Just Kids From the Bronx

by Arlene Alda

  There were a lot of things happening in the 1960s. The living wage jobs for low-skill people were dwindling, because so many people were coming here looking for those jobs. The ability of a man with very little education, like my father’s father had in his day, to earn a living wage was quickly vanishing. At that same time, there was this dramatic rise of primarily people of color from the South, who were coming here to escape what we know today was a hard situation down in the Jim Crow South. And the fact is these people came here hoping to achieve what they knew could be found here—only to be disappointed when it wasn’t really there. To make up for that disparity, the city helped out with welfare assistance. Here’s the weird thing about welfare assistance. You couldn’t be married and qualify for welfare because the assumption was that, as a couple, one person could always find a job. You couldn’t work and collect welfare at the same time. You also got a benefit if you had children, so the City of New York was discouraging people from getting married, encouraging them to have children without getting married, and making it very difficult for a person to earn a living if they in fact required welfare help. At the same time, if you were on welfare, where you lived was entirely up to the City of New York. My parents had a domestic who helped take care of our apartment but certain days the woman couldn’t come because a social worker was coming to meet with her at her own place and she had better be there, because if she wasn’t, and if they found out she was working, that would be the end of her welfare. This whole system was not designed to help people to come together, but rather to exacerbate a racial prejudice and economic stress, which is a foundation for conflict.

  If young people, in particular, don’t sense that they are welcome, or don’t sense any opportunity, sometimes just out of desperation a person would do something that they would rather not do. And once it becomes socially acceptable for people to be that way, for whatever reason, the reluctance on the part of a kid to harm a senior citizen walking down the street is no longer an issue for that kid. My grandfather, on my mom’s side, stayed in the Bronx well into the 1980s and ultimately didn’t ever go out. He used to pay someone to do his shopping for him because he was afraid to go into the street. It irritated me because I knew that what was happening was not accidental. The officials chose to make decisions that they recognized were not necessarily in the best interest of their constituency. They hid these problems rather than addressed them. An elected official would not likely address a long-term problem because by the time that problem might be resolved the official would no longer be in office. So sometimes people in government would push the can down the road, because they knew they couldn’t solve the problem quickly or easily. There was also rent control in effect in most of the apartment buildings in the Bronx. If you were on welfare, in some cases you weren’t paying the full rent, or in other cases the welfare system offset the rent costs. Most of the people who were living in the buildings moved in when the buildings were first constructed, so these original rents were ridiculously low. My grandfather was paying a hundred fifty-three dollars a month for a seven-room apartment. From the 1940s to the 1960s the city was showing all these danger signs and no one addressed them until the 1970s, when the city went belly-up financially. At that point the whole house of cards came crashing down.

  My grandfather on my mother’s side, Abraham Mayer, always said that it wasn’t how much you owned, but how much you could share. He used to say, “A rich man is not rich if he doesn’t know how to use his money to help someone else.” He would talk about the Depression and how he would buy dinners for people because he had the money and he knew someone else didn’t. One of the most devastating aspects of the Bronx turning from a prosperous community to a poor community was that although our community, which was mostly Jewish, although it was of one color, one race, one ethnicity, and one religion, it wasn’t homogeneous on income levels. There were different income levels within the community. I can remember people coming to my grandfather’s apartment and they would go into a bedroom and after they would come out and leave my grandfather would say to me, “That man lost his job. You never want to work for someone else. You always want to work for yourself. I was able to help him because I work for myself.” The point is that when the city started manipulating the way people lived in this community, it put everyone poor in one place. Well, if everyone in the building is just as poor as everyone else, where’s the help going to come from? And when you create an entire community of people who are desperately poor, who don’t want to be where they are, what is the inevitable outcome of that kind of lifestyle? If not one of violence, it’s certainly one of resentment. I know people who worked in this office [office of the borough president] who would say, “I need to rent a post office box somewhere else, because if I give my real address as the Bronx, who would want to hire me?” So they would rent a P.O. box at Grand Central Station so they wouldn’t have a Bronx address. This is what we’d done.

  My father was trying to inspire me to be a lawyer and, in retrospect, I regret that I didn’t follow his advice because he had a very successful law practice. During the summers, when I was a high school and college student, he would take me to work with him in order to expose me to his profession. And the more I was exposed to what he did, the more intimidated I got. I can remember one meeting with a client where my father was instructing this client as to how to answer the questions that the other side might pose. I was just bowled over, especially since I was a kid. I saw it as a chess game. And the whole point was that this was an adversarial thing where you have two sides trying to demonstrate opposite sides of an argument. This was my first case of law through my father’s eyes and it turned me off. It scared me. This is not me. I’ll never succeed in this. As a consequence, I followed a different career path.

  When I finished college I started looking for that career. I had a BA in political science from Kenyon College, which in New York City meant I knew how to think. I didn’t know how to make myself or someone else any money. I wound up driving a school bus in Westport because I couldn’t find a job. This was in 1975 and things weren’t so good, economically, so I decided to get myself a master’s degree. If you majored in journalism as an undergrad, you could become a news reporter. If you majored in accounting, you could become an accountant. I was a political science major. What does that mean? What I understood was how government worked and how it didn’t work, because of what I learned from watching and living in the Bronx. So I got my master’s in urban management.

  Things are different now. I moved back to the Bronx. I purchased the apartment across the street from where I work at the courthouse. The apartment is number 800 Grand Concourse. The reason I chose that building was because I remembered the building as a kid. To this day, it’s a very well maintained Bronx apartment house, and believe it or not it was affordable. It’s taken all these years practically until now for people to start to see the Bronx as a place to go to rather than a place to escape from. That’s because it’s affordable, it’s a super location, and there’s been a dramatic drop in crime and a diminishing fear of neighbors that appear to be different than oneself. I’m glad to say that things are looking up. The Bronx is New York’s borough of opportunity.

  CHAZZ PALMINTERI

  Actor, writer, director

  (1952– )

  In my neighborhood, the Little Italy of the Bronx, I saw things. I saw a murder when I was a young boy. It’s what I wrote about in A Bronx Tale. People always say to me, “Oh, my God, you must’ve been traumatized and horrified,” but I really don’t have an answer for them because I wasn’t at all. I was young, almost eleven, and I just kind of stared at it. I had seen some violence before, like punches and fights. Kid stuff. But I never saw anything like that. I was sitting on my stoop holding my head in my hands, and all of a sudden I saw one car trying to back in and another car going forward. I thought they were fighting over a parking space, but they weren’t. This guy who was backing in was after the other guy for something—
something which my father never told me and my mother still to this day won’t tell me after over fifty years. So this guy just pulled up, jumped out, and bam! Blood! Bam-bam! And then he kind of turned and looked at me. And I looked at him. But I wasn’t scared. It’s hard to describe because I was just kind of staring and looking at him. The next minute I knew, I was being dragged upstairs by my father. He had run downstairs. My mother had said, “Oh my God. Go down and get him.” So he ran down and dragged me up.

  That’s when I got scared—when my mother started crying. Mom! Mom! Are you all right? Why are you crying? She was like, Was the kid hit? In the movie and in the play, the cops come up and knock on the door, and I go down with them because I was a witness. What really happened was that the cops did come up, but I didn’t go down. My father wouldn’t let me go down. He said, “He’s not going. He’s a kid. He didn’t see anything. You’re not talking to my son. He doesn’t know anything. He’s a kid.” And that was it.

  But the interesting thing is that the only time the murder would be vivid in my head was when I would sit somewhere, like at a table, and put my head in my hands. If I re-created the position I was in, it would come to mind. I never even had nightmares. But you know what? I told a shrink about it once and he said, “It did affect you.” And I said, “How?” He said, “It was in your mind for a long time and you had to write about it. You wrote about it and you made it into art.” But at the time the killing actually happened I wasn’t aware of its effect on me.

  I became a writer because I was desperate for work. I had been working as a doorman in LA and when I got fired from that job I remembered the words that my father always said—I even had cards printed up with that saying—“The saddest thing in life is wasted talent.” If they won’t give me a great part, I’ll write something myself. I’ll do a one-man show. I’ll play all the parts. They gotta notice me. And I started to write.

  I wrote a five-minute piece and then I performed it for my theater workshop. They loved it and each week I would write another ten or fifteen minutes, and after I performed it I would take six minutes from that and add it on. I literally workshopped it in front of a live audience for a year. By the time the year was over, I had ninety minutes of a very tight one-man show. A Bronx Tale. Then I did it and it was like a rocketship.

  Now here’s a guy—me—who came out to LA who had decent theater credits, but all of a sudden I went from not even having an agent—I couldn’t get to William Morris, I couldn’t get to ICM—to everybody wanting me. Everybody! Wait a minute! I’m the same actor. How can this be? And then a week later I’m offered $250,000 because they wanted to make A Bronx Tale into a movie. I had two hundred dollars in the bank. But they didn’t want me to write the screenplay and they didn’t want me to play Sonny, the mobster, so I said no. Then they call again and offer $500,000. I still said no. They go to one million dollars. Everybody wanted to do the movie. I remember Pacino wanted to do it. Nicholson came to see the play. They all came to see it. And I was just like—no.

  There was such a bidding war after the play was a success. Big-time directors got my phone number and called my house. I had producers—huge producers—calling me. Following me into the bathroom in restaurants. Listen, you got to take this meeting with me. You got to!

  The interesting thing is, the hardest offer to refuse was the first one, the $250,000. That was the hardest one because that came out of nowhere: $250,000? What? That’s the one that put me through trauma. When I called my parents they said, “Don’t worry, son. It’s okay.” My parents were behind me. They said, “You do what you want.” After I turned down the initial $250,000, the rest just became numbers to me. I couldn’t connect with them. I also do believe that I’m just a very lucky guy. I’ve always felt that way. I felt that there was some divine intervention. That God was there and put his hand on my shoulder. It’s okay. You’re gonna be okay. And I thought, Yes. It’s gonna be okay. De Niro saw me in the play and said to me that if I wanted to write the screenplay and also play Sonny, he would direct it, play my father, and on a handshake it was a deal.

  When I went to Italy in 1998, I went to film a movie, about Giovanni Falcone, a famous anti-Mafia judge. Pretty amazing to be in Sicily in the towns where my family grew up. My great-grandfather was a poet and he would go to the town square and read his poetry to the people. So I was like, Wow! Because you know I was asking myself, How did this writing come about to me? How did this happen? Well, I found out that it’s in the family.

  They used to say that Sicily is a land kissed by God and cursed by man because of the Mafia. I have very strong opinions about depicting the Mafia in films. About showing Italians as bad guys. A lot of people put down The Godfather and they put down Goodfellas and they put down The Sopranos. Well, this is America. This is art. This is art. You don’t have to like modern art, for instance. If you like traditional art, the Renaissance, that’s fine. This is art. That’s what gives us our freedom. I know that Marty Scorsese said that he made Goodfellas to depict how awful and bad these people are. A Bronx Tale is not about the Mafia. It’s about working people. It’s about my father—De Niro in the film. My father is a working man. He’s the one who wins at the end. The Mafia dies. But to show the light you have to show the darkness. Every good story is about good versus evil. Otherwise you don’t have a story. Are there some very bad Mafia movies where Italians are made to look like total idiots? And they and the movie don’t have any redeeming value? Yes! That’s the price you pay for having free speech. Tell that person you can’t make that? Absolutely not. You can make whatever you like and that’s why I live in this country. You don’t like it, shut it off. Don’t watch it. It’s okay.

  This is not a knock on my mother’s brothers and sisters, but they all left the neighborhood where we grew up. They said to her, “If you don’t get out of this neighborhood, your children will all turn out to be bums.” They all left but my mother stayed. My mother said, “You worry about your kids. I’ll worry about mine.”

  We stayed there until I was eighteen, nineteen years old. My two sisters and I, we’re all very successful. One sister married a vice president of a bank. Then she started a travel agency, had twenty-five of them and sold them, and they both retired. They live in Boca. My other sister is a teacher in Tampa. I think she became an associate professor. Does very well. All three of us did very well. In fact, better than all of my cousins who moved out of the neighborhood.

  People say, Chazz, I feel so bad for you—your neighborhood. I go, No, no, no, you don’t understand. It was great. I loved it. It was a family neighborhood. We all loved it. My father said we might not have a lot of money but we have a lot of love. We have each other. What does a parent do? A parent can set examples for their children. They can say till they’re blue in the face, Do this, do that, but what they do is what you pick up. My father was always kind. My mother was always kind and generous and nice. I had a great upbringing. I believe that the problem in this country is that we try to say, especially in affluent areas, they say, My kid’s gonna go to Harvard. You’re gonna do this. You’re gonna do that. We’re not teaching them to be morally good people. If a child is morally a good person, he’ll be okay. He might not be affluent, but he’ll be successful as opposed to just being a winner at anybody’s expense. And that’s important.

  It doesn’t matter where you’re from if you have good parents. I think that parents are very undervalued. I always tell people when you create a child, that’s not just a child. That’s a universe because that child will grow up and affect a lot of people, like ripples in water. And they’ll get married and his kids will affect even more people and they’ll affect even more people. So if you treat your children as this incredible special love the world will be better.

  I go to juvenile prisons to talk to the kids there. It’s not a coincidence that the juveniles in these prisons all come from broken homes. Not one home with a mother and a father. What shot do these kids have? In Baltimore there was this young k
id, in solitary. The kid was sixteen, in for a double homicide, a gang-related thing. I went in to see him. I said, “You can tell me right now to get the F out, and I’m good with that. But I’m here because I care. If you want me to stay, I’ll stay. If you want me to go, I’ll go.” You could stay. I said, “Fine.” We started talking and I said, “Did you ever have any aspirations to do something?” “Yeah, I wanted to be an artist.” “An artist?” I thought he was going to say a bricklayer, a mechanic—but an artist? “What do you mean artist? What kind of artist?” “Well, I like to draw.” Two weeks later I get this mail that this kid drew a horse’s head. A beautiful picture of a horse. He had put my card, “The saddest thing in life is wasted talent,” on his wall.

  Here’s the problem with him in terms of follow-up. They can’t release him to anybody. There’s no one! His father’s dead, his mother’s a crack addict. Who wants him? That’s what they say to you. Who wants him? Some of these kids who want to get out, where are they gonna go? Are you going to throw them out on the street? They don’t know what to do with most of them. There’s nobody to take them. It’s a vicious cycle so I really do believe the parents are key.

  I go back to the neighborhood once a month to go shopping. I buy my pasta there, my olive oil, my cheeses, my muzzarell. In each store I get something different. In one store, even if they have the muzzarell, I won’t buy it there. I’ll buy the cold cuts there, but I’ll buy muzzarell on 187th Street. The best muzzarell in the world. My cold cuts I’ll get in Mike’s deli, and my olive oil I get at Teitel Brothers. For my pizza I’ll go to Zero Otto Nove. Every time I go back, I go to a different restaurant and they’re all good. There’s Roberto’s, there’s Rigoletto’s, there’s Zero Otto Nove, there’s Mario’s, so I go to each one of them. I want them to know that, Hey, it’s not just one I like. I’m here to support all of you. The neighborhood is a wonderful place. It makes me feel at home. It brings back great memories, ’cause I used to roam these streets when I was a young boy. It’s such a strong feeling in me that I almost can’t explain. Those are my roots. I grew up there.