Patricia Vaccarino

Gertrude’s wispy-thin hair is shock white. Although she’s pushing a hundred, she doesn’t look a day older than eighty. Introducing herself by her nickname, “Trudy,” she smiles, showing her broken teeth—some decaying and in need of extraction.  Gertrude confesses she was never called Gertie because kids would have picked on her and called her Dirty Gertie, and you know what that means—Dirty Gertie is a bad girl, easy, a slut. 

When I was in Rome last November, I drifted to sleep at night listening to the sound of competing sirens. One night I had a dream about Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese. They weren’t doing much in my dream, just hanging out on the streets of Yonkers, the same way I used to hang out on the streets of Yonkers when I was a kid.