Makeup to Breakup (3 page)

The only time I got a taste of how other people lived was when I would visit some of my relatives who were better off and lived in nicer neighborhoods. My great-aunt May, my grandmother’s sister, married a really nice guy named John who made orthopedic shoes and was worth a lot. She would have my grandmother come out and clean her house, and my Nanny would bring me along sometimes. They had one boy, Johnny, who was in college, so I’d get to stay in his room. It was the typical
Leave It to Beaver
room: the perfect desk, college banners over his bed, model airplanes hanging from the ceiling. They had a basement with a bar and
a television and I’d look at my grandmother and say, “Someday, if I ever get rich, Nanny, I’m going to have all this, too.” Meanwhile, I was wearing hand-me-downs that didn’t fit. Before we left, May would give my grandmother a box of clothes and some leftover food and a couple of bucks. She was my godmother, but she was cheap. But then John would come home and he’d slip my grandmother a fifty-dollar bill.

All in all, Brooklyn was a phenomenal place to grow up in the fifties. At first all we had for entertainment was a radio. Besides music, I’d listen to
The Lone Ranger
and
Amos ’n’ Andy
and
The Arthur Godfrey Show
. When I was five years old, we got a TV. The first show I ever saw was
The Howdy Doody Show,
and I’d sing along to the theme “It’s Howdy Doody Time.” All those shows were great—
The Liberace Show, Queen for a Day, I Love Lucy, Flash Gordon.
But my favorite was the cartoons.

Cowboy shows were huge in the fifties. I always had my cowboy hat, two six-shooters, and cowboy boots. Then I got my Davy Crockett coonskin cap and the long flintlock plastic Davy Crockett rifle. Maybe that’s how I got into guns. I could morph into all these characters I’d watch on TV and my imagination would just soar. Even at that age, I started performing. I’d watch that dance routine from
Yankee Doodle Dandy,
and when my mother had people over I’d perform it for them in the kitchen. I slicked my hair into a pompadour and came out with a broom and did Elvis doing “Blue Suede Shoes. two microwave TV dinnerser when ” I wanted to be the center of attention at all times.

I was an only child until age seven, and I just built my own little world. I used to go through the stuff under my mother’s sink and be like a mad scientist brewing up some chemicals. I made big tents out of tables with blankets and had wars in them. I could play with my soldiers for twenty hours, acting out make-believe battles. I was a dramatic kid.

On hot summer nights, everybody would sit out on the stoops and bring out food and stuff to drink. We’d turn on the fire hydrants—we called them Johnny pumps—and cool off. But when we put them up full blast, we’d soak the houses and get the adults wet and they’d scream at us and the cops would come with a wrench and turn them off. If it was hot all night, we’d even sleep out on the fire escapes under the stars.

We didn’t have baseball fields like they had in the suburbs, so we played
stickball in the street. If you hit the ball a distance of three sewers, it was a home run. It was tough catching a fly ball with the cars parked on the street and the bottles and the garbage cans in your way. All the old Italian guys would sit on the side and make bets on the games.

When I was a teenager, my mother talked me into joining the YMCA so I would stay out of trouble. I loved swimming, maybe because I had big, fat, flabby feet and I got good at it. I won a trophy for the freestyle, and they had a big chicken dinner at the Y and my grandmother and my mother came. I was so proud to go up and get my little trophy. It was the only thing that I had ever won in my life. I got into boxing at the Y and I fought Golden Gloves for two years. But the neighborhood began to change, and even the Y started to get a little dangerous: People didn’t want to go because you’d get your ass kicked.

Christmas was really special at the Criscuola home. Even though we weren’t that rich, we celebrated it to the nines. Christmas Eve, all of our relatives would go to church and then get real smashed and come home and we’d open up maybe a little teeny thing. Christmas morning, I’d get up and open my presents and play with them for months on end.

But the highlight of my youth had to be the trips we’d take to Coney Island. It was just the greatest place in the world. We would get up early Saturday morning, my grandmother would pack a suitcase full of sandwiches, and we’d hop on the train, which was still safe then. We spent the whole day swimming and running and eating. The beach was packed with what seemed like a million people jammed in like sardines as far as you could see.

Come sunset, my uncle George would drive out and meet us. Then we’d each get three rides and a hot dog and a drink at Nathan’s. That hot dog tasted like no other hot dog in the world. Once a year Pfizer, the big chemical company, would have Steeplechase Day; my uncle Billy worked there, so he’d get us passes and we’d go to Steeplechase Park. They had the best rides, especially the Steeplechase, which was a ride with mechanical horses that raced around a track that encircled the building. After you rode the horses you had to exit the ride a certain way, and they’d have these clowns who would shock the guys with a shocker in their rear ends. And the women would walk over a vent and a blast of air would blow their dresses up.

But the best thing was to go under the boardwalk and look up the chicks’ dresses as they walked by. Sometimes you’d get lucky and she wouldn’t be wearing any underwear and we’d be like, “Holy mackerel, what was that?” We were still boys: We weren’t familiar with a gir a little uncomfortable.H when l’s sexual equipment. I could have lived at Coney. It blew Disneyland away. People came from all over the world, no one looking for trouble, everybody wanting to have a good time. No hate, no killing, no robbery, no rape. Just good vibes.

I had that experience all to myself until I was seven. That’s when my sister Nancy came along, followed by my brother, Joey, and my sisters Joanne and Donna Donna. It was weird being a seven-year-old boy towering over a crib that contained this little girl. I immediately freaked out at my sister Nancy because she was a girl and everybody gave her a lot of attention. I was really jealous. That’s probably why I took up the drums. I needed affection and I needed attention.

My grandmother would say to my mother, “Let Georgie come over to my house for the weekend. You got two infants there and it’ll give you a break.” Georgie was only too happy to go! I didn’t want to hear the kids screaming and crying all night. That was a blessing for me. All that space was good for my brain. My grandmother lived downstairs in the same building, so I loved staying there. She’d buy me potato chips and she had a little TV set. I had my own room and my own bed. After a while, I just wound up staying at my grandmother’s place and my mother didn’t care, because she still saw me every day. It was almost like living two lives, sleeping at my grandmother’s house but living with my mom and dad.

As they grew older, my sisters and brother hated me for it. They would say, “Spoiled little bastard. You got your own room, you come over here, you fucking fill your face, and you leave.” But it wasn’t always that simple. I helped my grandma out, too. I would undress her and put her to sleep. At that age, I would sleep next to her. For a ten-year-old boy, undressing an elderly woman and putting her to bed was not easy. But I loved her to death and she loved me. She was the best thing in my life.

My grandmother taught me how to sew, how to hem pants, how to iron clothes, how to do laundry. I resisted at first, but she would say, “Someday you may be all on your own in the world and no one will want
you. Trust me, these are important things to know.” I was so childlike, I think that she knew that I was going to have a tough time in the world.

When I was around fifteen, my grandmother moved to an apartment on the second floor of a nicer building. She had been working two jobs and got a raise, and these apartments were more spacious. Her new place was a five-minute walk from my mother’s, and I was happy to be even farther away from my brothers and sisters. My Nanny was part German, so of course she kept this new place spotless. And she was tough. Once she bought me a nice coat, and one day I didn’t hang it up. When I got back from school, all my clothes were in the street. My shoes, my socks, my underwear, and my new coat—she just threw them all out the window. People were laughing, watching me gather them up. And she stuck her head out the window and yelled down, “You get the message? You know how hard I worked to get you that coat? And you just throw it on the floor? Maybe now you’ll hang it up.” For the rest of my life, everything was hung, neatly folded, and put away in drawers. I was a tough little bastard, always getting in trouble, but my grandmother was tougher. My mom I could bamboozle, my dad was easy, but my grandmother, good fucking luck. She’d break my head with a bat.

Talk about tough love. When I was a teenager, I got drunk for the first time on Thunderbird wine. I got so high and dizzy that I stumbled home and banged on her door. She opened it and I just fell down on the floor, threw up, and passed out. When I came to, she was standing over
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d ever me. “You want to drink? You think it’s all fun and games? Well, this is the other side of it.” To this day, the word
Thunderbird
makes my stomach turn.

When it came to school, it wasn’t tough love I was getting: It was pure sadism, courtesy of the nuns at my Catholic school. I went to Transfiguration, about twelve blocks from my mother’s house. I started there in kindergarten and I remember how scary it was the first day. I was petrified to look up and see these old sisters of Saint Joseph with the big black-and-white habits and the huge black crosses around their necks and the rosaries hanging around their waists. In the first grade, I actually had the same teacher that my mother had when she went there. This nun was ancient. She even smelled like she was dying. We used to throw chalk up at her, shoot spitballs at her, and she couldn’t even hit
you because she was so feeble. She’d try to hit your knuckles with a ruler and whap, she’d miss and hit the desk. But I did respect her even though we tortured her.

My closest friends at school were the biggest troublemakers: Peter Cudereski, George Davidson, Tommy Gannon, Louie Demando, and Jimmy Greer. We were always getting into mischief and fights. So of course we became altar boys. It seemed like a cool gig to me. You got to mimic the priests and wear the same clothes they wore. They’d show you a little more leniency, give you a little more freedom, because we were a little more godly, being that close to the priest.

Well, the experiment lasted about two years. Part of the responsibilities of an altar boy was to do the funerals, which meant you had to get there at six in the morning because the funeral started at seven. It was depressing as hell for a twelve-year-old boy. People were all in black, crying; there was a big coffin out there. One morning, my buddy Jimmy and I said, “Fuck it,” and we went back to where the priest kept the wine and got drunk.

When the priest came in to get it, the wine was half gone and he looked at the two of us and we were slurring our words.

“I don’t believe you two!” he screamed. “Get your robes off ! Don’t ever come into my church again. I’m going to call your moms the minute I’m done with this Mass.” We knew we were fucked. And sure enough, when we went back to school, the nun marched us out to the playground and made us stand there for two hours under the most intense summertime sun. It was like
Stalag 17.
You don’t send a kid out into the sun where he could take a sunstroke and die. Where did they get these fucking ideas?

So I hated school. To be honest, I wasn’t a smart kid. I believe I might have been dyslexic. In the seventh grade I was left back one year. I didn’t seem to grasp the stuff they were teaching. But I had other things on my mind. I would rather stay home with my mother and watch TV and go into my never-never land. I didn’t want to deal with that ABC bullshit. Except for history. I always got an A+ in that.

I know I was deterred from wanting to learn by my fear of the nuns. It was definitely the old fire-and-brimstone shit in my Catholic school.
You jerk off, you go blind. You must never touch yourself.
They even tried to destroy my love of music. I was different: I had art and music in my
blood. I’d walk home on my lunch break no matter what the weather was and play drums on my mom’s pots and pans, listening to the radio. I even joined the drum corps at school but, being me, I was showing off to the guys when the drum teacher was standing there, and he better than ” ayl threw me out.

Then they banned Elvis Presley. I remember my nun getting up there, going, “This Sunday, Elvis Presley is going to be on
The Ed Sullivan Show
. No one in this classroom can watch it.” That was a dagger to my heart. I imitated Elvis. I’d have my hair long like Elvis and the girls would dig it, but the nuns flipped out. They put a pink ribbon in my hair and made me go to the girls’ classrooms and stand in front of their class to show them what a boy who needed a haircut looked like. I wanted to die. Then they made me cut my hair. God, it was traumatic.

Plus I couldn’t stand the hypocrisy. We’d go to see
The Ten Commandments,
and the nuns were all fixated on Charlton Heston on the screen. “Who are they kidding?” I whispered to my buddy Louie. “They got this guy half naked, sweating, everything hanging out. I think the nuns love it.”

Some of the older nuns were very mean to me. Maybe because I was different, I was the kid who cut up in the room and made a fool of myself to get attention. I wasn’t a great-looking kid. I was very skinny and sickly. I’m sure part of the reason I was getting sick so much was to escape the torture of these nuns: “I don’t feel good.” “My stomach hurts.” It was a litany of excuses I’d give my mom so I wouldn’t have to go to school.

Who could blame me? Let’s say I had to go pee. I’d raise my hand: “Sister, sister, I gotta go to the bathroom.”