About Bensonhurst

Life in the Death of Nonna

Cars Wars

Shlomo at the Duomo

A Bat Swings in Brooklyn

The Cyclone

Educating Little Jumbo

Forward

Most people are not prepared to read folklore when they sit down with a collection of short stories set in New York City. But folklore at its finest is what you encounter with great pleasure when you read Tales of Bensonhurst Brooklyn. Matt Cutugno is a master storyteller in the tradition of Raymond Carver, Italo Calvino, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. It is an understatement to say that I admire Cutugno's literary work. I highly recommend this brilliant collection.

D.S. Lliteras

author of Flames and

Smoke Visible

About Bensonhurst

Everybody knows Brooklyn New York. It would be our country’s fourth largest city if it was one and its history has well seasoned the great melting pot of America. Fewer know that the first campaign of the Revolutionary War took place in Brooklyn. It pitted George Washington against General William Howe. The Brit sailed past where now stands the Verrazano Bridge and landed his expeditionary force at Gravesend, one neighborhood over from Bensonhurst. That name comes from a man named Benson, former President of Brooklyn Gas, and from “hurst” which means woods. Mr. Benson bought up original farm land (long after the Lanape Indians left) in the southwest part of the Borough. This was in the mid-1800s. He parceled lots and sold them; thus a neighborhood was created.

The 1939 WPA Guide to New York City says that Bensonhurst is inhabited by Jewish and Italian families who cultivate truck farms. Shows how much has changed in sixty years. Today 150,000 New Yorkers call the place home. There are still Italians and Jews aplenty, but also Hispanics, Chinese, African-Americans, Russians, Irish and diverse people of Muslim faith.

Is there a single street that epitomizes Bensonhurst? I suggest 86th, between Bay Parkway and 24th Avenue. It’s a teeming array of green grocers, meat markets, pizza parlors and bargain stores. Elevated trains run down the middle, taking huddled masses to Manhattan in one direction and Coney Island in another. The trains shade the busy street below. On 86^th you buy bread, thread, aprons and napkins, fresh fish, Russian pastries, international newspapers and magazines, balloons that say “buon compleanno,” home insurance, Asian grocery products, used clothes, toilet paper and writing paper, Chinese-Cuban takeout food, and a hundred other things.

Bensonhurst has its own web page. Visitors are invited to post their reminiscences. Memories of Bensonhurst digitally abound. Folks write of stick ball, punch ball and street hockey; sausage and peppers at the 18th Avenue street fair, the Benson and Stillwell Theaters, Felton’s merry-go-round, and the old trolley along Bath Avenue out to Coney Island.

I modestly offer reminiscences of my own.

Matt Cutugno

Bensonhurst, 1998

* *

Life in the Death of Nonna

People on 79th Street don’t talk about it much but when the timing is right they will. There are different versions of what happened but all start with a beautiful April day; everybody remembers how nice the weather was that day.

Nonna was outside sitting on a folding chair in the driveway. The sun shone off her gray-haired head; she held a hand over her eyes as she looked up and spoke to Claire, her daughter-in-law. The old woman spoke Italian and pigeon English; Claire responded in English. She asked Nonna how her back was feeling. “Mezzo,” so-so, was the answer. Nonna asked Claire if she liked the anguilla she cooked the night before. “It was good” Claire replied though actually eel made her gag.

The 79th Street crowd concurs that kids were playing basketball that morning at the playground next door. They say it was a three-on-three game, though in one re-telling Philip was shooting hoops alone when his destiny met Nonna’s.

All agree though that a small framed, freckle-faced kid was the one who took The Shot. He admitted it, it happened. It wasn’t so much a shot as a heave; he was forty feet from the hoop. Half-court, fooling around, Philip took an impossible attempt at the basket. The shot banged the rim, went wide high, and sailed clear over the backboard. The roundball struck hard on the fence that marked the playground and then bounded farther into Nonna’s property.

As Claire tells it, she had just finished relating to her mother-in-law that Dominic, her husband (Nonna’s beloved only son), would come to Bensonhurst to visit Saturday. The old lady was pleased to hear that. Domenic was a good boy, though his position in the community (he owned a big car dealership on Staten Island) made it impossible for him to be around as much as she liked.

It was small talk between Claire and Nonna when all of a sudden the basketball shot by Philip, having bounded into the driveway, bounced toward them. Once, twice, it bounced and they watched it roll. It was startling, neither expected a basketball. And it was annoying. But Nonna’s reaction was unique. She gave a start; tugged once at an ivory pin that held her hair in a bun on the top of her head. She held her other hand to her breast. Then poor Nonna fell off the chair, dead.

People on 79th say it was a heart attack, logical enough. Subsequent newspaper reports mentioned broken vertebrae suffered in the fall. But for sure Dom’s mother died that afternoon in the driveway of her home. One second Nonna was speaking in her horse-voice, waving a hand for emphasis, pulling at a sleeve. Next second she was fallen, silent, gone.

Accounts of the story suggest that the kids playing hoops didn’t know what had happened. A kid said, “Nice shot dummy, it went next door.”

“Yo, Philip,” another added, “get the ball, man, we got a game here!”

It wasn’t until Claire yelled “Nonna, Nonna,” that anyone knew that the errant heave had such consequences. Claire’s yelling started a chain reaction: the game stopped, a dog barked, people looked out nearby windows, another dog barked, then another barked, neighbors came over, and soon enough was the plaintive siren sound of an ambulance.

They say that when Domenic heard about his mother’s sudden passing he went ballistic. In one version of the story he smacked around the person who told him the news but that’s unlikely. He was a businessman and would know better than to assault people. But he was a powerful man with friends. He demanded to know everything, every moment before, during, and after the death of his saintly mother. He had an eyewitness, his wife, plus the police reports. Soon enough, Domenic learned that sunny day or not, heart attack or broken neck, the old lady was killed by a basketball. The ball was thrown by Philip, a half-Italian, half-Irish kid who’d lived in the neighborhood all his young life.

Dom’s first reaction was a desire to have Philip maimed. That was his second reaction too, such was his grief. The person who caused the premature death of the grandmother of his children had to pay a price. He told Claire this and his wife said that such talk was not good and that he should remain calm. But Dom was famous for his stubbornness, molto testardo. He decided that calm was useless. He knew a man at the social club, an old friend.

Nico was there the day Nonna’s son stopped by. The two drank coffee with anisette at a small table at the window looking on 18th Avenue (aka Cristoforo Colombo Boulevard). Nico was a large man with a round face. He wore a gold ring on each pinkie finger that appeared to have been placed two hundred pounds ago; no way those rings were ever coming off. He had an old fashioned pencil mustache and wore glasses that were tinted red. His hairpiece was shabby for a man wearing a thousand dollar suit. He and Dom had gone to high school together, many pounds ago.

“So, Domenic,” Nico started, “I hope you’re not here to talk about the kid shooting hoops.” Dom was surprised that Nico knew but then he shouldn’t have been: the president of the social club knew everything. He considered Dom’s surprise.

“Your mother was a saint,” he said, “but life is life and death is death.”

“I know,” Domenic began in a solemn way; he stirred his coffee with a tiny silver spoon. In contrast to his huge friend, Dom was thin enough. But it wasn’t the slimness of a healthy man but rather that of one who abuses his meds.

The grieving son continued, batting his brown eyes. “I don’t come here frivolously. I’ve never asked for a favor.”

Nico took a sip from his cup, smacked his lips. “How old was your blessed mother?”

“Eighty seven.”

“Eight seven, God bless. Where was she born?”

“Napoli.”

“I had a favorite uncle born in Napoli.”

“Yes,” was all Dom could say.

“Can’t trust Neapolitans, except for my uncle and your blessed mother,” Nico added. Then he took a pause, he’d learned over the years that pauses were good, the person on the other end of the conversation thought you had a reason for the silence even when you didn’t. And that’s what Domenic thought, letting a long time go by before he queried, “So is there any way?”

Nico was a gentleman. He looked at his friend like an older brother might a lost little brother. “I won’t lie to you woglio,” he began. “Other people would have problems, not a good time to grieve. Capeesh?” Domenic knew Nico was a man of few words. Bottom line: the motherless child could expect no acceptance from the Social Club of Palermo.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the neighborhood, Philip was having his own problems. His schoolmates were making life difficult. Thus went dialogue whenever he showed on the playground or in a classroom:

“Yo, what have we here?” a kid would start, “Philip Corleone, the man who whacked Nonna!”

“Yo, Philip,” another called out, “what did you use on her? Nine millimeter? No, it was a basketball!”

A third added to the jibes with an awful pun: “Nonna sleeps with the Seventy-Sixers!”

Beside stinging but otherwise harmless comments from classmates, there was real fear. As stories surfaced that Dom held grudges, bore ill will, and had friends in low places, no one wanted to sit near Philip in class. Two of his teachers went on sick leave. His parents were more than concerned when they heard talk of hostility. A police lieutenant counseled them to ignore the dire rumors.

But rumors feed the hunger of paranoid minds. One day a man appeared at Philip’s school and announced that he was the exterminator. He was an unlikely-looking exterminator; he wore a black jumpsuit, sunglasses, and carried a fine leather suitcase. He was a good looking man with a great thatch of nicely combed, curly hair and a neatly trimmed goatee. The secretary who saw him was distressed, and the janitor who normally dealt with maintenance said he had to go the bathroom. Even the principal had an important phone call and disappeared into his office. And the word spread like garbage across Coney Island beach on a windy day that this mysterious man had arrived to do Philip harm.

After a half hour or so of buck-passing and confusion, it was determined that there were indeed rodents in the school’s east annex, the man was indeed an exterminator who had been called in, and did carry nothing more sinister in his suitcase than bug spray, mouse traps, and rat poison.

Miraculously, shortly after that wildly paranoid day at Philip’s school, just when the crisis for both our characters seemed its most intense, it was over. People forgot about the whole thing. Domenic didn’t mention it anymore, Philip’s classmates got bored with it. Philip went back to being an average high school kid and Dom went back to his auto business. No one really knew (or cared) what ended the crisis.

What really happened is known by few and makes a notable sidebar. Nonna appeared to Dom. How