This was the beginning. The end of our round-the-clock games of Stickball. In Bushwick, it was a "my court, my rules" kind of game. Where you were a star if you could hit a Spaulding two sewers. Legend had it that Willy Mays could hit it three and then some. It was nineteen fifty-five, the year after my father left us and drove the big, blue Mercury to Long Island. The potato fields fast becoming rows of identical and architecturally bankrupt suburban houses.
We were approached in early summer by a group wearing trench coats and stingy brim hats. Would we be open to joining their crew? This was not about playing CYO basketball, my first shot at being a team player as the backup point guard for 14 Holy Martyrs. Where assists turned into points made you a winner. No, this was about their gang, the Halsey Bops, protecting our turf, the neighborhood. Maybe fifty of the baddest guys I had ever been around. Just like that we became the church division. Our job was to protect the areas to the south and east from the Saints, Halsey Park being our home base to the north. Our time to prove ourselves came quickly when we caught up with a few of their gang on Knickerbocker, drinking from quart bottles of Piels and flirting with some girls from the block. “Shout your colors motherfuckers,” we yelled and when they responded Saints, we were on them like a colony of feral cats.
Gangs were and I guess still are, a brotherhood. A one for all and all for one kind of deal. I mix your blood with mine and you mix mine with yours and we are brothers. Never to be left to drift aimlessly alone. When the poolroom beckoned and we started to get high, it meant no one was left behind because maybe your father was a drunk and you didn't have the money. Always remembered by guys like Little Frankie, if his girl had a sister or a best friend that you might have a chance to get lucky with. This allegiance to one another came up repeatedly as our journey went from gang bangers hanging out in the park, to weekend warriors shooting the white stuff, to my new squad in Vietnam, who shared their fears and care packages and introduced me to the back alleys in Saigon.
On the block there was Johnny Ferrara who would buy a ‘57 Pontiac at nineteen that would become his final resting place. There was Pedone who was his mom's escort and maybe something more than that. There was me and Tony and Paulie, the butcher. Frankie who we called Dufo because he wasn't very bright and Donnie Vi, known as Vi because he combed his hair with Vitalis. He was kind of oily, and if he scored, he couldn't be trusted to give you a good count. After that to be called a Vi was the lowest of the low. We only let him hang out with us because he let us take turns driving his red and black '53 Buick. Fat Anthony was a part of our crew, but he couldn't fight because he had a wooden leg. Had lost the real one hitching a ride on the side of the bus that ran down Schaefer. His right leg had been crushed by those double tires in the rear. Now all he could do was play the piano and hope. None of the girls wanted to make out with a guy who had what we now call a prosthesis. During the war I became a lot more familiar with the term. Body parts a constant theme.
My new gang was the 69th Signal Detachment, 145th Aviation Battalion. My time in the army didn't start on a good note. There was the kid with the phony sergeant stripes that I told to fuck off when he ordered me to mop the floor. The real sergeant threw me down a flight of stairs. And the kid in C platoon who was a general's son but couldn't live up to the standards set out for him and took a header off the second floor porch. He had nothing to fall back on and I wasn't sure I did either. I didn't click with anyone in basic and none of the Vietnam guys began as my guys, but now we were in it together, and to survive we knew we had to take care of each other. And we did.
Frank Gioia is a writer, actor and playwright. His recently published memoir, The Mercury Man: Remembering Brooklyn, is a collection of thirty-six short stories about coming of age on the streets of Brooklyn in the 1950s and the year he spent in Vietnam in the early 1960s. An audio version is available on Audible and iTunes. His writing has been published in the on-line magazine, Ovunque Siamo, as well as The Artful Mind and an Anthology of Veterans Voices. A staged reading of his play, 14 Holy Martyrs was performed in Great Barrington in 2016. He has read his work for the past ten years in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, the Twin Cities, Sacramento and the Sierra Foothills.
Inquiries about his book may be emailed to Frankie at frankjoy70@icloud.com
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Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.
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So great to have Frank's writing on seventysomething. He has what amounts to total recall of a time and place that resonates deeply for many other people and opens up a whole other world for those of us stuck uptown.
Great writing, Frank. Women have their own communities but not based on survival. It's interesting to read how men find each other at such deep levels.