BY MINERVA DURHAM | Many local Italian-American men hung out all day long in Little Italy in the ’70s and ’80s, more than anyone might have realized. Shift workers, plaster and metal craftsmen, men between jobs, retired city workers or just plain gangsters, they may have been outside because their wives and children were cooking or bathing in their small apartments, or they may have got tired of drinking coffee in their social clubs, rented storefronts that the neighborhood men took refuge in.
They had a way of making themselves invisible, mostly near street corners where they “kept an eye on the neighborhood.” You might walk three blocks thinking that the sidewalks were deserted while there were actually guys around being inconspicuous. Like Tasmanians pretending to be tree stumps in a barren landscape so that they would not be captured by European settlers sweeping across the island to imprison and exterminate them, these urban dwellers uncannily found architectural elements, columns, doorways, trash cans, light posts, awnings or railings, to disguise their presence.
As I got to know some of the Italian men on the street, I realized that many had a kind of street smarts sharpened by their interest in women. They had ways to check out a woman’s availability without exposing their interest. Sometimes I thought that maybe they just had an extra sense informing them how recently a woman had had sex, how many minutes, hours, days, weeks, months or years it had been since she had had a sexual satisfaction.
Of these men I write. There were three I became friendly with — Joe, Lou, and Sal.
Joe C. worked evenings as a dispatcher. He spent a lot of time with Mike, the refrigerator man who had a storefront across the street from 86 Kenmare and provided used appliances to landlords Downtown.
Joe and I spoke sometimes on the street. He had an athletic body and was proud of it.
“Feel my thigh,” he boasted, “as hard as a rock.”
It was.
At the time, my knowledge of anatomy did not include awareness of the iliotibial band, connective tissue on the outside of the thigh that steadies the body and compresses the vastus lateralis muscle when the lower leg is kicked out. It is a structure that feels as hard as a rock on almost everyone.
Joe liked to tease me. He would engage me in conversation up to the point that he would somehow cause me to blush, and then he would end the encounter smirking and complimenting himself. For years our relationship consisted of this ritual.
One day I saw him run into Mike’s store and back out again swinging a baseball bat and screaming as he crossed Kenmare. An African-American man in sweats jogged by. A crowd gathered as the dark-skinned jogger turned around to confront Joe, grabbing the lid of a garbage can to use as a shield to defend himself against the bat. At that time there were garbage cans out in front of most of the buildings.
I kept a safe distance away watching from between two parked cars as the jogger danced like a boxer. More than a match for Joe, he was a true athlete executing marvelous feints and admirable footwork, avoiding Joe’s swings, and saying, “Let me go.” From my safe distance I called out, “Let him go. Please, let him go,” a few times.
All of a sudden, as though a bell had rung to end a round in a boxing ring, Joe brought the bat down to his side and walked away. The crowd dispersed quietly and the jogger ran on. Later Joe told me that his unleashed dog had been bothering the jogger and that he was angered when the jogger slapped the dog’s snout with his fingers.
With a few exceptions, African-Americans were not welcome in the neighborhood. Like the jogger, they risked being harmed for just being there. Well-dressed black teenagers and the occasional worker were safe if they were known.
The last time we ran into each other, he began his usual tease. I had no idea why I did what I did, but I said to him, “We’ve been flirting long enough, Joe. Let’s f—.” I didn’t feel desire for him, nor did I want to be lovers with him, nor did I expect him to accommodate my suggestion. I still have no idea why I challenged him at that moment.
He stepped back and paled.
“I can’t do that,” he said. “I’m a married man, Don’t you see my ring?”
He had never before said anything about being married. Maybe he had married recently and maybe I felt that his flirtation was halfhearted. For whatever reason, I had crossed a line and we never spoke again on the street. I suppose that from that point on, if he saw me coming he made himself invisible.
Rumor has it that the character De Niro played in “Mean Streets” (1973), John “Johnny Boy” Civello, was based on Joe’s older brother. He had first been warned to stop committing petty crimes in the neighborhood and then was found dead one morning in a car parked on the street. As the story goes, older men in the neighborhood gave the go-ahead to the younger men to kill him. Vigilante justice was common and commonly agreed upon.
Many residents here still remember the stink bomb thrown into the storefront of 226 Lafayette to protest that a methadone clinic was moving in. The Italian neighbors just east of Lafayette were angry because Virginia Admiral, having just converted 226 Lafayette into artists’ live/work co-op floors, rented the empty storefront to the clinic. She saw it as a good interim tenant, and she carried through with her plans despite the neighbors’ objections.
John Zaccaro was also angry. It was the first of many conflicts and arguments between Virginia and Zaccaro, in most of which, it seemed to me, Virginia came out ahead.
The roadbed of Lafayette Street just south of Spring Street was one lane wider in the early ’70s, and there was very little car traffic. Many late afternoons through twilight, and sometimes into the night, boys played hockey on skates in the street. I remember watching them from Virginia’s kitchen window when I first came to New York, not thinking anything about it, not ever imagining that kids playing sports in half-deserted streets would ever disappear from the neighborhood.
On the night of the stink bomb, a car drove up to the boys. The driver, a neighborhood man, rolled down the window, and told them to take their game to a different street. No questions were asked and the bomb found its way to its destination.
They say that you can sometimes still smell that stink bomb near the front door of 226 Lafayette.
