Gilbert Sorrentino's Bay Ridge: A Guided Tour.

In 1975, the journalist Nik Cohn published an article in New York magazine titled "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night;' a work of mock-sociological observation of the disco-inferno weekend recreations of the culturally limited and recession beset outer borough youth of Bay Pddge, Brooklyn. ]he scene of the revels was a discotheque named 200 h A Space Odyssey, and the master of the dance floor was a flashy Italian-American named Tony Manero. As it much later emerged, "Tony Manero" was an entirely fabricated character, but, at the time, nobody noticed, including me--I'd grown up in Bay Ridge dealing with just such types. The article was adapted into the film Saturday Night Fever, shot on location (Tony, the ur-guido, lives on the street where I once did), and it became such a global box office sensation that I imagine a billion-plus people have watched John Travolta strut down Eighty-Sixth Street to the Bee Gees soundtrack, paint cans swinging.

The Bay Ridge portrayed in the article and film is by no means completely inaccurate, but it relies heavily on cultural stereotyping and lacks any sense that the characters might in fact have inner lives of any complexity. There is no record of Gilbert Sorrentino, a Bay Ridge native who wrote about its indigenes with unsurpassable intimacy, ever having delivered an opinion about Saturday Night Fever, which is a shame, because I can easily imagine how scaldingly funny he would have been about its cluelessness on class, its ethnic prejudices and Manhattan-centric snobbery, and its shaky grasp of human particulars. We can confidently state that however wildly superior Sorrentino's portrayal of Bay Ridge is to the movie's, his books command considerably less than one percent of its audience--a melancholy fact to which I'm not sure he ever quite reconciled himself. Brooklyn is not lacking in literary bards and chroniclers, but I would make the claim that no other writer on or from the borough had a richer, deeper understanding of his or her patch of asphalt. Especially of the speech and thought patterns of Bay Ridgites, who may not make it into "the city" all that much, but whose dreams and delusions and sins and virtues ate given precise weight and scale. Cue up the inevitable comparison to James Joyce's Dublin--but as an aboriginal Bay Ridgite myself, born and bred and escaped from, I speak with some authority in drawing the parallel.

I was twenty-one years old in 1972, when I crash-landed back in Bay Ridge, having graduated from my Ivy League college (it felt more like being banished), back in my parents' house with no prospects and no plans. The horror, the horror. In this grim mood I was given a copy of Gil's second novel, Steelwork, which was set in, mirabile dictu, Bay Ridge and presents an unsentimental but not unsympathetic portrait of a group of locals from 1935 through 1951 as they kill time, get loaded, shoot the shit, get laid (of more often try to), get loaded, bowl, shoot pool, trade sexual boasts and misinformation, go to the movies, get loaded, work, shirk work, daydream, get loaded, die. Jesus H. Christ! This guy Gilbert Sorrentino had taken the dismal raw material of the sorry-ass backwater I'd had the misfortune to be born in and so desperately wanted to leave, and turned it into a work of literature. And it was exactly right in every geographical particular, not just right but astonishingly detailed. (The cover of the Pantheon hardcover is, in fact, a stylization of the street sign for the comer of Sixty-Eighth Street and Fourth Avenue.) This was a revelation, to say the least, and a chastening rebuke to my callow college-boy disdain.

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I have been reading Gilbert Sorrentino ever since, savoring the way he has returned time and again to his neighborhood subject matter, always in a shiftingly prismatic and infallibly tough-minded fashion. I even got to interview Gil for a critical profile in Bookforum, in Bay Ridge, at the Bridgeview Diner on

Third Avenue a few blocks from his co-op apartment on Shore Road. In life, as in art, he was a neighborhood guy to the end, moving back to Bay Ridge after his retirement from Stanford University.

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One rainy and miserable Sunday in January of this year I drove from upstate New York back to Brooklyn, camera in hand, stopping off at my parents' grave in Calvary Cemetery in Queens, to find out just how much of Gilbert Sorrentino's Bay Ridge--and mine--remained. My wingman on the trip was Brian Berger, resident of Carroll Gardens, a fellow Sorrentinoite and a historian of Brooklyn with astounding depths of knowledge of the non-Dodgers variety. I had pored over Steelwork, Little Casino, Crystal Vision, and A Strange Commonplace, notepad in hand, jotting down the names of bars, churches, diners, movie theaters, pool halls, pizza joints and ice cream parlors, mentally triangulating the locations of ones that were unfamiliar to me. Since Steelwork's earliest episode takes place in 1935 and almost all of the references in the other works date from the forties and fifties, we were conducting something of a temporal experiment in literary archaeology. Would the Melody Room still be in business, serving yet another generation of rummies? How much would survive the churn of urban life?

Gilbert Sorrentino's Bay Ridge is for the most part a very delimited territory, comprising not much more than fifteen or so square blocks, from Ovington Avenue to Sixty-Fifth Street and from Third to Fifth Avenues. Our first stop was Fourth Avenue and Bay Ridge Avenue ("Joanne, twenty, is the product of one of the oldest families on Bay Ridge Avenue, 69th Street to you aliens." [Crystal Vision 240]). There I was delighted to find a genuine continuity; a Greek diner, Greekishly named Yianni's, stands on the exact location of the fabled Royal Diner, a twenty-four hour greasy spoon designed in the classic faux dining car fashion. In Sorrentino's single greatest work, the short story "The Moon in Its Flight," the narrator returns from his date with a beautiful Jewish girl in the remote Bronx, gets off the train filled with a sense of self-loathing inferiority, and "[sees] his friends through the window of the all-night diner, pouring coffee into the great pit of their beer drunks. He despised them as he despised himself and the neighborhood" (15). And there's this from Steelwork: "Drunk, falling down drunk, and with great bravado, they reeled up Ovington Avenue toward Fourth. To get a hamburger in the Royal" (58). The diner, it seems, was the neighborhood location of choice for alcohol-based erotic melancholy, a mood I'd experienced there a few times myself. I was sad that the no doubt architecturally significant Royal was no longer extant, but it was reassuring that Yianni had taken up the task of ministering to Bay Ridge's nutritional and psychic needs.

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My deepest disappointment was that none of the bars that are so often mentioned in Gil's work and that serve as the stage for his brilliantly rendered talk have left any trace of their existence. No sign of Flynn's Bar and Grill, of Gallagher's ("Now it was two o'clock and Eddy sat at the bar in Gallagher's having a Fleischmann's and ginger" [Steelwork 158]) or the Melody Room or Pat's Tavern or Carroll's Tavern or Henry's ("I once heard Ray Eberle, Bob's brother, at the end of his rather undistinguished career, sing in a Brooklyn saloon named Henry's" [Little Casino 20]). The best I could find was the Leif Erickson bar, the name reflective of the once-thriving Norwegian community in Bay Ridge.

This at first surprised me, since Bay Ridge's bibulous population used to support many dozens of local bars. But as I drove around the reason for their absence quickly became apparent: that section of Bay Ridge in particular had be come heavily Muslim in the past two decades, with a local mosque and many Middle Eastern groceries abounding--not exactly a drinking population.

Nor, alas, could I find any trace of the candy store named Yodel's where so much of the endless bullshitting in Steelwork takes place. (Its name is transposed into "Vogler's" in Little Casino.) The stretch of Fourth Avenue, where I held out hope that at least a soda fountain might have survived, yielded only newsstands, convenience stores, smoke shops, and car services--yet another sign of the disappearance of egg-cream Brooklyn.

The amazing Brain Berger had discovered, through an actual 1940 census record, that Gil had lived with his father and mother at 466 Senator Street before their separation, so we drove one block over to view the old homestead. To my mild surprise, it turned out not to be the expected apartment building but a free-standing two-story (and possibly two-family) home, clearly showing the wear and tear of its seventy-plus years. Steelwork's entry "1940 / Senator Street" describes a peculiar, militarily obsessed older kid named Stinky, aka The Colonel, who leads troops of twelve-year-olds armed with swords fashioned from orange crates in invariably futile attacks against the Sixty- Eighth Street kids--defeats often followed by mock court martials for cowardice. The piece captures perfectly the way a kid's imagination transforms the most mundane urban features into the field of imagined valor, and how a mere one block can lead one into enemy territory.

We then drove over to Our Lady of Angels church on Fourth Avenue and Seventy-Fourth Street--an important institution in the formation of Gil's worldview not because he went to its parochial school, but because he couldn't; since his mother was separated from his father, the nuns decided that young Gibby (as he calls himself in Steelwork) was tainted goods, unworthy to attend OLA (as it was universally called). A later collision with the Church occurred when his short story "Last Rites;' published in the Brooklyn College literary magazine, was denounced as blasphemous in the Brooklyn Tablet, the diocesan paper, and on the floor of, no kidding, the United Nations. I used to attend the excellent high school dances at OLA, which for some reason used to have the best CYO basketball teams in the borough, but lately the parish has fallen on hard times, having been closed by the cash-strapped diocese, punching a huge hole in the community and, one must suppose, spiritual life of the neighborhood.

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So off went young Gibby to the local public school, P.S. 102 on Colonial Road, where I did a year's tour in kindergarten myself before being remanded to St. Anselm's parochial school. We found the whole building draped in scaffolding and in the midst of renovation, yielding only this one unsatisfactory shot, looking like every other NYC public grammar school. Gil's classmate was his friend and neighbor Hubert Selby, Jr., making P.S. 102 one of the most literarily distinguished public schools in the city system. Gil then went on to Fort Hamilton High School, a huge (4500-plus student) public institution overlooking the Narrows. Let it be noted with dismay that Gil's name is not to be found among the 50 "Hall of Fame" alumni listed on the school's website. The only name recognizable to me was that of the basketball great Bernard King.

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Ten blocks north on Shore Road can be found Fontbonne Hall, "an academically excellent and socially genteel high school for very smart Catholic girls" (Little Casino 87), a description that certainly obtained throughout the sixties and beyond. One of the recurring characters in Little Casino is Dolores, a "dark, black-eyed, sweet Italian girl with a straight-A average from Fontbonne Hall, who looks absolutely beautiful in her school uniform" (45). Her doppelganger might well be a later alumna of Fontbonne Hall, Maria Bartiromo, the famed "Money Honey."

In Crystal Vision, the same Dolores writes to a boy to admonish him for "what you were trying to do in the Alpine. You know, Donald, that I am not that kind of girl, and that the Alpine is not that dark ..." (248). In "1941/ Movie Houses" from Steelwork, Sorrentino waxes Homeric about Bay Ridge's once rich supply of movie palaces: "They went to the Alpine because it was there ... You got flea and louse bites in the Stanley ... The Sunset was a bucket of blood ... Your mother took you to the Fortway to see Clark Gable and Bette Davis, fuck them ... the Dyker was for Friday night, all boys, save only the bravest of girls. It was loud and obscene ... The Electra showed pictures nobody

ever heard of ... The Bay Ridge was so dark you really could get laid there" (166-67). Of these theaters, the Stanley, the Sunset, and the Electra were unknown to or at least unpatronized by me, but the Alpine, Dyker, Fortway, Bay Ridge and, quite a bit farther down Fourth, the Harbor, got plenty of my business as a movie-going youth. But only the Alpine, Gil's local theater on Fifth, was still in the movie business.

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A Strange Commonplace contains two apostrophes to the place, one a sweet remembrance of being taken there by his father to see Tarzan movies and smear his face with Lucky Charms lollipops, the other a present-day lament that "now it was a multiplex, showing all the latest blow-em-up, imbecile-comedy fake-sex movies. The saloon that had been next door was now a mosque" (25). It still is; its imam was the subject of a long two-part profile in the New York Times that won a Pulitzer Prize. Upon inspection, all the other theaters had been repurposed: the Bay Ridge into a McDonald's, the Fortway into an Asian grocery store serving the growing Chinese population, and the Dyker and the Harbor into health clubs. Sic transit gloria cinema.

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After a movie date or an OLA parish dance, Bay Ridge's youth would repair to one of the invariably German-run ice cream parlors--to Hellberg's ("Later their now customary ice-cream soda in Hellberg's was strangely unsatisfying to Penny" Steelwork [136]) or Holsten's ("... present was Joanie Holsten, the baby's dad's sister, whose husband was Otto Holsten of the ice-cream parlor clan" Crystal Vision [242]). Neither of these bemarbled milk-product emporiums has survived, nor has Meyer and Blohms, my family's favorite for an unbelievable cherry vanilla, but we found a perfectly preserved stand-in in Hinsch's, farther up on Fifth Avenue. My friends and I would repair to Hinsch's on many a weekend to indulge in pointless chatter and ragging a la Diner, just as Gil and his buddies must have done in the faraway forties.

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Winding up our tour of the monuments, we drove back along Shore Road to the Sixty-Ninth Street Pier, once a working dock that was a terminal for the Staten Island Ferry before the Verrazano Narrows Bridge put it out of business, now refurbished for recreational use and providing an excellent view of the lower bay. Little Casino has a terrifying description of a kid attempting a leap from this pier onto a scow, falling into the water and suffering a gory death, as the scow is pushed by a swell and crushes him against a supporting timber. Sorrentino glosses this episode with these touchingly apposite lines from John Wheelwright's poem "Fish Food":

 What did you see as you fell? What did you hear as you sank?
 Did it make you drunken with hearing? 

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A string of ambiguously delineated parks curves up from this point, marking the borderline between Bay Ridge and Sunset Park to the north. The first of these is either Bliss Park or Owl's Head Park; Gil helpfully explains in Little Casino that "The true name of Bliss Park is Owl's Head Park, by which appellation it is never called, at least by neighborhood residents" (207). "Owl's Head" is thought to derive from the putatively owlish shape of the hill upon which the park is situated; "Bliss" comes from the manufacturer Eliphalet W. Bliss, who sold his estate to the city with the stipulation that it be used in perpetuity as parkland. Whatever you call it--and I remember the names as being interchangeable--I played basketball there often and my parents' last apartment was right across the street, on Colonial Road and Sixty-Sixth Street.

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At some indeterminate point, Owl's Head/Bliss Park shades into Leif Ericson Park, the existence of which testifies to the once-flourishing Norwegian community in Bay Ridge. In my memory, the excellent Norwegian delis had superb homemade potato salad and the counters were immaculate enough on which to perform brain surgery. Every May the Protestant kids got off school to watch the Norwegian Day parade, in which Scandinavians in folk costumes marched down Fourth Avenue to the Leif Ericson rune stone plaque (dedicated in 1939 by Crown Prince Olav of Norway himself), where the invariably blonde Miss Norway would be coronated, to be celebrated on the front page of Nordiske Tidende, the local paper. In Crystal Vision, the chapter "Leif Eriksson's [sic] Memorial" features a hilarious group disquisition on the matter of where these various parks start and end, Cheech, Richie, Irish Billy, Professor Kooba, and Big Mickey all weighing in on the matter. Richie goes on to relate an utterly fallacious story, in which the stone is replaced by a large statue of Leif Eriksson on a horse, sword in the air--except that on "Protestant Day" they discover that someone has sawed off the sword and "cemented a bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon into old Leif's hand" (138). The statue, Richie goes on to claim, was sold to a Coney Island attraction and the stone plaque put back. Complete entertaining bullshit, rendered in the authentic Bay Ridge register of which Sorrentino was the master.

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Our last stop is the former location of Lento's, of thin-crust pizza fame, on the corner of Ovington and Third Avenues. Mentions of Lento's dot Sorrentino's work: "As usual, not enough damn cheese... We ought to start going to Lento's" (Crystal Vision 215). I had been saddened to read in, yes, the New York Times, that Lento's was closing as a result of an intramural family dispute, particularly as one of my best high school friends was a member of the family that owned and ran it. What had taken its place was a joint called the Yellow Hook Grille. "Yellow Hook" was marginally acceptable, in that Bay Ridge had once been known as that until the advent of yellow fever made a change in nomenclature advisable. (It's all about real estate values, isn't it?) But that phonus balonus "Grille"! We can only imagine what vicious sport Gil would have made of that spelling.

Our mission to Sorrentinoland accomplished, Brian Berger and I repaired to a pizza restaurant farther down Third for what was advertised as "Lento's-style pizza" It was pretty good, but it was not as good as Lento's. Take my word for it.

WORKS CITED

Sorrentino, Gilbert. A Strange Commonplace. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2006.

--. Crystal Vision. Normal: Dalkey Archive Press, 1999.

--. Little Casino. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2002.

--. Steelwork. Normal: Dalkey Archive Press, 1992.

--. The Moon in Its Flight. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2004.

Article Details

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Title Annotation:	PART 2: Writers on the Writer
Author:	Howard, Gerald
Publication:	The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Article Type:	Critical essay
Geographic Code:	1U2NY
Date:	Jun 22, 2011
Words:	3619
Previous Article:	Mr. Sorrentino's Neighborhood.
Next Article:	A Memorial Reading.
Topics:	Art and life Criticism and interpretation Place identity Criticism and interpretation