Eat the City(80)

Hard-earned leisure came with homemade wine. Raffaele and Paolina sold it by the glass or the pitcher out of their compact grocery store to the men out back playing bocce ball, the hand game morra, or the card game brisk, or briscola. Manuel the Portuguese on Conover and King, and Sal’s aunt Vittoria on Van Brunt, peddled it by the gallon or half gallon from their narrow little row houses. You would be mocked for the rest of your life if you were caught pouring store-bought wine into the barrel in the basement to present as homemade when the homemade ran out.

Kids would get drunk for the first time in their own cellars, giggling with their cousins in the damp cold as they used the siphon like a straw in the barrel and sucked and spat and sucked some more of their fathers’ homemade red. In dimly lit apartments-cum–social clubs, with bedrooms furnished with nothing but card tables and chairs, men would buy homemade wine and fifty-cent dinners of mussels or tripe and stay up late into the night, gambling. At home, the osso buco and veal cutlets and eggplant Parmigiana on the table at dinner could simply not be swallowed without the accompaniment of wine. “A gallon would go phtttt!—like that,” wrote Jerry Della Femina, a chronicler of Italian Brooklyn Sal’s age. Homemade wine answered problems medical, sexual, cultural, wrote Della Femina. “If our neighbor Bellitti had cancer, which he did, and couldn’t eat, the neighborhood advice was, ‘Have a drink of wine.’ ”

Sal’s father died when Sal was nine, when his two oldest brothers were already off in the service. His sister supported their mother and the four youngest on earnings from her thirteen-dollar-a-week job in a jam and jelly factory, and on her black market sales of the rationed sugar she would stuff into her pocket-book. After the war ended and the black market disappeared, Sal needed to contribute. Sal’s zio, or uncle, Daniel Nito, had developed a profitable business selling wartime black market grapes as they came in on the freight cars. Now Daniel took the professional name Tony—it sounded more Italian—and focused his efforts on the seasonal business of providing paesani with California grapes to ferment into a hard red wine. When Sal was thirteen, Tony hired him. By the time Sal was in high school, he would finish his classes around noon and unload grapes till night, and on harvest weekends, he’d wake up at five in the morning and work all day. All the labor made him preternaturally strong, with a good arm for baseball, which he rarely had time to play. He would turn over his weekly eight-dollar pay to his mother and keep the tips.

At that time, Tony Nito & Son (the son was Sal’s cousin Joey) bought California grapes at auction in New Jersey, shipped them across the Hudson on a float to the rail yard in Brooklyn at Columbia and Baltic, and sold them right out of the freight cars. Sal would step up the metal stair, grab the handle, and swing himself into the car to unload thirty-six- and forty-two-pound wooden boxes of grapes. Hauling up into a given freight car, you could guess right away if the grapes were good. Often they would just smell fruity, which was a good sign. Sometimes the farmers would gas them with sulfur dioxide to preserve them for the journey, and if you could still smell the gas, you could bet the fruit would taste fresh. But sometimes—especially in those early days before refrigerated cars, when ice kept the grapes cool but also moist—they smelled of rot. Occasionally they arrived full of roll worms eating them from inside out.

The freight cars had no lights, and when Sal worked into the night, he would turn over a few wooden grape crates, melt some wax on top, and stick on some candles. He would unpack Muscats and Alicantes and Zinfandels in a flickering, uneven candlelight until ten, eleven, or twelve. Seven days a week, the grapes came in.

Loading grapes could be hard on the body. Sal had to get stitches in his head when a freight car door fell on him. When it was time for the stitches to come out, he walked into a tailor shop and asked a seamstress to remove them so he wouldn’t have to bother with a doctor.

At least a half dozen grape sellers operated around that part of Brooklyn—each with his own turf—and many more worked other Italian neighborhoods. By the time Sal was eighteen, he started delivering the grapes himself, in a World War II “deuce and a half” army truck he drove without a license. “Jerkoff. You bastard,” he’d say to traffic from the booth of the car. “Vaffanculo!” He had a string of other jobs, but always tried to take time off to work the grape season. Starting at eighteen, he worked at the White Rock Soda factory during the summer rush, only to leave in the fall for the grapes. Later, he labored on a construction crew building dams and bridges up and down the East Coast, only to quit in the autumn to be nearer home at harvest time. Eventually, Sal got a steady job at the city’s Department of Sanitation, but would ask his boss for days off during the grape harvest. “Bastard guinea,” his supervisor would say, but he would shut up when Sal paid him off in beer and the occasional bottle of homemade wine.

In the 1970s, Joey Nito bought a little bar called the Sky-way Tavern right in front of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and gutted it to make a grape shop. Tony Nito & Son would sell thousands of boxes on a good day, stacked three high on the curb. The supplier out in California was the grower and winemaker Angelo Papagni, who later went to prison for passing off cheap wines as more expensive ones.

Grape crushing had its glam side, since the Mafia boys made wine too. Carlo Gambino, the crime family boss known for gifting friends with bottles of his homemade wine, would occasionally show up in his Cadillac to buy grapes from Joey Nito, Sal says. The dapper, black-hatted mobster would sit in his car and Joey would walk over to the window, Sal recalls. “He used to just tell my cousin, ‘Send the grapes.’ ” It is not clear to Sal whether he made the wine himself or had “his monkeys” do it. “Crowd of geeps,” Sal says, dismissively.