The Neighborhood
Before World War II, we lived in the ground-floor apartment of a three-story brownstone: 25 Vernon Avenue in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. It was in the middle of the block, halfway between Nostrand and Marcy Avenues.
My father had been born on that street. He often pointed to the flat across the street from where we lived and said, “I was born right there.” I was born in Bushwick Hospital, a few blocks away.
When my father was growing up on Vernon Avenue, it was (he told me) mostly populated by Ashkenazi Jews who had made their way out of Manhattan’s Lower East Side tenements. Neither he nor my mother would have used the word Ashkenazi because, I think, they had no awareness at all of Sephardic Jews, the ones who spoke Spanish. Both of my grandmothers spoke several European languages–German, Yiddish, Russian, Polish. But not Spanish.
The only Jews I knew of who weren’t Jews like us were the Chassids we’d see from the trolley in Williamsburg when I was on the way to piano lessons at the Henry Street Settlement, off Delancy Street in Manhattan. My mother would look at the men in their black hats and coats and curls hanging down and would always say she couldn’t stand them. She couldn’t stand Gypsies, either. Gypsies, she said, stole; I never learned what she had against the Chassids.
By the time I was born (1936), the block was Jews and Italians. One block away, Myrtle Avenue, the parallel street with an El, was, with one exception, all black. The exception was the bookie parlor, run by Italians, where my father spent far too much time.
Beyond that was another street that was all Italian. Another nearby street was all Puerto Rican. My main interest in Myrtle Avenue was the El: an elevated train that could for a nickel take you on an all-day ride above the city streets.
New York was like that in those years, and some parts of it still are: you go one block and you’re in another language, smelling different food odors coming from the kitchen windows. Nearly all the Els are gone, but you still can ride the subways forever, if you know how to avoid the exit that tosses you out into the street. I don’t know why you’d want to, but you can.
Family
We had cousins on my mother’s side in two or three of the brownstones, and my mother’s sister, Estelle, lived in a third with her husband Jack and their two daughters: Honey and Ginger. Those two cousins seemed hugely older than I, but it was probably only five or six years. When you’re a kid, five or six years is a big block of time. Later, it’s nothing. Except, both of them are dead now, so it matters at this end, too.
My mother’s parents, also Russian/Polish Jews, had moved from the Lower East Side to Easton, Pennsylvania. I don’t know how that came about.
My mother and father met on a street in midtown Manhattan when she was working as a clerk in the jewelry district and he was a motion picture projector operator. She gave him the sapphire ring that he wore on his left hand the entire time I knew him on the day they got engaged. (He wore his wedding ring on his right hand, Russian-style.) The day he died, an ICU nurse came out and handed it to me. I’ve never worn any jewelry other than a wedding ring, so when my son, Michael, was about 30, I gave him the sapphire ring. He has no more interest in bling than I do, so a few years later I asked him for it back. I gave it to my sister, who had it made into a necklace which, for a while, she wore. I think she gave it to her daughter.
I asked my mother a few times how it was that she got picked up on a New York street. She got kind of coy about it–a very rare mode for her–but I never got the details. I don’t know how her Pennsylvania family and our part of my father’s Brooklyn family wound up on the same Brooklyn street. New York is a city of coincidence, a place where the random is part of everyday logic.
There are questions I never thought to ask, and now there is no one to ask them of.
Eli’s farts
My grandmother, Sarah Jackson, died June 16, 1940, eight days after my brother was born. I was four. She was 69 years old. I remember her. There are photos of us in Atlantic City. I don’t remember that, but I remember her at my Aunt Minnie’s apartment near the George Washington Bridge.
Her husband, Eli (on the death certificate: his name was probably Eliazer) died eighteen years earlier, when my father was eleven: June 10, 1922. He was a tinsmith and he had, my father said, one particular skill: he could emit SBD (silent but deadly) farts at will. This figured, my father said, in an ongoing, never articulated battle between him and my grandmother.
They were poor, but she took very seriously the Jewish obligation to help those who have less than you. She regularly brought home to dinner derelicts she encountered on the street. They were, my father said, invariably odoriferous. She was doing a mitzvah, a good deed, so my grandfather couldn’t argue with her about it. But he could wage guerilla war: every time she brought one of her street people home for dinner, he’d emit SBDs the entire time.
You didn’t talk about farts,” my father said, so he had her. “He couldn’t talk about her bums; she couldn’t talk about his farts. The whole time that went on, right up until he died, I never heard a word of complaint from either of them. I still remember the odor of the people at the table and the odor of my father’s farts.”
The block
My father–who worked in the summer as an auctioneer and shill at an auction joint in Atlantic City and the same thing at an auction joint on Broadway the rest of the year–tended the furnace for the brownstone–feeding it coal and hauling out the ashes–in exchange for which we got reduced rent and use of the back yard, which you got to by way of our kitchen door. My pals and I, we played out there all the time.
One summer day, my cousin Marvin Ort and I collected two fruit jars of baby fireflies. We brought them into the kitchen. My mother screamed, “Mosquitoes!” Either Marvin or I, maybe both of us, dropped the jars on the instant and the kitchen was aswarm with New York summer mosquitoes, which immediately did what New York summer mosquitoes do.
I hung out with Marvin (who I remember as always having a white skim across his upper lip, as if he’d just pulled his mouth away from a glass of milk; he was blonde; where did that come from?), and Lenny Kaplan (my mother’s side of the family). I’ve looked for them on the Internet but have come up empty.
And Danny Rich, whose father had in the basement of their house, a huge electric train array. A whole room for a grownup’s electric trains!
And another cousin, Jackie Newfield, who lived one house to the left of us. I’d forgotten him until my mother sent me a 1942 photo of Marvin, Jackie, me, my kid brother and Lenny in front of our brownstone. She included a note telling me who everybody was. “Jackie Newfield,” she wrote, “grew up to be a writer, just like you.”
You can find Jackie on the Internet. He grew up and wrote for some of the same places I did (like The Nation), and many I didn’t. The writing came later. In those days, it was cowboy outfits and chalk games in the street, like Scully. Nobody plays Scully any more. There’s no place to do it: too many cars.
Dominick
Three horse carts came to the street regularly. One was a guy with vegetables and fruits. I didn’t pay him any attention. Another was the iceman. We had a refrigerator, but my aunt Estelle had an icebox. I remember her iceman with his ice tongs, bringing a cubic foot of ice wrapped in burlap to her second-floor apartment. He’d push it in the top compartment of her icebox, then leave, the tongs in his hand, the burlap over his shoulder. He didn’t interest me either.
The third horse cart was operated by a guy named Dominick. He sold Italian ices. My favorite was lemon, which was the color of old paper. He would scoop it into a small paper cup. By the time you got to the bottom, it was melted, so it was a drink sweeter and tarter than any drink you’d have anywhere else.
Dominick always gave me a sugar cube, which I would immediately feed to his horse. I used to know the horse’s name, but that’s gone now. It amazed me: that huge animal with those enormous teeth taking the sugar cube from my fingers with a moist, gentle touch.
I’d see Dominick’s horse and cart up the block and I’d sit on our stoop, nickel in hand, and wait for the cup with the lemon ice and the sugar cube.
Across the bridge
My father’s sisters, Minnie and Leah, lived far uptown, at 2 Pinehurst Avenue near the George Washington Bridge, but we still had one very old aunt on the Lower East Side: Tanta Zadie on Hester Street. Once a year we’d take the trolley over the Williamsburg Bridge, get off on Delancey Street and walk over to her building. She lived on the fourth floor. There was one toilet on each floor and the stairs to her flat always reeked of urine. For years I thought it was just something poor people did: they pissed in the hall. Only recently did someone explain it to me: One toilet per floor. Somebody’s in there forever. Two people are ahead of you. What choice do you have?
That neighborhood became Hispanic for a while, but in recent years, I’ve heard, it’s become gentrified, so poor people can’t afford to live there now. An avant-garde theater company–”The Wooster Group”–is based near where my Tanta Zadie lived. In 2017, they did a play based on work in Texas in 1964, The B-Side. I spent so much time with them, they made me an associate member of the Group. Sometimes, when I’m in a cab on my way to the theater, we are on the same streets we walked to get to Tanta Zadie’s place. Something happens: I get a flash of what those houses and stores looked like then, then I’m back in the present.
Brother
My brother’s name is Moss Alan Jackson. He is four years younger than I. My father’s mother died a week after he was born. When he was in high school, he went by the name Alan. Later, he decided he liked Moss better. When he’s around very old friends, you can tell if they know him from high school or college by which name they use. In the family, nobody ever called by either name. Everybody called him “Brother.” My parents, my sister, the aunts, uncles, and cousins: he was “Brother.” Me, too.
When Diane Christian and I got together in 1972, she said, “Don’t you think it’s strange that everyone in your family addresses Moss in terms of his relationship to you?”
I said that I didn’t know what she was talking about.
“Brother,” she said. “You all call him ‘Brother.'”
“That’s his name,” I said.
“No,” she said, “It’s not his name. His name is Moss or Alan. Nobody in your family calls him either one of them.”
I told her I’d never thought about that before.
“I bet he has,” she says.
“That might explain some things,” I said.
“I’m sure it does,” Diane said.
Blood
During World War II, my father worked as a riveter on the night shift in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and we lived at 24 Monument Walk in the Fort Greene projects, which were built to house those wartime workers. There was no neighborhood there. It had all the anomie of all high-rises. The first year, I went to P.S. 5, then I went to P.S. 67. I walked to both of them by myself. It wasn’t like now.
My mother worked in the shoe department at Abraham and Straus, a Brooklyn department store, long gone. Brother and I were usually alone at night. We were told that if there was a problem we should go to Mrs. Robinson, in the adjacent apartment.
One night, Brother and I got to jumping up and down on our beds. I don’t know what I did wrong, but I did a flip and my forehead hit the radiator. I went to the mirror in the hall to see if I’d done any damage. I saw cut, an inch or so long, flesh on both sides a different color than my skin, and in the middle, a thin rectangle of white bone.
Almost instantly, blood started gushing from the wound. It hit the mirror, the wall, the floor. I ran to the bathroom and got two towels. I held one to my forehead with my right hand and I began mopping up the blood with my left.
I couldn’t keep up. Whatever I mopped up was replaced by blood leaking from the towel in my right hand.
“Mom’s going to be angry,” Brother said. He kept on saying it: “Mom’s going to be angry. Mom’s going to be angry.” If I hadn’t had towels in both hands, I’d probably have hit him.
I’d had a few stiches in my scalp at the Emergency Room at Cumberland hospital earlier that year, so I knew what to do. I threw the two towels in the bathroom sink, got another towel, managed to get my jacket on, and took Brother next door. I told Mrs. Robinson I had to go to the hospital for a while. She looked at me and said, “All right.” It was that kind of neighborhood.
I walked the block or two to the hospital and went to the emergency room. I told them I’d cut my head and I needed stitches. A doctor took me into an examining room. He looked at the cut. “Yes, you do,” he said.
He threw the towel into a container. He asked where my parents were. I told him they were working. I also told him that it was very important that my mother not be told about this because she would be very angry. He no doubt told me that it was highly unlikely that she would be unaware of it. Maybe he said nothing.
He leaned over me. I asked him to tell me when he was about to start stitching my forehead. I wanted to prepare myself for the pain of the needle going in. He nodded, but didn’t say anything. Then he said, “All right.”
“You’re going to start?”
“I’m done. Four stitches.”
“You won’t tell my mother?”
“No.”
I thanked him and went home. No paperwork, no telephone calls, no bills, no nothing. Imagine that today. My mother would have been called at work. A Family Services worker would have beat her to the apartment wanting to know why an eight- and a four-year-old kid were home alone: a big mishigas. Some things really were better in the old days.
I fetched Brother from Mrs. Robinson and set about cleaning up the blood. I thought I did a perfect job. I rinsed out the bloody towels and hid them.
“Mom’s gonna be angry,” Brother said.
I got into bed, turned out the light, and pulled the cover over my head, so if she came in the room she wouldn’t see the bandage covering the stitches. Morning was a long time away.
A few minutes later, I heard her key in the lock. The door opened and closed. I heard her footsteps in the hallway. There was a moment of silence, then she roared, “WHAT HAPPENED HERE? WHERE DID ALL THIS BLOOD COME FROM? WHY IS THERE BLOOD ON THE MIRROR? WHO MADE THIS MESS?”
The Store
After the War, we moved back to Vernon, this time to the second apartment house in at the corner of Vernon and Nostrand, 7-11, the back flat on the top floor of a five-floor walk-up. Mail came twice a day. I loved getting mail. I’d write for everything that was free in magazines so I’d get whatever it was, and I’d be there when the mailman arrived with his huge fob of keys to open the top of the brass mailbox. I’m still like that: I check email like a junkie.
On the first floor, an Italian widow lived alone. My mother spoke of her in quiet tones and said she had “the consumption.” I never knew what that was: it was just something that was not talked about. Tuberculosis, the endemic disease of the poor, or cancer, the disease no one then knew how to address, were both like demons you were best not to name. They both killed just about anybody who had them. “The consumption”: she never said it without the definite article.
My father operated what in New York is called a “candy store” or a “luncheonette.” It was on the ground floor of the apartment house next to ours, 1-5 Vernon, at the corner of Vernon and Nostrand. Places like that were that era’s convenience stores, minus the canned goods and soap. It was a short order restaurant and ice cream fountain; it sold newspapers and magazines, Alka-Seltzer, pads, pencils, razor blades. I loved it because I could read all the comic books and, when the ice cream barrels were too empty for the scoop, I could finish them off with a spoon. And, in the backs of magazines, I could find offers that, for a postcard, would get me mail.
Our newspaper rack held The Daily News, The New York Post, New York Herald-Tribune, Daily Mirror, New York Times, PM, The Brooklyn Eagle, The Forward (Yiddish), and Il Progresso italo-americano. There was also a Hebrew paper, and The Daily Worker. One of my jobs was to unpack the bundle of newspapers in the store entryway and put the papers in their proper place in the rack. I loved the odor of fresh newspaper ink. I still do.
Many years later, my mother told me she hated the store because it was 7 AM to 10 PM seven days a week. “When we had that store,” she said, “we had no life.”
A glass case on the counter with three shelves held Charlotte Russes, a sweet that existed, so far as I know, only in New York City. They were sponge cake inside a cardboard wrap. The cake was topped with a layer of jam, whipped cream and a Maraschino cherry. A guy would come every few days to refill the case. The only time I’ve seen a Charlotte Russe in the past fifty years was in one of my favorite scenes in Sergio Leone’s great gangster film, Once Upon a Time in America.
Dominic, one of the kids in the film, is sitting on a tenement staircase waiting for the Peggy, the neighborhood tart, to finish her bath. He’s holding a Charlotte Russe. Give Peggy a Charlotte Russe and she’ll put out for you on the roof. It’s Dominic first time. He sits there, looking at the door. Then he looks at the Charlotte Russe. Then he looks at the door. He looks at the Charlotte Russe and runs a finger along the side, lifting off some of the whipped cream. He looks at the door, then he lifts some more whipped cream. He looks at the door again, then, with utter joy, he gobbles the rest of the Charlotte Russe. I loved Charlotte Russes when I was a kid, but not enough to have passed up my first chance to get laid. I think.
Geno’s TV, Geno’s fish
The first TV set in our building was owned by Geno, a fisherman on the fourth floor. I remember all of us–”Geno’s family and ours–sitting on the floor and on the bed watching Roller Derby, Kulkla, Fran and Ollie, Milton Berle’s show, Howdy Doody and, of course, wrestling. A lot of wrestling. I don’t know if that was because Geno liked wrestling or because there was a lot of wrestling on TV in those years, and we’d watch pretty much anything that was on.
When we all talked, we spoke English; Geno and his wife often spoke to one another in Italian. The first time Diane and I went to Italy I was surprised to find I understood a lot of things. For years I thought it was because I knew French, but now, writing this, I realize it was probably more because of those nights watching television in Geno’s apartment.
My mother would often babysit for them in exchange for fish. We were as poor as everybody else in that building, so she babysat a lot and we ate a lot of fish. My mother was a lousy cook. Her basic technique was to cook whatever it was for a very long time. I still have a difficult time ordering fish in a restaurant, even though I know properly-cooked fish is nothing like what I had as a kid. I was 27 before I learned that cooked vegetables did not have to be soft as mush.
The garbageman’s son
One of my closest friends, Benny Panapento, was the son of a New York garbageman. They didn’t call them “sanitation workers” then. That term still brings to my mind someone with an alcohol-soaked rag wiping a surface to kill bacteria, not someone dumping garbage into a huge noisy truck.
It was, for Benny and me, the coolest of occupations because Benny’s father brought home all kinds of fascinating, useful things people had tossed out. Nowadays, there are people who cruise the streets on trash days looking for useful things. When Diane and I are getting rid of an old TV or piece of furniture, we always put it out the day before and it is gone before the city trucks come. But back then, hardly anyone had a car (passenger vehicle manufacture had been suspended during World War II) so the only people who cruised the streets on garbage and trash days were the garbagemen.
Benny’s apartment–it was on Sanford Street, which was one block the other side of Nostrand and across Myrtle–was filled with an astonishing variety of mismatched things. The kitchen chairs were all different from one another, as were many of the dishes and picture frames. There were a lot of books: all sizes, all subjects. The kids in Benny’s family had a lot of toys, some of which worked and some of which didn’t.
Benny and I used to take the trolley to Prospect Park (designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, whose most complex single project was in Buffalo, where I now live), where we’d capture frogs, which we would assiduously dissect in an unused room in the basement of my apartment house. We were, at that point, preparing for later. That was a time when my mother was telling everyone I was going to be a doctor. I had a Grey’s Anatomy and I learned every muscle and bone in the human body. In the English department where I now teach, I am probably the only full professor who knows the difference between the biceps radial ulnaris and the biceps flexor ulnaris. I don’t know what happened to Benny Panapento. Maybe he became a scientist or doctor; I didn’t.
Every year, Benny’s block had a huge San Genaro feast. I was insanely jealous. Jews had no festivals like that. All my family had was Yom Kippur, which is as far from a fun festival as you can get.
The monkey wrench with a two-inch jaw
There was on kid on the block whose father had a monkey wrench with a two-inch jaw. Nobody liked the kid very much–I don’t even remember his name–but we let him hang with us because of that monkey wrench.
That was enormously important in our neighborhood in the summer because the two lugs that got the cap off a New York fire hydrant and turned the water on were about two inches. Ordinary household wrenches wouldn’t do it.
After the hydrant was turned on, one of the stronger guys would hold a small plank under the pressurized water coming out. The higher he pulled the plank, the higher the water would arc over the street, where we’d run around in bathing suits. There were few cars on New York City streets then, so there was plenty of room to do that. When we’d see a car coming, we’d move to the sidewalk. It was summer in the city before air conditioning, so car windows were always open. As the car passed by, the guy with the plank would hit the water stream, flooding the interior of the car. The drivers would yell and curse and we’d go back to running around in our kid-made rain.
School Daze
When we moved back to Vernon Avenue after the War, I went to P.S. 54. Most of the Italian kids went to parochial school. You could tell the boys who went to parochial school because they often had red knuckles from the nuns’ rulers. They got whacked with the rulers when they misbehaved or didn’t do their homework. Or per niente, for nothing.
I mentioned that to someone not long after Diane and I got together. Diane said that was just a folktale; nuns didn’t really do that. She had been educated by the Sisters of St. Joseph in Rochester and had become a member of that order herself. So, she was one of those ladies in black outfits teaching school. She insisted she’d never hit anyone with a ruler nor seen anyone hit with a ruler. I believe her on both counts. She is a very gentle person. The Sisters of St. Joseph were a kind and gentle bunch.
But the nuns who taught the guys in my neighborhood were of a different order. Over the years, when we’d meet someone who’d grown up in New York about the same time as I, I’d ask, “Did you get your knuckles rapped?” So many said, “Yes,” or, “I can still feel it,” that Diane finally gave me that one.
New York schools then had a fast track for bright students. It was called “SP,” which I think meant “special program.” We were grouped together in classes that did more work than others at the same school and at the same level. Over a three- or four-year period, we skipped two terms. I had skipped fourth grade, so that meant by the time I was a high school senior I was two years younger than everybody else. What had seemed cool when I was in junior high school turned into a nightmare: the other guys were getting driver’s licenses and I was still pedaling around on my Schwinn, and the girls were far too old for me. Schools handle that sort of thing much better now.
I skipped the term in which you learn about “who” and “whom,” which I still sometimes get wrong. I’ll write something and Diane will correct me on it. She converted a “who” to “whom” in the next paragraph.
I started that program when I went into Junior High School 148. The one teacher I remember from that school, one of the two most important teachers I ever had, was Mrs. Ehrlich, whom I hated at the time. She was my English teacher. She made us keep ethics notebooks. Every day we had to write down three ethical issues we’d encountered or ethical choices we’d made during the day.
This was a class of bright, mostly Jewish and Italian street kids, and we had to write about ethics. There was a Woolworth store on the walk from my house to JHS 148 and every so often two or three of us would go in there and shoplift pencils. I certainly didn’t need the pencils–my father sold them in his store. The shoplifting was just for the sport of it. Usually three of us would work as a team–two to steal the pencils, the third to be lookout, a role we called “laying chickee.”
I always thought that was an absurd name for a lookout and wondered if I remembered it wrong. Google just told me I remember correctly: “playing chickee” or “laying chickee” was to be a lookout. The phrase comes from “Chickee!” a 1930s New York street shout that translated, “Watch out! The cops are coming.”
I don’t think I ever put the shoplifting of pencils in my ethics notebook. But it was from mean Mrs. Ehrlich that the notion of ethics was jammed into my head. It never left. My parents were atheist Jews, so I had no religious education. I’m forever grateful to Mrs. Ehrlich.
The only other class in junior high I hated as much was typing, which my mother forced me to take. I was the only boy in the class. It was humiliating. The guys on the street made fun of me. Typing turned out to be as important in my life as Mrs. Ehrlich’s ethics notebooks. I became a very good touch typist. I’ve written a lot of books, in part because I had that skill. I still have the Royal portable I got for my 13th birthday. I had it with me the whole time I was in the Marines. I took a lot of ribbing for it then, too. But being a fast typist kept me out of the brig once. That’s another story.
(The other teacher who mattered was Mrs. Gold in third grade. She realized I had finished reading the week’s reading assignment on Monday, so she exempted me from the regular reading assignments and brought me books to read. Because of her, I skipped fourth grade, which may have been the who and whom year. She licensed me to go at my own speed, something I’ve tried to apply in my own teaching.)
Cosimo’s pink pistol pockets
The hot book in 1947 was Irving Schulman’s The Amboy Dukes, which was about Jewish street gangs in the Brownville section of Brooklyn. All the boys I knew had read it, even the Italians. There were no kid gangs in my neighborhood, but there were gang-wannabes, one of whom was named Cosimo.
He was enough older than I that we never talked or hung out. He used to lean on the brick wall on the Vernon Avenue side of my father’s store with one foot on the wall behind him. He always had a cigarette in his hand.
After The Amboy Dukes made street gang culture fashionable, Cosimo started wearing one of the most popular gang garments: pants with pegged cuffs and pistol pockets. That is, the cuff was several inches narrower than the calf, and the back pockets had flaps in the shape of a pistol, always in material of a different color. Cosimo’s pants were light blue and his pistol pockets were pink. (Yeah: it was even silly at the time; Cosimo loved those pants.)
He used to come into my father’s store to use the toilet, then he’d go back to his position on the wall. One time, I guess he zipped up and left the toilet too fast because his faucet was still running. As he went out of the store, I saw a huge dark wet stain on the inside of one of his pants legs.
I immediately went onto the block and told everybody. For maybe thirty minutes, kids–boys and girls–would stroll past Cosimo where he stood, one leg behind him on the wall, smoking, being cool. I don’t know if he ever noticed what was going on. Maybe he thought the grins were in admiration of his light blue pants with the pink pistol pockets.
I said there was no kid gang in my neighborhood. I don’t know about the adults. There was one man who lived across the street who my father referred to as “Joey, who is in the Black Hand.” It was pronounced almost like one word: JoeywhoisintheBlackHand.
I asked my father what the Black Hand was. “It’s an Italian thing,” he said. He never said more about it. I don’t know if that was because he didn’t know anything more or if it was because that was another one of the things you didn’t talk to children about.
Fights and a dead guy
Next to my father’s store was a glazier shop run by two Jewish brothers. One day they had a fight. Dozens of us circled around them watching them punch each other bloody. Nobody tried to break it up. In our neighborhood, you didn’t break up fights; you watched them. (One time I got into a fight with the son of one of the neighborhood loan sharks. I was losing badly and I wished someone would break it up. Nobody did. But a lot of people watched, my father among them.) Finally, the two brothers got tired, and went back inside their store and worked together on a large piece of glass.
Another day, a guy came into my father’s store and said he was really thirsty, could he have some water? My father gave him some, he said thanks, he went outside, took a few steps, and collapsed and died in front of the glazier shop. He was the first dead person I’d ever seen. I was maybe 11. I took pictures with my father’s camera and got on the subway to Manhattan. The Daily News was always advertising for spot pictures. They developed my roll, which was overexposed and out of focus, but gave me $5. The photo editor said, “Keep at it, kid.” It was my first photograph sale.
Three on the even side
I had two friends and one object of unending lust in the two apartment houses on the even side of the street, in one of which my father, as I noted earlier, had been born. The friends were Zetz and Danny; the object of lust was Sally.
Zetz was a D.P. His real name was Nathan, but everyone called him Zetz, even his parents. “D.P.” was short for “displaced person,” which is what we called refugees in those days. I never heard anyone use the actual words “displaced persons” for the Jews who survived the camps or their villages and managed to get here after the War. It was just “D.P.”
No one talked about family who had stayed behind or left behind. I once asked my mother about what relatives remained after her parents and my father’s parents left. “What about the others?”
“There were no others. Everyone left.”
It could not have been true. Neither could that have been something my generation’s parents could bear to talk to us about. On both sides, the conversation was unbearable. I’ve since asked friends my age what their parents said in those years. The answer has always been the same: “Nothing.”
For a time, Zetz and I played chess every afternoon on the steps in front of his building. He was a Polish Jew. I don’t remember having any language problem. I remember that none of the other guys hung out with him and some of them didn’t think much of me doing it. Maybe it was because so many of us had family on the block and his family had nobody. Maybe there were language issues I no longer remember. You don’t need talk for chess. He told me wonderful stories about working in the underground, about shooting a machine gun, about killing Nazis. You can tell a good part of stories like that with gestures. I remember some of Zetz’s gestures.
Then, one day, I realized Zetz would have had to have been about seven or eight years old at the time of those stories. I thought of what I had been doing, and capable of doing, at seven or eight. Making it to and from Cumberland Hospital was my single epic adventure. None of the things Zetz had told me was remotely possible or plausible. He’d gotten the stories from other people’s talk, or from the place the rest of us got our heroic stories: movies. I believed them because I’d probably seen the same movies, so I would have known they must have been true.
A switch turned. I had none of the sympathy about need or understanding of how we inhabit other people’s stories that I have now. I felt conned and betrayed. I never spoke to Zetz again.
Sometime later, my father said, “What happened with you and Zetz? You were such buddies.” Then he said, “You’re his only pal.” My father rarely commented on anything I did on the street. I don’t remember what answer I gave, or if I did anything but shrug.
Danny Hyber and I went to P.S. 54 together. We got telephones the same week. Telephones, like cars, had been in short supply during the War, so getting one was a big deal. Even though we saw one another on the block and walked to and from school together. Danny and I talked on the phone every day. I remember our phone number: EVergreen 7-8701. That was when you could tell where someone lived by the telephone exchange: CHelsea, CUmberland, MUrray Hill, Beekman, BUtterfield.”
The main reason we had the phone was so my parents could talk to one another when one was in the store and the other was in the apartment. They were five walk-up flights away. For Danny and me, it was something to do. It was more the fact of doing it rather than having anything to say, much like kids now with their smartphones. (On my way out of the building in which I now teach, I recently heard a young man, who was at that point crossing the street and heading toward the library, say to his smartphone, “Oh, nothing. I’m crossing the street and heading toward the library.”)
In 1991, not long before she died, my mother said, “You remember your friend, Danny Hyber?” I said that I did. “I heard he committed suicide,” she said. We’d been off the block for forty years. I’d never heard her talk about contact with anybody from back then. I asked where she’d heard it. “Somebody told me,” she said.
She said that to me before the Internet. When the Internet came along, I searched Danny Hyber. His name didn’t turn up. None of the names turned up, except Jackie Newfield. People who weren’t out and about after the Internet, they’re hard to find. You don’t know if they’re gone, or if they just haven’t logged in.
And Sally. Sally: my first object of unambiguous lust. She was perhaps a year older than I. She was the daughter of one of the neighborhood loan sharks. She had breasts I could not not-think of. I remember them as fabulous breasts and I am convinced they were, even though I know, at that age, proximity to any breasts at all, on someone close to my age, would have made them fabulous. The other girls our age were barely budding, but Sally had those wondrous adult tits, there, just two garment layers away.
I had only recently learned a crude adolescent version of sex (this was a world before YouPorn, where all is revealed and imagination is superfluous). I desperately wanted to fuck Sally, whatever “fucking” in fact was. I desperately wanted to do all sorts of sweet and tender and fondling and stroking things with and to Sally. I desperately wanted inside those two garment layers. I imagined us in one of the vacant basement rooms in our apartment houses, doing things to one another that we’d figure out how to do once we were there, alone, in the cellar twilight.
It was years before it occurred to me that Sally was perhaps suffering similar thoughts. I realized it because I remembered that just about every time we were close to one another, we’d punch each other on the arm, really hard. Harder than the guys did to one another. Hard enough to show bruises the next day. I don’t remember us ever talking. Just finding an excuse to draw neigh, glower, and then to let one go, really hard.
Hair, opera, circus
The most important part of the block was the barbershop next to the glazier. I hated haircuts–my neck always itched afterwards. But I liked the music. The barber’s name was Vito and, whenever I went in for a haircut, he always had opera on. Back then, the Metropolitan Opera broadcast Saturday afternoons, which was the day my mother sent me there for haircuts.
The Met broadcasts were sponsored for decades by Texaco. I later learned that they did that because they had some illegal Nazi affiliation during World War II and they were trying to build a classier image. It worked.
Vito would sing as he cut, and, since I understood only a little Italian, he would tell me the plot of the opera, or what he thought was the plot of the opera. Years before I ever sat in the Met or any other opera house, I knew the stories–more or less–of just about every opera by Verdi and Puccini. I would, in later life, go to a performance of an opera I had never encountered and, part-way through, think, “I know this song.” It was Vito.
Vito also gave me tickets to things. Back then, one of the ways shows advertised was by getting shop-owners to put posters in their windows. Vito often had posters from the Barnum and Bailey/Ringling Brothers Circus and from rodeos, both of which took place in Madison Square Garden. Every time he put one of those posters in his window, he got two free tickets. He wasn’t interested in circuses or bucking broncos, and he had no family. So I got the tickets. The circus, the rodeo, and the opera stories more than compensated for the itchy neck.
Fire
There were, as I said, two apartmen houses on either side of Vernon where it met Nostrand. The rest of the block, up to Marcy, was brownstones.
One of them was vacant. A few of us used it as a place to hang out. It would have been our clubhouse if we’d had a club, but we didn’t, so it was just where we hung out and did things.
There was nothing there at all, save some old newspapers and letters. It didn’t occur to me, at that age, to look at the letters. One day, one of us, I forget which one, said: “Let’s set the newpapers on fire and see how long it takes the firemen to get here.”
Someone had matches. We gathered the newspapers–all of them old and dry–in the middle of the room, and lit the match. Then one of us ran to the corner and pulled the fire alarm. The rest of us dispersed, but all to places where we could watch the street.
It wasn’t long before smoke came from the second-floor window of the house. And then the firetrucks came. It was easy for them to spot the house in question. They dragged a hose inside, did their work, and were soon gone.
I never gave that adolescent mischief any thought until May 1985, when police in Philadelphia dropped a smoke grenade on a row house in which a communal group called MOVE lived. The grenade set the building on fire. The fire spread, destroying 64 other houses in the neighborhood. It killed eleven MOVE members, five of them children.
We were just curious and mischievous when we set that fire. And more than a little stupid. And we didn’t realize that acting on curiosity and engaging in mischief can have consequences nothing can fix.
The lady in the second-floor window
My sister was born in 1948, when I was 12. I remember walking along the sidewalk with my mother when she was wheeling the baby carriage. People would pass by; people would be on stoops. She’d sometimes stop and talk; she’d sometimes say hello and keep on moving.
But as we approached one house on the block, she always covered my sister’s face and sped up. I remember her saying, “Don’t look up.” I asked why. She said, “That woman on the second floor has malocchio, the evil eye.” She pronounced it maloik, the way the Italians did.
I looked up. A woman was sitting by the second-floor window, looking out at the street. I’d often seen her doing that. I asked, “What’s the evil eye?”
“Maloik,” she said again.
That was no help, so I asked the same question: “What’s that?”
“I don’t know,” she’d say, “but it’s not good.”
My mother, as I said earlier, was a Jewish atheist, hardly at all superstitious. The only holiday she and my father observed was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. For Jews of their generation, Yom Kippur transcended religion. It was as basic as throwing salt over your shoulder after you accidentally spilled some, or not walking under a ladder even though you don’t believe in bad luck. They even fasted.
But she wasn’t going to risk my sister being exposed to that woman with malocchio.
When we were both a lot older, not long before she died, I asked her what that was about. “I didn’t believe in it,” she said, “but that woman did, and you never know.”
It wasn’t just an old Italian lady in a second-floor window who brought malocchio into my life. When I was in high school, leaving the house of a girl I was dating, I would frequently find a head of garlic hanging from my rear-view mirror.
The first time, I thought the girl did it, as a gag. The second time, I asked. She shrugged. “It’s my grandmother,” she said. Her grandmother lived with her family. No one knew how old she was. She was a Sephardic Jew from Salonika, Greece. She spoke no English and referred to me as “The Americano.” The girl pointed at my car. “She’s protecting it from the Evil Eye,” she said.
“What’s that?” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said, “but my nana does.”