Read Brooklyn Noir 3: Nothing but the Truth for Free Online

Closes as Part of Plea Deal” by Michael Brick (New York Times , June 21, 2006).

THE GHETTO NEVER SLEEPS, MISTER POLICEMAN
    BY R OBERT L EUCI
    Atlantic Yards
    M y father was born and raised in East New York, on Hull Street and Hopkinson Avenue, one block off Fulton. He’d tell you he came from Brownsville; that’s the way he chose to remember it, and he spoke of his neighborhood devotedly.
    The only member of his family born in this country, Pop was one hell of a ballplayer and a devoted follower of the socialist and East Harlem congressman, Vito Marcantonio. Pop loved Brownsville and was proud of its socialist history. When I became a cop we hardly ever discussed politics; in the 1960s, we hardly spoke at all.
    In the back of my mind where memories flourish, I often think of Brownsville. As a kid growing up in Ozone Park—Pop thought Queens, just across the Bayside and Acacia cemeteries from Brooklyn, was best for us—I went every weekend to the street markets of Brownsville to shop with my mother. Her name was Lucy and she called Brownsville “Jew-town.”
    One summer Sunday morning, I was playing stickball with my buddy Norman Bliestien. My mother drove by the playground to pick me up. In those days, going Sunday-morning shopping with my mother was at least as important as, say, going to the Crossbay Theater with the neighborhood guys to watch a movie. Or possibly my first sexual experience.
    “Normie, I have to go shopping with my mom,” I tell him. “I gotta go.”
    “Where you going?”
    “Jew-town.”
    “Where?” says Normie.
    “Jew-town in Brooklyn. Pitkin Avenue, Stone Avenue. Down there.”
    “That’s Brownsville. What are you, a moron?”
    I’d always thought that Jew-town was the name of the neighborhood, like Ozone Park where we lived, or Richmond Hill or maybe Polack Alley in Woodhaven. I was ten years old, so what did I know?
    Brownsville in those years was awesome. On Belmont Avenue—Stone and Pitkin too—there were rows of pushcarts heavy with vegetables and fruits and pistachio nuts and great round, thick, chocolate-covered halvah rings that were shoulder-to-shoulder with immense loaves of black breads, bagels, bialys, and pickles in enormous wooden barrels. In the shops there were appliances and clothing and shoes—special sample shoes, the only ones that would fit my mother, whose feet were tiny.
    The shopkeepers loved my mother. They’d notice Lucy and shout her name; the commotion was unbearably loud and dazzling.
    “Lucy, here Lucy—look what I got for you, only for you!”
    My mother was beautiful. Small and beautiful with huge breasts. She was a Sicilian woman and they were Jews and the market women jumped for joy when they saw her. My mother greeted them as if they were family.
    I learned how to slip and slide in and around fast-moving crowds as a little kid. Walking those streets, I worried that Brownsville’s uproarious world would swallow us up. But that urgency in my belly passed soon enough when Lucy laughed. She laughed a lot, and anyone could see that she loved being there. The little lady could shop.
    Her astute eyes missed nothing. Shirts for my brother, a dress for my sister, Keds sneakers for me—only half sizes, with soles so thick that when I wore them I’d feel as though I could jump over a building and back again.
    I can still see the people, closely packed along the sidewalk and overflowing onto the stone stoops that led to the shops. On the cold days in the winter it was a sight to behold, all those people warming themselves from the fires that rose out of black metal barrels, the fragrance of wood smoke mixing with the spicy essence of lox and salami. They are some of the most magnificent, clinging, and lasting memories of my childhood.
    That was then.
    Not until I became a cop in my early twenties was I to visit Brownsville again.
    Years had passed and things had changed.
    There were mountains of garbage in the little yards in back of the tenements where