A belated gift for goatsandgangsters, who did such a wonderful job spearheading the Anniversary. Forgive me:
Scrapping over a couple blocks of Lower East Side may seem petty, like fighting for leftovers from a takeout that didn’t sit particularly well the first time. What’s a few blocks here or there? Might as well spare the headache and find somewhere else to peddle your goods.
The problem is that we aren’t talking about blueprints and business plans, here – we’re talking about home. And home isn’t something you can pick up and put down so easily. Home isn’t four walls and a roof. Home isn’t the lettering on the doors or the patches bare of paint. Watch as Nucky Thompson, on his knees, at last surrenders Atlantic City to New York. They casually hand off the city as a Bar Mitzvah present only scenes later, papered with embarrassments and indignities as it was, but to Nucky, who has thrown over friends and family alike, this is the beginning of the end. It was all he had – the only thing he ever had. No matter how many graves he dug there, it was still home.
Because what is home, really? Is it only a place to rest your head, or is it even a place at all? Is it a memory, a paper chain of memories, inked so that try as you might, you can never truly shed it? Is it the smell of fish guts or the smell of the sea, the shouts of trade or the shouts of betrayal, the wistfulness of belonging or the bile of displacement? Is it somewhere you’ve left or something you carry with you? Somewhere you long to return or somewhere you can never escape?
Only natural that a show about turf wars should confront the question head-on and find it lacking. How could it not, with this cast of exiles and driftaways, of poor and tired souls yearning to be free, of strangers in strange lands. These people will never find their place – “then you are walking, too,” Daughter tells the unmoored Chalky with his family and his big house and his club and his life of prestige – because there isn’t one. Every home is a false dream; every home is a utopia. Owen speaks tenderly of horse fairs and mourns the pieces of himself slipping away, but does everything only look better in the mirror? Owen, whose expression breaks when he hears the official at the customs counter, is the same Owen who grows disillusioned with the cost of that life. Owen left, he changed, he became an American. And you know what they say – you can never go home again.
That is not to say that everyone speaks with such deference of the places from whence they came – nor are they willing to accept the burden of those places upon themselves. For every Narcisse who imagines America as his own personal Babylon, there is another who sees in it a kernel of the promised land. Margaret, who cannot be cowed by the accusations of her brother; Eddie, who will flee as long his lead allows; Manny, who imagines he can build here a new Odessa; even Torrio, so quick to shed off the aura of Naples when shoulders rub with another territory-sniffing gang of upstarts. Listen to Meyer Lansky as he tells his story. Listen as the weight of the accent when he speaks the name of his birthplace – forever a weight around his neck – softens with affection when he describes how the family settled in the Lower East Side. Because pathetic as it may be, it’s home. Stalked by ghosts of the past and buttressed by demons of the present, it’s home. It may despise you, but it’s home.
Because, in the end, home is what you make it – and what you make yourself. If you want to talk about a man struggling through a confusion of identity, talk about Charlie Luciano. A son of Sicily. A son of America. Constantly stretched between these two poles. “Siciliano?” questions Petrucelli. “New York,” responds Charlie. Seems simple, doesn’t it? But do we define our homes or are we defined by them? Can you ever shape a new future if something is always there to remind you of where you should be? Take, for instance, the absolute disdain in his voice when he mutters, “I’m not living in fuckin’ Florida.” Not only because it’s Florida, of course, but because he already lives where he wants – New York City. The city that is not just his home, but his whole self – his chance to be something greater than what time and circumstance might dictate he be.
So if ever you wonder why these rough-and-tumble gangster types are so quick to engage in pissing contests over their respective towns, know that these things actually matter. Oh, do they matter.
snowghoul
tangentwithtanner
romaincrisis
dededos
stormborns
baratheonpilled
annaxmalina
ellievsbear
izzy806
