LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter 1 Birth, Bananas, Heroin and Marriage

      Three men made the greatest difference to my career: Milton Anderson (also known as Drake), Dr Israel Silverman and Leon Block were my mentors, to whom I owe an enormous debt. But they came along a little later. First I had to survive early childhood.

      From the area where I was born you can look across the Narrows to Staten Island where the Statue of Liberty is sited—you don’t come more New York than me. The area of Brooklyn where I was born is called Dyker Heights. I arrived on 24 April 1944 at Victory Memorial Hospital, I was a war baby. None of my family was involved in the fighting; my father was drafted too late. Avoiding war would be a tradition I would carry on when I avoided the dubious Vietnam War draft in my own unique way. My mother says that she named me for the British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden—the fact that Anthony was also my father’s name was irrelevant according to her.

      In the early years of their marriage my parents were living in various homes with relatives, in Red Hook, Flatbush and, ultimately, Bay Ridge—all located in Brooklyn. My mother’s name is Josephine, her maiden name was Ciampo and she was born in America. My grandparents Gennaro and Rachela arrived from Italy in separate years, and came through Ellis Island in the early 1900s. Emigration from Italy was not the result of any one single event. Overpopulation, high taxation, unemployment and a wish for property of their own were all factors in driving the migration to ‘the land of the free’. From 1870-90 an estimated 355,000 Italians went to the United States. Many quickly sent word back home of the prospects that existed in America. Initially it was mostly people from Northern Italy who made the journey. In the spring of 1898 there were food riots in many regions of Italy after a smaller than expected wheat harvest the previous summer. Faced with increasing economic problems at home the steady stream of émigrés became a flood. Between 1890 and 1914 nearly four million Italians went to L’America.

      When my grandparents arrived the Irish-American immigration officer couldn’t spell Ciampo so he shortened it to Campo; it’s something that happened to lots of immigrants. My grandparents bought a house in Red Hook (now called Boerum Hill), although when I was growing up it was simply known as ‘Downtown’ Brooklyn. My Dad, Anthony Ferdinand Visconti, was born in 1917 in Jersey City, New Jersey, very much a contemporary of Frank Sinatra. At some point in his early years his family moved to Warren Street in Brooklyn, which is where he met my mother. They became childhood sweethearts and stayed together all their lives until my dad passed away in 2005.

      Like most people my recollections of my early years are patchy, although I do remember riding a tricycle when I was about two or three. One afternoon I rode my little tricycle around the corner and I got lost; I started crying. Someone came up to me and asked me my name. ‘I’m Simon Ackerman,’ I replied. A strange answer, but not so strange because at the time there was a radio commercial for an insurance company; the sign-off line for the advert was. ‘What’s my name?—Simon Ackerman.’ I had heard this so often that it seemed the obvious answer.

      My idyllic life in sunny Ocean Parkway came to an end when my parents decided to move briefly to my grandfather’s house. He lived alone because my grandmother had been in hospital for about ten years having fallen out of a window. She was paralysed from the waist down and over the years dementia had taken hold to the point where she didn’t really recognize anyone and was kept alive by basic feeding and care.

      Grandfather Campo could speak almost no English; he never bothered or needed to learn, living as he did amongst the Italian community in New York. He spoke in a strong Neapolitan accent and made a great living as a fruit salesman. He walked around Brooklyn all day with a big wooden cart full of fruit, mainly bananas, and used the few words of English that he knew. He would yell out at the top of his lungs, in a very raspy voice ‘BANANA’, he also knew the words for American money (‘ten-a cents-a’; ‘a quarter-a’). He was a feisty guy, full of spirit. He was fun to live with except that the neighbourhood where he lived was terrible; it was little more than a slum.

      The house was rat-infested. We had this incredible cat called Tommy, a huge tabby with a scarred face from having been in too many fights. Best of all he was a champion ratter. He would regularly drop a big plump rat at the feet of my grandfather to show what a great job he was doing. I was very wary of rats as a little kid; I instinctively knew I was an easy target. When I was about five my mother went to the corner shop and for the first time left me at home alone for a few minutes. As soon as she was gone the rats intuitively knew I was alone. They could hear me or smell me and all of a sudden there was much scurrying in the wall cavities, and it wasn’t just a little bit of scurrying; I could hear what sounded like twenty to thirty rats. I thought they were coming to get me. I started to scream at the top of my lungs. Fortunately, a tenant of my grandfather’s, on the top floor of our three-storey building, came running down to see what was the matter. He wrote a note to my Mum. ‘The rats scared me I am upstairs in Dominic’s apartment’, signed Anthony. My mother never left me alone again. Shortly afterwards my father was asleep with his arm hanging over the side of the bed and was bitten by a rat; his finger became so swollen it looked like a small salami.

      Many Italians lived on our street. Next door was a family of Sicilians and above us was also a Sicilian immigrant, a tenant. The older people only spoke Italian and really didn’t speak too much about the old country, one that held bitter memories. If anything they talked about America and making money. Italian music would pour from windows, either from 78-rpm gramophone records or from the non-stop Italian broadcasting on AM Radio; the DJs only spoke Italian. The smell of red sauce pervaded the air and more often than not Italian food was the main fare on our table every night. My mother’s mother was an excellent cook by all accounts and she taught my mother well. I remember that the Italians kept to themselves, yet there was an undermining class distinction amongst them. The Neapolitans (us) thought that we were better than the Sicilians; I was brought up to believe this too. But it wasn’t an issue because I played with the Sicilian kids next door, who were every bit as American as I am. In fact, I felt rebellious about the amount of peasant Italian culture that was forced on me and I held my ears shut when my mother or grandfather tried to speak Italian to me. It was different for my father as his mother never taught him Italian because she wanted her children to grow up as 100 per cent Americans.

      Our neighbourhood was predominantly Italian but there were also Puerto Ricans living at the other end of the street, and a couple of Arab families. Back then it was a broken down working-class neighbourhood, today apartments there go for about half a million dollars and up.

      My mother sang all day long when she was cooking and doing her housework; she would sing in both Italian and English. My Dad, a carpenter by trade, was an amateur accordion and harmonica player; he also sang bass in a barbershop quartet. The quartet sometimes rehearsed in our kitchen and the strains of ‘Sweet Adeline’ became ingrained in my young brain—all four parts.

      When I was five years old my parents bought me a plastic ukulele. I had seen it in the window of a toy store and I wanted it. It was not just any old ukulele, but a Popeye ukulele, with transfers of the great man, Olive Oil, Wimpy and Swee’Pea on it. Each nylon string was a different colour—the A string was blue, the D string was red, the F

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