One of the greatest aspects of living in Brooklyn
is that you get to meet a lot of native New Yorkers. People for whom the City and all its noise,
grime, frustration, danger, shabbiness, competition, union labor, cooperation,
inventiveness, history, excitement, entertainment, and four complete seasons
are just regular stuff that has been absorbed into their psyches to create
their intriguing perspective. Rich or
poverty-stricken, educated or illiterate, old, young, and any ethnicity - no
matter what – I find native New Yorkers to be interesting because they exude
the City.
I met Jimmy the Fish - not his real name, but similar – one day on the boardwalk in Coney
Island. He was bald, muscular, Sicilian, and had a thick Brooklyn accent. Jimmy was born,
raised, and still resided in Bensonhurst which was mainly an Italian
neighborhood in South Brooklyn, although transitioning, as it was being populated by Chinese and Russian immigrants.
Jimmy the Fish explained his 3-word name, telling me that
when he was in high school, he and his friends aspired to get connected to a certain Italian-run organization. Their dads weren’t capos or soldiers, so to
get attention from the members of that organization, they created a nicknames
for themselves. Eddy the Fixer, Johnny
Bats (not the animal, the weapon), Bobby the Shadow. I’m not sure how connected Jimmy ever became. He didn’t wear a fedora or carry a
violin case, but he told me that he made his income by loaning money a few
weeks at a time and lived off the vig.
He shared a duplex with his mother which was
not unusual for a native New Yorker, especially Italian, who was divorced. Jimmy actually had lived in the same duplex when he was
married. Many people in Brooklyn
married and lived in the same neighborhood or multi-family home with their
parents. Family ties were tight even if
they fought all the time.
I asked Jimmy if he would show
me Bensonhurst and he agreed to do it.
On our first adventure, he took me to the Santa Rosalia Festival,
an annual week-long festival that ends on Labor Day.
This is a celebration of Saint Rosalia who, for the love of God, went to
live in a cave in Sicily and died
there. During a time of plague, she appeared to a man in a vision and told him
to fetch her bones from the cave, which he did.
He carried her bones around the town twice and the plague was cured and
she was made a saint dear to the hearts of Sicilians.
This festival, now dying out on account of parking and other
problems, was a bit of a disappointment.
Mainly it was just about food – sausage and pepper sandwiches, funnel
cakes – things you could pretty much get any time of the week at an Italian
deli or donut shop. I think there might have been ring toss and that game where you try to ring a bell by slamming a hammer on a circle. But there were no men
carrying a 2,000-pound statue down the street like they do for the Giglio
Festival in Williamsburg that I
wrote about earlier on the blog. There
were no stalls where I could buy bootleg mixes of old-time Italian crooners
singing love ballads. Jimmy and I didn’t stay long
there because it was a hot, muggy August night, but long enough for Jimmy to ogle the teenage girls and tell me that he
longed to be younger.
Next time, we went out to a diner. I ate dinner. He didn’t order anything for himself. .Jimmy told me this was a gathering spot, a hang
out for him and his friends when he was in high school. I’d heard about King’s Highway in Flatbush as
a place where kids used to walk up and down on weekend nights. I asked him if he ever went over there. He said, “That wasn’t my
neighborhood.” Like it was a foreign
country or something.
That night, he taught me the Italian slang word. goumada which is what an Italian married
man calls his girlfriend. I’ve since
looked it up. Goumada derives from
mumbling the Italian word comare
which literally translates as godmother. I guess it’s a joke, as in, “I’m going to see
my godmother.” I hope it’s a joke.
After the diner, we toured Bensonhurst in his car, driving
past New Utrecht
High School which he attended and
which was the high school shown at the beginning of the Welcome Back Kotter series that brought John Travolta fame. You
can look at yearbooks of the high school online as far back as 1929 when Dr. Harry Potter was principal – maybe you'll see a
picture of Jimmy:
You can
buy a yearbook, too.
After seeing the school, we drove under the elevated D-train
tracks that run along New Utrecht Avenue. He told me this was where they filmed the
chase scene in The French Connection. We turned onto 86th
Avenue where there were a lot of small specialty stores
selling cheese, meat, and other foods designating an Italian neighborhood. These stores are being replaced by chain
stores that I won’t name.
Bensonhurst is not a high-rise kind of place. Commercial buildings are generally no more
than 3 or 4 stories tall. There
are plenty of residential streets with nothing but 2-story red brick duplexes or 2-story limestone row houses with the bay windows, or streets hosting
detached houses with wood or aluminum siding – again 2 stories high. Almost feeling suburban.
Reciprocally, a week later, I invited Jimmy to lunch at my
apartment and made us a pot of tea. I
told him I pretty much only drank hot tea and water and asked if he wanted
ice. He did.
When we went out for dinner one last time, when he arrived, Jimmy presented
me with a crate of boxed teas.
All sorts of tea. I asked him
where it came from. He laughed and said,
“It fell off a truck.” Who am I to judge
God’s plan? I accepted it.
We went to dinner at a restaurant in Sheepshead Bay, a nice
little neighborhood of curvy streets and quaint little stores on the waterfront
where you can pay boats to take you deep-sea fishing. Again, Jimmy didn’t order
anything for himself. It’s not all that
comfortable to eat with someone who isn’t joining you, but then, he was so busy
looking at the pretty women who walked by.
I didn't see him again after that night and I hope Jimmy has found a nice Italian girlfriend over
18. (PS Jimmy had just turned 40)
Post by Alana Cash
Post by Alana Cash
