I Only Know Who I Am When I Am Somebody Else

by Danny Aiello

  My world ended when the national union sided with the Greyhound corporation against the wildcat strikers. They took over our local. My coworkers felt as though they’d been stabbed in the back. Whoever heard of a union favoring the company over the rank and file?

  As a parting gift when I was kicked out, Greyhound hit me with a $500,000 civil suit for the damages the striking drivers had done to the buses on the thruway. The company wanted me gone. Suing me was just a scare tactic. Leave the office for good or we’ll drag your sorry ass through court—that was the message they were sending me.

  If the national board had stood with me, I could have fought back. Instead, it asked every officer of our local union to take over my position as president. One after another, my executive board members refused. Four stand-up guys stuck by me when the going got tough. Vice President Joe Daly, Recording Secretary Charlie O’Keefe, Financial Secretary Art Mason, and Garage Representative Buddy Casano—all are enshrined on my personal honor roll, and I will never forget them.

  The whole episode, of course, was devastating. The life that Sandy and I had built together depended on my bringing in a paycheck every week. Little League for the kids, the nice apartment at 238th and Broadway, the food on our table—all seemed about to disappear as if they had never been there to begin with. Ten years at Greyhound, all gone. My old fears about failure and homelessness now returned with a vengeance.

  My experience at Greyhound was meaningless in the job market. Try looking for a job as a union president. The bottom dropped out of my life. I had nothing. I was nothing.

  I resorted to desperate measures, doing many things I’m not proud of today. None of it worked to drag me out of the hole I was in, and none of it was pretty.

  Chapter Eight

  Breaking In

  The 1960s were staggering to an end, and American society seemed to be coming apart at the seams. There were riots, war protests, assassinations. Half of the Bronx was in the process of getting burned out or abandoned. Success was the furthest thing from my mind at this point. Survival was more like it.

  Where was I in my life? I can give it to you in one word: nowhere. I was flat broke with no job, never knowing where my next nickel was coming from. As far as I could tell, I was unemployable.

  I hustled pool, playing in halls all over the South Bronx. Once in a while I was able to knock down a couple hundred bucks over the course of a few days, but I didn’t make a ton of money doing it. Most of the money I made in that period came from a pool hall called Jimmy’s. All the Puerto Rican players there liked the game of nine-ball.

  Nine-ball is all about position. You have to sink the balls in numerical order, and when I scored the final nine, that was my sign to sweep up whatever money had been bet on the game. There was also pill pool, a game that had each player picking a number out of a leather cup. If I sank the ball with my number on it, everyone in the game paid me. If I sank the ball with your number, I got paid by you. It was the potential of getting paid twice that made pill pool exciting.

  Whatever I did, and however hard I hustled, my fortunes kept spiraling down. The Aiello family was on the ropes. Twice, and for a few months each time, I had to go on welfare. My veteran status made me eligible for public assistance. The shame I felt about being on the dole made me push myself to do better. I took all sorts of jobs, having to accept whatever was offered. Frequently, that meant hiring on as a bouncer at after-hours clubs, working off the books and getting paid cash.

  The official closing time for bars in New York City has always been four a.m. After-hours clubs illegally catered to those who didn’t want to go home even then. Those after-hours joints were brutal places, with guys looking for fights just so they could tell their buddies that they kicked your ass.

  Management always had a rule: no fights inside the club. If I ever got into a fight on the premises, I’d lose my job. So a customer could feel free to insult me as the bouncer, knowing the most I could do was order them out of the place. I got around the rule by telling the offender that I’d meet him outside. I’d slip out a side door and the two of us would then battle it out in the street.

  For a while, I ran a Manhattan after-hours club on West Ninth Street called the Toy Top. There were fights every night, the police constantly busting the place for being open after-hours. The butch lesbians who hung out at the Toy Top used to take the rap for me, knowing I had kids and a straight home life. They’d step in and swear to the cops that they were the ones managing the club, not me. They had hearts of gold.

  After the Toy Top, I got hired as a bouncer at the world-famous Roseland, but that didn’t last long, either. I could never bring myself to crack heads. The patrons there were too sweet. They were all big-band aficionados, and it was as if they had been trapped in the year 1945. I bounced no one, so management bounced me after only three nights on the job.

  Hustling pool was feast or famine, and so were the club jobs. Day by day, I could feel my life slipping away. As a result, self-respect went out the window. Out of sheer desperation, I made a series of bad moves that almost landed me in prison.

  I began to steal. A longtime friend of mine, Barry, was my partner in crime. I met him when we were both pin boys at Metropolitan Lanes on Whitlock Avenue. He was a great bowler. I wasn’t. When our fortunes hit the skids, Barry recruited me and we embarked on a petty burglary spree all over the South Bronx. I was doing it just to make ends meet. Barry liked the thrill.

  The two of us would break into isolated businesses after hours. We’d find ways into local stores, bakeries, and warehouses by prying open windows or back doors. Barry was the second-story man. He’d do all the climbing and scaling of walls. He’d squirm inside somehow and then open up the place for me.

  We took safes, when we could find them. We weren’t these high-style cinematic safecrackers, either. If I had tried twirling the dials and listening to the tumblers, I would have been there for years. Instead, we broke them open by force right on the spot, or took the easy route and tossed the safe out a window to the pavement.

  If a safe still didn’t open after all that, I would heft it into the trunk of Barry’s car and we’d drive it to a junkyard that he had access to, deserted in the off-hours. The two of us would attack it with sledgehammers. Hard as we went at it, more than once we couldn’t break a safe before daylight came. So we would bury the stubborn fucker and come back to work on it some more the next night. After all that effort, the most we ever got from a safe was $80.

  We had to really move it along whenever we hit bakeries. Bakers had a habit of coming in predawn to open up and light the ovens. We also liked to target bowling alleys, including ones where Barry and I had worked as pin boys. Sometimes we burgled the same places over and over. One bowling alley got hit maybe a dozen times.

  They couldn’t keep us out. Whenever I played pool at one of our neighborhood bowling alleys that had tables, I was doing two things at once: I was setting up my next shot and casing the joint, trying to find locks to jimmy or windows to force. These were local places I was in and out of all the time. But I never hit Pop Bennett’s pool hall. That would’ve been like busting into a church.

  Barry and I were a two-man crime wave. There was never cash in the tills in any of these places, so instead we rifled the candy and cigarette machines. That was our take, chump change, quarters, dimes, nickels!

  Shooting pool one day in a bowling alley, I saw a skylight over the tables that I thought would be a perfect way in. We came back that night, broke open the skylight, and used ropes to lower ourselves down from the roof. Since the skylight was right over the billiards lounge, we didn’t land on the floor but wound up on one of the tables. Then we hit the cigarette machines, took our loot, and beat it.

  The next day, I went back to the same bowling alley. I remember clearly racking the balls for a game and seeing my own telltale footprint on the green felt of the pool table. That was me, the cat burglar from the night before.

  “What’s all this
?” I remember Sandy saying one night after she found me at our kitchen table, stacking up rows of coins.

  “This is rent money,” I replied. For months at a stretch, I paid the rent with stolen cigarette machine coins. My wife was none the wiser. She thought I was bringing in the money from hustling pool.

  * * *

  Once in a while, my father had me come down to where he occasionally worked at the New York Coliseum, across from Central Park on Columbus Circle, nowadays replaced by the towering Time Warner headquarters. My uncle Sal Aiello was president of Local 814 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, and sometimes I’d get work through him. I’d have a day’s paid labor, unloading trucks.

  The Coliseum hosted a lot of trade shows and exhibitions, so there was constant action. The place was also a feeding trough for the Mafia. The FBI spent fifteen years investigating pilferage at the place. Merchandise was constantly falling off the back of a truck, as they say.

  If a vehicle came in without a helper, union rules dictated that a Teamster had to be assigned to work the load. We didn’t know what kind of shipments we would be working. A full “thirty-eight”—a semi with a thirty-eight-foot trailer—could take all day to unload. A “shorty” was a smaller truck that might have only a couple of boxes in the back. But I got paid the same—$100 per load—no matter how much work it took.

  My dad had to explain the workplace facts of life to me. “Danny,” he would say, “you gotta kick back.”

  At first, I thought he was telling me to relax, take it easy. But he jerked his thumb toward one of the wiseguys who hung around the place. Then I got it.

  “What do you mean, Dad?” I said. “I’m not giving him money!”

  Soon afterward, I found myself called to account, sitting in a diner across the street from the Coliseum with my father and his wiseguy boss.

  Bobby C., I’ll call him. My experience with made guys was that they were nice enough—until they weren’t. You could sit and have coffee with them and never feel any fear. But the minute you crossed them, they turned vicious. I wondered what I was getting into. This was my dad’s world, not mine.

  Bobby C. wasn’t a real high-ranking mob boss. He was just the captain of a crew. The first thing Bobby did was hand over his keys and tell me to move his car, at the moment double-parked outside the diner.

  “You’re asking me to park your car?” I said. “No way.”

  My dad grabbed me out of the booth and pulled me aside. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m a married man with kids, for chrissakes,” I replied. I wasn’t going to act as anybody’s gofer.

  In fact, all the pushback I was giving Bobby C. worked like magic. The mobster actually liked the fact that I wasn’t intimidated by him. The next thing I knew, he put me in business with his son. Bobby bought the two of us our very own legitimate union charter. He sent his son and me out to recruit workers. I was the president of a union again, but it was a paper union, with no members, just officers.

  Our job was to decertify the current union and get the workers to transfer to ours. Despite the shady players in the background, this was a legitimate practice, sanctioned by the government’s National Labor Relations Board. One of our first targets was the Star Factory, a machine parts plant in Poughkeepsie, New York. I was hired on, pretending to be nothing more than a common laborer. But my secret agenda was to badmouth the electricians’ union that had a lock on the factory’s labor force.

  “Oh, man, that goddamned union is here?” I’d moan to the other workers. “I had a lot of trouble with them on my last job. They’re no good. If they’re here, then I’m leaving.”

  I kept working the pitch, talking to workers, insinuating myself into their confidence. I thought they bought it. I told Bobby C.’s son that I had them convinced. At the next election, the plant workers could check a box for our own union, one for no union, or one for the now-maligned electricians’ union. Due to my efforts, I predicted our union would be certified. It wasn’t.

  I might have been a little naive. Two weeks after I started at the Star plant, I walked out to the parking lot to find the van I was driving had every single one of its windows smashed in. This was the electricians’ union’s retaliation for my bad-mouthing activities. I drove home with the breeze blowing in my face, going about five miles an hour without a windshield to protect me.

  My union job was only part of the game, though. Whenever I went around with Bobby’s son, I noticed that he was constantly popping in and out of places along our route. “Hey, Danny, I have to make a stop,” he’d say, directing me to an apartment building in the northern Bronx. He’d go inside and wouldn’t come back for fifteen minutes. I didn’t think anything of it. I just stayed in the car and waited.

  But it happened again and again. Bobby’s son had me make stops all over the Bronx. I suspected he was dealing drugs, and I was unwittingly serving as his driver. But I certainly couldn’t complain to Bobby C. about what I thought his son was doing.

  How the hell do I get out of this?

  Eventually, I felt I had to make a move, and I went to see Bobby C. in the same coffee shop across the street from the Coliseum. “Bobby, I can’t do this. It’s not for me,” I said. “Since my time with Greyhound, you know I’m all disillusioned about unions. I don’t want to have anything to do with them.”

  Bobby C. was silent. I couldn’t tell if I was digging my own grave.

  “Your son,” I continued. “He’s really the one who should be taking the lead on this. He should be president of the local.”

  “My son,” Bobby replied. There was an awkward pause. He stared at me for what seemed an awful long time.

  “Okay,” he finally said, and that was it.

  I was out. I couldn’t believe it. I felt a sick kind of relief. I think my father, too, felt relieved. In his heart of hearts, he didn’t want his boy going down the same path that he himself had traveled.

  A certain kind of future died when I said no to Bobby C. But there was only one problem. I didn’t have another future to replace it with.

  * * *

  Ball fields are scattered all over Central Park, a couple dozen in all. But the ones I knew, my home diamonds, were the Heckscher Fields just to the north and east of Columbus Circle. They’re used for the city softball leagues, and for the Broadway Show League in particular. Unemployed actors, writers, musicians, and students all congregated there in the summer.

  I wasn’t an unemployed actor or an unemployed writer. I was just unemployed. Whenever there was no work at the Coliseum, I’d drift over to Central Park and those ball fields, soon becoming a familiar face. Naturally, I got recruited into the Central Park softball games. Every team was clawing for any scrap of advantage it could get. The use of ringers wasn’t technically allowed, but there were always ways to bend the rules. No one was checking Equity membership cards.

  The New York Yankees sponsored the Broadway Show League. I played on the CBS team first, alongside people like retired Yankees star shortstop and announcer Phil Rizzuto. Also in the mix was football great Frank Gifford and local CBS anchor Jim Jensen. For a while, I was on the team fielded by Sparks Steak House, the midtown restaurant where years later the notorious John Gotti would have his boss Paul Castellano rubbed out in cold blood.

  Mostly, though, my teammates were actors. Tony Lo Bianco, the French Connection star, was a pitcher so competitive you would have thought he was playing in the World Series at every game.

  Back in those days, I was called “Tree City Danny,” so nicknamed because I always swung for the tree line in left field, 275 feet away. In softball, there’s no crack of the bat. The sound made is more like a solid thud, like the punch of a fist into a gut. I still remember the satisfaction when I would connect with a ball and send it sailing into the trees. Nothing could have been sweeter.

  I used to live for those games. They represented time off from the grind of always hustling for work. I was a man in a hurry, looking for a job where I could ma
ke solid money in a short amount of time. I needed a break.

  My family didn’t really grasp the level of desperation in my life back then. At home, I tried to present a calm, fatherly face. I loved watching Sandy spoil Stacey, our little girl. But outside the home, I was a madman. I made frantic dashes from one end of the city to another, hustling up games at pool halls, committing those second-story jobs with Barry, trying to cadge work at the Coliseum—and hanging around the softball fields of Central Park.

  There wasn’t any money there. But there was a human connection. One of the people I met was Budd Friedman, who ran a famous comedy club called the Improvisation on West Forty-Fourth Street off Ninth Avenue. The Improv was a phenomenon, one of the pioneer clubs in what would become an explosion of stand-up venues. In contrast to the dozens of comedy clubs around the city today, back then there was only the Improv and one other forerunner, Rick Newman’s Catch a Rising Star.

  Friedman fielded a team in the Broadway League made up of the staffers and performers at his club. When he and I spoke, details of my situation inevitably came out. As an unemployed high school dropout who was expecting his fourth child at any moment, I was carrying a heavy load of trouble and anxiety.

  Was it my sad-sack story or my power hitting that prompted Budd to offer me a job at the Improv?

  “You had a kind face and good heart,” was all Budd would admit to later when I asked him about it. “You also needed the work.”

  Budd recognized me for my talents, so he hired me as a bouncer at his club, and he put me in at first base on his softball team.

  I didn’t even know it at the time, but I had my foot in the door.

  Chapter Nine

  At the Improv

  Budd Friedman’s Improvisation was in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan. The place is gone now, a Mexican restaurant and a brick-oven pizzeria in the space where the Improv used to be. But for me, that area will always be a sort of personal shrine.