Exile on Bridge Street (4 page)

Again my eyes are filled with the tears of rage. Here she is. She who has given so much of her to her sons as she sits by the hearth pondering them. The mother in need now. And during the blossoming of my fighting years. I am fifteen and ready. My brother Timothy a year older than I. The two of us strong for her, for I know that she would not grudge us for going out and breaking our strength and dying for her. That she would know us faithful. That we fight for her. And if I am to give my own life for her, would I not be spoken of among my people for generations? That I'll be remembered forever. Alive forever. Speaking forever, I'll be heard. Forever.

And won't it be said I am blessed for having the chance to give my blood in a protest against her mistreatment? And what of my father, who has longed to die for Ireland and is now given his chance? What of him, I'm not sure. And that of my sisters either. Clare is a long way from Dublin where the rebellion is taking place, but my worry is the whole of the land will be brought to its knees again by the flying of the butcher's apron above Ireland.

I am done then. I am leaving Brooklyn behind me forever. Forget Brooklyn as no more than a mistake in my life. It's not for me. To start anew now and to realize my missteps, is the best thing for me. I go now to see the Claremen's protective in Greenwich Village for my passage back home. Leave Brooklyn behind me.

CHAPTER 2

Pulcinella

M
AY
, 1916

T
HE
MAN
KNOWN
ROUND
AS
“W
ILD
B
ILL
” Lovett, pale and thin and hard with the street-rearing of old New York City behind him already, steps out from the Doric columns and the long shadow of the Fifth Avenue Court inland of the Red Hook docks. With a hand of knuckles now scabbed over, he drops to his head a wool cap where hidden within the inner lining is a razor ring. He looks down from the top of the steps onto the street moving in front of his eyes. Carts and drays and sidewalks traversed by groups of whisking dresses grubby and browned along the hems. Men clopping along in work boots and leaning forward toward their destinations with old-country hats of various styles and the worn wool suits that hug the lifting of hard labor day in, day out. A filled-to-capacity, four-car trolley clanks through the middle of the cobblestones between the street that is walled in by masonry and brick buildings on the one side, the other is the sullied and grimy façade of the Fifth Avenue Court—this neighborhood's Parthenon satellite of Anglo-American law shadowing Lovett here.

Released, today it is his twenty-second birthday, though there will be no celebrations. Looking out over the South Brooklyn streets, the cruelty in his eyes hidden within a gentle face and protruding ears. His body is slight and not tall; he gives everything he has to prove to men larger than him what great things loom inside, as Bill Lovett does not have it in him to follow others. And so, there is that great cruelty in his eyes betraying the innocent features. The lips red as if painted. The cheeks blushed by the cool air and the wing-like fawn ears all giving him the appearance of a young angel. The Italian laborers of Red Hook who fear not only his temper, but the violent men loyal to him, call Lovett “Pulcinella,” a clown-like figure of their own lore. Standing among the courthouse pillars, it's only been a few days since he and Non Connors and others shot and killed three Italians and a pier house manager on Imlay Street at the foot of the New York Dock Company's headquarters. The news quickly traveling through the Italian Red Hook and Gowanus neighborhoods that Il Maschio—Frankie Yale's Black Hand connection on the docks—was gunned down by Lovett and The White Hand. The Irish clown of the Red Hook docks, Pulcinella, whose cherubic appearance betrays the depraved man inside, had laid down his law in the neighborhoods in which the Italian lives in great numbers.

But to see his eyes is to know him. And to know him is to know it better to be away from him. He is a grandson of the exiled. His family's past smothered in the shame of a horrendous starvation and a grueling journey never recounted. Left only to the imagination of storytellers like those that told me, who tells you now.

Shoeless and emaciated, his grandparents landed in Brooklyn in 1848 from their native County Kerry and took to begging for scraps. His grandmother six months with child, face gaunt and pale. Weakened and choleric, her motions were slow and mouth stuck in an open position, eyes staring forward and unresponsive, stomach bulbous and half-covered by a fraying sack dress. Catholic, they could not find steady work in New York. One week after arriving, the police pushed them off the vacant lot where they slept without roof or cover. The local newspapers wrote that, “An extensive colony of Irish people who had settled on the vacant lots . . . which . . . from the number of pigs and dogs there, is known as ‘Young Dublin.'” The same article described the area as a “pigdem” and wrote that the police had “rooted” them out.

Along with thousands of other newly landed Irish, Lovett's grandparents dug a hole in a foothill on a piece of land called Jackson Hollow just south of the Navy Yard. The police left them there since ownership of the property was in litigative dispute between the heirs of Samuel Jackson. Soon there was a baby, the eldest sister of Bill Lovett's unborn father. The baby breaking in a shallow, rain-puddled cranny on a night untamed dogs roamed Jackson Hollow, sniffing new mother's blood in the air. And so, they blocked off the entrance of their scalpeen home with long sticks and branches taken from trees that once grew all over Brooklyn. They stole a chicken from a child by beating him with their fists and running away with it. Then stole a pig too from another family. And a goat and slaughtered them all with sharpened rocks. When challenged by another starved Irishman for thieving, Bill Lovett's grandfather rose from their dirt hole with one fist clenched, hair falling out from malnutrition and only rags covering his groin and chest. The two men challenged each other in Gaelic, holding their sticks. One died.

In their generation, no Irish spoke about such things as the shame of destitution on their name. The embarrassment of want being the bane of pride. But Bill Lovett knew nothing of his family's struggle in Brooklyn and the Lower East Side of Manhattan when they arrived, for it had never been told him, yet the story thrives in him as it thrives in all the men I knew in Brooklyn. Told by the storytellers come out of Irishtown like The Gas Drip Bard, who gave way to Beat McGarry and finally down to myself, here. Giving allegories about innocence and cruelty. The backdrop of our story can be seen on each and every face that washes up. The innocence of appearance and in the cruel and inhuman eyes of Bill Lovett now as he steps quickly at a swift angle down the wide stoops of the Fifth Avenue Courthouse toward yelping children holding newspapers above their heads.

“Irish rebels to be executed, read it here!”

“Local gang men released after recent rampage, only one charged!”

“No mercy for those of the Easter rebellion, get it now!”

He drops a coin on one of the boys and flips through the April 29, 1916 morning edition, leaning on one leg propped on the bottom step of the courthouse. On page three he sees a small headline, “Brosnan made a detective for work breaking up gangs, jailing its leader John ‘Non' Connors,” and below reads the reporter's summary, “Brosnan vows to keep light of law along dark waterfront goings-on.”

“Meehan and Brosnan,” Lovett mouths and crumples the paper, dropping it on the ground by the feet of the newsies.

Adjusting his cap and immediately turning west toward the water, he crosses the street with purpose as the windswept faces of Frankie Byrne and two others, who had been awaiting Lovett's release on the corner of Union and Fifth Avenue, look toward him and wait for his order.

“Connors got the brunt,” Byrne says. “Meehan's work, along wit' the tunics.”

“I'm goin' to get Lonergan an' his boys,” Lovett says. “Them yokes played right into it.”

“Ya want ya piece?” Byrne asks.

They come in close to each other and exchange it. Bill places the .45 in his coat pocket while looking over shoulders; Jidge Seaman and Sean Healy watch too. With the wind forcing his eyes low he tells Byrne, “You're my right hand now. The time comes, we cut ties wit' Meehan an' them, I'll need ya right next to me. All o' yaz. You know like I do Meehan'll come for us. We gotta be ready, but we'll never survive under him. He kills us or we kill him. He'll keep us around long as he needs us. When he don' need us, he'll set us up like he did Pickles back in 1913, and like Non. Time comes, we'll keep Red Hook for our own in the south and never pay tribute to that fuck again. But we're gonna need Lonergan and the kids and we're gonna have to be quiet about it, right?”

Byrne and the others nod in agreement.

“I-talians in the ILA are weak right now, but that feller—what's his name? Used to run the Five Points Gang?”

“Vaccarelli, Paul Vaccarelli,” Byrne says.

“Yeah, he's way up the ladder in the ILA now and all the I-talians follow him in Manhatt'n and New Jersey, but we can never let 'em cross the Gowanus Canal here in Brooklyn. We gotta keep 'em back—they can stay south down at the Bush Terminal. No I-talian labor allowed on the Red Hook docks, ever. Dig?”

“Yeah.”

“Let one in, and they'll overrun us,” Lovett says. “Meehan said anythin' to you guys about Connors? Deny settin' 'em up, what?”

“Nothin' to us,” Byrne said.

“Won't even deny it,” Lovett says, looking up Fifth Avenue, and as he walks away, yells back to them. “Go down to the docks 'til I come back. No I-talians!”

Byrne turns, walks toward the water at Red Hook, Seaman and Healy follow south on Fifth Avenue.

With a single-mindedness that he has come to be known for, Bill Lovett walks angrily in his workman's suit and beat boots. His quick steps move him ahead of a lazy horse clopping along in an aloof stride, the dray plopping at each step from a bockety wheel. Cheeks reddened in rage, teeth and fists clenched he stomps out into the street again, adjusting the cap over his eyes. Jogging across the way with a thin tie flying over his shoulder in the wind, he heads west on Union Street where an Italian woman sways slowly along the sidewalk with her children. Happening to look up, she sees the white man strutting toward her with a cold tilt to his head, fists at the ready. Grabbing desperately for her six-year-old and her toddler while dropping a sack, she yanks the children out from the man's way with herself leaning against a lamppost in safety. She notices her husband walking backward toward her. He is speaking the Italian language in a jovial tone to one of the neighborhood men up in a window.

“Giancarlo!” she screeches toward him.

The husband instinctively knows his wife's shrieking tone and wheels round just in time to notice the elfin man stamping toward him. Slyly, he spins out from the way and unplugs his derby respectfully, for the white man who chugs by has many stories that follow him.

“Pulcinella,” he says the man's name under his breath, then motions vulgarly toward Lovett's back.
“Va fan culo, uh? Va a cagare.”

A half-block from the trolley stop, Lovett ducks into an unnamed saloon on Union and Hicks well before any expressways are built through the area. It is dark inside and he sits at the mahogany bar closest to the door. Those inside know his strange face. His bow-shaped ears, red lips, and the small frame that comes with great repute, ill or otherwise.

“Two beers, no foam,” Lovett demands.

In the obscured light and the musky stink of old beer sunk deep in the walls he sits in anticipation, elbows to the bar showing his scarred hands. Five men enter behind him. A group of what some call “shenangoes,” or floating migrant laborers that come for a single day's work unloading lighters and barges on the water, then evaporate into the city and the port saloons. Lovett downs one beer whole and looks up to the tender, twirls his finger for another round. Sets at the second and it is gone too. Soon three more men wander in—Scandinavians, though Lovett mumbles, “Austrians.”

“Can I buy you a beer, sir?” one man offers.

“Nah.”

The tender drops two beers in front of him and he pays, then takes one of them and drinks it down too. Sips on the fourth, burps silently through gritting teeth.

“Sammich? Soup?”

“Nah.”

The tender looks away shyly, then back to Lovett, “Just get out? Glad to see someone's puttin' these fookin' dagos round here in their place. Ya know, if it were . . .”

“I don' know you,” Lovett says.

The tender stops, walks down slowly to the other end of the bar.

Lovett hears behind him the mumblings of words, “Old Jay Street Gang” then, “Leader, Lovett” then, “White Hand in Red Hook.”

He looks behind at the men that speak of him and one ducks out, bringing in a shock of spring light. Five minutes later that man arrives back again with two others.

Lovett finishes his beer and steps off the stool through the crowd, but is blocked to the door by a large man.

“Talk, Bill?”

“Who you?” he says, and slyly takes from the lining of his cap the razor ring and slides it on behind his back.

“One on one, I'll take ya,” the man says simply.

The crowd of men listening opens outward, surrounding the two in the doorway. The large man has puffy fists and a thick build beneath the coat and although he is quite young, his hair is thinning. Lovett sees the man is nervous and as his opponent peels back his coat, Lovett slowly rolls his left shoulder to the man and drives the ring with a quick right swing that bounces off the man's orbital bone with a blatting sound.

The man begins to smile unfazed, but soon realizes he cannot now see from the eye. Touches it with his hand. Blood streaming down the sleeve of his white shirt. Moving to the left, Lovett swings again into other eye. The man begins losing his balance at the second landing and is now completely blinded, both eyeballs punctured by the razor ring. Lovett then swings three, four more times opening up the man's face with fleshy wounds and continues puncturing the top of the man's head when he goes to his knees, then resolves to kicking the man's head until he is no longer awake and sprawled dumbly among wooden chairs.

“Afoul it is,” yells a squirrelly man with a northern European accent.

Lovett turns round at the circle, gnashes at them. Eyes alight. Legs bent, left fist clenched and right fist of a sudden holding a .45 with fresh wounds glistening at the knuckles again. He moves toward the door and two men jump from his way.

“Bill Lovett,” he yells his own name at all inside, daring any one of them speak of this to the police. “Red Hook!”

He opens the door and walks out onto the bright sidewalk tucking the piece into his coat with his blood-ringed hand. From behind, he jumps a trolley bound for the Bridge District and although the standing driver sees him in the rearview, does not demand fare from the man sitting at the edge of his own seat and staring into his red fist pensively.

Jumping off at Bridge Street just a few blocks south of The White Hand headquarters, he walks himself into the Lonergan bicycle shop and finds Richie's teenage buddies loafing around the counter, Petey Behan, Matty Martin, and Tim Quilty.