Displaced Snippets of Bayonne by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

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Bayonne; property of the author.

Bayonne has been home and/or birthplace to a surprising number of people of notable achievement. Athletes, artists, movie stars, organized crime leaders, and indicted politicians, as well as many who didn’t get caught. Their fame may well be dwarfed by that of Richard Kuklinski. A reasonably complete list may be found on Wikipedia, but “Cookie” gets special note for being the subject of the 2012 movie; “The Iceman.” He was allegedly a contract man for the DeCavalcante family of Newark and the Five Families of NYC, allegedly having performed more than 100 hits on guilty humans as well as having some minor involvement with other allegedly criminal activities. He’d have received my personal #1 rating had I not discovered that in his youth he also killed countless innocent cats.

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So, my personal favorite is Billy Wondolowski and he didn’t even make the Wiki list. He was a backup wide receiver on the 49ers for 3-4 years. It wasn’t that which impressed me most.

Billy lived right across the street from me in my earliest years, his family occupying the entire bottom floor of the house in which my maternal grandmother and grandfather rented the entire top. Frankly, this wasn’t all that impressive, either.

But being right there I became privy to things about Billy others didn’t know. The boy absolutely loved his football. When he was about ten he blind side tackled his older brother on concrete. His brother received both a broken leg and a lifetime limp. That’s one hell of a hit.

One of the nicest things about having grown up in Bayonne is the previously mentioned, catchy, relaxed attitudes of the residents. Nobody there gives the least bit of a fuck and everything’s a total goof. It had at least one more advantage over modernity. Rather than cyber friends, every time you went outside there were at least six other kids already there ready to play and argue with.

Housing is quite unique. Most people lived on the Avenues in apartment buildings of various ages with no more than three floors, now often having achieved condominium status. Most

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single and two family homes were on the side streets and carry a description experts find difficult to nail down; but the few times we were paying any attention, we locals knew a bit better in terming it nondescript, and see it as a yet-to-be-recognized advancement of fashionable post-post modernism.

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#3- My First Residence

I don’t remember that much from this time, other than being plagued with sore throats and fevers. Dad was away much of the warm weather months playing softball for Burry’s in the Tri-State League. I guess since she didn’t have anything to do either, Mom taught me reading, writing, and arithmetic. My health got better by age 7 or so; and because of my prior training my first four years of school were a complete academic waste of time, though a revelation concerning “human” behavior.

We had an apartment of four “railroad” rooms on the corner of Avenue C and 20th Street. The heat was provided by a huge black stove in the kitchen at one end. In winters we’d shut off the fourth room and pull the blinds and shades as it just got too cold to be in there.

Maybe the most significant thing about the place was that it was on the second floor right over Hymie’s Candy Store and Louie’s Barber Shop. Hymie didn’t sell much candy, but was reputed to be Bayonne’s biggest numbers operator. For younger people, numbers were illegal at the time until the government took over the business. You’re legally playing numbers when you buy a Lotto card.

The big event happened one winter day when all three of us were home. Some guys kicked in the door with guns drawn and

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headed to that shaded and blinded room which was actually the one right over the shops. I was too little to know that I should have been scared, so I wasn’t. I don’t know about Mom and Dad at the time of the break-in, but I know that they eventually got good and pissed.

It wasn’t a strong armed thief; it was the FBI. After finding nothing but this weird frame with needles at the edges which Mom occasionally used for something to do with clothing or bedding and some of her girdles, they came out and apologized.

They said that they had the place staked out for some time.

They had been trying to get the goods on Hymie and suspected that the windows with the shades drawn were hiding his operation. Before computers, the larger numbers guys kept records on a big blackboard; at least that’s what I saw in some 1940’s noir movies. Hymie must have been smart enough to keep everything in his head.

The G-men apologized and left, but also left the door wrecked. That’s when Mom and dad got most pissed; especially Dad, because he had to fix it.

I later realized that if the FBI really did have the place under surveillance, that they must have been doing it from Dominick’s Café across Avenue C. Dominick’s was home to the Alky Gang; a loose configuration of harmless drunks who would occasionally sleep off their revelry in our hallway; much like

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your typical modern day writer. If you gave them a little kick they’d leave; much like your typical modern day writer. The only problem was that Mom wouldn’t do it. She’d call Dad and he’d have to come back from wherever he was to do it.

Though she had much too soon imposed the disciplines of reading, writing, and arithmetic upon me, this woman had no personal interest whatsoever in writing, a smidgeon more in reading, though a genuine interest in arithmetic as it applies to money. Her library consisted of a few cook books, “The Late Great Planet Earth,” the acquisition date forgotten, and some ostensibly religious book which was definitely not the Bible and was missing the first 1/3 of its pages which I found in a kitchen drawer. It may have had something to do with Charlemagne, but I found it to be confusing.

My reading supply came from the library on 30th Street and Classics Illustrated Comics Mom bought for me at the 5&10’s. I recall liking “Swiss Family Robinson” and “The Velveteen Rabbit”

in particular. I had about 75% of the Classics Illustrated repertoire, and the only ones I really didn’t like were those written in some abomination of the English language by Shakespeare.

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