by Tim Sultan
Sunny had been delivered by the midwife to a front row seat on one of the busiest deep-sea ports in the country, a crossroads of shipping and rail and truck. His family home was midway between two ship basins, the Atlantic and Erie, which, upon their completion in the mid-1800s, had made Red Hook the gateway to the Erie Canal. The sugar, the coffee, the tropical produce destined for Cleveland, Chicago, and beyond, came through its port. There was noise all the time. Today it would be like living next to the tarmac of Kennedy Airport.
By the time of Sunny’s birth, the Balzanos had already resided in this corner of Red Hook for more than a quarter century. His grandfather Antonio had arrived from Calabria in 1888 as a fourteen-year-old, his grandmother Angelina di Martini in 1896 as a twenty-year-old. The two married in 1898 and shared a tenement with her parents, Raffaele and Maria Grazia, at the northern end of Red Hook until 1907, when Antonio bought Sunny’s birth house, a three-story redbrick building at 251 Conover Street, for $1500, and the entire family, including grandparents, moved to the Point.
Although they now lived directly down the street from the piers, and shipyards were by far the largest employers in Red Hook, Antonio was unlikely to have been chosen during the shape-ups, then dominated by Irish hiring bosses. He was a slight man who spoke little English. For a time, he worked in a hat store before starting up with Miles Paints. For thirteen years he saved until he had enough money to buy the building next door at 253 Conover, intending to open a bar in its street-level storefront with his father-in-law. The year was 1920, the same year that Prohibition began. This may seem as providential as going into the typewriter ribbon business in 1990. But in a community like Red Hook, a law against liquor consumption would have been as enforceable as a ban on nocturnal erections. It’s only a mild overstatement to say that nearly every adult male who lived in this quarter of Red Hook was what today would be considered an alcoholic. With the same low regard for the well-being of others as the crack dealers of later times, some Red Hookers during this time sold “smoke”—denatured alcohol cut with milk—from their storefronts and restaurants. In 1922, one such batch sold on Conover Street killed twelve and blinded six. Ten years later smoke was still being made and when a reporter asked a resident of a Red Hook shantytown known as Tin Can City what kind of person would buy the stuff, he was told, “Only dumb fellers drink poison. Then they die. There’s no trouble, and if the police don’t come around, we bury them and the thing is closed.”
Antonio never sold smoke. The Volstead Act allowed each household to produce two hundred gallons of homemade wine a year. If one owned two adjoining houses, had a well-concealed backyard, and a stream of workers passed by your front door all day and much of the night, it was not hard to see the entrepreneurial possibilities of this loophole. So for the first dozen years of its existence, Balzano’s didn’t serve beers and shots—the usual staples of a laborers’ bar—but wine fermented in four fifty-gallon barrels in the basement. After one of Antonio’s daughters married a Southerner named Hoppes and the two moved into the building, Antonio took advantage of his son-in-law’s native expertise, supplementing the bar income by discreetly distilling whiskey in one of the upstairs apartments. The product was good enough for export—to Staten Island and New Jersey. By this time, Antonio’s sons Raffaele (Sunny’s father, now known as Ralph) and John had joined the family concern and father and sons took care of delivery themselves, by suitcase.
Ralph Balzano first saw his future wife, Josephine, in one of the many Coney Island wine gardens that operated openly during Prohibition. This one happened to belong to his aunt Mary and her husband, Dominick. Josephine was half an orphan. When she was an infant, her mother had leaned against the kitchen stove to keep warm and her cotton petticoat caught on fire, the sudden blaze consuming her. Her father, Francisco Travia, had taken her and her younger brother Anthony to a charity ward run by Irish nuns. The orphanage was something out of Dickens transplanted to Brooklyn’s southern shoreline. There were privations and beatings and humiliations. When she was a teenager, Francisco came one day and took her to live with his brother Dominick and his wife, Mary. But there her sense of captivity only heightened. She was put to work in the wine garden, where she cleaned the toilets, chopped firewood, and served men who leered at her and pinched her when she walked by with her hands full. She pushed a cart of roasted chestnuts on the newly built Coney Island boardwalk until one morning she bent to light the stove beneath the cart and the kerosene vapors exploded in her face. Fire seemed to be a curse that ran in her family. Her aunt bathed her skin with lemon juice and iodine for weeks. She took Josephine to some industrial vats in the neighborhood that emitted gaseous fumes, and, in the belief that inhaling these was somehow medicinal, the two would stand next to the vents and breathe deeply. Even years later, after she had moved away from Coney Island and had had children of her own, Josephine would periodically make the pilgrimage back to inhale the gases with her aunt. People came from all over the borough to that spot. It was the Lourdes of Brooklyn.
Coney Island was known as “the people’s playground” but when Josephine tried to do anything playful herself, like wearing makeup or going on a date, her uncle would search the Steeplechase Park, the rides, the seats of Loew’s Kings Theatre, and if he found her, he would kick her all the way home.
When Ralph saw all this, he came home one night and told his parents that they needed to rescue this distant relative by marriage from a life of mistreatment by bringing her to live with them in Red Hook. His motives were both altruistic and logistic. It was a way to liberate her from Uncle Dominick’s tyranny but also to bring her physically closer to him. His parents agreed and before long, Ralph and Josephine were married, in 1933 at Red Hook’s Church of the Visitation. By Christmas, Josephine was pregnant with Sunny.
Sunny’s extended family were unusual, and sometimes mysterious, people. The most educated of his relatives was his uncle Louis Anatriello who, before marrying one of his aunts, had gone to whistling school in Italy and whose Sunday visits were announced by the chirrups and trills of warblers and wagtails and thrushes. His grandparents Balzano, who lived upstairs, never called each other by their real names, Antonio and Angelina, but rather Marc Antone and Juliet, as if they had wandered away from two different Shakespeare plays and run off together to start new lives in Brooklyn. His grandmother towered over her husband in height and girth, though her weight was largely distributed to her bosom. She was known in Red Hook as a maga, a woman who could summon the power of the saints, cast and undo spells, heal the ailing, and change the fortunes of the unlucky. In a neighborhood where people filled their homes with plaster statuaries of saints, the understudies of the Roman and Greek gods petitioned by their ancestors, Angelina bartered her talent for chickens, bananas, coffee. Her superstitions were those of Southern Italians—part Catholic, part idiopathic. She feared the evil eye, il malocchio, and frequently warded it off by pointing the sign of the devil’s horns at the ground. She believed there were hidden patterns in numbers, a trait that she passed down to her eldest grandson. Half a century later he still searched the tallies on receipts and the serial numbers on dollar bills for clues as to how to play the lotto. Angelina confessed to the priest and prayed to Mary and thought of Christ several times a day, and yet when she made a protective charm for Ralph to carry on his person, a pouch wrapped in cloth, it contained rosary beads but also a Buddha. How a statuette of Siddhartha came into her possession and what she believed it to invoke are a mystery lost to time.
Sunny’s maternal grandfather, Francisco Travia, who had left his daughter at the orphanage, was even slighter than Antonio and lived in Coney Island, where he worked at the Blowhole Theater in Steeplechase Park as a cowboy clown. He never remarried after his wife succumbed to fire, and when he got out of work in the evenings, rather than return to his empty room he preferred to search the boardwalk and the sand for pieces of jewelry, little trinkets, combs with missing teeth, toy shovels, and discarded Steeplechase ti
ckets that hadn’t been entirely punched. He would make little packages for his grandchildren for when he came up to Red Hook. In the spring, he would bring them chicks or baby rabbits. He spoke broken English and even as a young child Sunny sensed that his grandfather was a kind of stranger in the world, a tormented man who only really seemed at peace when he held his grandson on his lap and murmured softly in Italian to him. In truth, he had briefly been an infamous figure in New York, accused of a grisly crime, but this was a family secret so closely held that Sunny wouldn’t come to fully know it until he himself was an old man.
* * *
8
The Japanese Zero That Sank in the Mississippi-Hudson River
Late in the spring and late in the evening, we placed our jackets over our stools and headed for the door. “Sunny, we’ll be back in a bit.”
“You fellows, you be careful,” Sunny replied gravely.
Outside, across the street, a green-lit tugboat returning from the fuel pumps in Erie Basin glided by and across the water the shore lights of Staten Island smoldered. Bell buoys dinged in the dark as if clanging for an underwater fire.
There were three of us: Jimmy, Jon, and myself. They were among the few friends I had begun to bring along to Red Hook, knowing they would appreciate Sunny and his magnificent bar. We shared that certain recklessness particular to bachelors. In our late twenties, we still had parents but no wives or children to feel a responsibility toward. We had begun swimming in the harbor weeks earlier and by now had a kind of routine. We never swam before midnight. This was not a rule; we just needed time to drink. Sobriety has its virtues but impulsiveness isn’t one of them, and foolhardy impulse is surely at the root of most adventures. So, we would have boilermakers (my friends had been easily persuaded that this was the only fitting drink at Sunny’s) and either talk amongst ourselves or try to get Sunny’s attention in the hope he would tell us a story.
Eventually one of us would get the restless itch and he’d motion to the other two and we would slip off our stools. I’d usually call out to Sunny to let him know where we were going and he’d invariably respond with a worried frown, his quiet way of saying, “Timmy, do me a kindness. Don’t fuck with the water.”
Sunny knew the harbor. Or rather, he knew that no one can ever know the harbor. The water speeds up as it crosses shallows over what perhaps once had been breakwaters, and slows abruptly over pools tucked into the shoreline. It curls into itself, creating swirling vortexes that disappear and reappear with the tides. Waves materialize unexpectedly from the wake of the far-off Staten Island Ferry. Sunny knew that water could turn on you. He and I would both be reminded of it one day, but that is another story.
On that spring night, my friends and I crossed the street and walked the two blocks to the nearest jetty. We hushed as we passed the night watchman near the brick warehouse sleeping in his shack lit by a blue television glow. On the backside of the building, the wooden pier jutted out at the elbow of Red Hook so that the Statue of Liberty lay straight ahead across the open harbor, Governors Island and lower Manhattan were off to the right beyond a narrow stretch of water called Buttermilk Channel, and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge twinkled to our left. A Swiss woman I once knew had exclaimed while driving by the Verrazano, “Bridges are like cathedrals to me!” She was excited about America and disposed to saying things like “J’aime graffiti!” but looking southward at that string of pearls from this pier, I knew what she meant.
We stripped and started crab-walking across the oily rocks that led down to the water. Tiny barnacles eked out a living here; on mornings after these swims I’d often wake in bed and not immediately remember the night before until I’d look down at my feet and see the cuts they’d made.
Once we had come this far, there was no turning back. The tide could be running fearsomely strong, but with our feet scraped and greasy and briny, we’d sooner take our chances with the current than crawl back up the mucky rocks and have nothing to show for the night but the smell of ocean funk. The darkness concealed most drifting debris and if one of us spotted a familiar limp latex shape floating by, which we did with some regularity, there always had to follow a crack about the Coney Island Whitefish running that night. The Gowanus Herring. The Red Hook Shad.
We lined up, balancing unsteadily on the rocks, taking in this panorama of ours, trying to overcome the last doubt that always came at this moment. Suddenly a harbor patrol boat appeared around the jetty, not more than two hundred yards from shore. We stood as still as marble replicas of ourselves, unsure whether it was legal or not to be standing naked on the edge of New York Harbor in the middle of the night. Jim, a psychologist by day who perhaps was now giving momentary thought to his practitioner’s license, muttered softly, “Nothing happening here, officer.” If anyone on board spotted us they didn’t let on; the boat continued its steady path up the channel like the refined society lady who is unruffled by lewd illustrations defacing a Park Avenue wall as she strides past. Soon we were left in the quiet once more, with the wake lapping against the rocks at our feet.
Some nights the water would rush northward in a continual surge and only being a strong swimmer had kept me abreast of the rocks. I would have visions of myself clawing my way ashore in Manhattan, pale and apparitional like a revenant, and startling some lovers sitting on a waterside bench.
Impulsive harbor swimmers don’t consult tidal charts, but that night we arrived at slack tide and the water was as still as it ever would be here. I crouched close to the water’s edge, as you had to make a shallow dive. One could never be certain what the terrain was like beneath the water. More than once, I had gotten my feet tangled in twisted steel rebar while trying to climb out. When I hit the water, still cold in June, my body rang, the inner alarm bells all sounding at once, and I took ten, fifteen strokes before coming up for breath. My friends were just behind me. We easily swam out several hundred feet before rolling over onto our backs. Warehouses stood in silhouette behind us. In that dark shoreline there was a speck of orange light as insignificantly small as a single glowworm on the far side of a meadow, but unmistakably coming from the bar, and it seemed inexpressibly strange that minutes ago we had been contained in that speck.
I have looked at the city from the 102nd floor of the Empire State Building, from planes banking over the Hudson, from Central Park West penthouses. I would one night walk the suspension cables to the top of the Brooklyn Bridge, risking tabloid headlines, Rikers Island, and, of course, death, to have an unobstructed panoramic view. But I would never feel more a part of New York than when I was drifting in its harbor and looking at its lights—the shore lights, the skyscraper lights, the bridge lights, the ferry lights, the moonlight above, the phosphorous lights below, and us out in the middle of it all, bobbing corpuscles in the city’s bloodstream.
Why did we do this? Perhaps it was the old saw that one goes out into the wilderness—and for us, the harbor was wilderness—to be off the map of one’s daily life, to a place where one is nobody, one is nowhere, and where one has the feeling of being most alive.
We didn’t say any of this, of course. Instead we whooped in the chilly water and Jon shouted, “This is better than cocaine.” I wasn’t so sure he had ever taken cocaine, but I understood. The harbor swimming rush was powerful and, as borne out by the many nights we would return to this spot, addicting. We never stayed in long, aware of hubris’s downside and knowing that our drinks were waiting and Sunny was nervously watching the door.
On that night and others, we swam ashore and pulled on our clothes and walked back the way we had come, past the dreaming night watchman and to the three barstools with our jackets draped over them. Perhaps this, as much as any other reason, was why we were harbor swimmers—the feeling of returning to the security of the bar, knowing that while the drinking and smoking and flirting and talking had continued uninterrupted in this room, we had, for a few moments, not only stepped outside but into another world.
—
; SUNNY SAW US come back in with our hair and clothes still a little wet, our moods giddy, and he wandered over and said, “You guys didn’t happen to see my ring out there?”
“Your ring, Sunny? What’s that?”
“My Zero ring. It’s been there for, oh, over fifty years now.”
Although we had only known him for a short time, we already knew of Sunny that he had once commandeered a B-29 bomber down a runway in the dead of night, been discovered in flagrante by both the Bell Telephone man and Andy Warhol (the telephone man apologized profusely and Warhol asked whether he could go get his film camera), dispatched a rabble of rats that had invaded his house with a .22 rifle, and ridden polo horses with the staff of the municipal waterworks in a place called Mount Abu in the Indian state of Rajasthan. Sunny told elaborate discursive histories of his past, of the past in general, and loved to eulogize his forebears, our forebears (that is, those who had sat on these same barstools), and his younger self. We’d prompt him some nights by saying, “Sunny, was Hitler’s yacht really moored over on Coffey Street?” or “What would Hubert Selby drink when he hung out here?” There was something scripted about these moments, as if Sunny was just waiting for his cue. We were happy to say our lines.