The Old Block

June 4, 2021·41 min·3 clips

Jim O'Grady beats the unbeatable Vince Mutarelli in a shocking upset, fueled by his mother's hidden Bronx toughness.

The episode features two storytelling performances recorded live, each dealing with family mythology, geography, and the things fathers do to shape their children without being understood at the time. The first piece is by Jim O'Grady, a journalist and writer who grew up in a carefully sheltered Irish-Catholic household in Westchester County, New York. His mother, he explains, came from Highbridge in the South Bronx, a neighborhood that was demolished and rebuilt through the urban renewal and crack epidemic years, and which she rarely discussed. She takes him back to the block once, and the building she grew up in is gone — razed, replaced by a parking lot. Jim watches his mother stand in front of the empty space and name the rooms that used to be there, and the precision of her memory against the physical absence of the place reshapes how he understands her. This experience connects, unexpectedly, to a race: a local competition in which Jim pushes himself to near the performance of Vince Mutarelli, a legendary runner in the area, and nearly beats him. He draws a line between his mother's unsentimental strength and his own sudden unexpected capacity. The second piece is by Gastor Almonte, who emigrated from the Dominican Republic to Brooklyn as a five-year-old. His older teenage cousins dealt drugs and were figures of terror in the apartment. One of them wore a Beetlejuice mask and used it to menace Gastor regularly, creating a fear that was both specific and general — of the dark, of the hallway, of his own family. Gastor copes by constructing an alter ego he calls Brooklyn Batman, a personal mythology of fearlessness. Years later, as an adult, his father reveals that he had paid the cousins to frighten Gastor deliberately, with the goal of making him terrified of the street culture surrounding him, so he would never be drawn into it. The revelation reframes the entire childhood memory: what felt like random cruelty was a specific act of protection.

As heard by us

A Halloween scare and a Six Feet Under memory draw out how families revise the people they thought they knew.

The episode follows how a family story can change shape when it moves through another person's memory. It begins with HBO's Six Feet Under, as Claire visits her aunt Sarah and hears Sarah's friends remember Nathaniel as funnier and wilder than the father she thought she…

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Why you'd press play

Press play when a Six Feet Under family revelation and a Halloween mask feel oddly close to home.

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