I opened our apartment door and instantly smelled fire and tasted smoke. As I pushed the door in I saw my father on the floor, on his knees in front of his open closet in the foyer.

“Dad! Dad!” I screamed.

“It’s ok,” he said. “There was a fire, but I put it out.”

He was holding a half-full glass of water.

“Should I call the fire department?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I’ll call Jack Plotnick in a little while.”

*****

We lived in the West Bronx, on a typical Bronx block filled with six-story apartment buildings interspersed with a few two-family houses. It was a working-class neighborhood populated by mostly Jewish families. The fathers went to work as cab drivers, haberdashery salesmen, garment center workers, candy store owners, truck drivers, teachers, tailors, pharmacists, house painters, fruit vendors, accountants, musicians, upholsterers and printers.

The mothers mostly stayed home and took care of the kids, shopped, cooked and cleaned.

Among the families in our building and the immediate vicinity, we were in the lower half of the economic spectrum. My father was a factory worker in the fur trade, a fur operator skilled at sewing together individual mink pelts into a coat, a cape or a stole. He was from a long line of furriers going back many generations in Russia. It was my grandfather’s skill in the fur trade that allowed him to even dream of moving to America in the early 1890s. The czar’s approaching “army recruiters” enabled his dream to come true sooner rather than later.

The problem of being a worker in the fur trade in those days was that the work was seasonal. And that meant there often were long stretches of time when my father was out of work. And that meant out of money.

There were few luxuries in our household. The four of us, my parents, my 16-year-old sister and I all lived in a one bedroom apartment. We didn’t spend summers at the beach or up in the mountains, as many of my friends’ families did. We didn’t own a car as more and more of our neighbors did. My mother didn’t own much jewelry and, despite my father’s trade, didn’t dress in furs.

My father hardly drank and never spent time in bars. He never ran around with other women and was not a big gambler. He did occasionally play in a floating crap game he helped organize for men in the neighborhood, but the stakes were relatively small. When he won, it was no more than the cost of a good meal for the entire family at The House of Chan in Manhattan. That’s how he used his winnings.

When he lost, it never impacted the family’s standard of living. At worst, it meant he would have to forego a couple of lunches of cream cheese on date nut bread at Schrafft’s during the week.

But my father did have one vice: fine clothes.

He didn’t have an extensive wardrobe, but what he had was fit for royalty – literally. He had always told us that when it came to his clothes, if he didn’t have the money, he would rather do without for a while than buy an item that was not the finest.

Of his four suits, the two oldest were bespoke, purchased before my sister was born. No one, including my mother, knew what he paid for them. After my sister came along, he compromised and bought his suits from the Men’s Shop at Saks Fifth Avenue for about $175. Saks was also his source for socks (French lisle) at $15 a pair; handkerchiefs (hand-rolled Irish linen) at $10 each; shirts (custom-made) at $30 each; and underwear (silk or Egyptian cotton) with no elastic but rather custom-sewn buttons to his fit at $20 each. (These prices are all in 1950s dollars when our rent was $42 a month and a pack of cigarettes cost 15 cents.)

My father’s ties were, of course, silk and came only from Sulka at about $25 apiece. His overcoats, one for winter, one for spring, were from F.R. Tripler at about $100. His grey fedora hats were from Cavanaugh at $40 apiece. Each of these retailers was pretty much known as the finest shop in the city for the merchandise each sold.

Every day of his working life my father left home dressed in a suit, a freshly laundered and pressed shirt, with a tie around his neck, a handkerchief in his outer breast pocket and a fedora slightly tilted on his head. He may have been a factory worker but no Wall Street lawyer ever looked better dressed.

And he came home every day, regardless of how hot or nasty the weather, looking exactly the same.

He cut a unique figure in our Bronx neighborhood. While he stood about 5’9” tall, with his slim build and tailored clothing, he always appeared taller. He walked at a brisk pace and with such a distinctive bounce in his gait that my friends learned to spot him approaching our building from three blocks away.

But if there was one item that defined my father more than any other, it was his shoes. He would never compromise on shoes. They were connected to his soul.

Again, he didn’t own many pairs of shoes. I can recall no more than three or four pairs at any one time. But everyone in the family and all close friends knew his occasional declaration: “These shoes are custom-made by the same boot maker who makes shoes for the Duke of Windsor.”

It had been a good number of years in that spring of 1950 since my father bought himself a new pair of shoes. The year before, he had taken his black wingtips to the boot maker for repairs and was told that they no longer could be refurbished. He continued to wear them, sparingly, throughout the year but by the spring, they were on their last legs. His problem was that he didn’t have the cash to order a new pair.

Now, he could have gone to Thom McAnn and gotten a pair of wingtips for about $12. Or, he could have gone a little more upscale and visited Florsheim and spent about $15 - $18. He might even have been able to get a pair of Bali shoes for $35 or $40.

But he would never compromise on shoes.

And that is where the situation stood on that spring Saturday – until the hand of fate (or some other hand) intervened.

*****

The apartment was filled with smoke and an acrid stench. My father told me to open all the windows and I dutifully followed his instruction. When I got back to him, he was standing in front of his closet, looking down at the floor.

“My shoes are ruined,” he said mournfully. “My black wingtips are burned to a crisp.” Then he turned away and walked slowly into the kitchen. I followed and watched as he opened a cabinet and took out a bottle of Cherry Heering, his favorite alcoholic beverage. He took a small glass and filled it halfway and then sat at the table and sipped quietly.

After about 15 minutes he got up and went to the phone in the foyer.

“I’m going to call Jack Plotnick now,” he said. He put on his glasses, looked up the number in our address book and dialed.

“Hello, Jack. This is Luke Miller. I’m sorry to bother you, but we had a little accident down here, a little fire,” he told Plotnick. “Yeah, we’re all ok, everyone’s fine. But, could you come right down? OK. Good.”

Plotnick, one of our upstairs neighbors, was a very successful, self-employed insurance agent. His agency sold all forms of insurance – personal, business, life, burglary, fire. And he was as persistent as, well, an insurance salesman. I remember the many times he sat at our kitchen table with my mother and father trying to convince them to buy a small life insurance policy to “just take care of final expenses.” But each time he left without making the sale. My parents told him they couldn’t afford it, even when Plotnick said, “But it’s only a couple of dollars a month.” My parents never had life insurance.

Within three minutes of my father’s call, Plotnick was at our door. He was a short, pudgy man of about 50 with horn-rimmed glasses and curly grey, thinning hair. He always seemed out of breath.

“What happened? I smell it. Where was the fire?” he asked.

My father directed him to the closet.

Plotnick looked in. He stared at the floor and bent down and touched the ruined shoes. Then he stood and looked at the clothes – my father’s suits and ties and overcoats. He took out each piece of clothing on its hanger, examined it and put it back. Then he looked up at the closet ceiling, pushed the clothes aside and looked into the back of the closet and then all the way to the left and right.

“What happened here?” he asked my father.

“I smelled smoke and saw it coming from under the closet door. When I opened the door I saw flames so I got some water and put it out. It must have been electrical, a spark or something,” my father suggested.

“But there aren’t any wires in your closet,” Plotnick told him. “Could you have dropped a cigarette or an ash?”

My father shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. He didn’t know.

“It’s amazing,” Plotnick said. “Luckily, the only thing damaged by the fire is a pair of shoes.”

My father agreed it was lucky.

“Well, your fire insurance policy will pay for your shoes,” Plotnick announced with a smile. “All you have to do is get me a sales receipt and I’ll take care of the rest.”

“Wait here,” my father said. “I have it in the bedroom.”

He came back a minute later holding a yellow store receipt. “I save all my clothing receipts,” he told Plotnick as he handed him the bill.

Plotnick took the receipt and peered at it through his thick lenses. “Wait a minute,” he said. “There’s a problem here.”

“What’s wrong?” my father asked.

“The decimal point is in the wrong place,” Plotnick said. “The way this is written, it looks as if the shoes cost $125, not $12.50. You’ll have to get a new bill.”

“That’s not a mistake, Jack,” my father said. “The shoes cost $125.”

“Now, come on, Luke. Are you kidding? $125 for a pair of shoes? What are they made of, gold?”

And my father responded: “Jack, these shoes are custom-made by the same boot maker who makes shoes for the Duke of Windsor. That’s what they cost. I can show you the receipts for the others in the closet. Better yet, call the company and you ask them. And ask them if I’m a customer.”

Plotnick glanced at my father with his head slightly tilted to the side and a half smile on his face. “So, tell me, how much does this cost?” He was holding the sleeve of a navy overcoat.

“About $100,” my father said. Plotnick slapped his right palm against his jowly cheek and quietly moaned.

“And this,” Plotnick asked as he held out a tie from the rack on the door. “What, you’re going to tell me about $15?”

“No,” my father said. “It’s from Sulka and it costs $25.”

“Ok, you win. I’ll see what I can do.” And Plotnick left.

It wasn’t too long before my mother returned home from her job selling women’s hats at Lord & Taylor. My father filled her in on the details, including Plotnick’s visit.

“What was Plotnick doing here?” my mother asked.

“I’m putting in a claim under the fire insurance policy,” my father offered.

“Fire insurance!” my mother exclaimed in a tone two octaves above normal. “Since when do we have fire insurance?”

“Well, last year I was outside talking to Plotnick and I asked him how fire insurance worked. And before I knew it, he convinced me to buy a small policy,” my father explained.

My mother said: “But fire insurance? You said we couldn’t even afford life insurance. Why would you buy fire insurance?”

“Well, Plotnick says it’ll pay for my shoes.”

One evening about ten days later, Plotnick showed up with a check. He gave it to my father and said, “You know Luke, after you showed me the cost of everything in your closet, I got to thinking. You really need a larger policy.”

And my father said: “You know what, Jack. My wife says we can’t afford a policy anymore. I’ll have to cancel it now.”

*****

My father never talked about the fire after that. For a couple of weeks, both my mother and sister periodically pressed him about what happened. He told them time after time it was just an accident.

I couldn’t understand why they kept pestering him. He told what happened and that was it. What more did they want? I believed he was a hero; he put out the fire and maybe saved the apartment, the building.

It was a few years later, when I was about 15 or 16, that I thought about the incident and it dawned on me why they kept quizzing him.

What had happened on that long-ago Saturday? My father was always smoking. His Chesterfields left more than a couple of burn marks on the living room coffee table, his dresser, the linoleum in the foyer.

Maybe he dropped a book of matches on his closet floor. Maybe he went to his closet with a cigarette in his hand. Maybe a hot ash fell onto the matches and they burst into flame. And maybe he unknowingly fanned the flames when he closed the door, only to smell smoke and see it seeping from the closet a few minutes later.

On the other hand, a fire insurance policy?

Berton Miller is a retired ad agency owner, former Adjunct Professor of Communications at Iona College
and sporadic freelance writer. He grew up in the Bronx and now lives in Manhattan and Sag Harbor with
his wife (and muse), Ivy, and their yellow Lab, Bravo.

“What subway are you taking home?” Emma asked me. There was a slight lilt in her voice that I took to be Caribbean. I had noticed Emma earlier as I was crawling out of the sweat lodge. She was sitting near the exit gently rocking back and forth in meditation, her face serene. Light caramel colored skin, hair pulled back in a ponytail, she had a small frame, and delicate features. I guessed her to be in her 50s. Emma sat next to me too in the dirt near the fire as the shaman said some closing prayers for the ritual. That time Emma sat cross-legged, Indian style, with her eyes open watching the fire. Her right hand shook, as if holding a violin in vibrato, or a penis in excitement.

Turns out that Emma and I lived near one another in Brooklyn, so Jay offered her a ride. We walked over to his 4-wheel drive Honda and got in. Jay in the driver seat, me in the passenger, and Emma behind me. Jay and I were just getting to know each other, so I wasn’t sure if romance was on his agenda. If it was, I put the brakes on that direction by blurting out earlier in the night that I thought he was my dad in a past life. So I thought Emma was a good buffer for any further embarrassing interaction between Jay and me. She’d be an asset to the conversation.

Emma and I agreed the quickest route from the South Bronx would be the BQE to Brooklyn. Jay had a vague idea of how to get to the highway. I had none.

As Jay started the car and turned on Brook Street, he paused at the first traffic light. Emma screamed out to a man on the street, “Hey papi, do you know how to get to the BQE from here?” Her tone was assertive but not aggressive. She obviously had no inhibitions asking questions. I awkwardly smiled as he looked into the car. Who knew what she attracted? Jay looked in the other direction. I wondered if he thought about locking the windows in the backseat so she couldn’t roll them down.

We saw signs for the Bruckner Boulevard, Willis Avenue, the Third Avenue Bridge and New England. Several illegal u-turns later, Jay said rather bluntly, “It would have been quicker if you two had taken the subway.” He didn’t sound angry, just frustrated.

But Emma was undeterred. “Go straight down this road and you’ll run right into the highway,” a third man on the street responded to her catcalls. I noticed we were back on the road we had started on.

Sure enough, there it was. We got on the BQE headed West and Jay sped a bit to make up for lost time. He didn’t say anything but I saw his grip tighten on the wheel.

Having Emma in the car was like turning on an early-morning AM radio program. Her chatter was constant, rapid-fire, and somewhat nonsensical. We couldn’t turn down her dial, we had no choice but to listen. She was a teacher, did a recent teacher team-building exercise. They were stranded on a desert island and could only keep a few items from a list. One teacher insisted the group keep a gun rather than a rope or water. “The rest of us agreed. We decided we could shoot him if he caused too much trouble, like Lord of the Flies,” she giggled. And Jay and I laughed at her.

We talked too about the sweat lodge.

“I noticed you. You shake. Vibrate,” I said and mimicked her hand gesture.

She had been sitting into the backseat, but then moved into the middle of the seat, closer to Jay and I.

“Oh yes, I was invited to another spiritual gathering where my friend Matthew was going to see the Black Madonna.”

Jay was quiet during this part of Emma’s story. Did he know about the Black Madonna? We hadn’t yet shared all our self-help escapades, so perhaps he knew more than me. I made a mental note to look it up when I got home.

“At some point at the ceremony, I fainted, and then got up to dance,” Emma continued.

Did she dance like Madonna the pop-star in the“like a virgin” or “crazy for you” videos?

“It was tribal, my dance. And since then I’ve had the shakes,” she said as if to answer my unasked thought.

Rather than sound ignorant, I asked some journalistic questions.

“Does it hurt? Are you always shaking? Doesn’t it scare you? Doesn’t it scare the kids at the school?” I smiled as I asked and tried not to catch Jay’s eye to keep from laughing. I didn’t want to offend Emma with my giggles, but I still wasn’t sold on her gift. Emma smiled too. I guessed a lot of people didn’t believe her at first.

“It doesn’t hurt. I get a burning sensation in my palms and know the shaking will begin. It means that someone nearby needs to be healed. It usually occurs in a spiritual place, like the sweat lodge or a Hindu temple. So no, it doesn’t happen at school. I’ve always been empathic,” she told Jay and me matter-of-factly.

“We were talking about that earlier,” Jay looked at me.

“Yes, we were discussing how we could feel someone else’s pain. Like you’re in a great mood, then all of a sudden a sadness fills you up for no reason. As if you’re taking in someone else’s energy,” I said to make the connection with Jay and Emma.

“You need to get some black tourmaline from Chinatown. That will help you,” she suggested as she lifted her slim wrist and shook her multiple bracelets, “The gem will help protect your energy.”

Jay shook his head in assent as if he’d been told that before. I learned new things by the minute.

Emma told us that, at first, she wasn’t quite sure what to do with her new gift. “So I went to see the thirteen grandmothers. And the Brazilian one, she told me I was lucky. I was a healer.” Again, I wasn’t sure about her reference. She spoke as if Jay and I were well-versed in the self-help, shaman realm. Were the Black Madonna and the Thirteen Grandmothers new-age icons? I hid my ignorance.

As if on cue, Emma’s wrist started to move. Was this a magic trick?

“This isn’t a sacred space, this is a car,” I said as I pursed my lips in a frown.

“I just need spiritual energy. There’s some in the car,” she stated and moved closer so her body was between Jay and me, “Who needs to be healed?”

I looked at her and said, “I just had a healing with a Filipina healer, so I’m all good.” And the truth was, I did have a healing session with a Filipina babaylan about two weeks prior. She fluffed my aura, read my chakras, did an astrological chart, and cleared up an issue in a past life. So I was confident it wasn’t me.

Jay, on the other hand, somberly said, “I’m having a problem with my heart chakra.” Poor guy. I hadn’t known he was going through a rough patch. We had just finished up at the sweat lodge and he seemed to be in a good mood. Did I misread the situation?

So the strategy was Emma would touch my shoulder and I would touch Jay’s. Her healing energy would flow through me because he was driving and she didn’t want to overwhelm him by touching him directly. I wasn’t sure I could say no to this arrangement. And I certainly didn’t want Emma to touch Jay if it could cause an accident, so I agreed. His facial expressions didn’t change, so I wasn’t sure if he was skeptical or not. But he didn’t move away when I touched his shoulder. I think we both wanted to see what would happen.

I braced myself. I thought it would feel like heat or a surge of adrenaline or maybe an orgasm. But I didn’t feel anything. As soon as she started, she stopped. She removed her hand from my shoulder. Her shaking stopped.

“Are you okay?” I asked Jay. He nodded but seemed more focused on the road than before. I’m not sure if he was mad or weirded out by the attempted healing. And I’m not so sure about Emma’s gift at this point.

Jay took the Kent Avenue exit off the BQE and I tried to change the topic by making small talk about the neighborhood. We all smelled of earth, smoke, sage, lemongrass and sweat from being inside the sweat lodge. Our collective funk reminded me that earlier in the day my cousin had given me a perfume set for my birthday. Perhaps a spritz would clear the air? I rarely wear perfume so I tried to give the set to Emma who insisted Jay give it to his mother. “Its almost mother’s day,” she said. Earlier she had told us that she had two children ages 29 and 31, a little bit younger than Jay and me. I wondered if we reminded her of them.

Within blocks of Emma’s apartment, she asked us to keep in touch. She scribbled down her name, address, email and phone number. She told us she was on Facebook. And that sometimes she felt the emotions of her friends through the computer. But she simultaneously played Mafia Wars as they instant chatted. She’s on level 2 and adept at killing. I thought her sweet and maybe insane. Sure, I’d be her Facebook friend. Why not? I think Jay wanted to be in touch with her too.

We stopped at a traffic light before taking a right onto Emma’s block. Her shaking began again.

“Oh yes, someone definitely needs some healing,” she announced. Jay double-parked in front of Emma’s apartment building. He turned off the gas. The car was silent. If he didn’t believe her before, his current actions told me otherwise.

Emma powerfully rubbed his arms, his chest, his back and over his heart. She was slight but her touch was firm against Jay’s muscular frame. I watched, silent, unsure what to do. He was very still and very quiet. I could tell her massage was affecting him.

“Release your anger. You don’t need it. Let it go. Breathe,” she advised. I noticed too her demeanor had changed. She was focused and serious.

Jay inhaled and let out a huge exhalation. And with that Emma’s tremors ended. We all hugged and she went inside. But she came back out one last time to make sure we knew the way home. In that moment, Emma reminded me of my mother.

“Oh my god, what just happened?” I asked Jay as he drove the few blocks to my apartment. We laughed as we rehashed the events with Emma. Lost in the Bronx, yelling at bystanders, the story about the Black Madonna and the thirteen grandmothers. I peed on myself just a little bit from laughing so hard.

But then in all seriousness, I asked Jay, “Was it true. Did you need a healing?”

“Yeah. I got fired from my job,” he responded. He didn’t look at me and was measured in his response. I wasn’t sure if he wanted to tell me more. If he wanted to keep his story private.

“I just lost it. Lost my cool. Took an action at work that I regret,” Jay shared but I didn’t press him. Whatever it was, it was bad. The happy expression he had five minutes before was replaced by a sad, distant look.

“Then my girlfriend broke up with me. All of it was too much. You know what I mean?” he looked at me this time. His voice cracked as he said it. Was he going to cry? His life sucked at that point, I got that.

Jay confessed too that he was skeptical of Emma at first. That you could throw “anger” and “forgiveness” in any direction and someone would relate to it. But why would she go through all that trouble? I had to agree. To me, she was just shy of crazy. But something about her interaction with Jay brought him peace. For that, I was glad.

The drive from Emma’s neighborhood to mine took five minutes. I hugged Jay goodbye, opened the car door, and ran into my apartment building. Whatever just happened, I was happy it was over.

Amelia Blanquera is a freelance writer and lawyer. She is a community contributor to the NY Times Local blog and writes regularly for spirituality/creativity site Soulpancake.com, which will release its first book this fall.

“Aw, c’mon, BB, let’s do it,” recommended “Reese,” one of my Southwest Bronx neighborhood pals and fellow schoolmate during my sophomore year at DeWitt Clinton High School. Otherwise easygoing, when it came to missing school, I couldn’t legitimize attending a weekday baseball game . . . that’s what weekends were for and I’d be too guilt-ridden if I had yielded.

Pal “Reese” obviously didn’t mind missing a day of school for what he believed would be a truly memorable game . . . sure enough, that game became legendary when the Orioles’ Frank Robinson did a backwards-flip up-and-over the outfield wall to catch Yankee Roy White’s fly ball.

Both teams’ umpires had a tough time determining this play. Did Robinson actually catch the ball during his backwards-flip? Did he “bobble-the-ball” instead? What actually happened behind that outfield wall? The outcome wasn’t caught by the TV cameras, nor was it within the umpires’ field of vision.

The toughest point of contention was the time that elapsed before Robinson triumphantly arose behind the outfield wall and held-up the ball as high as his arm could extend. The umpires argued whether Robinson’s time behind the wall involved retrieving a “bobbled” or fallen ball.

Fortunately, what the TV cameras captured on videotape suggested that Robinson was directly following the descending ball’s path – that he could have “made the catch” by remaining within the ball’s “flight pattern” as it angled downward over the outfield wall.

Robinson was ultimately credited with “the catch.”

But it was Yankee Steve Whitaker who made that day even more memorable for pal “Reese.” Reese and Whitaker actually bumped heads over the low bleachers wall, beyond which there was an equally-low fence. This low fence separated the playing field from the bleachers wall, leaving enough space for a bleachers spectator to reach over the low wall and to retrieve a ball between the wall and the fence. Eventually, the Yankees removed this gap.

Wow! Pal “Reese” interfered with a play! Always bringing along his fielder’s glove (I still have my vintage 1966 Detroit Tigers Al Kaline glove!!), he wore the glove during every play, anticipating a successful catch if a fly ball approached.

Go for it, “Reese” . . . catch that ball . . . it’s headed right to you. And so “Reese” ran towards the bleachers wall in the direct path of the incoming ball – from which Orioles player I don’t recall – and briskly reached down into the space, or gap, between the wall and the low outer fence.

Yankee Steve Whitaker missed the overhead fly ball as it plummeted into the bleachers gap. Oh, well, at least he could retrieve it and hurl it to the second baseman. Not really – not with pal “Reese” running towards the gap, reaching down into the gap at the same time as Yankee Steve Whitaker.

Oh, no . . . that’s all Steve Whitaker needed – a teenaged spectator interfering with the play, preventing a timely strikeout but allowing for an unwelcome collision as their heads’ “bumped.”

After the game, pal “Reese” waited outside the stadium gates hoping to get ballplayers’ autographs. Just as Steve Whitaker exited, pal “Reese” retreated behind the other fans, fearing recognition. Could you blame him? Only for cutting school perhaps!

Barry F. Bealick, a lifelong resident of The Bronx, was born in the shadows of Yankee Stadium, at 1355 Grand Concourse, which opened in 1923 — the same year that Yankee Stadium was completed. A member of The Bronx County Historical Society, Mr. Bealick subscribes to Back In The Bronx magazine.

Dad would spend hours playing Brahms, Schumann, Clementi, Chopin. At the end, he would always start playing an old Russian folk song called “Two Guitars” and stare wistfully into space. It’s my belief that this was a song that he used to play, during his childhood, as a duet with his violin-playing brother, who died an untimely death in the late ’40s.

When I was eight years old or so, Dad started teaching me to play the piano. At first, I really enjoyed it. But it soon became clear to me that I had no say in what I played – I’d have to play what he wanted me to play. And if I played something incorrectly or made an insufficient effort, he’d yell: “You idiot! You moron! Wrong! WRONG, WRONG, WRONG!” By the time I was 12, I told Dad I didn’t want to take lessons anymore, although I never stopped playing, on and off. Dad tried to teach my brother too, but my brother, who was more outspoken in criticizing our parents, only lasted six months or so with Dad as a teacher.

Anyway, that same year, when I was 12, the Beatles came to America. I would often go to the piano and try to play the Beatles, the Dave Clark Five, Motown. This drove my father nuts. “That’s not music! THAT’S JUST BANGING!” he’d say. He’d take to locking the piano with a key he had, just so that I wouldn’t play it when he was in the house. And the worst of it was that my father definitely didn’t believe in the golden rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” There was only one TV in the house, and it, too, was in the living room. Many was the time that I’d have to wait what seemed like an eternity until my father finished practicing piano for the night, until I could watch one of my favorite TV programs. It’s probably thanks to him that I never really grew to like classical music, with the possible exception of Bach and Handel — and it took my wife, years later, to make me appreciate them.

I moved out of the house, then moved back, then moved out again, then moved back again, then moved out for good, but the piano was always there. The unsteady piano bench, with its wobbly legs, finally went the way of all wood, but the piano itself remained. In the early days he’d call piano tuners periodically, but when he got older, especially after my mother died, he let things go, and the piano’s sound became tinny. Still, he practiced every day.

Finally, in 2004, he died. One day, while going to Dad’s Co-op City apartment to clean up, I met a young pre-adolescent girl and her mother in the hallway. I told them Dad had died. “I knew it,” the girl said. “I haven’t hearing him playing his piano for a long time. I used to hear him every day! I knew all his songs!” I was a little thrown off – I don’t know if you can call a Bach fugue a “song” – but it soon occurred to me that he hadn’t changed these “songs” in 35 years. Once, a friend had tried to give him some new sheet music – I remember “Mussogursky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” was one of them – and Dad tried to make a go of it, but he soon fell back on the tried and true. The pieces he played regularly were likely the same ones he’d played back in the East Bronx, during his childhood in the 1930s.

My brother’s son Joseph, a rock musician in his 20s, wanted the piano. He had, my brother told me, written many of his own songs on this piano. The movers soon came, and the piano was wheeled away after 25 or so years in Marble Hill and 35 years in Co-op City, gone to a new life.

Raanan Geberer is a community newspaper editor in Brooklyn who is now in a Master of Arts in Teaching program. He grew up in the Bronx, went to SUNY and once lived in Washington Heights, although he now lives in Chelsea’s Penn South co-op with his wife Rhea and cat Celeste.

On any given day at this site something totally unexpected happens, the kind of incident no one I know ever describes while we discuss our day at work over coffee. My stories rather than create mere interest, usually stimulate coffee nose tricks. After every insanity–as the honcho, or resident honchette–it falls to me to handle it. The incident, not the turd, thanks god.

So I summon Pepe, the janitor, to extricate it. I dread this, but tell myself each time I need to call him that it goes with the turf. There are whole days when Pepe doesn’t nudge a dust ball. But when bad things happen they sometimes fall into Pepe’s bailiwick. Pepe brings things back to merely abnormal. Like the time that Mr. Malatesta brought in his pit bull who killed a cat in front of the clinic ramp. Pepe had to clean that up, too.

He was new then. That was before, on a rare peek into the clinic storeroom, I discovered one entire wall plastered with semi-nude photos of Madonna, ripped from a wide variety of popular magazines. That was the start of the event I later called “The Battle of the Madonna Pinups.”

With my discovery I had to request Pepe to take them down after explaining to him that the store room, where he changes clothes and sneaks smokes, is not his office, private or otherwise, and the discovery of his crotch trove by my boss or an unannounced state auditor would create tsunamic consequences for us both.

First he whined and cadged. When I finally said, “Pepe, please stop trying to manipulate me,” he replied, “I only manipulate the women I make love to.” Did he really say that? Yes.

“Pepe, you have no right to post pictures of bare breasts in there.”

“It’s my office,” he retorted.

“No it’s not. And it’s not your garage.”

“Other workers have pictures on their walls,” he sneered.

“They’re counselors. They see patients all day and they put up reproductions of restful scenes, and inspirational sayings, not semi-nudes.”

“These are my inspirations. They give me strength!”

“Stop now. Pepe. Just hear me, please. They have to go.” I could feel myself on the edge of an abyss.

“I need them,” he added, “This is my shrine; I look at them every morning.” His voice had gotten louder and slightly mean.

“Skip the religion, please. There’s an empty locker in the hallway. Drag it in here and put them inside it if you need inspiration, but they can’t be visible whenever anyone opens the door to the storeroom. Finito.”

I started to walk back toward my office. He followed close behind.

“I have a constitutional right!” he shouted.

“Bull.” I was struggling with the door to my office. I wanted to yell, “Call a lawyer!”

Instead I said, “Pepe, I’m too angry to talk to you any more right now. We’ll talk again when I’ve cooled down. You better think about what I said in the meantime. It’s not an office, and this is a state-funded clinic and the constitution has zip to do with it. Put your pictures in the locker tomorrow and enjoy them in privacy. The end.”

“You don’t respect me.” He carped.

“Pepe, if I didn’t respect you I would have ripped them off the wall as soon as I saw them instead of speaking to you about them. I’d also write you up for insubordination for refusing to take them down. Instead you give me a hard time.” This was the first time I’ve ever raised my voice at a worker. I closed my office door behind me.

Pepe was still arguing with me when we locked the clinic and left with the Burns guards.

“Talk to Sgt. Diaz,” I told him, knowing they carpool and the Sarge would clue him in, “He won’t lie to you. Ask him if I’m being fair or if I’m asking you to do something out of line. Then tomorrow tell me what you decide.” I could tell he had already talked to the Sarge, who was nodding in agreement behind Pepe’s back.

This doody is three years later and now we get along, Pepe and I. I still don’t know if or when he’s conning me, doing a kind of Latino Stepin Fetchit, but when there’s a shit in a cabinet he knows who’s going to clean it up, even if we never learn who’s made the smelly statement.

You know, it might just be a staff person. Someone who wants to create commentary, controversy, disgust. One of the more demented ones.

My friends think they’re having a tough day when the printer gets jammed, or it takes an hour for the lunch delivery to arrive, or any one of a thousand office vagaries. I feel good when no one comes to the clinic carrying a bazooka. An anonymous poop doesn’t get me down.

Originally from southeastern Massachusetts, Marcelle Harrison lived on City Island for many years enjoying the quiet almost crime-free life in far northeastern Bronx.

My brother Elliott was also at home – he’d just received his BA from Stony Brook and was also looking into going to grad school in a science-related field. Come to think of it, that was the last summer all four of us – me, Elliott, Mom and Dad – lived together in that apartment.

When the lights went off, we, like everyone else, thought it was a local thing in our apartment and rushed to the circuit-breaker panel. But then Elliott noticed that all the windows in the neighboring buildings had also gone dark. Mom lit a Yahrtzeit candle, a traditional Jewish memorial candle, and Dad got out the transistor radio and the flashlight. At first, the radio just reported that the blackout was citywide, although they expected some neighborhoods to “go on” sooner than others. But then, there were reports of looting in several inner-city neighborhoods, especially in Brooklyn.

“The animals are gonna start breaking into the stores on Fordham Road any moment now,” said my non-too-subtly racist father. “Alexander’s, Sears, they’ll all have to move. Fordham Road will be ruined, just like Crotona Park was. It’s a damn shame,” he said, shaking his head. “Thank God tomorrow’s Saturday – I won’t have to work. I just wished I had gone to the supermarket tonight!” Remembering the last big blackout, in ’65, he informed us that at least the phone lines would work.

Bored, Elliott and I drifted into our room. “Let’s make some calls,” he said, with a naughty grin. In his freshman year, one of his college roommates had introduced him to the joy of making crank phone calls. Although he was moving away from this juvenile activity, there wasn’t much else to do now that the power was off.

“Who should we call?” I asked.

“How about Bob Marksman?” Bob had been Elliott’s closest childhood friend, although they hardly saw each other nowadays. “I’ll give you the phone, and you put on an accent. Say any crazy thing you like!”

The phone rang, and a young male voice, which I supposed to belong to Bob, answered. “Hey,” I said in an old-man’s Yiddish accent, “You hoid about dat homo blackout?” He mumbled something, then hung up. We both giggled.

Then, it was my turn. “How about Angelo,” I asked, mentioning a friend who had gotten married a few months ago.

“You kidding?” Elliott asked. “He’s probably f—ing his wife!”

Ignoring him, I dialed Angelo. “Hi,” I said, dispensing with the crank idea, “This is Ron. How are you doing?”

“Um,” said Angelo, “can you call some other time? We’re busy now.”

I hung up. “See?” my brother said, turning to me. “He’s f—-ing his wife!”

On that note, we went to sleep. We wondered if we should take the transistor radio into the room and listen to Jean Shepherd, like we used to in our teens, but we didn’t even know if he was still on the air.

In the morning, we listened to the radio. They were rattling off a list of neighborhoods where the power was already on. One of them was City Island, about a 20-minute walk from Co-op City’s Section 5, where we lived.

I suggested walking over to City Island and buying some food at the small grocery store – only as much as I could carry. Elliott enthusiastically agreed, although he couldn’t go along with me – he had to go to his part-time summer job as a gardener on the grounds in an hour or so, although he still didn’t know whether the maintenance office would be open.

“Let’s make a list,” Elliott said. “Mom and Dad always have lots and lots of bottles of apple juice and cans of soup and boxes of cereal, and some coffee, and like, also a box of spaghetti, so we don’t need any of that stuff.”

“Let’s see,” I said “What’s not perishable?”

“Good, good.”

“Maybe I could get a bottle of soda!”

“Good, good. And don’t forget spaghetti sauce.”

“OK, spaghetti sauce. I’ll also buy a loaf of bread and some orange juice, and, let’s see, some cheddar cheese, and some carrots and celery, um, with a few apples and a box of raisins.”

“Now you’re really swingin’, Jack’!” Elliott said, approvingly.

“And I’ll get a carton of milk!”

“Milk? What’s wrong with you?!!! It’s too perishable!” said Elliott, ever the scientist. “You gotta get some yogurt! It has bacteria in it that will make it last longer!”

“OK, yogurt!” I reluctantly conceded. I slipped on my clothes, laced up my sneakers and headed to the living room, where Dad was reading a magazine and slurping a cup of coffee.

“I’m going to City Island to buy some food. The radio said the power’s back on there.”

“City Island, eh?” he asked. “Why don’t we go to one of those seafood joints and get some shrimp and clams? Yeah, yeah, shrimp and clams!” he said, laughing. Dad wasn’t very religious, but he never missed an opportunity to make fun of non-Jews for eating shellfish, which he termed “scavengers” and “dirty animals.”

I said nothing, but just headed out the door. We lived on the 20th floor. Thank God the co-op had its own emergency power — although it was only for the elevators, hallways and lobbies, not inside the apartments.

I left the building, walked across the covered bridge over Pelham Parkway, and then down the dirt path through the weeds leading to Pelham Parkway itself. Walking on the side of the road, I passed the garbage dump, the horse stables, the Police Department firing range. Then, I came to a crossroads, although certainly one more prosaic than Robert Johnson’s “Crossroads.” One way led to Orchard Beach, the other to City Island. Taking the road toward City Island, I passed the Turtle Bay golf driving range, where I spent many idle hours on less-complicated days.

Finally, the City Island Bridge – the narrow island’s only link to the mainland – and then City Island itself, with its boat yards, seafood restaurants, Navy surplus stores and art galleries. With one exception – the five-story “skyscraper” in the middle of the island — none of the buildings were more than two stories high. I walked into City Island’s sole grocery store and got everything on the list. The guy behind the counter saw that it would be heavy, so he gave me two strong paper bags with handles, for which I was grateful.

Walking home along the same path, the bags felt heavier and heavier, and I had to put them down every 20 steps or so. The hot sun was scorching. Feeling totally miserable, I thought about my life. I wasn’t a full-time journalist – all I was, was a goddamned ARTICLE WRITER! Two couples my own age I knew had recently gotten married – Angelo and Karen, and Mark and Natalie – and I hadn’t even had a real girlfriend for five years, although I dated a lot. And to top it off, I still lived with my parents. The fact that I had lived on my own when I was away at school didn’t mean a damn thing now! As I saw it, I was batting zero.

Just then, as I was passing the trash dump, I saw the lights of Co-op City turn on once again. Hope rewarded, for now and for the future. I headed home.

Raanan Geberer is a community newspaper editor in Brooklyn who is now in a Master of Arts in Teaching program. He grew up in the Bronx, went to SUNY and once lived in Washington Heights, although he now lives in Chelsea’s Penn South co-op with his wife Rhea and cat Celeste.

And then, a miracle happened. I graduated and within one week landed a job, the next, I moved in with my college boyfriend. Finally, I was an adult and could live the life I wanted. Unfortunately, after a couple of months, my boyfriend decided to live the life he wanted too, and threw me out. And instead of going back home to 2:00 am curfew, I proved I was truly an adult by getting an apartment by myself. Oh, excuse me, did I call it an apartment? Ever hear of the film This Property Is Condemned? Well, I lived there. The ceilings dripped, every outlet sparked like a Tesla coil and there was a hole under the kitchen sink large enough for a German shepherd to crawl through. All this for just $550 a month. But it did have a backyard that could have made a pretty nice garden, if it was cleaned up. I was sure it would only take a week. Two months later, I had dug up a half-century of fossilized pets, (I kept some of the more interesting bones) a three-foot pile of rusted nails and five dollars in Indian-head nickels. And every time I cut myself on yet another piece of beer bottle forged before my parents were born, I saw it as one more manifestation of my rotten miserable life. And then, just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, I lost my job. My new job. The job where I hadn’t yet worked long enough to qualify for unemployment.

I had $2000 dollars in my savings account, enough for about three months rent and exactly $66.66 a month for everything else, including my two new kittens. I looked out the window at the clean, tilled garden. When I looked at it before I had pictured a soothing floral oasis for my tortured soul. Now I looked at it and saw dinner. The next morning I went straight to the library and took out every book I could find on organic gardening (the internet, sadly was still a couple of years away). In the afternoon, I went to the Caton Avenue stables and pushed home a creaking shopping cart of Key Food bags overflowing with horse manure. Before the week was out, I had planted my miniature farm with plum and beefsteak tomatoes, green beans, zucchini, eggplant and 36 stalks of Silver Queen white corn. All under the watchful eyes of my next door neighbors, a family of indeterminate Eastern European origin consisting of a fat mother with an eyepatch, an even fatter drunken husband and their skinny teenage son who liked to sunbathe in his rotting yellowed underwear. They all had something to say while I planted garlic, scallions, marigolds and nasturtium in between each row. “Vy you is plantink flower mit food?” my neighbor said to me in her indeterminate Eastern European accent. “You are knowing nothing of garden. All plant vill be diet. You vill see, ugly girl.” I thought I knew what I was doing. According to the organic gardening books, planting the spices and flowers would guard my vegetables against mold, infestation and rot. But, not unfortunately, against theft.

By the middle of August my garden was like an Henri Rousseau painting bursting with life and color. My neighbor’s, a soggy heap of mold and rot. “Vat you do my plants, ugly girl?” my neighbor said as she shook her fat fist at me. What could I tell her? That all the bugs and germs that were repelled from my garden were feasting on hers? Besides, I had other things to worry about, I was now living off the bottom of a 10-lb. bag of rice, but the first veggie to be ripe, a fat purple eggplant was just a day away.

Have you ever been hungry? Really hungry? The kind that wakes you up at night and keeps you on edge all day. I know I was always just a phone call away from my parents, but I was stubborn. I intentionally had moved as far away from them as I could (while still being in the same city) and I was determined to deal with this on my own.

That morning, I went into my garden and my perfect eggplant was gone. The next day, the next eggplant was gone. Then a zucchini. Then half my tomatoes. I couldn’t understand. And then one morning, a message in the dirt: A fat bare footprint next to the chain link fence and on the other side, a stepladder. How could I have been so stupid? I looked into my neighbor’s yard and she smirked at me. “Vy your plant livit and mines is die. Not correct, ugly girl,” and she put out her unfiltered cigarette with her fat bare foot.

I had never been so furious in my life. I wanted to climb that fence, break off her fat fingers and her fat foot and stick them into the fat hole where her right eye used to be. But I knew if I even as much as touched her, I would be the one to go to jail. I went into my apartment and cried and screamed until I collapsed onto the floor. I was a total and complete failure as an adult and would now have to call home and beg to come back. As I resigned myself to a lifetime of 2:00 am curfew, Boris, my fat little Russian Blue kitten, who I caught eating a waterbug the night before, went into the litter box and took the worst-smelling cat crap I ever smelled in my life. And through the miasma, the hunger and the tears, came an idea.

I went into my backyard at 2:00 am. It was cool and peaceful under a fingernail moon. I waited until all the lights on the block went dark, then I crept into the garden. I compared the last two eggplants, only the plumpest, ripest one would do. Lying on my back, I took out my sharpest Xacto knife and slowly, carefully, sawed a circular plug out of the bottom of the eggplant and hollowed it out, all the time comparing it to the circumference of the cat turd in the baggie at my side. The sky began to grow light. I was sweating. I saw a light go on in my neighbor’s kitchen, slipped the turd up into the eggplant and replaced the plug just in time to hear their screen door open. I crawled back into my apartment just in time. Later that day, I saw my neighbors on their front stoop. They wouldn’t look at me. “How is garden?” I asked. They banged into their house and locked the door. I thought I was going to break in half laughing, because what I was dying to know was, how/when did they find out about the booby, or should I say “poopy” trap? Did it slide out into her hand as she picked it? Or did it liquefy inside as she steamed it for her family whole? I would never know.

What I did know was that nothing ever disappeared from my garden that summer or any other summer for the five years I lived there. Funny thing is, now, for some reason, there’s one vegetable I just can’t eat anymore. So nothing good ever happens after 2:00 am? Sorry mom, this time, you were wrong.

Michele Carlo has lived in four of the five boroughs of NYC and can remember when a slice of pizza cost fifty cents. She has been published in the short story anthology Chicken Soup For The Latino Soul, is Editorial Director for the online underground entertainment newsletter Toxic Pop and is the curator/producer of It Came From New York, a storytelling show featuring and celebrating native New Yorkers. She is currently at work on a memoir of growing up in the NYC of the 70s-80s, entitled Red Sheep: The Search For My Inner Latina.

I had never known such rage.

There was no conscious thought to exiting the rig and beating each member of this group to death.

Unguided, my hand found its way to the door handle.

But try as I might, the door would not open.

That’s when I started to climb out of the rig through the half-open window, while simultaneously shouting an unbroken stream of the most explicit profanities.

Bearing witness to this unexpected turn of events, Bob, the chauffeur, grabbed my belt with one hand, the steering wheel with the other, and hit the gas while hollering: “No Lou no, it’s not worth it!”

Before the rig travels a block, my fury has dissipated, but I know my days of fighting fires are finished.

I just can’t take anymore.

The madness that laid waste to vast areas of our city during the sixties and seventies had finally consumed itself and now the job is just standard big city firefighting, which is madness with the anarchy removed.

It is 1988 and I am a Lieutenant assigned to Engine Company 96, located on Story Ave. in the Bronx, which is surrounded by numerous “Housing Projects.”

With the passing of clean air laws, the incinerators of all these buildings were converted to compactors and it seems to me that some residents delight in setting these machines afire.

Since they are housed in shafts originally constructed for incinerators, the actual fire danger to the buildings tenants is minimal.

However, the public hallways filled with a foul smelling reek that left its stench behind long after the smoke itself had dissipated.

Meanwhile, down in the cellar, firefighters had to spend significant periods of time removing and extinguishing from the bowels of these machines enormous amounts of soiled diapers, used sanitary napkins, decomposing food and every other type of nauseating household garbage.

We do this so frequently and became so proficient at it that our firehouse is known around the job as Compactor College!

Another pain in the ass is the extremely high rate of false alarms transmitted in our response area.

Do not get me wrong, 96 had their share of real fires and they were good at fighting them.

But the large amount of bullshit was wearing me down.

I just don’t realize it.

It is close to 4AM, and we’ve been running all night.

As the rig pulls up to what we all know will be simply another false alarm, I am compactor and false alarmed out.

This time, however, instead of the usual no one in sight, there are half a dozen denizens of the night, populating the sidewalk alongside the alarm box.

Rolling down the window I inquire, where’s the fire?

One of these mutts locks eyes with me and says, “Fuck you, fireman.”

Haven’t we all seen this headline in the newspapers?

CRAZED GUNMAN KILLS SIX THEN SELF

Coworkers say, HE JUST SNAPPED

Fuck… you… fireman.

Those three words give me insight into the psyche of the crazed gunman.

Simply put, it’s the concept of the last straw.

The rational half of the brain says: I cannot deal with this shit any longer.

I’m going for a coffee break.

Control of the body is then taken over by the wicked half of the brain, whose only rule is Fuck everybody.

I’m going to shoot them all and someone else can clean up the mess!

This is when violence erupts and it does not cease until there is only one, wild-eyed, blood-spattered, howling at the moon person left standing.

At this point, Mister Rational returns from his coffee break, sees what Mister Wicked has done and says, Oh Shit, I’m screwed now.

Then he puts the gun barrel into his mouth and pulls the trigger one last time!

Upon returning to quarters, I begin looking through our copy of The Department Orders, searching for what we call a day job while contemplating what would have happened if the door on the rig had opened and why it had not.

The DOs are to the fire department what a local newspaper is to a small town.

They are of interest to everyone, because everything published in them affects you or someone you know personally.

The information contained includes among other things, hirings and firings, changes to the rules and regulations, and requests for personnel to fill jobs other than firefighting.

Within a month, I find a day job with the Bureau of Training, where I finished out my twenty-seven year career filling a variety of roles, never again setting foot upon a fire truck.

If given the chance to live my life a second time, I would not become a firefighter; it just took too great a toll.

Physically my liver, lungs and legs have taken quite a beating.

Psychologically all the horrible situations I ever encountered still reside in my brain.

I never know when they will commandeer my attention, as they often do, returning me to places I’d rather not be.

Nevertheless, I would not trade a minute of it because…it was one hell of a ride!

A former New York City fire fighter, Thomas R. Ziegler is now a flight attendant for jetBlue Airlines

I didn’t get a ticket that morning. Not because they had sold out, but because I didn’t have enough money. Even the blue nosebleed seats were now $5.50—a whole dollar more than the year before—and I wasn’t the only one who was disappointed. Some of the kids were so disappointed they started tearing up the selling floor, tagging and throwing mannequins around and cursing. I was having none of that. I had spent a half-hour in Central Booking for graffiti writing and vandalism once and wasn’t eager to repeat the experience. So at 10:30am, I left Macy’s with my five crumpled one-dollar bills and walked back to school, figuring the day wasn’t a total loss, as I had only missed three periods. I got to school a little past 11:00 and right away saw something was up. For one thing there was a phalanx of cop cars around Westchester Square train station. For another, I heard the yelling all the way down the hill. And then I remembered. Today was Kill Whitey Day.

I know that in some alternate universe one’s high school days are a halcyon, carefree time, with fond, gauzy memories of homecoming days, pep rallies and proms. But at my high school, Herbert H. Lehman High, (fondly referred to as Lehman State Prison) the pivotal events we had to look forward to each spring were “Kill Whitey Day” and “Kill Black & Puerto Rican Day.”

It’s said that gangs are cyclical in NYC. There were gangs in the 1950s. There are gangs now. And in the mid/late 1970s, teenage New York was a city divided and ruled from Parkchester out to Morris Park and up to Throgs Neck by the white gangs The Bronx Aliens and Bronx Ministers. Their black and Latino counterparts The Savage Skulls, Savage Nomads, Mongol Brothers and the biker gang The Ching-A-Lings claimed everywhere south of Soundview Avenue and west, past Yankee Stadium and Fordham Road all the way to the Harlem River. Every spring, every high school would have their week or so when they would be at war. And as in any war, any unfortunate civilians who found themselves behind the front lines would just have to get by as best they could.

The messed-up thing about it was, you knew exactly when it was going to go down. The information crossed gang, race, and ethnic lines and flashed through your entire school faster than group text messaging locks down a campus today. You knew when your Kill Day was going to be. And not going to school that day was not an option. Because everyone would know you had punked out and your own neighborhood would make you a pariah for being a faggot, a pussy, for not having enough heart to risk getting a major beat down with everyone else.

Lehman High School, being in a mostly Italian neighborhood, was Bronx Ministers territory. But by some fate of late-60s decentralization, half the student population were various ethnicities of white, the other, black and/or latino. So Lehman was a school doubly “blessed” as it observed both Kill Days. Kill Black & Puerto Rican Day had been the week before and luckily I had escaped unscathed. Not so the year before, when two Italian boys stabbed me in the shoulder with a stiletto. Not because they specifically hated me, but because a couple of Savage Skulls had whipped them with a car antenna. And since they weren’t motivated (brave/stupid) enough to go down to the Bronx River projects to extract revenge, the next best thing was to attack me. They both actually apologized to me later and hoped I understood it wasn’t personal. I still have the scar.

Since not going into school was not an option, I went around the back way, where I knew (and security amazingly didn’t) a door was always propped open. Fourth period was about to begin and something told me not to try to sneak a cigarette before entering the relative safety of Health class. But I was nervous, so I took a chance. I peeked into the Girls bathroom and seeing no one, ducked into the last stall and immediately assumed the smoker’s position. Crouched on the toilet seat so someone bending down to check the stalls wouldn’t see any feet; constantly waving my right arm back and forth so the curling smoke wouldn’t give me away either. A few minutes later, the Newport Light just wasn’t doing it for me, but I decided to have one more drag. Famous last words.

I was about to flush the cigarette when the door opened and four black girls came in. I knew they were black because of their names. Keishas and Tawandas were in-utero or just being born. Girls my age were the last of a generation who were still named after jewels and desirable attributes: Crystal, Ruby, Precious and Unity. Delicate flowers who stashed razor blades in their afros and carried rolls of pennies balled up in their bandannas. I knew who they were because of their reputation. They were finely tuned, Black Pride lionesses who hunted their prey with particular savagery: What they caught, they would not release. And I knew that if they caught me, I was a goner. Because none of them would stop to ask a light-skinned freckle-faced redhead where her family was born before they beat the hell out of her.

“Dag, Ruby, you see that blond bitch face when we knocked her toof out?”

“Yeah, but my hand cut up, shoo. Precious, watch the door. Oh shit, you smell something? Who in here?”

I had neglected to do the one thing that could have saved me, which was to douse the cigarette and keep still. There wasn’t a thing I could do except wait as the four of them opened the stalls one by one until they found me. It was pointless to fight back. One, definitely. Two, maybe. But there were four of them. And it would have been suicide to try to tell them they were making a mistake. The year before, an olive-skinned Irish girl named Ellen something-or-other had tried to say she was half Puerto Rican and she ended up being held down and raped with an umbrella. That was not going to happen to me.

They pulled me off the toilet and threw me on the floor. I rolled up in a ball and tried to protect my face as they punched, kicked and penny-rolled me. How long? Too long. And then, the door opened.

“Yo, Nan-cee, we got another white girl, you want some?”

I looked up through one swollen, tear-and-Afrosheen clouded eye and saw Nancy Ortiz walk in. Nancy, who really was half Puerto Rican/half Irish, was one of those anomalies in our little world, a blessed creature who moved seamlessly between the races, befriending everyone, beat up by none. She came over to look at me.

“Dag, man, that girl ain’t white, she’s Puerto Rican.”

“What?”

“She’s Puerto Rican. That’s Shell, I know her from Homeroom. She’s from St. Peter’s, but she’s Puerto Rican. She just looks white.”

The punches stopped. A razor blade whizzed by my left cheek and clattered onto the tiles.

The one called Unity said, “She’s Puerto Rican?” and prodded me with her Pro Ked.

“I axed you, you Puerto Rican?” I spit out a trail of blood and snot and croaked out the only thing I could think of. “Si.”

“See, I told you. Stoopid!” And Nancy, having secured her place in heaven, left the bathroom.

Four pairs of eyes saw me as a person for the first time. “Oh man! We sorry.” “Oh man, we sorry.” “Shoo! Why didn’t she say something?” “Why didn’t you say nothing?” “Come on, help that girl up.” That was Unity, their leader talking. And Crystal, Ruby and Precious picked me up off the floor, patted my hair and tried to rearrange my clothes. “Get some water, clean her up,” Unity commanded. The girls ran to the sink, wet their bandannas and daubed at my face. I took Ruby’s pink bandanna and walked to the mirror to clean myself. She didn’t protest.

“This ain’t right,” Unity said. “We sorry Shell. We didn’t know. Why didn’t you say nothing? You’re not gonna tell, right? We gonna make it up to you. C’mon. Give her your weed.” And Crystal, Precious and Ruby all looked down at their sneakers. “I said, give her your weed,” yelled Unity. “Give it up!”

And one by one, the girls reached into their afros and their tube socks and pulled out crooked joints rolled in banana, chocolate and strawberry EZ Wider. Mutely, with averted eyes, they handed them to me. “We sorry,” Crystal mumbled. “Yeah, man, we sorry,” Ruby said. But not Precious. She had been standing on the other side of the bathroom and was now trying to sidle her way towards the door. But she couldn’t get away from Unity’s watchful eye. Unity’s fist shot out: Biff! And punched the side of Precious’s head so hard her afro pick flew into the sink, clattering in front of me. “I said, give her your weed, bitch!” Precious’s hand trembled as she dug around her bra and finally handed me a crumpled, sweat-stained, half-full nickel bag.

“Look, we sorry, It was a mistake, right?” Unity said. “You’re not gonna tell right? I mean, like we did you a solid and all. Come on, let’s go kick some real white ass.” And just like that, they left. I stood there for a moment and totally accepted what had happened as just the way things were. I still couldn’t quite believe my luck in escaping with just a cut lip and black eye. And then I looked at what was balled up in my clenched fist—and I did believe it. I walked right out of school and over to Zappa’s Corner where I sold all the pot, then ran back to Macy’s, getting there just before Ticketmaster closed at 4:00pm.

The day wasn’t a total waste after all. I was going to see “Kashmir.”

Michele Carlo has lived in four of the five boroughs of NYC and can remember when a slice of pizza cost fifty cents. She has been published in the short story anthology Chicken Soup For The Latino Soul, is Editorial Director for the online underground entertainment newsletter Toxic Pop and is the curator/producer of It Came From New York, a storytelling show featuring and celebrating native New Yorkers. She is currently at work on a memoir of growing up in the NYC of the 70s-80s, entitled Red Sheep: The Search For My Inner Latina.

We were always happy to see each other and bask in that unique flavor that belongs to the O’Connell clan: we share a way of looking at the world that seems almost biological. When the entire family is gathered, the party goes on for hours. My brother Chris, the now-debonair lawyer, reverts to the Bronx idiom, and then imitates with hilarious precision the peculiar mix of self-pity and lyricism that is Irish as he voices the familiar peasant’s lament, “Ah, it’s a terrible thing what the British have done, a terrible thing….”

Today, it would be just us three. When I arrived, my father told me, “The chow is in the oven already.” He gave me the bear hug that always made me nervous as a child and then, later, as a young woman. He said, “Ah, Mary girl, you look great, you look great.” Then he waved his big farmer’s hand in the direction of the living room and said, “I cleaned the joint up. Have a seat, have a seat. Big Pat should be here soon.” Big Pat was so-called because my sister’s name was Pat also, ‘Patricia,’ and because Patrick, determinedly turning fat into muscle with weight-lifting, had grown quite strong.

Soon after I arrived, Big Pat rang the bell. When he came in, carrying a six-pack, my father called from the kitchen, “Pat, good man, good man.” Pat said, “I brought beer, Dad.” And my father answered, “Right you are, right you are. You’re a good man, Pat.”

We all sat together in the dimly-lit living room, Pat and I on the ancient green couch that had ceased to be comfortable sometime in the ’70s. It emitted a cloud of dust as we sat, first with me, and then with my brother, more dust. My father sat on the green vinyl recliner that had a huge hole in the seat. When my husband had started to make money, we offered to buy my father new furniture. But “No,” he said. “Be dead in a couple of years. Never get the use of it.”

It was his ability to look so squarely into the face of reality that made me admire and respect him. He never feared death. He feared only living an ungraceful life. I always remember the story of my grandfather’s death that my father had told me when I was young: “Death’s nothin’ much, Mary girl. It’s part of the natural process. Well, for Chris’sake, you can’t avoid it: animals die, plants die, trees die. Your grandfather, may he rest in peace, worked in the field till the last day of his life. He came in in the afternoon, complained of a stomachache, and lay down. Little by little, the feeling stopped. First, in his feet, then, in his legs, then after awhile, he just went to sleep. He wasn’t afraid. Had the whole family around him: he was 89.”

That story entered my life and became a part of me: it’s the reason why I, without any question, know that I am strong, and that I will be able to conclude my life with dignity.

We sat in the living room, and my father was as happy as if we were in a palace. He always was the most incredible storyteller. But that day, strangely, his timing was off and the punch lines were not as uproariously funny as they usually were. He began the one about the two Irish housewives commenting on the new man in the neighborhood. They were talking in front of their children, and so spoke in code. One said to the other, “And what does the new gentleman look like?” Her friend answered, “Oh, he’s a fine-lookin’ man, six foot six.” After a moment’s hesitation, she added, meaningfully, “And built accardingly.” He got lost in the middle somewhere, and was embarrassed. “I used to be able to drink all night when I was your age. Now I have one beer and I get a headache: makes the doctor happy. He says I have high blood pressure and shouldn’t go near it at all. Ah, well.”

He got up to check the fresh ham in the oven and announced it was ready. Then, uncharacteristically, he called Pat and me in to do the rest of the preparation, because he suddenly felt tired. Then he left the kitchen, and asked us to call him out of the bedroom where he would be lying down when everything was prepared.

So Pat went to the oven to take the ham out and when he opened the oven door to look in, fell into a fit of laughter, motioning me to come over. My father had neglected to remove the saran wrap from the ham and had cooked the meat with its price tag intact. On the table were a few empty beer cans. “The old man must’ve been high when he put it in,” Pat said.

When we got hold of ourselves, we decided what to do: take the chance that we might get sick eating it rather than hurt our father’s feelings or spoil his day. Somehow we both knew without even mentioning it that my father would not get sick: his stomach was made of cast-iron and we had seen him eat every possible combination of food and alcohol through the years. In fact, at his age, he was stronger, healthier, and more good-looking than Pat and I put together.

During dinner, my father had another beer. He got up to get something from the kitchen and swayed a bit and landed in a heap with the small end-table shattered beneath his weight on the floor. We jumped up, horrified, thinking immediately of the broken hips and joints that old people suffer at the slightest fall. To our profound surprise and relief, he started laughing and sat there quite comfortably, announcing, “Ah well, the old gray mare just ain’t what she used to be.” Then he looked up at us and said to Pat, “And what did you say your name was, young man? Is that your wife with you? You’re a handsome couple. What’s the name of this fine establishment anyway?”

He was not pretending. We realized that he thought he was in a bar somewhere and he had just met us.

We got him up from the floor and sat him on the couch. For the few moments that that took, he was in another place, mentally, and we were with him. Then, ever so gently, Pat said, “Don’t you know me, Dad? It’s Big Pat and this is Mary.”

He came out of it and for a second sat startled. He did not quite seem to realize what had happened, just that he had been out of control somehow. Then we just continued the day as if nothing had happened, undisturbed and free at heart.

It was afterwards that I realized how extraordinary the whole thing had been. For a second we had glimpsed what might very well be our father’s and our own futures: what was supposed to be the most horrifying and daunting experience: witnessing your parent’s mortality. And it had been funny, even pleasant, like some wonderful trip into another lifetime when we were not family, or like a game of make-believe. There was no morbidity about it at all. And on reflection I knew that that was a testament to the strength and joyousness of my father’s life. Although his circumstances had often been tragic, he was never so. He never gave in to self-pity or despair.

Other people speak of the horror of watching a creative mind slowly fade away. But my father’s life was so triumphant, so fulfilled, that in his case it was more like a brilliant sun setting, slowly sinking in majesty and returning to its source. He had raised seven children, virtually on his own, on a window-washer’s salary. He had struggled and established his family in a country where they could fight for their future and make their life what they would. He left through his example a legacy for future generations to draw continual sustenance from.

My father lived most of his later years on Havilland Avenue in the Bronx. I used to take the #6 train to Parkchester to visit him. I used to ask him, “Dad, don’t you miss Ireland? Don’t you want to go back there?” “Why??” he would ask. “Well…don’t you miss the beauty, the nature, the trees?” “Trees? There’s plenty of that in New Jersey!”

The old man was no saint, certainly. There’s a line from The General’s Daughter that always puts me in mind of how I feel about him. When asked about his feelings for his ‘old man’ the protagonist, a real smart-ass, quips, “My old man? He was a gambler, a womanizer, and a drunk. I worshipped him.”

My father no saint, but he was a force of nature: Patrick O’Connell. His life was big, like him. It reverberates through time and space, like every life, an incredible cosmic event.