Return to Shepherd Avenue

by Charlie Carillo

  “Reservoir?” he asked, without loss of breath.

  “Yeah,” I gasped. “That’s what I’ve been doing.”

  “Okay.”

  We headed for the reservoir, which was surrounded by a rough dirt path. Suddenly he stuck his hand out in front of my chest, as if to stop me, but he didn’t break stride. He was introducing himself.

  “I’m Justin.”

  “Joe.”

  We shook hands without stopping. It was the firmest grip I’d ever experienced, a hand thick with calluses.

  “You’re in some shape, Justin.”

  “Pretty good, I guess.”

  “One of us is breathing hard, and it ain’t you.”

  “We can take it down a notch.”

  “No, no, it’s good for me to get pushed a little. Let’s go.”

  He chuckled. “Two laps?”

  “Hey, why not?”

  We completed two laps around the reservoir, ending it where we started, me collapsing with my hands on my knees, Justin remaining upright and actually running in place, just to show me how much he had left.

  “Hey, man, you okay?”

  “Mild coronary. Nothing serious. Easy trot back, okay?”

  “I’m good with that.”

  I felt great. A hard run breaks out a deep sweat you don’t get from a lazy run, and the cool-down run that follows is almost like a vacation. We were moving at an easy conversational pace. I could run and talk at the same time.

  “You on a track team, Justin?”

  He shook his head. “Baseball.”

  “No kidding? What position?”

  “Short.”

  I stopped running and grabbed his elbow. He was startled and jerked himself out of my grip, then squared off, ready to fight.

  “What the fuck, man?”

  I held my hands out, palms up, to show I meant no harm.

  “I’m sorry! It’s just—are you Justin Wilson?“

  “Yeah.”

  I’ve been a baseball fan all my life, and I followed the game in the pages of the Post. Justin Wilson of Franklin K. Lane High School was being touted as the greatest Brooklyn high school player since Shawon Dunston, who’d gone number one in the 1982 draft and went on to play eighteen years in the majors.

  And here he was, eyes wide, fists clenched, ready to pound the shit out of this crazy Caucasian who’d grabbed his arm.

  “Easy, guy,” I said, making placating motions with my hands. “I’ve been reading about you. You’re some ballplayer.”

  He lowered his fists, seeming embarrassed. “Don’t go grabbin’ people ’round here,” he said. It was friendly advice, not a lecture.

  “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  “Cool.”

  We walked the remaining two blocks. I dared to speak again.

  “Do you live on Shepherd Avenue?”

  “Uh-huh. Across the street from you. You just got here, right?”

  “Well, I lived here when I was a kid.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit. Same house I just bought.”

  “Oh, man,” he chuckled. “Never heard of nobody movin’ back here!”

  “Well, I always liked the house.”

  “You gonna regret takin’ them bars down.”

  “Hope not . . . want to hear something funny? My uncle, who grew up in my house, was a baseball star. Got signed by the Pittsburgh Pirates, back in ‘61.”

  Justin stopped walking. “No shit?”

  “Swear to God. He played shortstop for Lane. Had good power, just like you. It was unusual in those days for a shortstop to have power.”

  Justin hesitated before asking, “He make it?”

  I shook my head. “Washed out in his first year in the minors. Couldn’t hit the curve.”

  Justin squared his shoulders. “Huh. Curveballs don’t bother me none.”

  “That’s what I hear.”

  It was incredible. This kid without a line on his face was about to get the better part of a million dollars to sign with whatever team drafted him, according to the New York sportswriters.

  Unless he accepted an offer from one of the dozen or so colleges offering him a free ride. It was a tough choice and it was coming up soon, yet somehow he seemed as calm as the Dalai Lama.

  We reached Shepherd Avenue, and now came an awkward moment. Was Justin going to join me every morning for a run? Would I be expected to wait for him before taking off? I liked the kid but didn’t want to get hemmed into a schedule.

  He made it easy for me, patting my back and saying, “Thanks for the run, man. If I see you, I see you.”

  With those words the greatest baseball prospect in America was gone, trotting across the street and into a little clapboard house that looked as if the hard slam of a door would send it crumbling to the ground.

  Chapter Eight

  In the afternoons, with the day’s painting done, I took leisurely walks in the neighborhood. But not too leisurely. It was wise to look as if you had a destination while walking in East New York.

  I went past the house where my tough little friend, Mel DiGiovanna, had lived with her aunt, until she was banished to another relative on Long Island after we were caught playing “doctor” in my grandfather’s garage. Past the house where Johnny Gallo lived, the auto mechanic and resident heartthrob who’d knocked up his girlfriend at age eighteen. And past the tiny brick house that was home to Zip Aiello, the strange old odd-job man who’d taught me how to collect and redeem deposit bottles, a scheme that was going to finance my escape from Shepherd Avenue—an escape that was thwarted when I tripped and fell on a midnight run to the elevated train, with my 200-pound grandmother hot on my heels.

  Ten years old, making a break from those mean streets—only to return fifty years later.

  I crossed Atlantic Avenue and made my way to St. Rita’s church, where my grandmother dropped her skepticism for an hour each week to worship God, just in case He did exist. This was where I’d come to know Deacon David Sullivan, the man who caught me and Mel in the garage and ratted us out to our families.

  I dared to enter the church in my paint-spattered clothes. The church is always the best-maintained building in a poor neighborhood, and St. Rita’s was no exception. The floors gleamed and an old Hispanic woman with her hair tied up in a bright red bandanna was busily digging wax out of the candleholders, whistling softly as she worked. She didn’t hear me approach and clutched a hand to her chest at my sudden appearance.

  “Jesus, you scared me!”

  “I’m sorry. I used to come here when I was a kid. Just wanted to see the old place.”

  She gestured at me with her wax-digging tool. “Shouldn’t go sneakin’ up on people like that.”

  “I really am sorry . . . Listen, this is a long shot, I know, but would you happen to know a priest named David Sullivan?”

  “Who?”

  “Actually, he was a deacon at the time. We called him Deacon Dave. I realize it’s a crazy question. I mean, this was back in 1961.”

  A jolt of awareness came to her face. “Oh, that guy!” she said, quickly crossing herself. “I heard about him! Yeah, he died. Been dead a long time.”

  “Really?”

  The old lady looked left and right before whispering, “He had the AIDS.” She shuddered, crossing herself. “That’s what they say.”

  “Whoa.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe you wanna say a prayer for him, got a feelin’ he can use it.”

  She shrugged and turned back to her work, whistling away.

  I went outside and resumed my walk up Atlantic Avenue, numb over the news of Deacon Dave. My grandmother used to feed him Sunday dinners to get brownie points toward heaven, and after he left she’d say: “He’s a nice man, but he seems . . . delicate.”

  I was approaching the building where I’d redeemed all those deposit bottles I collected in ‘61. Back then a gray-haired guy known in the neighborhood as “Nat the Jew” paid a nickel per bottle. The place was still
standing but now it was a garage, with tire recapping a specialty.

  A skinny man with snow-white hair sat in front of the garage in a folding aluminum chair, the kind you’d take on a picnic. His skin was pale and the lobes of his ears hung down almost as low as his chin, the way they always do on very old people. Everything he wore seemed too big for him, including his shoes—an old man’s shoes, with Velcro tabs instead of laces. The collar of his windbreaker was turned up, though the day was far from cold. He was facing the Atlantic Avenue traffic but seemed to be looking beyond it, like a man on a beach staring at the horizon.

  It was the pattern of his hair that jolted me. It was as wavy as corrugated iron, and I’d only ever known one other person with hair like that. It seemed impossible but I had to ask him, as soon as my heart stopped pounding.

  “Excuse me, sir, are you . . . Nat the bottle man?”

  He blinked at me with cloudy blue eyes. I wondered if he’d heard me. Then those eyes got watery, and I knew he’d heard every word.

  “I used to be,” he said, startling me with a strong, confident, non-trembling voice. “Who are you?”

  “A guy who used to bring you bottles.”

  “Don’t shout! I’m goin’ blind, not deaf.” He leaned forward and studied my face. “Which guy?”

  “You’re asking me my name?”

  “You catch on quick. Come closer, my eyes are all shot to hell.”

  I was already directly in front of him, but I squatted so we’d be face-to-face. He squinted as he studied my face, scowling like an archaeologist peering into the past.

  “It was a long time ago, Nat. I was just a kid.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, give me a second . . .”

  Minutes passed. It was as if he were in a trance, until he jolted me with the words: “All right, I give up.”

  “I’m Jo-seph Am-bro-si-o,” I said, punctuating each syllable with a bob of my head, as if to drive the words into the deepest recesses of his memory.

  He didn’t respond for a few seconds. Then the corner of his mouth corkscrewed in recognition.

  “Joseph, Schmoseph,” he growled. “We called you Joey. When’d you get so fancy-schmancy?”

  “You remember me?”

  “Connie and Angie’s kid.”

  “Grandson.”

  “Whatever. Sal’s son. Am I right? Tell me I’m right.”

  “You’re right!”

  He pointed at me with a bony finger. “You tried to run away one night. Am I right? Tell me I’m right.”

  “Right again! And I was carrying all the money you paid me for bottles—my getaway stash!”

  “What the hell are you doin’ here?”

  I spread my hands. “I’m back in the old house, Nat. We’re neighbors again.”

  He stared at me for a few seconds, then shook his head in wonder. He lifted his arm and I thought he wanted to shake hands, but instead he jerked a thumb over his shoulder, toward the garage.

  “There’s another chair like this one in there. Get it, bring it out here, we’ll talk.”

  I already knew that Nat Grossman was a young man when he was liberated from the concentration camp at Auschwitz, where both his parents had died. Kids in the neighborhood used to point at him and whisper things like, “See that guy? He escaped from Hitler, but he don’t like to talk about it!” Nat had lived in the neighborhood for more than sixty years, refusing to move away when his bottle business went belly-up. Instead, he sold his house on Norwood Avenue, moved into a nearby retirement home, and now—at age ninety-eight! —he spent his days seated in that aluminum chair in front of the garage, where the boss allowed him bathroom privileges.

  The city’s Meals on Wheels program delivered breakfast and lunch to Nat each day, right there in front of the garage. He had his dinner at the retirement home, three blocks away. It was a walk Nat made each morning at dawn and each night at sundown.

  I was surprised by that.

  “Kind of dangerous after dark, isn’t it?”

  He spread his hands and shrugged. “Who would mug me? What have I got? What would it prove?”

  “It’s just that you’re so . . . vulnerable.”

  “You mean old.”

  “All right, old. Damn right you’re old! You shouldn’t be out on the streets all day!”

  “Bullshit! These streets?” He stamped his foot three times, like a horse who can count. “They’re mine. This is what I know. This is where I’ll stay, until . . .”

  He didn’t have to finish the sentence. I sighed and said, “I just don’t want you to get hurt, Nat.”

  He chuckled. “I ain’t worried about that.” He looked left and right, then whispered: “Funny thing about these colored kids, Joey. They look at me like I’m a ghost, and they’re afraid of ghosts.”

  He laughed out loud in a way I can only describe as ghostly. “So finally, it’s safe for me to be out on the streets, ‘cause these kids are superstitious. Lucky me, huh?”

  Who the hell was I to challenge the way this man was living his life? I’d forgotten the unspoken neighborhood code, which hadn’t changed since ‘61: Mind your own damn business, and leave everyone the hell alone.

  “Good for you, Nat,” I said. “Goddamn it, this is a miracle, seeing you again!”

  “No, Joey. The miracle is you moving back. All I did was stay alive. No miracle in that.”

  “It is these days.”

  “Oh, you think it was safer here, back then? This was always a rough neighborhood. And no offense, but your people were some of the roughest. Those Italian hoodlums with their guns, they did some real damage!”

  He cocked his head, narrowed his eyes. “Ever hear of Happy Maione? He was with Murder Incorporated. Ever hear of that?“

  I started to worry, because he was getting worked up. Of all the things I didn’t want to do, I mostly didn’t want to be responsible for Nat Grossman’s coronary.

  “I’ve heard of it,” I said softly, hoping to calm him down. “It was a Jewish organization, wasn’t it?”

  “That’s right. And the Jews hired that Italian Maione gangster to kill people. And where do you think he spent his free time?”

  “This neighborhood, I’m guessing.”

  Nat grinned, his teeth long and golden. He pointed upward, as if to indicate heaven.

  “Upstairs from you,” he chuckled. “He was dating your grandmother’s tenant, a pretty girl. Can’t remember her name. But Happy? Him I remember! Sharp dresser. Always tipped his hat to the ladies. Your grandmother, she loved him. Thought he was a real gentleman.”

  I swallowed. “Did he marry the girl?”

  “No, sir. Happy died in the electric chair. Put a little crimp in his romantic life, know what I mean?”

  I shook his hand, oh-so delicately. “Gotta go, Nat. I’ll see you soon.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m easy to find. My address is Right Here—capital R, capital H.”

  I said good-bye, went home and Googled Harold “Happy” Maione. Sure enough, the bottle man’s story held up. Happy had gotten his nickname from the constant grin on his face—a structural thing, like the grin on a dolphin. And according to newspaper accounts of his execution, that grin never left his face, even as all that voltage coursed through his body.

  A legendary crime figure, and he’d made love in one of the rooms I’d just finished painting in my grandfather’s house.

  My house, now. Mine.

  And I would never have known about it unless I’d come across an Auschwitz survivor going strong as he approached the century mark, far outliving Happy Maione and a priest who’d died from AIDS.

  Life is strange. I’d always known that, but Shepherd Avenue was driving that point home, day by day.

  Chapter Nine

  With the upstairs painted, I got going on the first floor—a much tougher job, as Eddie Everything had predicted, with those wild colors needing three coats of white for full coverage.

  I was in the middle of the second coat on my bedroom wal
ls when I was jangled by the doorbell, the first time it had rung since I’d moved in. There on my front stoop stood a short, slight woman in blue jeans and a black T-shirt, with skin the color of a penny you find in the back of a drawer you haven’t opened for a long time.

  Her brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail, revealing small ears and the highest, widest cheekbones I had ever seen. Stunningly attractive, but also a little bit scary, as if she were a werewolf just starting to turn from human being to beast at the rising of the full moon.

  But this was a sunny morning on Shepherd Avenue, not midnight in Transylvania, and the woman glaring at me with raisin-dark eyes was clearly not happy as she stood there with squared shoulders, shifting her weight from foot to foot like a boxer eager for the bell.

  “May I help you?”

  She rested her fists on her hips. “What the hell you doin’ with my boy?”

  A dangerously deep voice, not at all shrill or whiny. I wasn’t expecting that. I cleared my throat.

  “I’m sorry?”

  She folded her arms and shook her head, making the ponytail flick from shoulder to shoulder.

  “Don’t bullshit me. You’re the one goes runnin’ with my Justin, right?”

  “Oh, you’re Justin’s mother!” I extended my hand, which she ignored. “I’m Joe Ambrosio. Would you like to come in?”

  She hesitated, then strode into my house like a parole officer, arms still folded across her chest.

  “I just made coffee,” I said, following her to the kitchen. When she got there she whirled to face me.

  “Look, I gotta know right now—you a chicken hawk?”

  “A what?”

  “You one of those old guys likes young boys? ‘Cause my Justin, he ain’t no fag. Just shy with the girls, is all.”

  I wanted to laugh but stifled the impulse. This was a fiercely loyal mother, barging into a stranger’s house to protect her son. If I’d laughed she might have socked me.

  “I’m no chicken hawk,” I said. “I run in the morning and once in a while Justin goes with me.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  She uncrossed her arms, let out a long sigh and sank into a chair at the kitchen table, breathing hard, as if the two of us had just gone running. Then she scowled at me again.