The Pope of Brooklyn
Page 5
JFK inaugurated. Catholics kicking ass, taking numbers. Robert Frost (whose words these are I think I know) recites a poem (supposedly) in the freezing cold. We watch the ceremony on TV in class. The new president, defiantly not wearing a hat, delivers his unforgettably eloquent (and possibly the most bellicose in history) inaugural address.
Pope John XXIII starts blowing the house up and the Catholic Church promises never to be the same. I don’t believe John XXIII’s street name is “Pope,” which is already taken.
(I am aware of the existence of at least one other street-named “Pope,” which was the nickname of Michele Greco, the frighteningly notorious mafioso. He makes his appearance in Alexander Stille’s Excellent Cadavers, a stunning, stomach-churning study of Sicilian magistrates and the Cosa Nostra. Read it and weep, and I mean that. You will never again be tempted to lionize the mafia. Excellent cadavers? Cadaveri eccellenti was how they characterized the trophy assassinations of public figures like politicians and magistrates, and not to be confused with the routine killings of run-of-the-mill mobsters.)
Bay of Pigs.
Nuremburg Trials. Adolph Monster Eichman. Hannah Arendt coins “the banality of evil.” She’s in bed, in both senses, with Nazi sympathizer Martin Heidegger, whose iconic works become my intellectual touchstone in college and beyond.
Freedom Riders in the Deep South. Sit-ins in the Shallow North. Martin Luther King emerging. Malcolm X. Civil Rights.
Cold War.
Berlin Wall.
Nikita Kruschev pounds his shoe at the United Nations and is going to bury us. He hates tying laces, so it was a loafer; no details as to the color of his Red Communist socks. We regularly dive under school desks, practicing for the inevitable Russian atomic bomb.
Bomb shelters proliferate.
(This brings up a much later association. In high school, I have a pal who, when he gets in trouble, which is habitually, is banished to the basement where his punishment is to dig in the family bomb shelter. We keep him around not entirely, completely, totally because his sister is excruciatingly foxy. He also has beer access and keys to a functioning car. At some point I get a part-time job in a busy department store selling women’s shoes. Don’t go there, it was real money for an on-commission teenager, at least till the women returned them the following week, as they maddeningly would, and my next paycheck was docked. All of us salesmen every day spill out of a clown car and punch in. There is one saleswoman, but insofar as her cutthroat marketing style makes me think of bloodthirsty, spurned women in Greek tragedies, she fits in. Otherwise, they are mumblers and chain-smokers, yucksters and conmen, partial to wearing cheap suits and skinny clip-on ties, their dragon breath a noxious bittersweet blend of Dentyne and coffee. The undisputed stars and big earners of the sales staff are two suspiciously overqualified, extremely intelligent and mordant middle-age unctuous fellows who compete with and detest each other. One lights up every opportunity in the stock room and leaves a smoldering cigarette to char the edges of every available shelf when he hustles back onto the floor to complete the sale and get a leg up on his nemesis. He is a supremely confident explainer, by which I mean he answers customers’ questions and concerns about the wares in a professional-sounding esoteric way no one could either contest or comprehend, but it does the trick: customers line up at the cha chinging cash register. The other gent, who is somehow more oleaginous, wears the same suit every shift, but is magically never less than supremely presentable. He speaks in complete paragraphs with an indefinable and perhaps fake Southern accent, which charms the gals, and vents his Satanic sneering contempt for them once he slips and slides off the floor into the back room. He has one joke he has seemingly perfected in the course of his life. A customer who would like his attention inquires, “Are you free?” and he replies, “No, but I’m cheap.” I didn’t hazard the following diagnostic supposition at the time, but here goes. Sure, everybody needed a job, but my purely indefensible speculation now is those two smart slicksters might have been foot-fetishists. Not that that is wrong, I am supposed to say. But if so, what a field day they enjoyed, because the money couldn’t have been adequate to satisfy some deep yearning, which was more ungraspable to me than the tender soles of women sacrificing themselves on the altar of their monetized desire. Anyway, in the Women’s and Ladies’ Shoe Department, as I called it, my personal professional shoe sales high point takes place when my friend's foxy sister dances in one Saturday afternoon. Her foot measured a perfect slender seven, I think, and she was wearing a white mini, I know. See? No foot fetish for me—yet. This moment replays thereafter in the all-night theater of my favorite, eventful dreams. I hoped she would soon bring back her shoes so we could do this pas de deux do-oeuvre all over again, hell with the commission. One other minor mystery lingers—not that I was ever hired in the first place, no, that’s more like nobody else suitably psychologically wounded wanted the job. More than a couple of times I waited on ladies or women who insisted they were, say, a six, or whatever, and when they tried on the six, or whatever, it was obvious to my male or masculine eyes they were in reality eights or nines because, look, their feet sloshed out, sides and toes and heels beyond the islands of their soles. But they purchased the smaller, constraining, more beautiful shoes anyway. This was a valuable lesson I learned that I still don’t understand. Wait. Was that why my return rate was so high?) Now back to our regularly scheduled program.
Cars with fins, resembling spaceships probably hovering over the moonlit East River.
West Side Story, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Hustler, La Dolce Vita, The Parent Trap.
Ribbon cutting on the new BQE. (The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, of course, for the instructional benefit of you rush-hour Californians stuck on the Golden Gate Bridge or the Four Oh Five into El A.)
Peace Corps created.
Russian astronaut, first human in space.
South Africa: apartheid, the law of the accursed land.
First US military involvement (as “advisers”) in Vietnam.
First disposable diaper, Pampers.
Gallon of gas: twenty-seven cents.
VW Beetle. Chevy Impala. Ford Thunderbird.
Patsy Cline: “I Fall to Pieces.” Forty-five rpm records rule.
Catch-22, To Kill a Mockingbird, Franny & Zooey, Tropic of Cancer.
Among the Dangs, National Book Award short list; beautiful short stories by George P. Elliott, my future college professor, earliest writing advocate, friend and mentor. To this day, miss him like water.
Wagon Train, Gunsmoke, Perry Mason, The Andy Griffith Show.
Brooklyn Fucking Dodgers now the Los Angeles Fucking Dodgers: forevermore dead to me.
As in Greenpoint, I become an altar boy in Berkeley, and remain a pious tyke, albeit one who shoplifts and secretly studies smutty word-picture books that masterbatefully use words like “stiff shaft” and “perky boobs” and “areola” (had to look up that one in my trusty big swinging dictionary), paperback tomes lifted from the corner drugstore mass market rack. (Rack, another useful word, different context.) The shop owner notifies the school—guess the boychik thief’s green uniform was the first clue as to the reprobate’s identity. Sister Euphemia puts the whole class on salvation alert, chillingly advising us: don’t do anything you wouldn’t do in front of the Blessed Virgin Mary. (Cheap shot, but potent enough.) Big picture: the Church is about to undergo a sweet bloodless revolution called Vatican II, though the Jews are universally guilty of killing Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. But then the Jews are deemed not guilty anymore of killing Jesus. My first real girlfriend in college is Jewish and Manhattan-born and –bred and almost every single one of the legion of talk therapists I eventually bore to tears as an adult are Jewish; no idea what all that means for my guilt-ridden, smut-stained soul.
I make my first basketball shot, on an asphalt court in Berkeley. I would go on to spend the rest of my extensiv
e, undistinguished basketball career on one outdoor court or gym or another, never passing up a shot whether I was open or not. As a former student once asked me after he heard I blew out my ACL in a game: how the hell did you hurt yourself when all you do is stand outside the three-point line begging for the ball?
Melvin picks a fight with me on the court. By rep he reigns as biggest badass of the tough-as-tuna-fish-salad elementary school. I had mixed it up on Greenpoint streets, but I had never tussled with a black kid before. Judges split on the result, though I argue I am victorious on points; egos and faces are bruised but we’re not on the waterfront and nobody bellows “I coulda been a contenduh,” and no blood is spilled before a teacher pulls us apart and tells us to go to our corners. He and I would become friends. Kids, right?
•
Nineteen sixty-one, then, was the year the Di Priscos had packed in a hurry, left no forwarding address, and neglected to throw themselves a bon voyage party. They traveled under the radar as long as they could. In strictly demographic terms, such a departure was hardly strange. True, during the 1960s the population of New York, the Empire State, increased by 8 percent, from 16,782,304 to 18,190,740. In that same period, the population of Brooklyn dipped, from 2,627,319 to 2,601,612. Census-takers didn’t need an oracle to predict a drop was coming. Once upon a time, 1950, there were 2,738,175 Brooklynites sucking in diesel and smokestack fumes along with their Lucky Strikes while dodging the trolleys that were fast going the way of the dinosaur. Those were the days. Meanwhile, California was booming. In 1960, the population had been 15,506,974. Ten years later, it was 19,953,134, a 27 percent increase, as the Golden State overtook the Empire State as the most populous in America. In fact, between 1950 and 1970 the populace of California had nearly doubled, assisted by the contribution of more than a few New Yorkers who gravitated toward the promise of money, mild winters, endless summers, and perpetual suntan that awaited them on the West Coast. They included Duke Snider and the Brooklyn Dodgers, who became the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1958. That was the same year their blood rivals, Willie Mays and the New York Giants, became the San Francisco Giants. Vengefully, I adopt the Giants as my team. During the sixties, while Brooklyn was shedding inhabitants, it so happened that the population of Berkeley, California, was growing almost 5 percent, from 111,268 to 116,716. At least four of the former citizens of Brooklyn defected to Berkeley in the Fall of 1961. As arrivals go, theirs was as uneventful as could be. No ticker tape parade up University Avenue took place, no ribbon-cutting, no keys to the municipality. Joseph Di Prisco, age thirty-five, and Catherine Di Prisco, age thirty-seven, were husband and wife on their way elsewhere, with two young boys in tow. Joe and Kay were not the typical Commie pinko, jazz-hound, beret-topped, reefer-mad agitators and activists that Berkeley had been famous for. They were political inactivists of the first order. For instance, they had never voted. They had never thought of voting, not because they were anarchists, but because they apparently never thought of voting. And they were not academics or artists, and neither had much in the way of school experience. In this regard, and in numerous others, the college town of Berkeley was as wildly improbable a destination for this family as any on the planet. Borneo, Brazil, Bermuda, Beirut, Burma, or the Bastille and Babylonia would have made as much if not more sense. In some other respects, theirs was the ordinary, familiar story of transplantation to California, the land of opportunity. This small family was starting over on the opposite coast. Ordinary as the story may have been, there was nothing simple about what they did or why they did it. As students learn in history class, the United States of America is the setting, and sometimes the devastating cause, and sometimes the grand inspiration of great migrations. The Grapes of Wrath comes to mind. As do the hearty tales that echo in the memory vault of Ellis Island, like that of my grandparents. The Di Priscos’ story ought not to be confused with any of those. In their more reflective moments, if they occurred, did they let themselves believe they were leaving behind Brooklyn and the past for good? Doubtful, but with them, who can say? Did they allow themselves a glimmer of hope that life was going to be different, perhaps improved? If they knew anything, they had to know better than that. Hope was in short supply around them in Brooklyn, ever since that famous tree growing there caused all those problems and sold all those books. Had hope, had faith, had trust, had worshipful love stopped Duke Snider and the Dodgers from blowing off the most loyal town in America? Of course not. On this score, the Di Priscos were congenitally, perhaps you might say professionally, jaded. Or they were simply deep-down disappointable. Miserable might have been a marker in the family DNA. Anthropologists and ecologists and documentary filmmakers narrate how the geese and the wildebeests and the Monarch butterflies and the sperm whales and so many other species organize themselves to migrate their way across incredible distances—year after year after year. It is a pure wonder. To the expert student of migrating zebras and red crabs, the Di Priscos would have appeared aimless, driven, and a little bit doomed, like glazed-eyed gamblers staring in the face of slot machines all night long in a roadside Nevada casino, waiting for the jackpot bells and whistles that never go off. Yes, they sailed from Brooklyn and yes, they dropped anchor in California. But as sure as the one-arm bandits were going to siphon off the silver dollars in their coin cup, they had no idea what the next move would be. Or the move after that. Or the one after that. Or the one after that. That one, that one especially. No, comma, fucking, comma, idea, period.
•
In October 1961, my father made his first of several appearances to testify in New York City.
Later, he returns to California. I have no explicit recollection of the homecoming. He spins no tales as we gather around the old fireplace. No fireplace, either.
New York State Appellate Division
RECORDS AND BRIEFS
Q. You’re under oath?
A. Yes.
Q. You know what that means?
A. I’m not lying.
Q. You’re not a liar?
A. I’m not lying.
My Urban Plan
At one stop along my Subway to California book tour, I gave a reading at Diesel Bookstore in fashionable, upscale Brentwood, California. That evening President Obama had descended to hobnob with his bankable big money Hollywood donors up the road, and traffic in the vicinity of the Country Mart was nightmarish, even by LA standards. By the time I started around seven thirty some intrepid souls and local friends along with my publisher and some former students and colleagues and my cherished college-age goddaughter had managed to fight their way inside. People at the bookstore couldn’t have been more welcoming, and if the turnout wasn’t SRO, the mood was upbeat. I can never forget that I once gave a reading in Virginia during an earlier book tour where exactly one person showed, so I never complain, and I give thanks there are bookstores out there promoting the work of way-less-than-illustrious authors like me. In fact, that night the Diesel Bookstore rep offered a quite beautiful, literate, subtle introduction, which praised the book, but—more importantly—demonstrated she had actually read it. I have travelled on a few book tours and once ran a reading series in a Berkeley bookstore, so I know firsthand that this is a much rarer occurrence for authors and their introducers than is commonly assumed.
At the conclusion of that Brentwood reading, which went all right, I suppose, a business casual woman approached and said fairly pleasantly, or at least without detectible edge, “I am an urban planner. I thought Subway to California was a book about public transportation.”
Public transportation remains a hot topic in a once-upon-a-time car-mad state the likes of Elon Musk will one day colonize before he does the same on Mars. It’s not quite up there with water rights these droughty days, but really? I pretended to understand what she said, honest I did—because again, this conversation took place after my reading, during which she had not spun on the heels of her Jimmy Choos and stormed out. A little part o
f me defensibly worried about the future of urban planning in The Golden State.
“So the subway is a metaphor,” she continued, “about traveling underground, through darkness?”
“You have no idea,” I said.
New York State Appellate Division
RECORDS AND BRIEFS
Q. And what was your conversation with [Officer] Celentano?
A. I asked him about the hundred dollars, if he had it, and I told him I had another bookmaker.
Q. What did he say about the hundred dollars when you asked him?
A. He told me when he got it I would get mine.
Q. Did he say anything else?
A. Yes. And then he told me we start from scratch, being that I told him I had no hard feelings, that I took his money that I owed him.
Q. That he took the money you owed him?
A. Yes, sir. And he said, “We start from scratch.”
Q. Was anything else said?
A. Yes, I said I had another bookmaker, and that this fellow was—
Q. Did you mention the bookmaker?
A. Yeah, Junior Loterzio (phonetic).
Q. Did you mention where he operated?
A. He worked for a bank, a policy bank, and he would have these tapes in the car every Sunday, because he would meet runners and give it to them.
Q. What area did he operate in?
A. North Seventh.
Q. Did you tell this to Celentano?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. What did Celentano say?
A. He said, “Let things cool off, you take three thousand dollars out of one neighborhood, that is a lot of money.”
Q. And then what happened?
A. Well, then I left.
Q. You left? Now, did there come a time when you met with him again?