The shopkeepers loved my mother. They’d notice Lucy and shout her name; the commotion was unbearably loud and dazzling.
“Lucy, here Lucy — look what I got for you, only for you!”
My mother was beautiful. Small and beautiful with huge breasts. She was a Sicilian woman and they were Jews and the market women jumped for joy when they saw her. My mother greeted them as if they were family.
I learned how to slip and slide in and around fast-moving crowds as a little kid. Walking those streets, I worried that Brownsville’s uproarious world would swallow us up. But that urgency in my belly passed soon enough when Lucy laughed. She laughed a lot, and anyone could see that she loved being there. The little lady could shop.
Her astute eyes missed nothing. Shirts for my brother, a dress for my sister, Keds sneakers for me — only half sizes, with soles so thick that when I wore them I’d feel as though I could jump over a building and back again.
I can still see the people, closely packed along the sidewalk and overflowing onto the stone stoops that led to the shops. On the cold days in the winter it was a sight to behold, all those people warming themselves from the fires that rose out of black metal barrels, the fragrance of wood smoke mixing with the spicy essence of lox and salami. They are some of the most magnificent, clinging, and lasting memories of my childhood.
That was then.
Not until I became a cop in my early twenties was I to visit Brownsville again.
Years had passed and things had changed.
There were mountains of garbage in the little yards in back of the tenements where rats the size of small dogs prowled. No longer did I see women in ritual wigs, men in beards and long dark coats, boys with curls of hair dangling alongside their ears.
Brownsville faces were now black and brown and angry. It seemed new, but it was really the same old class struggle, only with different music. I was doing my best to understand the anger on the basis of hopelessly limited information.
During this rookie time, I was still living at home and the breakfast discussions with my father were becoming more and more heated.
“The yoms, Pop, they’re crazy. They live like animals and throw shit at us from the rooftops. I mean bottles and bricks. You know what a bottle or a brick would do to you thrown from six stories up?”
“Yom is a dumb word spoken by stupid people,” said Pop. “Don’t ever use that word in this house again.”
“Those people are crazy,” I told him.
“They’re not crazy. They’re poor and oppressed, and they’re angry. They take their anger into the streets. And let me tell you something, Mister Policeman, it’s going to get worse.”
My father was kin to all the demoralized and poor and out-of-work peoples of the world; his instinctive belief in the class struggle, back then, drove me up the wall.
“The bosses and landlords screw these people over in ways you could never understand,” Pop said.
“You have to see how they live,” I replied.
“I know how they live. You think we lived any differently?”
“Sure you did.”
He smiled.
“Drugs, Pop. The drugs are everywhere — on the rooftops, in the basements, in the hallways. And where do they get the money for those drugs? They rob, they steal, they burglarize. Their women are prostitutes. It’s a hellhole.”
“Mister Policeman, who do you think brought all those drugs into that neighborhood? I wish you’d stayed in school.”
In those days, I was assigned to the NYPD’s Tactical Patrol Force. The unit had been formed in 1959, the creation of Police Commissioner Stephen Kennedy. At first, there were thoughts to simply name it Special Services. Except, having SS on the collars of New York City cop uniforms would have been less than wise.
TPF’s nickname was Kennedy’s Commandos. It was a specialized uniformed unit — most of the members were young and had been Marines or paratroopers. We patrolled across the city in high-crime areas.
Our special training focused on dealing with all sorts of civil disorder. Patrol in TPF was mobile and proactive and very aggressive. We all shined up our brass with silver polish. Our uniforms were always creased and unsoiled. It was there, in that unit, where I would draw my gun for the first time and shoot someone — in a place where I almost got shot myself, and the place where my first partner was killed.
In TPF, you carried yourself with poise, a kind of dignity and macho zeal. What I remember most about those years are the alleyways and backyards of the tenements, scary stuff, the sounds and smells and always the music — the sweet sound of salsa wafting up to the rooftops, how it made the scary stuff somehow go away.
Things happen quickly in the street, and as a cop you really don’t know what you’re doing most of the time. You’re just doing. Afterward, you can tell yourself any kind of bullshit you want. Say that you handled it well, it didn’t bother you one single bit, that you loved doing this or that, that you behaved heroically and you’re proud of yourself. “You would not believe this shit,” is what you tell people.
I had two partners, Dave Jackel and Pete Schmidt. Dave was six-foot-five and Pete was just about six-three. I was five-foot-nine, the smallest man in the unit; in my memory, we made a unique-looking trio walking our posts.
The TPF attitude was, action comes on so fast it’s not smart or safe to involve yourself in tentative assumptions or too much scrutiny. Speed counts.
“Fuckin’ muggers, I hate ’em.” This was Officer Pete Schmidt talking. “We break out the gym set on those bastards.”
Irony of ironies, after so many years I was back in Brownsville, standing with Pete Schmidt on the edge of a roof of a sixstory tenement overlooking Pitkin Avenue. I tried to mentally reconstruct the street, as it had been in my youth. The shops and pushcarts and most of the Jews were gone. The neighborhood had changed; it was now one of the most dangerous, squalid, and dilapidated areas of the city.
Remember, this was the early ’60s. A battle at the other end of the world was ratcheting up, and we had a drug war blazing in our backyard. At the time, even the most pessimistic observer could not imagine that we could lose both.
Most of time, when on patrol, I’d feel like the good yeoman crime fighter for the city of New York, the designated lightning rod for the madness that took place in ghetto people’s lives. In a short time I learned that along with street criminals, there were hard-working, good people in these neighborhoods, people who counted on me.
When I walked patrol, I eyed the alleyways, hallways, and storefronts. I wasn’t stupid, or very brave. I forced myself to go into the dark places, the long alleyways that ran between the tenements. At the end of those alleyways were doors that led to stairways that led to basements that were lit with candles, where mattresses were scattered on ice-cold floors, where rags were blankets and buckets were toilet bowls — the tenement cellars where desperate street people slept.
I could see faces at windows, shapes in hallways, forms traveling in and out of the darkness. Believe this when I tell you, the ghetto never sleeps.
I had been a visitor in many ghetto apartments — sometimes invited, most times not. I knew that on the coldest of nights, ice formed inside the glass windows and on the sills of those apartments. I had seen ice on the floors and on bathroom mirrors. Slum landlords regulated heat in that part of town so that none rose after 6 o’clock in the evening.