20

BORN AGAIN

Gerri was sentenced a month after her thirty-sixth birthday, and served seven hard months in a women’s penitentiary, let out early for good behavior. While behind bars, she found God and was born again. She sent Paula a long, penitent letter, apologizing to her. In the letter, Gerri told Paula she hadn’t meant to hurt her.

Because of the letter and because Gerri did her penance, my sister finally forgave her for her sins. Seven years was long enough. At a family party, complete with a cheesy karaoke machine, she and Paula got up together and sang the Sister Sledge anthem “We Are Family.” It was a corny but poignant moment. Gerri practically cried, the prodigal daughter so happy to be back in the fold.

Paula and Gerri made up at my cousin Jamie’s wedding, at a big restaurant on the Jersey shore. It was the first time the whole family had been together in seven years. We all excitedly posed for a group photo on the restaurant’s giant, echoing porch, the unfamiliar sea air sticky and damp as we linked arms and held hands. If you looked closely at the picture, you could see that my cousin Susan and I—the babies in our families—were both pregnant with babies of our own. It was a new beginning, in a way. The beginning of an era. Or the end of a bad one. Life had come full circle in the blunt, poetic way it usually does.

Susan had a son with a sense of humor so sharp he made his grandfather—Uncle Jerry—sound like a mortician. Amid the family turmoil, the comedy gene not only survived but thrived. I was glad the fighting was over, that I was able to get to know little Alan and see what a pisser he was.

Optimist that I was, I naturally started worrying about negative traits that might get passed down from the family, like cancerous cells incubating year after year, waiting to cluster into a tumor and wreak havoc. A good sense of humor was a wonderful family trait. But what about a desire to kill? A penchant to steal? To run numbers? I was afraid to research the topic of criminal genetics, scared of what I might find. And, besides, what was the point?

There was little I could do, other than choose a good husband. It was no accident that Wendell’s grandfather was a judge—the upstanding, righteous kind, not the nickel-pork-chop variety that usually got assigned in Jersey City.

“We have a lot in common,” I told Wendell on one of our first dates at Boulevard Drinks. “Your grandfather’s a judge and mine was a criminal.” I figured the judge genes might outweigh the criminal genes if we ever decided to get married and have kids.

Maybe there were other measures I could take to guard my offspring from the evil genes. Though I’m not a believer in Original Sin, I planned to have my baby baptized. I figured that in my family, with all those sins floating around, it didn’t hurt to get spritzed with a little holy water. Just in case there was such a thing as a soul, heaven, hell, and limbo, my baby would be protected.

Most days, I was still too sophisticated to believe there were such things. But once I became pregnant, I started to wonder. At night, when all was quiet and my mind let down its defenses, I thought about the drawings Sister Isabelle had made us sketch in third grade in anticipation of the coming end of the world, our own versions of heaven and hell—angels on downy wings and devils with pitchforks. Then my mind wandered to places like the Sistine Chapel and the museums hung with Bosch paintings, the Cold Storage, the piles of dead rats, and the emergency room into which Daddy disappeared, and I worried that maybe there was a heaven and hell after all. That there were souls that needed to be saved and prayed for, and souls that floated into the heavens on their own lightness.

With the baby fluttering inside me, I felt a sudden panic and a helplessness. Now that I was contributing to the family line, I was connected to something huge, to eternity or a continuum that would make my life a mere star in a Milky Way of lives that came before me and would stretch on after me. Long after me. I was part of it but so, so small. The thought made me feel lost and scared, like I had that night I got out of the car with Wendell on the California highway.

If there was such thing as a soul, were there billions of them circling the heavens or were they recycled? My family members were firm believers in reincarnation. It was really just another version of genetics, with a religious spin to give it all a sense of mystery. The rule was that the newborn baby inherited the soul of the dead person who had just exited the planet or was on his deathbed. The death and birth, or rebirth, usually occurred within months, weeks, or days of each other, although the difference could stretch as long as a few years.

Uncle John was convinced my mother was Great-Grandma Irene reincarnated, with her face, her wit, her straight black hair, and her love of dancing.

When my brother was born, Dziadzia was on his deathbed, which explained why my brother’s name was Stanley. Dziadzia’s real name had been Stanislaw. My father begged my mother to name my brother after him. Then, in an extra cosmic twist, Stanley was coincidentally born on St. Stanislaw’s feast day. Ma had no choice. Stanley it was, even though Stanley never really looked like a Stanley.

Right after Babci died, I was born, and came out looking just like her, squinty eyes, big nose, thick, dark hair.

When Stanley had a son, just a couple of years after Daddy died, Alex came out looking exactly like Daddy. He even acted like him, quiet but observant, coming out with a great one-liner every now and then. I had wondered where Daddy had gone off to in that emergency room. And now I knew. Alex was Daddy all over again. It was as if someone had boiled Daddy down to his essence and then poured him into a much smaller mold. I could just picture this kid years from now, broiling a few lobster tails just like his grandfather.

I was all for reincarnation: Take a soul to give a soul. It seemed like a resourceful, environmentally correct way to run a universe. As long as my kid was recycled from someone I liked, someone good.

But in my family it was slim pickin’s.

I wondered whose soul—if anyone’s—my baby would inherit. I wondered if cross-gender reincarnation was possible. My mother was a good soul, but I didn’t want her dying anytime soon. So her soul was off-limits. Maybe Aunt Katie would come back in my kid. Short, squat, smoking Lucky Strikes, throwing back shots of Canadian Club.

I had a boy and we named him Dean, after no one in the family. We simply liked the name. Fresh and new. It was an added bonus that Dean Street was not far from my Brooklyn apartment, the street where Grandma came to live with her brother right before she met Grandpa. Dean Street was where Grandma had nearly escaped.

When I took Dean home from the hospital, I stared hard at his face and searched for clues in his features. With each twist, his face would completely change, like a kaleidoscope, leaving little trace of the last pattern I viewed. Daddy was in there. But so was Ma, with Wendell’s lips curled into my smirk. And he hadn’t even been to Jersey City yet. Aunt Katie was nowhere to be found.

Mornings he looked like Stanley, and evenings, like Paula. He had my sister-in-law’s toes, my father-in-law’s piercing stare, and my mother-in-law’s round head. But he seemed to have my attitude, thoroughly unimpressed with everyone around him.

Sometimes he was like one of those Stapinski smorgasbords, with all my Polish relatives bringing something different to the table. When he frowned, my baby was Daddy. When he was sad, Uncle Tommy. When he cried, Uncle Eddie. When he scowled, he was Cioci Stella. And when he lifted a toy too close to his face and his eyes crossed, Uncle Henry.

But when he smiled, my baby was Grandpa. The first time I noticed, it scared the shit out of me.

I asked my mother if I was seeing things, and she shook her head. It’s Beansie, all right. He only appeared in charismatic flashes. But there he was, Grandpa, smiling up at me, more often than I liked to admit. Grandpa the charmer. Grandpa the handsome guy who Grandma fell in love with seventy years ago.

I hadn’t seen Grandpa smile much in my lifetime, but I recognized the grin from family photos he hadn’t gotten around to destroying. It wasn’t so much the smile itself. That was more like Wendell’s and my own. It was more in the cheeks and around the eyes that Beansie came out to play.

My cousin Jamie—on a roll from the family reunion that occurred at her wedding—dug up some old family movies and had them transferred to videotape. I saw Grandpa in motion for the first time since childhood. Eyes blinking, lips moving, bald head nodding. The movies were from my mother’s wedding: Grandpa in a white tuxedo jacket, looking slightly demented, walking my skinny mother up the St. Mary’s Church steps. I watched the film several times, and each time I rewound and watched Grandpa ascend those stone steps, the less I hated him. The ice-truck dent on the left side of his head was clear as could be. I had always thought that was just an excuse. But there it was.

There was also a sad, vacant stare in his eyes that most snapshots couldn’t capture, and a timid smile, a remnant of the charming one I knew from those pictures and from my baby’s face.

Grandpa was pathetic, not scary. Now, when I looked at his picture, I felt an unfamiliar ache, one I associated with seeing Uncle Tommy at Meadowview. It was sorrow. Maybe it was because of motherhood, but for the first time in my life, I actually felt sorry for Grandpa. I preferred anger over sorrow. It hurt much less.

For years, my mother had said she believed that Grandpa had been in purgatory and that she should pray for him, to try and move him along. I had always assumed Grandpa had gone straight to hell.

When I asked my mother why she prayed for her father, she said she felt he had done his penance on earth and that he didn’t deserve the fires of hell.

After we kicked him out back in 1970, Grandpa went to live with Gerri and her family. But he drove Aunt Millie and Uncle Jerry crazy, yelling all the time that the television was too loud. Once, when they went out, they left Grandpa to baby-sit. He screamed at my cousins all night, scaring the memory deep into them. My cousin Susan remembers him accidentally stepping on her Barbie Dream House and crushing it. He promised to buy her a new one for Christmas.

Because he was impossible to live with, Grandpa wound up alone again, wandering the streets by himself until he had a heart attack and wound up in the Medical Center.

My mother took mercy on him one more time and visited him there with Uncle Jerry. When they got there, Grandpa cursed and yelled and scared them away for the last time. The exasperated doctors sent him to the Trenton State Hospital psychiatric ward for over a year. While there, he wrote a letter to one of his sisters—his handwriting still impeccable and sane—begging her to take him out, to save him. He told her in the letter that he didn’t belong there.

I imagined what that was like and how much worse it was than being like Uncle Tommy, retarded and unaware of what was happening around you. I imagined being trapped in a psychiatric ward, knowing that you’re simply mean, not crazy.

Six months later, Grandpa wound up in John F. Kennedy Hospital in Edison, New Jersey. That’s where he died, alone, Christmas morning.

The hospital was a half mile from my uncle Robby’s new house, and when he heard that Grandpa had died there, he thought that Grandpa had been stalking him and his family. But it was just another one of life’s little coincidences. Grandpa didn’t even know that Uncle Robby had recently moved there. His son lived less than a mile away and Grandpa didn’t even know it.

Now that I had a son of my own, I understood why my mother prayed for Grandpa. He had suffered in the worst way, alone. Though he deserved to be left all alone, it was still sad. And besides, family was family. If they didn’t pray for your soul, who would?

No matter whose soul my son inherited, he would turn out just fine if I raised him right. But how did you raise a child right? Would I send him to Catholic school, to try and instill a sense of morality? Would I let him run wild, or watch his every move? Make him eat organic vegetables, or let him eat hot dogs from Boulevard Drinks? Should we stay in the city, or move to the country?

I decided I would hold him close but not too tight. I would sing to him and brush his hair and find trees for him to climb. I would protect him from oncoming traffic and head injuries, and would avoid putting him in a crib for as long as possible, so he wouldn’t have to stare at the world through a set of bars those first few months of life. When he got a little older, I would teach him right from wrong. I wasn’t sure how to go about it, exactly, but I figured it would come to me. I would take him to church on Sundays to give him some grounding and something to rebel against in life besides me and Wendell. He would know who was good and who was bad and how to tell the difference, and that sometimes there really was no difference. That most people were angel and devil, Beansie and Grandma rolled up in a complicated mess.

He would know about Vita’s card game, about Peter beating Irene, about Grandma and Aunt Helen and their brothers, Uncle Sam and Uncle John and their brownstone on Grand Street and the books on their shelves. He would know about Dziadzia’s bootlegging and Babci’s accident, epileptic Uncle Tommy and Meadowview, Kunegunda and Uncle Andrew and the Polish revolution that never was, Uncle Henry the bookie, and Uncle Eddie and the bull, about Hague and Kenny and my mother dancing with the mayor-to-be at Victory Hall. My son would get to know my mother, and know her well, learn about how she was so much like Aunt Katie in her old age. He would know about Aunt Katie’s job as a committeewoman and as a riveter, about the night of cousin Mike’s campaign party, the night I wore my first pair of glasses, about everyone hitting the number the day I was born, about the igloos Paula and Stanley built on Sussex Street, about how Grandma died on Ash Wednesday, about Daddy and the lobster tails and the trips to Bubbling Springs and the Loew’s Theatre. I’d eventually tell him about Frank, Kelsey, and the backyard; the OLC nuns and priests; Aunt Julie and cousin Stephen and the day John was shot in Arizona; about the stolen Blessed Mother and the salesman that Grandpa threw down the stairs. He would hear stories of Grandpa from Uncle Jerry and Uncle Robby, the bad stories and the funny stories, like the one about the day Aunt Mary Ann and Ma carried that block of ice and then let it go, only to carry it up again in the next retelling, forever and ever. He’d know about the day Uncle Sonny died, and, once he was old enough to understand, why Grandma married Grandpa. About Carvel and the stolen ice cream, Venice and the Stanley Theatre, The Jersey Journal and the night Stanley almost punched the priest in the mouth, the Manna transcripts, Mayor McCann and cousin Mike running one more time, Uncle Tommy voting, and my running away from home finally. He would know about cousin George seeing his father dead and then dying right across the street, about Gerri teaching me to ride a bike and stealing all that money. I would point to Jersey City from the apartment window, to the railroad terminal and the new shiny buildings, and sometimes I would even take him to visit.

On an overcast day, Jersey City could still bring me down, with its aluminum siding, junkies, and crumbling highways. But on a good day, a sunny, clear day, Jersey City didn’t look quite as bad as I remembered it. And it wasn’t just the distance that softened me.

The New York skyline was even more spectacular with the Colgate factory buildings demolished, no longer obstructing the view. A new Colgate development was filling the hole left by the old factory, the pile drivers so loud that they broke the windows of George’s mother’s house on Morris Street. Development spread farther inland, to other neighborhoods besides the waterfront areas, and was rising at a furious pace.

Activist Colin Egan founded a farmer’s market right in the shadow of the horrendously ugly PATH building, where sallow Jersey City residents, deprived for years of good, fresh produce, could finally buy a nice tomato. The farmer’s market was a footnote in Colin’s list of good deeds. He, Joe Duffy, and Ted Conrad, before he died, eventually convinced the planning board that the Loew’s Theatre was worth saving. It was being rehabbed and was fully supported by the new mayor, Bret Schundler.

The first Republican in nearly a century, Schundler was elected the year I went to Alaska. He was an investment banker with money to burn, so corruption was no longer an issue. He didn’t need to steal money. He had enough. Finally, a mayor of Jersey City who had enough.

Schundler was all right in my book, Republican or not. Some people disliked him because he wasn’t Hudson County born and raised. The worst accusation they could dredge up was that he owned a house in Jersey City but lived most of the time out of town in a second home in the suburbs. They said the first chance he got, he’d leave Jersey City flat and follow his ambitions for higher office. But I didn’t think that was so bad. It was better than taking kickbacks and stealing taxpayer money earmarked for new schools and nontoxic playgrounds. In an imperfect world, I would take a politically ambitious, conservative commuter over a born-and-raised corrupt swindler.

Schundler was one of the legions of yuppies who had moved to downtown Jersey City in the mid-1980s. When he pulled up in front of his apartment in a cab in those first few months in town, the driver noticed the address and gestured to the front door. “My brother was shot to death right on your stoop,” he told him.

Less than a year later, the day before he closed on his brownstone, Schundler was walking in the neighborhood and watched as police cars zoomed past him and his wife. When they got to the house they were about to buy, they saw that the cop cars were parked out front. They had just arrested two kids who tried to rob the house. Schundler’s house.

Schundler thought twice about closing. But he went ahead and made Jersey City his home. Vice and all.

He knew, firsthand, that the city could be a tough place. At the turn of the new century, crime was down 40 percent from the time he took office. But it still had a long way to go.

There were still chopped-up bodies and floaters pulled from the Hudson River each spring. But times were changing. There was the lesbian-rough-sex murder case in Bayonne, and the Internet case, in which a Jersey City guy was accused of luring a California girl online and then murdering her. In the autumn of 1999, a Hudson County real estate baron who had bought Mayor Hague’s fourteen-room luxury Kennedy Boulevard apartment was allegedly gunned down by his disgruntled doorman, a three-hundred-pound former Board of Ed worker known as Big Daddy. The only witness to the murder was an eight-year-old boy. Bad news didn’t get much more colorful than that.

The crime story that fascinated me the most, though, happened the summer before. A time capsule placed under the Christopher Columbus statue on Journal Square was missing when the statue was moved for construction. The time capsule, including photos, newspapers, and other mementos, had been sealed at the base of the statue in October 1950 by Judge Zampella and Hudson’s other well-connected Italians.

The oblong copper box was supposed to be opened in the year 2000 and resealed until 2050. But when workers moved the bronze explorer from his perch on a hot August afternoon in 1998, to make way for a $7.5-million Journal Square face-lift, the box was nowhere to be found. The construction crew searched the base and dug through the construction rubble, but it was gone. Who could be low enough to steal a time capsule? It was almost as bad as stealing the Blessed Mother.

Jersey City was so corrupt it couldn’t even hold on to its history.

But then again, neither could I.

As a freelance reporter, I stole other people’s hard-luck stories and wrote about them. It was my job to sneak into their lives and take notes. Five-finger discount. Secondhand. I wrote about crime victims and celebrities battling cancer, infertile couples and union workers phased out from jobs they’d held for fifty years, people losing their businesses and kids dying of drug overdoses. They weren’t my stories. But I took them and put my byline on them. I made them my own.

My family’s stories were different. For years, I felt a sense of entitlement to them, the way rich kids must feel about the family fortune. True tales about stolen encyclopedias, lobster tails, a statue of the Blessed Mother, a hospital bed, rare coins, a quarter of a million dollars. They were my only inheritance—save for a few stolen objects that I got to keep along the way.

But I had been away too long, had missed too many family gatherings. Maybe it was that seven-year hiatus. Even the old stories were told less and less frequently, an eerie foreshadowing to what was happening to people like George and Gerri. The crime stories, funny at first, grew closer and closer to home, eating their way to the heart of the family, until they almost devoured us altogether. Gerri’s crime had nearly wrecked us. And no one wanted to talk about it. It wasn’t a funny story, and it wasn’t mine to tell, really.

I wondered if any of the stories were mine to take with me wherever I went, like the books from Aunt Mary Ann and the stolen dictionary that went with me whenever I moved. Now that I was gone, I felt like I had to steal the family stories back, bit by bit, phone call by phone call, like a thief in the night, my relatives rightfully suspicious of my motives.

I wanted my son to know those stories, to show him where his mother grew up, to see it, taste it, smell it. But the smells I smelled at his age, both good and bad, were all gone. No more coffee or chocolate, soap or blubber. The factories had moved out long ago. The restaurants Daddy took us to were gone, too. Lobster tails, I discovered, were very expensive and difficult to cook. Daddy, like a champion figure skater, had only made it look easy.

I wanted Dean to meet the good people of Jersey City, the few I encountered throughout my lifetime. Though many Jersey Citizens were not worth meeting, there were some who’d surprise you with their no-bullshit attitude and willingness to do you a favor.

I wanted him to know that Jersey City had prepared me for the world—a harsh place, filled with jerks and criminals, no matter how far you traveled. In Manhattan, I once tripped and fell and watched people step over me at the curb. In Brooklyn, my apartment was broken into three times. In San Francisco, a big fat guy stole my wallet on a bus, then treated all his friends to the movies on my credit card. In Hong Kong, people pushed me out of the way to get a seat on the ferry. And in Cairo, a guy tried to grab my butt as I walked past him. I punched him hard in the chest and told him to go paw his wife like that. He had no idea what I was saying. But he heard the tone in my voice, and looked apologetic.

Because Jersey City had been so tough, I was always prepared for what might come my way.

I wanted my son to know that Jersey City was the world in high relief, stark black and white, with no punches pulled. The bad was especially bad, so the good stood out. When you met a good person—a truly good person—in a place as ugly and as awful as that, it could choke you up and make you want to cry.

I wanted my kid to know that, to know the characters I knew, to show him where his mother played, the wall on which I slammed a handball at age five, the pole I climbed, the door to my building, where the junkies came to hide, the door to the Majestic Tavern that I had pushed open with hands as tiny as his. But the Majestic was replaced by a Pakistani restaurant. And those doors opened the way for stories that were barely mine anymore, told in an accent that was slowly, surely fading.