When I was an altar boy in Brooklyn, priests and nuns taught us that the smoldering incense symbolized prayers lifting up to God. Me, I wasn’t sold. Usually I felt lightheaded from inhaling the sweet reek of curling smoke. Such wooziness often washed over me during the late fifties and early sixties, about the same time my father was a young man on the hustle. On the street, Joe Di Prisco was called “Pope.”
Clad in black cassock and bleached, starched white surplice, I was occupied lighting candles, genuflecting, tolling Sanctus bells. When the Mass celebrant intoned “Dominus vobiscum,” The Lord be with you, I’d reply as instructed, “Et cum spiritu tuo,” And with your spirit. My spirit and I had not yet acquired the inside information that my dad was a confidential police informant, petty criminal, scam artist, and stool pigeon. I was also unaware that felony indictments of his own would soon be hanging over his head. I never had an inkling he was discredited in open court as an “unsavory character” and a “known gambler”—which was the considered judgment of one presiding eminence. This was someone who added on the record, perhaps surprisingly, that he believed his testimony.
As a five- or ten-year-old, I myself hadn’t yet been christened with a street name of my own, unless Jo Jo qualified; that was the theoretically cute handle my family used for me but it made me cringe. Around our claustrophobic Humboldt Street shotgun walk-up in Greenpoint my dad wasn’t called Pope, and he wasn’t smeared with the “unsavory character” label. There he was better known as an “Italian barbarian” and a “fucking antisocial degenerate.” At least those were the terms of endearment screamed by his wife, my mother, in a voice to rattle the kitchenware.
Whenever I asked her, my mother with a trucker’s mouth, why they called him Pope, her stock answer was “Because he never shuts the fuck up.” That made no sense to me, but his own explanation of his name’s origins was more puzzling: once his crew observed him coming out of a church. This sounded peculiar if not dubious to me, because I myself had very sparse memories of his being inside a church and therefore could not visualize him stealing inside to light a votive candle or make confession.
Growing up and working the angles in the day: when I look back, I imagine such vocation might sound entrancing if not inevitable to somebody like my father. Ample evidence demonstrates that the calling resonated for him—much as it might do later on, in complicated, indirect ways, for me and my younger brother.
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In one legal proceeding he testified against plainclothes police officers in 1961 on charges stemming from a shakedown four years earlier. The crime’s execution was somewhat convoluted, as with a lot of capers, though it wouldn’t ever be confused with Ocean’s 11 or The Sting. My dad was thirty-two the day he and the cops conspired to set up a bookmaker by the name of Sal Valenti for the purposes of squeezing some cash out of him.
On the street they accost Valenti, whom my father zeroed in on, and tell him to get in the car. The guy naturally fears for his life. He’s probably seen the movies, or maybe he has a three-digit IQ and he’s asking himself if obeying strangers instructing you to get in their car ever worked out well in Brooklyn or any other borough. Once the book is ushered into the backseat, he hears his options: door number one, the cops arrest him with those incriminating betting slips in his possession and run him in, which—if he was following the bouncing ball—would damage his enterprise and lead to fines and imprisonment; or door number two, the man ponies up cash and the whole thing never happened. The way the bookmaker should look at it, this could be his lucky day. That’s when they squire Valenti home and seize six hundred bucks, a lot of money in 1961, and later—what arrest?
During that and every other trial, counsel for the cops’ defense relentlessly grilled my dad, who admitted fingering unfortunate bookmakers for the accused policemen to score. The fancy suit whittled away at Pope’s trustworthiness. It’s reasonable to assume this strategy must have appealed to him as much as shooting fish in a barrel. In one hearing, he harped upon an apparent inconsistency in his previous testimony, and the two conducted a tortuous, heated exchange, which featured this dispositive moment:
Q. Do you remember being asked those questions and making those answers?
A. Yes.
Q. Was that answer true?
A. It was true at the time.
•
His lie had been true at the time.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, meet my old man.
As for the substance of his Pope-splaining declaration: Disingenuous? Evasive? Tactically ingenious? Epistemologically ridiculous? Cognitively sophisticated? Any chance factual or possibly honest?
I’m going with All of the Above, and if you knew my dad—my unmanageable, impulsive, bottled-up, unhinged, sentimental, take-no-bullshit, shifty, tough, smarter-than-he-wanted-you-to-think, dumber-than-you-could-believe, hyperactive, attention-deficit old man, a rakishly handsome guy of supposedly few words whom my va va va voom mother excoriated as somebody who, and I quote, “never shut the fuck up”—so might you. Then again, I am not convinced anybody could take an oath that they really knew him—including me, himself, his immediate and extended family, as well as any and all representatives of law enforcement. My whole life I tried to pin him down and I usually failed. At the same time, like a winter cold, he was tough to shake off.
•
Conversation in the City with a New Yorker, asked if he grew up here.
“No,” he said, and pointed, “one block over.”
The Brooklyn where both my father and I grew up has little in common with the chichi Brooklyn of today. Nowadays Brooklyn is the home of cool television shows and movies, the home of the splashy Barclays Center, where Jay Z and Beyoncé and Spike Lee sit courtside for NBA games, the home of trendy restaurants that serve something other than the veal parm or pierogi that once used to dominate every menu, the home of a murderers’ row of authors, and base camp of hipsters sporting stingy brims, man buns, Civil War beards, hoodies, e-cigs, and designer sneaks.
Wait, let me make an act of contrition. I think it’s now against the law to use Brooklyn and hipster in the same sentence—or lifetime. So nobody should say that anymore. You utter the word “hipster” and everybody knows you’re an idiot or, in other words, you probably come from California, where all you talk about is organic this and vegan that, the drought, the death of lawns, which—well, who cares about dumb lawns anyway? As for Brooklyn: nobody goes there anymore, it’s too popular. Sue me, Yogi Berra’s Estate. I miss Yogi, though not as much as my dad.
My father didn’t exactly come out of nowhere, but it was close. It was on the mean streets of Brooklyn in the hardscrabble fifties where he made his bones. That was when and where the Dodgers of Ebbets Field, the legendary Boys of Summer, ruled the borough and therefore the world and, depending on who you were or even more who you were not, the wise guys and the wannabes called the shots.