By Joe Ortiz
The night Freddie da Bookie showed up with the gun, my father had his head stuck through the wrought iron security bars of our kitchen window. It was circa 1952 in the Queensborough Projects when I was 7 years old.
“Help me,” he clowned in his Puerto Rican patois. “Joey, help me. I can’t get out! My head’s stuck inna bars.”
“Let me try, Daddy,” I said. “Let me try.” For better or worse, my father was my hero and I wanted to do whatever he did.
Mama, who was cutting up a chicken to make broth for pastina, had no time for these games. “Just like ya fatha,” she said disgustedly. “Betta ya should imitate me makin’ pastina. At least pastina’s good for ya.”
She put the cut-up chicken in eight cups of boiling water along with a carrot, a stalk of celery, and a roughly chopped onion.
Meanwhile, Daddy, his head still stuck out the bars, saw Freddie coming up the path to our apartment so he ducked into the back bedroom to hide.
“Herman in?” Freddie snapped at Ma.
“No, he just left,” my mother covered. So, Freddie pulled a pistol out of his waist and laid it on the stove next to the boiling broth.
“He home now?”
“Ahhhhhh, Herman! He’s got a gun!”
When he heard my mother scream, Dad came running, pulling up his pants and rubbing his eyes as if he’d been resting up just for Freddie’s visit.
In the panic Mama let the broth boil over and that turned out to be a slice of good fortune. See, just like everyone in our neighborhood, Freddie knew a little something about pastina himself.
“You shouldn’t ova boil the stock. It’ll bruise the broth,” Freddie said, sticking the gun back in his waist.
After you give a man advice about his pastina, it just doesn’t seem right to fill him full of holes. Believe me, in our neighborhood a man’s life often hinged on smaller matters than good soup.
Besides, Freddie was right. The boiling down of the broth is essential to the flavor. Cooked down too little, the flavor is weak; too much, the flavor is too intense, the broth too thick.
Later, after the broth cooled, Mom put it on a potholder in the refrigerator and we went to bed.
The next day, the whole neighborhood was gabbing about Freddie and my father’s gambling and the pistol and the whole mess. My mother just went right on making her pastina. She took the chicken broth out of the fridge, skimmed off the cold, white fat from the top of the pot, then took the meat off the bone to use with some leftover tomato sauce (we called in “gravy.”) for chicken cacciatore. Mom strained the chicken broth with cheesecloth and put in back on the stove to cook down a little more.
After that my mother took off her apron, sat me down on the edge of the table and yelled out to my father in the living room, “Herman, watch Joey and make sure the chicken broth doesn’t boil ova. I’ll be right back. I gotta get some parsley from Aunt Rose downstairs.”
As soon as she was gone, I went to the window and squeezed my head through the bars. Below me I could see Aunt Rose’s hand coming out her window to pick a few springs of parsley from her window planter box. That’s when I realized my head really was stuck.
Just then I heard my father opening the front door and saying something about a quart of beer. “If the chicken broth starts ta boil, just turn it off,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
“But Daddy,” I squealed, “my head’s stuck . . . “
Too late. The door slammed and I was alone. In a minute the pastina started to boil. Steam began to crawl down the sides of the kitchen walls and roll out the window above my head.
I started to scream for help but all that did was draw and appreciative crowd, eager for a good laugh. I could hear the broth boiling down, down, down and I knew my mother was going to be steaming when she found out I’d spoiled her hard work. The bars began to tighten around my ears.
Finally, I saw Daddy walking up the path below me, carrying his beloved bottle of Rheingold Stout. He looked cockeyed at the crowd outside our place. Then he spotted me.
“Stop joking around, Joey,” he yelled. But then he looked at me again. He could see something in my face and knew I wasn’t joking.
He ran up the stairs, put his beer down, checked the pastina, then reached around, grabbed hold of the bars, and spread them like a pair of suspenders. I dropped to the floor like a dirty piece of laundry.
The curative effect of chicken broth is something Italians, Jews and other ethnic groups have long prescribed for any ill fortune, a sort of religious experience tied to suffering and repentance. Like Mom used to say, “You sin; you suffer. You pray (and eat a little, warm bowl of pastina): you save the soul.”
When my mother got done gabbing with Aunt Rose downstairs, she came back up and threw a handful of tiny star macaroni into the broth.
“Don’t put too much in,” she told me. “It grows when it cooks.”
All I could think about was my head expanding in the bars.
When the macaroni was cooked, Mom chopped up a few springs of the parsley and added it to the soup. We all sat down to a golden, glowing bowl of pastina. With a few sprinkles of black pepper and a little parmesan grated on top, a warm bowl of pastina can lift the weight of any little agony a soul may have to endure.
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Joe Ortiz, author of “The Village Baker,” wrote and produced a musical inspired by bread and created a musical based on his family story, Escaping Queens, that was a hit at Cabrillo Stage. He and his wife Gayle received the 2016 Gail Rich Award for contributions to the arts in Santa Cruz County.