Brooklyn: A Grim Retrospective

As I was reading Brooklyn: A Grim Retrospective by Joe Castaldo, I realized that this could've been my life.  I spent my first four years in that borough, before my folks decided to start over in West Palm Beach, FL.  I would never know how it felt to grow up on mean streets.  To spend listless days on stoops and getting into trouble.  Maybe be part of a (Italian) gang and march/stumble into fights.  To steal cars.  I guess could've done those things in SoFL, but it wouldn't have been the same.  There's something about the atmosphere of neighborhoods like Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst, the latter in which Castaldo grew up and almost died a few times.  He almost died in Manhattan, too, as a young adult.  Who's to say that couldn't have been me as well?

Having this discomfort made my read that much more involving.  My parents escaped what seemed to be a grimy place in the early '70s.  If I had grown up there, it's possible I would've been the same "good" kid I was in Florida, avoiding "hoodlums" and "punks" and staying away from drugs.  If so, the "bad" tough kids might've called me a "pussy".  I just don't know what would've happened.  What happened to Jerry?  He describes himself as being a good Catholic kid in his earliest years, then falling into one bad scene after another through his teens and beyond.  He describes his mother as being caring and nurturing.  His family was poor, living under very modest conditions.  They resided in Bensonhurst (where I still have some relatives), a place portrayed by the author as insidious, a clean looking row of streets (run by the Mafia) that nonetheless harbors violence and addiction.

I've visited Bensonhurst several times over the years.  It indeed appears as a neat, modest 'hood with working folks who actually do say hello to each other as they haul out their trash and make sure they parked on the right side of the street for that day.  My grandmother's sister and some of my cousins live in the same old brownstones.  It always felt safe to me. Maybe because I look like them.  Maybe because I was never there long enough to get to know the secrets, to look at someone the wrong way.  I've corresponded with Jerry on Facebook and he says it's all changed in the last few years.  I have heard it is becoming increasingly Asian.  Maybe the way Chinatown has slowly eroded Little Italy in Manhattan.

Castaldo is a good storyteller.  His remembrances of the '70s and '80s play like little movies, maybe like junior Scorsese pictures.  He stole cars, but only because he loved to drive; he always returned them.  But once, he absconded with the wrong ride, one that belonged to a Mafioso.  Jerry did keep all the Tupperware he found in the trunk and surprised his mother.   The goombahs caught up with him.  Somehow Castaldo lived to tell the tale.  There are recollections of street fights with hammers (which would come back to land on his skull),  sexual abuse at the hands of an EMT in an ambulance, clashes with a peer who would later take pity and perform plastic surgery on him for free, and his longtime on-again, off-again girlfriend, who stuck with him through suicide attempts and an endless cycle of bottoming out and re-emerging from drug abuse.

Her name was Mary Lou, and Jerry reveals that she eventually, finally left him for good.  Underneath my exterior of appreciating realistic, sometimes darkly realistic conclusions, I hope that she reads Brooklyn: A Grim Retrospective, and reaches out to forgive him.

Castaldo's book is compulsively readable.  His memory is clear enough to recall some fine detail, much of which is ugly and unpleasant.  He's a vivid writer, and while his style is sometimes choppy and crude it is very suitable for this story.  It's honest writing, and that's what's critical here.  The final chapters, the years before Castaldo finally cleans up, get bleaker and bleaker until it's nearly unbearable, and are some of the most compelling words I've read.

P.S. These days Jerry is an entertainer (singer/guitarist) with an exhaustive schedule of over three hundred shows a year.  His repertoire are songs in the adult contemporary style, from the "Great American Songbook".   His voice reminds me of Jerry Lewis, with shades of Neil Diamond.