You, my loyal blog readers, will get a sneak peek at the first draft of that book, that I keep attempting to write. Maybe having the responsibility of giving you guys something to read will motivate me to actually finish it. Here's the first chapter. Enjoy!!!
I was born on a Sunday morning in the summer of 1969. It was an interesting time in America, and the world. We had an unjust war going on in Vietnam and Richard Nixon was our President. We were two weeks away from sending three astronauts to walk on the moon, for the first time. Woodstock was a month away from occurring in upstate New York and the New York Mets, for the first time, were actually a contender. John Lindsay was the major of a big apple in decline. The city was in debt as many of the middle class were moving out to the suburbs in droves.
My family was among those you would consider middle class. My father, Rocco, was a supermarket manager. He managed a Key Food, at the time, and did well enough that my mother, Mary, could stay home, and take care of my older brothers, Joe and Rocco Jr. One event that may have made this story different was that my father felt a lot of pressure, raising a young family and having a lot of job-related stress. It may have contributed to him having a heart attack, at the age of 32, in 1968. Luckily, he survived or I would not have been born.
They lived in Alphabet City, on East 11th Street between Avenues B and C, which was quickly going downhill as a neighborhood, at the time. Because of that, and it being a 5th floor, walk-up which was not the healthiest thing for my father, at the time, and the plan to have a third child, which would mean the need for another bedroom, they decided to move into a bigger apartment, preferably a few blocks west, into a safer part of the East Village. They found one on Avenue A, between 6th and 7th Street. A building with an elevator, but it would be slightly more expensive, $100 a month, up from $85(Those were the days.) It would be the only place I would live for the first 22 years of my life.
My early childhood days were relatively normal, by most standards. I was a healthy baby and toddler, except for cases of measles and chicken pox, at the ages of two and three, respectively. I was known for being a fairly quiet little child. My mother claims that I cried less than my brothers did, at the same age, and my interest in television started very early, which may have pacified me quite a bit. The show Sesame Street began in 1969 and I do remember being glued to that show, along with The Electric Company and Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. I didn’t miss many episodes in those pre-school days. That surely played a big role in my early interest in wanting to learn, along with having a school teacher for a baby-sitter.
Her name was Nelda, and she lived across the hall from me. She was just starting to teach at a public school on the Lower East Side and there were times when my parents weren’t home, and they didn’t really want to lug a young child around, plus they saw right away that I enjoyed staying with Nelda, because I quickly developed a strong interest in Math and other subjects and she made it so much fun to want to learn about numbers. I was able to add and subtract by the age of 4. Another trick I learned was to be able to say the alphabet backwards very quickly, usually under five seconds. (You try it). I don’t know if that would be considered advanced, but it did convince the principal at the school I would be attending, St. Stanislaus on St. Mark’s Place, that I wouldn’t need to attend kindergarten. She told my parents to just wait another year, until I was six, to start first grade.
My brothers were both already attending St. Stan’s, though it was mainly a parish for those of Polish ancestry. They started allowing others to attend, because of the tough fiscal situation in the city, combined with many middle class families moving out of the neighborhood and the city. It was only two blocks away from home, which was convenient for my mother to walk us and pick us up from there. It was a Catholic school with the church around the block from the school. The families that remained became a fairly tight-knit bunch of neighbors, though some would move as the years went on. My mother made friends with a bunch of other mothers who sent their children to the school. They would usually meet at Leshko’s or Odessa for coffee. They were two Polish/Ukrainian diners on Avenue A that both served great pierogies. The guilty pleasure of my youth was the chocolate egg cream, and both places made them very well, along with Ray’s Candy Store on that block, but I’ll get into Ray’s later on, as that was my first job.
Another thing that I distinctly remember is how much I loved music, as a very young child. If I wasn’t mesmerized by the TV programs I was watching, I would spend a lot of my time listening either to the radio, or to the records, or 8-track tapes, that the other members of my family had. My father was a big Frank Sinatra fan, or other Italian-American performers, like Tony Bennett, Jerry Vale, Jimmy Roselli or Perry Como. Also groups like the Four Seasons and Jay & The Americans. My mother, on the other hand, loved Elvis Presley. She had many of his albums. She also liked what you would consider adult contemporary. There was Dionne Warwick, The Lettermen, Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck, Sonny & Cher, the Carpenters and later on, Helen Reddy and Barry Manilow records in her collection. My oldest brother, Joe was more into rock n roll, like CCR, the Beatles, the Guess Who, and Led Zeppelin, but also soft rock, like Three Dog Night, Elton John, The Brooklyn Bridge, Billy Joel and Steely Dan. Rocco’s taste was a little unusual. He loved disco, but he was also in the Kiss Army. I can’t really explain that. The point is that each family member had an influence on my musical taste, though I will say that I was more of a top 40 fan than anything else. There were certain songs that were popular when I was 4-5 years old that always stuck in my mind like; “Brother Louie” by the Stories and “Dancing In The Moonlight” by King Harvest. Also “Come and Get Your Love” by Redbone and “Rock the Boat” by the Hues Corporation. These songs have always made me smile, when I hear them because, they remind me of happy things in my childhood. As you’ll read, my childhood was not always happy.
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