4

OFF THE TRUCK

After Grandma died at what I considered the incredibly old age of sixty, I began asking my mother how old she was every few hours. Forty, she would say. Same as last time you asked. She questioned the pediatrician about it. The doctor said I was afraid Ma was going to go next—that she’d go from forty to sixty in a flash. And then die, like Grandma.

With Grandma gone, my mother attempted to enroll me in nursery school. Armed with my plastic Banana Splits lunch box, I went bravely into the playroom of Holy Rosary. The program was run by a nun so old that she barely had the energy to walk, never mind work a room of preschoolers. She tried in vain to get us to take long naps on the little cots she provided. And when that didn’t work, she left us in front of a black-and-white television set. My schoolmates and I sat staring at the screen, watching Popeye scroll by. The nun didn’t know how to fix the horizontal hold.

I missed my grandmother and the excitement at City Hall and was insulted that my parents would deposit me in such a boring place. To escape, I thought up a clever lie, the first lie of my life. I told my mother that the horrible nun was giving us vitamins. My mother was convinced she was drugging us to get us to sleep on the tiny cots, and immediately removed me from Holy Rosary.

My mother rarely left me with Stanley or Paula—not because she didn’t trust them, but because she didn’t want to burden them. Because her father was in jail and her mother was always working, she had been forced to watch her brothers and sister as a child. The only one she didn’t have to keep an eye on was her older brother, Sonny, who kept an eye on her. But Sonny died when he was only fourteen, killed in a truck accident that left Ma the oldest in her family.

She knew how much she resented those long days of being the little grown-up, having to tell her siblings what to do. And she didn’t want Stanley and Paula to have to go through the same thing with me. Besides, one of the few times my brother did watch me, we got into trouble. It wasn’t his fault. I take full responsibility, though I think I blamed it on him at the time.

Stanley was my first hero, and my scapegoat, protecting me at all costs. He was skinny and dark-haired like me, but had hazel eyes and a crooked, uncertain smile that I would later inherit from years of living in Jersey City. It was part smirk, part fear of letting anyone catch you smile, and it shows up in decades of family photos.

While my mother was at work at the DMV, Stanley and I played a game of soccer. I kicked the hard plastic ball, the kind sold in large bins at the ShopRite supermarket, and hit the living room light fixture, a glass bowl hanging a few inches from the ceiling. It didn’t break right away, but it came falling down toward the round coffee table in the middle of the room. It smashed into hundreds of pieces, creating a glass minefield all around us. We carefully tiptoed to the kitchen and called my mother to break the bad news. She came running home, more worried we were hurt than mad at us. Ma quit her job soon after that.

On the days indoors with Ma, I would place my father’s dusty polka 45’s on my Close ’N Play phonograph and fly through the rooms to the clarinet and accordion until I was exhausted. It sometimes took all day. When I needed a rest, I’d listen to my favorite 45, an old Jerry Lewis song that went, “Put something on the bar besides your elbow. Something like an old ten-dollar bill . . . They can’t ring up your elbow in the till.” When the song was over, I’d lift the needle and place it back at the beginning. I thought Jerry Lewis was hysterical, though I’m sure my mother couldn’t stand to hear that whining, off-key voice sing the same stupid song over and over again.

But Ma never complained about the noise. Neither did our upstairs neighbor, Ducky, the guy who had tipped us off to Grandpa’s plan to shoot us. Ducky often let me play with his Siberian husky, Keno, named after his master’s favorite casino board game. Like Ducky, the drunks downstairs never complained about my noise, either. I was allowed to sing Jerry Lewis songs and run free in our three-bedroom apartment above the Majestic.

Depending on the season, Stanley and I would play Nerf football, basketball, or baseball, the home-run zone the space behind my father’s vinyl recliner. After the incident with the light fixture, plastic balls were no longer allowed. And soccer season was eternally suspended.

One summer, Stanley and I ate dozens of Popsicles and used the sticks to build a miniature of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, which were growing at a much faster rate than I was. Stanley and I watched it rise floor by floor from across the river. First the steel girders were laid down, one atop the other. Then the vertical holes were filled in with concrete, metal, and glass.

Every day I would beg Stanley to play house, and he would grudgingly agree. “Pretend I’m your husband and I’m at home sick,” he’d say, turning on the television and lying down on the couch, smiling that crooked smile.

To pass the time between my favorite TV shows and the City Hall excitement, my mother would read to me. My favorite book was a children’s biography of Christopher Columbus, which she read in a mock Italian accent, imitating her own grandmother. She would improvise passages: “And then, his-a mama said, ‘Christopher, whatsamatta for you? You don’t like-a my meatballs?’ “ My mother and her siblings all had a sense of humor, which was how they survived Grandpa all those years.

When things were calm outside, I would go downstairs and place my feet in the stream of cool hydrant water that flowed down Mercer Street. The hydrant was turned on by the Puerto Rican kids down the block. I envied them, because their parents let them play out in the street on those hot summer days, letting them run in and out of the hydrant’s spray. I could see them in the distance doing their awkward hydrant dances, arms flailing, bare feet kicking. Beyond the high, cold spray, and a block or two past the low-rise homes and boarded-up city buildings, stood a few trees. I wondered if that’s where “the country” was and if someday I might be able to walk there. For the time being, I was confined to the curb, the small brook washing over my tanned feet, my only entertainment an occasional cigarette butt or a much-needed Popsicle stick floating past.

I had seen the dark side of playing in the street, so I knew my mother was right to confine me to the curb. Every summer, souped-up Chevys and Caddys without mufflers sped past, and each year kids were run down. Parents had petitioned for a traffic light at the corner of Mercer and Grove, but because the poor neighborhood had no pull at nearby City Hall, a traffic light was never installed.

At a very early age, I got used to the drill. The screech of tires was followed by a thud and a scream, my mother’s signal to run downstairs with blankets and bandages. The smaller the kid was, the more likely it was that he would die, because his head would be about even with the car grille.

To get me out of the neighborhood, my parents took me everywhere with them. Some parents in Jersey City just left their kids at home while they went to work. Once in a while, there’d be a story in the paper about a kid discovered handcuffed to a radiator while his parents went out on the town. Most mothers stayed at home with their kids, ignoring them and providing very little entertainment. But I was constantly amused. My parents held me close, but they rarely sheltered me.

Daddy liked taking me to the movies, particularly to Journal Square, to the Loew’s or Stanley Theatres, the only bright spots in that part of the city. Journal Square was a mini-Calcutta, filled with crippled pencil sellers in wheelchairs, midgets who hawked the evening Jersey Journal, deranged people with growths and tumors, and mumblers who walked the streets talking to themselves. Chief among the mumblers was a defrocked priest who still wore his frock and paced up and down the sidewalk delivering private sermons.

The deformed and disabled liked to congregate on Journal Square. One woman had a goiter on her neck the size of a baby’s head. There was a bowlegged dwarf with an underbite named Helenka, who always wore a housedress. The local guys would tease Helenka by picking her up by the ankles and shaking her. Back in the old days, there was a man with no legs who came around begging on a little board with skate wheels, singing songs like “My Time Is Your Time” through a megaphone. He had a beautiful voice. People would lean out their windows and throw down two or three cents wrapped in a small piece of paper torn from The Jersey Journal.

Wandering the streets was a grown-up mongoloid named Rachel. She wore several dresses and coats but would take the top layers off to turn rope for the kids in the street, her strong, long arm throwing the jump rope into a high arc. There was also a guy who would step up onto the curb and then back down, over and over again, then march in place. He was probably a war veteran, but no one ever got up the courage to question him. Sometimes out-of-towners unfamiliar with the curb guy would wind up walking behind him and get stuck at the curb until they realized he was crazy and that they should walk around him.

Because of the Journal Square bus and PATH station, the area also attracted the homeless, who back then were called bums. My favorite was a woman named Mary, who never spoke but always ran around in a rush, dressed in a raincoat and worn black loafers. I wondered where she was off to in such a hurry.

The Loew’s—mispronounced Low-ees—was just about the only pretty thing left on Journal Square and was as magical to a five-year-old as visiting Disney World. More than pretty, the Loew’s was beautiful. Or as Jersey Citizens pronounced it, beauty-ful.

The place was ornate and over the top, with a huge white, lighted marquee, a tall tower, and a clock that featured St. George slaying the dragon. The façade was made of textured terra-cotta blocks, encrusted with dirt from years of Journal Square traffic pollution. What made the Loew’s beauty-ful were the fantasies and, later, the memories everyone attached to it.

Once in the lobby, I would let go of Daddy’s hand and run up the red-carpeted stairs. Not bothering to hold on to the bronze railing and the lion’s-head banisters, I’d head straight to the red velvet–trimmed balcony, where I would stand overlooking the rococo lobby and wave to my adoring fans, Daddy in particular. He would wave back, smiling his toothless smile. There were golden mosaic tile alcoves and red-and-gold tapestries along the walls. The ladies’ room had a marble mantelpiece and four big, mirrored vanities, which made me feel like a movie star. Daddy would wait for me outside the bathroom near the shell-shaped blue-tiled fountain, where goldfish swam. Hanging over everything was a Czechoslovakian-crystal chandelier that cost $60,000 back in 1929, the year the theater was built, just a month before the stock market crash.

Whatever decade it was, when you went to the Loew’s, you felt special. It inspired you, unlike any other place in Jersey City. It was where a young guy named Sinatra took his date to see Bing Crosby sing in 1933 and decided he could do better than that. And better than Hudson County.

It was where a giant Wonder Morton organ piped out Phantom of the Opera–like chords that rattled your insides and made you think God lived inside the theater.

In 1960, with John F. Kennedy on his way to visit Journal Square during his campaign, local politicians held a rally outside the theater. The loudspeakers and music were so loud that they bled into the theater. The manager asked them to turn it down, to preserve the quiet inside and the illusion that the theatergoers were royalty. When the Democrats refused to turn down the volume, the manager threatened to shut down the marquee that night—which would have left JFK in darkness. The young Democrats bowed to the Loew’s and piped down.

One of its architects commented that the Loew’s was “where the rich rub elbows with the poor, and we are the better for it.” Even in the 1970s, when vandalism on Journal Square was at all-time high, graffiti never touched its walls. Young vandals knew the theater was special.

As if to make up for all the ugliness in Jersey City, Journal Square had two movie palaces. The Stanley Theatre, which I used to think was named after my brother, was a block away and was almost as gaudy as the Loew’s. Built in 1928, it had a vestibule made of Italian marble and stained glass and lighted by a colorful chandelier hung with crystal fruit baubles. In the main lobby hung a Grand Crystal chandelier taken from the old Waldorf-Astoria, which was knocked down to make way for the Empire State Building. The chandelier was 13 feet high and 10 feet wide and shimmered with 144 lights and 4,500 pieces of crystal.

The ceiling was painted sky blue, with wisps of white cloud sailing across. Brass rails ran along the staircases, and at the top hung small lanterns. A woollen shepherd tapestry, an antelope mosaic, and a tiled fountain with a lion spitting water decorated the upstairs lobby. The Stanley, with its stylized animals, was as close as Jersey City came to having its own zoo.

My favorite part about it, though, was the auditorium. The huge room held 4,300 people and was decorated like a Venetian courtyard, with painted urns and flowers. There were no real flowers in Jersey City. Spring was marked not by the first tulip or crocus but by the first floater, or dead body, to wash ashore in the Hudson River, its arrival always recorded in The Jersey Journal.

At the Stanley, terra-cotta buildings with red-tile roofs surrounded you, and the Rialto bridge stretched over the wide screen in front of you. The only dead bodies inside the Stanley were the ones that turned up on its extra-wide movie screen.

Overhead, stars twinkled and clouds actually floated past, thanks to the Stanley’s mysterious cloud machine. Because of its ceiling and because it was named after my brother, the Stanley was my favorite place in Jersey City, and for years, my favorite place on earth, long before I knew there was an actual place called Venice or real courtyards with flowers and stars.

My mother saw her first movie at the Stanley when she was twelve years old, with her brother Sonny. When he noticed the stars, he got scared and told her they had to get home. “Sissy,” he said. “It’s late. Look. It’s already dark out. Mama’s gonna be mad.” It was always a shock, even twenty-five years later, to emerge from the Stanley and be greeted by daylight and the reality that was Jersey City.

To escape reality, my parents had gone to the Stanley on hundreds of dates, the most memorable in 1953, when they went to see The Moon Is Blue, an Otto Preminger film starring William Holden and David Niven.

The movie wasn’t very racy, but the dialogue included the words virgin, sex, and tramp. Local priests objected to the theater showing it, but the Stanley’s management showed it anyway. My parents, who hadn’t heard yet of the controversy, sat upstairs in the loge, where they always sat, so that my father could smoke and my mother could watch the stars twinkle and the clouds drift. Each in their own way, they waited for the movie to begin. But it never did.

The house lights came up and an announcement was made that everyone in the theater had to leave: The Moon Is Blue was no longer being shown. My parents left their seats and walked down the long, grand staircase in the lobby, that Waldorf chandelier blazing overhead. Like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, my mother slowly descended, with newsreel cameras and photographers’ flashbulbs going off at the foot of the stairs. It turned out that Jersey City’s public safety commissioner, Bernard Berry, had had the theater’s manager arrested. It was big news, making national headlines. Once he became mayor, Berry continued to boycott the Stanley, banning the movie Blackboard Jungle. Berry and Jersey City became synonymous with small-town, narrow-minded thinking. It was already considered too corrupt a place to be thought of as puritanical.

While still a preschooler, I could never tell the difference between a trip to Journal Square and a trip to Manhattan. From downtown Jersey City, we had to take the underground PATH train—called the Hudson Tubes—to both places. There were trips to Macy’s in New York, where Mom would let me play with the toys and ride the bicycles around the showroom floor, and excursions to the Battery, the place where the boat left for the Statue of Liberty. We would feed Cracker Jacks to the pigeons and watch the tourists line up for ferry tickets. Mom gave me dimes for the viewing machines in the park, which were meant for looking at the statue and Ellis Island. But I would focus my sights on Jersey City, searching for the Majestic and for Vince sweeping the gutter. In the summer, we’d go to Greenwich Village, to check out the hippies in Washington Square Park or the annual outdoor art exhibit.

But more fun, and more frequent, were the trips to the funeral parlor. My mother attended hundreds of funerals with me in tow.

To my mother, there was no concept more depressing than dying and having no one come to view your body. Funerals were my first lesson in what-goes-around-comes-around. If there were three or four people at a wake, it was obvious the person in the casket had not made many friends and had not gone out of his or her way to help others. The more people at the wake, the kinder the person was in life. It was a true, and final, test of character.

Heaven wasn’t so much the goal after death. A crowded funeral parlor was.

Since my mother had lots of friends and knew practically everybody in the city because of the DMV, she attended everyone’s wake. My grandmother’s wake is the first one I can remember, though not the first I attended. Grandma was dressed in a powder blue gown that matched her eyes, which were now forever closed, and rosary beads were weaved between her fingers. I was so blasé, I leaned my coloring book on the kneeler in front of the casket and broke out the Crayolas. Dead bodies didn’t faze me in the least. As a preschooler, I was an expert in public grief.

At other families’ wakes, I knew the right moment to approach the relatives of the deceased, when to cut off conversation and kneel in front of the coffin, how long to pretend to pray and gaze longingly at the stiff inside, and how much the mass cards and flower arrangements cost. By the time my best friend’s grandmother died, I was a pro. Still a child, I took Liz’s freckled hand and bravely escorted her up to the casket, the stuffed body inside and the gardenias surrounding it. My mother was so proud.

Wakes were important, because that’s where many of the family stories were retold. Funeral masses were better than wakes, because they were followed by the burial and a full meal at a local restaurant. The burial was key, because it guaranteed a romp on some of the only green grass in the county. There were trees and grass and freshly cut flowers thrown on the coffin at Holy Name Cemetery, signs of nature I was otherwise deprived of. It made no sense to me that the dead got all the green space in Jersey City. They certainly couldn’t enjoy it.

While the casket was lowered into the freshly dug grave, I was off running and jumping on the grass between the other, older graves. I never stepped directly on them, avoiding them like I sometimes avoided stepping on the cracks in the sidewalk. Ma said stepping on a grave was sacrilegious.

The reward for attending the burial was the meal afterward. If the deceased was a close enough relative, we’d get to ride in a limo to the cemetery and restaurant. Otherwise, we’d have to bum a ride off someone in the funeral procession. Ma didn’t drive; neither did Daddy or their parents or most of the Stapinskis. For forty-one years, my father got a ride to work from a friend. He and my mother took a bus to her senior prom. In the snow. (She graduated in the winter semester.)

After a burial, we’d hitch a ride with an old friend of my mother’s to a place like the Hi Hat, a big banquet hall in Bayonne, the town to the south of Jersey City, where some of my Polish cousins lived. The Hi Hat specialized in funeral meals. A good funeral meal was something you never passed up.

Eating was the most important form of entertainment in my family—better than the movies, better than polka music. We were taught at a very young age never to waste food or turn your nose up at it or disrespect it in any way. I cringed when I saw other kids in nursery school throw their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the garbage or, worse, throw them at each other.

It was a sin to throw God’s food on the floor. Though our family had plenty of food, we treated each supper as if it might be our last. Both my parents were born during the Depression, so they never took basic things like food or heating oil for granted.

As a child, my mother and her brothers and sister stole K rations from the Armour yards and coal from the railroads to keep warm. Always on the lookout for “the bull”—the railroad detective—they would steal loads of the dark black fuel and drop it down to their accomplices stationed under the trestles. My father and his brothers did the same. Well, most of them.

My uncle Eddie, Daddy’s brother, didn’t like to get his hands dirty and usually stayed away from the shoots, the coal cars down on the tracks. But on one occasion, Daddy and his brothers brought Uncle Eddie along to be their lookout. “You stay here,” they said to Eddie, “and watch for the bull.” But they never told Eddie that bull was slang for “detective.” So there Uncle Eddie stood with a big red wagon, waiting for a bull to come running down the tracks.

It wasn’t such a dumb mistake. The rails were often filled with cattle and other animals, mooing on their way to slaughter at the Armour stockyards. My mother and her friends saw a dead lamb one morning in the street, which had fallen from a train car stopped on the Seventh Street trestle. Another time, a bull actually got loose. My mother was wearing a red coat that day, and ducked into a hallway to avoid the charge.

So it was no surprise when one of Uncle Eddie’s brothers yelled, “Cheese it! The bull!”—code for “Get going! The cops are coming!”—and Eddie hung around to get a glimpse of the animal. Wildlife was rare in Jersey City, save for the doomed livestock, a few pigeons, rats, and the ornamentation at the Stanley. A chance to see a bull charging down the railroad tracks would not be missed by young Eddie.

But there was no bull. Just the railroad detective, who caught Eddie red-handed with the red wagon. “Who sent you here?” the cop demanded. Not knowing what to answer, Eddie stupidly said, “My mother.”

Eddie was escorted to the police precinct for a good scare, then home in a big car. He was sure he was being taken to jail. He probably would have been better off. The police reprimanded Babci, and after they left, she reprimanded Eddie, giving him a beating like he’d never known. His brothers never took him to the shoots again.

Poor epileptic Uncle Tommy even got in on the action and was caught stealing oranges at a fruit-and-vegetable stand in the neighborhood. The police brought him home and yelled at Babci again for not keeping a better eye on Tommy. Daddy got into trouble, because Tommy was usually his responsibility. Uncle Tommy was held back in school two years so that he and Daddy would be in the same class. That way Daddy could keep an eye on him. It was like asking one inmate to keep an eye on another.

Stealing food outright from stores and delis was never condoned—not when my father was little and not when I was growing up. But my father, a Teamster, fed us with the merchandise that fell off the truck at work. At the Union Terminal Cold Storage he was a warehouse checker, which meant he had to make sure everything they said was on the truck got into the warehouse, and vice versa. There were meat and fish trucks on their way to butcher shops and fish stores, sausage that was delivered to the feasts in Little Italy, and more exotic food—like snake, venison, and bear—on its way to the swankiest restaurants in Manhattan. Everything stopped at Daddy’s place before going on to Tavern on the Green and Sparks.

At least once a week, a crate of Steak-umms or prepackaged Chicken Cordon Bleu would fall off the refrigerated truck and into our own freezer at home. Mom insisted Daddy never stole a morsel, that the boxes were gifts from the truck drivers for whom he did favors. As if it was theirs to give away.

Thanks to the drivers who Daddy let cut in line to unload their hauls, we always had a big bag of frozen french fries on hand for late-night snacks. Daddy would come home half-crocked from the Majestic and cook them up for us in a pot of oil, the flames licking the ceiling.

My mother resourcefully used everything he brought home, which usually came in large quantities originally intended for restaurant delivery: A big box of clams was made into a big pot of clam chowder. A huge hunk of Muenster cheese was melted over macaroni. A giant bag of oranges was sliced up and placed on a ham Daddy had brought home a few days earlier. Our family never once bought a turkey for Thanksgiving. It was part of the unofficial Teamsters’ benefits package: major medical, dental, and swag—the extra box that just happened to fall off the back of the truck.

Because of my father’s daily packages, tied in brown paper and carried under his arm, I was the only kid on my block who knew how to peel a lobster tail from its curled shell and who could tell the difference between a sirloin and filet mignon. For a while, I thought lobster and steak were staples in all working-class homes. But my father knew it was special. When the timing was precise and the right boxes fell off the truck at the right moment, my father would treat us all to surf and turf, with a shrimp-cocktail appetizer served on a bed of iceberg lettuce to start. His cocktail sauce was a sinus-searing light pink mixture of six parts fresh horseradish to one part ketchup. My mother wasn’t allowed to cook the lobster or steak. That was Daddy’s job. He would place the orange-black shells in the broiler with love, and join the lemon and butter in a small saucepan. With tenderness, he would trim the fat from the steaks, leaving just enough gristle to give the meat its sweet, juicy flavor. My mother complained that my father had missed another of his many callings: He should have been a butcher. He handled that meat more gently than he handled her. The steaks—the love of his life—were then grilled to perfection.

It was because of meals like these that my cousins were always sleeping over at our house. Gerri started having a weight problem because of my father’s hot roast beef sandwiches. My father loved Gerri, because she had such a good appetite. And she loved him. Uncle Babe’s cooking was always the best in the family, she said, even better than my mother’s sauce or my aunt Millie’s meatballs. And each day we destroyed the evidence, our insides digesting the buttery fingerprints Daddy left.

There was no money saved for college, since most of my father’s cash went to Uncle Henry and to Nicky, in the Majestic, for gambling and booze. But we always had plenty of food. And we always had a block of dry ice that Daddy would bring home from work on Halloween to place in a bowl of water to make bubble and smoke for my astonished party guests. We couldn’t go trick-or-treating, since the neighborhood was dangerous, so my mother invited all the kids over to bob for apples.

Thanks to Daddy, I was never at a loss when ordering in a fancy restaurant. Whenever he hit the number, Daddy would don his suit and star-sapphire pinkie ring and take us all out to eat. He loved food so much that he couldn’t confine himself to the kitchen. It was at places like the King’s Court, a Jersey City restaurant with its own coat of arms, and the Top of the Meadows, a swellegant spot atop the North Bergen Holiday Inn, with a view of the swampy meadowlands, that my father and I learned lessons in fine dining.

By the age of six, I knew the menus by heart, the difference between a scallop and scrod, between Chateaubriand and porterhouse, the maître d’ and the waiter, all thanks to Daddy. Because he brought home high-quality frozen cakes, the kind restaurants use, I could tell whether a restaurant had a bakery on the premises or not. I could identify the culprits: seemingly homemade but actually mass-produced wheels of cheesecake, or Black Forest chocolate cake that we had in our freezer at home.

Sara Lee cupcakes were a favorite commodity at Daddy’s warehouse, and they sat piled high atop our refrigerator, each box missing its chocolate cupcake first, its strawberry next, the coconut and lemon left for desperate midnight raids. Sometimes you’d have to search through six boxes before getting to the cupcake you wanted, hidden at the bottom.

Whenever there was a parish event at Our Lady of Czestochowa—a card party or a Chinese auction—my father provided the dessert free of charge. And any Pepperidge Farm chocolate layer cakes that were left over, the Polish nuns took back to the convent with them. As far as I know, they were never charged with receiving stolen property. Like us, the nuns ate the evidence.

At one card party, a woman named Lillian tried to steal the cake that was left over, stashing it under the table. “Imagine the nerve?” my mother complained. Stealing stolen chocolate cake from the mouths of nuns? Lillian was destined for the fires of hell.

Bake sales at school were easy for my mother, even though she didn’t know how to bake. She would simply show up with an armful of Daddy’s swag from the Cold Storage. That cake was the first to go at the sale, before Mrs. Romanski’s cupcakes or my aunt Julie’s cream puffs. It wasn’t exactly in the bake-sale spirit of things, but this was Jersey City. Swag was just part of everyday life.

Swag wasn’t the same thing as out-and-out stealing. It was an unwritten rule in Jersey City—and all of Hudson County—that you could take as much merchandise as you could carry from your job. The politicians skimmed off the top, so why shouldn’t the little people?

As far as I know, my father never got into trouble for taking all that cake and lobster. His hauls paled in comparison to the other stuff going on at the Union Terminal. In the 1970s, vast numbers of canned hams started to disappear from the warehouse. It turned out that a night crew was pulling a truck up during the lobster shift (which I thought was named for the lobster crates that came in around midnight) and piling on the canned hams. One night, when they were almost caught, the crew threw the canned hams in the freezer to hide them. Canned hams are never frozen, merely refrigerated. So when the bosses found dozens of canned hams in the wrong place, they launched an investigation. Fingerprints were lifted from the frozen hams and about twenty-five guys were collared.

Things got worse over time. A new foreman affiliated with the Gambino crime family was brought in, because the Bonanno family was hijacking trucks. As long as the swag didn’t exceed daily needs, bosses in Jersey City looked the other way when employees walked away with a paper bag or two of merchandise. Some companies even gave the merchandise away in small quantities, to discourage grand theft. Excessive greed was to be avoided. In 1943, for instance, three men were arrested for stealing $23,000 in toothpaste from Colgate. For months, they had been pulling a truck up to one of the loading docks and taking boxes of the stuff, selling it as part of a fencing ring in New York City. As long as you stayed modest, you were safe.

When I was growing up, because we had friends and relatives at Colgate, we were never in need of toothpaste or toothbrushes. It was ironic that the Polish side of the family, which lived closest to Colgate, always had such bad teeth. Our Colgate connection also provided us with a steady stream of shaving cream and soap. We had all the Irish Spring we needed. When a new product line debuted, like the Colgate pump, we were the first in the state to try it.

Though he was the biggest swagster in our family, Daddy was certainly not alone. When she was in high school, my mother worked at the General Pencil factory. Half her class seemed to work in the same building. Her job was to polish—or paint—the pencils yellow in the second-floor “dip room.” The more important your job, the higher the floor you worked on. Downstairs, black workers were busy putting lead in the pencils, exposing themselves to lead poisoning. Erasers were placed on the pencils on the third floor. So the pencils my mother and her classmates stole for school never had erasers on them. It made her a more careful person, never able to erase her mistakes.

My mother and her friends would also go down to the Old Gold cigarette factory and yell up to their friends working inside, who would throw down loosies. Old Gold was my mother’s first smoke.

All the books on our shelves were swag, either from Grandpa from the free public library or from my aunt Mary Ann, who worked at the American Book Binding Company. They weren’t crummy little paperbacks or galley proofs. These were serious hardcover books, which, over the years, grew into an impressive library.

The first book I ever read—A Mystery for Meg, a sort of Nancy Drew knockoff—came free of charge from Aunt Mary Ann. My adolescent fantasies ran wild thanks to the collection of Daphne du Maurier novels that she brought home. Like Rebecca, I pined for Manderley. My favorites, though, were the leather- and clothbound series of half-size classics. Aunt Mary Ann transported them in her oversize girdle, worn intentionally to place the whole collection—nineteen books in all—around her midriff. When a coworker jokingly grabbed Aunt Mary Ann one afternoon and swung her around, he commented that she’d gained a little weight.

I loved to flip through the books and smell their yellowing pages, thinking that Aunt Mary Ann had taken them just for me. The Collector’s Edition Book of Quotations and The Pocket Book of Greek Art, with photos of statues missing their arms, were my favorites from that series. I looked at those pictures for hours and wondered if someone had stolen the arms. What could they want with arms?

Aunt Mary Ann didn’t limit her talents to books alone. While working at the Jersey City Medical Center, where she landed a job sterilizing instruments for the operating room, Aunt Mary Ann brought home the occasional unnecessary tool. We had a stainless-steel funnel, which my mother used for cooking, and a surgical clamp, which helped us change the channel on a small black-and-white TV long after the knob had fallen off.

Aunt Mary Ann was my idol—not only because she loved books, but because she was the first person in my mother’s family to move far away, to the wilds of Miami. We visited her there three times when I was a child, and just a taste of life outside Jersey City—the coconuts and palm trees, the white sand and surf—made me dizzy with happiness. Back in New Jersey, I took to wearing suntan lotion just so I could smell like Florida, and Aunt Mary Ann.

My new favorite 45 immediately became a Harry Belafonte calypso number called “Marianne.” Jerry Lewis was knocked off the charts. The song went something like this: “All day, all night, Marianne. Down by the seashore sifting sand. All the little children join in the band.” I believed it was written for my aunt. And I loved her deeply, though I hardly knew her.

All I knew was that Aunt Mary Ann was everything my mother was not: bleached-blond, sarcastic, and cynical. For years she swore she’d never get married, and even when she did, at the old age of thirty-six, she stayed independent and sexy. She never had kids, and she wore a purple velvet bikini even after she married Uncle Ray. Their apartment had modern orange furniture. They were cool.

Just the mention of her name conjured thoughts of the mystical. Whenever my mother cursed, she would shout, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” which I misheard as “Jesus, Mary Ann, Joseph.” I thought Aunt Mary Ann was a member of the Holy Family. The outlaw member.

Moving out of Jersey City didn’t destroy Aunt Mary Ann’s talent for swag. She was the family’s only test case that showed swag was in your bones, not a viral infection floating through the Hudson County air. As a dental hygienist in Dade County, Florida, Aunt Mary Ann compiled an impressive stockpile of toothbrushes and dental floss in her pantry at home. We even had a small chrome dental mirror, which kept me occupied for hours as I checked my incoming molars.

Aunt Mary Ann rarely stole for herself. Like Robin Hood, whom I had seen at the Loew’s in an animated Disney film, Aunt Mary Ann selflessly took from the rich to give to us. There was the story about the lamp on the wall in a fancy restaurant in Florida that someone had admired during dinner. Aunt Mary Ann unscrewed it and placed it in her large pocketbook. She was brave, ballsy, and wonderful. She was the outsider. And in a campaign to be more like her, I began to swipe restaurant ashtrays, smudging my rigid, childish concept of good and evil.