I Only Know Who I Am When I Am Somebody Else Page 5

I almost cried. “Take the money!” I said. “Take it all! Give it to her for the operation!”

  She had the operation, the first of several. This is the new role that I wanted for myself, to be a provider, a breadwinner, a dutiful son who took care of the ones he loved. Meanwhile I was living on my three-hundred-dollar mustering-out pay and a twenty-six-week stretch of unemployment benefits, at seventy-five dollars a week.

  Even the warm cocoon of my family seemed to have changed while I had been gone. I rarely saw my siblings. My brother Joe worked with my uncle at his business, Aiello Junior Moving and Storage, at Ninety-Sixth Street on Manhattan’s East Side. My sisters were married and living their own lives.

  Mitchell Eddis, a baseball scout from the New York Giants, took a look at me on the ball fields of the South Bronx. He came up to our apartment a few times, having lunch or just coffee with me and my mother. I had last been scouted a half decade before, when I was still in high school.

  Eddis was a genial man, a real old-fashioned aficionado of the game, the kind of shoe-leather scout you don’t see much anymore. I reacted to his interest in a peculiar way. At that point in my life, in 1954, I had just been away from home and in a uniform for my stretch of time in the army. I simply did not want to don a baseball uniform and go out on tour with some minor-league franchise. It sounds like a whim, refusing a professional baseball scout for such a reason, but I just wanted to stay around my old neighborhood.

  My time in the army might have made a different man out of me, but I slipped back into my old South Bronx ways with my former number-running buddies. I played a lot of pool and got to the point where I could knock down some coin hustling other players.

  Then I had the greatest piece of luck I ever had in my life.

  I found what I was missing. I discovered my heart’s desire, right there in my old neighborhood.

  Chapter Six

  Sandy

  I remember the first time I saw the most beautiful girl in the Bronx. It was April 1954 and I was standing on the corner of East 170th Street and Wilkins Avenue. Walking toward me was a knockout: blond hair, five foot two, maybe eighteen years old, with the most gorgeous blue eyes imaginable. She wore scotch-blue plaid slacks and walked like a little duck. She was alone and I wondered how the hell that could be.

  I must say, I looked pretty good myself. I was twenty years old and had come out of the army at six foot three, weighing in at one hundred eighty pounds. The blond girl stopped a few yards down the sidewalk. Looking straight at me, she said, “Are we going to the movies?”

  While I desperately wanted her to be talking to me, I knew that she really wasn’t. I was like a pane of glass to her. She was looking right through me, focusing on another guy standing on the street right behind me.

  He approached her and whispered something in her ear. They embraced and walked off, passing me by as if I were begging to be ignored.

  At the time, I was with my friend Larry Leifbaur. I asked him if he knew the girl.

  “She lives on Boston Road,” Larry said. “Her name is Sandra, Sandy Cohen.”

  “Sandy,” I said, already dreaming.

  “You want to meet her?” Larry asked.

  “Well, that’s her boyfriend, right?” I said.

  “So you don’t want to meet her?”

  “I didn’t say that,” I said. Right about that time, there was no one I would have rather met. “She’s the girl I want to marry.”

  “You’ve only seen her once!” Larry said, scoffing.

  After that, as fate would have it, I kept encountering pretty Sandy Cohen. A few days later I was in a candy store on Boston Road, drinking an egg cream (New York’s favorite drink, which, despite its name, has no egg or cream in it—only seltzer, Fox’s U-bet chocolate syrup, and milk). I had stepped into the store’s old-fashioned phone booth to make a call.

  Sandy entered soon after and fell into a conversation with the store owner. She never once looked over at me. I couldn’t make out what they were saying. I stayed in the phone booth like Clark Kent afraid to change into Superman. My time in that damned booth seemed like forever. I kept asking myself, how many occasions could I possibly end up in the same place with this girl and not get up the nerve to speak to her?

  Finally she left. I emerged from the booth and asked the store owner what the two of them had been talking about.

  “She comes in here all the time with her boyfriend, Stanley,” he said. “Now she tells me that they broke up.”

  There was a chance for me, I thought, but she didn’t even know I was alive. But I kept bumping into Sandy: on the sidewalks of Wilkins Avenue, in a park, or at a café. I thought it was a series of coincidences, but all of those “accidental” meetings were actually carefully planned by my future wife.

  The very next day, after our nonencounter at the candy store, I was playing baseball with a sandlot team in the Federation League at Crotona Park. I was playing first base and looked over into the stands. And there she was, sitting next to a friend of mine who also happened to be named Sandy—not an old girlfriend, but someone dear to me from the neighborhood who had thoughtfully sent me care packages while I was in Germany.

  I hit a home run that day, three hundred and fifty feet over the left center-field fence, but Sandy Cohen didn’t see me do it. She had left the game by that time, but had given her phone number to her friend Sandy with instructions for me to call her.

  I was equal parts excited and flustered. When I finally called, her mother answered.

  “Can I speak to Sandra?” I said, my voice trembling.

  “She’s out,” her mother said. “Who’s calling?”

  “Danny.”

  “Danny who?”

  “Just Danny,” I said, panicking. I didn’t want to give my last name, because I didn’t know if an Italian suitor would be acceptable to her mother. Now thoroughly embarrassed, I thanked the woman and hung up.

  I was shooting pool later that same evening at Charley’s—a pool hall that was one of my main hangouts in that period, right across Boston Road from where I first saw Sandy—when my friend Larry came in.

  “I gave you her number,” he said. “You didn’t call?”

  “I did! Her mother answered.”

  “So?”

  “I got all nervous when she asked me my name. I told her ‘Danny,’ thanked her, and hung up. Her family’s Jewish, right?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Larry asked.

  When you live in a melting pot like the South Bronx, there are mix-ups like these all the time. Sandy’s mother had told her that a boy named Danny had called and didn’t leave his phone number. But little did I know that Sandy had another boy after her: Danny Fisher. It was a case of two Dannys and two Sandys. What the hell else could happen?

  Without telling me, Larry had contrived to have Sandy come into Charley’s poolroom that very night. When Sandy showed up and the moment came for me finally to introduce myself, I froze once again. I could not force my feet to walk or my mouth to speak. I made no move to go up to her. I continued to play pool.

  “Say hello, Danny,” Larry said. I couldn’t do it. I knew I was being foolish. I was so messed up that if Larry had laughed at me right then, I would have busted his head open.

  Sandy had come into the place with a girlfriend. They went over to the pool hall’s shuffleboard game and started to play. She knew that I wanted to meet her. She could also see that I couldn’t work up the nerve to speak. It was a classic, romantic beauty-and-the-beast standoff. I was a full head taller than her, and I probably outweighed her by a couple of weight classes. Yet this sweet, tiny thing flattened me as sure as if she had knocked me out in the ring.

  While I shot pool, Sandy and her friend continued to play shuffleboard. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched her plug nickel after nickel into her game. I couldn’t even look directly at her. She gave up and prepared to leave. I had the desperate thought that I had totally blown it, and she was walking out of my life forev
er.

  Instead, Sandy strolled over to me.

  “Here,” she said. “I think this is yours.” She tossed a plastic wristwatch onto the green felt of the pool table. A high score on the shuffleboard game won a prize courtesy of Charley’s, and Sandy had gotten it.

  I remained totally tongue-tied. I had forgotten every word of the English language. I simply stood gaping and watched her walk out. Larry and everyone else in the place except me broke out in laughter.

  From that stumbling beginning, I rose to the occasion, romancing the girl I thought was more beautiful than any other creature on earth. She was Jewish and I was Italian and this was the Bronx, where everyone fought each other tooth and nail. But it didn’t matter to me. We were together.

  Sandy’s parents did not welcome their daughter’s new beau and made their feelings known. “But he’s Italian,” her mother protested, stating the obvious, as if that fact was enough to derail the relationship right there.

  “Ma, I’m just going out with him,” Sandy would reply. “What’s the big deal? I’m not going to marry him.”

  Sandy herself had second thoughts all the time. In her eyes, I was this rough, macho street guy who was a little too ready with his fists. I kept a cigarette pack rolled up in my sleeve. I wore a T-shirt in winter, and a suede jacket without a collar and a zipper up the front.

  “You’re a hoodlum,” she declared more than once, whenever she was mad at me.

  The pool halls of the South Bronx were my second home. Lefty’s on Whitlock Avenue, over by the Bronx River, was a favorite. Pop Bennet’s at Tremont Avenue and Southern Boulevard was almost like a holy place to me. But after I met Sandy, Charley’s became my main base of operations. What I didn’t know at first was that Sandy’s family had a fourth-floor apartment right across the street. She had a view out her window directly down into the place.

  I found this out in a particularly painful way.

  Sandy called the pay phone at Charley’s one evening. My brother Joe was there with me and happened to answer. She demanded to know why I was so late for a date we had scheduled.

  “Danny’s home sick,” Joe said, scrambling to cover for me.

  “Really,” Sandy said.

  “Poor guy,” Joe said.

  “What if I told you I’m looking at him right now playing pool?”

  Rattled at being caught in a white lie, my brother abruptly hung up the phone. The episode spooked him, as though Sandy was all-knowing, all-seeing. She laughs about the incident now, but back then she wasn’t so civil when I apologized for Joe’s white lie.

  In general, my family was a lot more impressed by Sandy than her family was by me. “She looks just like Lana Turner,” Mom would say. She was right that there was a resemblance, but I thought Sandy was much prettier than Lana.

  In those days of summer and fall 1954, Sandy worked in Manhattan as a secretary at a candy company. She would catch the downtown IRT at the Freeman Street el station. Her route from her home to the subway brought her directly past my apartment building. We lived on the ground floor. I had moved in at 1401 Stebbins Avenue with my sister Gloria and her husband, Johnny. I stayed there with Mom and my sister Annabelle.

  Every morning Sandy would come by on her way to work and knock at my window. We would start talking and pretty soon I had made her late. That morning stopover became something of a ritual, so much so that she finally had to quit her job.

  I was deeply in love. It was an unlikely pairing, a feisty Jewish girl and an explosive Italian boy. At first, she balked when I asked her to marry me.

  “Why don’t we just go steady?” she said.

  “I’m a grown man!” I exclaimed. “I don’t ‘go steady.’ That’s kids’ stuff. Let’s get married.”

  I finally wore down her resistance. When Sandy told her parents that I had asked her to marry me and she had accepted, they did not exactly sit shiva, but almost. Her mother had a novel way of trying to talk me out of it, emphasizing how expensive it would be to support her daughter.

  “You know she needs hay fever shots, right? Do you realize how much money those cost?” I just laughed it off.

  We were married on January 8, 1955, in Mount Vernon, New York, the nearest place we could find a justice of the peace. My sister Gloria bought me a dark blue suit for the occasion, the first one I ever owned. The reception was at the home of Sandy’s family, 1461 Boston Road, with twenty friends and relatives in attendance. As was the tradition, the well-wishers lined up single file to congratulate me, kiss the bride, and present their gifts, mostly envelopes of cash.

  My father, in a rare appearance, attended both the ceremony and the reception. My mother was ecstatic, and I remember feeling happy to see him there, too. For this one day, at least, the Aiellos gave the appearance of being a complete family. My father presented me with a five-dollar bill at the reception. As he left the party later that night, he asked to borrow it back.

  On the surface, Sandy’s parents liked me and treated me well. But I once overheard her mother say to her father, “It will never last.”

  As of this writing, Sandy and I are enjoying our sixth decade together.

  * * *

  Sixty years of marital bliss? Even those people who are happily married know how difficult that is. There are always hard times in every relationship. Sandy and I are no exception. We fight well, but more importantly we make up well. It took a long time for us to figure out how to do that. For a time, our marriage was a bumpy road.

  The first hint came at the wedding breakfast. The morning after we became Mr. and Mrs., we went out to a restaurant, just the two of us and our parents. Sandy ordered a sardine sandwich, a perfectly normal request. She didn’t count on my deep loathing of all forms of seafood.

  “Sandy, please change your order,” I said, speaking low so her parents wouldn’t hear.

  She refused. She absolutely would have a sardine sandwich, and that was that. I was upset and made my feelings known. She finished every morsel of that sandwich. To this day, Sandy still loves sardines, but after that wedding breakfast, she made sure to never eat them in front of me again.

  Our first son was born in September 1955, almost nine months to the day from our wedding night. Sandy chose the name Rick. At that point, though, I was one step removed from the situation. Sandy and I were living apart.

  She had come to learn what a bullheaded guy I was, and I began to understand how headstrong she could be. We were young. We didn’t know how to disagree without allowing the situation to escalate all out of proportion. She moved out of our place and into her parents’ apartment. It wasn’t far—I still lived right across the hall.

  The day my son Rick was born was probably the happiest day of my life, and also the scariest. How will I do this? I asked myself. Is there a manual on how to be a good father? A better husband? What kind of work will I do? Will I be able to get a job?

  I tried to calm my anxieties with the thought that I had held a position in the U.S. Army for three years and had been honorably discharged. That was a job, wasn’t it? Yes, but not one that would translate well into civilian life.

  From that point on, I realized life as a married man would be a lot more difficult. I started asking myself hard questions. Were the same kind of worries I was having the reason my own father was never around? Did those worries contribute to why my parents’ marriage had failed? Maybe there was truth in all of that.

  I made a solemn promise to myself that my father’s mistakes were never going to be mine.

  The new baby brought Sandy and me back together. Another son, Daniel Aiello III, came along in January 1957. In 1960, we moved out of her parents’ building to the Marble Hill projects on West 228th Street. Our third son, Jaime, was born there in March 1961. Later on, after we moved to West 238th Street in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, our darling daughter, Stacey, came into our lives in November 1969.

  Our family was complete. After years of fumbling around, never knowing who I really was, alwa
ys searching for the true me, I thought I had finally settled into my role in life as a father, a family man. I vowed that I would always be there for them. More than anything, I would be their guardian and protector.

  Maybe it was the influence of my brother Ralphie, who had died before I was born. Maybe it was the uncertainty I felt about my father. How it developed, I’m not sure, but I have always had a strong protective streak in my life.

  Here’s an example. I had an odd habit as a young child. Whenever my family went to the beach while we were living that summer in Coney Island, I would watch out for them like a little lifeguard. Standing at the shoreline with my back to the ocean, I made sure they didn’t get too close to the dangerous waves. I didn’t know what I would do if one of my brothers or sisters got themselves into trouble, since I couldn’t swim myself. It didn’t matter. I was the self-appointed sentinel who would protect them from harm.

  I was like this as the head of my own family, too. I remember a blizzard when my children were young, and New York City came to a total stop. Rick and Danny III were at baseball practice at an indoor gym, four miles across town. All forms of public transportation were halted. The streets were piled high with snow. But I was going to get them home, no matter what.

  When we were out in the storm, I plowed ahead of my boys and made them walk behind. I held the flaps of my coat out wide to shield them from the wind. I looked like the Caped Crusader, but we got there. That was me, acting in my role of protector. To my sons, I must have appeared crazy.

  My love for my children was mixed with dread that they would somehow be taken from me. I remember once having a jolt of fear go through me when my son Danny III passed out in church one Sunday from the smell of incense. I was sitting in the pew next to him. I looked at his white-as-a-sheet face and thought that my son had died. I picked Danny up in my arms and ran out of the church.

  “My son, my son!” I screamed, tearing down Southern Boulevard. I didn’t know where I was going. Lincoln Hospital was miles away. Danny woke and was fine, but from that day on, I knew I had to worry about my boy. I experienced many sleepless nights. He became stronger as he grew up but was still left with lingering problems.