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Chapter 1 Growing Pains
Welcome!
You are about to embark on a journey into the world of Louis Michael Gelormino II. As we travel together,
may our voyage help to unlock the wonderful potential that exists within all of us to lead lives of
meaning, faith, hope, and joy. There are over 6 billion stories to be written in our world, and this one
is mine. Come with me as we stroll down Gelormino memory lane.
South Brooklyn, New York, is where I grew up. We lived in a very tough Italian neighborhood where the Mafia was king, and we were often the pawns in a power struggle that left many lives shattered and destroyed. It's a sad commentary that a little bad often seems to overshadow a lot of good.
Most of the families in my community were closely knit Italian Americans who were basically working-class people. They were warm and loving, had talents and abilities, and were a credit to society. However, the small organized crime element is what everyone seems to remember about South Brooklyn in the 1950s and 1960s. This small but powerful group of men created a stigma for Italian Americans that is not easily shaken. The Mafia helped create the social, economic, and emotional background that I was born into back in the fall of 1948.
Born in poverty and raised in a corrupt neighborhood, my early recollections are of constant violence while growing up on Carroll Street in good old Brooklyn, USA. This is the backdrop to my story and the starting place for our journey. I hope you enjoy the trip!
There is an age-old question that I feel I must throw out to you at this time because it will play heavily on the story about to unfold. Are we the product of our environment, or do we determine our own destiny in life? I believe the answer lies somewhere in between. While certain barometers of success may point to the influence of environment, others point more to our own determination. I will come back to this issue often as I relate my story to you, for while I am a product of my environment, I also, now as I look back, see that I chose the life I have lived.
In my neighborhood, you had two choices: either you conveyed the image of strength or you got beat up by people who viewed you as weak. While all the people I hung out with lived by this code of behavior, there was always a lighter side to the constant pressures of keeping up a tough image.
One such incident I will never forget involved Vinny Mophead. Vinny had just moved into our neighborhood. He was about fifteen years old, and he was always trying to show everyone how tough he was by picking on kids younger than himself. While Vinny was quite successful at this, there was one person who always seemed to destroy the tough image he wanted so much to convey: his mother.
Vinny's mother would come down from her apartment at 12 o'clock every day and force Vinny to go upstairs and eat his lunch. This was very bad for Vinny's image since it showed that his mother dominated him, and that he was basically a sissy because he did what his mother wanted him to do. Vinny had a plan that he thought would help restore his tough-guy image; however, it only made matters worse. He began to tell his mother, "If you keep coming down and forcing me to go upstairs for lunch, one of these days I am going to kill myself."
However, Vinny's mom proved tougher than her son. She would grab him by the ear, slap him on the head, and tell him to go upstairs and eat lunch like a good boy or else she would break his head.
In a desperate attempt to regain some dignity, Vinny did something that will forever immortalize him to those of us who grew up on Carroll Street. One day when his mother came down and demanded that he go upstairs for lunch, he became so disgusted that he went to the top of a four-story brownstone and hung from the face of the brownstone, clutching the top of the roof. He told his mom that if she didn't leave, he would jump.
Vinny's mother proved to be one tough customer herself. She said she was going upstairs and that when Vinny came upstairs, she would give him a nice beating—and if he didn't jump, she would kill him. This went on for several months and proved a real test of wills. Every day, Vinny's mother would come down and bring him upstairs to eat his lunch. And every day, Vinny would go to the top of the roof and hang down, clutching the roof and telling his mother to leave him alone or he would jump.
For this reason, it was never necessary to wear a watch to determine lunchtime. Whenever you saw Vinny Mophead hanging from the four-story brownstone on Carroll Street, you knew it was time to go home for lunch. Fortunately for Vinny, he had a strong pair of hands and never missed a lunchtime meal.
As I look back and reflect on my friend Vinny Mophead, his life seemed to revolve around the image he felt he had to project to others—even if it wasn't who he really was. It was more important to Vinny to project an image of who he thought he should be rather than who he really was. And when I look back at Vinny, I am really looking back at myself. As I was growing up, it wasn't me who was growing up but a composite set of behaviors and images of what I thought I should be.
I guess that was the way many of my friends grew up. We didn't have a real identity, and we looked to the role models around us to establish one. Unfortunately, most of us fixed our eyes and hopes on the wrong models. While in search of an identity, many of us wound up on the wrong side of the tracks.
Being accepted by our peers was very important and, since we grew up in a very physical neighborhood, we developed our own set of standards for what we felt was important. Being strong and tough, belonging to a gang, and having a nickname became the parameters we felt would bring us identity and respect.
Take, for example, nicknames. First of all, if you wanted to hang out with the guys you had to have a nickname. A person's nickname meant a lot back then—it conveyed self-image and self-worth. To give you a flavor of the types of people I hung out with, let me introduce you to some of my friends: Johnny Dog, Richie Chigot, Ralphie Bopper, Stroll Bracioli, Richie Wax (also known as Gabaybork), Joey Gutless, Nicky Egghead, Anthony Dumbo, and Tommy Lightning. And my nickname was Crazy Louie, which was quite appropriate since I was constantly fighting with other people as I grew up.
As far back as I can remember, hostilities, hatred, and bitterness were the emotions surrounding my childhood. Without having positive, constructive programs to channel my energies toward and to make up for the severe problems I faced at home, it became almost natural for me to place my energies into fighting.
On the home front, my family life was far from normal. I was born to a mother who at age fifteen had a nervous breakdown and developed paranoid schizophrenia, which remained with her till she died at the age of eighty-four. While I loved my mom, it broke my heart to see her in and out of mental hospitals my entire childhood.
Today, I have a wonderful son who has his own room and the love of a mother and father. But back in the 1950s, the Gelorminos lived in a four-room apartment where I not only shared a bedroom with three brothers, but three of us shared the same bed! During winter, it was a sight to behold—the three of us huddled together under the blankets.
My dad was a very dear man. He was a dock worker who worked very hard to not only feed a growing family of four boys and one girl, but also to help pay the enormous medical bills that my mom's condition entailed. Perhaps it was a broken heart or maybe it was the tremendous pressures and stresses my dad had to face year after year that led to his premature death of a heart attack when I was just fifteen.
My older brother, Gene, decided to get married and move out first. My next eldest brother, Anthony, turned to drugs as his way to escape and handle the pressures of our dysfunctional family. My younger brother, James, also turned to drugs in an attempt to make sense of a world that seemed to offer nothing but pain and suffering.
Sadness, unhappiness, and hardship were for the most part what helped to mold my early childhood. I always dreamed of someday breaking out of the misery that surrounded me and being a respectable member of society, even though the odds were very much against me.
My dad had dreams too. He had hoped to save up enough money to one day move the whole family to Long Island. But when my mom got sick, his life savings evaporated quickly and so did his dream. It broke my heart and made me angry to watch my father constantly struggling to make ends meet. As we grew older, I saw how our involvement in gangs and Anthony and James's drug problems added to the sorrow my dad had to bear. Seeing my dad's dreams fade away and my entire family life crumbling before my eyes created intense hatred and bitterness in my soul.
Yes, my environment was shaping me, and by the time I reached ten years old I had become a tough but lost young man, desperately searching for love and a sense of belonging. In order to cope with life, I somehow knew that dreams were very important, especially since the harsh realities of life were ever-present. Though I saw my dad finally resign himself to the fact that his dreams and hopes were never going to materialize, I never let go of mine.
Even little dreams, when they come true, can mean all the difference in the world—especially to a little boy who has little to look forward to in life. Nicky Egghead and I had always wanted to see a Dodger game in Ebbets Field. However, being poor, we were never afforded that opportunity. Nicky was an avid Dodger fan whose love for them was enormous. At this point in time, the Dodgers were moving to California and Ebbets Field was about to be knocked down. So Egghead decided that we should go to Ebbets Field and play a game of stickball before they knocked down the home of our beloved Dodgers. So, along with Richie Wax, Ralphie Bopper, Stroll Bracioli, my brother James, and a few others, we decided to travel to Ebbets Field for a friendly game of stickball.
As we set out for Ebbets Field, the excitement seemed to be mounting as we approached the stadium. It was a beautiful Sunday morning, but none of us was prepared for the game we were about to participate in. We all managed to get into the ballpark by squeezing through a small window that couldn't have been more than a six-inch square. As we crawled under a fence, we found ourselves standing on the playing field. Nicky and I were awestruck to actually be on the same field where Duke Snider and Carl Furillo played.
I immediately assumed a position in right field because it was always my dream to be like Carl Furillo. James wanted to be Duke Snider, so he moved to center field. The rest of my friends began to move into the positions of the baseball players they wanted to be.
Nicky always wanted to be a baseball announcer, announcing Dodger games. So he made his way up to the announcer's booth and, as luck would have it, the microphone system throughout the stadium was operable. Nicky began to announce our game, calling out the positions we played on the field.
Pretty soon, the groundskeeper for Ebbets Field appeared. He was so infuriated seeing us playing ball that he began screaming at us at the top of his lungs. He shouted that if we didn't immediately leave the field, he would call the police and run us over. We paid no attention and continued our game. True to his word, the groundskeeper got on his tractor and started chasing us around the field, trying to run us over.
Nicky, still on the microphone system, began to address his comments to the groundskeeper. He told our tractor friend that he was interfering with the baseball game and that if he didn't remove himself from the field at once, he would call the police. Nicky was calling for Don Larsen to come to the pitcher's mound and claimed that the groundskeeper was preventing Larsen from coming to the mound.
This was truly a sight to behold. We did indeed have our dream come true that day—having our stickball game in Ebbets Field, pretending to be the Dodgers whom we idolized. We risked our lives that day—we almost got run over by a tractor or arrested, but it was worth the memory of playing stickball in Ebbets Field.
God bless you, Nicky Egghead, for your vision, daring, and helping dreams come true. Continue to Chapter Two.
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