The Dancing Leaves: Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn

By Pierre Gerard

Merriam Press Vietnam War Fiction Series. Although written as fiction, this work is based on the author's personal experiences as a Vietnam veteran encountering other vets at the Veterans Administration (VA) in New York City at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn. The author served in the U.S. Army, Security Police, and Soc Trang, Vietnam during his 1967–1968 tour of duty. Some of the chapters: The Bunker; Welcome to the VA; A Soft Gauze Over Their Wounded Minds; A Mentor: A Case Officer’s Case Officer; The War Hero; Thousand-Meter Stare; They Wear Their Ribbons Inside Their Hearts; Psychiatric Trauma Unit; Shrapnel Was Deeply Embedded in His Psyche; Dirty Business; Phoenix Program; Anything for You, My Brother; Just Before the Spring of the Betty Went Off; Flashback; You’re My Friend, I Won’t Question It; Clenching and Unclenching His Fists; The Face of the Nameless Would Appear Before Him at Night; Green Explosion: The Vietnam Experience. Includes 41 author photos depicting his time in Vietnam.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 22, 2019
• ISBN: 9780359607846

Book preview

The Dancing Leaves: Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn

The Dancing Leaves: Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn

by Pierre Gerard

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Hoosick Falls, New York

2019

First eBook Edition

Copyright © 2019 by Pierre Gerard

Additional material copyright of named contributors.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

The views expressed are solely those of the authors.

ISBN 978-0-359-60784-6

Library of Congress Control Number 2018958538

This work was designed, produced, and published in the United States of America by the Merriam Press, 489 South Street, Hoosick Falls NY 12090.

Notice

The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to five years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.

Foreword

I, Yakova Lynn, widow of Pierre Gerard, believe my beloved husband of blessed memory, devoted United States soldier, and Vietnam veteran would have wanted to dedicate this book to disabled American veterans.

Disabled American Veterans

by Pierre Gerard

We do not want your charity or patronizing attitudes

because we are disabled;

We want dignity, a right to life, just like everyone else.

-

We want your respect as a human being

to be treated with dignity and compassion.

-

Because of our emotional and physical scars,

we take pride in our accomplishments and courage

to face life every day despite our wounds.

-

We are disabled American veterans,

and we are the toughest men and women in this country.

The Dancing Leaves

by Pierre Gerard

The leaves on Bedford Avenue dance,

They dance like the spirits of the long dead,

They swirl and twist in semicircles,

They are bright orange and brown and are forever twisting and turning.

They dance and turn, and make me think,

They might be returning spirits from the past.

The dancing leaves on Bedford Avenue make me think of soldiers

Lying in rice fields covered with water.

The color of scarlet red.

They are the lost souls from the Street without Joy.

Does anyone ever think about the leaves on Bedford Avenue?

The Bunker

by Pierre Gerard

The walls were four inches thick and made of hard concrete. Inside, a musty, cellar-like smell permeated the place. The four-inch slit that traveled around the square walls gave the cell’s inhabitant a small, narrow view of what lay in front of him. Moss covered the bunker’s walls, and its corners were filled with small nests of insects and cobwebs. It was a small fortress and made the soldier feel a sense of false security.

He first saw the bunker in May of 1967 after one week in country. It stood there in bright, searing sunlight, its shape solid and permanent. The bunker had gray walls low to the ground and what appeared to be an old jeep seat sitting on its roof. The sergeant told him that this was his place and that he was to be here at 1800. The bunker, he said, was better than lying in rice paddies or, worse yet, a triple canopy jungle. The nineteen-year-old soldier touched the cold outer wall and watched a nameless insect crawl around the portal.

The sergeant told him there was PRC-25 (radio) inside so that he could call the CP (command post) with every hour. Don’t fall asleep, he said. If you miss, I’ll have your ass in a sling. He said, No radio and no bullshit on the horn for the soldier to keep quiet. The sergeant’s face was hard, his eyes cold, almost dead. He said he was a field man and hated this rear echelon crap. The new guy heard other soldiers call him the lifer, a regular John fuckin’ Wayne. He hated cherries. The sergeant wrote something on his clipboard, turned to look the soldier in the eyes, and told him if he fucked up, he would send him up North, maybe Hill 881.

The same evening, the soldier walked toward the bunker, his gear making clicking sounds against his body. He had not yet learned to tape web gear. The soldier carried an M-60 machine gun, its barrel pointed toward the ground and its legs dangling like a dangerous insect. The weapon smelled of cleaning solvent and felt smooth and slippery. The soldier’s steel pot shifted; it had begun to feel heavy. This was his first night on the bunker line.

The older guys had told him to keep a watch out for the rats because they sometimes crawled into the bunker. They told him about their bites and that they were the size of small dogs. One of the soul brothers kept an ax by him in the bunker; they called him rat man.

The line of sight ran down the runway of the airstrip. Helicopters periodically broke the silence; they would fly bubble down toward the edge of the runway. A chain-link fence with rolls of concertina wire stood directly in front of the bunker, crisscrossing the perimeter. After the chain-link fence were several rings of twisted barbed wire, and after that came the glasslike rice paddies, reflecting light from the sunset, which made glistening mirrorlike images that appeared to shift in a small sea of grass.

In the haze, the men on the perimeter could barely discern the tree line. It was there, they said. The VC had set up their 60 mm mortars. They told the soldier that if the cherry heard an explosion to get inside the bunker and to call the CP immediately. The tree line seemed far away, its shapeless black brush already fading in shadows. The buzzes and whirs from nocturnal insects made the soldier itch and scratch his legs and arms. A blazing red sun, streaked with orange and bright reds, settled behind the tree line, slowly bringing darkness over the airstrip. It was his first night in the bunker.

The soldier began to feel crawling things on his body while the oppressive heat made his uniform stick to him. His forehead was already covered in beads of sweat, and his body was clammy from the humidity. They had told him to stay awake because there were sappers (soldiers responsible for building and repairing roads and bridges or laying and clearing mines) who sometimes penetrated the wire, and they might cut his throat. They told him to watch for two-step snakes (meaning if bitten you would walk two steps before dying), and that sometimes they crawled inside the bunker. They told him to watch the fence and call the CP every hour.

Night is black in the Mekong Delta. There is no black like night in the bunker. The sky was empty, shrouded in mist. Heavy humidity saturated the night air. The soldier could not see.

The first night, the soldier watched shapeless movement in front of him. He imagined he saw Vietcong guerrillas crawling along the perimeter, but they were only nightmarish ghosts of the dead wandering the delta rice paddies. He expected to feel a sniper’s bullet smack him in the temple or hands cover his mouth and jab a knife in his spine, grating against his backbone. He felt nothing. He could not find anything inside the bunker because it was too black to see. Periodically, he kept jumping up because he felt another thing crawl over his legs and up his back. The weeds shifted in front of the perimeter. The soldier thought that the dead wind cast spells around him, creating a netherworld before his eyes. His eyes widened as he tried to discern moving objects in the blackness; it was the beginning of the disease called the thousand-meter stare. Gunships began playing dangerously on the horizon, firing sheets of red tracers into a blackened ground. Occasionally, rounds were fired upward toward the ships. The thump of rockets made the soldier jump. Gunships had found prey and were pouring fire into an area on the tree line. The soldier jumped up, expecting hordes of Vietcong to come pouring across the rice paddy. Nothing.

The soldier looked down at his luminous Timex: twenty minutes past 0300. His eyes burned; he was beginning to get a headache. Then it happened. The first mortar round hit with a heavy thud, followed by more explosions that progressively got louder and louder. The soldier jumped, banging his head on the ceiling of the bunker and knocking his steel pot askew. Explosions were becoming louder now, thundering around him, sending earth and a shattered tarmac crashing into the sides of the bunker. Shrapnel whistled in the night air while more distant explosions followed. Huey gunships exploded while the cries of men yelling to one another in the darkness seemed surreal. The night sky broke into a sideshow of fireworks and mayhem of bright flashes and color. Frantically, the soldier grabbed the PRC-25 and quickly called the command post. He screamed the bunker number to the CP while running around the bunker’s interior like a rat in a maze.

Then it stopped. All the soldier could hear was his heart pumping blood madly through his veins. His temples began to throb; his skin felt hot and burning. A voice called to him from outside the concrete coffin. You OK, troop? The faceless voice repeated, Bunker 22, are you OK?

The soldier wanted to appear in control and replied in a cracked voice, Yes sir, everything is under control. He placed himself in front of the bunker much closer to the slit and waited for the battalions of VC to come. Nothing.

Early morning, you could watch bats flying over South Vietnam. The dawn would break grayish, a strange bluish color over the perimeter. The soldier watched in front of the concertina wire, expecting to see corpses and bodies littering the rice paddy. There was nothing. Grabbing his gear, he prepared to leave the small bunker at 0600. He picked up the M-60 and looked around the dirt floor and at the small box he had been sitting on the night before. He had 360 more days to go. He walked away from the bunker.

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Author’s Collection

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Author

Chapter 1: Welcome to the VA

Brooklyn

The early morning light shimmered off the blue-green walls of the Brooklyn VA Medical Center. Raymond Cavour heard a faint low hum of undulating voices rising up and down, loudly, softly, like gentle waves buffeting a shoreline beach. The sound of people speaking in small, inaudible whispers, swallowed phrases, and half-spoken words echoed in his ears. Where am I? he thought. He spoke out loud. Where am I?

He panicked, momentarily thinking that perhaps he had just died. He felt dead. Perhaps he was lying somewhere in purgatory. Maybe the pain in my body will never end? He thought maybe this would last forever. Waves of nausea and dizziness spread throughout his body. He felt violently sick. Slowly, he stretched his arms and battered legs. Extending his feet over the edge of the hospital bed that was not large enough to contain his lanky frame, he tried to sit upright.

His mind raced back to eons ago. He was not quite sure where he should be or what he should do. He heard the roar of jets and of helicopter rotors spinning near him. This must be Bien Hoa Air Base, he thought. I must be just outside of Saigon. For a moment, the red-white lights of teeming Saigon flashed multicolored beams toward a heavy overcast gray sky. Flares spun and spit dropping fireballs slowly on a fearful community in hiding. At any moment he would hear his name called out for his assignment to a field unit in the Mekong River Delta. Before him, he saw the red-burnt umber, the dry powdered earth, the results of the dry season on a parched land, so contrary to what his environment was like back home. Again he thought of the helicopter rotors twisting, swirling clouds of pink and gray as he strained and blinked his eyes toward the dazzling sun, so fierce, so blazing. He then closed his eyelids tightly, attempting to erase the scorching on his mind. Raymond Cavour fell back on the lumpy bed and slept a restless sleep.

*

Beautiful bright colors whirled through his mind. The rich hues—soft red-orange and glittering gold—spoke to him in a brilliant illuminated language even though the events had occurred twenty-five years earlier. Feelings of nausea swept through him repeatedly in violent rippling waves. Slowly he traced his fingers over a pain-racked torso and along the edges of rough adhesive tape that encircled his rib cage. Ray felt like a blind man. He felt his face slowly—the nose and lips, an ear he expected to find missing, or a gaping hole where his face should have been. His mind’s eye did not view the facial swelling or the bluish and purplish welts covering his head and neck. The grotesque picture of a slab of meat dangling in a butcher shop or a piece of slaughtered carcass thrown haphazardly on a wet wooden butcher’s block was how he visualized himself as he awoke. The bits and pieces of fragmented memory tried to surface painfully in his consciousness.

Ray slowly realized the events that had transpired within the last few days, first in small segments, then in larger sequences of thought, sometimes clear, sometimes confusing. Faces appeared before his eyes, distorted, angry, and threatening, while phrases spoken in harsh disjointed tongues—brutal, coarse, and loud—reverberated in his ears. Slowly, like a child with building blocks, he began to reassemble the missing parts that had broken his mind’s continuity. Fatigue overwhelmed him. Sleep came again, deep black sleep where there was nothing.

*

The fall sun set slowly over the shadow of the Verrazano Bridge. The bright orange flame descended like a giant orb behind Staten Island and contrasted sharply against the spidery lines of the bridge’s suspension span. The gentle radiance of sunlight was unusually harsh for late October. Shimmering lights filtered through the large windows, casting a set of surrealistic images on the drab hospital walls. Waking up once again, Ray surmised his location. The proximity of the massive bridge and the small white logo on the striped hospital robe registered bluntly in his confused mental state. The Brooklyn VA, he thought. This is the Brooklyn VA, he simply stated out loud. He touched his robe carefully, rubbing his bruised fingers along the small slightly embossed white letters.

Ray knew Brooklyn. The territory was all too familiar to him. He was not quite sure how he had managed to get there, especially after being on surveillance in Flushing, Queens. The New York State Organized Crime Task Force had been monitoring a group of Dominicans moving narcotics to a Brooklyn crime family. His mind slowly grasped the shards of a shattered memory and pieced together what had occurred. He became distracted for a moment.

Cool antiseptic air filled his nostrils with scents of ethyl alcohol and cleaning fluids. Someone spoke loudly. Hey! Chow, fellas! Let’s go, gentlemen! Time for breakfast! A small-framed black woman began to wheel a cart filled with blue plastic trays through the ward. Let’s go, people! Now, I ain’t gonna tell you again! Get offa them beds and get your breakfast. I don’t hafta repeat myself over again, do I? Mercy! Crawford! Get up and get your tray! No salt, right, Benny? Samuels! Get out of the bed and put your robe on! Now, I ain’t gonna repeat this a thousand times over! The small physique of the woman never diminished her commanding voice. This was her flock her sheep she lorded over, sometimes threatening, sometimes protective. She cajoled, begged, implored, and commanded them. They were her boys. She both loved and hated them. Ray watched the kindly features full of humor, full of life’s experience, a face that reflected and accepted adversity and pain as normal daily occurrences.

A spectral flow of striped ghosts began to move through the blue-gray corridors. Wrinkled, shroud-like human forms drifted toward the hallway. They were like lost spirits wandering in despair in a netherworld as they trudged quietly toward a set of closed swinging doors.

Vertigo seemed to make Ray’s head spin violently as he waited for the undulating floor to finally stop moving and again become a flat, solid surface. Placing one foot gingerly after another, slowly, one at a time, as if walking in a minefield, he attempted to regain his equilibrium. His mind’s eye visualized a crippled phoenix, flesh burned and seared, peeled back as the body floated above the licking tongues of flame. Again, slowly he placed one foot in front of the other and meshed with the small crowd of men shuffling along the hallway to select their food trays.

Glancing toward his right side, Ray spied a men’s room. Entering the smoke-filled bathroom, he saw patients sitting along the wooden benches. The room was flush with pallid tiled walls glistening with shower moisture. The patients sat in bunches, smoking and speaking to one another in hushed conspiratorial voices, passing what they must have thought as secrets to one another. They stared at the newcomer suspiciously as he trod into their space. The scene could have been out of the film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Ray thought, with its grotesque set askew and hellish. Patients stared vacantly with disconsolate empty expressions formed from institutionalized tedium. Pain seemed to hide behind masked indifference. Welcome to the VA, he thought.

Ray needed to wash his face in the row of small porcelain white sinks. Hot, steaming water hissed ominously, filling the room with vapor and steam. He approached one of the mirrors and gazed at the reflection of his distorted face. The bruises made him look older. Ray knew he was not quite the image that looked back at him in the mirror. The face was unrecognizable, foreign, as if another person occupied the space blocked out in the mirror’s image.

The people around Ray spoke in hushed whispers. They analyzed his personality type quickly. Charlie Murphy, a frequent visitor and resident of the ward, spoke to his friend Eddie Mutton. He’s probably psychotic, he said softly. Maybe a drunk… Avoid him, Mutton, he stated in a low, whiskey-like voice. This one’s had a few too many, I’ll betcha. He’s probably a brawler and maybe trouble… Ya know what I’m sayin’? Be fussy about who you speak with here, Eddie. I’ve been in and out a’ this here whorehouse for years. Your best bet is to mind your own business, and don’t mess with the newcomers unless you know ’em.

Eddie Mutton nodded his head reverently. This was Eddie’s first VA experience. He had suffered from a nervous breakdown after losing his wife to a heart attack.

Charlie Murphy was known as the informal boss of the hospital. He knew where to get booze, drugs, laid, and extra food. He had made a lifetime career out of the VA and had been a disabled veteran since World War II. His life had never changed much afterwards. The VA was a revolving-door part of his daily routine. He watched patients die, get better, and come in and out of the place like Macy’s Department Store, as he described it. Winter brought the homeless, alcoholics, drug addicted, and destitute who could not find shelter except for those run by the city. The nightmarish city shelters were battlegrounds for thieves, brutal beatings, and AIDS.

We consider the VA to be the Ritz-Carlton, Charlie said. It’s the best hot food in New York, you bet. The symbiotic relationship between him and the Veterans Administration never really helped Charles Patrick Murphy readjust his life. His physical scars had gone away; however, the mental wounds festered and bled him for years. His pleasures, his world, his whole being centered around daily life at the VA. The professional staff quietly accepted his presence. Old hands recognized both the familiar face, and older medical staff members respected his judgment, influence, and experience. He was a professional patient. Charles Murphy would never respond to any of the modern therapies, progressive or otherwise. He existed. He was there like an old coat, comfortable and ready to put on. Most staff never fully realized the amount of time that Charlie Murphy stayed hospitalized or went out on release. He came and went as he pleased. Charles Murphy was to the younger veterans an old-timer, a lifer, and still waving his flag. Some of the Vietnam-era vets ignored him. He was an anachronism, a dinosaur. Their idea of a stereotypical American Legion God Bless America and Remember the Alamo veteran. He was both loved and detested simultaneously.

Ray glanced over his shoulder. Two seated men caught his attention. He thought the older veteran to have an ashen complexion. His face was lined with wrinkles, and liver marks showed age and fatigue. The clear blue eyes squinted hard at Ray while the other man appeared to be daydreaming, staring off into some unknown void. Slowly, Ray turned the tap water on. The steaming water began to soothe his puffed-up face. Gently, he pressed a washcloth against his bruises.

Ray was not aware how long he had been dousing his face with the water. He knew it felt reassuring and comforting. It seemed to ease his aching mind. The gentle effect immersed his psyche in a soft gauze, which he found brought about significant comfort. He now surmised that he had been given a hallucinogenic drug, probably LSD, acid, or another psychotropic mind stimulant, maybe PCP, aka angel dust. The brilliant screaming colors that had echoed inside his head the past few days, spinning images, and conscious drifting from an awakened to a sleeping state further supported his conclusion.

He continued to stare obliquely at his distorted face. He had been tripping, or what one of the Brooklyn crime bosses termed sent on a vacation. He vaguely remembered an expression used by a local Mafioso. Hey, you wanna go on a vacation? D’you like to travel or what? ’Cause I’m gonna send you on a little trip. Grimly, the words registered. Such great people he had chosen to associate with. Penetrating an organized crime family was synonymous with walking through a jungle in pitch-black darkness. Those people were like walking booby traps; if you tripped a fine wire, the whole world would explode in front of you.

Vivid flashbacks of the red Econovan bumping and twisting along a blackened road came in segmented pieces of memory before Ray’s mind’s eye. A flashback. He remembered he was somewhere in Staten Island. The stripped gears made the van bounce, bumping and jumping its way up small inclines and down gully-like turns. The sound of Tina Turner’s voice seemed to echo in his head, her voice fading in and out as if the reception on the radio were poor. The rock band blared its loud, raucous music around the inside of the van. One kidnapper pounding the steering wheel furiously kept time to the beat. There were two of them, he remembered. For a fleeting moment, he felt as if he were flying above the rich bright green rice paddies while the fiery sun seared etched lines on his face. The blaring boom box screeched deafening noises while the bouncing and twisting van reverberated with the loud music. Its suspension screeched and moaned in metal shrieks as tires squealed from burned rubber that filled his nostrils with the all too familiar stench. Tina Turner’s body provoked him, the sensual swaying, her eyes melting into a blue-green whirlpool while her curved body gyrated. It was then that he fell. He fell in a swirling, spinning hole that encompassed his entire being. Everything went dark and then black.

One of the older veterans standing near him was meticulously drying his hands. Accidentally, he brushed up against Ray, nearly jarring him out of his skin. The old-timer muttered, You’d better hurry if you want breakfast, son. They never leave any extra trays on the cart. Sometimes they’ll eat two, if ya know what I mean. It ain’t like down inna city shelter. Here best food inna world. Make sure you eat something. It will make you feel better. Florence will take that cart away quicker ’n’ hell. Believe me, she’s faster than anything. The old man grinned, then scurried off on red swollen ankles resulting from liver problems and swilling booze. He was used to sleeping in the dark alleys and recesses of the city.

Ray had to get out of there. Almost panicking, he pushed the exit door violently and stepped out into the hallway.

*

Tommy Donahue carefully watched the nurse. Her facial expression was pinched and hawklike, her eyes cold, icy, with a stone-faced look. Ray spotted the hallway phone as he rounded the corner. Suddenly he felt nauseous, confused, and disoriented. He realized that he was still under the influence of the narcotic. Dizziness overcame him. Little irritating noises were dancing and playing tricks in his head. Exiting the ward, he faced the silver panels on the gleaming elevator doors. The phone became a black blur.

As Ray steadied himself, a distant voice said, Hey, buddy, why don’t you sit for a few minutes? Take a load offa your feet. Sit for a minute. I’ll get the nurse. You just hold on. Tommy walked quickly toward the nurses’ station.

Ray’s knees began to wobble and buckle. His body began to slide off the blue plastic chair onto the floor. He tried to sit up for a moment to regain his composure but faltered and began to feel his stomach roll and twist in convulsive heaves. His head felt as if it had exploded several times. The distant sound of Tina Turner’s band kept ringing in his ears. What’s love got to do with it? … a second-hand emotion. Swirls of blue-gray walls came crashing down around him. Suddenly the angelic figure of a large female mouse wearing a nurse’s uniform hovered over him. Rapidly, Ray thought he saw several bright orange flames and pinpoints of light. The flashes were beautiful sparkling lights, scintillating hot points burning his eyes. Then there was nothing.

Chapter 2: Bensonhurst

Adara Speros enjoyed working in the library. Life around books, written words, poetry, and scholarship appealed to her sense of learning. The reality was that Brooklyn General Library was not the Library of Congress or the setting of an esoteric learning center that she would have preferred it to be. It was a neighborhood library, a library of children struggling to make SAT scores, of illiterate parents trying desperately to coach their kids to a higher level of learning. It was a library short of money and books as well as qualified people to better the situation. The Bensonhurst branch was medium-sized, an old Carnegie building with wrought iron latticework and small circular stairwells leading to the children’s room and a quaint fireplace. The heating was poor and the lighting atrocious. Mice and small crawling rodents were everywhere in the damp storage areas and basements.

Adara nevertheless loved her job. Most of what she called her real friends were books. She was neither antisocial nor introverted. She just happened to prefer books to people at times. She often felt her personality was an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. Adara, contrary to her behavior, developed a somewhat aggressive personality type as opposed to a bookish one. This somewhat surprised most people who met her.

The quiet Bensonhurst neighborhood was home. The small one-family, middle-class house that told Brooklyn’s story was a part of her life. Adara had spent most of her childhood a few blocks away from the branch, playing games on the streets surrounding the area—skelly, hopscotch, and ringolevio. The older patrons who frequented the branch knew her. She was a neighborhood kid. As an adolescent, she attended St. Mary’s Catholic Parochial School and went to mass at the adjoining church. The families knew of Adara Speros. They were Italians, Jews, Hispanic, Irish, and Greek. She could relate to these people. She spoke to grandparents of children she had attended school with daily. Patrons could relate to her.

Adara did not resent change in her neighborhood. She welcomed the influx of new immigrants. Adara is odd, some staff members said, always championing the great morass of cultural diversity that immigration brings. She was especially friendly to the new Asians, Russians, and African-American population and preferred to be friendly and open instead of hostile as some staff members appeared to be.

The old families of the neighborhood would never budge unless the area became totally ghetto-like. The idea of leaving Bensonhurst was out of the question for many homeowners. They would die there. No Florida for them. Mr. Piccone, retired butcher, eighty years old, exclaimed to her, Where do I get a Daily News? Florida, I ask you? I must wait an hour in ninety-degree heat to take a cab that costs me twenty bucks to go to the airport! Is that living? Tell me that’s living, Adara, tell me. Not me. I’m stayin’ right here! I get my Daily News at Medici’s on the corner, my macaroni at Bataglia’s, and my lotto ticket at Bernstein’s. Tell me, what the hell do I need Florida for? He would state emphatically, You can keep Florida. Now I go to OTB!

Adara would smile. She loved the older people. They wouldn’t leave. They were like boulders: immovable, old, and hard. Some were scared because of the crime and petrified of robbery, drugs, and gangs, but as Mrs. Stein said, Where the hell am I gonna get a bagel in Ocala? The water there is horrible. There are always things floating in it! They can keep it!

Adara loved them. The truth was they couldn’t afford homes in Florida. Condominiums were not cheap. Social Security didn’t buy the villa they had hoped they would have when they reached retirement age.

The neighborhood knew the Speroses. The old man, they called him. The old Greek, they whispered behind his back. The proud grandfather with the fiery temper, Milos, they whispered. He’s a real devil, that one, the gossip went around. The grandmother: quiet, dignified, resigned to her family cooking and the never-ending cleaning and coping with the terrible tempestuous fights and drinking bouts the old Greek had a reputation for.

The whole neighborhood spoke of the Speroses. They all spoke of the young Irish wife who would marry the Greek boy, Milos’s son, the one with the light green eyes, dark auburn hair, and skin like alabaster. They whispered, It’s because of her father that Sofia hates them. He owns a gin mill. They’re all the same, they said. It’s drink, you know. What do you expect? Milos probably owed them money. What do you think they said? The talk went on…

Milos Speros ignored them all. He was a laborer. His hands were blistered, his breath full of the dry dust of the powderlike cement he toiled with daily. His days lasted for ten, twelve hours, often in bitter cold or in oppressive New York humidity. Grandpa, Adara would ask, why are you always so white? or How come your hands are so rough? She would look at him as if he were a God and repeat, Why is your tee-shirt always wet?

The old man would stare at his granddaughter. He’d reach for her and press her small body close to him and say to her, My sweetness, my beautiful little sweetness, let Grandpa kiss you, my little Greek angel. Adara would pull away from him, struggling for release from his grip around her small body. His breath, reeking of alcohol, made her turn her face while she pushed away the hard body full of heat and dampness from his daily battle with cement.

Adara would remember his scent even after he died. The scent would linger on in various rooms of the house. She would smell him, she thought. At times she thought he would appear behind her as if he had never died, as if his presence were still there. She once called out in her sleep, Grandpa? Is that you? She felt him sitting by her bed, watching her with loving eyes. The dusty, moist smell would permeate the house for years after his death.

*

Milos Speros loved cement. The cement was lasting. It was permanent. He molded it and formed it. He was a god with the cement. He also detested it. He hated it with a passion as if he had never hated anything more. He lay down sidewalks and porches, and he mended cracked walls and worn-out steps. He poured the heavy concrete mush into wooden frames so that executives and the wage earner could have their private little utopias. He hated the cement because the ache in his joints and pain in his blistered fingers and hands never stopped. The smell of dry dust on a hot New York day seared his nostrils. The hot sun burned his skin a dark reddish brown and contrasted with the white powder over his body. The awful fatigue he experienced made him curse the fine gray powder to a hell everlasting. Hell, he thought, would have concrete walls. He would smell the powder for eternity, never washing it totally out of his skin, rubbing forever to rid himself of the odor.

Milos was illiterate, a common laborer. His manners were uncouth, harsh, and backward, but the family ate. The dinner table was plentiful, filled with food that above everything else filled him with pride. He would boast, We ate well even during the worst years of the Depression, didn’t we? Even the best families on this block didn’t have the food on the table that we had. Remember that! Milos Speros worked!

Milos married Sofia. The marriage, arranged by the grandparents, was traditional, planned according to centuries of cultural mores. The couple was never to question the arrangement. It was their way. At Milos’s first meeting with his bride-to-be, he thought her to be birdlike in appearance. She was quiet and, he was sure, stupid. She detested him. He never bathed. His manners were coarse, peasantlike. Her father was a man of means. He owned three fishing boats, a successful business. Milos was a nothing. Why had her grandparents arranged such a marriage? It had been planned out of necessity, they said, before her father’s success in business.

Sofia hated Milos and began to hate him even more after the marriage. She dreamed of America, of movie stars and diamonds. Milos was her ticket out of the poor fishing village in Paros. There, men were always bossy and domineering. They always drank too much and beat their wives, she thought.

Milos married with resignation and followed his parents’ wishes to take a bride. It was not a Hollywood love. The marriage was one of convenience. Sofia’s dream of America would materialize while Milos Speros broke his back mixing cement. They existed together.

When Milos proposed to her, Sofia immediately refused. He spoke to her in a harsh Thera dialect with his coarse tongue. She finally changed her mind and agreed. She would marry him. It was her ticket to America, away from Paros. Later she would mumble under her breath, Sometimes … he’s like the meltemi (the legendary Greek wind). He’s as cold as the wind from the north. Ice, she would say. Today he’s like icy wind. His breath, she whispered, is like cold air because his heart is frozen. She would whisper to her cousin Grace, Meltemi.

Adara would listen quietly behind the door while the two women would speak in hushed voices. Adara, you little witch! What are you doing spying on Grandma? You’re gonna get a good spanking! Come here. Let me see you. Adara would quietly approach the older woman. Her bright black eyes were piercing, shining points that burned right through to her soul. God will punish you, Adara! You must never do this again when older people speak. You must never sneak around and try to listen to them, especially when they may not see you! The evil eye is always watching you, do you hear? Adara would stand rigidly, her body quaking with fright. She secretly hated the old woman because her mother also received verbal abuse from her. The Irish one, Grandma said, bitterly spitting out the words. Fine thing he marries. The daughter of a barkeeper. The owner of an Irish gin mill. We really need shanty Irish in this family, I suppose. She would speak in a voice loud enough so that the whole house and the entire neighborhood could hear her exclamations. Adara resented her.

The grandmother would spend most of her day in the kitchen hovering around the stove, endless days of preparing dinners, lunches, and special meals. On feast days such as holidays and birthdays, the aroma of spicy food eternally wafted throughout the house: tender lamb, moussaka, bits of hot beef, and steaming fish dishes with a mixture of basil and feta stinging the palate with the fragrance of coarse Mavrodaphne. The rich dark wine from the bursting grapes of Greek vineyards would forever remain in the Speroses’ home.

Adara would close her eyes and imagine the icy blue Mediterranean along with the sheer drop from the chalk-white arid and parched cliffs, the barren landscape, white stone houses filled with old women in black dresses hidden behind a veil of cloth, their eyes dark and threatening. She could visualize the old men with their hats roughly pulled over their heads, their black peasantlike clothes symbolizing a perpetual mourning of the dead. Their expressions were tired on bronze weather-beaten faces, with eyes watching for intruders, forever watching the sea and gazing at fiery sunsets. Small fishing boats followed by seagulls drifted dreamily around the azure water. Adara would dive mysteriously below the water and count the different multicolored rocks that lay fathoms below in clear water while rainbows of fish would swim in semicircles around her. Down … down so deep as she slowly drifted and spiraled to the very bottom of the world. She would dream.

Vivid memories of childhood had both positive and negative effects on Adara’s life … images of dark, gloomy days; perpetual arguing; and fear generated from loud bellicose shouting. The memory of her grandmother, ladle in hand, was almost classic. She thought that it was perhaps wishful thinking to help alleviate the pain and harsh words of the old woman. The picture of her grandmother in the kitchen muttering quietly to some imaginary person left an impression on her mind. The Greek argot with chopped-up English phrases left an unintelligible stain on Adara’s memory. She was neither warm nor loving but a selfish old tyrant who favored her brother over the affection of her granddaughter.

Sofia would work diligently, washing and sewing. She did what Milos bid her to do. The silent acquiescence and condescending behavior was a daily occurrence. Milos would wave her away from the table, his drunken stupor making him slur his words. His pronouncements were final, the law. He bellowed and waved his arms as if he were on a construction site, threatening to murder the whole family if they transgressed. Sofia would speak quietly, whispering, Meltemi, that’s what he’s like. Please, God, she thought, deliver me from this animal someday. She suffered because of her selfish desire to come to America. She had paid well for the stupidity of taking the ticket at any cost. The Greek church on Kings Highway heard her soft whispers pleading for God to take him away from them and to bring peace to her bereft life. Such was her penance. She would bear the cross. Sofia never knew that Adara would do her utmost in her life never to become like her.

*

Milos Speros’s bouts with drink were a way of life for the family. His passionate outbursts rose to a raging pinnacle with the marriage of his son, Spyridon. The obstinate old man was furious because of his son’s choice of bride. They called her the Irish whore. Spyridon Speros chose Joan McDade, daughter of a nefarious owner of a gin mill and Irish watering hole, as the family said. The place was a legend, its language replete with the blaring sounds of the Clancy Brothers and an occasional bellicose brawl that resulted in a patron being flung head over heels onto the avenue.

Old Man McDade was a short, stocky Irishman and hid a small billy club neatly beneath the sink. He would generously use it on the heads of neighborhood louts. The saying went that you were from the neighborhood if Old Man McDade flung you out on your arse one time in your sorry life. McDade was a friend of the family, (Mafia) they said. He never discriminated. Even the Italian youths were thrown out of the bar on their heads when unruly, they said. He dabbled in numbers and some small-time narcotics but mostly catered to the only the lonely club of barflies and losers running from ruined marriages and houses full of whining children.

On Fridays, the singles came in. Most of the after-work crowd would tip a few cold ones and vent the tensions of an ever-present growing crime rate and job shortages. Joan! McDade would scream. Get me more glasses! Hurry up! Fer Chrissakes! You’re slow as a pregnant fat lady. Hurry up and get these tables cleaned off! What the hell am I payin’ you fer? Yer head is always in them damn movie magazines! What are ya dreamin’ of? I ask you. Are ya goin’ to Hollywood? Joan would sullenly glare at him. She knew she would probably have to close up. He would be in the back room playing cards with a few of the locals.

Tom Flannery, the precinct captain, would end up drinking an entire bottle of Dewar’s Black Label while Amatoria, the so-called real estate agent, would think that he was in demand by the few lookers who frequented the Shannon Pub. He would then attempt to cheat as much as he could at the poker game. Amatoria wore cheap imitation sharkskin suits. His meticulously coifed hair would give him a fop-like appearance, a prima donna prancing and fawning over women at the bar. Carefully, he pressed their sides, lightly touching their hands, brushing their arms ever so gently while he tried to look deeply into their eyes. He flattered the lonely, catering to their vulnerability. Most female clients didn’t like him. They preferred drinking alone than listening to the daily dribble about Amatoria’s family and how powerful his connections were. He always knew somebody’s brother, someone’s uncle, this one’s son, and the cousin in Calabria. He spoke of his important relatives in Palermo, powerful connections on Mulberry Street and the high-priced gambling dens he was privileged to know about and proudly attend. The reality was he was a nonentity.

When Spyridon announced his intent to marry Joan, the grandmother shrieked, Her father owns an Irish gin mill! Do you want bums for relatives?

Please, Mama, Spyridon implored, try to understand. This is my choice, not yours.

Sofia spit the words harshly from compressed lips. "We’ll have a bunch of drunken longshoremen and Mafia here. Those are his favorite customers. Did you know? Do you want them coming here? How stupid can