Joe

He was a sculptor and worked in polished bronze.  
His skin was smooth, luminous, tan; clean, wide fingernails
 
Beautiful brown eyes, like the ones cut in mosaics of the boys in the Greek and
Roman halls in the Metropolitan  
He made radiating forms that looked like children’s jacks and there were big and
little ones all over his studio.  
He wore an oversized plastic mask when he was welding and he was always
soldering something, so the place smelled like hair singed in the dryer.
 
He was Sicilian, first generation American
Grew up in the neighborhood in NY where the people from Castro Filippo
congregated, not like the Neapolitans or Abruzzes of Mulberry and Elizabeth Streets
Where they worked in concrete or trucks
But on East 26th Street, in a tenement building, near the firehouse in Kips Bay
Where they were in vegetables and fruit and street cleaning
His father died of a heart attack when Joe was young
His mother was Carmela  
Even though she’d lived in NY for more than 40 years she didn’t really speak English
She had an expression that meant, “it’s the little things that get you,” and translated
it is
“There’s always a hair in the egg.”
He wore cologne called Acqua de Selva. It came in a green glass bottle and the top
looked like a pinecone. It came from Italy and you could get it at Bloomingdale’s and
also at the Italian import store on Grand Street.
He went to Stuyvesant, the neighborhood high school and got into the Merchant
Marine Academy so he loved the water and could really swim.  
He got to go to Cooper Union on Eighth Street and he talked about people like Betty
Parsons and Theodore Stamos.  
He won a Fulbright to Florence and lived there for ten years, then returned to New
York
He wasn’t rich but had great taste, he loved to shop at second hand stores and he
was slim so got great deals: soft cotton shirts with labels from shops in Florence
called La Camiseria, velvet jackets. His friend Joe Lucci had a shop on East 56th street
and always called him when they were having a sale and he’d come back with
perfectly tailored buff colored pants or a navy blue cashmere sweater with pearl
buttons, or a soft suede shirt with a creamy smell
I walked through his looking glass and into the exotic world of words and sounds
like
Soave
San Gimignano
Piero della Francesca
Borromini
Ghiberti doors
Mint tea from Germany
Merluzzo with garlic
 
WQXR  
Music of all kinds
Stravinsky’s “Romeo and Juliet,” which was his favorite
Felix Pappalardi, from Cream and Mountain
We went to see Derek and the Dominos at Fillmore East, then went to the Giraffe
uptown for pasta
 
He told me the story of Michelangelo and how they had to cut his boots off when he
died because he never took a bath
 
We shopped in Chinatown of all places for things he cooked that I’d never heard of like escarole, whiting fish, bok choy and broccoli rabe ‐‐ and carried it home in string bags he bought in hardware stores on trips to Italy
 
He took me to Nick & Guido’s on West 46th Street where all the Italians from the ad agencies had lunch. Waiters hunched over the table with something mysterious: coiled yellow stuff with a blob of green oily stuff and a butter pat. They said things like “alora, ecco lo” and “carissima” His friends ate leaned back with arms draped around their chairs and managed the stuff absent mindedly – no twirling against spoons.  
 
You called it “pasta al pesto” – not spaghetti. And it was a plate, not a dish or a bowl – “a plate of pasta.”
 
Some of his relatives lived in Oyster Bay Long Island and we would go visit in the
summer, where the beach wasn’t sandy like those I was used to, but big pebbles and
you had to be careful walking. They always had cake or coffeecake there, a kind we
didn’t have in New Jersey, called Entenmann’s. One revelation was black‐out cake
and you could smell the icing when they cut it.  
 
He came up with an idea to raise money after the Arno flooded – it was the famous
(but not to me) Cimabue crucifix that was almost destroyed and he worked with the
best printer in New York to get it done. His friend Giuseppe Lucci was head of
communications for Alitalia at 666 Fifth Avenue and another friend, Tony Palladino,
designed the poster that Alitalia used to promote the cause.  
 
My friends, after they knew him, called him “Mr. Eggplant” (Signor Melanzane),
because he taught us about the chemistry of food and presented it so beautifully.

He taught me about centrifugal casting and took me to the Rambusch foundry on
West 13th Street ‐‐ just one block from the Path train to NJ where I was from – but
one block to a whole other world
 
He gave me presents like dried porcini mushrooms and heart‐shaped things, like a
little leather box, a puffed gold heart, a stickpin with an amethyst heart because I
liked the color purple.
 
He loved boxing and designed an exhibit shown in Madison Square Garden
contrasting Roman gladiators with modern‐day fighters
 
He was so kind and generous and funny and most of all – really alive and vital,
always learning, always teaching.

He went out for bread and milk early one summer Sunday with just a few bucks in
his pocket, and he had a heart attack, just like his father.
 
They took him to Bellevue and he was a John Doe for two days.