Portfolio – Story 2

My name is Donovan Gronkowski, but most people call me ‘Donny’. I’m a second generation Polish-American currently living in Brooklyn, New York. When my ‘Ma’ and ‘Pa’ moved here in the late 50’s they called it the ‘Golden age of capitalism’. America was the greatest country in the world, or so they were told, and to them anything was better than the iron fist of the Soviet Union. The details of how they got to the United States were never revealed to me as kid, but I do know that once they were here it wasn’t all they thought it would be. My Mom struggled to find work for the first year or so, and ended up becoming a cleaner in some downtown mall, meanwhile my father found work in the meatpacking district in one of the warehouses. From what I could grasp, neither of them learnt English very well so any better jobs were impossible to get. After 2 years in America, they brought me into the world. We all crammed into a 1 room apartment in Queens, and that’s about all I can remember from what my foster parents told me. When I was about a year old, my ‘Pa’ died. It turned out that the guys he’d been working for had ripped off the local Mob Boss, so he sent a car full of shooters to iron out the problem. My old man was caught in the cross fire.

Quickly after my dad’s passing my Mom spiralled out of control. From what I’ve been told she drank too much and ended up in relationships with some pretty unsavoury dudes. I think she must have realised that this was no life for a kid, so when I was two she put me up for adoption. Once I was in ‘the system’, I had to learn to be tough from a young age. Not only did I get beat, I eventually started dishing out the beatings. I dropped out school at 14 and found myself doing manual labour down at the docks. The work was hard. Blood, sweat and tears were common every single day, but through the hardships I became one tough son of bitch. After only seven or eight months I was in the best shape of my life. By the age of 15 I was bigger than some of the men that were almost twice my age. This was when my foster mom finally told me about what had happened to my real parents. I can remember the rage that I felt that night. I’d heard all about the gangs, or ‘wise guys’ as they people referred to them as, down in the meat packing district when I was working at the docks, heck I’d even met a few of them. Too think they could have been responsible for my parents deaths made me sick. For weeks after the news broke I contemplated my revenge, how could I get to the most untouchable of men without getting killed or arrested? That’s when it came to me. I’d become a cop.