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

  So I first showed up in the Bronx minus a dog and minus a grandfather. I had to find my own way. All the neighborhoods I grew up in were scrappy, physical places. My friends and I fought constantly. We used to have fistfights in the hallways of the tenements where we lived. In those close quarters, it was like fighting in an alley. Your back was always to some wall.

  There were two kinds of fights in my younger years. The first was clearly anger related. We played the dozens. Somebody went too far with the insults and pretty soon fists were flying. The second was more about entertainment—real punches landed, but we were fighting just to see who was the quickest, the strongest, the most unrelenting. Our heroes were the boxers who made headlines: Joe Louis, Billy Conn, Willie Pep, and Beau Jack.

  In the Bronx, I was the new kid on the block, so I had to prove myself. I was battling on the streets of an ethnically mixed neighborhood. Officially, it was called Crotona Park East, but I don’t remember any of the locals calling it that. The majority of the population was Jewish, but there were Italians, Irish, Germans, Puerto Ricans, and black people. We lived in the middle of it all, in a series of cheap apartments along Stebbins Avenue, Boston Road, Hoe Avenue, Home Street, Southern Boulevard, and Freeman Street.

  The Aiellos were on Home Relief, a welfare program that President Franklin Roosevelt had pushed through during the Great Depression. Government spending on the war effort had started to lift the economy, but it took a while before the good times reached the Bronx.

  All through the war years, my mother did piecework, either as a seamstress or stuffing envelopes for mail-order campaigns. Our kitchen table was always piled high with stacks of advertising inserts. At the time, there were still manufacturing jobs in New York City. Most of the men were away overseas, so my mother was finally able to land a job, working as a supervisor in the Sid Spindel toy factory on Southern Boulevard. She still did her piecework to make ends meet.

  I attended PS 54 on Intervale Avenue, five blocks away. After school, Annabelle and I would walk over to the factory and yell up to the window. “Mom! Hey, Mom!” She’d appear at the window and toss us money for an after-school snack, coins wrapped in a napkin or a piece of paper—a quarter, sometimes a little bit more, whatever she could spare.

  My mother constantly juggled her day to make things work for her children. The older Aiello kids were off on their own. Mom would prepare breakfast for Annabelle and me before we left for school. We would have our lunch at Jack’s Restaurant, at Freeman Street and Southern Boulevard. We’d always order the same thing: mashed potatoes with brown gravy. We didn’t have to pay ourselves, since my mother ran a tab, paying for our lunches at the end of every week.

  Mom finished work at five p.m. and came straight home to prepare supper for us. She sometimes had a second job in the evening, cooking at a local restaurant. The woman was tireless, and all her efforts flowed from her love and devotion to her children. I used to take it for granted back then. Now I recall what she did with reverence.

  I don’t know if it was the family’s relocation to a new neighborhood or just normal growing pains, but during this period, around age thirteen, I began to act the rebellious teenager. My oldest sister, Helen, wasn’t around at home much anymore, so Mom was the only one who was there to discipline me. I played hooky a lot, disappearing from PS 98, Herman Ridder Junior High on Boston Road. My teachers reached out to my mother, begging her to get me to school.

  “He’s so sweet, I love him,” my teacher Mrs. Rossellini would say. “Why doesn’t he come to class?”

  When my mother confronted me about my excessive absences, I’d swear to her that I really had been attending school. Of course, there’d be hell to pay for my lies. She got so angry that she would come after me with a broom. I dove under my bed, the only place to get away from her. I used the bedsprings to pull myself up off the floor, as Mom would be swatting and sweeping under the bed. But she could never reach me, and in my heart I know that she really didn’t want to.

  I was wild outside the home, too. When you’re uneducated, there are always people around who are verbally quicker. They’re able to use words to put you down. When they got to me, I didn’t talk back but just used my fists. That’s how I settled my differences with people. Throughout my Bronx years, I was always nursing bruises and scrapes. Part of my ear got torn off in a fight. I got stabbed. That was just the way of the streets.

  At times it seemed that nobody got out of the South Bronx unscathed. I can still trace the wounds I got during those days. I received the scar that is the most attractive part of my face when a guy ripped my eye open. I also have a scar on my thigh from when I got shot by a bullet fired from a zip gun.

  Constructing zip guns was a popular pastime in the neighborhood. We got all the materials necessary from shop class at PS 98. I took an L-shaped piece of wood, fitted it with a lamp pipe for a barrel, and used a nail for a firing pin with a rubber band to propel the nail into the bullet. Then I’d wrap the whole mess in white adhesive tape. I used a lot of tape, in the vain hope that the thing wouldn’t explode in my face.

  The first time I was taken into the local precinct house was when I was caught stealing a Hooton chocolate bar from the Woolworth’s on Westchester Avenue near the Simpson Street el stop. The store manager called the police. Two officers arrived and took me to the “Four-One,” the Forty-First Precinct stationhouse in the Bronx. There they handcuffed me to a radiator near the bullpen, right next to a holding cell crammed with people who definitely should not have been out on the street.

  The cops wanted to scare me, trying to teach me a lesson. I learned two things that day: I never wanted to be in a bullpen again unless I was a relief pitcher with the Yankees, and I never wanted to be handcuffed to a radiator that was being used as a toilet.

  The precinct house of the Four-One went by another nickname. Because of its embattled status in the middle of a high-crime zone, it came to be called “Fort Apache,” after the old John Wayne cavalry movie. Thirty-five years after I sat chained to that urine-soaked radiator in the Four-One, I would return there to film Fort Apache, the Bronx, starring Paul Newman, with me acting the role of the psychopathic cop Morgan.

  As a young teen, I ran with a group of neighborhood kids. We called ourselves the Kingsmen. Belonging to the Kingsmen was based more on which block you lived on than from what country your people had emigrated. Outsiders looked on us as a street gang, but really, we were just a stickball team.

  The neighborhood had block parties that extended from day to night. In the evening there was music, bands, dancing. It was like a festival. The streets were closed off. The events were usually run by the PAL, the Police Athletic League. The PAL organizers would also cordon off a ring and allowed us kids to fight if we wanted to, only not bare fisted, the way we usually did. We had to wear boxing gloves.

  Our stickball contests at times pitted neighborhood against neighborhood. Stebbins Avenue might play Boston Road, or Freeman Street would line up against Hoe Avenue. We played for money, a few dollars at most. In reality, the games were for boasting privileges.

  Fights broke out all over the place. The stickball wars swept up not only the players but everybody from the whole neighborhood. Tenants from our blocks fought tenants from their blocks, pitched battles right there in the street. It was madness. Combatants employed bottles, fists, or garbage cans. The cops arrived, confiscated the broom handles that we used as bats, and settled everyone down.

  Until the next game.

  Crotona Park East might have been a wild ethnic mix back then, but like I said, the population was predominately Jewish. As a kid, I was hired as a Sabbath goy. I would go around to the Jewish homes on holy days and light stoves or turn on lamps. Observant Jews were not allowed to perform even the simplest task on the Sabbath—from driving a car to flipping a switch.

  I was too young to drive, although I would have probably been delighted if I was ever asked. But the lights and stoves were easy, and the families I helpe
d out were very appreciative. Since no one in that community could handle money on the holy days, I got paid in empty milk bottles worth two or three cents per deposit. Even though it wasn’t much, I was grateful for it.

  Just as we had when we lived on the West Side of Manhattan, the Aiello family kept moving. The rent was always due. Like my earlier days before we moved to the Bronx, I remained a working kid. I no longer journeyed down to Grand Central to shine shoes, but I delivered the Saturday Evening Post, canvas bag and everything, a real newsie.

  I also used to deliver loads of wash from the local laundries to the customers. Wet wash was very heavy but cheaper. If customers wanted dry laundry, they paid a premium. They’d accept the heavy bundle from me and hang it out to dry themselves via clotheslines running from back windows to poles erected for that purpose in the back of each apartment building. The laundries never paid me a salary. I got paid only in tips.

  At this point, I was hustling for any job I could get, working in downtown grocery stores like Gristedes and later at the fancier Charles & Company. I delivered messages for Western Union.

  A few of my gigs actually furthered my informal education. Even though I was technically too young to be allowed inside Charley’s Pool Hall on Boston Road, I learned my way around a billiards table when I got hired to sweep up at the joint. The same thing happened at Tremont Gym AC, one flight up off the street on East Tremont Avenue near the Elsmere Theatre. For a time I wielded a broom there, too, and picked up pointers on how to box, watching the French middleweight Marcel Cerdan train for his match with Jake LaMotta.

  Eventually I entered into a little shadier style of work. I ran numbers for the local mob. The racketeers liked to use underage children to carry betting slips because they knew that police couldn’t bust us. We were a gang of little snot-nosed kids running around to neighborhood street corners and candy stores. Along with the money, we collected the slips with the numbers scrawled on them.

  Everything would eventually be delivered to the numbers “bank,” a storefront operation at Fordham Road and Belmont Avenue, where the neighborhood controllers worked. But as runners, we rarely went up there. Instead, we would turn in our slips at the local diner, Fred’s, located at Boston Road and Stebbins Avenue. A runner’s pay was nothing, just a few nickels for every run.

  I collected from a poverty-stricken betting public that had little money to spare but was always hoping for better days. Even the most down-and-out folks could find a nickel, dime, or quarter. Hitting a number was a common dream in the neighborhood, the odds being 500 to 1. On a quarter bet, the payoff was a hundred and twenty-five dollars. That sum represented the jackpot fantasy for the poor people of the Bronx.

  During those days I was always hustling, always looking for ways to make bank. In 1946, the summer I turned thirteen, I somehow finagled a way to join the National Guard. This was the postwar period, when the guard was so starved for manpower that it would take anyone. I was short, five foot seven, and still looked as though I were nine. My mother had to sign permission papers to allow me to go.

  The guard assigned me to the Forty-Second Infantry Division. As part of my enlistment, I had to go away to Pine Camp in upstate New York for two weeks out of the year. It was all for money. I turned over to my mother the seventy-five-dollars-per-month National Guard compensation.

  Other attempts at making something of myself were less successful. When I was fourteen years old, my mother brought me down to East Fifty-Second Street in Manhattan, where they were holding tryouts for the Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts radio show. All through the 1940s and beyond, the prime-time variety program was extremely popular and had a huge nationwide audience. The whole Aiello family listened to it, gathered around the radio in our apartment in the Bronx every Monday night at eight-thirty.

  Mom always wanted me to sing. She thought I was a real Caruso. I definitely could not manage opera, but I had a good time singing at gatherings of friends and relatives.

  For the audition, I planned to do “All of Me,” the 1931 classic of all classics, written by Gerald Marks and Seymour Simons. While Mom and I were sitting in the vestibule of the Talent Scouts audition hall, waiting for my name to be called, nervousness overcame me. I asked if I could be excused to go to the bathroom. I fled that audition and never returned. I got on the subway and hightailed it back to the Bronx. The next time my mother saw me was at home.

  I was too nervous to perform in public. All I could think about were the millions of people in Arthur Godfrey’s audience, listening to the radio and hearing me screw up. My nervousness about singing stayed with me for a long time afterward.

  During this time, we lived on Stebbins Avenue in the Bronx and I worked in a drugstore at East 170th Street, delivering prescriptions. My best friend was fifteen-year-old Bey Domini, a kid who could draw anything and had all the makings of a great artist. He and his mom lived in the same building we did, and that year I spent more time in his apartment than in my own.

  Hanging around so much with Bey, I noticed something odd. Over time, there seemed to be fewer pieces of furniture in the apartment. It turned out that Bey was selling the family furnishings to support his heroin addiction.

  His mother seemed unable to do anything to stop him. Bey began avoiding me, his best friend. I wasn’t around when Bey Domini, a kid with everything going for him, died of a drug overdose at age fifteen. I believe it was this incident from my childhood, more than anything else, that created a hatred in me for drug use and a low tolerance for those who used that shit.

  I was still just a kid, fooling around with street fights, zip guns, and shoplifting—pretty ordinary stuff for the South Bronx in those days. What dogged me more than anything was a nagging sense of searching for something. For a long time, I thought it might be my missing father.

  I saw my dad more in my teens than when I was little. Now that I was older, I wanted the chance to get to know him better. When I was fifteen, my dad arranged for me to live with him in a boardinghouse for a couple months one summer in Astoria, Queens, near Steinway Street. My mother was all for it. She thought it was a good idea for father and son to mend fences.

  Those two months turned out to be a lonely time for me. Unlike when I was living with Mom, I had a strict curfew. I had to be at the boardinghouse by nine every evening. It was embarrassing. I was going out with a girl named Joan Delaney back then, and she wound up walking me home at the early hour of nine o’clock.

  I had no friends in the neighborhood, and I saw my dad only briefly at night, when he was getting ready for sleep. He was always early to bed, early to rise. That summer, he would come back to the boardinghouse, smoke one of his trademark White Owl cigars, and then turn in, barely speaking to me at all.

  The closest we ever came to an intimate father-son talk was one night he showed me a tackle box he kept beneath his bed. “There’s money in it,” he said. “If you ever need any, go ahead and take it.”

  “Okay, Dad.”

  A long, awkward silence followed. “How’s your mother?” he asked me.

  “Mom would feel a lot better if you were home,” I said.

  “I have to be out of town most of the time,” he said.

  For the period when we shared living quarters, he’d disappear for days at a stretch. I never knew where he went. I never saw him with any friends. I didn’t know how he spent his days.

  I found out one afternoon when I encountered my father walking down the street near our boardinghouse, accompanied by a woman. A few times over the course of that summer, I had seen them together before, but I didn’t know who she was. This time he introduced us. Her name, he said, was Eileen. She nodded to me. We didn’t shake hands. It was an awkward moment for both of us.

  That was the last and only extended period of time I ever spent with my dad. I never told my mother about the other woman.

  Chapter Five

  How Baseball Saved My Life

  In ninth grade my run-ins with the law turned a little m
ore serious than a stolen candy bar. Due to constantly missing school because of my eczema attacks, I had been held back a year. I was older than the other kids in my class, sixteen instead of fifteen. In 1950, while I attended PS 98 on Boston Road in the Bronx, I was called into the principal’s office one day.

  Two plainclothes detectives from the NYPD waited for me there. With no questions, no ceremony, and certainly no reading of my rights, they marched me out to the street and loaded me into their unmarked car.

  The detective who wasn’t driving leaned over the seat toward me. “You know someone named Joe Ariargo, a Spanish kid?” he asked. “The one that got his ass kicked? You have anything to do with that?”

  I knew what they were talking about. I had heard rumors around the neighborhood. The beating had happened the week before. But I sure as hell had had nothing to do with it, and I told the detectives that.

  “You’re Danny Aiello, right? They call you Junior?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “But it wasn’t me.”

  “Well, we were given your name by a witness.”

  All the stories of false accusations and innocent men locked away for crimes they didn’t commit suddenly occurred to me.

  The cops took me thirty blocks south on Boston Road, then farther south on Third Avenue. I swear a pop song was on the car radio during that drive, repeating the lyrics “I have an alibi” over and over. I figured the detectives wouldn’t appreciate it if I sang along.

  The ride gave me plenty of time to think. The mind is a funny thing. The more I thought, the more doubts came to me. Even though I was innocent, I started to feel guilty. I was sure that the whole catalog of my petty crimes showed on my face. Maybe I really had attacked Joey Ariargo.

  The bulls pulled up at Lincoln Hospital, on 149th Street just off Grand Concourse. I had visited the ER there many times before for various busted bones, scrapes, and wounds. But I’d never had the honor of being walked through the lobby by a pair of NYPD detectives.