I

To Willie: “Bless you, damn you. Love, Joe”

My father was a god in my eyes when I was growing up. His name was William Pepitone, and he was called Willie Pep after the fighter, but my father was bigger and a helluva lot tougher than the former featherweight champion of the world. My father was six feet, one inch tall, he weighed about 190 pounds, and his muscular shoulders and chest sloped down to a thirty-inch waist from working construction all his life. He had been a Golden Gloves fighter, not a boxer, as a kid. He was a puncher who kept coming, and he did that all his life, too. He was the toughest guy in my neighborhood. I saw him fight, in the street, at least fifty times. He never lost. Never. And this was in a very tough neighborhood, the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, a semislum that was populated almost entirely by Italian and Irish hard-noses. He had a furious temper and, when he wasn’t spoiling the shit out of me, he was beating the shit out of me.

Willie’s main thing was family, the Pepitones and Caiazzos. Nobody could mess with any of them without having to deal with my father. He took care of the physical problems in this very physical neighborhood, and my grandfather, Vincent Caiazzo, took care of the housing problems. Vincent Caiazzo was a shoemaker who did very well for all of us, even though he so disbelieved in banks that he saved his money in a water pipe in his shop. At the close of business every day, he rolled up his bills and with a long pole rammed them into a forty-foot pipe. To make a withdrawal, he rammed farther until cash flowed out the other end. “Who ever think anyone putta their money in a water pipe?” he would say, and he was right.

When I was very young, Vincent owned two three-story apartment buildings that he filled with members of the Caiazzo and Pepitone families. Later he sold them to buy two bigger, five-story apartment buildings that housed more of the family. The older Italians were all heavily into family togetherness, all looking out for one another, genuinely caring for one another—a particularly warm and lovely thing it seems to me these days. My family, the Pepitones and Caiazzos, has had Sunday dinner en masse at Vincent’s for as long as I can remember. A couple of dozen Italians sitting around eating, talking loudly, throwing bread at one another, and laughing. My father, who enjoyed kidding, would lead the laughter. But it ended abruptly if I got out of line.

I remember one Sunday when I was eight years old going to my grandfather’s with Willie. My mother had gone over earlier with my younger brothers and my dog. My grandfather kept telling me every time I’d go there that he was going to kill my dog because it peed on his tomato plants out back and damaged them. “One day I kill that dog, Joe,” he’d say. “I cook him.” This day my dog wasn’t there when I arrived. I got scared and went right to the oven. I opened the door and inside, staring at me, was a head, with two shining eyes and a tongue hanging out like a dog . . . cooking.

“My dog!” I screamed, bursting into tears. “Look what Grandpa did to my dog!” I grabbed the head and yanked it out of the oven, but it burned my hands and I dropped it on the floor.

My grandfather came running in from the living room. “That’s my capozell on the floor!” he yelled.

I started punching him and kicking him. “You killed my dog!”

“That’s my capozell! Sheep head!”

My father rushed in, saw me kicking my grandfather, and knocked me to the floor, yanked me up, and knocked me down again. It was a sheep head, one of my grandfather’s favorite meals, eyes and all. Just then my mother, Angelina, who is called Ann, came in with my dog on a leash. She’d been walking it.

“Willie, that’s enough!” she yelled at my father, who was still beating me. But she didn’t step in to stop him. She was as afraid of Willie as anyone, fearing he’d turn his terrible temper on her. He never pulled his punches, left me black-and-blue and bloody, particularly as I got older. My mother, who never raised a hand to me, could do nothing about it. Some of the blood that was spilled out of me by Willie was her fault. She was always a very nervous person, and she had a hysterectomy when I was ten, had to live on tranquilizers after that. If I was two minutes late getting home at night, she would put a pillow on the windowsill and lean out, looking for me, worrying. Anything could happen on the streets in that neighborhood. If you stepped out of your area into another neighborhood you’d get beaten up. So she had reason to worry. But the more she worried, the angrier my father got. I’d come home five minutes late, and Willie would punch the shit out of me.

When I look back, I don’t know how my mother was able to get through it with my father and me, all the crap we brought down on her. My father was such a jealous person that my mother could never really relax, be comfortable, enjoy herself in any kind of social situation. Even with her sisters’ husbands she had to avert her eyes if Willie was present. She’d just glance at a guy at a party, and if that guy’s eyes paused on her, Willie would jump up and scream at him, challenge him, embarrass him . . . and Ann.

My mother worked most of her life in a clothing factory in Brooklyn. Willie always picked her up after work because his construction job ended earlier. One evening he was about thirty minutes late. My mother’s boss was nice enough to give her a ride home. When he dropped her off, Willie pulled up, leaped out of his car, and screamed at this man, threatened to punch him out if he ever drove my mother home again. My mother ran into the house crying.

I don’t see how she was able to push aside all the pain, all the fears through all those years. She is truly an amazing human being, with a great, all-giving heart and super strengths, resources. She loved my father because he worked hard and was a good family man, because he would do anything, as she would, for anyone in our family. Like me, she had to be proud of a guy who would physically stand up to anyone, anyone, if his family had been threatened, had reason to be afraid.

My Uncle Red, Louie Caiazzo, is my mother’s younger brother, and he was also like a kid brother to Willie. My parents took him every place they went. One day when I was about eight and Louie was about eighteen, he walked into our apartment all beat up. There was dried blood under his nose, a bruise on his cheek, a mouse under one eye. Willie’s jaw got very tight, like the skin on a drum, and his eyes kind of clenched, as they always did when he got mad. “What in the hell happened to you?” Willie said. Louie’s eyes filled up, he was so ashamed of having Willie see him in that condition. But he was more ashamed of going home like that, so he’d come to Willie. I guess he also came to Willie because he knew my father would straighten out whoever had beaten him. Willie always took care of such things promptly. Louie sucked in the tears and told Willie he’d gotten into an argument with the guy who owned the hardware store in the area, a big guy who’d just beaten the shit out of him over nothing.

“Come on,” Willie said, and stormed out of the apartment, followed by Louie, who could barely keep up. I knew my father wouldn’t allow me to go along, but I didn’t want to miss the action. I waited a couple of minutes, then ran to the hardware store. Willie and Louie were standing outside the window, Louie was pointing through the glass, and then Willie nodded. “Okay. Wait here,” I heard Willie say; then he went inside. I walked right up beside Louie by the doorway, knowing he wouldn’t care if I was there.

“Listen, I need a piece of copper pipe,” Willie was saying to the guy. “One-inch pipe about five inches long.”

The guy turned to a bin behind the counter and handed him a length of pipe. “How’s this?”

Willie hefted it in his hand, staring at it, then closed his fingers around it. “Yeah,” he said, “that’s just right.” Then bing! he hit the guy in the jaw and, as the guy went down, Willie yelled, “You beat up my brother-in-law? Get up, you bastard!” Stupidly, the guy got up; Willie hit him again and busted his nose. He was lying on the floor bleeding, half conscious, when Willie tossed the piece of pipe on his chest. “You’re not worth a shit, but your pipe does the job.”

He came outside and said, “Let’s go, Louie. That guy ever messes with you again, it’ll be the last—” Then he noticed me. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“I was just walking by, looking for a stickball game, Dad.”

“You little wise-ass!” He raised his hand to me, then lowered it with a smile. “Come on, we’re all going home.”

Willie took on everyone, even racket guys who could and did lay very heavy beatings or worse on people who gave them trouble. It wasn’t long after the hardware store problem had been corrected that my father heard that this guy I’ll call Valonni was badmouthing someone in our family all over the neighborhood. Valonni owned a clothing store, but he was also large in the rackets. Willie went to see him at his store and got there just as the guy was rolling up his awning, closing for the day. “What’s this shit I hear you’re saying about my family?”

“Get lost,” the guy said, pulling out the awning rod.

Willie hit him on the point of the chin, and Valonni lifted off his feet and did a back dive right through his plate-glass window. “Don’t ever badmouth my family again, you bastard!” He left the guy lying among the broken glass in the window, trying to shake some light back into his head.

Within hours, bad guys all over Brooklyn were out looking for my father. Luckily the word got to Jimmy the Bug right away. Jimmy the Bug lived in our building and was a good friend of our family. He was in the numbers business. As soon as he heard what had happened, he came right in to see my father. “Look, Willie,” he said, “stay in this apartment. Don’t go out until I talk to some people. I’ll straighten this thing out.” He did. It only took him a month of steady negotiations to keep Willie alive. But after the first couple of days at home, Willie said, “Fuck them.” My mother ran and got Jimmy the Bug, who told Willie to be patient, that he’d work it out. But that Willie had to think of his family, and if he cared about them at all he wouldn’t leave the apartment. Every day or so he had to come and convince Willie again. But he kept at it, with Willie and the racket guys, and finally negotiated a pardon. When it was over, Willie said, “They still better not badmouth my family unless they like sleeping in windows.” Jimmy the Bug threw his hands up in the air.

Jimmy the Bug had solid juice with both sides of the law. He saved my father from getting arrested for assault one day—after the police had started writing the report. My friend Lemon was the cause of it. We called him Lemon because he was shaped like one: short and round, very fat. He was two years older than I, and Willie had appointed him as my protector against the big guys. “Lemon, anyone hits Joe, you hit them—or I hit you,” my father had told him. Anyway, on this day Lemon, who was about thirteen, and I went to the movie across the street from our apartment: The National Theater, which we called The Itch, because that’s what you did the moment you sat in the place. We were sitting way down front and there was some kind of collection between shows, March of Dimes or something. While the cardboard collection cups were being passed, we saw this little boy, five or six years old, wandering around by us, crying. He was lost. So we got up and walked up the aisle with him, yelling, “Anybody lose a kid? We’ve got a lost kid here!”

The movie came on and we were still yelling, which brought the manager running down to us. He took us in back and threw us out. “We were just trying to help this kid!” I yelled.

“At the top of your lungs!” he said angrily. “You’re ruining the show for everyone.”

“I’m not leaving!” I yelled, and Lemon yelled, “Me neither!” “Get outta here!” he said, and pushed us out the door. As he did so he kicked me in the ass.

Lemon, who loved to see my father fight, said, “Let’s go tell your dad.” I was so upset, on the verge of tears, I didn’t want to. But Lemon dragged me along and told Willie. The story came out like a hyphenated word: “The-theater-owner-kicked-Joe-in-the-ass-for-us-helping-a-lost-kid!” By then the tears were rolling down my cheeks.

My father grabbed our hands and said, “Come on. Show me the guy.” He was always very careful to go after the right guy. The manager was in the ticket booth when we got back to the theater. “There he is!” cried Lemon. “There he is!”

“You!” my father said, pushing his face against the bars of the booth. “Come out of there. I want to talk to you.” The manager saw the anger on my father’s face and decided the last place he wanted to be was out of that booth. He latched the screen door behind him, then started to close the metal door. But my father stepped behind the booth, punched his hand through the screen, grabbed the guy by the front of his shirt, and dragged him through the split screen. “You kick my son in the ass, huh?” Willie hit him in the face. “For helping a little lost kid, huh?” He hit him again, holding him up with his other hand. “You are a no-good sonofabitch!” He hit him and let him go this time, and the manager sailed backward, his head banging off the sidewalk.

Just then, two policemen ran over from the Eightieth Precinct, which was a few doors up the block across the street. “That’s assault, Pepitone,” one said. “You’re under arrest.”

“What arrest—for smacking a grown man who kicked a kid?”

Each cop grabbed an arm and started marching him across the street. My father turned his head over his shoulder. “Joe, go get Jimmy.”

I ran over to our building and up the two flights of stairs to Jimmy the Bug’s apartment. I told him what had happened and he shook his head, buttoning on his shirt. I followed him into the station house where my father was being booked. Jimmy reached his hand behind him and touched my chest for me to wait there. He walked right up to the desk and leaned in to the officer on duty, who leaned his head close to the numbers baron. Jimmy the Bug whispered something to the policeman, who nodded, signaled one of the arresting officers to come over, whispered something to him, and then said, “All right, Pepitone, get your ass out of here.” Case closed. That was how important Jimmy the Bug was in my neighborhood, a big man and a good man.

Jimmy the Bug was also a very tough man, too. I saw him, not once but several times, tell a cop on the street who was giving him trouble about his business: “You come at me with that kinda shit? Take off that badge and I’ll kick your ass right now! Right here in the fucking street! I’ll destroy you!” And every time, the cop walked away from Jimmy.

He was tough, but my father was the champion. I used to wait for him to come home every evening when I was young. He parked his car in the garage at the end of our street at this time, and every day around five I’d run down there and wait for him, see if he’d brought me anything—which he often did—and walk back to our house with him. One day I went down a little late and my father was already coming down the street—with both of his arms in casts. The plaster ran from his hands all the way up his forearms.

“Dad, Dad! What happened?”

“Just an accident on the job.”

The accident, it turned out, had happened on the head of Willie’s foreman. My father was the number one man on his construction crew because he was the hardest worker. And the guy who owned the construction company loved Willie. He was always doing Willie favors: lending him big cars, giving him extra jobs that brought in good money for little labor—like setting out fresh “bombs,” those round black pots full of fuel oil that were lit around construction sites, on weekends at double-time rates. The foreman was very jealous of Willie, and on this day he tried to give him some crap to do, just to harass him. Willie did not find it amusing. The foreman told him he wanted some heavy piece of equipment moved, and Willie said, fine, he’d get some of the guys to take care of it. The foreman said, No, I want you to move it. Willie suggested what he might do to himself with the shovel handle lying nearby. “I’m the foreman here, Pepitone, and you move that thing or I’m docking you!” He was a large man and he grabbed Willie’s arm. “Now get to it!”

Willie slapped his hand away and yelled, “You can dock me—but I’m decking you, you big fat sonofabitch!” And he punched this guy from one side of the job to the other. Guys ran over to pull him off; he tossed them away and kept hitting the guy in the head until both his hands were broken. They took six weeks to heal, and by that time the foreman was out of the hospital. He never bugged Willie again.

If my father was hard on people who crossed him, he was even harder on me, it often seemed. I have two brothers—Jimmy, who is a year and a half younger than I am, and Billy, who is six years younger than I am. My father would tell me that I was responsible for them, that I had to look out for them all the time. “They come home hurt,” he’d tell me, “you’re gonna get a beating. Understand?”

So Jimmy would get in a fight and come home with a bloody nose, and my father would be waiting for me. “I told you to look out for your brother!” he’d yell, and without another word, no explanation, nothing, he’d beat the hell out of me with his fists, bloody my nose, leave bruises all over my face. Little Billy would fall off his bike, come home with a scraped-up knee, and my father would just whale the shit out of me. “But it wasn’t my fault! I wasn’t there!” “You shoulda been there!” Rap, bang, crack. One time Billy hit a fire hydrant on his bike, flipped over the handlebars, smacked his head. “I was there, Dad! I was right there, I just couldn’t catch him!” “You shoulda caught him!” Rap, bang, crack.

He had a flare temper and he was very strict. He said do something, I had better do it—or duck. Whatever time he said I had to be home, eight o’clock, nine o’clock, I better not be a minute late.

I remember the evening he brought me home a new bicycle. It was a Schwinn with chrome fenders, a chrome headlight, a chrome horn, a chrome basket, a fancy reflector on the back. It was beautiful! I was so excited I almost cried. “Thanks, Dad! Wait’ll Lemon and the guys see this!”

“All right, Joe. But watch the time. It’s five-fifteen. We eat at six. You be back here to eat at six. No later.”

I rode off down the block on my new bike, met the guys, and they all went what we then called apeshit. I let them have a couple of rides each, I had a couple. Then I pedaled home. My father was waiting on the front stoop. He was looking at his watch. It was three minutes after six.

“Get off that goddamn bike, you little bastard!”

He jumped down the steps, grabbed my shiny new bike, raised it over his head, and smashed it down the steps to the basement. The headlight flew off and all kinds of other pieces. But it wasn’t enough. He leaped down the basement steps, kicked in the spokes, lifted the bike again, and smashed it against the wall, just kept smashing it and smashing it against that concrete wall until there was nothing left in his hands except twisted metal.

I ran up to my room crying, thinking, Three minutes late, three minutes! I was lying on the bed crying when he came in and beat me. But I didn’t feel that beating. All I could think of was that mutilated bike. I’ll never forget it. The next day he bought me a new bike.

Usually, right after he’d beaten me, my father would cool down and apologize to me, saying he was sorry, that he didn’t mean to hit me so hard. Almost every time he’d beat me, he’d come back minutes later and apologize. Finally I told him, “Dad, don’t apologize to me—just stop beating me, or at least make sure I deserve it.” But he couldn’t control that temper. It would just explode!

He had no patience whatsoever, NONE. I liked to be with him, do things with him, I admired him so much, respected him so much as a man. He’d take me fishing, crabbing, to ball games, and for a long time I enjoyed it. But as the years went on, it got harder and harder.

He wanted to do things with me, to teach me, but so many times he’d just blow it. I remember when I was fourteen or fifteen he let me drive the car, and I did okay, just steering it around. So he decided to teach me to drive. He had a “fluid drive” Chrysler. You could use the clutch or put it in automatic and it would shift itself. You let up on the gas, waited for the click, then you shifted and you pressed the gas again. I wasn’t too sharp with the clutch, but I was all right in automatic.

So we went out in the car and I was driving along very nervously, very tense. My father said, “Relax, Joe, relax.” He was making me more nervous, and the next thing I knew I’d gone through a stop sign. Luckily nothing had been coming in either direction, so there had been no real problem. But Willie blew up, smacking me in the shoulder as hard as he could.

“Get the hell out from behind that wheel!”

I hit the brake, stopped dead. “Why, Dad, we’re okay—”

He grabbed me and yanked me right across his lap, out of the driver’s seat. “You ain’t driving no more till you get some sense!”

“Aw, Dad . . . what the hell.” Shit, it tore me up. I just couldn’t understand why he couldn’t relax, why he couldn’t have patience, couldn’t give me a chance to show him. I wanted so badly to do well when I was with him.

A year or so later, he had the car parked on the block and he gave me the keys because there was a guy coming to charge the battery and Willie himself had to go see his mother. “You wait for the guy to do the charge, let him start it, then put the keys in the house. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

About ten seconds after my father left, the guy came and charged the battery. Then my friend Lemon showed up and we decided to sit in the car and play “driving.” I started it up, and every time a girl would stroll by, I’d race the gas and say, “Hey, how ya doin’? Wanna go for a ride?”

We didn’t get any calls, but finally Lemon said, “Why don’t we take it around the block, Joe?”

“Are you shitting me, man? Take Willie’s car around the block? He’d kill our asses.”

“Hell, he won’t be back for an hour. We’ll just go around the block and be back here in ten minutes. C’mon.”

I put it in third and let the clutch out very, very easy and we pulled out. I knew I didn’t have to shift, but I forgot I had to put in the clutch when we stopped. We putted up to the corner, stopped, and stalled. I restarted, turned the corner, putted up to the next one, and stalled again. I made the third corner without stalling and I was feeling pretty good. I speeded on up to about ten miles per hour, and cruised right back to our parking space. But it was gone.

“Lemon—someone’s taken the spot! There’s no place to park!” I looked around frantically, and every space on the street was occupied. “Goddamn! My father’ll come back and find his car in the middle of the street!”

I thought I knew the owner of the car that was in our spot, and I ran to his apartment and asked him to please move. He said it wasn’t his car. I ran back to Lemon. “What the hell are we gonna do, man? Willie will kill us.”

“Uh, Joe,” Lemon said, “I better be getting home. It’s getting late.”

“Lemon—it’s eight fucking o’clock! Going around the block was your idea! You stay with me!”

I turned on the engine and started backing down the street, looking for a space, when all of a sudden Willie came running over, screaming, “Turn off that goddamn engine!” He grabbed me by the throat through the open window and dragged me out of the car, plopping me on the sidewalk. He leaned down and rapped me twice. From where I was lying I could see Lemon’s fat ass running up the street. He was in a crouch, as if to keep Willie from seeing him. Willie saw him.

“You ever hang around with my son again, I’ll kick your ass, you sonofabitch. Make him drive my car!”

“Dad,” I said, “I just pulled out to give a guy a space. I figured you’d want to test the battery.”

“You lying sonofabitch!” He punched me again.

“You’re right, Dad. It was Lemon’s idea. He made me—” He punched me again.

I deserved it that time, and a lot of other times. But there were still others, too many others, when there was no way I should have been beaten. And those times really hurt, when I hadn’t earned the whacks. What hurt even more was when my father didn’t keep his word, when he would tell me we’d do something together, and then change his mind.

Next to playing ball, crabbing was my favorite thing as a kid. So many times on a Saturday my father would tell me we were going crabbing the next morning. We’d take our nets to the Cross Bay Bridge at daylight and catch baskets of crabs. But the night before, I’d be so excited I couldn’t sleep. I’d go to bed early to get up at five o’clock in the morning and I’d just lie there all night praying, Don’t rain, don’t let it rain!

Then at five in the morning I’d go into my Dad’s room and shake him. “Come on, Dad. Get up. It’s time to go.”

And he’d roll over. “No, I decided we’re not going today.”

He did that to me quite a bit, and I hated it. This would hurt me more than anything. I know now he didn’t mean it, that when he said we would go crabbing he fully planned to do so . . . but that when I’d waken him in those dark mornings, the fatigue from a week’s construction labor would hit him, or perhaps the residues from that extra glass of wine the night before, and he’d cancel. He didn’t intentionally disappoint me. He did the best he could for me in all things. He wanted only good for me, wanted me to do right, wanted to teach me about obligations, responsibilities. It took me years and years to understand, to realize that the beatings were a reflex, his way of teaching me, the only way he knew. The constant beatings followed by apologies were not the best way, not for me. Willie didn’t know that. I think he loved me too much, wanted too much for me, expected too much from me.

I know I loved him too much. As a little kid I always wanted to be with him. I remember sitting next to him at the dinner table and looking up at him like a puppy. He’d look down at me, and that small warm smile would tingle me, my whole body. He was so alive, such a vibrant man, always kidding, putting people on. Every Sunday, when twenty to twenty-five members of the family would assemble for dinner at my grandfather’s, Willie would lead the conviviality, the laughter, keep everyone loose, happy. They all looked up to him, had so much respect for him, and I bathed in the glow around him. I wonder if ever a father has been such a god to his son? I know now, though, why being alternately praised and put down by a god was so painfully confusing, disorienting. Bless you, Willie; damn you. I miss you.