Fort Lee author draws on mean streets of youth
It’s understandable that Fort Lee author-filmmaker Philip Cioffari would love to tell tales of his formative years in the 1950s Bronx.
What’s not so understandable is that he lived to tell them.
“One of our big pastimes was riding on top of the elevator,” he says. “You go to the trap door of the elevator, and you’d climb on top of the cage and ride up in the darkness of the elevator shaft. You’d hold onto the cables, or crouch on the elevator roof.”
Other big activities included trying to outrun approaching El trains, or chasing them by car – a la “The French Connection” – from the street below the tracks. “You did it late at night, hoping the police weren’t around,” he says.
That’s the kind of material that made its way into his books “A History of Things Lost or Broken” (a short story collection that came out in May and won several awards) and “Catholic Boys,” an urban crime thriller about a detective investigating the death of a schoolboy in a Bronx housing project, coming out this month.
“It’s really a human story about how the crime affects the individual,” Cioffari says. “[The detective] blames himself for the death of his son, who died in an accident he might have been responsible for. So he begins to investigate this schoolboy and in the process he discovers this web of treachery and deceit in a Catholic school in the Bronx. He feels if he can find the killer, he can expiate his guilt and somehow redeem himself.”
Memories of his Bronx boyhood also play a major part in “Love in the Age of Dion,” a 2006 independent film (Cioffari both wrote and directed) that won prizes from the Long Island International Film Expo and the Hoboken International Film Festival.
The $75,000 film, based on a play by Cioffari that ran for eight months in 1999 at the Belmont Italian American Playhouse, deals with middle-aged, twice-divorced Frankie (Jerry Ferris), who returns after many years to the old Bronx barroom where he spent his youth, looking for the gal who got away.
Any resemblance between the hero and Cioffari is, of course, purely coincidental.
“Is it autobiographical in the literal sense? No,” says Cioffari, 66, for 41 years a teacher of creative writing at William Paterson University in Wayne.
“As a writer, I would never say that [it was autobiographical] – even if it was true,” he adds.
It’s been years since Cioffari lived in the housing project in the Arthur Avenue section — the Bronx’s Little Italy, fabled for its mean streets and its doo-wopping teens, among them Dion and the Belmonts.
Even so, it remains the well from which he draws much of his literary water.
He goes back to the old neighborhood on a regular basis — both in his fiction and in real life. “It’s always been my feeling that place shapes you as much as any other factor,” he says.
And the Bronx, in the 1950s as today, is a place that shapes you with a very rough chisel.
“The Bronx at that time was a tough place,” he says. “There were gangs. You were continually forced to define or maintain or establish your manhood. In those days, the streets really shaped you. Schools were the polite alternative, but the reality was you had to go out in the streets every day. That’s where your friends were, and how you defined yourself. It’s where you learned what you need to do to survive.”
There were compensations: a sense of community and connectedness that can’t be found in today’s suburbs. Neighbors knew neighbors. Shopkeepers remembered your name. “You walked outside your apartment building, and there was a continual parade of people you knew,” he says.
But Cioffari isn’t interested in writing “American Graffiti Part 2.” Nostalgia, as an end in itself, isn’t his bag.
What jazzes him, in his writing and in his life, is watching his old neighborhood change – and stay the same.
The Italians, Irish and Jews of his day have been replaced by Hispanics, Asians, Middle Easterners and African-Americans. But the issues he dealt with then are the issues they deal with now.
“It’s a very diverse collection of people, but I see it as a variant of the ethnic groups I grew up with,” he says. “In many ways, it’s still the same people, struggling to make a better life for themselves.”
SOURCE: NorthJersey.com
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