The Day Of The Holy Innocents

12/27/25 – It is the day before my birthday.

I was born on December 28, the day of the Holy Innocents, or that is what it is called in the Christian religion. It is the day King Herod sent out his soldiers to knock on every door and find any newborn child in every house and behead that child. Why? Because he was told by three wise men that a child had been born who would be King. King of the Jews. The true King of the Jews. A King that would rule forever and never be removable. A King who would erase him, his history, and all he stood for. Herod the usurper. Herod the fake. Herod, the stool pigeon of the Roman government.

So what did he do? He shed blood everywhere. He ordered his soldiers to kill every baby, born and to be born. The streets ran red with blood. Red with the blood of the Holy Innocents, in the same way they did when the Pharaoh killed the children of the Jews who were living in Egypt in the hopes of killing their savior—MOSES—who turned out to be his own adopted brother. That is according to the Charlton Heston version of the story. The one we paid 25 cents to go see at the movie theater on Rockaway Boulevard in Ozone Park, right down the street and across from the Mafia hangout, across from the little grassy triangle in the middle of Rockaway Boulevard, which was across the street from Sam’s Candy Store and the drugstore where I bought all my jazz records at age fifteen. And across the street from the pool hall where the young boys hung out.

I was different from all the other kids around me, so I was alone. Always alone. I would walk around the neighborhood for hours, looking at everything, watching all the people. The Italian girls in their teased high hair and tight skirts. The very handsome Italian boys, especially Angelo, every girl’s heartthrob. He was tall and worked in construction, so he was built, and he had this jet-black hair that swooped back onto his head and sometimes hung on the side, but he was married. He seemed to me to be too young to be married even then, but he was married. The official word was out, and even an immigrant young girl, a nobody in the hood then, had heard, knew about it. He was off limits.

I never saw his wife, had no idea who she was or what she looked like. I just knew she wasn’t one of the Italian girls who hung out in the hood. So I watched him from afar as he rode the same bus with me, trying not to stare or even look in his direction, hoping no one on the bus noticed how in awe I was of him. With my eyes dropped, I stared in wonder.

It was at Sam’s Candy Store that I met Dougie Margiano, and it was at Sam’s Candy Store that I heard about all the drugs that were suddenly coming into the neighborhood and about the gang wars the Italian boys were having with the then-called “Negro” boys in Harlem who had come down for a rumble, or to buy drugs, or both. But our neighborhood was off limits to the whole world. Italian rule kept our neighborhood safe. And for a while, I could still wander around the streets watching, learning. The future was far, far away.

So it is over fifty years now, and the future has come and is soon to go straight out to wherever the future goes. Tomorrow is my birthday. There will be no mass murders of children, so I am safe, and even though I was safe even back then when I was told about the day, I always felt a feeling of dread, fear, and horror at the mental picture those words coughed up in my young, innocent soul.