Judging by its skimpy stamens and overripe pistils, this was a girl tree, though, occasionally, it could switch sex like the morphodites (hermaphrodites) neighborhood mopes were always shouting about: I discover persimmon trees are gender-specific. Year after year, I’d wait for spring, watch the tree flower, but no pollination. I’m his namesake and, sure enough, his obsession becomes mine.

As long as he lives - he’ll die of a heart attack working in his daughter’s Bensonhurst garden - the tree never bears fruit.

“Probably not,” the scientist says, “all the yards in South Brooklyn are poisoned.”įigs and grapes blossom in grandfather’s garden, but the persimmon tree is his pride and joy. “Goddamn this canal,” I moan, “I’m screwed.” The cost of hauling out and replacing the soil runs into tens of thousands of dollars. There’s enough lead and base metal to build a chemical weapon. Years later, under threat of a lawsuit brought a yuppie tenant I have this magical dirt analyzed by an environmental expert at Syracuse University. Somehow, he’d coax tomatoes, peppers, melons and squash from his tiny plot. We have a peculiar relationship: He’d twist my cheek between his thumb and forefinger - “Come sie bello” - until I screamed I’d hide rusty barrel hoops in his garden hoping he’d step on one. My grandfather, a large and dour man, makes bad wine in the cellar. To see a tree, I have to walk six long, sloping blocks to Prospect Park. Gasping at the stench, we strip the leaves and slash ourselves with thin, whip-like branches. There are a few sickly sumac trees on the banks of the Gowanus. Johnny the Butcher has a pigeon coop Joey DeSimone, his rose bushes Honey, a wise guy, a circular blue swimming pool where I see him dunk Joey Heatherton. On Carroll Street below Third Avenue, ours is the only house with a backyard tree. A persimmon tree with shiny, two-tone leaves and fissured, rectangular bark that resembles alligator hide, planted by Vincenzo Coppola, my immigrant grandfather, long before I was born. The tree dominates our yard, green, vital, limbs clawing above the grim, windowless, brick and cinderblock walls that enclose our house on three sides like a prison yard.

Dragons of God by Vincent Coppola