John earned his discipline from the hands of his mother’s various suitors, an endless stream of men who knew only one way to handle a boy. He seldom spoke about the beatings, but we all knew they took place.
Even though he was only four months younger than Michael, John was the smallest of the group and was nicknamed the Count, due to his fascination with The Count of Monte Cristo, which was also my favorite book. John was brash and had the sharpest sense of humor of any of us. He loved comedy and would spend hours debating whether the Three Stooges were gifted comedians or just jerks who beat each other up.
He was our heart, an innocent surrounded by a violence he could not prevent. He was the most handsome among us and often used a smile and a wink to extricate himself from trouble. He loved to draw, sketching sailboats and cruise ships onto thin strips of fine paper with a dark pencil. He would spend afternoons down by the piers feeding pigeons, watching waves lap against the dock, and drawing colorful pictures of the ocean liners in port, filling their decks with the familiar faces of the neighborhood.
He was a born mimic, ordering slices of pizza as John Wayne, asking for a library book like James Cagney, and talking to a girl in the school yard sounding like Humphrey Bogart. Each situation brought about its intended smile, allowing John to walk away content, his mission accomplished. He concealed the ugliness of his home life behind a shield of jokes. He never set out to hurt, there was too much of that in his own everyday moments. John, more than any one of us, was always in need of someone else’s smile.
Together, the four of us found in one another the solace and security we could not find anywhere else. We trusted each other and knew there would never be an act of betrayal among us. We had nothing else—no money, no bikes, no summer camps, no vacations. Nothing, except one another.
To us, that was all that mattered.
3
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH played a large part in our lives. Sacred Heart was the center of the neighborhood, serving as a neutral meeting ground, a peaceful sanctuary where problems could be discussed and emotions calmed. The priests and nuns of the area were a visible presence and commanded our attention, if not always our respect.
My friends and I attended Sacred Heart Grammar School on West 50th Street, a large redbrick building directly across from P.S. 111. Our parents paid a $2 a month tuition fee and sent us out each morning dressed in the mandatory uniform of maroon pants for boys and skirts for girls, white shirts, and clip-on red ties.
The school was rife with problems, lack of supplies being the least of them. Most of us were products of violent homes, and therefore prone to violence ourselves, making playground fights daily occurrences. The fights were often in response to a perceived slight or a violation of an unwritten code of conduct. All students were divided into cliques, most based on ethnic backgrounds, which only added tension to an already tight situation.
In addition to the volatile ethnic groupings, teachers were faced with the barriers of language and the difficulties of overcrowded classrooms. After third grade, students were divided by sex, with the nuns teaching the girls and priests and brothers working with the boys. Each teacher faced an average class size of thirty-two students, more than half of whom spoke no English at home. To help support their families, many of the children worked jobs after school, reducing the hours they were free to concentrate on homework.
Few of the teachers cared enough to work beyond the three o’clock bell. There were a handful, however, as there are in all schools, who did care and who took the time to tutor a student, to feed an interest, to set a goal beyond neighborhood boundaries.
Brother Nick Kappas spent hours after school patiently helping me learn the basic English I had not been taught at home, where both my parents spoke Italian. Another, Father Jerry Martin, a black priest from the Deep South, opened my eyes to the hate and prejudice that existed beyond Hell’s Kitchen. Still another, Father Andrew Nealon, an elderly priest with a thick Boston accent, fueled my interest in American history. Then there was Father Robert Carillo, my cohort in the clacker escapade, and the only member of the clergy who had been born and raised in Hell’s Kitchen.
Father Bobby, as the neighborhood kids called him, was in his mid-thirties, tall and muscular, with thick, dark, curly hair, an unlined face, and an athlete’s body. He played the organ at Sunday mass, was in charge of the altar boys, taught fifth grade, and played basketball for two hours every day in the school playground. Most priests liked to preach from a pulpit; Father Bobby liked to talk during the bump and shove of a game of one-on-one. He was the only priest in the neighborhood who challenged us to do better, and who was always ready to help when a problem arose.
Father Bobby introduced me and my friends to such authors as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Victor Hugo, and Stephen Crane, further instilling in us a passion for written words. He chose stories and novels by authors he felt we could identify with, and who could, for a brief time, help us escape the wars waged nightly inside our apartments.
It was through him that we learned of such books as Les Misérables, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and A Bell for Adano and how they could provide a night-light to keep away the family terror. It was easy for him to do so, because he had been raised in the same manner, under the same circumstances. He knew what it meant to find sleep under the cover of fear.
Other clergy were not as caring. Many took their cue from parents, using violence to enforce their classroom rules. In the Catholic school system of the 1960s, corporal punishment was acceptable. The clergy were, for the most part, given parental approval to deal with us however they saw fit. The majority of priests and brothers kept thick leather straps in a top drawer of their desk. Nuns preferred rulers and paddles. A closed fist or a hard slap was not out of the question.
No one used that show of force more than Brother Gregory Reynolds, a bald, middle-aged man with a jowly face and a round beer belly. He always held the leather belt in his hand, walking up and down the classroom aisles, swinging it at the slightest provocation. A missed homework assignment called for four sharp blows to each hand. Lateness carried a penalty of two shots. A smile, a smirk, a glance in the wrong direction, could easily set fire to his wrath and bring the leather belt crashing across a hand or face.
Brother Reynolds was an angry man, his frustration fueled by drink and an answer to a call he was ill suited to handle. We all at one time felt the pain of his strap. My friends and I dealt with him in much the same way we dealt with all our other problems, through humor, pranks, and wisecracks. If we couldn’t beat them, we decided, we might as well laugh at them. It can safely be said that Brother Reynolds had more water balloons dropped on his head, more pizzas delivered to his door, more scarves, gloves, and hats stolen from his office than any clergyman in the history of Hell’s Kitchen. He always suspected me and my friends, but he lacked proof.
One day I handed him all the proof he would ever need.
I was bored, halfway through a math class that never seemed to end. To pass the time, I reached behind me and, scraping snow off the windowsill, made a wetball. I was sitting in the last row next to the clothes closet. I bet a pimple-faced Puerto Rican kid named Hector Mandano a sour pickle that I could make the snowball curve, throwing it from my seat in the back out an open left window in the front. Windows were always open in class, regardless of weather conditions, since the teachers felt fresh air kept the students alert. We never objected, especially in the colder months, when the heat in the building was enough to make the strongest student sink into a pool of sweat.
Brother Reynolds had his back to me as he wrote a series of math problems on the blackboard. He was a few feet to the right of the open window. Since I had the utmost faith in my ability to throw a curveball, and since I would do anything for a sour pickle, I tossed the packed piece of snow across the room, convinced it would find its way.
Whitey Ford would not have been pleased with my throw. The snowball not only didn’t curve, it actually picked up speed, mo
ving like a missile toward the back of Brother Reynolds’s head. It landed with the kind of splat I’d heard only in cartoons. The entire class took in one collective breath. My only hope to survive was that the snowball had landed hard enough to cause a hemorrhage.
It didn’t.
Brother Reynolds flew down the aisle like a runaway bull, leather belt held high, swinging it from all sides, hitting the innocent and heading straight toward me, the guilty. He attacked me with an accumulation of rage and embarrassment, landing blows to my hands, head, and body, flailing away until he fell to his knees, exhausted. But nothing he did could stem the tide of laughter around him, which had grown so loud that it more than outweighed any pain I felt.
The memory of Brother Gregory Reynolds shaking snow from the back of his neck, his face lit like a flame, his eyes bloated with fury, his body too angry to form words, will be one that will stay with me always, as will the laughter heard in that classroom on that dreary day.
Brother Reynolds died less than two years after the incident, victim of a bad heart and too much drink. At his wake, his open casket surrounded by an array of flowers and a stream of mourners, someone in the back of the room brought up the story of the snowball that never curved.
The laughter began all over again.
4
SACRED HEART CHURCH was quiet, its overhead lights shining down across long rows of wooden pews. Seven women and three men sat in the rear, hands folded in prayer, waiting to talk to a priest.
My friends and I spent a lot of time inside that small, compact church with the large marble altar at its center. We each served as altar boys, working a regular schedule of Sunday and occasional weekday masses. We were also expected to handle funerals, spreading dark clouds of incense above the coffins of the neighborhood dead. Everyone wanted to work funeral masses, since the service included a three-dollar fee and a chance to pocket more if you looked sufficiently somber.
In addition, we went to mass once a week and sometimes more, especially if Father Bobby needed someone to escort the elderly of the parish to weeknight services. Other times, I would just stop inside the church and sit for hours, alone or with one of my friends. I liked the feel and smell of the empty church, surrounded by statues of saints and stained glass windows. I didn’t go so much to pray, but to relax and pull away from outside events. John and I went more than the others. We were the only two of the group to give any thought to entering the priesthood, an idea we found appealing because of its guaranteed ticket out of the neighborhood. A Catholic version of the lottery. We were much too young to dissect the issue of celibacy and spent most of our time fretting over how we would look wearing a Roman collar.
John and I were intrigued by the powers a priest was given. The ability to serve mass, say last rites, baptize babies, perform weddings, and, best of all, sit in a dark booth and listen to others confess their sins. To us, the sacrament of confession was like being allowed inside a secret world of betrayal and deceit, where people openly admitted dark misdeeds and vile indiscretions. All of it covered by an umbrella of piety and privacy. Confession was better than any book we could get our hands on or any movie we could see because the sins were real, committed by people we actually knew. The temptation to be a part of that was too great to resist.
There were two confessional booths on either side of Sacred Heart, lining the walls closest to the back pews, each shrouded with heavy purple curtains. The thick wood door at the center of the confessional locked from the inside. Two small mesh screens, covered by sliding wood panels, allowed the priest, if he could stay awake, to sit and listen to the sins of his parish. Every Saturday afternoon, from three to five P.M. a handful of parishioners would head into those booths. There, every affair, every curse, every transgression they made during the week, would be revealed. On those days there was no better place to be in Hell’s Kitchen.
John and I sat in that church every Saturday afternoon. We knew Father Tim McAndrew, old, weary, and hard of hearing, always worked the first hour in one of the booths closest to the altar. Father McAndrew had a penchant for handing out stiff penalties for the slightest trespass, whether he heard it confessed or only thought he did. He was especially rough on children and married women. Self-abuse was worth a dozen Hail Marys and a half-dozen Our Fathers.
On a few occasions and always at my urging, John and I would sneak into the booth alongside McAndrew’s, shut the door, and hear the sins we had only read about. We couldn’t imagine what the penalty would be for getting caught, but whatever it was, it couldn’t possibly surpass the joy of hearing about a neighbor’s fall from grace.
I was inside the second booth, squeezed onto the small wooden bench, my back against the cool wall. The Count, John Reilly, sat next to me.
“Man, if we get caught, they’ll burn us,” he whispered.
“What if our mothers are out there?” I asked. “What if we end up hearing their confessions?”
“What if we hear somethin’ worse?” John said.
“Like what?” I couldn’t imagine anything worse.
“Like a murder,” John said. “What if somebody cops to a murder?”
“Relax,” I said as convincingly as I could. “All we gotta do is sit back, listen, and remember not to laugh.”
At ten minutes past three, two women from the back pew stood and headed for the first confessional, ready to tell their sins to a man who couldn’t hear them. They moved one to each side, parted the curtains, knelt down, and waited for the small wood doors to slide open.
Seconds later the sides of our booth came to life.
“Here we go,” I said. “Get ready.”
“God help us,” John said, making the sign of the cross. “God help us.”
We heard a man’s low cough on our right as he shuffled his way to a kneeling position and leaned his elbow on the small ledge facing him. He chewed gum and sniffed in deep breaths as he waited for the door to open.
“We know him?” John asked.
“Quiet!”
There was a woman’s sneeze from the other side of the booth as she searched through an open purse for a tissue. She blew her nose, straightened her dress, and waited.
“Which one?” John asked.
“The guy,” I said, and moved the small door to my right. The man’s thick lips, nose, and stubble faced us, separated only by the mesh screen, his heavy breath warming our side of the booth.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” he said, his hands folded in prayer. “It has been two years since my last confession.”
John grabbed on to my shoulder and I tried to keep my legs from shaking. Neither of us spoke.
“I done bad things, Father,” the man said. “And I’m sorry for all of them. I gamble, lose all my rent money to the horses. Lie to my wife, hit her sometimes, the kids too. It’s bad, Father. Gotta get myself outta this hole. What can I do?”
“Pray,” I said in my deepest voice.
“I been prayin’,” the man said. “Ain’t helped. I owe money to loan sharks. A lot of it. Father, you gotta help me. This the place you go for help, right? I got nowhere else to go. This is it.”
John and I held our breath and stayed silent.
“Father, you there?” the man said. “Yes,” I said.
“So,” the man said. “What’s it gonna be?”
“Three Hail Marys,” I said. “One Our Father. And may the Lord bless you.”
“Three Hail Marys!” the man said. “What the hell’s that gonna do?”
“It’s for your soul,” I said.
“Fuck my soul!” the man said in a loud voice. “And fuck you too, you freeloadin’ bastard.”
The man stood up, pulled aside the purple drapes hanging to his right, and stormed out of the booth, his outburst catching the attention of those who waited their turn.
“That went well,” I said to John, who finally loosened his grip on my shoulder.
“Don’t do the woman,” John said. “I’m beggin’ you. Le
t’s just get outta here.”
“How?” I asked.
“Don’t take any more,” John said. “Let ’em all go over to the other booth. Have ’em think no one’s in here.”
“Let’s do one more,” I said.
“No,” John said. “I’m too scared.”
“Just one more,” I pleaded.
“No.”
“Only one more.”
“One,” John said. “Then we’re outta here.”
“You got it,” I agreed.
“Swear on it?”
“You can’t swear in church,” I said.
THE WOMAN’S VOICE was soft and low, barely above a whisper. The edge of a veil hung across her face, her hands curled against the darkness of the booth, the tips of her fingernails scraping the base of the wood.
“Bless me Father,” she began. “It has been six weeks since my last confession.”
We both knew who she was, had seen her more than once walking the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, arm in arm with the latest man to catch her fancy. She was a woman our fathers smiled about and our mothers told us to ignore.
“I’m not happy about my life, Father,” she said. “It’s like I don’t want to wake up in the morning anymore.”
“Why?” I asked, my voice muffled by the back of John’s shirt.
“It’s wrong,” she said. “Everything I do is wrong and I don’t know how to stop.”
“You must pray,” I said.
“I do, Father,” she said. “Believe me, I do. Every day. It’s not doing any good.”
“It will,” I said.
“I sleep with married men,” the woman said. “Men with families. In the morning I tell myself it’s the last time. And it never is.”
“One day it will be,” I said, watching her hands curve around a set of rosary beads.
“It’s gonna have to be soon,” the woman said, holding back a rush of tears. “I’m pregnant.”
John looked at me, both hands locked over his mouth.