Five-Finger Discount Read online

  Copyright © 2001 by Helene Stapinski

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  EMI Music Publishing: Excerpt from “Marianne (All Day, All Night, Marianne) by Terry Gilkyson, Richard Dehr, and Frank Miller. Copyright © 1955, 1956 and copyright renewed 1983, 1984 by EMI Blackwood Music, Inc. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission.

  Warner Bros. Publications: Excerpt from “When Day Is Done” by B. G. DeSylva and Dr. Robert Katcher. Copyright © 1924 by Wiener Boheme Verlag. Copyright © 1926 by Warner Bros. Inc. Copyright renewed, assigned to Warner Bros. Inc. and Stephen Ballentine Music. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Warner Bros. Publications US Inc., Miami, FL 33014.

  Henderson Music Co. and Fred Ahlert Music Group on behalf of Old Clover Leaf Music: Excerpt from “Bye Bye Blackbird” by Mort Dixon and Ray Henderson. Reprinted by permission of Henderson Music Co. and Fred Ahlert Music Group on behalf of Old Clover Leaf Music.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Some of the names of the author’s friends and relatives have been changed to protect their privacy.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Stapinski, Helene.

  Five-finger discount: a crooked family history / Helene Stapinski.

  p. cm.

  1. Criminals—New Jersey—Jersey City—Biography. 2. Stapinski family. I. Title.

  HV6785 .S73 2000

  364.1’092—dc21

  [B] 00-059104

  Random House website address: www.atrandom.com

  eISBN: 978-0-375-50690-1

  v3.0_r1

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  1 - MAJESTIC MEMORY

  2 - LUCKY NUMBER

  3 - NO SOUP FOR SUPPER

  4 - OFF THE TRUCK

  5 - THE MACHINE

  6 - CHECK YOUR COAT AND HAT

  7 - LUCKY STRIKE

  8 - STRAW KATIE

  9 - PENNIES FROM HEAVEN

  10 - BAD BOY

  11 - GONE AWAY

  12 - FALLING STAR

  13 - THE HEIGHTS

  14 - THROUGH THE TUNNEL

  15 - TEN PLAGUES

  16 - ON TRIAL

  17 - RESURRECTION

  18 - VALENTINE’S DAY

  19 - NO FILTERS

  20 - BORN AGAIN

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  1

  MAJESTIC MEMORY

  The night my grandfather tried to kill us, I was five years old, the age I stopped believing in Santa Claus, started kindergarten, and made real rather than imaginary friends.

  Because Grandpa was one of two grandfathers in their family, my cousins called him Grandpa Jerry. For me, he was simply Grandpa. I had only one. The other—my father’s father, the Polish grandpa we called Dziadzia (pronounced Jaja)—was hit over the head during a burglary in his front hallway seven years before I was born and died after slipping into a coma.

  Everyone in Jersey City knew Grandpa—Italian Grandpa—as Beansie, because when he was young, he stole a crate of beans from the back of a truck. Details about his life started to bubble into my consciousness during the summer of 1970, the year my memory kicked in full force. There were stories about Grandpa “going away” to Trenton for murder. Being arrested for armed robbery. Beating my mother, her sister, and her three brothers.

  Grandpa was a well-known neighborhood bully and crook, though the only stolen objects I knew of firsthand were the ones he swiped while working as a security guard at the Jersey City Public Library and Museum in the late 1960s. The fact that Grandpa was able to get a city job as a security guard—through an uncle, who knew a local judge, who was connected to the mayor—says a lot about Jersey City’s patronage system and general reputation. Everybody stole. It was no big deal.

  My brother inherited most of the objects Grandpa took from the library and museum—the shiny, shellacked coins with Indian feathered heads; a photograph of Abraham Lincoln; small, black Indian arrowheads; a set of encyclopedias. I always wondered if Grandpa stole them book by book or had one of his friends with a car pull up to the library and help him load them in.

  The only stolen object of Grandpa’s that I possess is a dictionary, a Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate edition, which he inscribed to my sister the year I was born: “From Grandpa. Hi Ya Paula. Year—1965.” The call numbers on the spine and the blue stamp on a back page, which reads FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY JERSEY CITY, N.J., have been crossed out in blue indelible marker, his attempt to legitimize the gift. Grandpa obviously had his own interpretation of the phrase free public library.

  Before I started school, my grandma Pauline baby-sat for me while my mother worked as a clerk at the Jersey City Division of Motor Vehicles office, three blocks away. When Grandma died in February of 1970, my mother had no one to baby-sit, so she quit her job. Though I’m sure I missed my grandma—a saintly woman with a halo of white hair and small, pretty hands—my world changed for the better. I was suddenly the center of my mother’s attention. With Grandma gone, Grandpa was at the center of no one’s.

  Because my grandmother had stayed married to Grandpa for four decades, she died fairly young. She was only sixty. She died on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. By then Grandma hated Grandpa so much that on her deathbed, with the smudge of ashes on her forehead, she made my mother promise that Grandpa wouldn’t be buried on top of her when he died. She couldn’t stand the thought of his remains mingling with hers.

  During her lifetime, Grandma quietly threatened to poison Grandpa, but she never did. She never even got up enough courage to leave him. I couldn’t understand why she stayed with him for so long. Or why she was even with him to begin with.

  Maybe it was because Grandpa was so handsome. Like my mother, he had delicate features, thin lips, and olive skin. His hairless body was covered in tattoos, like a bloom of fresh blue-and-purple bruises, which he’d gotten when he was in the army, which he joined, illegally, at age fourteen. On his leg was tattooed a hula girl, which, in his lighter, happier moments Grandpa would make dance for me by rippling his calf muscle. A blue chain was tattooed around one wrist. A snake slithered up his arm, past a cross and a red-and-blue heart. On his other arm was my grandmother’s name—Pauline—underneath the profile of Evelyn Nesbit, the famous girl in the red velvet swing, a popular tattoo subject in 1906. It was a sign that Grandpa adored Grandma. Though he was known to beat his children, he never laid a hand on his wife. He loved her and even had a pet name for her—Boobie.

  But Grandpa’s rage was so potent that it could be contagious. My aunt Mary Ann had moved to Florida just to get away from Grandpa after almost hitting him over the head with a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Uncle Robby, my mother’s youngest brother, was once chased by Grandpa with a broken bottle in front of his own children. Uncle Robby, pushed to the brink of insanity during one of their fights, went at him with a five iron, then smashed Grandpa’s picture window.

  The violent streak hadn’t been passed down to my mother so much. She cursed a lot, though. Whenever she let loose a particularly nasty string of obscenities, my quiet father would yell from two rooms away, “Shut your trap.” When she was going through menopause, she ripped a phone out of the wall. But that was the only time I ever saw her do something violent.

  Right after Grandma died, Grandpa turned his rage on himself, since he had no one at home to terrorize anymore. He tried to kill himself three times. He jumped out the first-floor window of his apartment but did little damage. If Grandpa had lived in a high-rise, our troubles that year would have just ended there.

  But Grandpa was persistent. He tried again, swallowing twenty tranquilizers. When the pills failed to do the job, he stabbed himself with a penknife. Later that spring, he was taken to Meadowview, “the crazy house,” the only one of its kind in Hudson County.

  Meadowview was in Secaucus, a few towns over from Jersey City. Because land was abundant there, it was not cramped like nearby Hoboken and Union City. Secaucus, destined for office parks and multiplexes in the 1980s, was still trying to live down its reputation as a pig farm in the 1970s. When I was a kid, there were jokes about Secaucus and how it smelled like manure. A joker would stretch out one arm and hand, like in a Nazi salute, and hold his nose with the other hand.

  “Who am I?” he would ask. “Superman flying over Secaucus.”

  I didn’t get it. I didn’t know about the pig farms. I was convinced that people made fun of Secaucus because of the smell rising from Meadowview.

  With no baby-sitter, my mother had to take me with her wherever she went—to funerals and wakes, shopping, and to visit Grandpa at Meadowview. It reeked of urine and dirty bedsheets. Legions of mentally retarded men and women and crazy people—much crazier than Grandpa—wandered the fluorescent-lit yellow hallways.

  One man had the habit of twisting his wrist all the way around, then placing his hand over his skull, pressing his thumb and middle finger to his temples. The compulsive action
—repeated thousands of times—left indentations in his head. I wondered if it gave him a headache and, if it did, why he kept doing it. Another floormate of Grandpa’s would lift the lid off a garbage can and replace it, again and again and again. Yet another wore a turban and was known to stand up on a chair and pee onto the dinner table. Grandpa may have been crazy, but he certainly didn’t belong there. Nobody belonged there. Except maybe the guy with the turban.

  On my first visit to Meadowview, I learned that I actually had two relatives in residence. My father’s brother Tommy had been there since 1963, but until Grandpa was institutionalized, I had never visited him. Tommy, the shame of the Stapinski clan, was now brain-damaged from years of epilepsy. Various family members had taken turns caring for him after his parents, my Polish grandparents, died. Most of the time, they had liked having him around. Uncle Tommy cleaned house better than a woman, turning the mattresses over and cleaning the bugs out of the springs. Some afternoons he even made a few bucks cleaning and waxing the cars down at the Manischewitz factory, where his brother Joe worked.

  Unfortunately, Tommy was also known for his fits of rage, which always came on the heels of an epileptic seizure. He had almost killed his brother Henry, the family bookie, bending him backward over a tub and nearly breaking his back.

  Once, at our house, Uncle Tommy had a seizure and, due to some especially slippery carpet, slid under my parents’ bed and got stuck there. Several uncles ran to his rescue and dragged him out before he swallowed his tongue. Another time after a seizure, Uncle Tommy ran up onto the roof of his house. The cops were called, and they chased him from roof to roof until he was caught. Then there was the time he fell down the stairs and knocked his teeth out. The Stapinskis had no choice but to send Tommy “away” to Meadowview.

  Whenever I saw him, timid and smiling a shy, squinty-eyed smile that looked too much like my father’s, I felt like crying. I couldn’t decide which was worse, visiting Uncle Tommy or not visiting him. Being at Meadowview with him was awful. But the incredible guilt and sadness of thinking of my uncle there alone was even more painful. The most heartbreaking vision of all was one that I could only imagine, one that my older sister, Paula, had witnessed as a child: Uncle Tommy standing in a doorway with a shoe-shine kit outside the downtown train station, pleading, “Shine?” over and over again at disinterested passersby. On my visits to Meadowview, I wondered if Uncle Tommy missed his job, or if he even remembered he’d had one.

  For Grandpa, I felt much less sadness. What upset me most, made me cringe, was the sight of his bloody fingernails, which were chewed practically to the cuticles. Just the thought of them sent a sharp pain through my abdomen and down to my groin. I was a nail-biter myself, but there were limits.

  The sight of Grandpa must have bothered my mother, too. After convincing my father it was all right, she finally signed Grandpa out of Meadowview and invited him to come and live with us in our three-bedroom apartment that summer of 1970. Meanwhile, Grandpa would search for a place of his own. Something on the ground floor.

  From the second-floor kitchen window in our apartment, my mother would watch me play. She kept a close eye on me because we lived above a tavern—the Majestic—which sometimes attracted a “bad element.” During the day, the Majestic was filled with harmless old drunks and corrupt City Hall politicians, who came to the tavern for lunch—soggy pot roast sandwiches with rich brown gravy or delicious pepper and egg or cheeseburgers, which seemed as big as Frisbees in my small hands.

  Patrolling the corner was the Majestic’s mascot and most loyal customer, a hunchback named Vince, who wore a fedora and a long raincoat. He was the bar’s first customer each day, a true alcoholic, who downed his first drink in broad daylight. To help defray the cost of his beer—which he slowly sipped like tea, savoring every drop—Vince swept the cracked sidewalk outside the Majestic every few hours, then swept the gutter, pushing the cigarette butts and other litter down past the sewer grate.

  My brother, Stanley, who was seven years older than I was, usually played ball with his friends across the street at City Hall Park, a concrete plaza with a few patches of dead grass. When his friends weren’t around, he would join me in a game of stickball against the graffitied wall of our three-story brick building. The rest of the time I played alone, watched over by my mother and Vince.

  In winter, I built snowmen with the dirty snow out front. Instead of a broom, I sometimes stuck a discarded, empty whiskey bottle in the snowman’s side. My mother yelled at me for it. We weren’t allowed to play with bottles, and whenever we even went near one, my mother would retell the story of the little neighborhood girl who was found standing up, dead, a broken bottle lodged in her jugular vein. Did I want the same thing to happen to me?

  Some afternoons I wasn’t allowed out to play at all, especially during the riots and parades that were staged outside City Hall, an imposing building with a two-story-high arched entrance and four Corinthian columns, which took up a whole city block. Guarding the entrance was a green-bronze statue, a seated woman with a helmet on her head and her right arm in the air, who I thought was a tired, miniature version of the Statue of Liberty. My mother told me that late at night, when I wasn’t watching, the lady got up and danced. Maybe that was why she was sitting down during the day. Her feet obviously hurt.

  We lived on the corner of Mercer and Grove Streets. My parents’ bedroom window looked out onto Grove, a heavily trafficked street, and directly at City Hall and the tired lady. Our front door was on Mercer, a one-way treeless street of battered three-story brick buildings and dilapidated brownstones. The intersection was a busy one, because of City Hall, and was easy to find through the telescopic viewing machines from the top of the World Trade Center in Manhattan, where my mother took me on field trips when I was a little older. From the top of New York’s tallest skyscraper, my house and Jersey City looked a lot like that statue outside City Hall—small and tired.

  Living across the street from City Hall guaranteed hours of entertainment, better than watching Kojak and Cannon, because from my parents’ bedroom window I could see the political action unfold.

  One afternoon I made a poster, featuring the name of a political-reform mayoral candidate. I used red and blue Magic Markers, and hung the poster from my parents’ bedroom window on the day Mayor Smith took his oath of office. I was on the news that night—or at least my skinny arms were, sticking out from the sides of the poster as I waved the oak tag in the wind.

  One autumn, City Hall nearly burned to the ground. Along with the Tired Statue of Liberty, we sat and watched the fire department battle the flames. I bit my nails as the pump and ladders doused the building with three-story-high sprays of water. Mayor Smith, wearing a fireman’s hat, ran in and out of the building, dragging soggy files into the street, his face covered in soot.

  It took all day for the firefighters to extinguish the flames and a few weeks for them to rule out arson. There were reports of disgruntled workers driving off in a red car minutes after the blaze began. Those stories were either unfounded or hushed up. All we knew was that part of the green copper roof was destroyed, its metal frame poking out like a skeleton. The bronze lady was intact, though. A little wet, but undamaged.

  One year my mother made us all duck for cover when bullets started to fly at the Puerto Rican Day Parade, which always ended at City Hall. Tensions were high during the parade every summer, and no wonder, with a mix of new immigrants from the island and the third-generation Irish and Italian cops. The Puerto Ricans would wave their single-star flags, and the white Jersey City residents, forgetting they were only a couple generations removed from immigration, would yell things like “If you like it so much, why don’t you go the hell back?” I remember watching one riot from my parents’ bedroom window and hearing the distinct crack of a billy club hitting a hard skull. Another summer, a local anarchist threw a Molotov cocktail at the building. That time, the fire didn’t catch.

  Jersey City was a tough place to grow up, except I didn’t know any better. I had nothing to compare it to. All I knew was that I was well fed and comfortable in our apartment. The air was filled with industrial smells that meant home. On rainy days, the sky was thick with the pungent smell of coffee manufactured by Maxwell House in Hoboken, the next town up the Hudson. On most other days, the air was dusted with scents from the Colgate-Palmolive factory just a few blocks away. Depending on the stage of manufacturing, the air either stank with the fat from which the soap was made or it hung heavy with the perfume with which it was scented. On the worst and windiest days, the city borrowed its smell from the south, from Newark’s bone-rendering plant. But on its best days, Jersey City smelled of chocolate from the Van Leer cocoa factory, a five-year-old’s dream come true.