Where I grew up, if you were small, you were in trouble. There were neighborhood bullies who usually acted alone, several gangs of tough kids (some tougher than others), and assorted crazies with severe mental problems. They would rob you, beat you up, and just for the fun of it hold you down, take your pants off, and hang them from the highest point on an electricity pole. These things started when a boy was about ten and usually ended when he was about fourteen, unless he was seen as “queer” or a “fairy,” in which case the tormenting continued until he moved out of the neighborhood after high school. Many kids were forced to perform oral sex on the gang members one after another. I witnessed that once. It was a brutal rape that left the victim screaming, battered, and humiliated. I never forgot it.

Living in those neighborhoods could be brutal. There were certain streets you were not allowed to walk on without paying a five- or ten-cent toll. The leaders of those gangs were school dropouts, many of whom grew up to be hardened criminals—from thieves and drug dealers to hitmen and made men in the Mafia. The big Mafia names all started out small. John Gotti grew up a few blocks from me in the East New York section of Brooklyn, which even today is one of the murder capitals of the country. He went to Franklin K. Lane High School, which was in my district, and his headquarters were in Ozone Park.

When I was thirteen, I was five-two and weighed about a hundred and ten pounds. I remember precisely how tall I was because at the Prep I narrowly escaped being the beadle (a title given to the shortest kid in the class, who sat in the first row, first seat, and opened the classroom door when someone knocked). I missed being the beadle by a half-inch. Fortunately, I had a growth spurt and grew eight inches in the next three years, but at thirteen I was a small kid and would have been a target for neighborhood delinquents had it not been for Rocco Romanelli.

Rocco was two years older than me and a head taller. Nobody messed with Rocco. He had broad shoulders and hands like catcher’s mitts. He was very muscular and a good athlete. He also had a reputation for loving to fight at the slightest provocation—though only when provoked. He didn’t look for a fight but was always ready for one. He would take on two or three guys at a time and could do a lot of damage: I remember broken noses, teeth knocked out, and a dislocated jaw. Rocco and his friends were untouchables.

He started out as my protector, but we soon grew into friendship. He liked me, and I genuinely liked him. He was different. I have to say that it was a friendship of opposites; he was big and strong but had limited mental abilities. He could barely read and write. He simply wasn’t interested in books (not even a comic book) or radio programs. The only movie he went to was Knute Rockne, All American. He loved that film and never missed seeing it when it came to the Earl on Liberty Avenue. Rocco’s one dream in life was to be an All-American football player at Notre Dame. He never talked about going to the pros, I suppose because the pros in those days were nothing near what they are today. It was all college football.

I don’t think Rocco ever knew, or cared, that Notre Dame was a Catholic college. He was not a Catholic, and no one in his family was—unusual for an Italian family. He had contempt for religion in general. He often asked me, “Could God build a rock bigger than she could lift?” I would start out by telling him that God was a “he.” “Answer the fucking question, Tom,” he would shout. I would explain to him that all the pictures of God portray him as a man, and all references to God are masculine. Once we got through the he/she business, I would explain to Rocco that, yes, God could do everything because he is God. And, yes, God could build a rock that big if he wanted to, and Rocco would immediately come back with, “Well, if God can do everything, how come she couldn’t build a rock bigger than she could lift?” We would go around and around until I finally gave up.

Later in life, I told this story to John Silber, president of Boston University, who said that Rocco was way ahead of his time in raising the possibility that God was a she. I explained to John that Rocco had very poor command of the English language. He constantly made grammatical errors and had no interest in learning, but it didn’t matter because he was Rocco. Rocco could be very irritating and obnoxious at times, and his ignorance often got in the way, but we remained good friends. Another friend of mine once suggested that Rocco was like Lenny in Of Mice and Men. I quickly corrected him, pointing out that Lenny had a mental problem and Rocco had nothing wrong with his brain. He was just ignorant and shut out anything he wasn’t interested in.

Rocco was always kind and gentle with me and always went along with anything I suggested. I did help with his homework, though I am sure his teachers knew that someone else was doing it for him. I wrote his book reports and tried to help him to read and write better. He could add and subtract but not multiply or divide. But handling money did not require multiplication or division skills. Our relationship grew into a kind of brotherly love I suppose. He was a very good person underneath the very rough exterior. We spent a lot of time together. Though he was a few years older, we were in the same class because he’d been put back several times. I spent a lot of time at his house and ate there whenever I wanted: always a red sauce pasta dish with meatballs, sausage, chicken, or pork. His mother was a good cook but didn’t speak a word of English, and I never saw her wearing shoes.

In the summertime, we climbed to the flat roof of his house, making sure we were upwind of the awful smell of the pigeon coop. The coop was large, roughly the size of a 9-by-12 room, built primarily of old doors, one of which was on a hinge so someone could go in and feed the birds and clean out the coop occasionally. The birds were let out almost every night for exercise, and most of them would return. There was a lot of stealing pigeons, trading, and buying and selling. A couple of years later I discovered that Mrs. Romanelli would put pigeons in her spaghetti sauce. That did it for me. From then on, I skipped the meals that contained the “chicken.”

We would often go up there to cool off on hot summer nights. There were times when we would spend the whole night there. Rocco would spread out a canvas tarp, and we would lie down, out of reach of the mosquitoes, looking at the stars and the moon. Often, he would ask me to tell him a story. I would tell him something I’d made up or describe a movie that I’d seen recently. After a while he would stop asking me questions about the story, and I would look over and find him asleep.

We graduated from our separate elementary schools at the same time. I went to the Prep, and he went to Boys High in Brooklyn, recruited for his football skills. After a year he was expelled for fighting and hitting a teacher who tried to break up the fight. Rocco swore that hitting the teacher was an accident, and that the teacher got in the way of a punch. I have a feeling he would have been thrown out for academic reasons anyway.

When I walked out the door of Prep, I was advised not to come back in September. I had no intention of returning. I was fourteen and by law had to go back to school. Rocco was sixteen and the law did not apply to him, but if he wanted to play college football he had to graduate from high school. He understood that.

I decided on John Adams in Ozone Park, Queens, because Mr. Sheppard, an award-winning teacher, was there. I talked Rocco into applying there as well, as Adams had a good football team and a legendary coach, Joe Scarlatta, an Italian-American who did not care about his players’ academics. We applied together. I was accepted on probation for a year, but Rocco was turned down. At that point he enlisted for a three-year stint in the Air Force. He quickly made the Air Force football team, which was based in Okinawa. He was first string, playing both defense and offense in the same game, and racked up impressive stats, clippings, and letters from coaches and officers. He earned promotions in rank and had a spotless record as an airman and an outstanding record on the playing field. Three years later, he returned home.

He never gave up his dream of going to Notre Dame. ln those days there were no copy machines, so I had his clippings and stats and letters Photostatted. I wrote a letter for Rocco to Notre Dame coach Terry Brennan, who had taken over from Frank Lahey. We included the Photostats. We didn’t have to wait long. The coach wrote back and told Rocco that he was very impressed and included a ticket from New York to South Bend and fifty dollars in cash to cover any expenses along the away. The coach told him he would be at South Bend for about five days.

The letter included a short test involving a little math, literature, history, and a request for a short composition on a subject of your choice. I tried a few of the questions out on Rocco, but in the end, I took the test. It was easier. I can’t tell you how excited Rocco was the day I took him to Grand Central and put him on the train. Five or six days later he returned with the news that he had been rejected not for his football skills but because the coach realized that Rocco could never make it at Notre Dame academically. At one point Coach Brennan asked him if he had completed the test himself, and Rocco told him that his friend Tom McCann had done it for him. Brennan said to tell me that I passed the test. Rocco did say that Brennan told him he might be able to help him get into another college, but he couldn’t remember the details. I concluded that Brennan was just trying to let Rocco down easily and giving him some hope for the future. He must have seen Rocco’s reaction on having his dream shattered.

I was wrong. It was not an idle promise. A few weeks later, Rocco got an invitation to visit a college in Pennsylvania, where he was accepted. It wasn’t Notre Dame, but it was college football. He was very happy, and so was I. He was about to be enrolled and play football at a college that provided a lot of academic help to its athletes. In my mind, he would play football and then graduate and move on to other things. Rocco himself did not project much into the future. He went to Pennsylvania in late July, and a few weeks later he sent me a postcard saying, “Going good. Lost twelve pounds. Working my ass off. Feeling great. Write back. Your friend forever, Rock.” The message on the card was written by someone else, but the signature was unmistakably Rocco’s.

A few weeks later, Rocco took a date to a campus dance. The story goes that a guy who had too much to drink insulted Rocco’s date. Words were exchanged. The two decided to take it outside and began trading blows. Rocco threw a punch, and the other man want down, hitting his head on the curbstone. He died before the ambulance came. The police arrested Rocco and took him to the station. The two cops and Rocco got out of the police car. Despite being cuffed, Rocco managed to hit the cop and knock him to the ground. He took the gun from the cop’s holster and ran a block away before he put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

Almost seventy years later, it is still painful for me to think about this and more so to write about it. As I get close to the end of my own long life, I think about Rocco and all the other friends and family who are gone. I miss them. That goes with age. But I feel the need to leave a record somewhere of them, including Rocco. They are people I loved and who loved me. None of them ever did anything great or accomplished anything that will go down in the annals of anything. But they are people who deserve to have their names and their stories recorded and read. That is why I wrote this book. Books last a long time. Memories fade.

I don’t know why Rocco did what he did that night. Perhaps he was overcome with grief for the dead young man. Was that grief enough to cause him to take his own life? Was he afraid of what might happen to him? A trial for murder perhaps? Prison? Was it because his lifelong dream of playing football for a college team ended that night? Was it any of those things? Was it all those things? Was it none of those things? I don’t know. I never will. I wish that he had been able to live out his dream. I wish that he could have had a full life and that he and I had been able to know each other all our lives and that we had been able to grow old together.