11

GONE AWAY

All my knowledge of Grandpa came from family stories, repeated over and over again until I knew them by heart. Though wakes and funerals provided an unending chorus, the best place to hear a Grandpa story was at my cousin Gerri’s house in North Bergen. The township was never anything to write home about, but its ugliness paled in comparison to Jersey City’s. As did its reputation.

North Bergen was shaped like a semiautomatic handgun. But people felt it wasn’t half as tough as Jersey City, Hudson’s largest city and the county seat. When we visited North Bergen, kids would step back an inch when they heard where I came from, as if I were carrying a .44 in my back pocket. I didn’t mind, really. Being from Jersey City made me feel taller.

There were no brownstones in North Bergen, mostly wood-frame or brick houses built on incredibly steep hills. Some houses were on such an incline that North Bergenites couldn’t get reception from their antennae, since they faced the meadowlands and not New York City, where the signals were sent out from the Empire State Building.

I always considered North Bergen the suburbs, because it had hills and trees. But the towns of Secaucus and Kearny and Harrison—connected to Jersey City by a street called Fish House Road—were even more suburb-like. Its residents were often embarrassed to be associated with the rest of Hudson County.

On my trips to New York and to Hudson County’s other towns, I started to piece together a map of my world in my head. If I surgically removed Kearny, Secaucus, and Harrison, which protruded from the western edge of Hudson County like polyps on a cancerous host, I was left with a strip of land floating between the polluted Hackensack River, Newark Bay, and the Hudson River. This strip of land, which consisted of Jersey City, Bayonne, Hoboken, Union City, West New York, Weehawken, Guttenberg, and North Bergen, lay directly across from Manhattan.

The strip resembled a wrench or some other blunt object aimed at the back of New Jersey’s head. To me, the state looked like the bust of a hunched-over little man wearing a fez. He was in profile, and had an overbite and a big nose, which pointed toward the rest of America. He was giving New York the cold shoulder because New York thought it was so great. Which it was. I wanted to live there someday. Eventually, all my Hudson County reference points would have to do with Manhattan.

If I waded into the Hudson from downtown Jersey City, swam less than a mile, and didn’t die from the undertow or PCBs, I would be in New York City’s financial district. If I looked at the city from Hamilton Park in Weehawken, I had a perfect sight line down Forty-sixth Street, straight to the horizon. Or if I took a dive from Frank Sinatra Drive in Hoboken, I could doggie-paddle over to the Empire State Building. New York was so close that I worried its skyscrapers would fall and hit my house if there was ever an earthquake. I should be so lucky.

People thought places like North Bergen and Bayonne were a step up from Jersey City. To visit my cousins who lived in those towns, we had to take a bus or get a ride down Kennedy Boulevard, originally called Hudson Boulevard. The boulevard was the county’s main artery, filled with plastic flag–fringed car dealerships and low-lying bowling alleys.

Most of the other towns along the boulevard were populated by former Jersey Citizens who had moved on to two-family, aluminum-sided homes with driveways and bathroom mat–size backyards. In some ways, those other towns were worse off than Jersey City. People there were lulled into a false sense of security. They had toxic waste, just like us. Sometimes even more.

Their mayors were no better, either. In 1970, Mayor John Armellino of West New York was found guilty of taking bribes to protect illegal gambling; U.S. representative Neil Gallagher of Bayonne, once a potential candidate for vice-president of the United States, pleaded guilty to income tax evasion. Then in 1976, Guttenberg mayor Herman Klein resigned when prosecutors threatened a case concerning his no-show county job. Klein was reelected a few years later, demonstrating the forgiving nature of no-show city workers.

That same year, North Bergen mayor Angelo Sarubbi was convicted of taking bribes from a contractor. But North Bergen’s most notorious character was town clerk Joey Mocco. Prosecutors were constantly accusing Mocco of all sorts of things. He was indicted and arrested on charges of embezzlement and fixing votes in favor of his brother, mayor Peter Mocco, but was never convicted. Eventually, Joey got twenty years for bribery, official misconduct, and illegal dumping. When he was sentenced, the judge told him, “You plundered and pillaged your town and treated it as a fiefdom as if you were a medieval lord.”

Parts of North Bergen looked better than Jersey City, but the danger was there, lurking just below the surface. Kids in those satellite towns were lost in some kind of netherworld—not urban and not suburban, but the worst of both worlds. North Bergen kids wore concert T-shirts, faded Lee jeans with patches of the Rolling Stones tongue on their butts, and lots of suede and brown corduroy. They wore their hair long in the back and short in the front, as if they lived in white-trash Middle America. They hardly ever visited New York. For some reason, Manhattan seemed farther away from places like North Bergen and Bayonne than it did from Jersey City. But the rest of America seemed closer, with its pickup trucks and country music.

In Jersey City, kids listened to R&B and disco and dressed up when they went out. They were better groomed, in general, with shorter, cleaner haircuts. In the other towns, kids were more racist, since they were exposed to very few blacks or Puerto Ricans. Even in Union City, which had the biggest population of Cubans north of Miami, people were racist. The Cubans, many of them formerly doctors and businessmen in their own country, looked down on other Latinos.

Jersey City wasn’t exactly enlightened, but at least we had black and Puerto Rican friends and neighbors. We knew they were the same as we were. My brother’s best friend was a black kid named Jay, who taught him how to dance the robot, which he did, very well, at the high school Ebony Club dances. Stanley was the only white guy in attendance, and was voted best dancer in the class of ’75. His nickname was Brother Kielbas, as in kielbasa.

The African Americans lived mostly in the Bergen-Lafayette ward, made up of beautiful Victorian mansions next to burned-out and abandoned buildings and drug dens. The neighborhood had once been an elite shopping district, but white flight had left the area with a few liquor stores and check-cashing joints, a white-owned cheap-furniture store, and little else.

Kids in Bayonne and North Bergen were afraid of black people, so they called them names, something my mother forbade. I remember one of my cousins choosing sides for a game of freeze tag once and singing, “Eenie meenie miny mo, catch a nigger by the toe.” I couldn’t believe she said the n word. We always said “catch a tiger by the toe.” She must have picked it up from the kids in her neighborhood.

One other crucial difference was that kids in towns like North Bergen attended public school. Jersey City’s public schools were so bad that only the poorest of the poor went to them. Any parent who could scrape together the money sent her kid to Catholic school. Even Protestants and Muslims. It was a flawed system that we had inherited from the days of Hague.

Catholic schools like OLC were lame, but public schools were much worse—even in Hudson County’s other towns. In public high schools, there were fistfights and drugs for sale in the hallways, as well as apathetic, tenured teachers who couldn’t care less if you showed up for class. The nuns were bad, but at least they instilled discipline. That was my mother’s rationalization for subjecting us to Sister Grace. The only good thing about public school was that you could wear your own clothes every day.

Though we had junkies and dealers on our corner, it seemed there were more drug-addicted hippie teens in North Bergen High School. It was the only place in Hudson County where I had heard of kids doing LSD. There was the urban legend about the girl who tripped out at White Castle in North Bergen after eating a mini-burger laced with the drug. She danced on the tables and scared everyone out of the restaurant. There was something wild and scary about North Bergen. I loved going there, and whenever I could, I’d convince my mother to let me sleep over at my Italian cousins’ house.

Whenever I visited Gerri and her siblings, we didn’t have to get up early on Sunday to go to church. My cousins only went to mass on special occasions, which seemed like a great idea to me.

In North Bergen, I was allowed to play in the street, especially the many dead-end streets. I liked dead ends, because there was less traffic zipping past. It was on one of those streets that Gerri taught me to ride a bike without training wheels. There were fewer cars, not to mention an abundance of hills and rocks, on which we’d climb in the summer and slide down on cardboard boxes in the snow of winter.

Whenever I was there, I felt a certain freedom that I didn’t get at home. I felt more grown-up. When I slept over, we made Aunt Millie breakfast in bed. My cousins and I would get up before she did, perc a pot of coffee, poach two eggs, and make triangles of white toast. It was a special treat for me, since my mother never let me near the stove for fear I would set my hair on fire.

Aunt Millie worked nights, as a career waitress, so during the day she usually slept. My uncle Jerry liked to tease her about snoring so hard that when she inhaled, the curtains would blow off the windows and the ships would come in from the harbor. Uncle Jerry was the family comedian. To make a living, though, he drove a bus. I thought he might get on his bus one day and keep driving and never come back to North Bergen. He longed to leave Hudson County, and did so whenever he could. He visited Aunt Mary Ann more than anyone else in the family. When he didn’t have time to go to Florida, he’d drive to the airport and watch the planes take off for foreign destinations, places he wanted to fly to. He could do almost any accent—Russian, Greek, whatever. And he could imitate all of the Muppets. So could my uncle Robby, the family storyteller. When he and Uncle Jerry got together, we were entertained for hours.

At Gerri’s house, over Aunt Millie’s famous meatballs, Uncle Jerry told the story about Grandpa forcing Mom and Aunt Mary Ann to go get a block of ice from the iceman when they were little. The ice weighed more than they did, but they managed to carry it up the stairs. Or most of the stairs. Just as they got it up to the top of the long flight, the ice slipped out of the pan and bounced down, step after step. Whenever Uncle Jerry told that story, I watched that block of ice slip and bounce, step by step by step in my mind’s eye, eternally falling as Grandpa came running out like a maniac, cursing them, then grabbed the ice under his arm and took it upstairs himself. Every time Uncle Jerry told the story, we laughed and laughed, imagining Ma and Aunt Mary Ann as skinny little kids.

There was also the story about Grandpa’s ridiculous visit to Uncle Robby’s army base in Indiana when he went to borrow some cash. And the story of Grandpa taking the settlement money after a flying bowling pin hit Uncle Jerry in the nose while he was working as a pin boy to help support the family. Uncle Jerry’s nose was still crooked after twenty years.

When Uncle Jerry and Uncle Robby told the stories, they seemed funny, not tragic. Living in poverty and having rats run under your bed seemed comical when they talked about it. Their sense of humor had helped them survive it. That and the fact that the family was so close. Getting together to talk and joke about the bad times helped a lot. It was their therapy. My family didn’t believe in psychiatrists, and never had the money for them, even if they wanted to believe in them.

While they were telling stories about the bad old days, the one about Grandpa trying to shoot us would sometimes come up. My cousin Gerri said she couldn’t remember that night. I thought it was strange, since Gerri was a few years older than I was. How could she not remember? Maybe she was like George, with the awful memory clinging somewhere back there in her brain like a big tumor, pushing, pushing. But Gerri didn’t seem to be haunted like George. She was an optimist, and remembered the good things about visiting our house: the hot roast beef sandwiches my father made, the lobster tails, french fries, and Sara Lee cupcakes.

Gerri was everybody’s favorite cousin. My sister, Paula, was Gerri’s sponsor for her Holy Confirmation, so they had their own special bond. Even Daddy loved Gerri, since she had such a good appetite. He and my mother were Gerri’s stand-in godparents. Her real godmother was a friend of Aunt Millie’s who’d forgotten about Gerri and never sent her cards on her birthday. Ma adopted Gerri and always sent her a birthday card with money inside.

I felt close to Gerri, because our birthdays were just three days apart. I tried not to remember that Grandpa’s birthday was only a day before mine. I didn’t want any special bonds with him. Not after hearing all about him. But I never tired of the stories, Christmas after Christmas, family wedding after family funeral, until the family soul was recycled and we got together again for a baptism.

My brother would grin his crooked grin. My cousins Susan and David, the same age as I was, and the youngest in their families, too, would sit with me and giggle. Gerri smiled her big, toothy smile, her eyes sparkly blue like Grandma’s. Unlike me, she had an open face, without shadows or doubt, and a great laugh, which flowed clear and clean like the spring water we had to buy whenever a water main broke.

When we got a little older, the family get-togethers and storytelling sessions were often held at my sister’s house. Paula was the oldest girl cousin in both the Italian and Polish families, so she became the natural hostess when she moved out and got her own place. Paula married a banker from Hoboken named Basil, and traded in her difficult-to-pronounce three-syllable Polish name for an even more difficult to pronounce four-syllable Italian name. She had a baby, whom she named Paul, after herself and Grandma and her favorite Beatle, Paul McCartney.

Paula and Basil would have the whole clan to their modern high-rise apartment three blocks from the Majestic. They lived in the newly built Gregory Apartments, named after the first mayor, Dudley S. Gregory. Cousin Mike helped the city secure the financing for the three buildings’ construction.

My best friend, Liz, lived in the Gregory building across the street from Paula, and when I slept over at my sister’s house, Liz and I would wave to each other while talking on the phone. It was from Paula’s seventh-floor apartment, high above the crowded buildings, that I watched the sun set for the first time, the sky smeared with the vibrant reds and purples that only serious air pollution could provide. It was at Paula’s apartment that I tasted, for the first time, Kraft Macaroni & Cheese and Chef Boyardee ravioli in a can—two things Daddy didn’t have at the Cold Storage. In her own way, my sister rebelled.

When Gerri, the next girl in line, came of age, she got her own apartment, too, in North Bergen. Gerri had a family get-together every Christmas, putting out a big spread of cold cuts and beer and wine. I looked forward to it every year. I looked up to Paula and Gerri and hoped someday I could have family parties at my apartment. I imagined what my bachelorette pad in New York would be like—with beanbag chairs and plastic beads hanging from the doorways and a view of the tall buildings surrounding me. I couldn’t wait. Everyone would come to my luxurious apartment to tell their funny stories. Even Aunt Mary Ann.

She came from Florida to my sister’s house a few times. I remember one time, everyone was gathered together, each with a big plate of antipasto on their lap: roasted red peppers, provolone cheese, salami rolled like little fleshy cigars. Cousin Susan always liked the black olives, and would place one on each finger and then eat them one at a time.

As the stories were told, I watched Aunt Mary Ann’s face. I figured that she, my favorite aunt, would outdo my uncles with her hilarious memories. But the ice story and the Indiana story didn’t make her laugh at all. Aunt Mary Ann didn’t say a word. She looked like that picture of her the night Kenny won—there but not there, her mind floating somewhere off in the distance, somewhere you didn’t want to go.

After that night, I found that the stories about Grandpa didn’t seem as funny anymore. All of sudden I saw them through Aunt Mary Ann’s eyes. The older I got, the more I blamed Grandma for staying with Grandpa and subjecting her children to a life of torture. I could understand how Grandma wound up meeting Grandpa and why she thought he was attractive, being the bad boy and all. But why had she married him? If you looked at Grandpa’s arrest record and listened to the stories, without the laugh track, you could see what a terrible person he was.

Aunt Mary Ann was right. It wasn’t funny at all.

In the early days of their marriage Grandpa didn’t need to work, because of Grandma. With her three siblings, she’d inherited the row of brownstones on Grand Street when her father died. Her siblings did well for themselves with their inheritance and with their lives.

Her brother John had some problems early on, when his wife and baby both died while she was in labor, because of a tubular pregnancy. But Uncle John persevered. He became a Wall Street stockbroker, married a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, and settled in Brooklyn, first on Dean Street, where Grandma had lived with him for a little while as a teenager, and then in Flatbush. We visited him there about once a year, usually around Easter. It was always an adventure. My cousins and I would pile into Uncle Jerry’s car and ride, squished, through the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. Susan got in the car with dog-doo on her shoe one time, and we threatened to throw her out the window. We were just kidding, but she cried all the way to Brooklyn.

Uncle John’s wife, Aunt Frances, looked like George Washington and had an impressive collection of Revolution-era antiques. Uncle John collected rocks, which was much more impressive to a kid. Every time we went there, Aunt Frances cooked lamb, another food that Daddy never brought home from the Cold Storage. I liked it, but it made Paula gag. So I ate her portion. I was always sad to leave Uncle John’s house when night fell. Though he had had a traumatic childhood, he managed to make himself a happy home.

Uncle Sam, the one who got his head stuck in the Morris Canal, had a wobbly start in life as well. His daughter, Rose, died of pneumonia when she was two years old. Then his wife left him for a cop whose beat was Journal Square. But Sam, like John, bounced back. He remarried and became a professional bowler, then managed a bowling alley over the Canton Tea Garden. He retired, like most of the city’s elders, to Miami. We saw him whenever we went to visit Aunt Mary Ann. Sam’s swimming days were over, but he taught me how to fish in a canal near his house.

Even troubled Aunt Helen, the one who discovered her Russian mother dead in bed, made a better life. After getting out of the youth house, she became a flapper, got a job at Lord & Taylor, and met a Puerto Rican strawberry-shortcake baker from Lindy’s in New York. Aunt Helen and Uncle Jesús retired to Puerto Rico. On a visit to our house once, Jesús was fed lobster and french fries by my father and was sent home with a Butterball turkey so large that it was still frozen when their plane landed in San Juan.

Grandma didn’t manage her inheritance, or her life, quite as well as her siblings did. She let Grandpa handle the finances. He pissed it all away, gambling, drinking, and taking a vacation to Canada, of all places. By himself. He could have at least gone to Italy or somewhere romantic. But Canada? Within a year, Grandma’s money was gone. Grandpa even hocked the wedding ring he had given Grandma, forcing her to go to Woolworth’s and buy a cheap replacement.

Using pop psychology, I figured Grandma married him because he was a brute like her father, the Russian wife-basher. Grandma was continuing the cycle. Grandpa beat his children regularly—when he wasn’t in prison, anyway.

Even Grandpa’s sisters couldn’t understand why Grandma stuck around, and they repeatedly tried to get her to leave him. After one of his violent binges, one of his sisters went to Grandma and begged her to pack her bags. “Get dressed, get lost,” my aunt whispered. “Get the boat to China. Anything. Just get going.” Instead of leaving, Grandma had a fight with Grandpa and wound up telling him what his sister had said. When Grandpa saw his sister, he attacked her, wrapping his hands around her throat, yelling, “Why the fuck are you telling my wife to leave me?”

Grandpa could not—or simply would not—hold down a job to support his wife and five children. He tried working as a union deliverer for the New York Sun, a good gig during the Depression. But a life of crime appealed to him most. When Grandma needed milk, Grandpa would go out and come back immediately with three or four bottles, having robbed them from the doorsteps of the neighbors. The only time he ever put food on the table was the night he came home, drunk, with fruit that he’d stolen from a local vendor. It wasn’t a lovely fruit basket. It was a big, stinking freight box full of rotten oranges, which were probably headed for the garbage anyway.

Grandpa would steal whatever he could lay his hands on. His conscience knew no bounds. One afternoon, the local Jewish door-to-door salesman came to collect on a statue of the Blessed Mother that my grandmother had purchased. Grandma was paying for the statue on time, a quarter a week. The statue of the Virgin, dressed in blue, with her arms outstretched, was about two feet tall and encased in a bubble of glass, like a bell jar.

Not only did he refuse to pay, but Grandpa threw the salesman down a long flight of stairs, the same one where my mother and Aunt Mary Ann dropped the block of ice. The salesman never returned. But Grandma got to keep the holy statue, free of charge. My mother inherited it when Grandma died, and whenever I helped Ma clean the house, it was my job to dust its rounded globe. I never opened the glass bubble, but I peered at the saint safe inside. Though it would be a poetic story, it was not the same statue my aunt Mary Ann tried to beat Grandpa with years later.

Thanks to Uncle Al, Grandpa landed a job as a stevedore down at the Linden Avenue docks, stenciling names of places he would never visit onto wooden boxes destined for the high seas. He stole the long, chrome stencil guns and brought them home, thinking he was doing the family a favor. He quit the job because, he said, it was too easy. But there may have been more to it than that. Grandpa got into a fight with a fellow member of the International Longshoremen’s Association while eating with his brother Bicky at Nedick’s diner in the Grove Street PATH station. While Grandpa was eating a hot dog, a dock worker named Joseph Wykoff hit him in the forehead with a portable coffee urn. But Grandpa retaliated.

The next day, my mother was waiting for a train at the PATH station when she overheard some guy say to a cop, “Hey, what happened to the pay phone?”

“Oh, fucking Beansie pulled it off the wall and beat some guy in the head with it.” Everybody knew Beansie. And it was just another one of his tantrums. My mother slinked away, but later that day she read all about the fight in The Jersey Journal.

This time, Grandpa was the victim for a change. All the detectives in the city were on the lookout for Wykoff, whom the papers described as a “dock character” and “an ally of Frank ‘Biffo’ DeLorenzo.” Ma wasn’t sure who Biffo was, but with a friend named Biffo, Wykoff had to be bad. When he hit Grandpa with the urn, Wykoff was already under indictment for breaking-and-entering and possession of burglar tools and was out on $15,000 bail for possession of a dangerous weapon.

After getting stitches at the Medical Center, Grandpa talked to the cops about Wykoff, and was released. But early the next morning, Grandpa was picked up for his own disorderly-person’s charge. When questioned about Wykoff, he changed his story from the day before and said he got hurt when he fell and hit his head on the curb. Who knows why he changed his story. Maybe Grandpa was afraid Biffo and Wykoff would strangle him for ratting. Or maybe the bad guys felt they had to stick together, like all those criminals on Batman.

In 1935 Grandpa was arrested at least four times. His first victim, Gabriel Gurman, worked at a butcher shop and was cleaning up the blood and bones one March evening when Grandpa and a friend came through the door. At first they asked Gurman for five cents, which he gladly handed over, in the hopes they’d leave him alone. But then, always the overachiever, Grandpa asked for ten cents more. Gurman, starting to get nervous now, gave Grandpa the ten cents.

Sensing the butcher’s weakness and unwillingness to fight, Grandpa snatched a large butcher knife from the countertop while his friend stood lookout in the doorway. Grandpa held the knife over Gurman’s head while he riffled through the poor guy’s pockets with his free hand. He came up with $32, and ran. Maybe some cop on the beat noticed the robbers burst out from the butcher-shop door, or maybe Gurman screamed for help. After a short foot chase through the downtown streets, the cops cornered Grandpa.

While out on bail two months later, Grandpa was arrested again for assault and battery. His crimes often overlapped, one on top of the other, like a deck of cards when you fan it out during a magic trick: Pick a crime, any crime.

When he wasn’t out stealing, Grandpa was out drinking and fighting. Most nights, after a bout, his kids could hear him coming, weaving down the street and growling like a mad dog. He would often come home smelling of booze and covered in blood, and would then pass out on the kitchen floor, leaving his kids to drag him into the living room, where he’d sleep it off night after night.

From the next room, the family could hear Grandpa sing himself to sleep. There was no radio, since he had hocked it to play the horses. A cappella, Grandpa would sing an old Bing Crosby tune: “When day is done and shadows fall and twilight’s due, my lonely heart keeps sinking with the sun. Although I miss your tender kiss the whole night through, I miss you most of all when day is done.” Grandpa liked “When Day Is Done” so much that he once recorded it at a booth in Coney Island, dedicating it to Grandma. “Hey, Boobie, this is for you,” the record began. (Years later, after Grandpa died, my mother and her brothers found the haunting recording and burned it.)

Grandpa’s worst binges were always around Easter. Maybe because the moon was guaranteed to be full—since Easter Sunday is based on the Paschal full moon—Grandpa always lost his mind during Holy Week. One Good Friday, Judge Zampella refused to lock Grandpa up after he broke every piece of furniture in the house. Grandpa was a Catholic, the judge reasoned, and it was Holy Week. My aunt Mary Ann cursed the judge over his Jersey City logic and was almost locked up herself. The rest of the kids kept their mouths shut.

The morning after a particularly harsh fight, Grandpa would send one of them to the Palace drugstore for three or four sticks of eye makeup to cover his black eyes. He would sit in front of the mirror and blend the different shades until they were perfect.

Grandpa was incredibly vain, and blamed baldness for ruining his life. His hair started coming out at age twenty-six, and by the time he was twenty-eight, he was pretty bald. Not completely bald, but close. Whenever his son Robby combed his own thick black hair in front of the mirror, Grandpa flew into a jealous rage and threatened to kill him.

To give his skin a healthy glow, Grandpa liked to sunbathe on the roof, reading a detective magazine or smoking marijuana to pass the time. When he wanted, Grandpa could be handsome and even charming. But those times were rare. He was usually covered in scabs and bruises, cursing out everyone around him.

One of his favorite objects was his gun—a .45, which he kept in a strongbox without a lock, stowed away on the top shelf of the kitchen closet. We’re not sure if he ever used it to kill anyone. Or if he simply preferred his bare hands.

In August 1935, Grandpa was arrested for atrocious assault and battery, the crime that would seal his reputation as a murderer. Though it was by far his most serious crime, it was the one we knew the least about. The complainant’s last name was Craig, from Brooklyn. I often wondered if he was related to Joseph Craig, the boxer Hague had managed years before. But there were no stories written about it in The Jersey Journal, and the records were sketchy. My mother tried to find out more about the crime after Grandpa died, but the county worker in charge of such documents said that the only records kept were those filed under homicide. And this wasn’t quite a homicide. Back in the 1930s, without a dead body, atrocious assault was the highest charge the cops could bring.

Ma suspected that the records were on file somewhere but that the clerk was just too lazy to look them up. The ancient files were kept inside Murdoch Hall, the old Medical Center building where Grandma had worked back in the 1940s. Because of a broken window, a family of pigeons flew inside one of the file rooms and took up residence. Many of the criminal records were covered in bird droppings and were ruined. Others simply sat there, yellowing and decaying. If they still existed, Grandpa’s files lay buried beneath a ton of long-forgotten murders and homicides, file upon file, box upon box, row after row, and room after room of other families’ crimes, tragedies, and sorrows.

All we had to go on were our own family stories. Aunt Katie said that during a campaign rally for Hague, a riot broke out. Craig was clubbed in the mayhem, and Grandpa was framed for the attack. Craig eventually died, but too late for the cops to charge Grandpa with murder. Knowing Hague, it’s not a stretch to think that Grandpa was framed. Especially if Craig was related to the boxer Hague had managed.

But then again, Grandpa was a man who, a few decades later, would plot to murder his own children and grandchildren. It seems as if Grandpa could have willingly beaten Craig to death. He would probably even have enjoyed it.

While out on bail a month later, Grandpa was arrested again, for breaking-and-entering and larceny. He pleaded not guilty to all his charges but was sentenced to seven years for the assault on Craig. In 1935, Grandpa went away—not to the country or overseas, but away. In Jersey City, when someone mentions that a relative has “gone away,” it means they’ve gone to jail or to the crazy house in Secaucus. Jersey Citizens, though they’d have you believe they’ve seen it all, were never enthusiastic travelers.

Grandpa went not to Atlantic City or Miami, two popular destinations for the most adventurous Jersey Citizens, but to Trenton State Prison. With time off for good behavior, he spent five years in the “Big House,” the state penitentiary, where the electric chair was kept.

They were wonderful years for my mother and her brothers and sister—Beansie-free years. But the times he had hit them, knocked them down the stairs, stuck a live Christmas tree into the coal-burning stove, balls and all, and almost burned the kitchen down, were still fresh in their young minds.

And it wasn’t long before Grandpa was back from Trenton State, re-creating all those precious family moments. My mother was sitting outside her house the day he was sprung, and she saw him come down the street. She was only nine years old, but she recognized him right away. Grandpa bent down and kissed her, then walked inside, where Grandma was curling her hair, getting ready for his big entrance. When she saw him, she dropped the curling iron on the floor and was swept up in his embrace. They hugged and kissed like in a movie. It was the worst day of my mother’s life.

Soon Grandpa was assaulting them again. He beat my uncle Sonny up so bad that he threatened to kill Grandpa someday. When my uncle Robby asked to go play in the pumps on a hot summer day, Grandpa filled the tub up with ice-cold water and viciously threw him in it. Then, when my mother had her hair up in a towel and was drinking a glass of milk, Grandpa unleashed this particularly obscene string of compliments: “What are you drinking milk for, you Hindu dying-looking fucking pimple-faced cocksucker? You’ll get more pimples on your fucking face.”

Ironically, my mother always had beautiful skin, just like her father.

With a monster like that for a husband, Grandma should have packed up the kids and left. But she couldn’t leave Grandpa. She was afraid. Not for herself, but for her children. Grandpa told her that if she left, he would track her down and kill the kids. That was why Grandma stayed.

Though he scared them, hurt them, and threatened to murder them, Grandpa embarrassed his children more than anything. The other kids in the neighborhood called Uncle Jerry, Uncle Sonny, and Uncle Robby jailbirds, beat them up, and wouldn’t let them play ball with them in the lot. All because of Grandpa.

My mother didn’t have to worry about stickball, but she had her own problems. She once woke up for school and found a half-dozen restaurant sugar shakers on the kitchen table.

“Where’d they come from, Mama?” she asked.

“Your father brought them home in his coat last night,” Grandma answered, shaking her head and wringing her small, white hands. “He was drunk.”

The next day, my mother and her girlfriends walked uptown to go swimming at Dickinson High School, the neoclassical Parthenon-like structure that’s visible from the New Jersey Turnpike approach to the Holland Tunnel. Like the Art Deco Medical Center, Dickinson’s elaborate architecture seemed somehow misplaced in Jersey City. The high school looked lost up there on its hill, like a crisp, new dollar bill you found lying in the gutter.

After swimming at Dickinson, my mother and her friends walked down the long hill, their hair drying in the warm sun. Along the way, they stopped for hamburgers and coffee at the local Greek diner. The owner, Poly, brought them their order, but when they asked for sugar, he threw up his hands.

“Some sonofabitchin’ drunk came in last night and stole all our sugar,” he yelled. My mother cringed and almost slid under the Formica counter.

She was actually relieved when Grandpa wound up behind bars again, out of their lives once more. It didn’t take long. While the rest of the country was at war, Grandpa was arrested and went away again in October 1943 for robbing a guy named Stanley Miniski, of Northport, Long Island, of three hundred dollars and a watch and chain after the two had been out drinking together in a saloon.

This time the crime made the paper, with the headline FATHER OF FIVE SENT TO PRISON. According to the story, Grandma passed out in the courtroom, but not before shouting, “Whatever is to become of my five children?” As if Beansie were a positive role model and great provider. The kids could surely steal their own bottles of milk, smelly oranges, stencil guns, and shakers of sugar.

If only the government had had the foresight to ship Grandpa off to Germany, he could have terrorized the enemy rather than his family. But he was too old for the service and had too many children. Instead, he was sentenced to three-to-seven. He was in prison barely a month when he was let out again, bound in handcuffs and shackles and accompanied by prison guards, taken from his cell just long enough to attend the funeral of his son.