuine street intellectual and philosopher.

Frankie's question went something like this: "Stan, I heard about this metaphysics stuff, do you know about this? You know, I want to get into this, like how can I use this on someone?" How can we use it against somebody we don't like? Clearly Frankie thought that metaphysics was some sort of sorcery or witchcraft or a spell that could be cast on someone. To say that he was a little off would be an understatement -- Frankie was off by a lot.

Stan, in his own inimitable way, moved to deflect Frankie's concerns and steer him in a different direction. Almost anything, after all, could trigger Frankie into a violent tirade.

Shortly after Stan worked his calming effect, however, Frankie started his nervous jumping around again. Suddenly, he wanted to have us over to his house for treats and sodas.

So we trekked on up to the tenement apartment where Frankie lived with his folks above a cheap jewelry store. We were a little uneasy about how all this would take shape. Frankie was in fact what we'd later call a borderline psychotic. As soon as we got into Frankie's apartment he began to yell at his mother to come greet us, then barks at her to get us sodas and, oh, did we want anything to eat? "Mom could also fetch some treats too, pastries, ice cream, whatever you want!"

Frankie's family came over in the post-war wave of Italian immigrants that had to leave their home because of poverty, and you could see and hear that old world mentality in their eyes, their voices, their gestures, their ability to be generous even though they had next-to-nothing. Frankie's Mom obliged him and served us potato chips and cokes. This was all very awkward and I felt bad for her. She looked like she'd seen and had enough.

Frankie meanwhile plied Stan with more questions: religion, politics, philosophy and, of course, metaphysics. Stan handled himself adroitly in the face of this and deftly presented Frankie with more questions than answers, which distracted Frankie and kept him calm.

But that couldn't last: What about the people Frankie wanted to get even with? "Hey, let me show you my guns!" He runs to his bedroom and pulls out from under his bed a box with a couple of handguns, a rifle, boxes of ammo, a serious collection of knives, a black jack, brass knuckles.

Frankie hands me a pistol, and a thought came to me: Is this gun loaded? I didn't want to ask, I examined the thing and quickly handed it back to Frankie. I never did find out if his guns were loaded. Stan wouldn't touch Frankie's guns. He was, as mentioned above, the smart one in the bunch. Frankie asked us if we wanted to get a gun for ourselves and that he could help with that. He knew people. During this exchange, Stan and I kept a close eye on Frankie and we would look at each other with every word or bizarre action from Frankie with a mix of horror and amazement. We couldn't wait to get our skinny asses out of there.

AT this point Frankie could see that we weren't totally on board with his train of thought and his mood changed quickly. He threw his guns back in the box and shoved it under the bed. He said he needed to take care of some business and had to get going. He wanted us to come back soon for more chats and hanging out. "Oh and Stan, I want to talk to you some more about metaphysics man, maybe you know some books I could get about that?" Sure Frankie, let's talk tomorrow, or whenever you're free.

Out the door and down the stairs we went, and as we did we could hear Frankie yelling at his poor mother "Why didn't you bring some nice pastries or cake!?" We could hear him all the way out on the street, yelling obscenities and demands and cries of injustice: crazy talk. Again, I felt bad for his parents, who were not equipped to handle the blustering gale of mental illness screaming in their faces.

So where did Frankie end up? That's right: in prison. He inevitably pushed past legal boundaries. It was a matter of when-not-if he'd get caught. His crimes were often violent, though I don't think Frankie ever killed anyone. Over time his mental state had deteriorated. Prison, psych wards, prison again, and then Frankie died.

I think about Frankie now and then, how his family wasn't all that different from mine, how with one wrong move here, another wrong person there, I might have turned out like Frankie.

Maybe not an early death, but somehow in terrible shape. So many of the kids I knew became junkies, got into serious crime or ended up in prison. Only a precious few straightened themselves out. I like to think I managed to do that, maybe by the skin of my teeth.

[gravesendstories]

Gravesend Chronicles #14: Lunch in Brooklyn -- Many Happy Returns.

I travel a few times a week from Queens to visit my mother, who is now 90, at her assisted living facility in Sheepshead Bay Brooklyn, not far from where I grew up. It’s a fairly long drive back and forth, but making these visits is the only way I can see her. She’s incredibly patient and calm for someone who has several physical limitations and can’t do much on her own.

I go whenever I have a free weekday or on weekends, usually late morning into early afternoon, and I try to time it so that I can have lunch with her. I bring roughly the same lunch for her with minor variations: usually a small eggplant parmigiana sandwich, because she seems to prefer that over whatever else I bring her.

This makes sense -- it was a favorite in our house when I was growing up. The meals my mother cooked for my sister, my father and me were made from old- school, traditional Italian dishes, and I always loved the particular way she made them. Eggplant parmigiana was in fact one of the very last meals she made during my weekly visits to our old house when she lived alone after my dad passed away. It gradually became too difficult for her to stand in the kitchen and cook the way she'd always done, so for a few years she lived with my sister.

Whenever I visit with her at lunchtime, it brings back a flood of memories from my childhood: running around with my friends all day on the weekends or after school, playing boxball or handball, or riding our bikes down streets where other kids were often playing wiffle-ball. When it began to get dark outside we knew it was time for dinner, and we scrambled in different directions back to our respective homes.

For my entire life, my mother had been an excellent cook and made scrumptious meals. I was always amazed that she'd work at her job from early in the morning 'til four or five in the evening and then come home and make an absolutely first-rate dinner for the family. My father wasn’t the demanding sort, but he held a special reverence for good food -- this particular stereotype about Italians is true.

My mother had trained as a seamstress back in Italy, when she was still in her teens. She made most of my clothes from the time I was born until I was about six. Though she worked for most of her life in sweatshops, sewing and stitching garments to be shipped off to all parts of the country, I rarely heard my mother complain of her lot. This happened only in cases of serious abuse.

This sort of stoicism isn’t unusual in people of her generation, especially those who lived through World War II. They simply learned to persevere and look for ways to move forward and try to suffer as little as possible — complaints would not be of any use.

When we got to the states, the only work she could get was with the kind of shops that had rows and rows of very old sewing machines that cranked along all day at ear-deafening volume, and which were run by young, often immigrant women for the enrichment of a few fatcats who made the real money.

Occasionally on school holidays, but when both my parents had to work, I'd go with one of them to their job site — day care was not something they'd have considered, or could afford. I can recall what it was like at one of the sewing factories I visited. Even at a very young age I could see that it was a harsh and oppressive experience for most of the workers.

There were rows of women grimly bent over their sewing machines, of course, but the image that sticks in my mind is one of seeing the older men who worked at the ironing stations. They wore t-shirts because working the hot irons and large steam presses was unbearably hot. They looked really old to me, sweaty, grizzled, with five o’clock shadows, a cigarette permanently hanging from sides of their mouths. They would press the freshly sewn garments, repeating the same movements all day long. I'd watch the smoke coming from their cigarettes, swirling upward and dissolving into the steam rising from the presses, and I'd marvel at this sight, it was mesmerizing to me.

The noise in these places could be deafening: two or three dozen machines going all at once, plus the steam presses. The sheer strangeness of these sweatshops was like something out of a David Lynch movie. I loved watching all this, but being just nine or ten, I’d quickly get bored, and so would sit near my mother and read my Movie Monster magazines -- I never got tired of those. Some of the women -- my mother's friendlier co-workers -- looked at these magazines and laughed or told me I shouldn’t be looking at such gruesome stuff. They thought it would scare me. They didn't quite get it that to me, all that gruesome stuff was just funny.

I find that sharing these lunches with my mother frequently takes me back to a certain day when I was in catholic elementary school at St. Francis of Assisi. I was only seven or eight. Once a week at the school cafeteria, it was pizza day. It was everyone's favorite. The pizza was thin with a very soft crust, cut into large rectangular pieces. The nuns who worked various jobs, including in the kitchen, would slice these larger slabs into smaller square pieces, using a large pair of tailor’s scissors: It’s an image I'll never forget.

After lunch the kids would go out to the schoolyard to play until the nuns corralled us back into our classrooms. The nuns terrified us -- the corporal punishment they dealt us was real: each of us received it and were made to watch as it was administered to others. It was genuinely cruel and quite disturbing by today’s standards.

On one such pizza day, a nun pulled me aside in the schoolyard and walked me back to the building, where I could see my mother waiting. But what was she doing here?

This was extremely unusual. I thought I was in trouble. Why would she come to see me at school in the middle of a working day? She took me into an alcove away from the playground and asked if I was hungry. She then pulled from her bag a sandwich wrapped in wax paper. I knew that she'd made it for herself, but was now sharing it with me: cheese and lettuce on rye — a fairly meager helping for someone who would be working in a sweat shop for eight hours.

She had a small plastic lemon squeeze bottle with some wine vinegar in it and would squeeze a few drops onto this sandwich for a bit of flavor. We stood there in that alcove eating together, my mother handing me small bits she would tear off. It was all a bit awkward, probably for her as well. I vaguely wondered why she had come but said nothing, and was happy to eat what she gave me since I hadn't had any of the school-lunch pizza. I hadn’t really given much thought about lunch, as usual I was busy chatting and cavorting with the other kids.

Years later, remembering this day, it dawned on me that my mother left her workplace because she had likely forgotten either to make lunch for me that morning or to give me money for a cafeteria lunch, probably in a rush to get to work. So, not wanting me to go hungry, she left work, traveled all the way to the school and shared her lunch with me.

I look back on these moments and realize the incredible sacrifices my parents made to raise my sister and myself, and to protect us from the suffering and indignities they endured when they were young. Having lived through the war -- WWII -- they experienced hunger and saw horrible things. When they had the opportunity to make a better life, they ran with it. My dad started training to be a mason when he was ten, I think he completed 5th grade. He went AWOL from the army in Italy to go to Argentina for better opportunities. Both my parents were simple people, my mother came from an extremely poor, rural and isolated town in the mountains of southern of Italy.

Providing and preparing food -- and observing the near-sacredness of a dinner ritual -- this was a way for my parents to show they cared for us, that we were looked after and loved. My mother made a special trip to bring me a meager little sandwich at school, this was a way to show this. A mother will never let her child go hungry if she can help it. The memory of that moment has always stood out for me about my mother: She was incredibly caring and generous, sometimes to a fault.

[gravesendstories]

Gravesend Chronicles #9: The Bridge

At least once a week I drive past the Verrazano Bridge on the Brooklyn side driving along the Belt Parkway. Usually it’s to go see my sister and my 90 year old mother. I’ve been “visiting” this bridge since I was about 11 years old, at that time riding my bike with friends from my neighborhood in Gravesend. We’d ride all the way over to the waterfront and then take the footpath along the water all the way to the bridge, often stopping under the bridge and just staring at this massive structure built to connect Staten Island to Brooklyn — it was a marvel of engineering design and construction — and it still is.

We’d spend an afternoon just riding around, hanging out in the park, flying cheap paper kites (59 cents!), ranking on each other for fun, eating pizza at our favorite spots (often it would be Spumoni Gardens on the way home) — we’d be out for hours, often into the evening. We did these routines for a few years and then things started to change as we got a little older.

A few years passed and when I found myself in college, those lazy afternoons just roaming around the south end of Brooklyn along the water seemed like a distant memory. College started in one place (Brooklyn College) and ended somewhere completely different (the School of Visual Arts). The move to The School of Visual Arts changed my whole perspective on everything I wanted and loved. Part of it was the times: late 1970s to early 1980s — a fantastic time to be a young person in NYC and open to all that was happening. I learned and saw and heard so much in just a few years time. I soaked it all up like some delicious, inscrutable exotic pastry.

I was also dating someone who I met while working at Macy’s, and who would radically turn my head around and open my eyes to vast new possibilities I hadn’t even considered. In retrospect, she wasn’t that radical, but to me at that time, she was exotic, fresh, unique and exciting; This, and the proximity to other like minded people my age put me in touch with a vast new way of seeing and being. Of course, it was tumultuous, tempestuous and we were both too young to really see much beyond the surface. It would all end in tears for me just a couple of short years later. And it was during this time that I was revisiting the bridge.

I took many friends and girlfriends to the bridge over the years. It was like an enormous talisman that bestowed a kind of grace and beauty on everything around it and, in some ways, on my life; to this day I love going past the bridge and it makes me happy just seeing it, always leaves me smiling, and sure, a bit nostalgic too. I often think of that scene in Saturday Night Fever when Tony tells his girlfriend all about the bridge, technical stuff, how it was built, etc. — it was a symbol for his escape from the pointlessness and emptiness of his current life. In fact, bridges were an integral part of that movie: we see Tony drive over the Brooklyn bridge and then play a cruel prank on his girlfriend on the Verrazano. I identified with this aspect of the movie though for me it was considerably different in tone — I wasn’t trying to escape from anything, but rather looking for new directions.

So it was at SVA that I came up with this notion of the bridge and my childhood, (Saturday Night Fever was most definitely on my mind) connected them, and made this student film that took a great deal of effort and an emotional toll. Unlike today, filmmaking in the early 1980s meant shooting film (video still looked awful then) which was expensive and required technical ability and a crew, as well as access to cumbersome equipment - in short, it wasn’t as easy as whipping out a cellphone and shooting a video. At the end of that process I was completely drained, totally empty when it was done. It would take me another year or so before I felt a real spark to create new things, and it wasn’t that this film was anything great, in fact it was quite flawed and strained, but it was something extremely personal and that’s all that mattered to me.

In retrospect though, it was this one pivotal connection, this one romantic entanglement that started on the main floor of Macy’s Herald Square, led me to SVA, to a host of new minds and new friends, and into a direction I might not have otherwise taken. From that point on, there were these stages of involvement that continued to expand to bigger and — to my mind — more adventurous possibilities, projects and people. Most of the people I know today and call friends are a direct result of these little stages. I think about this and often wonder if I had not taken those few steps down this one corridor at Macy’s in 1979, which road would I have taken, where would I be today?

As I drive past the bridge today, it offers no answers to me, only questions, possibilities, reviews of the past, nostalgia, frustration… the bridge is mute.

[Expert editing and consultation by Melvin Q. Watchpocket]

[gravesendstories]

Gravesend Chronicles #12: Grand Theft Auto Direction

In the early-to-mid-seventies, when I was in junior high and high school, I was doing more or less well in school even though I lived in Gravesend, Brooklyn. Many of the kids in my neighborhood — especially the boys — did not generally do well in school. Gravesend was almost entirely blue-collar, and most kids were left to their own devices. We relied on each other for information and guidance, which was often not the most positive or beneficial.

By the time I hit ninth grade I was doing well enough in my classes, but I got bored and started cutting the afternoon classes two or three times a week. I did this mainly so I could go watch a matinee for ninety-nine-cents at the local movie theater. I saw loads of films this way that other kids had no interest in. I barely understood some of these movies until I saw them again years later, but these early, secret film- going adventures were a big influence on my later direction, especially when I went to college.

I paid a price for these ninth-grade excursions: I failed two of my courses that year because of my frequent absence, and I had to make up both courses in summer school. Summer school was an exercise in futility for both teachers and students. No one wanted to be there, including me, but it was easier than regular school.

In school -- summer school or otherwise -- I was surrounded by a cast of fellow adolescent Gravesenders who were either straight-A students or total morons. I myself was stuck somewhere in the middle, and by the summer after ninth grade, something in me just didn’t like the conformity of the “brains” -- the smart kids. I was instinctively drawn to the hijinks the “bad” kids got up to, and the implicit, potential danger that came along with these hijinks.

So one night a bunch of us broke into our old grammar school "for kicks." Of course, the cops were called on us and we were severely reprimanded. My mother was mortified that she had to speak to the police and the teachers at the school. As a result I was transferred over to Lafayette H.S. -- the school where young miscreants inevitably landed; among some of the more infamous former students there was one Jeffrey Epstein, deceased.

Sal, one of my ninth-grade friends, had gotten himself a steady job that year at a butcher shop. He introduced me to the pleasures of pot, and we'd share a joint while talking about girls, sex, movies and music — more or less in that order. Sal had lots of things he liked to do for fun and sometimes for money, things like stealing cars. He told me how he made extra money stealing cars and passing them on to a mechanic for a nice fee. One day he asked me if I wanted to go with him on “a job,” and I heard myself say yes, my brain apparently misfiring in some backwards fashion.

We had a little strategy session where we talked about the job, the car Sal had in mind, where it was, and how we were supposed to pull this off, this pure theft that could have sent us both to prison.

The plan was to get up at four a.m. while it was dark outside and head over to where the car was usually parked, unlock the door with a coat-hanger, hot-wire the engine -- Sal knew how to do that -- and drive off like Steve McQueen in “The Getaway."

Before the big event, I was going to be prepared. Barely awake, I went into our garage and packed a bag with some of my dad's tools that I thought would be good for breaking into a car. My mother woke up as I was heading out the door and I had to make up some story about going to school soccer practice, which she was not convinced of at all.

When we got to the street where the car was parked a couple of neighborhoods over, we sat back for a few minutes and scoped out the scene. We walked over to the car and looked around nervously — or I did anyway. Sal got the window cracked but the thin wire he was using couldn't latch onto the car door's lock, while a very long two or three minutes passed.

Finally I told Sal, "Look, We can’t do this now, it’s taking too long. It’ll be light soon.” Also, we had no real plan for how or when we'd get the car to Sal's mechanic friend: maybe later that day, maybe the next day, we were winging it. We'd have had to sit somewhere with the car like sitting ducks waiting to be arrested once the owner reported it missing. We decided it wasn’t the right time. We'd revisit this another day.

Once I got back home, I pondered over this endeavor long and hard. I got pretty nervous about the whole affair. I thought I was maybe already going to be arrested for attempted robbery. I told Sal about this and he just laughed. Two weeks later he finished the job himself — I opted out. He made two or or three hundred bucks — a lot of money to a teenager in the 1970s. I congratulated him on his success, but secretly I was relieved I wasn’t in on the caper.

After this, a lot changed for me. I started moving away from guys like Sal and started hanging out with a different set of friends. I bought my first “punk rock” album upon its release in 1975: Patti Smith’s “Horses” — a record I didn’t initially understand, but kept listening to over and over until it started to click. The Song “Free Money” in particular somehow got under my skin — a fantasy about thievery. This and the influence of certain teachers in high school, and one or two truly good friends who had their head on straight really turned me around. I was reading books I hadn’t even heard of just six months before, like books by Edgar Allen Poe, Henry Miller and Luis Borges, to name a few... and I was doing well in school again.

Guys like Sal had a very different trajectory in their lives -- some managed to get jobs and have families but many of them ended up in prison, or dead at a young age. Others, like me, maybe went to college and struggled with direction and purpose but in very different ways. When I think about Sal and some of my other early Gravesend cohorts, I wonder how they feel now (if they're still alive) about the ill-advised capers we got into back then. We were kids, dumb, bored, rudderless kids — I suppose somewhat typical in certain ways.

[Thanks for expert editing by Watchpocket]