Cypress Hills Cemetery, Brooklyn. My summer job two years in a row in high school. First my junior year, and then in my senior year when my first summer stock experience in Benton Harbor, Michigan ended with the company closing after two weeks because of protests led by the two directors over unfair working conditions. But that is another sordid tale full of intrigue, sexual deviation, drunken pool games, and why I’ve always mistrusted the Midwest. But now it’s summer in Brooklyn and I’m getting a great tan under a hot merciless sun among tombstones and some people I used to know.
First there was Theresa Farrell, my mother’s cousin and daughter of Aunt Lizzie, who we saw quite a bit of and whose husband, Whitey Farrell, got me the summer job at Cypress Hills Cemetery. Theresa was a big woman, dark haired, laughed a lot, and loved my mother…

I was remembering Moondog this morning, this blind musician/poet who dressed as a viking and wandered the city streets reciting poetry, playing music, and scaring the wits out of drunk teenagers like me who just happened to bump into him when rounding a corner in the West 50s. The first time I was with Henry Munoz and Alvin Miller and we had spent several hours after acting class in the Blarney Stone eating those greasy cornbeef sandwiches and drinking draft beer spiked with rye whiskey that Julian Richards always smuggled in under his coat. Anyway, Alvin was going off to catch the D train to Carnesie, if I remember correctly, and Henry was walking with me to 34th Street where he would get the E or F train back to Jackson Heights and I would catch the LIRR home and boom. Right smack into this viking. I mean, man, that’ll…

Charles Frederick Russell. Charlie. My stepfather.
Perhaps it would be best to begin this by giving some background.
Charlie was the oldest child with one younger brother, Albert, and two younger sisters, Susan and Bertha. He was born in Manhattan but his father, a contractor, soon moved the family to Long Island where he built houses that he would later sell. They ended up in Lynbrook in a big, sprawling three family house where they lived on one side and rented out two apartments on the other side. Charlie would eventually buy this house after his mother died, paying his three siblings their market value shares, but that’s getting ahead in the narrative.
Charlie went to high school in Lynbrook and then to Gettysburg College, a private coed college in Pennsylvania. This was just before the Great Depression in 1930s America, and he graduated in 1930 when that Depression was…

I know that title sounds like some sit-com from the late 1950s/early 1960s starring Fred MacMurray & Bill Bixby but I wouldn’t have cast either of those two actors in the roles. No, it would be more like Ben Gazzara and Joseph Cotton. And the real star of the show would be the woman they both were married to, though, of course, at different times: my mother. But she deserves a whole ‘nother memory piece all to herself. So this will be about the two men in her life and the two who served as role models for me in what a husband should be.
First, there was my father, biological father, that is. A first generation Calabrese Italian who, if you know anything about the people from Calabria, you know when saying that you are supposed to bite the knuckles on your left hand and rap your right on…

Senior year of high school found me attending acting school in Manhattan. It all came about because I was enacting some story in my head to Jimmy Hanley who looked at me with a half smile on his face and said, “You oughta be an actor.” Now I probably thought the same thing at one time or another like every kid thinks, but never really taking it seriously because the only thing I ever wanted to do since I became enthralled by E.B. White’s Stuart Little was write. I mean, I loved reading, loved the worlds I discovered in books, loved getting lost in other people’s lives which in books I seemed to be able to do so easily, and I thought I’d kind of like to do that, too. Create worlds people could get lost in, create characters people could care about, want to get to know, have coffee…

so I see this cannoli in the window
and instantly think of my grandmother
saying something in half Italian half English
about desserts and espresso
so I buy the pastry to eat while walking
and the kid selling it to me says
you have the face of Italy
which probably explains why people keep stopping me
to ask for directions
there’s the same shrug of the shoulders
the same sad eyes in a smiling face
in the people on the street
and for dinner
it’s linguine with baby clams
sausage and broccoli rabe
homemade red wine in a ceramic jug
water with gas
and I’m home
Naples
I’m home

I walk down narrow streets
in my dream
passing strangers who resemble people
of my youth
the faces so familar
it is as if my uncles/aunts are here
huddled in conversation
politics and sports
though the talk here is of football
not the Brooklyn Dodgers
our hearts broken with each loss
our hearts bouyant with each win
and those damned Republicans
on the loose again
here the talk is of a loss of freedom
the high rate of taxes
what to eat for dinner
and time to drink one’s coffee in peace
the shrugs of shoulders
the helpless hand gestures
I know this world
so far from my own
and yet is my own
it is like looking
in a mirror
I have not felt so Italian
until I walked these streets
of Naples
my name not so musical
until I heard it here
I have not felt so at…

This world–
call it an image
caught in a mirror–
real it is not,
nor unreal either

translated by Hiroaki Sato and Burton Watson

in a mountain village
at autumn’s end–
that’s when you learn
what sadness means
in the blast of the wintry wind

translated by Hiroaki Sato & Burton Watson

Why should my heart
still harbor
this passion for cherry flowers,
I who thought
I had put all that behind me?

translated by Hiroaki Sato & Burton Watson