I had a feeling Pop McSweeny was sick a few months ago when we drove our new car up to the Bronx to visit him and Gilligan. By the way, our “new” car isn’t really a new car. Like I already told you, we don’t buy new cars, we just buy old used clunkers and after my dad couldn’t figure out why our last clunker, the Pinto, wouldn’t start, he had it towed up to the Exxon station and Mugsy, our car mechanic, told my dad it was time for the junkyard.
“Ashes to ashes,” my dad said because the fenders, the rear bumper, the driver’s side door, and most of the engine we’d also bought at the junkyard.
When your dad brings home a new used car every couple of years, each one worse than the next, it can be a little embarrassing. Maybe even more embarrassing than the no-brand food. But this car is even worse and not just because it’s a lousy car but because my dad bought this new piece of junk off one of the families we go to school with. And what makes it even more humiliating is this family is one of the dirtbag families whose kids never seem to wash and have greasy hair with dandruff and their clothes are all wrinkly and stained and I’m sure they must never shower because they have the worst BO you ever smelled. There’s a few families at our school like that. Even the parents seem unwashed. As my dad says, “Cleanliness isn’t high on their list of priorities.” That musta carried over to their car too. When I jumped into the back seat for the first time the floor was covered with old newspapers, empty soda cans, candy wrappers, a few smelly old beach towels, and two cans of oil. Guess who got the job of cleaning it up?
The family that owned this jalopy of a Delta 88 have a son who is a few years older than me. His name is Phillip Phillips. I don’t get why his parents would name him Phillip if their last name is Phillips. It’s bad enough to have the same name as your first and last name, because that’s just weird, but when your initials are P. P. you’re gonna get ragged on every day of your life because everybody is gonna call you P. P. But it isn’t P. P., it’s Pee Pee and when kids say it, they pretend to be holding their peckers and taking a piss. He’s also called Piss Pot and Pin Prick and Pig Pen, like the character in Charlie Brown who’s so dirty he walks around surrounded by a cloud of dirt. And that’s this kid too, he’s that dirty.
Now if I’m a kid whose parents don’t make me shower and clean my ears and wash my hair and scrape the shit out from under my fingernails, I wouldn’t make things worse by also being the kid who still picks his nose and eats it, but that’s what Piss Pot does, and he doesn’t try to hide it either. He’ll sit there at a lunch table in the middle of the cafeteria clawing up his nose like he’s digging for gold and pulling out a giant wet one that hangs off his dirty finger. The runny snot is so long and gooey that, in order to eat it, he has to stick his tongue out and tilt his head to the side to get under the booger. He doesn’t seem to care that every kid in the school is watching him because the whole cafeteria will start chanting “Pee Pee Pig Pen Piss Pot” until the Bull looks up from her desk at the front of the lunchroom with her mean eyes and her red face and everyone goes quiet. But then he still eats the booger.
I ask my dad, “Why did we have to buy their car?”
He said, “Because it was for sale and the price was right. Why? Do you have a problem with it?”
“No,” I say. He’s in a bad mood so I decide not to mention all the dried boogers I found on the bottom of the back seat when I had to clean up all the old newspapers, empty soda cans, candy wrappers, smelly beach towels, and oil cans because I knew if I mentioned the boogers I’d have to clean them and I am not touching no stinking dried-out snot rockets.
When Tommy sees the new car, he calls it the “Shit Mobile” because it’s brown with an all-brown interior and “it’s a total piece of shit.” I guess I should be used to having a crappy old car like the Shit Mobile because we’ve always had crappy old cars except in 1972 when we got a brand-new Chevy Impala. I was too young to really remember that car, but I’ve seen it in family pictures. It got stolen when my dad took it into work one day. Can you believe someone would actually steal a policeman’s car right off the street when it’s parked down the block from the precinct?
“But that’s New York, kid. Land of the free, home of the brazen,” he says. “And that’s why we don’t buy new cars anymore.”
On the drive to the Bronx, it had started raining, which made me feel better because it meant I wouldn’t be missing out on anything fun with my friends. Me and Tommy sit in the back seat of the Shit Mobile and for no reason at all, Tommy starts punching me in the thigh and giving me dead legs. My father threatens to pull the car over to smack the crap out of him but my mom just wants peace and quiet, so she tells me to jump in the front seat and sit between her and my dad. Tommy loves this because now he can lie down and have the whole back seat to himself. Within minutes, he’s snoring, sleeping off another hangover.
As we drive, I point out all the cars on the side of the road that have been stripped. Anytime your car dies and you have to leave it on the side of the highway to get gas or find a pay phone to call a tow truck, you’re pretty much guaranteed that by the time you get back, something will be stripped from it. If you’re only gone for a little while, it’s usually just the hub caps. If you’re gone for a long time, they’ll take the tires too. But if you have to leave it overnight, everything will be gone, doors, fenders, bumpers, seats, even the steering wheel.
My mom is terrified this new piece of crap we’re driving will break down and we’ll have to pull over on the Grand Central Parkway and sit in the car and wait for my dad to return with the tow truck. That happened once last winter on the Cross Bronx. Our old Pinto’s gas gauge was broken so anytime my dad put gas in the car, he’d write down on an index card he kept clipped to the visor how many gallons he put in and what the mileage was. This way he could keep track of when he needed to fill it up. So that day last December, when the old Pinto started sputtering and then just died right in the middle of the highway, my dad knew something was fishy. It was embarrassing enough we caused a traffic jam, but it got even worse when me and Tommy had to help my dad push the car to the side of the road and all the crazy New York drivers were honking and screaming and yelling at us and calling us schmucks and assholes and cocksuckers. My dad isn’t the kind of guy to let people talk to his kids like that, so he was cursing back at them, giving them the finger, telling guys to pull over and say that to his face while my mom sat behind the steering wheel yelling at us to just keep pushing for Christ’s sake. When we finally got the car on the shoulder my dad grabbed Tommy.
“I’ll give you one chance to tell me the truth. Did you and your asshole friends take the car out this week?”
Tommy nodded. I knew he’d tell the truth because our dad is a cop, and they get trained to tell when someone is lying to them.
“So, it’s bad enough that you stole my car and took it without permission when you don’t even have a driver’s license, but you’re also too stupid to cover your tracks and fill the tank with gas?”
Tommy shrugs.
“That’s all you have to say for yourself?”
Tommy says, “I didn’t think I used that much gas.”
That pisses my father off because Tommy says it like he could give a shit.
“So, because of your stupidity and your arrogance and your thoughtlessness I have to go try and find a gas station and leave you and your little brother and your mother by the side of the road. But you know what? I’m not gonna do that, you’re gonna do that.”
My mom stepped in. “You are not going to let him walk down this highway alone, let alone send him up into the South Bronx to find a gas station.”
“What’s the alternative option? I go and leave all of you by the side of the road? Or we all walk to find a gas station and leave the car here for the vultures? He’s seventeen. He can handle it. And it’s his fault we’re in this mess.”
Dad gave Tommy a gas can and the lug wrench from the trunk, which on a Ford Pinto is actually in the front of the car because the engine is in the back. This was a problem for Pinto drivers and their passengers because if you got rear-ended in a Pinto, the car could explode, which is why the Pinto was sometimes called the “Barbecue That Seats Four.” Anyway, my dad told Tommy to walk up the Cross Bronx to the next exit and find a gas station.
“The can is for the gas. The wrench is for anybody who might try to jump you.”
Luckily, no one tried to jump him, and he was back with some gas in an hour.
To get to the Bronx from our house we usually take the Throgs Neck Bridge but today we take the Cross Island to the Grand Central to the Triborough and then cut through Manhattan and over the Willis Avenue Bridge. When we take this route we drive past the big park in Flushing Meadows near Shea Stadium, where they held the 1964 World’s Fair. Every time we pass by this spot, my dad will tease my mom about the Greek guy she dated before she met my dad.
“Here we go boys. Get ready to hear all about Benny Baklava and what a grand time your mother had at the World’s Fair.”
Mom just laughs. “His name was not Baklava and you know it. And he was a very nice young man.”
I guess Benny the Greek was some kind of champion swimmer or something and he performed in the water shows they did during the World’s Fair. Because my mom would go watch Benny the Greek anytime he performed, she spent a lot of time at the World’s Fair and knows everything about the place. Her favorite attraction to point out is the ruins of the Aqua Theater because that’s where Benny did his thing. It’s falling apart now and it’s another thing that breaks my mom’s heart.
“Boys, you should have seen what it was like in ’64. It was like walking into the future,” she said. “It gave you a feeling of such promise. And now look at it. In ruins. Rusted and rotting.”
She goes on to tell us all about the Unisphere, which is that huge globe of the world you can still see from the highway. She points out the New York Pavilion with the Tent of Tomorrow and its three observation towers, which are now covered in fifteen years’ worth of pigeon shit. I ask her about the two old rocket ships that are still there, and she says they’re all that’s left of the Space Park. I love to see the rocket ships and I’ve got my face pressed up to the window to get a better look but it’s raining harder now and it’s tough to see anything.
I got to admit, it’s always a little depressing to see this place my mom loves so much is now ruined, rotting and rusting, but on a rainy day like this, it’s even more gloomy. As we drive away from the old World’s Fair site my mom gets quiet and I see the sadness in her eyes is back. And I can feel I’ve got the sadness in my eyes as well. Maybe the sadness is contagious or maybe it’s a family trait, like the freckles on my nose I got from my mom that she says she got from her mom even though she doesn’t remember any freckles on her mom because her mom died when she was young and she barely remembers anything about her and there is just the one picture of her on the deck of the boat coming over from Ireland and it’s old and grainy and in black and white so you can’t tell if she has freckles or not but Pop McSweeney said oh she was a beauty with a face full of freckles and that’s where you get them from young man, so you do.
The sadness continued when we got to Pop and Gilligan’s because Pop was getting old and must have already been sick because he barely got up from his chair. It made me feel weird to see him so weak with the life all but out of him and I remember feeling guilty that I didn’t want to be there because when I was little, I used to love coming over to his apartment. Maybe it was because I was getting older and when you get older, hanging out with grandparents just starts to get boring. But I think it was mostly because Pop couldn’t do the stuff he used to do that made it fun to be with him.
Pop used to take me and Tommy up to their roof because you can see Yankee Stadium from there and if a game is going on you could hear the crowd and the announcers and the organ like you were right there in the stands even if you couldn’t see the field. Pop didn’t like baseball because he was a Paddy-off-the-boat, but he knew we did, so he always made sure we came to visit on game days. But today’s game was rained out, so we didn’t go up to the roof.
If it wasn’t baseball season, he would invite us out onto the fire escape when he went out there to smoke his pipe. After he married Gilligan, he started having to smoke his pipe outside because she didn’t like the smell of tobacco and wouldn’t let him smoke in the apartment. I thought that was crazy because I loved the smell and now anytime I get a whiff of someone smoking a pipe I think of Pop.
“Lads, step out here to my office and let us discuss the state of the world, shall we now?” he would tell us as he climbed out his window.
Tommy and I would join him out there and sit on old wooden milk crates as he stood against the railing and looked out down the street to the Grand Concourse. As he lit his pipe and smoked it, you had no choice but to stare at his hands. Hands like Thurman Munson’s catcher’s mitt, as my dad would say, because they were huge and swollen and his fingers were as thick as Italian sausages and crooked from getting broken all the time at work.
“You can’t spend a life smashing rock without smashing a few of your fingers in the process. So you can’t,” Pop would say.
Pop was a sandhog, which is kinda like a miner, only instead of digging for coal or diamonds, they build tunnels, like the Lincoln Tunnel, which is the job Pop is most proud of. Anytime we go to New Jersey to visit my mom’s brothers, Mike and Mark, we always take the Lincoln.
“That’s my father’s handiwork all around us,” my mom says as we drive through the tunnel from Manhattan. When we drive through the Lincoln there’s no sadness in her eyes, only pride.
When we’d get to my Uncle Mike’s house, Pop would be there sitting in the kitchen, smoking his pipe, because in Mike’s house a man can enjoy his pipe and not be chased out onto the fire escape to face the elements, so he can.
“You take the Lincoln?” Pop would ask when we arrived.
“We did.”
“And you know who gave years of his life to that tunnel so you and yours wouldn’t have to take a ferry across the Hudson, don’t you?”
“We do.”
“We did a fine job too, that tunnel is a piece of history that will live on long after we’re all gone, even if my years digging that hole will end up being the death of me.”
You see, when they build tunnels, they dig down really deep into the ground and then put dynamite sticks into the bedrock and blow it up. The sandhogs then go down into the hole and pick up all these huge chunks of broken stone and lug them into the mining carts to be carried out.
“But the tunnel is thick with tiny bits of rock and stone dust floating about and as you breathe, you can feel the air has to fight its way down your throat, so it does.”
It sounds like the worst job you could ever have, especially when you see the state of Pop’s hands and I always wondered why didn’t he just become a bread baker when he got here to America because that’s what he did in Ireland and I know he was happy baking bread because he’s got a picture hanging in his hallway of when he’s young and smiling and standing proudly in front of the McSweeney’s Bakery wagon with his horse, Terrence Joseph—who, let it be known, was the finest horse in all of County Westmeath, so he was, and I still miss him till this day, so I do.
“But that was hard work too, waking up before the sun to stand in front of a hot oven all day but not nearly as hard as heading down into the hole to dig out the rock and suck in the dust,” he’d say. “But there was no call for an Irish baker in the Bronx when the place was crawling with Italians.”
My absolute favorite visits to Pops used to be on Saturdays because after dinner all his old Irish friends would show up for a session. It was usually the same three guys but sometimes there could be nine or ten of them. There was Brady, the guy who played the fiddle at the wake, and another guy who played a guitar and another guy named Frankie who played the accordion. Pop didn’t play any instruments, but he could sing. As the band would play, Pop would pick us up to sit us down on the kitchen counter and say, “Pay attention lads, these are the songs that tell our story.” He and the men would then play and sing and dance for hours. Even my mom and dad would join in. My dad didn’t know the words to any of the old Irish songs but of course my mom knew them all from the times she sat on the bars in all the pubs along Third Avenue waiting for Pop to finish his pint and finish his song before sending her home on the El with what was left of his paycheck.
One day out on the fire escape, Pop let me and Tommy take a drag on his pipe. Tommy said he liked it and didn’t cough at all. I guess I did it wrong because I couldn’t stop coughing for ten minutes and Gilligan heard me and knew what Pop did and she yelled at him.
“Isn’t that just grand, letting the boys smoke from your pipe. And the next thing you know, you’ll be taking them down to the pub for a pint, so you will.”
Pop winks and we laugh as Gilligan walks off in a huff. “Next year lads, we’ll go for that pint,” he says.
But next year is here and we won’t go for that pint because Pop is gone.
On the drive home I ask if we can stop at the Fulton Fish Market, but my parents say it’s been a long day and they’re tired and just want to get home.
“Besides, at this hour we’ll just take the Throgs Neck and be home in no time,” she says.
The Fulton Fish Market, if you don’t know, is this place in Manhattan where all the fish for New York City gets delivered before it then goes out to all the seafood shops and restaurants. My dad took us there a few years ago on our drive home from Uncle Mike’s house. It was really late, maybe three or four in the morning, and we had taken the Lincoln Tunnel into Manhattan to take the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel into Brooklyn to take the Belt Parkway out to Long Island.
“Let’s take the boys to see the fish market,” my dad said that night. “They should see it when it’s really up and running.”
“At this hour? No. Let’s just get home already,” my mom said.
“It’s two minutes out of our way. And there’s nobody on the road anyhow.”
“But knowing you, you’ll get to talking to somebody and we’ll be there till the sun is up.”
I held my breath because I had seen this before. This was another one of those moments where my parents could launch into a big fight depending on what my dad would say next.
“Come on, I think the boys will enjoy it. Especially Tommy.” Tommy used to love fishing and this was years ago when he was still a nice kid and he started begging my mom to please let us go and like I told you, Tommy used to be her favorite, so of course, she had to say yes, but you could tell she was still pissed about it.
The Fulton Fish Market is the craziest place you’ve ever seen. There were tons of trucks blocking all the streets and gangs of all these working guys in aprons and rubber boots pushing carts back and forth across the street from the docks to the warehouses and all the trucks and all the carts are packed with all kinds of fish. They had tuna, salmon, sword, sea bass, striped bass, sea scallops, bay scallops, clams, mussels, lobster, and my mother’s favorite, oysters.
“Your mother thinks she’s some kind of aristocrat with her taste for the oysters,” my dad said.
Of course my dad did know one of the main guys there, who he called the Professor, and of course the Professor was happy to see my dad, because my dad had helped him out when the Professor’s son got jammed up for stealing a car so the Professor had a few dozen oysters as a gift for my mom so she wouldn’t be so mad when we were still at the fish market as the sun was coming up just like she said we would be. The Professor also explained to us that oysters used to be so cheap you could even buy them on the street corner from a guy with a cart like you can buy a frankfurter from the hot dog stand today.
“That’s how Pearl Street got its name. But not from the pearl of the oyster but because so many people ate oysters and then dumped their shells on the street, the whole block looked as shiny as a pearl.”
“You see that,” my dad said, “That’s why he’s called the Professor. Because he knows more about the fish market than anybody else in New York.”
I loved every second of it—the fishmongers yelling at the truck drivers and the truck drivers screaming at each other, the boats at the dock unloading the fish, and the fish being put on ice in the old wooden stalls. It was all so busy and loud and exciting—except for the smell.
“If you got a sensitive nose, kid, then Fulton Street ain’t for you,” said the Professor.
When the sun came up and we got back in the car to drive home, my mom smiled at my dad and said, “The boys enjoyed that. I’m glad we stopped, despite the smell.”
Since then, anytime I smell fish, I don’t think of the any of the fishing trips I’ve taken with my dad, I think of the Fulton Fish Market and my mom’s smile in the front seat. But tonight, we don’t stop on Fulton Street, we just drive straight home and there are no smiles in the front seat.