I Only Know Who I Am When I Am Somebody Else Read online

  To this day, I don’t know how my mother did it. She fed, clothed, and sheltered six children and my grandfather. She once told me she had pared the family food budget down to thirteen cents a day!

  Mom had a hard-and-fast rule: “If you go out and they’re serving dinner at the home of a friend, you tell them that you aren’t hungry.” When I’d ask why, she wouldn’t explain. She would just shake her head and say to just do what she said. Only as an adult did I realize that it was simply a point of pride for her. She didn’t want anybody in the neighborhood to think her children were hungry. And I did what I was told, too, even though there were plenty of times I would have gladly accepted a free meal.

  Even with the Aiello family living as close to the bone as we did, I was still a problem child when it came to food. I was fussy. Often I refused to eat what was put in front of me. The worst were the onions, and any dish that had come near them would be immediately pushed away.

  Mom would say, “I removed all the onions.”

  “Not the smell, Mama,” I’d protest. “You didn’t remove the smell!”

  There was no chance I would eat any kind of seafood. If it looked “ugly” to my young eyes, that was that. My friends and I used to go to the docks on the Hudson River and watch people fish from the shoreline. I still remember the eels—they made me feel sick just looking at them.

  “I’d never put anything that ugly in my mouth!” To this day, I have an aversion to eating anything that swims.

  Chapter Three

  Mothers and Fathers and Sons

  I was a very sickly child. I was anemic and had a touch of asthma. From age six to when I was eight or nine, I was hospitalized several times for eczema, scratching myself bloody. It got so bad that I had to put gloves on at school to keep my fingernails from digging big red gouges into my flesh. At night, when I went to bed, my mother would transfer my socks from my feet to my hands for the same reason.

  I was small and should have been sitting up in the front of the class. Instead, because of embarrassment over my incessant scratching, I chose to sit in the back row. It was excruciating. I could see my classmates stealing glances at me, giving taunting smiles, giggling. I was a sensitive kid, so of course I imagined that I was disgusting to them.

  The tragedy was that I really liked some aspects of school. Definitely not math, but I couldn’t wait to read whenever teachers called on me. I simply loved reading out loud. If they ever asked me to get up and speak without a book in my hands, I was too shy. Whenever I was reading another person’s words, I didn’t stammer or lose my place.

  Though eczema practically overwhelmed my young life, I tried to hide from my mother how it affected my time in class. I didn’t want her to be upset. She already had too much to worry about. I didn’t have many friends at school. It wasn’t because I didn’t want them. I thought they didn’t want me.

  In school, I might have been relatively friendless, but on the street, it was different. The best times I had as a kid were when I played outdoors. Then I didn’t have the time to worry about scratching and bleeding. I was too busy having fun.

  I was a hell of a stickball player. I was always out on the block in front of whatever apartment we lived in at the time. We didn’t have yards, we had the street. The asphalt made a long, narrow field for playing ball. Traffic wasn’t as vicious back then as it is today.

  Using a broom handle for a bat and a pink rubber Spaldeen ball, we played the West Side version of the game, with a pitcher who delivered a one-bounce pitch. First base was that fire hydrant there, second base was sixty feet down the block, third base was that old battered Ford over there. On the pavements of New York City, I began to develop the baseball skills that would pay off later in my life in unexpected ways.

  My friends and I played other games, too, traditional street contests that had been passed down by our older siblings. I would take newspapers and roll them up extra tight, then wrap twine around them until I had something that resembled an oval shape. That served for our football, as heavy as a brick. A real inflatable pigskin was wishful thinking, of course beyond our means.

  Punchball was played in a square, with the goal being to “punch” the ball out through the line of opposing players. Johnny on the Pony was a pile-on contest that resembled the offensive line action in the NFL.

  Sometimes, we found other, more dangerous ways to amuse ourselves. The freight railroad tracks ran along the Hudson River, just a few blocks away. A neighborhood kid got his hands on some .22 rimfire bullets, I guess from a supply his father kept. My friends and I used to put the shells on the railroad tracks and wait for the trains to run over them. The sharp reports sounded like strings of firecrackers going off. We’d laugh like maniacs. Looking back, we were lucky that a stray round didn’t kill anybody.

  Our street games didn’t end until dark. I still remember the sound of mothers calling children home as evening shadows fell, the calls echoing between the tenement buildings of Sixty-Eighth Street.

  Every night before bedtime, the entire family would gather around the radio. Our Philco was like a piece of furniture, with a cabinet of varnished wood and a dial that glowed orange. All over the West Side and all over America, households would be doing the same thing, listening to the radio as a popular evening pastime. Our favorite shows had headlining comics such as Fred Allen, Jack Benny, and Edgar Bergen. There were also crime serials and mysteries like The Shadow, Mr. District Attorney, Inner Sanctum, and The Green Hornet.

  The holidays were another time of great family togetherness. One of my clearest childhood memories centers around what I’ve always considered to be my first Christmas. The year was 1939, and I was six years old.

  On Christmas Eve, I lay in my bed listening to a conversation that my little sister, Annabelle, was having with my mom in the next room. “Is Santa Claus bringing us presents this Christmas?” Annabelle asked.

  “I bet he comes this year,” Mom replied.

  Last year, he didn’t come, I thought, mentally joining in on the conversation. We don’t have a tree. Where will Santa put the presents?

  “How will he get in?” Annabelle asked. “There’s no chimney for him to climb down.”

  “Maybe the window,” Mom said.

  My six-year-old mind didn’t think Santa could fit through the window. And I didn’t think kids could get presents if the family didn’t have a tree. I was all torn up with worry.

  Through a crack in the door, I could see my mom smiling and giving my little sister a hug. “Santa is amazing,” she said. “Magical things can happen at Christmastime.”

  On Christmas Day, Grandpa Ralph woke me at six a.m. He was already dressed. He didn’t have a job but always looked as though he was heading out to one, wearing a crisp white shirt and a suit jacket.

  “Ju-ju,” he said—my name was Junior at the time—“this is for you, a good boy.”

  My eyes were still full of sleep. I rubbed them clear. I opened my hand and saw a nickel. I was so excited. Grandfather kissed me on the cheek and went out the door.

  The whole morning was enchanted. I looked up from my bed, out the window, and through the basement grating, and saw snow falling. Then I turned toward the parlor and saw a tree. Not a very big one, but it was a tree nonetheless. Our first Christmas tree! I thought I was dreaming.

  Understand that this was not a privileged person’s holiday. It wasn’t even a reasonably well-off family’s Christmas. I found out later that my older sister Helen had actually pinched the tree from a street merchant. That morning, its boughs were decorated not with store-bought lights and ornaments, but with bottle caps tied to different-colored shoestrings. The Christmas stockings were used socks that we kids had actually worn, now repurposed and filled with tiny candies.

  But to my young eyes, it was a perfect Christmas morning. It was just as Mom said to Annabelle, magical. Underneath the tree, there was at least one gift for each of us. My first real Christmas present was a pair of boxing gloves. Maybe I should
have seen those gloves as a sign of the struggles ahead.

  I didn’t think about any of that on this, my first real Christmas. I was too happy. I was in the warm embrace of my family, and nothing else mattered.

  * * *

  In my early days, my mother acted as both parents. I used to tell my friends that Dad was in Cleveland on business, making up the fairy tale that he worked as a police detective, “chasing prisoners.”

  Why a detective? I’m not sure, but I think it was because I had seen my father wearing a fedora and a raincoat, and detectives in the movies and comic strips always wore the same, so my young mind simply made the connection. And why Cleveland? Perhaps I thought of it as a faraway land, at least far enough removed that my friends could never check up on the white lie I was telling.

  The strange thing about my mother was that no matter how my father would treat her, Mom would never bad-mouth him. Her husband might disappear for half a year at a time, but she would say absolutely nothing against the man. And because my mother loved him, we children did, too.

  My father was nineteen when he married my mother in 1921. Frances was only fifteen. Even though Dad and Mom had met at formal, chaperoned events in the West Side neighborhood where they both lived, his family didn’t want the marriage to take place. Frances was too young to make a suitable match.

  What was my father doing when he wasn’t with us? “He’s a trucker,” Mom would say. “He’s away a lot.”

  It took a long time before the real picture finally came into focus. My father held jobs as a teamster and a moving man. But those weren’t the only ways he earned a living. Back then, they had a name for what my father was: a knock-around guy. That meant he wasn’t a mobster himself, but he consorted with them.

  Within weeks of the wedding, he took a job with the infamous bootlegger Dutch Schultz. He drove trucks for the beer baron. In the early days of Prohibition, mob rivalries were still being sorted out. For a while, my father called himself “Dan Dillon” to be able to pass for Irish. This was when he worked for Roger Touhy, the Irish-American gangster who was a rival of Al Capone.

  A story Mom told me about those days used to fascinate me as a child. In the 1920s, during the height of Prohibition, my mother was at home in the family apartment when there came a knock on the door. My father realized what was happening and immediately hid under the bed. A trio of wiseguys confronted Mom, demanding to know where her husband was.

  My mother didn’t know what it was all about. She was pregnant with my brother Joey at the time. “I just kept repeating that he wasn’t at home,” she told me. The wiseguys finally relented. As they were leaving, Mom said they gave her a parting tribute.

  “We know he’s here,” one of the mobsters told her. “You just saved your man’s life.”

  She never could find out what my father had done to warrant a visit from mob enforcers. But the image of my mother fending off gangsters while my father hid under the bed made a lasting impression on me. It told me how things were with my parents in the period before I was born.

  “He’s away a lot” was really code for my father’s being in prison. A hijacking scam he was involved with got busted and he wound up doing a two-year stretch in New York City’s Rikers Island.

  One of my earliest memories of my father is visiting him in jail. He was getting processed in downtown Manhattan at the Tombs, a.k.a. the City Prison. My mother brought me down to see him. They would not allow me into the prison, as I was too young. Mom left me with a policeman in the vestibule while she went upstairs to visit Dad.

  When my mother returned, she took me by the hand. We walked out into the street in front of the jail.

  “Look up,” she said.

  I peered upward at the dirty façade of the Tombs. In a barred window on the fourth floor I saw a small light, a shaky, wavering flame. It was my father. He held a cigarette lighter, a signal to his little boy.

  I definitely don’t want to make it seem like my spotty relationship with my father was some monstrous hardship. It wasn’t that way at all. Whatever my dad was doing outside the home didn’t much matter to me during that first decade of my young life. What did matter was that the man who gave me his name was never around.

  * * *

  As a kid I started working in 1942, at the ripe old age of nine. I was a skinny child but tough. Plus I was willing to do anything that would bring in a few nickels to the family. I ended up shining shoes in Grand Central Terminal.

  That year, the mobilization for World War II hit New York City in a big way. Servicemen poured through town, transferring to their respective deployments. The trains in and out of the city were jammed. Everywhere you looked was a uniform. And if you looked hard enough, you would have seen a pint-sized me sidling up to my prospective customers.

  “Shine, soldier? Shine?”

  Man, those boots! The tall, government-issued combat boots were heavy as hell and made to wear like iron. But I loved them because I got to charge extra to work on them. A regular shine was a dime, but the combat boots brought in a quarter.

  A sergeant would breathe fire on any soldier who didn’t have his boots shined to a high gloss. That’s where I came in. I buffed those boots until I could see my reflection in them. I used to pop that rag, making music with my buffing cloth. The better the show I put on, the bigger the tips I got. I was like a frantic bee buzzing around the soldiers.

  What I remember most is how the boots always seemed to be in mint condition. They were a light, yellowish tan, not even broken in yet and still smelling of new leather. I would be giving them their first shine.

  The boots were worn by boys maybe ten years older than me. Where were they headed? To the beaches of Normandy or Guadalcanal. I didn’t think about it then, but those fresh, clean boots shined in Grand Central Terminal marched through Europe or the Pacific theater, through mud and snow and blood. A lot of those boots never came back.

  Every day before I set up, I would buy a stack of newspapers. This was during the golden age of New York City journalism. I brought the tabloids to my shoe-shine spot, and my patrons liked them because they were easy to page through while I got to work. I would end up selling copies of the Daily News, the Daily Mirror, and the New York Journal-American, doubling the cover price. But my customers would happily pay the premium because they saw me as a determined little kid working his ass off to make a living.

  On a good day, I cleared a couple of dollars. With a few first-rate tips, I might even bring home five dollars. I never kept any money for myself. I wouldn’t have known what to do with it if I did. Every member of the Aiello family pitched in.

  It wasn’t enough. Nothing was ever enough. “Rent is due” is a terrifying phrase I remember hearing constantly throughout my childhood. With the war in Europe raging, it almost seemed like our family troubles were mirroring the turmoil in the world as a whole. Everything was in flux. The modern world was being born right before my eyes.

  I would return again and again to a furniture shop on Broadway and Seventieth Street, a few blocks from where we lived. Displayed in a window was a strange glowing device that must have been the first television ever produced. Animated images danced on a screen.

  But TV couldn’t hold a candle to my real passion, which was sneaking into the big movie palaces on Broadway. I rarely had the dime it cost for admission. A family friend, Al Vironi, worked as an usher and would slip us kids into the theater for free.

  The movies had an irresistible attraction for me. Penniless as I was, I simply had to see them as often as I could. The male stars of the day were everything that I desperately yearned to find—the father figures to replace the one who was missing in my life. Wallace Beery, the great MGM star of the 1930s, was my first favorite, along with Fredric March, Broderick Crawford, Spencer Tracy. These were stars who allowed me to dream of what life could be like.

  Around this time my childhood nightmares started, and a lot of those began in the movie theaters, too. Boris Karloff as Franke
nstein’s monster and Lon Chaney Jr. as the Wolfman scared the hell out of me, to the degree that I had to go to sleep with the bedcovers pulled up over my head as they worked their way into my dreams, disturbing my sleep.

  It didn’t help my nightmares any when we moved for the summer to a free place a relative provided for us in Coney Island, Brooklyn. It was 1942. We were in a second-floor apartment above a wax museum on the boardwalk. Lilly’s World in Wax Musee featured gory tableaus of famous crimes. The one that burned itself into my nightmares was of a madman from the 1920s named William “the Fox” Hickman. In the museum, Hickman’s wax figure was posed dismembering his victim Marion Parker in a bathtub. My dreams were haunted back then.

  When we left Brooklyn that summer, we didn’t return to our old neighborhood. Our wayward journeys from apartment to apartment weren’t over yet. The West Side may have been blighted and poverty stricken, but it had been my home for almost a decade. Smack in the middle of the chaotic war years, rent worries forced us to move yet again. This time we didn’t just change addresses. We moved to a whole new world.

  Chapter Four

  Fists, Don’t Fail Me Now

  No one welcomed us when the Aiellos landed on the streets of the South Bronx. We were on our own, strangers in a strange land.

  We left a few members of the family behind when we moved. Our new apartment in the Bronx did not accept pets, so our collie, Bessie, stayed behind with Jonesie, a black man who was a family friend. I was heartbroken to have to leave her.

  After we moved to the Bronx, I never saw my grandfather again, either. Apparently there had been a secret reason Raphael was getting dressed up every day in sharp clothes. He wasn’t headed out to look for work. He was meeting women-friends. My grandfather married again and moved to Plainview, Long Island. He outlived that second wife and another one besides, living until he was well into his eighties.