So, I was sitting on my bed one night looking at the big maple tree outside my window. It was a windy night and most of the leaves had fallen off and these thick nasty-looking branches were reaching out in all directions, going this way and that way, whipping back and forth, and there was this one branch that was scratching the outside wall of my room.
When I was a real little kid, that scratching sound would scare the shit out of me. And if I’m being honest with you, it can still be pretty scary now but I’m too old to run into my parents’ room and get into bed with them.
Except sometimes, when my dad is working midnights, I still sneak in to sleep with my mom. We listen to this radio show she loves, Jean Shepherd. He’s this guy that sings silly songs and tells stories and it’s really good for falling asleep to. I love the stories about when he was a kid. If he’s telling a really good one, like the one about being a paper boy, me and my mom will stay up till 11:30 p.m. when he goes off the air just so we can hear how it ends. If she’s getting tired and turns off the radio before one of his stories is over, she’ll ask me if I’m still awake and I’ll pretend to be sleeping so I don’t have to go back to my bed. I used to be able to sleep in her bed all the time but now that I’m older she says I need to learn how to sleep on my own. I tell her I already know how to sleep on my own, but I’d rather sleep in her bed and listen to Jean Shepherd.
“But you have your own radio in your own room. Listen to Jean Shepherd in there,” she tells me, but she doesn’t understand it’s more fun to listen with her so that we can laugh together and talk about the parts of the story we liked best.
Those are probably my favorite times with my mom, and I know they’re her favorite times with me because every time we do it, she hugs and kisses me like I’m still a little kid and calls me Kneeney and tells me these are her favorite times with me. The Jean Shepherd show always starts with this song that sounds like the racetrack when the horses are going to the gate. The call to the post. If I hear that bugle call coming from her room and my dad’s not home, that’s my signal to sneak in. I’m like one of the horses at Belmont—time to leave the paddock.
I know a little bit about horse racing because we live close to the Belmont Park racetrack where they hold the Belmont Stakes, and because my dad loves to “play the ponies.” Every year in the fall, me and my brother Tommy will go with him and some of the cops he works with to the fall meets. There’s a big event at the meets called the Marlboro. My dad says it’s our lucky race since we live on Marlboro Road. And he’s right. Every time we go to the track for the Marlboro Meet, we win.
I love our days at the track and not just because betting on races is fun but because my dad’s partner on the cops, Carmine Cappabianco, knows one of the trainers and we always get to go down to the stables with him and see the horses up close. Once, I even got to sit on one of them. We bet on Carmine’s friend’s horse that day, but he lost. Tommy said that’s why we were allowed to sit on him. “He had no shot of winning. They’d never let you sit on a winner.”
So, like I was saying, I was sitting in bed, looking out the window because usually there’s something interesting happening on the street corner. We live at the intersection of Marlboro Road and Page Road and the corner across the street from our house is a major hangout for the older teenagers in our neighborhood. Depending on the time of day or the season of the year, there’s always something fun to watch. There’s this one couple, Linda Leary and Paulie Fontana, who always show up around eleven o’clock when most of the others have taken off and these two will sit on the curb under the streetlight and make out for hours. And I mean literally, for hours! I know this because I’ve watched them a bunch of times. There have been nights when I’ve gone to the bathroom or went to talk to my mom to see what show she’s watching or one time I even fell asleep for a few hours and when I looked out the window again, there they were, Linda and Paulie, still going at it. I haven’t kissed anybody yet, but I can’t imagine wanting to do it for hours at a time.
But that night, it’s windy and cold out and the corner is quiet and I’m getting sleepy when I suddenly remembered I had to hand in this English assignment the next day. Like with most of my homework, I’d waited to do it until the night before it was due. You see, I’m not great at being a student. I mean, I’m not a moron and I get OK grades and I’m not one of those kids that just hates going to class. When it comes to school, I could take it or leave it. But when you’re in sixth grade, you have to take it, right?
Anyhow, my homework was I had to write a poem and what made it really suck even worse than a normal poetry assignment was it had to be about Jesus. I go to a Catholic school, by the way: St. Joes. So, this wasn’t the first time I had to figure out words that rhyme with Jesus. Breezes is one of my go-tos. And wheezes. And sneezes. And cheeses. You get the idea. It’s hard. But poems with sneezes and cheeses and wheezes don’t go over too well with the nuns. If you went to a school that had nuns, then you’d know what I’m talking about. That’s where the big maple comes in.
I’m watching the tree’s branches sway back and forth in the wind and all the smaller branches are reaching out toward the sky like little tentacles and I get this idea that this old tree is Jesus. I imagine that the maple tree struggling in the storm is like Jesus struggling to speak to people in a screwed-up world. The branches reaching out into the terrible windy night are like Jesus’s hands reaching out into the terrible sad world to heal people and make them feel better when they’re scared or lonely or, if they’re like my mom, sad that the world is changing. The big thick trunk of the tree shows how strong Jesus is and kinda represents his heart and soul. And all the roots are his words and prayers reaching down into the earth for people to find when they’re farming their fields or making sandcastles on the beach or digging for worms to go fishing or making holes in the street for new sewers or building a basement for a building, you know, basically anything that people do with the dirt of the earth. Anyhow, that was kinda the idea.
I know it sounds stupid but in the poem it sounded better because it all rhymed, except this time I didn’t rhyme anything with Jesus. And it was a poem, so it didn’t really need to make sense, right? It just needed to sound good and give you a feeling, which I think it did.
So, I hand in this lame assignment the next day and didn’t think about it again. I figure I’ll get a B minus if I’m lucky but I might get a C because I didn’t proofread it and I’m a terrible speller and I have really shitty handwriting. Talk about something the nuns hate. Bad handwriting. You would think it’s one of the seven deadly sins the way they go crazy over it.
When my mom and dad went to Catholic school they said the nuns were even tougher than the nuns we got at St. Joes, which is hard to imagine, until they tell you the stories about getting cracked on the knuckles with the ruler if you had shitty handwriting. Or worse than that, they’d crack the boys behind their legs with that skinny wooden stick they use when they’re showing you the different countries on the map or pointing to the different presidents’ pictures that hang above the blackboard. My dad said he got it so bad one time that the backs of his thighs were bleeding, and he had to spend all day at school sitting at his desk while the blood dried. When he finally got up at the end of the day, his school pants were stuck to the scabs on his legs. He knew he couldn’t tell his mother because the old Irish back then didn’t believe the nuns or the priests could ever do any wrong, even if they made you bleed.
“If I told my mother, she woulda said I musta deserved it and given me an even worse beating for upsetting the nuns in the first place,” my dad said.
He had a real problem on his hands when he got home from school that day because when he tried to take his pants off he couldn’t do it without ripping those scabs off, which he said would have hurt worse than the beating. So, his brother, my Uncle Tim, suggested they fill the tub with water and my dad could sit in there to soften up the scabs. But they realized if he did that, their mother was sure to see the blood in the tub and on the towels and find out about the beating so they decided they would walk over to the river and jump in. The problem was it was January in New York and to jump off the pier on the West Side of Manhattan wasn’t like jumping into the Mississippi River like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.
“You were likely to land on some poor slob that some wiseguy decided to dump in the river—or you’d freeze to death,” my dad said.
So instead, my Uncle Tim volunteered to piss on his legs and that’s when my dad knew he had to go home and tell his mother the truth because getting pissed on or jumping onto a dead wiseguy in the freezing cold Hudson River had to be worse than catching a beating.
They lived in Hell’s Kitchen, where my grandmother still lives, and as they walked home they passed a stable on Tenth Avenue where they noticed the horses drinking out of a trough and they both knew that was the solution. As my Uncle Tim kept lookout, my dad jumped into that trough and sat there until he could peel his pants off. Then the two of them ran down to Forty-Eighth Street, my father in just his underwear and my uncle behind him, laughing the whole way home. But then, as they ran up the stoop and into the apartment, who did they run into? Their mother. My dad laughs about it now but he said, “For a tiny little lady, she could pack a wallop. And that was the worst beating she ever gave me.”