YDN Magazine

VOL XXXVI t ISSUE 2 t NOVEMBER 2008

FOOD WATER SHELTER Savoring Pepe’s Famous Pizza

Learning to Fight Fire

Struggling Against Homelessness

INSIDE 20 COVER STORY

YOU NEVER GET USED

TO

IT

Caroline Berson Life is a struggle for the cadets who are training to become New Haven firefighters. And it won’t get easier once they graduate.

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Daniel Fromson

MANAGING EDITORS

Ben Brody, Jesse Maiman

ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Caroline Berson, Anthony Lydgate, Vivian Nereim Naina Saligram, Kanglei Wang, Victor Zapana

PRODUCTION MANAGER

Adrienne Wong

DESIGN & PHOTO EDITORS

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PHOTO ESSAY

GESTURE AND PERFORMANCE

Sonali Bloom A photographer roams Yale after dark, finding emotion and mystique in her fellow students.

14 FEATURE

Ginger Jiang, Jared Shenson, La Wang

GOT ANY MONEY?

FICTION EDITOR

Victor Zapana

POETRY EDITOR

Meet Edward Mattison, the foremost advocate for the Elm City’s more than 650 homeless. As funding for his programs begins to dry up, what can he do?

Angelica Baker

Carina del Valle Schorske

STAFF WRITERS

Rachel Caplan, Rebecca Distler, Jacque Feldman, Sam Jacobson, Nicole Levy, Frances Sawyer, Eileen Shim, Jonathan Yeh

ILLUSTRATORS

Maria Haras, Sin Jin

The Yale Daily News Magazine invites letters to the editor.

Please send your comments to the editor-in-chief of the Magazine at daniel.fromson@yale.edu.

The views and opinions represented in the Magazine’s articles and advertisements do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff. We reserve the right to refuse any ad for any reason and to delete or change any copy we consider objectionable, false, or in poor taste.

FICTION ILLUSTRATIONS BY MARIA HARAS “TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT” ILLUSTRATION BY SIN JIN

29 FICTION

THE LOSS

OF A

FREQUENCY

James Pollack When Cimone drives her sister Elsa home from the airport, the car radio breaks. Within days, everything else falls apart.

36 FEATURE

THE ORIGINAL Rachel Caplan Frank Pepe’s Pizzeria Napoletana is an institution in flux. As Pepe’s expands and the younger generation jumps ship, can it retain its integrity?

The Yale Daily News Magazine November 2008

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3

UP THE HILL

A STRESSFUL COLLABORATION Rebecca Distler

5

STUDIO SPACE

THE HUNCHBACKS OF HARKNESS

CAROLINE BERSON

T

Eileen Shim

6

MY YALE

THE GATEKEEPER’S HOUSE Laura Bennett

8

Trainee firefighters hone their skills on condemned buildings. Still, five of them per year will die during these exercises throughout the U.S. Turn to p. 20 for more.

AROUND ELM CITY

THE NEW GREEN REVOLUTION! Daniel Fromson

12 PROFILE ZONANA’S DEFENSE Jacque Feldman

26 TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON? Raphael Magarik

33 POEM ISIS

Katy Waldman

42 BACKPAGE IN THE YEAR 2012 Jesse Maiman

A

bout six months ago, I saw Barack Obama speak at Wesleyan University’s commencement. The topic of his speech was the importance of service to one’s country — a topic that, undoubtedly, is familiar to most students at Yale, who tend to rank community service and civic involvement among their highest values.

Now that Obama has been elected the 44th President of the United States, I imagine college students and others around the nation will be hearing that call to service loudly and often.

This issue of the Yale Daily News Magazine highlights the commitment to service that already exists within the greater New Haven community. Our cover story by Caroline Berson portrays the dramatic antics of New Haven’s firefighter cadets, while another feature story, by Victor Zapana, depicts the struggle to provide for New Haven’s homeless. Our profile, Jacque Feldman’s “Zonana’s Defense,” describes how forensic psychiatrist Howard Zonana has dedicated himself to aiding the thousands of individuals who suffer from mental illness yet remain in our nation’s prisons.

But service also takes more subtle forms. These may be the efforts of research scientists, the tending of a graveyard, the playing of a carillon for thousands of students, or even the continued dedication of Frank Pepe’s grandson to producing some of the best pizza in the world. All of these things, as well, are present in this issue of the YDN Magazine.

We hope you enjoy this issue of the Magazine. Our staff has put a lot of effort into it, and I personally think that the writing, artwork, and design in this issue are as strong as they has ever been.

Best wishes, —Daniel Fromson

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November 2008 The Yale Daily News Magazine

UP THE HILL A STRESSFUL COLLABORATION by Rebecca Distler

he first time you walk into Professor Hilary Blumberg’s office, you don’t expect to see the print. It stops you in the doorway: a grey blob of matter springs forth from a black void, pinpricked with bright reds, yellows, and oranges. The print is a replica of a painting, created by Professor Blumberg’s father, of the first brain scan she completed: one of a bipolar patient suffering manic symptoms. The grey is the brain, while the colors represent areas of neural activity.

Through delicate balance, Blumberg’s father welded art and science together and created a breath-taking painting of a devastating disorder.

The Yale Stress Consortium, where Professor Blumberg studies brains, is a project begun two years ago with a $23.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It follows the same interdisciplinary ethos that inspired the painting. While traditional research focuses on a specific question using approaches from one discipline, the Consortium consists of 14 different projects conducted across 20 fields — including neurobiology, genetics, psychology, and economics — to study stress, self-control, and addiction.

“When we were formatting the Consortium,” said Blumberg, “it was really something to sit in a room with people from across the campus and come together with a common goal. It was like a composition, like a piece of art that brought together all the different disciplines. In science, [that’s] not always common.” As the principal investigator (PI) of one of the Consortium projects, Blumberg and her co-PI conduct brain scans on adolescents to determine the effects of stress on brain development. Alluding to the print hanging above her desk, Blumberg notes, “That same part of the brain [that] helps to regulate and control emotions and impulses is also the part of the brain that stress can alter and make it harder for teens to regulate behaviors.”

Professor Rajita Sinha, director of the Yale Research Program on Stress, Addiction and Psychopathology, came up with the idea for the Consortium. Having spent years

KATE KRAFT

For the researchers of the Yale Stress Consortium, performing a scientific study is like painting a picture. Using interdisciplinary tactics, professors like Hilary Blumberg research trenchant disorders that plague the brain.

Hilary Blumberg, a professor of psychiatry and diagnostic radiology at the interdisciplinary Yale Stress Consortium, stands next to a print of her first brainscan. researching neural regions involved in stress, she applied to the NIH two years ago for a five-year grant for the project. Sinha explained, “Complex disorders cannot be solved in disciplinary ways; it is not adequate to only examine the chemistry or the psychology.” Sitting in her quiet office, she paused to comment, “We absolutely think disciplinary training is very important. Having said that, you also need to be able to understand that whatever topic you’re working on may have implications in another area.”

Professor Jody Sindelar, PI of the “Stress, Self-Control and Addiction in Large Populations” project, is trying to find those interdisciplinary implications. Trained as a health economist, Professor Sindelar’s approach to the topic of stress differs from those of the other researchers. “My contribution to the Consortium is looking at large populations,” she said. “We’re using economic models to look at self-control as described by willingness to put off something desirable, like eating cake, for a long-term benefit, like health.” Her group looks at how family factors like divorce and marital strife, health factors like diabetes, and occupational difficulties affect the three target behaviors in the study’s title. Her body of work also

includes studies that could be applied to the current financial crisis: for example, whether people are using cigarettes or food as a form of “self-medication.” “I look at it from the economic lens,” she said, “but I can call a Consortium neurologist and say, ‘tell me how the brain works.’”

Nonetheless, obstacles to interdisciplinary research still exist. “It’s good to say that everyone should be doing interdisciplinary science,” Sinha said, “but it has to be a topic that is relatable.” Sindelar agreed: “It’s hard to organize. Terminology is different, even for the same concepts. People come at it with underlying assumptions.”

Because the Consortium work is so recent, there are few definite outcomes as of now. But optimism prevails: Two years into the five-year grant, researchers are still delving into their original projects and receiving funding for new ones.

One can only hope that the end result is as harmonious as the print that hangs in Professor Blumberg’s office. Just as its hues eloquently blend art and science, so the on-going studies at the Stress Center blur the lines between disciplines — the research and the researchers coming together with a greater goal in sight.

The Yale Daily News Magazine November 2008

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STUDIO SPACE THE HUNCHBACKS OF HARKNESS by Eileen Shim

he ascent up Harkness Tower was daunting. 65 steps of winding staircase had brought me within sight of a carillon, but my guide cheerfully informed me that this was just the office level. 72 more steps awaited me. Turning pale, I clung to the railing and struggled on. At the top of the second staircase, I was met with an underwhelming sight: The carillon was tiny.

And there were no bells to be seen.

Several people were squeezed in the dimly lit room for the Saturday ring.

While most members take half-hour shifts, playing the bells once a week at 12:30 or 5:00, Saturday evenings are dedicated to group rings. Everyone from nervous heelers to seasoned alumni was there, taking turns showcasing their latest arrangements. I stood in the back, impatiently waiting for the music to begin. A heeler stepped forward, gingerly spreading out sheets of music. The chair squeaked as he sat down. He placed his hands on the wooden knobs of the carillon, where 54 keys are connected to the 54 bells above, and began ringing.

A heeler is a carillonneur in training.

Carillons are scarce, usually limited to universities, churches, and town belfries, so few people have any prior experience.

“It’s not like a cappella,” says Su Joo ’10, a co-chair of the Guild of Carillonneurs, “because most people didn’t play the carillon before they came here.” Portability is also an issue. “People who love singing can just sing in shower,” Joo says. “You can’t really lug around a carillon.”

ing process a fun venture. “It’s just really cool to go up to the tower and play something that no one plays,” she says.

Wendy Hou ’12 is more serious about the auditioning process. For her, the challenging and selective nature of heeling provides motivation. “The tower is pretty much revered everywhere,” Hou says. “I am definitely going through with it.”

The competition to become a fullfledged carillonneur is serious. While about 75 people signed up for heeling this year, only five to seven people will ultimately be selected to join the Guild.

Nine weeks of practice go into a single audition, which consists of a standard exercise, two prepared pieces, and a passage for sight-reading. “I just have to practice, practice, practice,” Hou says.

The Guild of Carillonneurs has existed since 1964, and, according to Andrew Lai ’09, another co-chair of the Guild, serves an important role. “We set the ambience for the campus, even though most people won’t realize it,” Lai says. “We are doing a public service by introducing the instrument.” w Though its sounds may permeate campus, the carillon remains enigmatic. While almost everyone on campus can hear the music, they can’t see who’s playing the actual instrument in the tower. Lai and Joo spend much of their time dispelling myths about the instrument and the Guild. They try to explain to their classmates that a) there are no hunchbacks in the tower, and b) the music is not played from a prerecorded machine. Wendy Hou, however, seems to like the air of mystique surrounding the carillon. “I’d rather they keep thinking we’re like Quasimodo,” she says. “We would be like gymnastic monkeys!”

After the heelers presented their pieces, Lai let me ring the hour with the Westminster Chimes. I was nervous, but he patiently pointed the keys out to me. I

“We set the ambience for the campus, even though most people won’t realize it,” Lai says.

Claire Wallace ’12 came to the carillon after playing handbells in high school.

She stumbled upon the instrument in a Google search for bell-ringing societies at Yale. Although the carillon isn’t quite what she expected, she considers the heel-

GINGER JIANG

Twice daily the bells ring out across Yale’s gracious quads. Sometimes credited to electronic recordings, the melodies are actually played by live members of the Guild of Carillonneurs. Here’s a look inside their gothic tower.

An exclusive group, the Carillonneurs use Harkness Tower as their headquarters. struck each one with my fist and the sound magnified hundreds of times around me; my impromptu performance reached the thousands of listeners 230 feet below.

As I left the tower, the bells were ringing above my head; I could feel their vibrations through the soles of my feet.

Each strike of the heeler’s hands brought forth a fresh wave of rumbling, and the entire building was awake with the immensity of the sound. I stepped outside of the room and paced the length of the tower. There were doors to small balconies, where pigeons roosted as if they didn’t hear a thing. A group of heelers huddled in one corner, flipping through sheets of music and deciding what to play next. They eyed me curiously as I plugged my ears and looked up at the ringing bells.

“First time,” I explained.

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November 2008 The Yale Daily News Magazine

MY YALE THE GATEKEEPER’S HOUSE by Laura Bennett At the Grove Street Cemetery, final resting place of historical figures such as Eli Whitney and Noah Webster, the grass must be cut, and the graves must be tended. Only one man has done this for the last 32 years.

Bill Cameron Jr. looks very much like an owl, with his bright eyes, feathery eyebrows, and rounded shoulders. He is heavily whiskered and dressed in dirty slacks and a patriotic sweatshirt. His face erupts into a craggy smile, and then he is suddenly jovial, impish, playing the host.

I am led up the stone stairs and into the office that Bill Cameron Jr. has occupied for 32 years.

I’ve never seen so much dust in my life. There is dust hanging in dim beams of light from the windows, coating the faded linoleum floor, a thin crust on desks and stacks of papers, caked on Bill’s shoes and under his fingernails. The air tastes like dust and smells like stale bread. As my eyes adjust to the grey light, I see a remarkable labyrinth of clutter: There are spindly chairs tucked among piles of books and boxes, a wooden barrel, newspaper clippings, figurines, old photographs, an enormous jar of pennies, more wood carvings than I knew existed, taxidermy with rumpled feathers and missing limbs. The walls are a sickly pea green and two yellowed light fixtures hang from the ceiling.

DANIEL CARVALHO/YDN

t is strange to cross that threshold, to step between the reddish pillars and into a field of graves.

On one side, Grove Street bustles steadily; on the other, there is just quiet air and grass studded with neat rows of stones, like granite fingernails. It seems unnatural to enter a cemetery without some morose obligation: to attend a funeral or lay flowers on a grave. I instantly feel like a trespasser amidst the epitaphs and fresh mounds. And the birds — there must be hundreds of them, converged on the roof of a small brick building.

From the outside, the cemetery’s Main Grounds Building is quaint and tidy, with bricks arrayed in decorative arches over the windows. There is not a shingle out of place. Something about the rounded windows and the curve of the roof lends the building the feel of a miniature cathedral. The top half of the front door swings open like a ticket window. As I approach, there is a sound of shuffling, the sigh of papers hitting a desk, and then a leathery face at the door. “I’m the cemetery superintendent,” says a gruff smoker’s voice.

“What can I help you with?”

The forbidding wall of the Grove Street Cemetery, facing Prospect Street. The office of the cemetery’s superintendent, Bill Cameron Jr., lies hidden on the other side.

Bill has spent his life as superintendent of the Grove Street Cemetery. “I’m sick of it,” he says, swatting the air, but then reconsiders: “Actually, I don’t know if I’m sick of it. I like the outdoors. It’s beautiful here.” He looks out the window.

“That’s why I came in the first place.”

To my left, there is a fish tank filled with rocks embedded in sand — hefty, bulbous things in dizzying shades of purple and red. “Someone gave me that rock collection,” says Bill. “I used to know all their names, but I forget now. I love rocks.”

The tangle of trinkets that litter the room reveals his other passions. Bill collects everything from animal figurines to duck decoys to naval-themed paintings.

Most of all, he is an avid wood-carver. His creations line the walls: horses with heads reared and manes billowing, birds of prey posed mid-flight, ships looming on turbulent seas. He slides a box out from under a table and dumps a collection of wooden birds into my lap. Many are quite beautiful. “You could sell these,” I tell him. “I don’t doubt it,” he says proudly.

On the subject of cemetery business, Bill is nonchalant. “I do everything here, cutting the grass, funerals, all that. Eighty percent of our funerals are now cremations. People are really getting into that,” he says lightly, as though discussing Pilates or some posh new diet. And then, after a moment: “I guess it could be depressing, but you get used to it.” He chews on a fingernail. “Nah, I don’t know if you get used to it. You learn to live with it. Let’s put it that way.”

I spot another fish tank, propped against the back wall. Inside is a miniature cemetery: little graves made of pieces of cardboard and wood, adorned with sprigs of tumbleweed and twigs, complete with a tiny church in the middle of it all. “I made it during a snowstorm, when I was bored,” Bill explains. He beams, running his fingers over the muddied glass. On the floor beside it is a large red clay skull, sculpted by Bill and his son. Death seems little more than another oddity here, something else shelved and gathering dust with a hundred other relics.

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LA WANG

The Yale Daily News Magazine November 2008

Deep within Cameron’s dusty office lies his cluttered desk. When not working, Cameron carves wooden birds and sculpts skulls.

The sun is garishly bright when Bill walks me outside. Part of his comb-over flops and flutters in the wind. I stand with him and look out at the cemetery. “It’s beautiful, eh?” he says. He trudges out back to take out the trash and leaves me sitting on a stone bench beneath a dogwood tree. Bill has strewn birdseed along the path leading through the graveyard, and an enormous flock of black-feathered

birds is feeding. The place feels more like an arboretum than a cemetery, with its trim, manicured shrubs and trees. The birds are quiet here, reverently restraining their warbles. The breeze is very slight and the plots are dappled with sun. The gravestones are aligned like teeth, their edges softened by moss.

Bill returns after a few moments and starts up the stairs to his office. “Stop

by anytime, say hello,” he says. As I walk towards Grove Street, a car horn sounds and suddenly, magnificently, the birds depart as one. There is a momentous beating of wings, and then the air grows silent again. I wave to Bill and he waves back.

I pass through the pillars and turn back once to see the birds and the grass and the tidy rows of graves and the soft light on all of it, filtered through the gates.

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November 2008 The Yale Daily News Magazine

AROUND ELM CITY THE NEW GREEN REVOLUTION! by Daniel Fromson Goji berry extract powder. Organic hempseed. Warmhearted assistance for the feral cats of Cheshire, Connecticut.

Yes, the Connecticut Green Expo had something for everyone, especially distractions from what really matters. ow friend, you seem like a conscious person. I mean really conscious — I can tell you care about making the world a better place for all of Mother Earth’s children. Well, I wouldn’t share this with just any old person, but let me tell you about a little something I like to call the New Green Revolution. Now you can make the world green and make yourself some green, all at the same time. That’s the wonder of the New Green Revolution. It’s about having fun, it’s about opportunities — that’s making money — and it’s about making a better world.

And let me tell you, there is something for everyone! Whether you’re looking for eco-friendly sunroom additions, cruelty-free vegan skin products, or dairy-free snacks, you’re sure to find it at the Connecticut Green Expo. At the JAG Studios booth (their slogan is Conscious Photos for Conscious People, isn’t that nice?), Jacklyn Greenberg is showing off her limited-edition landscape and wedding photos. Green gourmets line up at The Green Umbrella, where Lisa Storch is selling oh-so-yummy goji berry extract powder and organic shelled hempseed (Delicious Nutty Flavor, Add to Your Favorite Recipes!).

True hemp aficionados can purchase organic

The charmingly dreadlocked Marcia Duvall assures me the shirts aren’t made by a roomful of abused Indonesian women.

To see the magic for yourself, all you need to do is wander up the road to this year’s Connecticut Green Expo, the grand finale of the Connecticut Folk Festival and Green Expo, made possible for you by the lovely people up at New Haven Folk and Southern Connecticut State University. Don’t let global warming get you down! Experience the magic today! Then sign up for a booth at next year’s expo, and tomorrow you’ll be rolling in green!

Friend, I would venture to say that there isn’t a finer event east of the Mississippi than this gem of an expo in beautiful New Haven, Connecticut. Out in the parking lot, there are loads of conscious people just like yourself all clamoring to change the world — that parking lot is absolutely filled with hybrid and biodiesel and electric cars, and you just know the people are conscious since they’ve all got beautiful messages like Follow Your Heart and Imagine Peace and God Bless the Whole World — No Exceptions. Yes sir, these people are following their hearts and they’re following ’em right into the Southern Connecticut State University quad, right into the countless vendors and exhibitors and workshops that make up the 2008 Connecticut Green Expo.

hemp dog collars, hemp baby salve, and incense matches (For Masking Odors!!!) from my dear friend Stephanie Niles at the Earthetarian, which also offers Tibetan prayer flags, handmade knitting needles, and cookbooks like the ever-popular The Garden of Vegan: How it All Vegan Again. If you’re fashion-conscious, we’ve got everything from Little Hippie imprinted handmade children’s clothing to 68-dollar Steel Pony designer T-shirts whose promoter, the charmingly dreadlocked Marcia Duvall, assures me that the shirts aren’t made by a roomful of abused Indonesian women. Those in need of foreign nannies may also want to pay a visit to Brenna Lanigan of Au Pair Care. Now, she might have a bit of trouble explaining her connection to the green movement, but she’s a very nice lady and she fits right in with the New Green Revolution since — now here’s a little secret — she caters to our target demographic.

Now please, friend, before I get carried away let me remind you that the New Green Revolution isn’t just a day at the beach.

Let’s not forget about the really important issues in the world, like factory farms and global warming and Darfur and the poor feral cats of Cheshire, Connecticut. That’s

why the Connecticut Green Expo has also got things like the Connecticut Fund for the Environment. The Sierra Club. Jewish World Watch, which is providing Disney backpacks for Sudanese schoolchildren. Friends of Cheshire Feral Cats (Success is Pawsible).

If success is pawsible for those poor little kitty cats, it’s certainly possible for the children of Mother Earth.

And when you’ve got pals like these on hand, the conscious folks don’t mind spending a buck.

Sorry for being a bit of a downer there — now let’s just put those really important issues in the back of our mind while we have some fun. At the One Community Programs Booth you can learn how to harvest the energy that exists right in your own backyard and how to cultivate not only veggies but also a newfound respect for common weeds — the unsung heroes of the garden. For pure spectacle we’ve got a giant papier-mâché earth and a man in a carrot costume and a chakracleansing glitter-sprinkling wing-wearing friend of mine named Sweet Pea the Earth Faerie and a woman calling herself Mother Earth who will tell your children a colorful tale of how she experiences our presence! If you’re hankering for a snack, check out Bare Beans Coffee (Fair Trade Organic Coffee Roasted Fresh Daily in Teeny Tiny Batches!) or Mamoun’s Falafel (Home of the Crunchy Falafel Wrap and Not of the Whopper!) or First Fruits Fruit Smoothies (Yoga-nah Love These! Try a Mango Meditation or a Berry Blissful!). If you’re feeling stingy — and who doesn’t once in a while? — there’s free apples and pens and faux-Livestrong bracelets and T-shirts and vegetable juice and pamphlets — so many pamphlets! — and free samples from Steaz (The First USDA-Organic, Free-Trade, Vegan-Friendly Sparkling Green Tea Beverage, Which Will Always Be Cheerfully Described To You In Exactly The Same Way!). Don’t worry — it’s all going to contribute to greater conservation in the long run! Warm your heart, not the globe! Bumper stickers today, green tomorrow! Don’t let global warming get you down, because conscious or not, most of us don’t anyway!

Gesture & Performance A Photo Essay by Sonali Bloom

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November 2008 The Yale Daily News Magazine

PROFILE ZONANA’S DEFENSE by Jacque Feldman The insanity plea is more than a television stunt or a cheap tactic for defense lawyers. Dr. Howard Zonana, one of the country’s leading forensic psychiatrists, discusses the complex intersection between mental health and crime.

Howard Zonana tells me a story of two identical twins. They are psychotic. They both believe they have chips implanted in their brains. One twin helps the other murder his wife. At his trial, he is found not guilty by reason of insanity. Dr. Zonana testifies in his defense.

Vaguely mysterious, viscerally creepy, Hannibal Lecter’s day job — forensic psychiatry sounds like the stuff of fiction.

Popular shows like “Bones” and “Law and Order: SVU” fascinate viewers with its application. But for Dr. Zonana, a Yale professor who has developed the leading subspecialty program in the field, forensic psychiatry is no Fox rerun. His work, which focuses on evaluating the competency of individuals to stand trial and the validity of defenses based on mental defects, impacts policy at local, state, and national levels.

I meet Zonana at his office in the Yale School of Medicine’s Connecticut Mental Health Center, where he has worked for the past 40 years and serves as medical director and president of the medical staff. We sit facing each other in huge, lushly upholstered leather armchairs. I hover on the first four inches of mine, afraid of being swallowed by the chair yet everattentive. Zonana, long and lanky with piercing round eyes, fills his space better.

Yale Professor of Psychiatry and Adjunct Clinical Professor of Law at Yale Law School, Zonana tells me he enjoys the teaching aspect of his profession. As we talk, I imagine the attorneys and juries to whom he regularly explains the most criminal edges of the human psyche.

With much hard work, Zonana has had forensic psychiatry accredited as a subspecialty with the American Psychological

Association and with the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law, of which he is Medical Director and past president.

Besides some clinical work, Zonana performs and monitors psychiatric evaluations of defendants. He also holds positions such as the Chair of the Bioethics Committee at Yale-New Haven Hospital.

“Most doctors don’t like to talk to attorneys,” Zonana tells me, explaining what deters many psychiatrists from his field. But Zonana, it would seem, doesn’t mind the occasional lawyer. He has built a career bridging psychiatry and law, grappling with the dilemmas inevitable at this intersection. The ethical job of a doctor, he explains, is to do no harm. Law, however, is different. In a legal case, there are

frequently done for adolescents. And with that, Zonana resolved an ethical dilemma that would cripple most.

Zonana tells me he is attracted to the “delicate balances” of his field. Analytic and calm, with the mind of a scientist, he studies people and institutions in immediate danger of collapse. Forensic psychiatry is the science of the precarious.

He describes the American mental health system as “basically in shambles.”

Nationally, it has suffered from reduced funding, and responsibility has increasingly been delegated to negligent state governments. Coupled with a resurgent skepticism regarding the insanity defense, problems with the mental health system have led to equally dire problems in prisons.

“The insanity defense is complicated here in Connecticut,” Zonana explains. Through the mid-eighties, about 25 defendants each year were found not guilty by reason of insanity.

The Psychiatric Security Review Board was created to monitor those acquitted by reason of insanity. It oversaw a period of growing public worry regarding the insane, heightened by the midnineties killing of a nineyear-old girl by an insane escapee in Middletown, Connecticut.

The resultant policies mandated stays in mental hospitals that were even longer than the prison times for those found guilty, so pragmatic attorneys stopped recommending the insanity plea.

The number of defendants found guilty by reason of insanity dropped drastically, to about seven or eight per year. The rest went to jail.

“Prisons,” Zonana points out with a sad wryness, “are not a great environment for people who are schizophrenic.” Jails have been flooded with criminals in far

He has built a career bridging psychiatry and law, grappling with the dilemmas inevitable at this intersection.

The ethical job of a doctor, he explains, is to do no harm.

Law, however, is different. two sides, and one will be harmed. Justice and treatment, Zonana has learned, rarely agree.

He cites one such conflict: The Supreme Court has ruled that criminals sentenced to death cannot receive their sentence unless mentally competent. As a psychiatrist, Zonana has been forced to decide whether to treat a mentally incompetent criminal so he could be executed.

“We said no,” he concludes. Instead, he recommended a less severe sentence, as is

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HAN XU/YDN

The Yale Daily News Magazine November 2008

A leading advocate for the thousands of mentally ill housed by the U.S. prison system, Zonana is an expert on the insanity defense. advanced stages of psychosis, those who, just 20 years ago, would have been committed to mental institutions. The percentage of the United States population that is incarcerated is notoriously high, higher in fact than any other country’s.

Demands for mental healthcare, added to the sheer space requirements, strain the criminal justice system.

In the mid-eighties, the Connecticut Civil Liberties Union engaged Zonana as an expert witness in a case against Connecticut’s York Correctional Institution for women, addressing concerns of inadequate mental healthcare at the facility. After visiting the site to evaluate the situation, Zonana, along with psychiatrists hired by the defense and the judge, agreed on guidelines for adequate mental healthcare that regulated, for example, patient screenings and restraints, staffing, and policy on suicides. A consent

decree resolved the case out of court.

Yet Zonana has also influenced policy beyond the scope of York’s. He acted on a committee to weigh in on the Connecticut legislature on the passage of sexual predator statutes, which state that sex offenders must be committed to mental hospitals after they finish serving their sentences.

According to Zonana, these laws dangerously loosen the definition of mental illness, perverting the scientific language of psychiatry to punitive purposes. They turn state mental hospitals into forensic facilities, crowding them with the criminally insane just as jails have become filled with the psychotic. Zonana’s committee advised against sexual predator statutes, and the Connecticut legislature followed its advice.

In the wake of events at Abu Ghraib and what he calls “the Bush administration’s changing definitions of tor-

ture,” Zonana has also worked with the American Psychological Association and the American Council on Psychiatry and Law to officially denounce the use of psychiatrists as interrogators. This step influenced the American Medical Association to endorse the same policy.

Despite the breadth of his work, Zonana says that his ongoing work with the women at York inspires him most.

He continues to check on them every six months and proudly reports one patient’s comment that she received better treatment at the improved facility than she had at a mental hospital.

The law, Zonana tells me, tends to deal in types of people, while he concerns himself with “making sure people are evaluated as a whole person.” The stories of individuals, he has discovered, are much more complicated than attorneys and judges might admit.

Got Any

Money?

BY VICTOR ZAPANA

Homeless advocate Edward Mattison is fighting to keep the city’s sole winter overflow shelter running through the cold, bitter months. But does he need help? eff “Weasel” Lenor, 45, gets disability payments for his left foot. Years ago, as he separated metal bed frames in his bedroom at New Haven’s Taft Apartments, the bedspring snapped back, causing a loose cinder block to drop and shatter his toe. He spent $55,000 on surgery, but the nail keeps growing wrong, Weasel says. A podiatrist says Weasel can’t use clippers; Weasel needs a saw. “It hurts and it never heals and it’s never gonna be the same,” he says, sitting legs spread in New Haven’s South Central Behavioral Health Network office.

Weasel is the first homeless man I met when I came to see Edward Mattison — the executive director of the South Central Behavioral Health Network, and the man who is (I will eventually learn) the savior of the homeless in New Haven. Weasel leaves the office and sits by a table in the waiting room, asking himself whether he should sheepishly take his sleeping bag and belongings from Mattison’s office while I am there or after I leave.

In 2003, Weasel met Mattison through a mutual friend, Ron Reising, a former pastor of First and Summerfield United Methodist Church. Mattison and Reising had worked together at Inside at Night, a fundraising group for the city’s homeless shelters — overnight places where the homeless go during harsh winter nights.

When I ask Weasel to characterize his relationship with Mattison, he limps into Mattison’s office and whispers to him: “Hey Ed.” “Yeah.”

“He wants to know my relationship with you. Should I tell him…” The conversation lowers to murmurs.

Weasel limps out of the office and tells me that Mattison is a friend. “I’m a general nuiPHOTOGRAPHY BY JARED SHENSON

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November 2008 The Yale Daily News Magazine

sance to him,” Weasel added. “I want you to write that. I can be a nuisance sometimes. I’m a little overbearing.” Mattison “helps people help themselves,” Weasel says. He is sure Mattison will solve the homeless problem. But Mattison needs help. A 67-yearold man, Mattison can’t figure out the problem by himself. “He has nobly taken the cause,” Weasel says. A pause. “But he will burn himself out.”

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ix-hundred-and-fifty homeless men, women, and children walk the streets on any given night in New Haven, according to the state’s annual overnight count. The number is one of the highest in Connecticut’s history. During a good financial year, the city funding for homeless support systems — the highest for a municipality in Connecticut — is ten times greater than the second-largest amount, in Hartford. And New Haven has hundreds of units of supportive housing, which require rent in order to force homeless into the workforce or leech them from disability payments. The city has more supportive housing than any other municipality in the nation.

I’ve spent the last few months exploring these houses and shelters. I’ve talked to the dispossessed at Columbus House South Central Rehabilitation Center on Ella T. Grasso Boulevard, Emergency Shelter Management Services Inc. on Grand Avenue, and the Salvation Army on Crown Street — all major shelters in New Haven. One homeless woman named Latisha had smoked crack on her front porch and had been kicked out by her father.

She was stranded in the streets for months before she found help.

She is still homeless. Another woman, Johanna Montalvo, 35, was addicted to dope; after she returned from a tour in Iraq, her drug addiction got her kicked out of her house into a shelter. A man called I.F. smoked marijuana, lost his friends along the way, and ended up stranded on the streets for weeks. I listened to their stories; they are tragic, and they beckon listeners to help.

There are few shelters in the city — and only one overflow shelter, which is only for single men. The homeless are everywhere: on street corners, in tenements, on couches, at shelters. And the mass media sensationalize them: The homeless take, entertain, mug, live, and starve. They can’t help themselves.

And now, as the winter comes, they need the overflow shelter to help them through the night. In the 3rd Congressional District of Connecticut — where New Haven is — 2,455 people used an emergency shelter between October 2005 and September 2006, 543 of whom were children, according to the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness. At the same time, over 10,000 visits by the homeless were rejected. For Hartford and the 1st Congressional District, 5,662 stayed in emergency shelters, and about 14,000 visits were rejected. New Haven’s overflow shelter needs money. Otherwise, the place cannot run through all of the cold months.

The regular homeless shelters that open 365 days a year are at full capacity. Without the overflow shelter, up to 75 homeless will be stuck in the cold each night. Mattison can’t let this happen.

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attison was born in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn. His father, Harry, and mother, Lillian, owned a variety store on Liberty Avenue. He graduated from Stuyvesant High School, a prestigious public high school in Manhattan, and did what most kids from his neighborhood did

Any given night, 650 homeless roam the streets of New Haven. not even consider to do: go to college. He graduated from St. John’s. In 1962, he became a Peace Corps volunteer, working in Colombia to create curbs and flood plains so that the residents would not be without homes when the rain poured. He graduated from Yale Law School in 1964 and at the same time co-founded the Dixwell Legal Rights Association, a neighborhood program that educated mothers to be better candidates for the workforce.

He took a year off from the program and school to work in New York’s City Hall, where he helped turn $300 million into 600 centers for Project Summer Head Start, a program that aids underprivileged children.

A head of Inside at Night for several years, Mattison took over when Reising left the city scene due to his frequent heart attacks — he was physically unable to continue. He is the executive director of the South Central Behavioral Health Network. A part of the agency is the TAP program, which enlists case managers to go to shelters, talk to homeless there, and see if anyone wants to be placed in sober houses in order to be put on the right path. Not everyone goes to these houses, he says, because you have to “play by house rules.” No drinking, no drugs.

In his South Central office one day in October, Mattison took some phone calls and answered some e-mails, all with his back to the door. His office shares a building on Whitney Avenue, surrounded

by Yale University campus grounds, with several other companies.

His eldest son, Jacob, is a computer technician who works next door. His youngest son, Andrew, plays piano and teaches English at the University of Toledo in Ohio, while Benjamin, his other son, writes and edits publications for the Yale School of Management.

His wife, Alice, has written award-winning books and published articles in The New Yorker and Ploughshares.

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Edward Mattison, a former alderman, has helped to raise $160,000 this year for New Haven’s overflow shelter.

Mattison hangs up the phone; he looks at me, and he tells me that this day is typical for his schedule. I sit next to him while he busies himself under the wall-hung items from his Peace Corps days. In the far corner is a portrait of Rosa Luxemburg, a hero of sorts for Mattison. Luxemburg was a revolutionary in her time. “Everyone was stabbing everyone else in the back …. Rosa Luxemburg was able to put together a platform of things she believed in and got a lot of people to follow them.” She was later captured and killed for her leftist agenda, becoming a symbol for 20th century European Marxists.

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t is October 10, and Mattison has just come from a meeting with Mayor John DeStefano Jr. DeStefano is a New Haven political powerhouse, and he has championed the Elm City Resident Card, which grants access to city services for all residents, including illegal immigrants. Mattison has asked for a challenge grant (a grant that is promised by an organization to spur the requester and other donors to raise further funds) to support the Columbus House overflow shelter, the only one of its kind in the city nowadays.

The meeting had major players: DeStefano, Mattison, city community services official Kica Matos, overflow shelter director Allison Cunningham. Mattison did not look happy. “I didn’t get a sense we were going to get a whole lot, which is unfortunate, but oh well.” Although city officials have given $66,000 to the overflow shelter and pledged to help raise up to $50,000 through two fundraising events, they aren’t providing any money from city budget general fund. The $66,000 is mandated by the federal 1987 McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, the only major federal legislation in existence that responds to the homeless problem, according to many experts.

Time for a new strategy. “Life has gotten busy here,” Mattison matter-of-factly stated to me in his office. That day, the New Haven Register wrote a lead story on the homeless. The banner

headline on top of the issue: “PEOPLE WILL DIE.” Mattison’s face was smiling in front: “The idea we’d have 150 men living on the streets in the dead of winter in New Haven, Connecticut, is absolutely unacceptable. It just can’t be. People will die.” Mattison later said that it took some phone calls to make the article happen.

“I have an agenda, you have an agenda,” he said.

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hen Weasel was in high school, he wanted to become a journalist. He loved writing, and he double majored in English and journalism at the University of New Haven. He watched movies and read novels. His favorite is Scott Turow’s crime novel, Presumed Innocent. Weasel wanted to finish his college classes, but on the eighth term, the school “took money from my father and canceled some of my classes,” he said.

He left and sued the school; he got his father’s money back, but he was no longer able to find a well-paying job. His father disowned him after he first tried crack. Weasel was 18 when he first entered jail; that was for only 90 days. After doing more drugs, he landed in jail again. After he left, he was forced onto the streets.

In general, the causes of homelessness are drug usage, previous conviction or recent release from prison, lack of permanent or loving relationships, inability to pay for high housing and consumption costs, un- or underemployment, chronic illness, low wages, and any combination of the mix. In New Haven, recent studies completed by Columbus House suggest that half of all city homeless do not have a job or enough income to support themselves, one-third are drug abusers, and one-sixth have family issues. Many times, an “unexpected event” will trigger a “downward spiral” toward homelessness, according to the Connecticut Reaching Home campaign, a political group that fights to end long-term homelessness. The spiral continues, and it is often difficult for a person to get out.

Weasel recently lived in a two-bedroom condo on Front Street.

The electrical fire that destroyed it in July 2007 left him with-

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November 2008 The Yale Daily News Magazine

out his 52-inch television, he claims. He soon lived in a car in Branford; he had done so on and off for three years. He lived in attics. Buildings that had tenants. Buildings without. And buildings with raccoons. He squirts ammonia to drive them away.

Weasel has found an apartment in the city of Branford. He has a job performing clerical duties for a rabbi. But he owes money: $3,000. And he has only $2 in his wallet. (He asked me if I could buy him some food; he said he does not have a refrigerator or a microwave. I gave him $4 for ice cream. I sincerely hope he got it.) He fears that he may not stay in the home and will be forced, once again, to live on the street.

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attison and Inside at Night have raised $160,000 so far, enough to run the emergency overflow shelter at Columbus House South Central Rehabilitation Center from November until April. The United Way and Yale-New Haven Hospital are teaming up to work on a “Shelter Now” fund. The fund needs to collect the remaining $40,000 to run the overflow shelter from mid-November to May, like in past years. As the newspapers and the media spotlight honor the big donors, the organizations have started to pool funds. By the end of October, the “Shelter Now” fund had raised $60,000. And as of November 5, the overflow shelter, on 232 Cedar Street by the city’s Yale-New Haven Hospital, is open for business.

Unfortunately, as Mattison says, groups will not make the same donations again. “You can have a crisis once — and maybe even have it twice — but you can’t have it three times.”

Mattison says his ultimate goal is to reduce the need for emergency shelters. The idea trickled down from U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness Executive Director Philip Mangano’s theory that the helper must rehabilitate the toughest cases, the most chronic of the homeless. According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, a chronically homeless person is defined as someone who has been “continuously homeless for a year or more, or has had at least four episodes of homelessness in the past three years.” By highlighting the need to help these needy, Mattison and Mangano hope that the community can help them find stability in their lives. But a long-term goal means nothing if, as Mattison puts it, the homeless die in the winter.

Mangano, who was appointed head of U.S. homeless support efforts in 2002, also created the “Housing First” model — which has chronic homeless live in affordable sober houses and receive aid in finding jobs to pay the required rent — and the idea of a tenyear plan for municipalities to work with state governments and bring homeless into support housing. The New Haven Ten Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness started under DeStefano in the fall of 2004. Its guiding principle: “No one should be homeless.”

At the white prison-like overflow shelter, called the South Central Rehabilitation Center, workers welcome homeless men as the night goes on. The homeless leave their coats at the door and pick bunk beds for the night. In November, the workers say, only half are filled. So when will they be coming, I ask? “When it’s cold,” a worker says. “When there’s frost, they will come.”

So far, city officials and community leaders have reached out to homeless to let them know the overflow shelter is available.

The city has stressed that helping the dispossessed is a community effort, one that includes social workers, city officials, and business owners.

One day, I walked down College Street and talked to the managers at the storefronts. Common among their complaints: The Owl Shop, a cigar bar: Homeless.

Pizza Haven, a pizzeria: Those damn homeless.

Celtica, an Irish merchandise shop: Homeless, unless the owner buys them food at closing time.

The owners emphasized that if the hobos stay on the street, customers won’t come, and shop owners won’t be able to afford their rents. Someone should kick the homeless out, they said.

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hen I leave the South Central office that first day, Weasel volunteers to walk downtown with me. I hesitate and say I am waiting for a cab. Come on, he pleads, where do you have to go? “To Yale-New Haven Hospital.” I lie.

He pleads again, and I consent.

I hold “PEOPLE WILL DIE” in my left hand. We slowly walk down Whitney Avenue as he holds his sleeping bag. “I know someone will be happy with this,” he says. He assures me that he will not be homeless any longer, that he will get out of this track of failure. I listen politely as we pass by restaurants and groceries. I notice his black t-shirt: “DiAdam & Tracey Bail Bonds: ‘You Ring, I’ll Spring.’” Looking at the logo reminds me of Robert Jacobs and his sons Philip and Paul, all bondsmen. The Jacobs family had paid a New Haven police lieutenant to have officers arrest people.

They have been incarcerated and put in jail for many months.

Philip and Paul came out in October. I try to distance myself from

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Weasel ever so slightly.

We eventually arrive at an alleyway. Let’s go through this shortcut, he says, and cut through the alleyway. I nod. We start walking.

I clutch my wallet in my back pocket. We pass the halfway mark.

He laughs and slows down. I slow down with him; he cannot walk behind me. We pass the alleyway, and I quietly sigh. Two women in black blouses carry sandwiches towards the alleyway; “How’d you know I was hungry?” he sleazes. They smile and walk past; I turn around and see them look at each other in confusion and disgust.

As we walk down Audubon Street, I speed up. I do not want to be there. “Wow, you walk really fast. You gotta slow down or I can’t keep up.” I slow down; I do not want to. We approach the corner; he tells me to cross the New Haven Green to get to the hospital. As cars pass by between us, I try to turn and go another direction, towards my true destination. I start to — “Not that way!

Go right on the church!” I swerve towards him, nod, and smile.

I creep into the New Haven Green and duck out of sight. When I can no longer feel his presence, I run and run and run towards a locked gate blocking me from my destination. I need an access card to enter. I reach into my wallet, and nothing is there. Nothing is in my wallet. Where is everything? Where is my credit card? My debit card? My money? That son of a bitch. He took it. I looked away for too long. I let my guard down.

I look into my bag. I see my cards and cash inside; I put them into my wallet. I open the gate. I enter and I feel slimy.

attison claims he has a life outside his work. He leaves his homeless advocacy at the South Central office and goes home to his wife. I asked him whether I could come inside his house. He refused. A public figure and his private life are separate entities. I have no right to intrude in his personal life, his home. I do not push further. He focuses on homelessness; that is all he truly wants the public to know.

He works on these issues because someone needs to help the homeless and, frankly, few others will. “I’m not a martyr, and I’m not interested in appearing to be a martyr,” he says. “I don’t spend my time in the clouds. I spend my time on what comes next.

There’s no answer. There’ll never be victory. There’s no such thing as victory. Look at the people who come back from Iraq. After the Vietnam War, the shelters were filled with Vietnam vets. We gradually worked with them; some killed themselves, and some regained their lives. We got this new crew. It’s always gonna be like that.”

But he adds that he has not yet failed; he always finds money and a way to keep the homeless effort afloat.

But Mattison is worried about the long term. The Inside at Night group hopes to make enough money to keep the overflow shelter open until May. For next year, however, Mattison wants the state to help with the cause. Since 1972, Connecticut has been spending between $12 and $20 a bed per night for many shelters in the state, up to 80 percent of total funds needed to run shelters in municipalities like Hartford. But in New Haven, the state government does not have to pay more than 20 percent of these necessary funds due to a state Supreme Court ruling in the 1980s.

“This is a statewide emergency,” he said. “Every place is jammed. They’re overflowed. We can’t find money … If the state doesn’t come through, all over the state, there will be repercussions. It’s not like it’s just New Haven … There’s only so many potential sources of revenue.”

So, I asked, what happens if the state government chooses not to fulfill its “responsibility”? Where will he go to get the money for next year, if the companies will not give their large donations twice and the state holds out? Who will help the homeless? (And perhaps, in my head, can you expect to receive the help you so desperately want?) He does not know, he said. For now, he has no Plan B.

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uring one of my conversations with Mattison, I talked about Weasel’s story. I told him about the broken toe, the jail time, the drugs, the vulnerability in Weasel’s eyes.

Mattison shook it off.

Weasel is untrustworthy, he said. “The funny thing is half of what he says is a lie, and you can’t tell what half.”

But does it actually matter? Does it matter that Weasel is not telling the whole truth, if, perhaps, his life has veered off course and ended up becoming a story too horrible to be told? From his eyes, I could tell the pain and suffering were true, even if I do not trust him. It is clear from his story — and the stories of all the homeless I have talked to, no matter how true or fabricated — that once a person walks the path of homelessness (forced or by choice), they fail to get back on the right course. Often on this new path, no end is in sight, and when there is an end, it is certainly no victory.

Determining how much else is true: I leave that task to you.

Weasel, like the hundreds of homeless that flock the city each night, has lost his way.

Got any money?

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BY CAROLINE BERSON

The professionals admit their love of setting old cop cars on fire for the occasion, but firefighter cadet training is really a process of readying youngsters for a life on the line.

9:52 a.m.:

Dark smoke billows upward and out through the top of the first-floor window frame, curdling the siding and melting the paint into discolored strands. Three groups of firefighters rush toward the front of the apartment complex, carrying ladders, chain saws, and hose line. With a crowbar and hammer, two firemen pry and pop the front door off its hinges, while some screw the hose into the hydrant out front, and others plant a ladder and begin their ascent.

9:55 a.m.: The hose is live. With two pulls and a whir, the men on the roof balance with one leg on each side of the precipice and chew through thick shingles.

They shatter the first floor windows, raking the crow bar across the icicles of sharp glass.

9:59 a.m.: The smoke ventilates through holes in the roof and out through the broken windows. The fire sputters and submits. The smoke changes from a dark charcoal to amber to winter white.

10:05 a.m.: “All clear,” comes over the walkie-talkie, and Lieutenant Abraham Colon looks at his watch.

13 minutes, he says. Not bad.

F

or the 30 cadets on this on-again-off-again rainy Wednesday morning, this day of their training — called the live fire “evolution” — is an important preparation for their careers as New Haven firefighters. The heat and rage inside the condemned apartment complex are one tenth the strength of a true PHOTOGRAPHY BY CAROLINE BERSON

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“Everyone has coping mechanisms, but when it’s with kids, you can’t disassociate yourself from what’s going on.” fire, but the experience working with smoke is irreplaceable.

During the six-month training program, the cadets must learn how to control structure fires, propane fires, and car fires. They complete emergency medical training. They learn how to investigate crime scenes, how to collect evidence, and how to report arson cases.

They must also be able to assess the source of the fire and the type of fire, and they must understand how to deal with various scenarios. For example, propane fires grow when water hits them.

So they use the color and shape of the smoke, their intuition, and their nose and eyes and ears to deduce information about the fire.

Recent technological improvements provide them with heat sensor cameras, which help them locate a victim or the source of the fire. They practice working as a team, with cadets divided into groups, each assigned under the direction of a seasoned commander.

Over the past two years, ten firefighters from across the country have died during live fire training. But when New Haven firefighters practice this type of evolution, they prioritize the idea of “controlled chaos,” says Colon. They know the layout of the small apartment in advance, before smoke obscures chairs, walls,

people, everything. The fires are built using hay and wood and other materials found at the site. There are no burning plastics, no carcinogens.

“We want our cadets to understand what it’s like to be in a burning building where you can’t see the man standing next to you,” Colon says. “But we also want them to be safe. We build hinged windows in the roof and over the windows. In an emergency, we can quickly vent the fire, reducing any danger inside the building.”

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he second fire starts in the dining room. A single pile of hay and wood and cushions is lit on fire and the flames begin to rage. The cadets stand outside, chomping at the bit, waiting for the go ahead. Upwind of the control station, piles of hay are soaked and lit on fire.

When the metaphorical flag is dropped, the cadets run toward the building. Their suits, now drenched, each weigh upwards of 100 pounds. They climb ladders with an axe in one hand and a saw in the other. There are mosquitoes everywhere. Sweat fogs the inside of their oxygen masks. The humid weather, the intermittent rain, traps moisture in their suits.

The second fire is put out in 11 minutes.

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fterwards, the companies cluster in groups of five, standing in tall grass behind the building, assessing their performance and charting out the next fire.

“Good job guys,” one officer says.

“Remember, bring the tools to the building first, and then the ladder.

You don’t want to be rushing back for tools once the ladder is ready to go.”

These kids are all sharp, Colon explains. This cadet class of 30 was picked from over 1000 applications.

They don’t graduate until November, until after they pass a series of practical and written exams administered by the state.

There is a slight lull before the third fire is lit, while some cadets drag burnt hay and cushions out, piling the wreckage. The rest stand around, razzing one another.

“Hilbert is such a complainer,” laughs Lieutenant Michael Blatchley.

“I should make him use one of the old oxygen tanks, the heavy ones, the type you would get out of a glass case at a

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The air smells toxic and the floor is soupy. A stream of muddy water carries pieces of burnt hay over the door frame. Debris is everywhere, piles of burnt wood and hay on the left, a Lego piece and pink flashlight lying beneath one of the windows on the right.

The firefighters carry out a warped ceiling light, a burnt wooden crate, cushions, and more hay.

Part of this live fire test requires firefighters to find victims and pull them outside to safety. Dummies, representing full-size adult, child, and infant victims, are placed in various locations throughout the apartment complex. They are fire-worn, melted hunks of plastic. Their mouths are formed in perpetual screams of terror.

The child dummy has a deep, fire-licked recession in the middle of its chest. The adult wears the torn remains of a firefighter suit, one boot, torn pants.

“The human factor is the most difficult part of the job,” says Egan, flicking the ashes from the tip of his cigarette. “In training, there is no one in the home being burned. The realistic component is the devastation fire causes. The fact is that as heroic and as brave as firefighters are, you don’t get used to anything. You learn to absorb it, to compartmentalize it, but you never get used to it.”

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museum.”

Bring it on, Hilbert shouts back.

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here are 340 sworn personnel in the New Haven Fire Department. Most guys spend an average of 25 years on the line. They work three 10-hour days, from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., and then they have three days off. Then they work three 14-hour nights, from 6 p.m. to 8 a.m., and then they have three days off. Repeat.

“The hours will be one of the toughest parts for the cadets,” says Captain Billy Gould. “You miss birthdays, Christmas, and weekends. It’s a change in lifestyle. You work nights, you work days. It takes a long time to get used to the schedule.”

During their days off, over 50 percent of the firefighters work second jobs as bartenders, as drivers, as traveling firefighter trainers. Pay for the cadets will start around $35,000. Over time, the firefighters will earn a little over $60,000 per year.

T

he third fire is finally lit, and water pressure from the hose blasts open the window shutters. Intensity rises when a shrill chirp goes off inside the building.

“That means ‘guy down,’” explains Pat Egan, union representative, but then “it’s all part of the drill, although the cadets may not realize that. That’s why they’re freaking out in there right now. It’s a personal alert system hooked onto the firefighter’s gear. It goes off when it doesn’t sense movement for 30 seconds.”

s a given, their jobs are tough and their work is dangerous.

“Every time we’re out on call we give up our life,” says Egan. “Whether or not it’s taken? That’s up to God.” Nowadays, they are required to wear oxygen masks at all times, but that wasn’t always the case. The gear is constantly made better, more effective, lighter, stronger, but the fires are also more dangerous. They risk carbon dioxide inhalation. For years until they retire, they are exposed to burning carcinogens like plastics and synthetics.

“When I was first on the job, I inhaled burning plastic from a Tupperware container burning on the stove,” says Lieutenant Jay Schwartz. “My kid was six weeks old and I was at the hospital for a week.” “[But] I’m a third-generation firefighter,” he adds. “We thrive on it.”

Yet there are so many elements, from human interaction to nature, that these men will have to get used to. They are trained in emergency medicine for a reason — fire trucks are often the first vehicles not just at burning buildings but also at auto wrecks and other catastrophes. At night, fires light up the street, and there isn’t as much smoke. During the day, you have to work around crowds of people. During the winter, snow covers hydrants, the ground is not always shoveled, and it’s slippery and icy. The water you spray on the fire turns the ground into sheets of ice. The ground isn’t always flat, and there isn’t always room to plant the ladder. You have to squeeze yourself, your ladder, your gear, into strange positions and places.

“During the summer, you have issues of heat and humidity leading to dehydration,” Egan says. “When you’re dealing with 110 degrees outside with the heat and the humidity inside, it’s pretty brutal. You’re working on your knees, but it’s still hundreds of degrees near the floor. We only just started wearing those hoods, the ones that cover your neck and your ears. Before then, your ears would crust. You can’t imagine the incredibly intense pain. But at the end of the day, you keep going forward. You put

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out the fire because that’s your job.”

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ednesday ends after three more fires and extensive clean-up. In exchange for being able to practice on the apartments, the fire department must lug the burnt wooden pallets and hay out to the street. Over the next few months, the apartments will be demolished, and the land converted to some other use — park grounds or more apartments, the firemen speculate.

The entire week is spent practicing on live fires: the first three days on structure fires and the last two on car fires. On Friday, the cadets are split into two groups, with half working on car fires and half practicing on bringing a charged line — an active hose — up three flights of stairs.

“This is the physically hardest exercise we put them through,” says Colon, laughing. “The pressure coming out of the hose is incredible. This kind of thing separated the boys from the men. There are a lot of bruised egos.”

Down at the end of the parking lot, the rest of the cadets practice putting out car fires. The cars have been prepped to make the scenario safer: they remove the gas tanks and drain the liquids out.

Still, “anything could shoot out of these things at any moment,” Egan says.

Today, they fill an old cop car with hay and wooden pallets and light it on fire. The tires pop, the air bags explode. When the fire is hot enough — when the metal frame literally turns pink then red — the cadets move in with hoses and saws and axes.

“Man I love burning these cars,” Schwartz says. “Do you know what happens when cops score three percent points higher on their exams? They send them to firefighter school.”

“He’s joking, but we do get to burn any cars that have a boot on them for more than three days,” says Captain Frank Ricci, also joking.

The cadets disassemble the car as they put out the fire, cutting jagged holes in the roof, smashing axes into the trunk lid, pulling sections of the frame apart, ripping the seats out of the car.

“The last car fire we did was good,” says Blatchley. “We had this amazing black plume. We had to call communications to let them know in case people called the fire in.”

“If we had dogs we would be roasting them right now,” says Schwartz, laughing. “[We] bastards don’t take anything seriously.”

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hile the cadets clean up, the professionals head into a conference room. The table is littered with training papers, Dunkin’ Donuts munchkin boxes, crumpled

napkins, half-eaten trays of Oreos, coffee mugs, a pear cake baked by Gould’s wife, Diet Coke bottles, and two empty pizza boxes from Lorenzo’s.

In general, when the firemen have downtime — moments when they are on duty but not on call — the firefighters do house chores like cutting the grass, cleaning, and shoveling snow. At least three hours of their day shift is spent on training and planning. They visit local construction sites and study architectural drawings of multi-use commercial properties. They develop contingency plans. If there’s a fire at Yale-New Haven Hospital, what do you do? Some of the patients can’t be moved. In the hospital labs there are chemicals and other combustibles you wouldn’t be dealing with at a residence. They develop firefighting protocol for a huge range of scenarios.

They study how to approach school bus crashes; investigate an arson scene; break down locked doors that open inward; how to extricate a fallen fireman; and how to deal with chest injuries, spi-

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crash in 1993 — 12 kids burned that day.”

“You start making it your scenario, you imagine what it would be like to be the parent of the victim,” says Egan. “Billy was the firefighter who extricated the cop who died a few weeks ago. That was awful. We joke around with one another, but in New Haven, the police department and the fire department work together on a lot of things. Most people have relatives on one and the other.”

“There was also that New Haven kid who died last spring,” says Ricci. “I wasn’t there, but I heard about it. Her boyfriend was driving drunk. One of the firefighters who had been at the scene told me how she was just lying in the car. You could just tell she was deceased. Her phone wouldn’t stop ringing and finally one of the firefighters picked it up and the screen read ‘call home.’ It’s tough, especially when you are dealing with children.

There were so many men on that scene and that one thing, that phone, that message, it brought all of them together. You don’t think of that kind of thing, you can’t prepare for the way it hits you. Everyone has coping mechanisms, but when it’s with kids, you can’t disassociate yourself from what’s going on.”

“But, really, the worst parts of the job are the cookies, the donuts, and the candy machines,” says Gould with a slight smile, trying to shift the mood.

O

nal injuries, blood.

“I’ve been on the job 21 years and I still open the book every day,” says Gould, and then “every day I read an article, a chapter, because the training never ends.”

A

s Egan noted, textbooks and training can’t teach the cadets how to deal with the human element; that’s something they will have to learn over time. They will eventually develop coping mechanisms, ways to look past the car crashes and house fires.

But still, Ricci explains, anything with pain, with injury, is awful, especially if there are kids involved. There are some scenes you never get used to.

“When I was 18 I responded as an EMT to a community pool,” says Ricci. “A six-year-old boy had drowned. I don’t even remember my wife’s birthday, but I remember that boy. His name was Charlie. Another scene that really affected me was an Amtrak

n November 10, these cadets will graduate, joining the ranks of New Haven’s bravest. Their families will be there, along with the fire chief, people from the mayor’s office, and folks from the union. After the ceremony, 28 will be divided up among the ten stations in New Haven, and two will go to Milford and West Haven.

“They’re gonna learn quickly what a real fire is like,” says Blatchley. “What it’s like to want to crawl through the floor it’s that hot.”

Their units will become second families. When they first go on duty, they will get worked a bit and will get to experience some good old-fashioned, fun traditions. The seasoned firefighters want to see how much the cadets can take, how much they can razz them. They take the wheels off the cadets’ beds so they have to sleep on a slanted surface. They throw water on them in the middle of the night, put flour between the sheets, and that kind of thing.

It’s all part of the ball-breaking mentality of being a firefighter.

When they’re on the job, they put their own lives on the line, and they put their families’ wellbeing second to the job. They need to trust one another. They need to know the limitations of the men they work with: whether they will crack under pressure, how they will react in life-and-death situations.

Because that’s their job.

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TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON? by Raphael Magarik Equipped with whiskey, Clif Bars, and hand-me-down politics, Raphael Magarik confronts the difficult questions on a trip through Texas. Charity or heirloom tomatoes? Potatoes or pork? Promised Land or pastoral dream?

I. “Pie in the Sky” We leave Austin at six in the evening, heading west on I-10 toward Big Bend National Park. Having filled the back of the car with our packs and groceries — neonorange mac and cheese, Mountain House freeze-dried dinners of Beef Stroganoff and Chicken à la King, double fudge Clif Bars, a fifth and a pint of Evan Williams whiskey — we set out for the desert.

You do not share his cockamamie prejudices against pork. Austin is not Brooklyn.

There are no tenements here, no laundry lines strung between buildings, no pickled herring, no lukewarm chicken soup. Here, people eat what they please: hearty portions of steer and swine. Doesn’t the pork smell like smoke and pepper, like John Wayne and campfires, like the West and America? I order the Styrofoam cup of potato salad. ***

*** On our way out of town, we stop to pick up barbecue. Up north, I told my Jewish friends that I was going to eat pork in Texas.

I have been kosher for most of my life, and some of them were suitably shocked.

I explained that I do not want to ghettoize myself. It is important to me to prove that my dietary restrictions are choices and not neuroses.

But entering Rudy’s BBQ, I am no longer so sure. By the door hangs a sign saying, “Clean up for yourself! Your mother’s not here to do it for you.” That’s true; my mother is in Brooklyn. She does not buy meat from men named Rudy. Waiting to order, I watch a television above the counter that shows your meat being cut in the kitchen.

With clean strokes, a knife and gloved hand cut a plump sausage in half the long way, then laterally into eighths. The blade shaves thin slices of brisket, pausing to wipe a little liquid on a nearby towel. I have never seen so much cooked meat in my life. There are heaping plates of brisket, steam rising in thick pungent waves from their juices. There are sausages, thick and nearly bursting, red like bricks but infinitely softer, speckled with bits of fat. There are thin steaks, charred on the outside but just pink inside, and ribs so large they might be from elephants. But none of it is kosher, and there are few meatless alternatives. I see only potato salad in Styrofoam cups, banana cream pudding, and beans. The beans, I discover, contain pork.

Be a man, I tell myself, do not be a Jewish child. You don’t believe in the Hebraic God.

Rob Kerth is riding shotgun, more than six feet of him sprawled across the front seat.

With a voice like a drill, incessant and sharp, he says, “They do not tell you that to drive across Texas in this car requires the Shell corporation to kill Nigerians. You’re the beneficiary of that system; you are responsible for change.” I accept the contention; it is what I say I believe.

“Alright, but where does that leave me?

Should I go work for SEIU or Unite Here, give them forty years of my life knocking on doors and organizing workers, living in motels and never seeing the mountains?

Why can’t I just say ‘fuck this’ and head out to California, teach Freshman Composition and grow heirloom tomatoes?”

“Because this Robinson Jeffers escapism is a myth,” Rob replies. “You only get your Californian farm because of what was taken from others. You are living on stolen time.”

I say, “I hate politics.”

Lisa says, “Why don’t you become a professor and in your spare time you can work on politics? Why throw away your potential on something you don’t want to do?”

“I have an English professor,” I say, “a real leftie. On his office door he has news clips about sweatshops in Bangladesh. But that’s not good enough. He writes his scholarly articles, and meanwhile you have that poor Nigerian who just wanted a cut of Shell’s oil money. What do I say to that?”

“I really believe,” Lisa says, “that you should do what will make you happy.

Happiness includes being able to sleep nights; it’s not just short-term pleasure. But

it does not mean wholesale self-sacrifice. If you’re not fulfilled, what’s the point?”

“And I see that,” Rob says, “as profoundly self-indulgent.” *** When we stop at a gas station to fill up the tank, I get out of the minivan. We have been driving for three hours; it is nine at night. In my stomach, potato salad churns with Wheat Thins and Monterey Jack. There is nothing out there, I think, just long straight road and miles of ranchland.

“How long will it be until Rob finds out that what he really loves is all that?” I ask, gesturing to the hills in the distance. As I finish speaking, I realize I have misjudged Rob. Rob has told me many times about E. P. Thompson and the British working class, Gramscian hegemony and Eco-Marxism. He discovered these ideas himself. Rob is as at home in revolution as in the desert.

I have stories of organizing workers at Yale and in New Haven, but they feature my father. My dad took classes on John Brown and Henry Wallace; I take classes on Robert Browning and Henry James. He spent his summers working on political campaigns; I backpack. My politics are inherited. Like handed-down clothes, they do not exactly fit.

“That’s not how I’d put it,” Lisa says. “I wonder how many years it’ll take of crappy leftist politics before he gives up.” Are we talking about Rob or me? All I really love are those hills. How many years until I give up on politics?

Lisa looks up, staring into the night, and so do I. We can see easily the amoebic stain that is the Milky Way. Otherwise all is a deep blue-black. *** We arrive at the park’s boundary around two a.m. It is very dark; clouds have moved in quickly and blocked the stars. I-10 had been straight, but this road twists often, and each turn jumps out suddenly at us like

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a mountain lion surprising its prey. I am exhausted, my level of consciousness rising and falling in slow sweeps. Through my side window I see the dim shapes of unknown terrain features. Sometimes we seem to be driving along the edge of a cliff, other times through an artificial cut in the rock. Often the bright front lights illuminate nothing but desert vegetation. Animals gather by the side of the road, perhaps for the heat it emits on a cool night. We run over two desert cottontails and nearly miss a deer by swerving violently. Frances has cautioned Rob not to swerve for rabbits, as the minivan flips easily and the rabbit’s life is not worth the risk. We are in Big Bend. *** II. “This Land is Your Land” Our first day, we take a day hike to Devil’s Den, a canyon in the east of the park. In the sun, we can see clearly; what were indistinct shapes last night are now sharply defined mountains, plateaus, and mesas. The land lacks trees, except for the occasional Dagger Yucca, which looks like a pineapple, swollen to mammoth proportions and standing upright. Straight ahead lies Dog Canyon, a clean break in the ridgeline. The weather is warm and dry, threatening to become hot.

About three miles in, we turn into a creek bed, veering away from Dog Canyon and toward Devil’s Den. The walking gets trickier as we go through patches of brush.

Soon after we start moving again, we turn into another streambed. On either side of us, the banks of the gully start to rise.

The brush and cactus give way to bare rock as we walk up the streambed. We find a fine lunch spot, a sort of grotto carved by

flowing water, with a picturesque arch and shade for eating. From my daypack I remove a liter and a half of water, twenty-four small tortillas, a block of cheddar cheese, and salami. The salami is not kosher, though someone, probably Rob, has jokingly scrawled a big K on its wrapper.

“Everyone goes down a level in dietary strictness in the desert,” Rob explains.

“Vegans can eat eggs, vegetarians can eat meat, and I can eat babies.” For myself I cut thin slices of softened cheddar. I peel the generic plastic wrapper from each slab. After folding the cheese into the tortillas, I eat the uncooked quesadilla quickly. I do not mind this fast food, eaten in a couple of minutes and loaded with salts, fats, and other toxins.

I also do not mind that the knife I use is slick with salami-fat.

We continue on our way, now really entering the canyon, whose walls rise on either side until they block the sun. I scramble across stone, worn smooth by eons of water. We come to rock shelves five or six feet high, and it takes several tries to climb each one. The walls of the canyon must now be more than a hundred feet high, sheer and imposing, giving the impression that they might close up and crush us at any moment.

I feel as if the rock were unmoving sheets of water, as if I were an Israelite crossing the Red Sea. And then all of a sudden, the Promised Land. The walls, so tall just a hundred meters back, end abruptly in buttresses. In front of us spread the rough folds of the desert, pimpled with Dagger Yucca, covered with thick cactus stubble and an occasional whisker of tall spindly Ocotillo. The harsh land spreads far to a backdrop of pastel mountains, and nowhere is there the mark of man. The sun is high and alone in the sky. Cheese, bread, and

“Everyone goes down a level in dietary strictness in the desert,” Rob explains. “Vegans can eat eggs, vegetarians can eat meat, and I can eat babies.”

For myself I cut thin slices of softened cheddar.

perhaps meat fill our bellies; here and now is the best thing in the world. *** III. “Which Side are You On?” I’m on a cramped commuter flight between Austin and Atlanta. This is the worst kind of plane, narrow enough that you can see it turn by the tilting of the bulkheads. I can hear the engines get louder and softer. When they buzz loudly, the window rattles a little and I cannot read or sleep.

Every time the sound dies, I expect to drop out of the sky.

I am thinking about a union song I sang with Rob several times this week: They say in Harlan County There are no neutrals there You’ll either be a union man Or a thug for J. H. Blair *** Which side are you on?

Which side are you on?

Which side am I on? My father sang these union songs over my cradle, sermonized about radical politics at dinner, asked about campus unionization on college tours.

Rationally, I agree with my father and Rob. But those politics aren’t mine. From the mountains of Big Bend I get a great shiver of recognition, from thorns and cactusm a warm and loving embrace, from the Texas highway a sense of self. The wilderness, I have been told, is just a luxury, a pastoral dream supported only by the exploitation of the surrounding cities. Ah, but these are not your ethics, says Devil’s Den canyon, just the misguided ways that you were taught as a child. Potatoes or pork? Which side am I on?

I have been thinking a while, for the plane is already flying low over Atlanta’s parked cars and streetlights. The city is not as bad as I have imagined it; there is beauty in the edges of roofs and in the white lines of tennis courts. The plane descends tentatively, the engines firing and then idling, the wingslats opening and closing, the body rocking back and forth as if in prayer. We are less than ten feet above the tarmac. If I fall, I will be all right.

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FICTION THE LOSS OF A FREQUENCY by James Pollack Sometimes there’s a body next to you, but you’re still sleeping alone. Sometimes you lose your voice before a gig, and sometimes your license before a flight. But all you should worry about on vacation is what to watch on TV.

Cimone borrows a car for the drive to the airport, an old green Chevy that belongs to a friend, even though it has been more than a year since she has been behind the wheel. A familiar song comes on the jittery FM radio, and she resists the urge to sing along: bronchitis, laryngitis, and the gig on Friday. At the gas station where she stops to put twenty in the tank, she picks up a magazine, turns a few pages, considers buying a pack of cigarettes.

Her sister, Elsa, might enjoy one after an hour and a half on the plane from St. Louis. She might not.

Cimone buys the cigarettes and puts the magazine back on the rack. Outside, a thick man on a metal ladder changes the tall numbers on the yellow plastic sign by hand.

When she arrives at O’Hare, she searches in vain for a parking spot. As bad as downtown, though

The Yale Daily News Magazine November 2008

why, late on a Wednesday night, is anybody’s guess. She wedges the Chevy into the space between the last two untenanted yellow lines on level four, managing to do so without scratching either neighbor too badly, a stunning success, more or less. Several flights of stairs later, with the help of a black woman cop brandishing an unbelievably effective whistle, Cimone makes her way across the wide whitelatticed crosswalk and six lanes of traffic.

Excuse me, she says, just outside of the automatic doors when she bumps against a man wearing a checkered shirt. He looks at Cimone with disdain and then interest as he notes the way her top pushes together her small boobs in the semblance of cleavage, and then again at the sound of a nasal voice honking from the opposite side of the cart, his wife, perhaps, judging by the tone, who calls for him to hurry. The sweat has pooled in his armpits and all along his back.

Must be the heat, or the humidity, or the effort of pushing the baggage cart, which is stacked as high and heavy as any she has ever seen, or remembers seeing, ever, except in movies about crossing the Atlantic by steamboat.

Cimone is still trying to discern the destination of this tremendous accumulation when the chocolate-stained face of a little boy appears beside the mountain of luggage, the trappings of a Hershey’s bar clutched in his hands. Cimone smiles at him, gives a little wave, receives a smile in return. But an arm snakes out like the cane in a vaudeville show to pull the boy away. A head peeks out, the woman’s, small and angular, canvassed by displeasure, but disappears again almost as soon. The family moves toward the next vestibule down: him, huffing and puffing with exertion, the woman glancing over her shoulder, fraught with jealousy. Cimone watches them go, and pushes ahead.

The baggage carousel where Cimone has arranged to meet Elsa is nearly empty when she arrives. A suitcase with a black strap crisscrossing its crimson leather rests against an old brown number from the flight before. These keep Cimone company as she waits for the plane to land. She counts the number of times that each bag passes a point she has chosen on the moving track; she counts by fives.

She loses count in the flashing lights and blaring loudness that announce the arrival of Elsa’s flight. Bags begin to drop, thudding onto the carriage, surely to the detriment of dozens of trinkets, souvenirs. Cimone spots Elsa coming down the gangplank, takes a step towards the door, but stops when the scratch in the back of her throat demands a cough, then another, and then a whole fit.

Knowing how people are in airports, she covers her mouth and doubles over.

—You all right?

—I’m fine, I’ll be fine. Just give me a second.

—Okay.

Cimone stands, chest heaving, and wipes her hands on the thighs of her jeans. She looks at Elsa to see how she has changed since the last visit. More makeup, slightly darker hair, but lacking the expected glow of a girl of eighteen freshly finished with high school.

They embrace.

31

There was no response to any of the yelling or pounding, and the women were forced to call a neighbor to break down the door.

A few solid blows later, they were through.

—I lost my I.D. —Your what?

—My I.D. —Your fake? We can get you a new one, downtown, I’ll have to call someone to find out about a place...

—My driver’s license.

—Oh. —The real one.

—Oh, no.

—I’m not going to be able to fly back.

—Of course you will. There are lots of people who don’t have driver’s licenses.

Elsa points out her suitcase, which Cimone grabs with a heave and insists on carrying.

—But I don’t have anything with a picture on it.

—What about a birth certificate?

—Mom doesn’t have one.

—I’m sure that you and dad can go get a copy.

—Dad’s working the whole time I’m here.

—How do you know that?

—I called the house to talk to dad, but he wasn’t home and so I got Susan instead. She says he’s busy.

Cimone nods at the helpful policewoman for a second time as they cross back toward the parking structure. Susan is their father’s new wife, a real estate developer, Leigh’s mother, not theirs.

Cimone has never figured out what it is that draws her father to such a hellion of a woman, one who smokes and drinks with friends who are, invariably, lawyers, who never eats at home, who takes vacations without him. In her favor, the woman did give birth to their stepsister, whom both Cimone and Elsa adore.

—Leigh’s away at school then?

—Sounds like it. Do you think they’ll let me fly back? I don’t.

Not without an I.D. Cimone begins to respond, making it halfway through her placation and almost all the way to the car before she realizes that Elsa is hyperventilating. She puts down the suitcase and braces Elsa’s slim frame against the car while she rummages through her purse. She finds a little bag; Elsa presses it around her mouth. A minute or so later, Elsa’s breathing slows.

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—I’m... sorry... about that.

—What a pair, huh? You and me, falling apart, the both of us.

What are you so worked up about? That stupid I.D.? Forget about it. I’ll take care of it. I don’t care if I have to break into City Hall myself. Okay?

On the drive home, the radio in the Chevy ceases to function.

The drive is very quiet.

C

imone cooks pasta for supper, with a vodka sauce, which she serves in great steaming portions out of flat black bowls.

Elsa eats ravenously; Cimone picks at her food.

—You like it? I think I overdid the sauce.

—Why aren’t you eating?

—My throat has been bothering me... the steam is nice.

—Are you sick?

—Kind of.

—Your cough?

—Yeah. I’m not sure what it is though. I haven’t had it checked out. There’s this joke that we have, in the band, we always say “When we’re signed...” and then a whole long list of things, like paying rent, or buying a car, or getting health insurance. Some day, maybe. I’ll be fine by the show on Friday.

But Elsa is not listening. She’s spotted something. She pushes back her chair, gets up from the table, and walks across the kitchen to the grey wastebasket, where she salvages a note attached to a bouquet of flowers.

—“Cimone, last night was indescribable. Call me. Tommy.”

Nice flowers, bad handwriting. Is that the new boyfriend?

—No. —So...

—So, nothing. Not a boyfriend. Just some guy.

Elsa’s eyes go wide. Cimone is fairly sure that Elsa has never had a one-night stand, or a several-night stand. Or slept with anyone, for that matter. But now that Elsa lives in St. Louis with their mother, she can’t be sure.

—What was it like?

—Alright.

—Just alright?

—Yeah.

—Are you going to call him back? He left his number.

—Probably not.

—Do you love him?

—Look, Elsa, it’s different when you’re older. Sometimes there’s a body next to me, but I’m still sleeping alone, you know?

—Does he love you?

—I don’t know. No. Maybe.

They do the dishes together, and afterward Cimone offers Elsa a cigarette from the pack she bought at the gas station.

—Maybe that’s why you’re coughing so much.

—I don’t smoke. They’re for you.

—Do you have a light?

—Shit.

—It’s fine, I’ll use the stove.

Elsa bends over the range, too close, singes a few stray strands near her wrist. When she walks into the living room, Cimone holds a movie in each hand.

—I thought that we could watch Sixteen Candles. Or, if you’re not feeling an oldie, I rented this new one, I think it’s in French.

It’s supposed to be good.

—Do you have Gilmore Girls?

—That television show where they talk like auctioneers?

—Yeah, it’s my favorite.

—Maybe on the DVR. They sit together under a blanket on the couch and watch half of the third season. Elsa laughs in great big gulps and mouths the lines before they leave the actor’s lips. Cimone’s attention wavers, split between the screen and her sister, who barely notices her stare.

After a fashion, Cimone’s eyelids start to droop. She sleeps.

T

he next morning is spent at the art museum, looking at paintings; the afternoon at the aquarium, looking at fish.

Cimone gets an Italian ice from a cart. Elsa smokes. They walk together by the lake, where Cimone runs into a friend, who takes off her headphones and wipes the sweat from her forehead with a Nike wristband that matches her shoes, her shirt, her iPod. —Hey, Kristin, I’d like you to meet my sister.

—Hi, it’s nice to meet you. Your sister talks about you all the time.

Elsa gazes at the water for a long, quiet beat before turning back to the friend.

—Only good things, I promise.

—I’m Rory.

Cimone looks at Elsa, back to Kristin, but says nothing.

—It’s my pleasure Rory. I’m just kidding — I didn’t even know Cimone had a younger sister. Are you in college?

—She just graduated. High school.

—Oh, how exciting! Do you know where you’ll be going?

—I wanted to stay close to Lane, my best friend, and my mom.

Cambridge is too far. Grandpa wanted me to go to Yale, like he did, so I turned down Harvard.

—Must have been nice to have options. What do you want to do?

—I’m going to write for the News. It’s going to be great.

—Well, I wish you the best of luck.

Cimone and the friend chat briefly about mutual friends. She departs with the promise of a lunch, or coffee, and a wave.

—What the fuck was that?

Elsa doesn’t say anything.

—Seriously, Elsa. I don’t know what your deal is, but cut it out.

You can’t go around lying to people like that.

—Can we get something to eat?

S

omething rouses Cimone from her dreams. She looks at the clock, groans, tries to go back to sleep, fails, decides to get a glass of water from the refrigerator, rolls out of bed.

She finds Elsa sitting on the living room floor. Around her: green. A sponge, a throw pillow, a box of junior mints, all of the broccoli and lettuce from the fridge, a pile of coasters embossed with the logo of a local Irish pub, a comforter, a liter-sized bottle of shampoo, a folder, some pens, four coffee mugs with green printing, a package of tri-color rotini, canned food, plates and bowls, tiny scraps of crepe paper an inch deep.

—What the hell?

—I’m getting rid of jealousy.

—Look at this mess.

—It’s like when Rory tries to get over Dean without wallowing.

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I’m going to throw it all away.

—Would you shut up about that fucking show? These are my things, you can’t throw them away.

Cimone moves to clean up, doesn’t know where to begin... the vegetables. She picks up a few stalks, stops.

—Go to the bathroom and wash up. You’ll sleep in my bed.

Elsa is still in the bathroom when Cimone finishes undoing her mess, which takes the better part of a half-hour. They talk through the door.

—Are you okay in there?

—I’m fine.

—What’s wrong?

—I can’t pee.

—Why not?

—They’ll hear me.

—Who? —Brian and Kyle. Kids from school.

—What are you talking about?

—I keep trying, but I can’t do it.

—How in the world would anybody be able to hear you pee? I can’t hear you pee, and I’m in the next room.

—But what if they do? Kyle is in my Spanish class; Brian is in my Spanish class and my History class.

—Nobody can hear you.

—I just can’t.

The bathroom opens and Elsa walks past Cimone without making eye contact, heads straight into Cimone’s room and falls into the bed. Cimone stands at the doorway until she is sure that Elsa sleeps, pulls the door to and settles onto the couch with a telephone. She dials, waits.

—Dad? —Cimone, is that you? Why are you up?

—Look, I’m fine, but I’m not sure about Elsa. She’s been acting strange. I think it would be good for her to see you. Things have been hard for her since you split with Mom. —Are you alright? You don’t sound good.

—I have a cough. This is serious. I have a show tomorrow night at a bar, it’s going to be 21 and older. I won’t be able to get Elsa in.

—Tomorrow? I can’t. I have to be on a plane to Hamburg in... four and a half hours. This visit wasn’t scheduled.

—She shouldn’t be here by herself.

— ... I’ll ask Susan what she’s doing.

The line clicks. In the window Cimone can see the murky blue dawn pushing against night.

B

oth girls do not mention the incident at breakfast, or the used bookstore, or the afternoon matinee. They stop at a drugstore to get some spray for Cimone’s throat.

—I want to come to your show.

Isis She made him an omelet without breaking any eggs.

He held the intact shells in one hand, ghostly As unbroken skin, hollow, Blue as air.

“It is this easy,” she said, floating Into the subway car.

He watched the doors close behind her, and the train Scuttled like a scarab beetle through the dim tunnel, Full of gold and white linen.

He told her, “I’ll love you for four thousand years,” And she said, “Pass the milk.” The beads Stood out on the empty jug, Evaporating in sunlight.

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She walked through all the rooms in his apartment Until her face was behind every lampshade, Fixed to the glint of every penny-colored minnow In the darkness under the couch.

There is no hieroglyph for the way Wind goes, its hands wheeling air Over the windows, towards sucking stars.

In spring the trains ran late.

He bought a newspaper and the sun bled through it, Spreading over the text, as if The whole black-and-white world Were insubstantial.

-Katy Waldman

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—They’re not going to let you in.

—But I’m your sister and you’re in the band.

—It doesn’t matter, they’re strict at these places. Stand to lose a lot. Not worth it to them to screw around.

—So what am I going to do?

—Susan offered to come pick you up. Something about cocktails at one of her friend’s.

—I’ll just stay at your place.

—I think you should go. It will be good for you. She’s trying.

—You think it will be okay?

—Yes. It could even be fun.

Neither believes the lie.

A

t the venue, Cimone sweats beneath the lights. The club is packed nearly to capacity, and the temperature soars. In her hand, the microphone is at once a tool and a toy. The band is in a groove. A thousand eyes, all on her. She dances from one end of the proscenium to the other, reveling.

At the end of the show, she sticks around to talk with her fans.

Her throat doesn’t even hurt. She signs a few autographs, tries to sell some t-shirts, makes new friends. One girl, maybe 15 years old, waits around, leaning against a column, too afraid to approach.

Cimone calls her over.

—Hey, how are you?

—I’m good.

—Did you enjoy the show?

—It was amazing. You’re incredible.

—That’s too kind, thank you. Thank you for coming out. It was a great crowd.

—You were great.

—Did you want me to sign that CD? —Would you?

—Sure. Who should I make it out to?

—Could you make it out to Leigh?

—That’s my stepsister’s name. It’s a good one.

—Oh, it’s not mine. This is for a friend, I’ve already got a copy at home. My name is Rory.

Cimone balks, recovers, and scrawls her signature across the face of it. She says goodbye to the girl and begs off everyone else, instead returning to the green room. When she turns on her phone, she has twenty-seven missed calls.

I

don’t want her to go, but she goes. She’s left me with them, just up and left to go play with her band and left me to suffer at the hands of these… women. Oh, Lane and her band. It’s been like this ever since she took up with that guitarist, every time we have plans. But these women. It’s like being on “The View,” if all the chatterboxes were armed with cocktails and Parliament Lights instead of lapel microphones. I want to kill them all. They must want me to do it, too — NO, I DON’T WANT A DRINK I’M SURE, THANKS I DON’T HAVE A BOYFRIEND WELL, I’VE HAD A FEW THEIR NAMES?… DEAN. AND JESS. HAVE WE EVER WHAT? I MEAN, YEAH, OF COURSE WE HAVE… YES, I MEAN: SOMETIMES THERE’S A BODY NEXT TO

35

YOU BUT YOU’RE STILL SLEEPING ALONE MY HAIR? CUT IT? I LIKE MY HAIR THE WAY IT IS SOMETIMES A BODY NEXT TO YOU SLEEPS ALONE ALONE NEXT TO A HAIRCUT YOU SLEEP DRINKS AND WHERE AM I? I LIKE Y’R NT MKNG SNS WHERE?

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t the hospital, up on the fifth floor, Cimone sits in a chair next to the bed where Elsa is propped up by a pillow, catatonic. Her eyes are barely open. An orderly tries, with some struggle, to spoon some sort of hospital gruel into Elsa’s mouth.

She doesn’t respond, so the orderly turns a dial that increases the drip flow of the bag that holds a mixture of medications and sedatives.

The messages were all from her father. He had fielded a call from a hysterical Susan, who hadn’t been able to reach anyone, and had to call 911 because she didn’t know what to do. Earlier, she had picked up Elsa, who reluctantly accompanied her to a friend’s apartment on the gold coast. The host mixed drinks and invited everyone out to the patio to drink and talk. In the middle of it, Elsa excused herself to go to the bathroom. When Susan finally realized an hour later that Elsa hadn’t come back and went looking for her, all she found was a locked door. There was no response to any of the yelling or pounding, and the women were forced to call a neighbor to break down the door. A few solid blows later, they were through.

Elsa sat in the bath, naked from the waist down, in water up to her neck, humming a song and playing games with the bath soaps.

She barely noticed Susan enter, barely noticed when her pants were slipped back over her knees and hips, barely noticed when the neighbor carried her to a couch, barely noticed when the paramedics arrived and rolled the gurney into the ambulance. She actually invited them all to join her — water’s fine.

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t the hospital, Cimone takes over the feeding duties from the orderly, who looks grateful. She is just about to attempt another spoonful when Elsa makes a gagging noise and vomits what little she has eaten, the bile trailing slowly out of the corner of her mouth. Cimone dabs at it with a cloth from the bedside table.

This is not surprising: The doctors said in the beginning that severe nausea would be a side effect of the anti-psychotic medications.

She is at Elsa’s bedside almost continuously, leaving only to play a few half-hearted shows for fans that can sense somehow, the show is different, sadder. She sings to packed houses, the band gets signed. She sings beautiful lies about hope in the world, even as she has none. At the end of each set she stands in front of the lights and weeps. Some of the people in the front cry, too. Her performance has never been better.

In the dark of her bedroom, Cimone lies on her back and peers into the void. A hair in her ear canal gives up the ghost, dying with a high-pitched ring.

The loss of a frequency.

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BY RACHEL CAPLAN

If Wooster Street pizza is the stuff of legend, Pepe’s is its hero.

Yet as the family leaves the family business, the pizzeria is struggling to reconcile its unique history with its future. o get from Yale to Wooster Street, the short, quiet strip of a street that is known as New Haven’s land of pizza legend, you cross a bridge over the Metro-North tracks and pass through a tree-lined neighborhood dotted with churches and war memorials that list long columns of Italian surnames. The street is flanked by street lamps bearing Italian flags. The businesses on either side are family-owned places that look as if they’ve been around for years: Libby’s Italian Pastry Shop, Consiglio’s, Maresca’s Funeral Home. The man sweeping away the leaves in front of the liquor store has a straw broom, a black fedora, and looks about 90. At night, the iron arch that spans the street is lit up in red, white, and green, a glowing portal into a neighborhood that still calls itself Little Italy. This is the street where Frank Pepe, a baker from a small town in Southern Italy, built the brick oven from which the first legendary New Haven pizzas emerged.

Founded here in 1925, Frank Pepe’s Pizzeria Napoletana has the honor of being the first pizza place established anywhere in Connecticut.

The restaurant has since been enlarged and, in 2006, embarked on an expansion project that will open new branches in Connecticut, New York, and, in the summer of 2010, even in the Mohegan Sun casino. In more than 80 years, almost nothing has changed in the kitchen, but Pepe’s has grown from a small neighborhood pizza place to a phenomenon known worldwide. Gary Bimonte, grandson of Frank Pepe and co-owner of the restaurant, is determined to carry on the mission begun by his grandfather and guarantee the immortality of what he calls “the pizza that all others pizzas are judged by.”

PHOTOGRAPHY BY GINGER JIANG

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y first trip to Wooster Square: I arrive at half past noon to a street that still seems asleep. The park and neighboring playground are empty, and rival pizza legend Sally’s doesn’t open until five. But when I get to Pepe’s Pizzeria Napoletana, I walk into a stuffy, benchlined waiting room crowded with people shedding scarves and mulling over pizza choices. There’s a Yale girl with her parents discussing her scientific ambitions in the same breath as Pepe’s famous clam pizza. It was invented here. A middle-aged couple wrapped in leather jackets come in — the man with cropped silver hair, the woman with red lipstick and a Roman nose. He leans in and says, “At night, people line up on the sidewalk…” Once the door has opened to let in an old couple and a Korean-speaking party of five, a waiter half-opens the door to admit me. “Just one?” he says. “This way.” Only a half-hour wait this time.

I get a seat in the back of the restaurant, diagonally across from an old guy in a navy blue sweater and a baseball cap who also happens to be named Frank. When his pizza comes — plain, just tomato and mozzarella — he spends a moment just looking at it before settling down to cut it piece by piece, eating each bite with a look of immense contentment and solemnity on his face. When I offer him the jar of hot pepper flakes on my table, he says no. He likes it as is. Looking up from his pizza for the first time since he’s begun eating, he smiles. “I’ve been coming to this place since I was five years old.” For a while, I just watch him, bent over his pizza as if the rest of the world didn’t exist. He has been eating this stuff for almost his entire life, and he knows how to eat it well: slowly, bite by bite, down to the crust. Even after all those years, the sense of wonder is still there.

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he Original Tomato Pie. When you walk into the restaurant, red neon lights above the kitchen announce this iconic phrase. So that’s what I order when I sit down to eat with Gary Bimonte.

“Do you like garlic?” he asks.

“Yes.” “Good.”

Bimonte comes right out from the kitchen to meet me, and we shake hands. He has nice, doughy hands that seem built for making pizza. He is a big, tall man with a gray mustache, glasses, a friendly smile, and the same uniform that everyone in the kitchen wears: a neat apron over a white Pepe’s T-shirt. He moves with the confidence of someone who belongs here, both as a family member and as an innovative businessman in his own right. He is proud to head a kitchen that’s stocked with “the best stuff,” proud that pizzas are made and delivered under his direction, proud to talk about the restaurant that he’s been working at for nearly thirty-five years. And as a grandson of Frank Pepe, a little bit of reverence is his due. When I first came into the restaurant, the manager, Steve, told me I had to talk to Bimonte and nobody else. He’s in the family, he said.

When a fifteen-year-old Gary Bimonte started working in the restaurant in 1975, he earned 75 cents an hour. In those days, the

place stayed open until midnight. When the shop closed around one in the morning, they would all head to a nearby Howard Johnson’s for breakfast and a good time. Bimonte calls the Pepe’s of that era “truly a family business,” and all the workers, both kids and grownups, were “related one way or another.” And with their late hours in the kitchen, they had to work hard and joke around. At 16, Bimonte began to work on weekends and saw his hourly rate jump to $1.25.

One thing followed another in a long chain of promotions and successes, and now, along with six of his cousins, he owns the Pepe’s franchise. He didn’t always know that he would one day be at the head of his grandfather’s business, but he’s been practically living in the Pepe’s kitchen since his mother, a single parent, brought him there as a child. Looking back on his career, he can’t really remember a moment when he made the choice to make Pepe’s pizza his life.

Was it destiny? “I guess it was just meant to be,” he says.

At this point in our conversation the tomato pie arrives. It is steaming hot; messy; red with crushed tomatoes, visible chunks of garlic, and only a little bit of cheese. I dive into it and get tomato sauce down my chin, all over my hands and on the table. Bimonte is understanding as he watches me enjoy my pie, explaining the real meaning behind the pizza’s label of “original.” He tells me of his grandfather’s first pizzas and about the early days of the business, how Frank Pepe kept the business running through the Depression, how he was instrumental in getting a bar permit for restaurants all over town, how he was always generous and made his pizzas affordable for even the poorest immigrants in the Wooster Square area.

When I ate at Pepe’s for the first time, my companion Frank had reminisced about how, back in the thirties, Frank Pepe had a pizza cart and sold slices of tomato pie up and down Wooster Street for a nickel or a dime. There had been maybe 20 other pizza places scattered throughout the neighborhood then — many of them must

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pizzas getting cooked inside, their surfaces bubbling, the crust rising, the bright interior of the oven wavy with heat.

T

be long gone by now — but people would come to Pepe’s anyway.

When Frank the regular was older, in high school, he’d come in with his football team and they’d fill up all the booths in the back of the restaurant.

Does the pizza still taste just as good? Well, some things just taste better when you’re young, he says. It’s hard to be sure exactly.

Nowadays, he explains to me, it’s all regularized, and they’ve got a system. The pizzas come out more circular and even. I look over the side of my booth, where I can see the cooks doing efficient work in the bright, open kitchen, swirling deep red sauce onto wide circles of dough, laying down thin slices of mozzarella, lifting pies out of the oven on long poles. When he was much younger, Frank says, the pizza would come, and it would be a square, a rectangle! He laughs.

But he knows well what makes the pizza taste so good. “I think it’s because they burn it,” he says, talking about the charred, blackened crust that is the unique product of a coal-fired brick oven. It’s good for your teeth to chew on this stuff, he says. “I’m eighty-two years old, you know. I’ve got all my teeth.”

There’s no denying that a good crust is the backbone of Pepe’s pizza, but another “secret” is the “top quality ingredients,” mostly imported, that ensure that the pizza is made “just the way my grandfather used to do it.” Bimonte leads me into the vast kitchen, pointing out the 55-gallon drums of olive oil (it takes only about two months, he said, to go through four of those), and taking me into a room-sized refrigerator stocked with huge bags of unshucked clams, shelves holding circles upon circles of fresh dough, and a tower of bucket-sized tomato cans with labels that read Product of Italy. He tells me with pride that these are San Marzano tomatoes, known for their sweetness and acidity. In one part of the kitchen is a gleaming silver machine, a new dough-maker that replaced the old hand crank contraption. The three ovens, though, are the originals. We watch

he white clam pizza — golden, crusty, smoky, with a heady punch of garlic — is a masterpiece invented by Frank Pepe.

The story runs like this: If you had a vision of a pizza that you just had to have but wasn’t on the menu — a pizza that maybe had never existed anywhere in the world up to that point — Frank Pepe would make it for you. He would make it for you even if you knocked on his window in the dark, in the five or six hours out of the day when he wasn’t hard at work in the restaurant. Some guy with a very specific hankering came to him one day and wanted a clam pizza. And that’s what he got. Professor Paul Freedman, who teaches in Yale’s History Department and studies the history of European and American cuisine, mentioned this certain white clam pie when talking about the history of New Haven pizza. “They must have experimented very much,” he said. “It’s a clever use of a breadlike substance.”

According to Freedman, Italy in the early twentieth century had no “neo-Platonic form of pizza” — at least, not as there is today, in an age where Domino’s and Pizza Hut are hugely popular. He remembers family trips to Italy as a boy in the sixties, where they had this stuff that was “re-imported” from the U.S., “American-style” pizza that was usually a pale imitation of the pies served up in New York and New Haven. “In Naples in 1965,” he says, “they had this stuff that seemed fake.” Pizza, in the days when Frank Pepe still lived in Italy, was more of a local phenomenon, even a family thing. Go to a different house, eat a different pizza.

The uniqueness of Pepe’s is a tribute to that tradition of personal pizza styles. Bimonte shares a bit of history with me, recounting how his grandfather, after serving in the Italian army during World War I, arrived in Wooster Square and started making bread. Soon, he started adding stuff to the bread. “He would take a piece of bread dough and leftovers, bake it in the oven, and that was it. He went around saying, apizz, apizz, penny a slice.” The first New Haven pizza.

The mission to preserve and protect the uniqueness of Pepe’s flavor is central to the restaurant’s ongoing expansion. Ken Berry, the manager of the new Fairfield branch and the leader of the Frank Pepe Development Corporation (which opened in 2006), has absolute confidence in his new establishment and even a bit of the Pepe family faith. In our brief conversation, his responses sound as if he were answering to the ghost of Frank Pepe himself. If there are any doubts that a pizza place opened in this new century could even attempt to match the quality and authenticity of a pizzeria built in the heyday of Italian culture in New Haven in 1925, then the obsessive care taken in making the new facility should be enough to assuage them. “We replicated the old brick ovens brick for brick, customized,” he says.

His team took measurements and “went in with cameras and mirrors… our goal is to replicate the Pepe’s experience.”

Another Pepe’s trademark is also firmly in place. Even though the smaller Fairfield establishment can’t receive as many customers

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The tomato pie is steaming hot; messy; red with crushed tomatoes, visible chunks of garlic, and only a little bit of cheese. as New Haven, Berry says, “We certainly have crowds and lines.”

But the place is the solid mix of old-world authenticity and modern state-of-the-art hood that is the twenty-first century Pepe’s standard.

One of the biggest changes of recent years is that a branch of the business is now in the hands of a non-family member. But Berry adheres to the specifications laid down by the family to the utmost.

“This is the family’s project,” Berry says firmly, giving due reverence to the legacy of Frank Pepe and the historical significance of the restaurant.

I

knew it was time for me to visit Pepe’s rival. In New Haven’s pizza universe, Pepe’s and Sally’s are the twin stars. As such, they are often paired together as must-try pizza for visitors to New Haven. Yet despite the inevitable culinary links and their physical proximity — Pepe’s is only a few blocks down on Wooster Street — the two pizzerias are worlds apart. On the restaurant’s sign — Sally’s Apizza (hearkening back to the days when Italian immigrants here pronounced the word “Ah-beets”) — the date of establishment, 1938, is small and barely visible. Sally’s was founded then by Salvatore Consiglio, a nephew of Frank Pepe.

The narrow restaurant, simply a hallway lined with booths and with a brick-oven at the back, is filled with a dim rosy glow from mismatched lights. The décor, a clutter of trophies and newspaper clippings, signed photos and memorabilia (the place was famously a favorite destination of Frank Sinatra’s), is less focused on the singularity of the business; some laudatory articles framed on the walls name Sally’s side by side with its foremost rival. The waiter, who recommends a Heineken with our olive pizza and mumbles something about a senior moment, disappears to the kitchen during the excruciating hour-long wait for food, and is replaced by a half-apologetic high school kid with a mop of dark hair. The wait breeds anxiety and mistrust, but when the pizza comes on its metal tray, topped with mozzarella and olives, all is forgiven. The Sally’s pie asserts itself not only as delicious but as deliciously unique. It has the New Haven flavor, but the crust here is blacker, thicker, grittier, and the pie a richer tomato flavor than Pepe’s.

Sally’s is desperately crowded, its oven traffic unbearably slow.

But those in the know say that Sally’s wouldn’t expand. Many of its customers claim that a trip inside is like “stepping back in time,” and though it’s hard to define what era it brings us back to, there’s still something very hole-in-the-wall, mom-and-pop about the place. It is only after I leave the restaurant and walk back to Yale in the windy October night that I realize that the sweet old lady in a sweater and glasses who took my cash must have been Flo Consiglio, the widow of Salvatore Consiglio himself.

Pepe’s, though, highlights history and family lore with its pizza. The brightly lit restaurant, replete with an open kitchen where you can see pizzas in different stages of production and the pile of dark coal that fires the vast 12’ by 12’ oven, has preserved its distinctive green tin ceiling and layout, and, as Frank told me, looks just like it did when he came here years ago with his football team. Over each booth is a framed photograph from the early days of the establishment, black and white photos of cooks and waiters that Frank can remember from the forties and fifties. Idyllic, sunny paintings of Maiori, the small town in Italy where Frank Pepe was born, seem to say, this is it. This is the birthplace of the greatest pizza genius in the world.

I Gary Bimonte, Frank Pepe’s grandson, co-owns the pizzeria with his six cousins. But will their children carry on the tradition?

come in around 8:30 one night for my last pizza of the week.

While I wait, I watch the families in their booths. One is a family of four, parents and two kids: the parents have ordered wine, and the young kids, impatient for their pizza to arrive, sip tall glasses of milk. One group has crammed five into a booth and is making its steady way into two large pizzas with sausage and onions. Although all kinds of groups come in to eat pizza at Pepe’s, there’s a family feeling about this place, its walls reading like a photo album. The customers keep coming, the love professed over and over not just for the product but for the people who make it. The bathroom is scrawled with just two pieces of benevolent graffitti: We Love Pizza and I LOVE FRANK. Gary Bimonte and his family are faced with a difficult question:

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As the story goes, if you envisioned a pizza that wasn’t on Frank Pepe’s menu, he would make it for you. And so clam pizza was born. how to keep the business alive in an age of uncertain customers and ever-sprouting rival chains. Bimonte and the six cousins belong to the third generation of Pepe’s owners, but, as he says quietly, “there is no fourth generation.” The family isn’t dying out, but the kids want to have lives beyond pizza and beyond New Haven. Bimonte won’t be as lucky as my lunch date, Frank, who has been able to keep most of his children and grandchildren close to home, who planned on dropping off his leftover pizza with nearby relatives, and whose son even surprised him by taking over the flooring and carpeting business he had started in the sixties.

Without the security of a future generation, Bimonte believes that the best way for Pepe’s to live and grow is through expansion. The more people involved in faithfully preserving the original recipe, and the more fans that appreciate Pepe’s, the better off Pepe’s will be in the future. I asked Albert Grande, a pizza expert and author who calls Pepe’s Pizzeria “my favorite pizza place in the United States… really the whole world,” what he thought about expansion. Grande says that, though some people, like the owners of Sally’s, would say you can’t spread around a family pizza business, and some pizza makers wouldn’t sell any pizza that they had not personally made by hand, Pepe’s expansion will be good for the family and good for pizza lovers. The big question faced by everyone involved, he says, is “what can we do to increase the legacy?”

F

rank Pepe died in 1969, when Gary Bimonte was still a boy.

Bimonte is sad that he never knew his grandfather as an adult, but he has a few childhood memories of seeing him during his frequent visits to the restaurant. He was a very generous man and

always had a nickel or something to give. He loved his family, but he was a big man in town too, a legend in his time both among restaurant owners and just among customers who knew him well.

Bimonte has learned most of the things he knows about his grandfather only in the past few years. He discovered archives stashed in the basements of his mother’s and aunt’s homes, recovering old film footage of his grandfather at work, finding photographs of Frank Pepe and his restaurant that nobody had seen in years. He got the old photos restored and hung them all over the restaurant.

There’s Pepe with one of his friends, a tall Native American man who was a student at Yale in the sixties and later became a professor.

There’s a member of the circus troupe — in a chef’s hat with a pizza tray — who frequented the restaurant: a midget whom Pepe sometimes put to work delivering pizzas to customers. There’s a group of cooks standing behind the counter, all smiling. Once every couple of months, Bimonte says he would pull out some of that old footage, now stored on a DVD, and look at his grandfather at work.

Above one booth, there is a picture of Frank Pepe that Bimonte says must date from the 1920s. Pepe is a young man here, dressed, as in the other pictures, in his apron and chef’s hat. He is facing the camera but looking a little bit into the distance, as if at something just on the horizon. Bimonte stands for a minute looking at his grandfather, a man who had just arrived from Italy and war, a man who still wore the look of a foreigner but who was beginning to lay down roots in New Haven, establishing a restaurant that would become the center of a neighborhood and a part of history. When Bimonte looks to the future of his restaurant and his family, he looks to this man.

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BACKPAGE

IN THE YEAR 2012 by Jesse Maiman At the YDN Magazine, we have a great deal of sympathy for all you political junkies out there who just don’t know what to do with yourselves now that the 21-month festival of Electoral College Analysis is over. That’s why we searched high and low through the depths of the YDN building to find a long lost relic: the YDN Political Crystal Ball. Behold: the Politics of Tomorrow.

The Republicans SARAH

The Ball shows great sadness for Alaska Republicans: Palin decides not to run for reelection in 2010 so as to get a head start on her presidential campaign. The stars seem to be aligned for her, but her downfall is not long in coming after she instigates an international incident by shooting a Russian man she discovers in her front yard. Todd divorces her, marrying the President of the Alaska Independence Party. Luckily, her daughters (perhaps son-in-law?) are able to help her hone her new slogan: “Do you want fries with that?”

PALIN

MITT

Romney must have his own Crystal Ball, since he desperately tries to remain politically relevant by appearing on Hannity and Colmes. Every single day. However, internal strife within the party appears when Republican insiders realize that Romney actually wants people to have health care. Romney disappears faster than Sarah Palin’s expense account. Utah cries itself to sleep. The Crystal Ball says, “Ask again later.”

ROMNEY MIKE

Ah, at last the Ball has good news for someone… sort of. Huckabee struggles at first, benefitting from neither the popularity of Palin nor the big-money backing of Romney. However, after each of them shoots themselves in the foot (literally, in the case of Palin), Huckabee steps up as the undeniable front-runner. Not wanting to waste a viable young candidate against the Obama-behemoth, Republican bigwigs decide that Huckabee is the perfect lovable loser to cut their Election Day loses.

John McCain feels a definite sense of déjà vu.

HUCKABEE

JOE THE

The Jack of Coins sits next to The Fool. In other words, the financial future looks grim: Joe still doesn’t make more than $250,000, but at least he still does not pay more taxes under Obama than he did under Bush. He does, however, have to place a restraining order on John McCain and Greta van Sustren, who “just want to be his friends.” Changing course, he cuts a rap album under the name “Si’Pac.” He changes his name again in an attempt to escape the public eye, but unfortunately finds little solace after opting for the last name “Six-Pack.”

PLUMBER

The Independents JOSH

Past Lives: The award-winning actor runs as a man’s man. Democrats can’t handle the testosterone. Republicans are confused because they thought Dubya already served two terms. Nation strings him along for a little while, mostly because they want Diane Lane to be first lady.

BROLIN JOE

Karma: Once the party’s Vice Presidential candidate, Lieberman finds it difficult to re-assimilate into the Democratic Party following his McCain endorsement. The other Senators begin picking on him in the hallways between Committee meetings, calling him mean names like Benedict Lieberman and Joseph Iscariot. In a desperate attempt to make friends, the Connecticut Senator tries to get himself on the ballot as the running mate to every third-party candidate he can find. Only the Free Soil candidate accepts.

LIEBERMAN

The Democrats HILLARY

CLINTON CHRIS

Enlightenment: To the surprise of cynical Democrats everywhere, Hillary actually doesn’t challenge Obama for the nomination in 2012.

The Winds of Change: The Democratic Party very quickly becomes uncomfortable with the dynamism and youth that have come to define it under the Obama administration. They hastily nominate Dodd, who is as interesting as wet tea leaves left out after a reading. The New York Times columnists return happily to flagellating themselves.

DODD

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