by Tim Sultan
Caruso decided that Red Hook was no place for a grand opera tenor to be in the middle of the night and instead sent a double, along with several undercover police officers, to deliver a decoy packet of money. When two men were seen arriving at the designated corner, glancing around suspiciously before fleeing, they were tackled by the detectives who had been hiding nearby. The Black Handers were revealed to be two Red Hookers named Antonio Cincotti and Antonio Misiani.
The following day, upon hearing of the arrest of the two Antonios, Caruso smote his chest and blew kisses at the pink lilies that decorated his hotel suite and declared, “The Black Hand scares me not. Caruso says ‘Ha-ha!’ to the Black Hand. Should they open fire on me in the theater, I will shoot them down like flies. Caruso, he is always armed. Never is he without his revolver and his sword cane!”
The great illeist sang for another ten years while Cincotti, the leader of the plot, served a short prison sentence at Sing Sing and soon after his release was shot dead, a few doors down from Ferdinando’s, upon leaving a nearby movie house.
When I finished my story and began gathering my jacket and cap to go open up the bar, Frank shrugged and said only, “You know who else like-a my food? Frank Sinatra. He once order an entire platter of arancini.”
“Sinatra, Frank?” Now I was impressed. I had been listening to In the Wee Small Hours since my third or fourth broken romance. “Sinatra ate here?”
“No, he send his driver, too. He send his driver from Long Island, I think. I don’t-a know what he was doin’ in Long Island but I know he want my rice balls.”
It seemed not even Sinatra would come to Red Hook.
* * *
13
Radio Days
When Sunny was a boy, there were two men in Brooklyn named Leo who also had the moniker “Lip.” One was Leo the Lip, the bellicose player-manager of the pennant-winning Dodgers, and the other was a luckless soul who lived in the Point and who was known throughout the neighborhood as Lip-Lip Leo. Though he was a grown man, Lip-Lip Leo was tiny and he had dwarf-like features. Stubs for fingers. Something was broken in his mind and when a fire engine or an ambulance or a garbage truck drove by, Lip-Lip Leo would run after it like a territorial dog. No one knew why he did this. And when he saw the boys in the neighborhood start to pick up stones, he would run, too, because he knew they were getting ready to chase him, chanting, “Lip-Lip Leo! Lip-Lip Leo! There goes Lip-Lip Leo!” To be Leo the Lip—Leo Durocher, the Dodgers’ manager—was to live a charmed existence in wartime Brooklyn; to be Lip-Lip Leo was to curse existence every morning.
Red Hook was filled with wretches and outcasts like Lip-Lip Leo. Some were shunned for their bizarre if harmless behavior or for misshapen bodies. Others had allowed whatever light they had been born with to be extinguished by heavy drinking. Their homes smelled like boiled socks and week-old hot dogs. They argued and cursed and drank in front of their kids, who came to the Balzanos’ house for a few hours of normalcy.
Sunny’s parents had a stable marriage and they were loving to their children. Theirs was the kind of home where the smell of food cooking was appetizing. It wasn’t a well-to-do home. There were few of those in Red Hook. After the largest public housing project in Brooklyn, the Red Hook Houses, was completed in the late 1930s for the families of dockworkers, Sunny looked at the amenities—hot water and elevators and courtyards that included playgrounds and lawns—with wonder. His home had no running hot water and in the summertime, showering to Sunny meant going up to the roof with a bar of soap when it rained. In the winter, his shins were perpetually bruised from having to carry the sloshing bucket of heating kerosene up from the basement. He rarely owned more than one pair of shoes at a time and when the leather wore clean through on the bottom, he stuffed them with newspapers to keep his feet dry. One of those shoes with a hole in the sole is sitting on a shelf in the bar today like a hallowed relic. Every year, the week before Easter, his mother would take him to Fulton Street in downtown Brooklyn to buy one suit, two pairs of pants, and a fedora, which had to last him until the following Easter. Every Saturday she gave him one new pair of thin socks, which he was to wear for one week before throwing them away.
What he lacked in possessions was compensated by a sense of family and a warmth to his home life. There were five apartments in the two buildings that his grandfather Antonio had bought, and in each lived a grandparent or an aunt or uncle with a spouse and family. On holidays it felt as though there were five homes to visit. There would be five Christmas trees to admire, five kitchen tables to sit at, five radios turned to Gang Busters or The Shadow or Jack Armstrong or The Battle of the Baritones. When the extended family came together for holidays, they played cards, did impersonations, and put on short comedy sketches. The house was full of music. Ralph, Sunny’s father, would play the guitar and his mother would ask him to sing “A Little on the Lonely Side.” Ralph would also sing “Just a Gigolo”—because that’s how he liked to think of himself. Sunny’s uncle Louis, the one who had gone to whistling school in Italy, would play the mandolin and twitter and tweet like a sparrow and sing Italian popular songs such as “Funiculi Funicula” and “Marechiare.”
The world beyond the doorstep was at once perilous and thrilling. There were no playgrounds at this end of Red Hook; there was no grass at all. The ball fields were the flat roofs of the warehouses on the neighboring street—low dividing walls served as outfielders, and singles, doubles, and triples were measured by which successive wall one could hit the ball over. A home run had to reach the street. The local swimming pool was the gut of a partly sunken wooden ship across the street where a shipyard had once been. The fishing hole was the harbor. In the summer Sunny and some of his brothers and cousins would launch a plywood skiff with a five-horsepower motor from the end of Conover Street and cross the shipping lanes to the backside of the Statue of Liberty, where there was a graveyard for old ferryboats. The ferries were entirely submerged but at low tide one could walk on the highest parts, then only ankle-deep under water. The wrecks had become spawning grounds for crabs that lived there in great numbers, and the boys threw nets and scalloped the crabs from along nearby pilings and filled up V-shaped bushel baskets. Recrossing the bay to Red Hook, they kept lookout for the dangerous wakes, known as willies, created by passing tugs and ships. “Here come the willies!” they would yell and shift their weight around the boat. They hauled the crabs back to Red Hook and Sunny’s father boiled them up in the bar, laid newspapers on the sidewalk, and handed out hammers and pliers, and they would eat crabs till they were tired of picking them. What remained was served up in soup at the bar.
It was on the piers that Sunny had his earliest encounters with death. His father’s brother, Uncle Gigch, the harbor patrolman, periodically came to shore with bodies he had found in the water tied onto the back of his patrol boat. The first corpse that Sunny saw up close was one of these bodies, gorged eels emerging from its hollows. Sex, too, was on view at the piers as older boys took part in group masturbation circles—the brazenness of their public act transfixing and repelling him.
—
AFTER A YEAR in public school, Sunny was sent to the School of the Visitation, Red Hook’s Catholic school. He was a poor student and his knuckles were always raw. To the Irish nuns he was a guinea who stubbornly refused to learn how to read and write out of sheer guineaness. Dyslexia wasn’t a recognized condition and he was made to feel stupid for his illiteracy and ashamed to be Italian. Even when he excelled in a subject, such as art, he was made to feel inferior. The teacher would assign perspective drawings, simplistic exercises such as rendering train tracks disappearing in the distance, and Sunny would draw those tracks from multiple perspectives at once. The teacher would take the artwork from the hands of the Irish kids, the German kids, but when Sunny would approach to turn in his work, she would have him leave it on her desk to avoid making contact with him.
When he failed to learn the catechism in order to make First Holy Communion
, Sunny’s mother went to see the parish priest, Father Casey, to ask whether he could be allowed to take the test again. Father Casey was an intimidating man, feared by the students and nuns alike. Before Sunny’s mother had finished her entreaty, Father Casey held his palm up in her face and shouted in his Irish brogue, “He took the test once and he failed it! He should have studied harder and you should have taken the responsibility!”
Sunny’s mother started pleading with him. “Please, Father Casey,” she began.
“I am not going to give in,” he yelled. “He took the test and he failed it and that’s it!”
Sunny grabbed his mother by her skirt.
“Come on, Mom,” he said. “Come on. Let’s just go.” But she kept on imploring the priest, who looked down at her icily.
“Fuck him, Mom!” Sunny finally cried. “Fuck him!”
She turned to him with a horrified look on her face and whispered, “But, Sunny, he’s a priest….”
Sunny’s voice was pitching higher with every word. “Fuck him! He can’t talk to my mother like that! Fuck him!”
Sunny was not supposed to say “fuck,” not to a priest, not to any adult. Cussing in front of one’s family, let alone a priest, was something one simply did not do. It was like opening the door to the toilet while someone was in there. His mother said “shit” once and she apologized for a day. Only one person in his family was allowed to say “fuck,” and then only on special occasions such as Christmas or Easter. During family gatherings for such holidays, Uncle Gigch would take out a comb and sweep Sunny’s younger brother Frank’s hair across his forehead, then hand him the comb to hold over his upper lip, and then Uncle Gigch would announce the arrival of Il Duce and Der Führer and he would puff his chest and lower lip out and begin a demagogic oratory in Italian while Frank goose-stepped in circles around him, bellowing in a mock German accent, “YOUFUCKINGSCHWEINEHUNDFUCKINGDRECKSKERLYOUFUCKINGFUCKER!”
Sunny never traveled to Manhattan and the only other neighborhood he knew outside of Red Hook was Coney Island, where he would visit his grandfather at the Steeplechase circus. What little he knew of the world beyond his vision he learned from the radio and from the newsreels at the Pioneer Theater, which were dominated by battlefield reports from various fronts. When the war had first begun, Sunny mistook the lights of Staten Island for those of Europe and when he heard about the destruction that was taking place there, he gazed across the water many hours wondering how it was that the people there could not flee across that short span of water to the safety of Red Hook?
Soon blue and eventually gold stars began appearing in the windows of families with husbands or sons in the service and his mother hung blackout curtains in their apartment and his father hung them over the two windows of the bar and headlight hoods were welded onto cars and collection piles for tin cans appeared on the street corners. Sunny knew the names of all the great generals—Bradley, MacArthur, LeMay. The mailman brought prized letters from his uncle John, who was fighting in France, and from his uncle Tony, who had been sent to the South Pacific. When bombers like the B-25 flew overhead, the houses would shake from the noise of their piston engines. Vigilant grandmothers scanned the harbor with binoculars for U-boats at first light and searchlights swept the sky after nightfall. Each time air-raid warnings sounded every other week, Sunny imagined the Eastern Seaboard—and Red Hook—had finally come in range of the Luftwaffe’s Junkers.
The war preoccupied his imagination. He had his own air force, a flock of pigeons that he kept on the roof, and dogfights over Germany were reenacted in the skies over Red Hook by warring neighborhood coops. Various breeds—homers, tumblers, fantails—stood in for Mustangs and Spitfires and Messerschmitts. The outcome of the skirmishes was more benign than those taking place in European skies, resulting only in the capture of enemy birds. When a pigeon strayed from a passing flock, Sunny would throw his own flock up in an attempt to dupe the bird into changing allegiances. And when an intact flock flew by overhead, he would first throw a tumbler pigeon, hoping that it would fly directly into the invading band and, true to its name, tumble backward, dividing the flock in two. He would then release the rest of his flock with the hope that in the confusion some of the separated birds would merge and return to roost with his pigeons.
The U.S. Navy berthed ships directly down the street from the bar and when the war ended, some of the ships were decommissioned and sent to scrap yards, leaving behind scores of lifeboats stacked into pillars on shore. Sunny and his brothers soon discovered that the boats still contained ration boxes and flare guns and for months after V-J Day one would periodically hear a whoosh in the evening and look up to see a glowing red fireball suspended from a tiny parachute drifting over the rooftops, not a declaration of distress but just of life itself.
* * *
14
Cézanne’s Fruit
“How can we call ourselves a sailor bar if we don’t even have a boat?”
This was one of Sunny’s standard laments and though my standard reply was to point out that there were very few actual sailors or ship workers of any kind among the current clientele and that we were less a sailor bar than a retired sailor bar, he brought it up time and again. He could be stubborn with his fixations, and in his view, as long as we were boatless, we were cowboys without horses, firemen without a truck.
I already knew Sunny to make quite a few pronouncements that, while uttered in sincerity, were unlikely to ever come to anything. For instance, occasionally visitors from abroad found their way to the bar and befriended Sunny. By the excitement with which foreigners sometimes greeted Sunny upon meeting him, I concluded that in international circles, Sunny’s was already as famous a bar as Harry’s New York Bar in Paris or Havana’s Floridita. When it came time for them to say goodbye, Sunny would say, “Do me a kindness and write down your address.” And with unfeigned conviction, he promised that he was going to reciprocate the favor they had done to him in visiting the bar by paying them a visit in return. There was no doubt in either the visitors’ minds or in Sunny’s mind that he would be booking an airline ticket in short order to do so. There is a painter in Copenhagen, a short-order cook in Luxor, a tailoress in Rome, each waiting to this day for Sunny’s imminent arrival. Although Sunny never made a promise without fully believing in it himself, on his bedside dresser was an ever-growing pile of notes on which were written the names and addresses of people he no longer could put a face to.
So I didn’t take this latest notion of his procuring a boat any more seriously than his emphatic declaration that he would be spending New Year’s in Osaka.
One day late in the summer, I came home to a message on my answering machine: “Timmy, it’s Sunny. It pleases me to let you know that the bar now has its boat! And might I say that it is a vessel of the grandest kind. I think you are going to be quite impressed. Okay, bye for now.”
I went to visit Sunny that week to see his new acquisition. He had often talked about the assortment of boats that had been in his family when he was younger—saltwater cruisers, rum boats, simple skiffs for fishing Jamaica Bay—and knowing of his love for all things historical, I imagined I might be greeted by a vintage wooden Lyman hardtop, a prewar Gar Wood runabout. But instead of directing me to the small mooring around the corner from the bar, he led me into the backyard and with a flourish, presented the new bar boat—a yellow, sit-on-top two-seater kayak that had more than a passing resemblance to a banana lying on its back. I was amused rather than disappointed. I praised this latest whimsy of his and said we had to get it out on the water as soon as possible. Yet fall arrived and the kayak languished unused in the yard where Sunny would, on occasion, and with great pride, take indulgent customers to show off the “bar’s boat” sitting in dry dock. Sunny had never been one for needless physical exertion.
Finally, during the second week of November, I called Sunny and suggested we make an excursion before winter set in. The following day was Veterans Day, I had the day off from wo
rk, and it was supposed to be bright and mild for the time of year. Knowing the forecast was as far as my planning would go. I didn’t look up the tide table or inquire whether Sunny owned a flare gun, a whistle, or any sort of foul-weather gear. I didn’t prepare for any eventuality other than us paddling around in the harbor, having a good time of it, and returning when we had had enough. Weeks earlier I had taken a walk up the suspension cables to the top of the Brooklyn Bridge in the dead of night. It was a rite of passage for certain kinds of fools in those days. I had brought along a friend, a climber tutored on Mounts Denali and Rainier—and perhaps I had come to think of Sunny not as a man who had just begun drawing Social Security but as another peer ready to go on an escapade impetuously. Even poor judgment seemed to be a quality we admired in each other.
When I arrived, Sunny was still getting dressed. He and Tone lived in the apartment that had belonged to Uncle John. Sunny had inherited all of his late uncle’s mid-century furnishings, and their dining room and kitchen resembled a very cluttered version of the set of I Love Lucy. It was plain that this was their most private space, as it lacked any pretense. Art supplies and sketchbooks were heaped layers deep on seemingly every surface, and clothing hung from all available handles and knobs. While Tone brewed me coffee and herself tea, we watched as Sunny pulled on two pairs of pants over his long johns, a pullover, a sweater, a down jacket, a pair of wool socks that he “waterproofed” with two plastic bags, and his boots. As a finishing touch, he placed a fur-lined leather flyer’s cap on his head.
“Sunny, do you expect us to be crossing the Bering Strait today?”