American Gangster (36 page)

As for my mother, no one could ever accuse her of lacking a sense of adventure. Recently she went to Istanbul and preferred the Asian side. But she knows when things have come to an end. For months she walked the still quiet, verdant blocks around The House and felt out of place. “I'm lonely here,” she said.

One fall day I was sitting at her kitchen table and heard the pounding. The realtor was outside hammering a for sale sign into my father's lawn like a stake through the heart. Then they started to come, the prospective buyers. Local canard said someone Chinese would buy the place: a non-English-speaking man from Xi'an with a bad haircut, two daughters at the top of their class at Stuyvesant, and a suitcase full of cash, all of it up-front. But in this Queens you can never tell who might buy the house you grew up in. In the space of a fortnight, Syrians, Koreans, Chileans, and people from Bokhara and Thailand walked through the rooms my father painted and where he put up shelves. They sat on the sofa so long forbidden to me and my sister. It was a stirring ecumenical procession, a testament to the city's ever fecund, eternally replenishing genetic alloy. Soon The House would be the repository of an entirely different history, ringing with another sort of accent, the smells in the kitchen sharper, spicier. Soon the place, ever reliable, would serve someone else's purpose, only this time with a lot more TV stations than my sister and I ever got to watch.

My mother, she just wanted to sell. She's not the sentimental type. What no longer served a purpose had to go. In the end, Dominicans got the place. Nice people with a couple of kids and a travel agency business downtown, Mom said. Maybe she could have held out for another five or ten grand, with the market shooting up every day. But still, a 1,500 percent profit isn't too shabby, especially when all you want to do is get out.

“My heart is not broken,” my mother announced at the closing.

Forty-three years ago, on the very first night I spent in my twelve-by-twelve-foot square room, Mom told me to bang on the floor if I got scared. Back on 174th Street, where we'd previously lived with my aunt and uncle, my room had been right next to my parents'. Here I was upstairs, by myself. But I never got scared. From the start I recognized the value of vertical separation. They were
down there
and I was
up here
. Ah, my room, that little incubator of me. What do you say about a place where you jacked off for the first time? Where you listened to Ali beat Liston on the radio? So much happened in my room, I thought, spending one last night up here, the movers due at seven the next morning.

The House was in boxes; my mother, never one to wait to the last moment, had started packing months before. I'd taken some things—my sixth-grade autograph book from P.S. 177 (“drop dead” is listed as my “favorite motto”), my Ted Kluszewski mitt, an old vinyl of
The Platters Greatest Hits
, the chair I sat in to do my homework. Mementos, souvenirs, nothing more. This seemed appropriate, since I'd always told myself that even though I'd grown up here, The House had never truly been mine. I was just passing through, marking time until my life started for real.

By midnight I was in the basement. It was straight down, like a plumb line, from my attic kingdom to that murky chamber of unresolved issues. Down there was what remained of my father's workshop. When I was a boy, this was the land of hulking steel machines upon which imposing sheets of plywood were made to scream in pain while being torn asunder. Now it was quiet. My mother had managed to sell the giant bandsaw and the huge metal lathe. Most of my father's hundreds of hand tools—he had dozens of files arrayed in varying increments of size and grade, at least fifty hammers and screwdrivers—had long since been given to friends and relatives. Their customized, meticulously labeled racks and holders were now empty.

The basement had always been an awkward place for me and him, not that we spent much time talking about it. I'd always assumed it to have been a source of mutual regret—that I hadn't inherited his marvelous skills, his reverence for the joining of two pieces of wood in a perfect right angle. It
seemed like something a father and a son might do together, a gift to pass from one generation to the next in the old way. Now, however, on the last night of The House, with the machines gone or shut down, it was easy to believe that my father was relieved I'd shown no aptitude, that I was just another slovenly, uninterested teenager like the ones he taught all day long. In the stillness, I could feel him close, working away like some Queens hermetist in his fez, surrounded by his wonderfully precise toys, his files, planes, and grinding machines. Being a father now myself (as well as my father's son), I understood how Dad felt down here, his sanctum. With the ingressing ooze of life raging forth upstairs, it must have seemed like heaven.

That's when I started to pull that cabinet off the wall. It was one of the many built-in storage bins my father had attached to the paneling, each with several drawers bearing his familiar calligraphy (
BRADS
, ¼
INCH
;
BRADS
,
INCH; BRADS
, ½
INCH
, etc). This was really what I wanted from The House, this symbol of his manic precision, a little bit of the peace he found down here. Except the thing resisted; I couldn't get it off the wall. I couldn't even figure out how and where he'd stuck it up there—the fastenings were invisible. It was something he'd always tried to teach me, how things might stick together without the gory slather of Elmer's, without the splintered bash of a dozen nails. This was the art of it, he said, to make things seem as if they'd always been there, as if they belonged. But then, like now, that sort of craft was beyond me. Anyway, I must have been making a bunch of noise, because soon my mother was descending the basement stairs.

There was an amusing retroness to the scene: Mom in her housecoat, demanding to know what I was doing, why I was making all that racket. She'd told the Dominicans those cabinets were “staying,” and stay they would. I began arguing, saying that this cabinet meant a lot more to me than it could to anyone from Santo Domingo.

“You had your chance,” she said with cold finality. She'd been trying to get me to take things from the basement for months, but I'd always been too busy.

“But Mom …” Reversion to former behavior is always lurking, even on the eve of your fiftieth birthday.

“He built those things for this place,” my mother said. “They're not supposed to go anywhere else. So leave them.”

Mom had pulled rank. There was nothing left to do but go upstairs, brush my teeth, and put out the light.

Six hours later, four Hell's Angels-style clad representatives of Movin' On (slogan: “The Company with the Clean Trucks”) began carrying boxes out the long-shunned front door. It was more convenient, they said. By early afternoon the deed was done. “That,” my mother said, “was that.”

Now I visit my mom in her new apartment over on Seventy-fifth Avenue, near Bell Boulevard. Wanting to not move “too far” (no Florida for her), Mom found the place in a week. A totally nifty two-bedroom with a giant living room in a really nice development filled with “people to talk to,” and close to her long-favored Key Food, the apartment “makes sense,” Mom says, a little drunk on the novelty of it all. For Mom, to
hondle
is to live, and even as she misses my father terribly, there are all these new items to ruthlessly search out the best price on. At seventy-eight, she is finally living in a building that has an elevator. The view from the sixth-floor windows is fantastic. You overlook the old Vanderbilt Parkway, built as a private auto road by the old robber baron in 1908 so he could drive to his estate in Massapequa Park. Back in high school, my friends and I hung out on the overgrown parkway. It's where I first smoked pot, but Mom doesn't need to know about that.

After leaving Mom's place, as usual, I meander through the unending ethnikquilt that the borough of my birth has become. Driving past the Albanians and Afghanis on Hillside Avenue, I turn off to stop in at a candy store on Union Turnpike. My friends and I used to go to the place because the old man mixed his own Cokes and had a heavy thumb on the syrup. Now—the fountain long gone—it's owned by Sikhs. An old Russian, crucifix dangling on a key chain, is in there trying to buy cigarettes with food stamps. The Sikh won't allow it. “Why no? I pay tax!” the Russian screams
in protest. This cracks up some Chinese kids who've been sneak-reading the comic books.

“I pay tax,” they mock after the Russian has stomped off. Wise-asses. Like I said, now the epic of New York belongs to them.

In the end, I go by The House. It's been a couple of months now, and even if the grass looks a little patchy and my father would have have pruned the rosebushes, the place looks pretty much the same. But that won't last. Changes will be made. Which is fine, I think, silently watching from across the street, as the new people, all dressed up, come out the front door—as if they didn't know that, at The House, you always use the side.

When it comes to baseball, hate is a wholly acceptable family value. Written on the occasion of the “Subway Series.”
New York
magazine, 2000
.

The Yankee hater in me, sometimes dormant but never dead, stirred last summer at Modell's out by Caesar's Bay in Bensonhurst. I'd promised my ten-year-old son a new hat, and there on the wall was a veritable riot of sports merchandising. Logos as odd and alien as crop circles embellished snapbacks representing Devil Rays, Sharks, and Hokies. Through the glut, my son's eyes settled on a far more familiar emblem. There, a beacon among the ESPN trash jungle, stood the most famous trademark in all sports, maybe in all the world.

The N and the Y, like lovers so entwined, haughty, perfect. It was a fearsome icon, one that had been branded in my soul, stamped like a hot iron on my forehead, seared like a forever damning pair of letters on my back. My son, blood of my blood, DNA of my DNA, was about to purchase a Yankee hat.

This was a problem. For sometimes fashion is not just fashion and symbols are too evocative to be worn casually, by punk-rockers or little boys. Still, I'd promised. I'd get him a hat, any hat he wanted. As I drove home, the sight of this Yankee thing on my son's lovely, unsullied head struck
me as a possibly ominous first salvo in a long-running Oedipal struggle. My son, the Yankee fan. It struck dread into the heart.

“I don't see what the big deal is,” my son said, feeling the tension as we rolled up the Gowanus Expressway. “It's just a hat.”

Just a hat. How to explain? How to make it clear that in our family tradition, it was not considered proper to cry when Gary Cooper gives that claptrap “luckiest man” speech in
The Pride of the Yankees
? That one need not feel awe while walking past Mickey Mantle's restaurant on Central Park South because, even with all that corny violin music about his knees and being the son of a coal miner, Mantle, soul of stolen youth or not, was still a Yankee? Like Serbia, like Hatfields and McCoys, there are ancient hatreds that transcend conventional irrationality. Wherever I am, whatever I'm doing, news of a Yankee loss makes my day.

But what choice is there? It is bred in the bone. Shot through the helixes. We do, after all, live in Brooklyn. Not counting Romania, Brooklyn is our ancestral home. A tug on the wheel of the ole Camry, a dodge of a few trolley tracks seeping up from beneath the tattered asphalt, and we'd be on Empire Boulevard and Bedford Avenue. Even now, the place remains a power vector, drawing you closer, even though all that remains are projects and the Ebbets Field Donut Shop, corn muffins $1.25. Holy Happy Felton!—even now it is like yesterday: how on May 12, 1956, date of my eighth birthday and year of the last Subway Series, I strolled with my grandfather down Franklin Avenue, to the legendary ballpark where Carl Erskine pitched a no-hitter against the Giants. “Some game, no hits,” my father would later say.

It was an experience no eight-year-old forgets, especially as seen with Grandpa, the first generation of Jacobson Yankee haters, who spent his youth hauling overcoats through the Lower East Side and told me, in no uncertain terms, that the Yankees were the team of the bankers, every last one of them against meaningful social change and the workingman, from Jacob Ruppert on through DiMaggio, that flattop-headed Marine Hank Bauer, and the batboys, too.

Since Walter O'Malley really might be the third-worst person of the twentieth century behind Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, it seems unfair to hate the Yanks all the more because the Dodgers left town in 1957. But that's when it clicked in for me. There they were: the all-powerful inevitable, like the phone company, the only game in town.

The Yankees: Take it or leave it. I just couldn't do it, couldn't root for a team that won the pennant fourteen out of my first seventeen years of life. Rooting for the Yankees was like declaring yourself to be a front-running prick, a defender of the status quo. Beyond this there was the fact that they played in the American League, always so Gentile in comparison with the funky National. There was the phrase
Yankee co-owners
(meaning Dan Topping and Del Webb, forerunners of indicted Nixon/Watergate contributor Steinbrenner). There was the much rumored passing-over of first baseman Vic Power because he caught the ball with one hand, which was so (jive) un-Yankee, not to mention the tacit reluctance to hire black players in general outside of Elston Howard, who, as Casey Stengel pointed out, couldn't even run. Beyond this were the pinstripes themselves, which, like Grandpa said, were so much more Wall Street than River Avenue.