A LIFE OF STORIES
My parents never owned a book. None of their friends, all living in railroad
cold-water tenement apartments, did either. Few spoke English, preferring the
comfort of the language of their homeland. They were working class people, the
men putting in long hours inside dark hulls of piers or the cold interior of
the downtown meat market, their hands hard and callused, their faces lined and
weary. The women stayed at home, cooking meals, washing clothes by hand,
shopping and bartering for fresh produce at reasonable prices, taking their
kids to school in the morning and to the park in the afternoon. Each one longing for
a country they left behind.
Some of the men had criminal pasts, complete with years served behind state
prison bars. Many of them gambled their much needed and hard-earned money on
daily doubles and nickel numbers. Too many cheated on the women in their lives
and spent too many of their nights in dark bars, drowning the dreams of their
youth behind the hard taste of an empty shot glass. The women were devoted to
their church, spending countless hours under the glow of lit votive candles,
praying to an indifferent God for a way out of their impoverished plight.
They had made for themselves a lifetime of struggle and strife, working jobs
that never paid enough and were destined to damage their health, living in
apartments that were saunas in the summer and were so cold in the winters that
the window panes would often crack. They had no grand designs on the future and
little hope for the present. There was never any talk of summer vacations or
camps for the kids or having enough money saved to lay down on a small house.
That was the talk for uptown folks and people with five figures in their
passbook savings accounts. All that they had was spread out there right in
front of them and the only change would come in the seasons of the year and the
flipping of the religious calendar on the wall. They had nothing. Except their stories.
My life and career has been shaped by those stories. They were stories of
gangsters and gunmen, boxers and ballplayers, bookies and con men. There were
many different tales spread across many nights that made the images of World War
II and of a destroyed Italy all too real. They were all told in vivid detail,
the language spoken in soft and lyrical tones, the action of the story dictating its pace, the dialogue course, hard and ripe with emotion. They
were told best late on a summer night, the men sitting on hot stoops, sweating bottles of
cold beers or thick mugs filled with red wine resting by their feet, their
shirts half-open to welcome any breeze that dared to move their way. Across
from them, the women sat in semi-circles on old garden chairs, fanning themselves
with wash clothes, pitchers of ice water and paper cups lodged in a corner
shade, their hands in constant motion, each speaking in the lyrical tilts of
their native language. I would gravitate from one end to the other, allowing the stories to be
interrupted only by a quick run through the thick water stream rushing out
of an open fire hydrant that served as the neighborhood pool. I never spoke, wouldn't
dare ask a question or break into the flow of a story. All I did and all I wanted to do was to listen and learn.
Those stories have all found their way into my work. The seeds for GANGSTER
were planted by my father and his friends as I sat by their side and heard
about the exploits of such heralded hoods as Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll, Owney
"Killer" Madden, Charles "Lucky" Luciano and Abe "Kid Twist" Reles and the
infamous murder at the Half-Moon Hotel. STREET BOYS was born on those streets,
listening to my mother and her friends recount the losses and the horrors
they had witnessed in Italy during the brutal years of World War II, each woman wiping
aside tears with a crumpled tissue at the end of the telling. They would always
look to me when any one of them began the tale of the valiant boys who fought
the German army during four heroic days in the early fall of 1943. It was a
story always told with pride and always tinged with sadness.
Their stories influenced the books I embraced as a child and continue to
read as an adult. I poured through the pages of my favorite novel, THE COUNT OF
MONTE CRISTO, as though the story of the tormented sailor Edmond Dantes was
about a member of my own family. I lost myself inside the pages of Alexandre
Dumas, Rafael Sabatini, Jack London and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, always looking for
the stories that spoke of valor and vindication, betrayal and revenge and,
most important of all, friendship. Those stories by those truly gifted writers
remain as alive to me as the ones told by the uneducated men and women of my
poor neighborhood. And I will respect them always in equal measure.
I also found their reality in the movies and television shows I chose to
watch and study. At a very early age, my mother and her friends exposed me
to the world of Italian cinema, specifically the neo-realism films of Roberto
Rossellini and, by far my favorite director, Vittorio De Sica. There, sitting in worn
down theaters, I watched in grainy black and white the stories of despair and
defeat, of hunger and panic, of fear and loneliness they had so often told me
brought to cinematic life. It was concrete proof to me that those ladies
spoke words of truth, that behind their pain and tears, rested the hard shell of
reality. With my father and his friends, I was led into a different movie world. It was a place ruled by James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, John Garfield and George
Raft. The men around me had little use for pretty boy actors or dancers tapping
their way through a story. They wanted the harsh truth behind such movies as
THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT, BODY AND SOUL, WHITE HEAT and everyone's favorite, ANGELS
WITH DIRTY FACES. Cagney's final walk in that movie, heading toward the finality of the electric chair, was one of the rare instances when tears
welled in the eyes of the hard men around me.
While every man I knew growing up often played on the wrong side of the law,
they all preferred to watch mostly cop shows on television, embracing THE
UNTOUCHABLES, Lee Marvin in M SQUAD, Broderick Crawford in HIGHWAY PATROL and
Howard Duff in RACKET SQUAD. The only comedy we saw on a regular basis was
Jackie Gleason's THE HONEYMOONERS since his life (not to mention his furniture) most
closely resembled that of our own. OZZIE AND HARRIET, LEAVE IT TO BEAVER and
FATHER KNOWS BEST might as well have been science fiction as far as we were
concerned. NO ONE really lived like those people. Of that we were convinced.
The stories the men and women in my neighborhood liked and the ones they told
weren't always bleak. There were many that ended with the sounds of happy
laughter. Some involved childhood pranks, others were about botched heists and
fixed fights that still turned out on the wrong end. The women laughed about
their first boyfriends or the priest in the old country who would only drink wine
at the altar never water. They were simple stories and, given the harsh nature of their lives, it was always a comforting sight to see them laugh.
Again, through films and television they illustrated those stories for me
with ones they had seen as children, exposing me to the works of the great
Italian comics Edwardo De Fillippo and Toto and later Charlie Chaplin, the Marx
Brothers and Abbott and Costello. But even amid the laughter and the humor, the
foundation for each story was always drenched in reality-poor men doing whatever they needed to do to make it through the moment.
I am a writer because of the people I grew up with and the world they
allowed me to witness and live in. Men and women who could not read above a
second grade level formed the foundation of my literary education. Their lessons were
simple, heart-felt and meant to last me a lifetime. It was their gift to me
and one that they expected me to respect and pass down to others. I have
done my best to do so. Most of those men and women are now long dead, their voices and tales alive
only in memory. And in the pages of the books I write. I will never be able to thank them enough.
Originally published in Kinokuniya Bookstore Magazine,
September, 2002
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Lorenzo Carcaterra
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