Adrian Del Valle - Diego's Brooklyn

  Copyright © 2013 Adrian Del Valle

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1-4820-4046-8

  ISBN-13: 9781482040463

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-63003-002-5

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance in this novel to anyone’s character, alive or dead, including those based on real people or events or locales, is entirely coincidental and are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and meant as entertainment only.

  Dedication

  For my sister, Lucy and my brother Valentine.

  Table of contents

  Dedication

  Dean Street

  Making Money

  Amigos del Barrio

  P.S. 6

  Hell’s Kitchen

  The Steel Box

  Loose Ends and Loan Sharks

  Epilogue

  Chapter One

  Dean Street

  The 200 block of Dean Street, between Bond and Nevins, was typical of Boerum Hill in 1961, a mixed neighborhood near Downtown Brooklyn. Brownstone row-houses lined both sides of the street from corner to corner. Fat wrought iron gates, thick with layers of oil based, black paint, enclosed front patches of dirt ten feet square.

  The heyday of once proud, manicured gardens were replaced with the ignored nuisances of unintended growth—a place to put tin garbage cans and worn out bicycles. Oh, sure, the occasional well-kept frontage was also there, along with an occasional magnolia or umbrella cherry tree. A few caring souls even found a bit of free time in their hectic schedules to plant a tulip or two, but most were overgrown with weeds or cemented in.

  This is a land formed by glaciers that gouged out valleys and carried boulders the size of houses down from Canada. Before that, hadrosaurs ran from the likes of a cousin of T-Rex. Let’s just call him chompasourus, for now. I don’t have time to hoof it all the way to the library, okay? So, let’s get on with the story.

  It’s hard to imagine that only 350 years ago this was a pristine wilderness inhabited by Indian tribes like the Carnarsie in Brooklyn and the Manhattans on the other side of the East River. Both belonged to the greater Delaware language group that today would have populated lands from Nassau County to Eastern Pennsylvania and south to as far as the state of Delaware.

  Hard also, to picture woods teeming with deer, beaver and bear. Marshes bordered these shores and in the spring offered migrating ducks for the cooking pot. Blue claw crabs moved north to breed in these bountiful waters, with clams and striped bass plentiful as well. And from these marshes also came clouds of mosquitoes, the only relief, a generous helping of rancid, bear grease spread over the entire body.

  Then came the Dutch in the 1600’s, followed by the English, the French and black slaves. Plots of land a block wide and five or so blocks long were allotted to those who would farm it. A few of their names still grace some of the street signs to this day.

  Elms and maples now line both sides of Dean Street, their canopies mushrooming above the height of the roofs. And there are lots of cats, strays of a variety of colors and patterns. They forage inside garbage cans, and patrol up and down the block and through vacant lots for rats.

  Most landlords take up residence on the first floors and sometimes first two. The unfortunates live upstairs, renting one or two room flats. None of the tenants have private bathrooms. Those are shared one to a floor with all of the rooms facing common hallways. Single men usually occupy the small 9×12’s on the top floors. Many of the larger furnished units on the first are grabbed up by the Department of Welfare to house single mothers and the unemployable.

  This is fourteen year old Diego Rivera’s Brooklyn—a land of wealth as well as a land of have-nots. And for those unfortunates, it is fully roach infested and bare of extras.

  It’s summer and it’s hot, hot like cheap, dime store plastic curtains blowing out of wide open windows, hot. Air conditioning is unheard of. The ancient wiring would have none of it. Instead, rickety old fans spin noisily on table tops and next to bed sides.

  The worst of the poor lone minions reside on the top floors beneath dark tar roofs that absorb the heat of the sun the entire day. When it’s 90 outside, the top floors can reach temperatures of 100 or more. Add to that the New York City humidity that can climb above 90 percent, and you learn the real meaning of sweating in your sheets. The only relief is ice in a rag, but these are upper furnished rooms, remember? No kitchen, no fridge—no fridge, no ice.

  A bucket of tap water is all you have for the night, something to dip your rag into when you wake from that dripping sweat in the middle of pitch blackness. That is, if the rats haven’t either sucked up the last of it, or drowned in the bucket trying.

  Three buildings in from the corner of Nevins, 240 Dean Street sits unobtrusively among a row of indistinguishable brownstones. Room 2B, is the 9×12 home of Joe Barnes, a forty plus loser, who’s new and barely month old career, is as an usher at the Fox Movie Theatre, downtown. The job pays $1.15 an hour, minimum wage, for a five day work week from Wednesday through Sunday. Joe’s room rent is 48 baby clams a month. A couple of slices of pizza, at 15 cents each, takes care of most dinners. Breakfast before work is usually an egg on a roll with coffee, 25 cents.

  By walking the twenty odd blocks to work instead of taking a bus, Joe saves 15 cents. That’s 30 for the round trip, or two slices of pizza, or about 20 minutes of chasing kids up and down the aisles.

  Joe missed his old Irish neighborhood in Manhattan—“Hell’s Kitchen”. He had arrived there ten years prior by way of Hicksville, Long Island, and is the reason for his lack of a city accent. He could never go back though—not to the Kitchen, that is. He owes too much money to the Irish Mob and the old cronies are after him. Here at least, the rent is cheap, and who would think of looking for him in Brooklyn?

  With old friends like Mickey Spillane, (no, not the WWII pilot—slash—author) who needs enemies? An upstart from the old neighborhood when he was an apprentice of Hugh Mulligan, Spillane now owns the Kitchen and is nobody to mess with.

  That’s who Joe owes money to, lots of money—loan shark money. At 60%, the interest on the original loan has added up pretty quickly. It was the Trotters at the race track that got him into this mess in the first place. Even with all of the wheelin’ and dealin’ that he was into back in the city, he didn’t have the hope of catching up for a hundred years. Yeah, and Joe’s idea of a pleasure cruise wasn’t exactly laying crunched down into a fetal position inside of a barrel floating down the East River at high tide—or any tide for that matter. Besides, just think of all the tourist sights he would miss with his head facing those wooden planks at the bottom of that barrel. Nah! He was safe where he was. And nobody figured him to be right across the river—Philly perhaps, or way out in Vegas with the rest of the mafia wannabees.

  He had the perfect job, too, hiding all day in a dark movie theatre.

  The room at the back end of the hall is empty and ready for a new tenant, and has been that way for the past two months. Mary, a middle aged, and not to be disrespectful, but a bit generously rotund…hey, screw it, she’s a big, fat heifer of an ugly ass hag that Joe would have nothing to do with. She’s rented out the front room, 2A, ever since her twenties, fifteen or so years ago.

  Now, this is a room of stately size, 15×18, with a gas fireplace that doesn’t work—never worked. It speaks of an era when the building was once luxurious and high-end for its time, the late 1800’s. Back then, it was designed as a one family home, with the children and nanny/maid taking up these very same top floor rooms.

  Mary rarely challenges the stairs anymore. If she needs anything she simply calls out to a passerby in the street two floo
rs below from her munificently, oversized window arched in stained glass. A couple of bucks are wrapped in paper and tossed out of the window with a list attached: milk, eggs, bread—and don’t forget the Twinkies. And if they run out of those, she’ll settle for three or four packages of Scooter Pies, or even the round, strawberry Sno-balls. Just don’t come back empty handed. She’s been salivating the whole time you’ve been gone for whatever she needs, or shouldn’t need, for that matter. For a buffalo nickel, the local kids comply.

  Entering the house from the first floor—physically the second, after climbing 12 steps to the top of the front stoop—the first of two entry doors are never locked. The beveled glass is cracked and the framing is in desperate need of paint, neglected like the rest of the house. The lock works, but no one seems to have a key.

  The second, inside door, strains against the hinges. Caked with more than forty layers of paint, the screws still hold well, but to a frame that no longer binds properly to the wall. The leading edge of the door now scrapes along the floor and has to be pushed hard to open. The lock on this door works fine as well, but no one bothers. It’s too much trouble to close, so it stays ajar even in winter.

  Pass through the entryway and you come to Diego’s maroon door on the left, 1A, the paint, alligatored and chipped. It leads to two rooms, a real luxury among the serfs; indentured servants to his lordship who resides in a sub-basement castle keep one floor below. He’s a withered old fart and single all his life, and has hoarded all of his precious shillings. He’s got lots of those now, but little of anything else—and no family. He hates dogs and barely tolerates kids—hates when you’re late with the rent, too.

  Behind Diego’s front two rooms, at the back of the building, Karen and her two bratty kids luxuriate in a two room flat as well. Though they’re not allowed the use of the back yard, their two expansive windows, at least six feet high, offer sweeping views of the landlord’s garden of tomatoes, string beans, and a grapevine that stretches the full length of the back fence. Rumor has it an old lover was chopped up and is buried back there under the tomatoes, but that rumor belongs mostly to the kids.

  Summers could be boring at times, for Diego. His best friend, Hector, was away at summer camp—luck of the draw. Other kids of well to do parents went on vacation or travelled weekends to bungalows out on Long Island, Upstate or the Jersey Shore.

  Diego occupied most of the morning watching Farmer Grey cartoons, silent reruns tolerated from the forties that cost the local network next to nothing to run. Most of the time spent watching the nine inch screen was used up adjusting the rabbit ears topped with scraps of aluminum foil for a better signal. The horizontal lines kept rolling up and down the tube and always during the best parts, never during the commercials.

  He’d been out on the front stoop now for the last twenty minutes, beheading flies, while waiting for the garbage truck. He imagined himself a medieval knight, resplendent in armored wares, sword in hand to slay the red-eyed dragons.

  “Diego, Mijo, dee garbeege truck, she’s coming. Making sure ju bring dee cans back.”

  “Mom…I know, I know. Go inside, you’re hanging out all over the place.”

  “This ees my house dress. I’m no showing no-ting.”

  “Mom…please?”

  “Yes, okay, okay!”

  VROOM!

  Down the block, a white, behemoth lethargically crawled its way up the street. Diego’s block is lucky. The garbage men don’t get to his block until after 10:30 A.M. That’s a lot better than having all that banging wake you up at 6:30, the beginning of their shift.

  Bam! Crash!

  The men toss the cans onto the sidewalk with careless abandon. If they land right side up then fine, if not, then they’re the casualties of the day and the garbage men could care less.

  “Ay, Petey…look who it is. Wassup, Diego?”

  “Nothin’, Louie!”

  “Yo Petey, ya sees little Diego over there?”

  “Yeah, I see him,” said Petey, sitting at the driver’s seat and smoking what was left of a well chewed cigar. “Hey Diego, how‘s your mudda?”

  “Hi Petey, she’s good. Did you find anything today?”

  “Yeah…we gotcha dis pinky.”

  From inside the cab, the driver threw a crisp, new looking Spalding at Diego. The pink rubber ball, made by the Spalding Company, was great for handball or playing stick ball in the street.

  “You want this pimple ball?” Petey held up a dirty white ball covered with bumps for the boy to see.

  “Sure, Petey, thanks!”

  “Agh, don’t mention it. By da way…where is your mudda?”

  “Inside! She can’t come out right now.”

  “Naw, I wasn’t sayin’ nuttin’ bout dat, just hello or sump’n’”

  “Ayyy…Fat Tony! What are ya sleepin’ inside the can?”

  “Leave me alone, Petey, I’m checkin’ somethin’ out.”

  Louie, Fat Tony’s loading partner, stepped out from behind the hopper and approached the next stop, 240 Dean Street—Diego’s house. He took his greasy work glove off and put an arm around the boy’s shoulders. “Some partner I got, huh? You see that slouch what’s over there?”

  Diego Nodded.

  “He’s gotta go through ev-very freagin’ bag he finds like he’s lookin’ for gold. That’s why we never get finished on time. Ain’t that right, Petey?”

  Ignoring him, Petey’s focus remained on an old copy of Playboy’s center fold of the month for December, 1955, lying salaciously across the steering wheel—Joyce Nizzari—sweet.

  “Come on, move it up, Petey,” Louie shouted. “That’s another slouch what sits up there in the driver’s seat like king poop in the butt, right Diego?”

  VROOM!

  “And when you get to Diego’s cans, don’t bang’m, Fat Tony.” Louie turned to Diego again. “I guess we told him, huh, kid?”

  “Can I dump a few?” Diego asked.

  “Yeah, sure, go ahead. Help yourself. So…ah, what are ya gonna be a garbage man someday?”

  “Maybe?”

  BAM, BANG.

  “Ay-y-y! You handle that pretty good, kiddo. Like a real pro. Don’t he, Fat Tony? Oh, come on Tony, will ya? Get your fat head out of those smelly bags and do some work. Hey Diego, tell ol’ chubby over here what I said, ‘cause I’m ready to give ‘m a swift kick in the ass.”

  Petey stuck his head out of the window of the cab and shouted above the truck noise. “Let’s go! Lunch time! See ya Diego, say hello to Ana for me.”

  “I’ll tell her. See you on Wednesday.”

  Strange, how roaches know where they live. Bang the bottom of a can on the sidewalk and they fall from the bent rim underneath and scurry toward the building they came from, never to the house next door, but always to their very own Casa Grande.

  With the cans returned to the building line, Diego placed all of the covers on them. He swept the front of the building and closed the outside gate. The pay wasn’t much, but it was something. A week’s wages covered a few pounds of rice, a can of beans, and maybe the luxury of a loaf of Italian bread once in a while.

  Chapter Two

  Making Money

  Ana Rivera stood over the stove where she added onions to the day’s soup. She was real pretty once, still is when she covers her dark, tired eyes with makeup. She had bedroom eyes, her husband used to say.

  Handicapped with a bad hip, she walked with a limp. On days when the pain was too much to bare, the limp became harder to conceal.

  “What are ju doing today, Mijo?”

  “I don’t know,” said Diego. “No one’s around. Maybe I’ll go downtown and make some money.”

  “If ju make enough, peek up some milk for dee cereal.”

  “I will, Mom. Petey said hello by the way. He gave me this new pinky.”

  “Oh, si? That’s nice.”

  “I think he likes you, Mom.”

  “Mm, hm.”

  “I don’t think he’s right for
you, though. Besides, he’s always smoking those stinky cigars.”

  Ana didn’t answer.

  Rummaging through a shoe box by the side of the couch, Diego took out a heavy Master lock with string attached and a stick of Bazooka Gum. When he got downtown to his favorite spot in front of the Fox Theatre, he stood at his usual place at a bus stop above an iron grating covering a subway vent. Two stories below, the Lexington Avenue line rumbled by like a muffled freight train. Hot air rushed up into his face, and within the dampness, an aged stench of urine.

  He unfolded a two inch Bazooka Joe comic strip that comes with a flat piece of gum. The main character wore his baseball cap sideways and had a black patch over his left eye—or was it the right eye? Diego read it a couple of times while chewing the pink gum until it was nice and sticky. He then pressed it onto the bottom of the padlock and carefully lowered it through the grating. He aimed toward a subway token lying on a narrow ledge 12 feet below. The token was all shiny and new, the brass glistening like gold with the letter “Y” stamped out of it.

  Gold doubloons, Spanish coins from the 1400’s; a treasure trove worth millions was below the deck of Diego’s imagined Spanish Galleon. Through this heavy iron grating he could see piles of it worth millions and he would have it all.

  This was his lucky spot, the bus stop at Nevins and Flatbush. He had only cleaned it out a week ago and here he could see at least three tokens, a couple of quarters and a dime. The tokens, he could redeem for 15 cents each; a whole buck and a nickel was down there—a good day. It was enough to buy a quart of milk, a candy bar for both himself and his mom, and a ticket for the Lido. For twenty five cents, the cheap theatre on Court Street played ten cartoons, “The Three Stooges”, and two feature films.

  He left for home and 15 minutes later turned into his block on Dean Street where he saw Karen’s two girls playing skully. To most of its residents, the street wasn’t all gloom and doom. To Diego it was all that was familiar. It was home.

  “How much did ju get?” asked Ana.