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Saturday, September 9, 2017

The Writer's Life 9/9 - Growing Up Brooklyn

Here's a short story from the Billionths of a Lifetime collection. It's about growing up in Brooklyn. It's told from the point of view of a friend who is about eight years younger than me. While most of the experiences are those of his peers, I injected many of my own, which makes the work fiction, although it reads like memoir. The title is The Best Revenge, and it's about a ten-minute read.

   I was twelve the summer of '71. The streets and sidewalks of Brooklyn were filled with baby-boomers from morning 'til night. The most popular games for boys were stickball and Scully, or Skelzy, as we'd come to dub it. This involved the chalk outline of a large playing board that contained eight small boxes along its perimeter and a larger one in the middle. Using index or middle finger, we flicked bottle caps filled with melted crayon along the asphalt. The girls skipped rope or played hopscotch. You wouldn't have believed the racket, especially after dinner and, later, the soothing contrast of quiet after dark.
   I once calculated there were 325 people living on Bay 37th Street between Benson and Bath Avenues, a mile and a half from the heart of Coney Island. We called it "the Block." It was characterized by two, four and six-family dwellings, all but two attached, separated by alleys. Sal Pistachio's house, which stood apart near one corner, was a three-family brick structure. Pistachio was a take-off on his real last name. Crazy Joe Modica's house, at the other end, was to us a mansion and featured a spire topped with a weather vane. That old goat would threaten to slice up any ball that violated his spacious turf. He would pantomime the action with three phantom strokes augmented by short whistles, and then cap it off by saying, in a thick accent: "Time eese up. Go to bed, go 'head." His was a gentler approach than Steve the Greek, who would make a snapping motion with his hands and growl: "I breaka you bones." This earned him the moniker: "I break." He built a small fortune from nothing in the diner business, working such long hours we hardly ever saw him. He bought a big house in Mill Basin and moved his parents into the one on the block. They lived well into their nineties and died within weeks of each other. I will always remember how Mr. Karras, who barely spoke English, would greet me: "Hello Ann-Tony!"
   Our fathers were blue collar. Our mothers stayed home. Some would take a job when the kids were teens. It seemed 90% of our piece of the world was of Italian descent. This did not promote the harmony you would expect. We would belittle each other's place of origin: Sicily, Naples, Calabria, Bari, Abruzzi. My grandmother would even speak condescendingly of Sicilians from anywhere but St. George.
   Since many of us had the same first name, we distinguished each other using surnames or nicknames. I was Bags, short for Baglio. The other Tony was called Goofy Grape for his fondness for a particular sweet and his odd, lanky build. Sometimes I was called St. James in honor of my father, Jimmy, whom everyone loved. He often invited two of the older boys with us to Shea Stadium, where his boss had a box behind home plate. The top ticket was $3.50 then. It's $600 at the Mets' new field.
   The two Joes, scrawny kids, were the most energetic of our group. Scalzo, which in Italian translates to "barefoot," was as fitting a name as there ever was. Two years younger than the rest of us, he lived carefree, already smoking, climbing out of his bedroom window late at night, shinnying down the drain pipe, hanging with the older boys. He was as dark as a white person could be. He would pop into the bakery regularly just to ask the Asian woman behind the counter the price of a loaf of bread.
   "Fitty-fi," she would say in a heavy accent.
   "What?" he would reply.
   "Fitty-fi."
   "What?"
   And we would all be, as we used to say, "laughin' our heads off” at the foot of the entrance. The Asian woman had a beautiful, full-figured daughter, Judy, who would inspire our reverent silence whenever she passed, as did Kathy Alberto, who was in her 20s. Goofy summed it up best, writing in chalk on the street: "Kathy is sexy."
   Impy, whose light hair was shaggy, was Scalzo's partner in mischief. Old Mrs. Bianco would observe them from her perch at the corner window on the second floor of her brick house. "Cosi potts," she would mutter in quiet disbelief at the antics. Once, Impy made the mistake of mimicking her and was thrashed by Lorraine, the oldest granddaughter. To his credit, he stood there and took it. "I can't hit a girl," he said to the merciless jeers of his friends. He still hasn't lived it down.
   The two Joes had a brief fascination with fire, burning the neighbors' junk mail. One day Impy took a giant leap forward, stuffing paper into a cardboard box that had contained a washing machine, dragging it into the Schwartz's hallway, and setting a match to it. It did not occur to him until years later that he might have burned the house down. It'd seemed a harmless prank. Of the blaze having been spotted in time, he would eventually come to say: "That was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me." Mr. Schwartz knocked at the DeLuca door and said, in a voice Impy would often imitate, talking out of the corner of his mouth: "I want you to know that I called the fire marshal on your son," and promptly walked away. Nothing came of it. From then on Grandma Schwartz referred to Impy as "meshuga."
   We would play stickball several times a day in three or four man teams. The bases were painted in white in the middle of the block. While some neighborhoods measured drives by the distance between sewer covers, we did it by telephone poles, three being the longest. Whenever there was a rout, the losing team would complain of "slaughter sides," as if there'd been chicanery in the choosing. Eventually we would run out of balls, as they found their way onto roofs. Stuie Goodman, a lefty, had an uncommon propensity for this. Invariably, his pop-ups would land on the Russo and Manzi homes, which were attached. Impy would take it upon himself to fetch them, without permission. He would climb the ladder in the Russo hall and push open and slide back the heavy hatch.
   One day he found a bonanza of "Spaldeens," which was our pronunciation of the rubber ball that Spalding manufactured. Maria Conti, just off the boat, sporting an outrageous bosom at 13, called it: "Ball-ding," which always had us roaring. Anyway, there was Impy two stories up, smiling, firing balls down at us, when suddenly he jerked as if he'd been shocked by a cattle prod. Mr. Russo, whose head was just above the hatch, was cursing him in Italian and broken English. "Salama beetch," the 70-year-old muttered, climbing onto the roof. Knife in hand, dark clothing stained by the fish he'd been scaling, he chased the miscreant around the roof. Although spry for his age, showing no sign of the disease that would take him only three years hence, he was no match for an imp.
   Impy being Impy, he would not let the incident die. He plotted revenge, although he knew Mr. Russo had meant only to scare him. Scalzo suggested his own preferred methods -- prank phone calls or dead fish concealed in the front yard, which would begin to stink overnight. Impy scoffed: "Played out." I tried to talk him out of it, to no avail. The Russos were good people. I smile whenever I recall how Mrs. Russo, that gentle soul, would call to her son, who was older than us, just before supper time: "Fifateen minoots."
   There were vacant lots everywhere those days, weeds growing wild. Impy began catching butterflies and putting them into a jar, poking holes in the lid to allow the insects to breathe. When the jar was full, he quietly entered the hall just before supper and closed the front door. The intoxicating aroma of sauce was in the air. He stopped at the foot of the stairs and set the butterflies free. They rushed toward the skylight and hovered there. Impy cackled at the effectiveness of the ruse, betraying his presence. He ran outside, the heavy green door slamming behind him. Minutes later Mrs. Russo latched it and shooed the farfalle with underhand flails, singing to them in Italian, squinting in the brilliant sunshine. They swarmed past her. Her four granddaughters were at the front window, gazing at the sight in wonder. From the ringside seat on my front steps, I thought I'd bust a gut laughing. The image is seared into our memories, a special chapter in our urban ledger. All these years later we still laugh about it.
   Most of the families have scattered: Jersey, Long Island, Staten Island, Florida. Only Stuie, the other Tony and I, and a few others remain. To no one's surprise, Crazy Joe Modica went senile, "stunod," as his granddaughter Priscilla described it. The mansion was torn down, replaced by multi-family brick houses. The block has taken an eastern aspect: Russians, Albanians, Arabs, Chinese. I find sadness in that, in the inevitability of change. I guess it reminds me that our stay at this fascinating carnival is temporary.
   What a privilege it was to grow up in Brooklyn in those simpler times before play dates and the explosion of predators to come. We were unsupervised, expected to behave or resolve differences on our own. Unlike today's children, only Tom approached being fat, despite all the junk food we bought between games at Penny Profit, Betty and Joe's, and Katz's Deli. Smart-alecks that we were, we called Katz "Dogs." I still conjure his main catch phrase, his accent, now and then: "Vat else, pleece."
   We were outside all day, running around. It was beautiful. There were hairy moments along the way, of course. In their early teens the Joes went through a BB gun phase. Their errant shots put holes in windows all along the block. Neighbors wanted to kill them. We survived our club-hopping years, the stupid, drunken fights those nuts instigated, which Impy now rues: "What I put my father through -- bailin' me atta jail in the middle of the night when he was in his seventies."
   It is said that living well is the best revenge. I can't say how well we've lived, but our core is still intact. Stuie lost a leg to cancer, but is in good health otherwise. Goofy is on disability, doctors unable to pinpoint why he keeps falling down. Impy has his hypochondria under control. Even Scalzo, who lived full tilt into his 40s, is still with us, albeit battered. It is miraculous he is alive at all. I haven't been able to quit smoking, despite a recent health scare. We get together now only to bury one of our old-timers, most recently at the Alberto funeral. Nicky, forever young, was still wind-surfing and driving a motorcycle at 72. A year later cancer took him, but our memories of his positivism remain.
   "How ya doin', Nick?" I'd say whenever we passed.
   "Great!" he always responded, an example to us all.
   What an array we had in our cramped part of the world. We were blessed.

Here's a shot of where the Schwartz family lived:



My thanks to the kind folks who bought books today, and to Johnny, who donated about 25.
Vic's Sixth novel: http://tinyurl.com/zpuhucj 
Vic's Short Works: http://tinyurl.com/jy55pzc






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