EUCLID AVENUE

“The true Paradises are the paradises we have lost.”
Marcel Proust


“Nicky Eyes”,
so-called for his horn rimmed glasses.
He is my friend Pauli’s father.
The family that lived next door
on Euclid Avenue, in Brooklyn.

“Pete the Killer” was also a neighbor.
Now, I don’t know if Pete killed anyone,
he was just a sharp dresser.
You know, those elongated collars
on his Chinese laundered shirts.

My father also had a nick-name,
“Tony Surf and Turf.”
He made money in fish.
He lost money on horses.

Euclid Avenue in the Fifties,
Italian and Jewish.

In the Sixties they would build “projects.”
The neighborhood would die
a slow and agonizing death.

The old Sicilians were opera and bocce.
My generation was Rock n’ roll and baseball,
a uniquely American generation-gap.

We had one thing in common,
the church that they built, “Santa Fortunata.”
Whose the primary tongues were Italian and Latin.

Stained glass windows with familiar family names.
A Sanctum sanctorum for us all.

And the Jews, with forearm tattoos,
tough and cynical and world-weary,
who found, like the Sicilians,
a paradise of struggles on Euclid Avenue.

On hot nights families would
congregate on stoops.

Stoop-speak, as a fugue
of English and Yiddish and Sicilian
and, of course, Brooklynese.

To cool off in the summer we went
to the Kinema theater on Pitkin Avenue.
Everybody called the bleached-blonde
young guy, who managed the theater,
a “flaming faggot”,
but he was tolerated by our liberal
and simpatico views of the world.

Brooklyn: everyone had a nick-name.

Anyway, me and Pauli,
came out of the apartment
at the same time.
Nicky Eyes,
a name I never called him,
he was Uncle Nick to me,
was waiting at curb side.


©T.Puma/MMXI