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.

The sense of smell is the most powerful reminder of past events. It’s the hardest sense to pin down, the hardest to define. A smell is never described as it is, only in simile form.

It smells like burning leaves.

You know, it smells wet, like…like…like a wet dog.

That’s nasty, smells like grandpop’s farts.

Smell is elliptical, invisible, ethereal. Smell is understandable to us all, yet no two people would ever inhale it in the same way. Smell is an unbegotten force that gives us a sense of the universe in which we dwell, but it refuses to be subjugated by any obvious formulation of meaning. Much like bologna and white people.

* * *

In 1993-94, I spent a year doing volunteer work in New York City. I lived on Andrews Avenue, which is off Fordham Road in the University Heights section of the Bronx. I lived with four women. Outside of a few immigrant shut-ins who had lived on the block since the days when the Bronx was the middle-class Manhattan, we were the only white people who called Andrews Avenue home.

I always heard that The Bronx is the only borough/city/burb/town/burg in America that uses a definite article before its name. That’s because back in the day, when Gotham was still a forest, a nice white Danish family settled all the land north of the fancy island in service of the Dutch West India Company. The Dutch lived up to their company name; most of the Indians went West. The family farmed the land and made a fortune; they built an estate and invited all the white socialites from the city out to their lavish parties. The name of the nice Dutch family was the Broncks. Hence, everybody in Metropolis would say, “we’re going to visit the Broncks,” or “there’s an important cocktail soiree up at the Broncks.” I don’t know when it changed to an “X,” maybe when all those angry black men started setting stuff on fire.

* * *

My parents’ grocery bills must have been uglier than the Yankee Stadium crowds during a weekend set with the Red Sox. I counted recently, and with a margin of error of it’s been forever ago and things aren’t as clear in my mind as they once were, there were roughly thirty boys a week who would get their mitts on the contents of the refrigerator. We had it all, from your frozen goods to your pantry staples. Mom loved cookies, so we had two jars: one for Chips Ahoy and the other rotated among many varieties of delicious store-bought baked goods. She adored Breyer’s ice cream and pretzels: it took her from the serenity of Montana back to her old-school Irish neighborhood in Philly. She enjoyed sandwiches (or as she referred to them, hoagies) with sliced lunchmeat, rolls, pickles, fresh tomatoes, lettuce, mayo and mustard. She restocked the cereal shelf every time she went to Buttreys supermarket, mostly with nutritious fare.

My brothers and I only got the “junky” cereals on our respective birthdays (Daniel went with Cocoa Puffs, Brian with Boo Berries, Matthew with anything containing marshmallows and I alternated between flavors of Cookie Crisp.). She also hit the volume-discount store for: canned chili (usually cooked in conjunction with a package of Ballpark wieners), Chef-Boy-R-Dee raviolis, Top Ramen, Capri Suns, Campbell’s Chunky, Ruffles potato chips (she hates Doritos which has always been a sore spot with me), Popsicle variety packs, five-gallon vats of peanut butter (six family members split right down the middle, half creamy/half chunky, Mom likes creamy–guess what we ate ninety percent of the time?), jelly, homemade muffins, bagel bits, Jeno’s pizza rolls, and a hundred other things I’ve forgotten. The milkman came twice a week, all that testosterone guzzled down a gallon a day. The Schwann’s man also came twice a month; all of my and my brother’s friends knew what day to come over for first dibs.

The Schwann’s man delivered such cold treats as: Drumsticks, Creamsicles, Heath Crunch Bars, and Eskimo pies. And he brought hot (after two short minutes in the microwave) delicacies like: frozen calzones, bean-and-cheese and bean-and-green-chile burritos, sausage-and-egg biscuits, corn dogs, or breaded chicken patties. The food payments had to be astronomical, the aforementioned snacks were strictly for the boys’ afternoons and after-schools spent lounging by the pool or shooting hoops in the backyard. My father tithed to Joe’s Market, not the Catholic Church. Pediatrician’s salaries in Billings are good, but he tacked on years to his retirement in eats.

The one thing my Mother refused to buy was bologna. She never explained why. Possibly it took her back to the insular, unchallenging, blue-collar existence she had fought so hard to escape. Or maybe she didn’t like the taste. She said only, “I can’t even stand the smell of it.”

* * *

I worked at Pius XII, North Bronx Family Services, a neighborhood drop-in center. They provided all sorts of help: counseling single mothers and their children, sports programs, education programs, job placement, etc. You name it. We did it. I was the recreation supervisor. The kids would come to us afterschool, and we would try to give them something constructive to do until their parents picked them up. Ines ran a cooking class, Debbie covered arts and crafts, Terry had a theater group, Bervin, Chandra and Q worked with the older teens, and I did the rest. The “rest” in this case meant taking six-to-thirteen-year-old Puerto Rican and black kids around New York in hopes of helping them to see beyond the shelter of the ghetto. It was a great gig, one that only I could perform.

I was the only one with a driver’s license.

We would load up the brown, ’84 Chevy Suburban, break every legal passenger limit code in the books and hit the town. Most of the time we went to green, spacious parks in Yonkers, but we also went to the zoo, museums, concerts, FAO Schwarz, anywhere that didn’t charge very much. It was simply put, great fun. Unfortunately, it’s starting to blur now, one long glorious day with a group of kids whose faces are becoming more of a composite all the time.

* * *

There are, however, two days I remember vividly from my year in the Bronx. The day over Christmas break when my parents told me their marriage was over.

And the day Ronald asked me a question I will never forget.

* * *

The kids used to ask me all kinds of questions when we were driving around, some expected, some odd, way too many about sex. I got a taste of the ritual the first time I introduced myself.

Pat, that’s a girl’s name. Why you got a girl’s name?

Patrick, like…Patrick Ewing.

I never realized how quickly I could think on my feet. It was the first of many inquiries into my personal life. Other than the intimate details about what I had accomplished with members of the opposite sex (primarily queried by the girls, I might add), I would answer anything they wanted to know. I was learning from them, so why not let them learn from me.

They asked about Montana.

Did you ride a horse to school?

Do people there still fight Indians?

Did you live on a farm with chickens and cows?

And sports.

Knicks is wack, right?

No, Bulls is wack, right?

And entertainment.

Did you see Chuckie?

Chuckie’s dope, right?

Whose more scarier: Chuckie, Jason, or Freddy?

And a line of questioning I had no answers to.

How come all white people are rich?

How come all white people got big houses?

How come no white people live around here?

I should have expected the questions grounded in the half-realities from which stereotypes are hatched. To them, white people lived better lives somewhere else. I would try to explain I wasn’t the spokesman for all things white, but I suspect they ask the new white volunteer the same questions every year. I usually followed that up with the safe, wishy-washy, p.c. bullshit: “Not all white people are rich.” It wasn’t bullshit in the literal sense, but who lives in a literal world? Then I would proceed with an even bigger equivocation, that although they had an uphill battle anything was possible with hard work. The one response I never gave, though, is that white people have problems too…I didn’t think they would believe it.

I wasn’t even sure if I believed it myself.

* * *

It’s been ten odd years, now, but I remember the last time I was alone in our old house on Clark Street. I was setting up for a New Year’s Eve party. Mom had since moved to an apartment on the other side of town. She would leave Billings the following summer and move back to the old Irish neighborhood in Philly. Dad had already moved in with his soon-to-be new wife. The house sat quiet, waiting to be sold. The pool was drained; the bulk of the furniture was gone. I hung up some streamers and balloons to give the place a “festive” atmosphere. In reality, I wanted to get butt-stinking drunk in my own home as a “fuck-you farewell” to the way things were intended to be.

I remember filling up the empty fridge with beer. We had to bring our own food; the kitchen was empty. I looked in the cupboards, the downstairs freezer, the pantry shelves, and the lazy Susan. There was almost nothing left, save for a few signs of the newly separated male and some old canned goods that may still be there. I wanted to be righteously pissed off, but mainly I just wanted an answer to why these things happen.

* * *

Ronald was the type of kid the Bronx produces. He isn’t an overachiever, one to be demagogued by conservatives, to show how easily determination triumphs over adversity. He isn’t an underachiever, one to be exploited by liberals, to show how easily our society abandons good kids. He’s a neighborhood boy. A young, precocious, pain-in-the-ass skinny, little, black kid whose mother beat him when he lost his coat. Some days he was a funny, wide-eyed scamp who loved to throw the football, dance, and climb the jungle gym. Other days he was a hyper, petulant, uncontrollable realist who knew the more he messed up, the more it would come back to hurt him.

He didn’t have much; whenever Pius received donations of any kind, we always set aside items for Ronald. His manic energy could liven up the most boring of afternoons; he could virtually will the other children to laugh and have fun. It could also ruin the most special of days; he missed his share of events (movie trips, circuses, parties, etc.) because he adamantly refused to get along. He was an average kid defined by his surroundings. A kid the Bronx produces.

* * *

An upper middle-class white family. Husband hits his 50’s, leaves his wife and family for a younger woman. Wife is alone with twenty-six years and a lump sum. Children do not know what to think. A scrapbook of altered memories.

Don’t see this much in the Bronx.

Why is this so predictable?

Should this be expected?

What’s with white people who have money and big houses?

* * *

One day Ronald was stuck sitting in the office doing math problems because he had gotten into trouble again. I was working on the following week’s schedule, so I volunteered to sit with him. He walked over, sat on my lap, and asked me an amazing question.

Mr. Patrick, why do white people smell like bologna?

I was speechless. After a few minutes of uncontrollable laughter, I asked him to repeat the question.

I heard all white people smell like bologna, do they?

I said no.

And then I breathed on him.

Fortunately, I had eaten a tunafish sandwich for lunch.

He accepted my response and I excused him.

I wish I had a better answer.

“Jo–seph, why don’t you just try the soup?” my mother nagged and begged, never giving up hope of getting me to expand my food horizons. “Just try it once. You like my meatballs, the little ones I rolled by hand.” My mother wasn’t above laying on the guilt when pleading didn’t work. “I made this soup especially for you.”

In my youth I had an acute gag reflex with a hair trigger that I could turn on and off. It was very helpful whenever I wanted to get sent home from school, but it was a handicap whenever I ate something I didn’t like. All that goodness in my mother’s soup, like the lumps in her farina, only made me retch, like a cat passing a hairball. So I grew up trying to avoid soup all together, but on those rare occasions that I ate any soup, I preferred the Campbell’s condensed variety, and then only tomato soup, pureed and congealed into a thick paste loaded with salt that was reconstituted into “soup semblance” when my mother mixed it with water, or maybe some milk when I wasn’t looking, to make it creamier. No, my relationship with lobster bisque began a long time before, on that glorious early autumn afternoon I took my ex-wife, then my pre-wife, for a walking tour of City Island in The Bronx.

In those simpler days, before the disaster that became our marriage, I was still trying to impress her, and Olivia was still in love with me. Insatiable, we made love every opportunity we had. “Plan B” we called it, and we reverted to the plan whenever we could, whenever her parents were out of the house and instead of going to the movies or visiting relatives on rainy Sunday afternoons. Then her pet name for me was “Oh Babe,” and I lovingly called her “Oh Labia,” long before the divorce attorneys “stirred the soup pot,” and I became “Fucking Asshole,” and used a “C” word to replace not only O’s labia, but the rest of her as well.

By the time the afternoon sun was slanting over the City Island yardarm, the two of us were hungry enough to drift, arm in arm, into one of the many restaurants with nautical sounding names that lined City Island Avenue.

Inside the restaurant, festooned with nets and lobster traps and plastic crabs, was dark and empty, with a slight smell of fish, which I took to be not a good sign of things to come. The waiter, who was counting his tips in a corner, seemed surprised to see us appear out of the afternoon sunlight, too late for the lunch crowd and much too early for the dinner rush.

“Two?” he asked in a practiced tone and showed us to a table at the back, close to the noise and the smells of kitchen, so he wouldn’t have far to walk, I assumed. “You’re too late for the buffet.” He pointed to a bored looking busboy removing the last remains of food from the long table where the buffet had been set up. “But if you hurry up and order,” he looked at his wristwatch, “you can still get the lunch special.” He handed over two menus before we could respond and he disappeared into the kitchen behind the busboy, probably, I thought, to dump into containers the last of the buffet that would become our late lunch entries. “What do you think?” I asked Olivia. I pulled the paper wrapper off a skinny breadstick chewed on it. “Are you in the mood for ‘see food’?” I stuck out my tongue and showed her.

“You are so funny.” She laughed and touched my arm. “But it can’t be anything strange or exotic. I’m just starting to eat fish.”

Olivia was a “selective vegetarian” then, which meant she didn’t eat red meat, but allowed herself chicken and turkey, if when it was served it bore no resemblance to the beast. And only recently she began to tolerate the mildest of fish, but only if it was square, white, flakey and fried in batter, flour or breadcrumbs. My tolerance for seafood was less than that for soup, and the only fish that ever passed over my lips and teeth came from McDonalds, Mrs. Paul or the Gorton’s of Gloucester man and slathered in tartar sauce to disguise the fact that it was fish of any kind.

I looked over the menu that was divided into sections and written in Italian – Insalata Soupa, Pesce, Carne, Pollo – with the descriptions of each in English. My eye stopped when I saw Lobster Bisque. For some reason I was intrigued. Perhaps it was the crisp sea air that led me to go against everything I ever stood for and I announced with a flourish, “I think I’m going to live dangerously and try the lobster bisque. I never had lobster before, and I don’t have a clue what ‘bisque’ is, but it looks like it might be good. And if you want you can try it.”

“Not me. Lobsters are like cockroaches,” she said, and I could feel my stomach lurch as my gag reflex tried to kick in. “But you go ahead and enjoy it.”

When the waiter returned from the kitchen smelling of cigarette smoke I placed the order for both of us, everything from salad to dessert, including the bisque, and we sat back playing footsies until the same busboy brought out two crystal glasses that he filled with water from a pitcher with lemons floating in it, and another brought the silverware that he laid carefully in front of us. Then the waiter came with a basket of fresh bread covered in a cloth napkin to keep it warm. And on the next trip he laid a delicate bowl of pink soup on a doilied plate next to me. I sniffed it. “It doesn’t smell bad,” I said, isolating the soupspoon from the rest of the silverware and dipping it into the bowl. “Here goes nothing.” I steeled myself, but I wasn’t prepared for the taste, which was surprisingly pleasant. “This is pretty good. I had no idea that bisque is a cold soup. Do you want to taste it?”

She shook her head. “Enjoy it,” and she and watched me eat. I dropped my spoon into the mix and savored the flavor. “I really think you ought to try it,” I said, sounding like my mother. “I think you would really like it. It’s very rich. And the lobster has an almost sweet taste. Come on, have a little.”

She grimaced and shook her head. “No thanks. You finish it.” In a matter of minutes I was scraping the bottom of the bowl with my spoon, tempted to pick up the bowl and lick it clean, it was that good. “Delicious,” I said. “I think that lobster bisque is going to be my new all-time favorite, even better than tomato soup.” I broke off a piece of crusty Italian bread to sop up what soup was left.

The waiter came back just as I finished my soup and pushed the empty bowl across the table. Carefully he set another one in front of me. “What’s this?” I asked.

“The lobster bisque you ordered, sir.”

I looked at the pink and steaming bowl. “Then what was that?” I pointed to the empty one.

“Russian dressing,” he said in an even tone with a straight face. “I’m glad to see you really liked it.”

Olivia left the table in a rush and headed to the ladies room. She didn’t come back for twenty minutes, and was not the same when she did. The waiter disappeared, too, into the kitchen in the other direction. The entire time Olivia and I were trying to eat our meals in silence, I heard sounds coming from behind the swinging kitchen door and I watched as the busboys and then the chef took turns sticking their heads through into the dining room for a closer look and an occasional nod.

Olivia and I were doomed even before we started. I don’t think that afternoon on City Island had anything to do with it. Maybe that was when the handwriting first appeared on the walls, but I was too full of lobster bisque and Russian dressing to notice it. To this day, whenever I see lobster bisque on a menu I have to order it. And sometimes I even use it to dress my salad.

One day I ordered a pound of bologna and moved up close to where he was slicing because I liked the machine and the rhythmic movements of the rotary blade slicing back and forth. I watched the way he caught each slice the moment it fell, dropping it neatly like a pancake onto the accumulating pile. The sleeve of his white jacket crept up his arm as he straightened his elbow and bent it again and again. I noticed numbers tattooed on his arm, numbers from the concentration camp riding forward and back.

In the relentless motion of his arm that seemed riveted to the steel of the spinning blade I died a little; the thin slices of bologna falling like bodies from the blade into a pile that grew bigger and bigger until he finally clicked off the machine and folded the white waxed paper over the grave of meat, marking the white with a big black greasy number from a crayon pencil he took from behind his ear. Smiling his gold-tooth smile, he asked, “Anything else?” and it was as if he were miraculously resurrected, his corpse-white butcher’s coat, the gold from his teeth the Nazis had extracted, back in place.

“No,” I stammered, “that will be all,” though there was more on my list.

I didn’t like it when he waited on me after that. I couldn’t bear it when he smiled at me. Maybe it was just the light that caught the gold in his teeth in a sinister way, but that servile smile he gave the customers made me feel like a Nazi, like someone who was automatically in charge, someone he had to please, no matter what. Then I felt remorse and tried to change my attitude. Maybe he was smiling because he was glad to be alive; maybe he was in shock and smiled nervously out of a fear that had been permanently scorched into his being like the numbers on his forearm. Then I felt enraged for him, humiliated; his job seemed to make a senseless mockery out of all that he had survived. How could he stand behind the counter, day after day, measuring out farmer cheese and potato salad? Why did he accept such a meager existence? After all that he had been through, why didn’t he demand more out of the life remaining to him?

Around and around I went accusing him and forgiving him; accusing myself for my restlessness, my inability to be content with my life as it was. How dare I yearn for more when he who had more right than I seemed to ask for so little? I yearned for grand gestures, theatrical outrage, flourishing acts of courage to counterbalance fear and timidity.

Later that week, on a cold Sunday morning I went into a different shop, the bakery. The store was packed as it was on Sundays when people crowded in to buy fresh rolls, jelly doughnuts, and French crullers for a late breakfast. Just inside the front door I stood against a crush of grownups, men in full-brimmed hats, formidable and unresponsive in their bulky overcoats. I couldn’t make my way past them to the front counter and the ticket-number machine.

“Fifty-five! Fifty-six!” Aging saleswomen in yellow uniforms yelled over the pyramids of miniature Danish and fancy cookies piled high over the glass counter-tops, and if a customer did not instantly respond to the number, they went on, “Fifty-seven, fifty-eight…”

The heat was palpable, and I began to perspire beneath my coat; no one heard me say “excuse me” and I couldn’t move. The men who came in behind me shouldered their way past me up front to the ticket machine and the women used their square leather handbags to knife their way ahead.

“Two salt sticks, two horns, a half dozen hard rolls—what else, what else? You got a little over a pound of marble cake. You wanted the rye bread sliced, why didn’t you say so?”

The five dollars my father gave me was damp in my fist. I was being very patient only because I didn’t know how to be rude to people who looked like my aunts and uncles. I hoped someone would be polite and move out of the way once they had a ticket, but each one just stood there, right by the machine, so that others had to reach out over their shoulders from behind to get to the lever that released the ticket like a little tongue from the slot. I couldn’t reach so high and needed to stand on my toes to get my finger-tips on the lever.

“Seventy-eight, seventy-nine, eighty, eighty-one,” the women in yellow shouted, and hands went up, five voices called out their orders, and the cash register never stopped ringing, the crowd never thinned, and by the time I got a ticket, 92, I’d lost a little faith in human decency.

“Do you want it without seeds or not, make up your mind—Whaddya mean is it fresh? Listen Mista, if you don’t want it there are plenty of takers—ninety-two, ninety-three!” “Here!” I said, but the saleswoman didn’t hear me. On and on she went, the next customers spat out their orders. No one noticed when I started to cry.

Maybe it was the ovens in the back of the bakery that made me think of the camps, or maybe it was the people, all Jews, packed into the steaming space with no room to breathe; maybe it was the numbers we had to fight for, but it hit me that I never would have protested to save myself, never among so many of my own people could I have pushed my way to survival.

Sometimes, I was afraid it would happen again. The Nazis or someone like Hitler would get to be President. I remembered seeing the McCarthy hearings on TV and sensing my mother’s fear. She whispered whenever she said the word, “communist.” I remembered the loud accusatory voice of Joe McCarthy. He reminded me of Hitler, the TV pictures I’d seen of Hitler shouting. Once they thought you were a Communist or a Jew ordinary good people stopped listening to reason and got swept away by hate and fear. Neighbors turned against you and you lost your job and people were afraid to hire you because they feared being associated with you.

If it happened again I could see my friend Caroline or Joyce telling on me because I was Jewish. And I wished it wasn’t so obvious that I was Jewish, but there was little I could do to hide it. For one thing, I had this Orthodox Rabbi and his tiny synagogue right next door to where I lived and my grandfather was the president of the congregation. We were 1184 Grant Avenue and they were 1186. The houses were attached. Toby, the Rabbi’s slow-witted daughter, sat outside on the ledge in front of my house all day long repeating, “Good Yom Tov, Vos Machstu,” like a parrot.

Other houses had limestone lions or ornamental flowerpots perched on the level brick partitions separating one stoop from another; I had screeching Toby, clapping her knees open and shut like a grasshopper, a white patch of underpants blinking between her legs.

“The Rabbi’s wife wears a wig. She shaves her head—Gross,” my friend Caroline said. “You’re Jewish aren’t you?”

If we stood on tiptoes we could see inside the rows of long benches through the shadeless French windows and the fluttering white curtain that separated the women’s prayer section from the men’s.

“Yes,” I said. I felt as if I’d just admitted a crime. I wanted to be proud of being Jewish but I didn’t know how. I hated being associated with the Rabbi and his family and was embarrassed and intimidated by their Orthodoxy. When I was little my mother would dress me up on Saturdays and send me into the synagogue at the end of the service to wish my grandfather a “Good Shabbas.” On my seventh birthday, a hot Saturday morning in June, I went to visit my grandfather as usual. I was standing in the rear near the women who had a way of shrinking behind their prayer books and the long filmy curtain that blurred their view of the men and the dais where they read from the Torah. The air was close from the warm, stale breath of prayer. The men were davening, half chanting and whining in Hebrew, they stood rocking forward and back, each in his own rhythm, enclosed in the bold black and white stripes of his Tallis. Their voices sounded angry, one growing loud as another trailed off and I hesitated, afraid, looking for a safe moment to move up front where my grandfather sat.

A hand clamped down on my shoulder. I turned and the Rabbi towered above me in his long black satin coat that touched his shoes, his massive brown beard hiding his face.

“Shame, shame.” He held my wrist and whispered, pointing up and down my bare, sleeveless arms. “You must cover yourself. Go. Tell Mama, put on a sweater.”

I ran upstairs crying to my mother as I went through my bureau in search of a sweater. My mother was angry. Her eyes grew smaller when she listened, her face mirrored my distress.

“Rules, rules,” she muttered. She blamed the Rabbi, but I blamed her. Most of all I wanted to please, and in some way I blamed her for that too, as I ransacked my bureau and found the sweater I wanted.

The Rabbi nodded approval upon my return. I used to like the part when they finished reading from the Torah and many hands joined in to roll up the scrolls. The men grew tender, careful like I was when I dressed my doll, as they slipped the velvet coverlet over the top and smoothed down the gold braid embroidery and the silken fringe along the border. I would kiss my hand, imitating Zeyde, and reach out to touch the velvet as one honored man paraded through the congregation, cradling the holy bundle one last time before he returned it to its niche and drew the red plush curtain. Now it seemed as if the Rabbi and all these old men reserved their love for their precious Torah and saved their disdain for me.

“If you’re Jewish you have to marry someone Jewish,” my friend Caroline stated. You could marry Toby’s brother Shloymee,” she giggled. “You could live happily ever,” her laughter was loud and mean.

Shloymee, a sallow-faced adolescent with curly sidelocks and a yarmulke on his head, had once come to my house to see my grandfather. I answered the door and he would not look me in the eye. “And this is my room,” I gestured, trying to be friendly. Refusing to look, he turned his head away and stared over his shoulder into the darkness of the hallway.

“He’s not allowed to look at the things that belong to girls,” my mother explained later. “It’s part of the religion for boys to learn self-control and not be distracted by the opposite sex. All their attention should be on God.”

“But there’s nothing sexy about my room!” I had protested. “He can’t even look for a second?”

“It might trigger the imagination,” my mother said.

What dirty minds they have, I thought, angry that the pasty-faced boy might think I was attracted to him. And now I had to put up with Caroline’s teasing.

“Don’t say you come from the Bronx or New York City.” My mother corrected me in the elevator of a large hotel that summer we drove to Florida.

“Why not?”

“Just say you come from New York. Be sure to pronounce the ‘r’ in ‘York.’ Say it, New York.”

“New Yauk.”

Otherwise, they’ll hear that accent and feel superior.

“New Yaourk.”

“If you say we’re from the City, they’ll know we’re Jewish.”

“New Yaurk, New Yorrk.” I practiced until I got it right.

We were nine years old that bright summer morning when Norman told us about an airport “just on the other side of Crotona Park.” (When I was older, I learned that it was about thirty miles south of my home, on an island off the coast of southern Queens.) There were five of us in the group and the other four had just finished playing “off the bench.” This game is played with a “Spaldeen,” a pink, soft rubber ball which is thrown against the slatted wooden back of a concrete bench that stands on the park side of Fulton Avenue. There are two players to a side and on the fielding team one player stands in the street and the other on the opposite sidewalk.

You scored when the ball rebounded off a slat and bounced in the gutter or on the opposite sidewalk. One base for every bounce, four bounces, a home run. Since I was one of the worst players on the block I was not picked in the first choosing of sides. The game had been long and exciting and it finished in great style when Norman hit a home run, an uncatchable smash which reached the building on the other side of the street and fell into the cellar. I cheered this magnificent shot and then announced that it was my turn to pick. I would choose the best player from the losing side to be my partner.

Not to be. At this point Norman announced that we would go to Floyd Bennett Airport. “I know it is just on the other side of the park. We can walk there.” I was angry for not getting my pick and I argued loudly with him. His decision was final; there would be no more “off the bench” that morning. There was nothing I could do about it.

All through my childhood and adolescence I was not a good athlete; it wasn’t until after World War II and I was in my first year of college, a pre-med student, that I allowed myself to be successful. I made the football team on a scholarship but I quit halfway through the season because training, practice and the weekend games interfered with my studying. When I was forty seven years old I was a low handicap golfer and I qualified for the trials for the Israel National team which was being organized to play in the International Macabbi Games in 1969.

As a child and adolescent I had feelings of inferiority and sabotaged any natural ability I had. I was an overly-exuberant winner and a bad loser. Occasionally I struck out in punchball; in sandlot football I was afraid to tackle the ball-carrier’s head. In public school I was ashamed when I had to do the standing broad jump because much shorter kids than me out-distanced me. In fistfights I was afraid to hit my rival in the face, fearful that something terrible would happen. I almost never a won.

There were four of us sitting on the stoop and Norman stood facing us. His spiel was seductive and easily led us to agree to go to the airport. I suggested that we take along sandwiches. This idea was happily and immediately accepted. We agreed to take sandwiches from home, telling our mothers that we wanted to have a picnic lunch in the park. The five of us dispersed homeward to prepare for this great adventure: Norman, Tevie (Herbie), Lobo (Natie), Putzie (Paulie), and myself, Itchy (Irving). I had never questioned the fact that Norman was the only one without a nickname.

(Another distinguishing feature about Norman’s family is that his mother had come from England and spoke with an English accent. She wore flowered dresses all year round. She was very erect in her bearing, foreign looking, and when she walked her ample bosom projected straight out as if clearing the way for her. Today we would call her regal. Behind her back the grownups never called her Rose, her given name, but called her Queenie. In common with the other mothers on the block, though, she was often shouting down messages to Norman through the kitchen window of their first floor apartment in the new buildings on Fulton avenue. His father was also different from all the fathers on the block: He was a native born, much older than Rose and everyone on the block, including his family, called him Mr. Feinberg. For years he suffered from a crippling arthritis and was confined to a wheelchair, unable to work. He smoked cigarettes using an ivory cigarette holder which he kept fixed between his teeth, blowing the smoke out of his nose. He was doing this years before we saw Franklin D. Roosevelt do it.)

Flinging open the door of my house, I rushed into the kitchen, finding my mother busy preparing lunch. I breathlessly told her about our idea of having a picnic in the park and she bought it without any questions. I told her that Tevie, Lobo, Putzie and Norman were my picnic companions and they were bringing sandwiches also; my mother sliced four thick slabs of seeded rye bread and heavily spread butter on them. She made two jumbo sandwiches filling them with a “feinkuchen” (omelet.) She put them in a brown paper bag and handing it to me she said, “Don’t go too far in the park.”

There were four of us waiting by the bench for Norman. He was late. We were eager to get going and as time went by I volunteered to go to his home.

I ran up the double set of steps of the courtyard of Norman’s building and standing under his kitchen window I shouted up to Norman. His head popped out of the kitchen window, as if he had been waiting for me. He had a big bulge in his cheek and he was chewing slowly. In his right hand he was holding a banana and mustard sandwich. He told me to come up and I did. He was waiting for me by his open apartment door and motioned for me to come in. We stood in the hall of his apartment and he whispered to me, “You don’t know what happened. Somehow my mother guessed we were going to the airport and now I have to stay home. What lousy luck.”

She called from the kitchen, asking us to come in. When I walked in she bent down and gently pinched my cheek, saying, “I love your rosy cheeks.” Then she said that “It is not wise to make a journey of such a great distance without an adult along.” Norman supported his mother saying, “My mother is right. It’s no good to go past the Indian Lake. If you ask me, you don’t know what’s on the other side.” I mumbled “It ain’t so far,” and ran out of the apartment.

When I came out into the courtyard and was skipping down the upper set of steps Norman shouted behind me, “You can’t miss it. It’s just on the other side of the lake.”

The four of us entered the park, heading in the direction of Indian Lake and the airport. The park is about a mile wide and we were no more than half way across when we were attracted by the cheering noises of a large crowd, coming from the stadium. Putzie suggested that we detour there because “They have baseball games with uniforms and even umpires, guys in black suits.” Putzie was the best athlete on the block and his recommendation was quickly accepted. He led the way, running quickly and easily, with Lobo right behind him. Tevie and I were struggling to keep up.

There was a baseball game in progress and the players wore uniforms; this was the first time I had ever seen uniformed play. There were two men dressed in black suits, wearing small, black, peaked caps, and I identified them as the umpires.

The contest was between two semi-professional teams, one from a west side neighborhood of the Bronx and the other from our east side. area. Putzie was the only one who had seen a major league game, the Bronx Bombers at the Yankee Stadium. We knew about the Yankees from the radio broadcasts which I sometimes heard in the candy store, when the older fellows asked Mr. Nathan, the owner, to put on the game. Some of my bubble-gum tickets had pictures of Yankee players.

It was fascinating to see my first real baseball game, in a stadium, a small one, but still with a laid-out playing field. All the previous games I had seen were sandlot games. The stands were full and the noisy, enthusiastic crowd roared its approval at anything the home team did. The first base and third base foul lines were lined with children sitting on the ground. We found seats on the foul line just past third base and we settled comfortably onto the dry, dusty earth. The Indian Lake and Floyd Bennett airport were forgotten. After fifteen minutes of joyful spectating something happened to make us continue with our original mission.

A grounder hit down the third base line would have hit Putzie in the head but he ducked in time, avoiding a disaster. This near-accident prompted the umpires to clear both foul lines. We had to move behind the home plate screen where our view of the game was obstructed by the people and children already there. Tevie, the oldest of our group, reminded us of our original destination by pointing in the direction of Indian Lake. “What about it, guys? Do we stay or go? Which is it?”

After a brief discussion, Lobo, the natural leader of our group, quietly resolved our conflict. Firmly, clearly, he said, “The airport. That’s where we’re going, right?” We were on our way. A few minutes on we found ourselves standing on the top of a hill, the Indian Lake below us, and beyond that, Boston R. and Claremont Parkway. The lake seemed so big and deep and there were rowboats.

(I had been to the lake for the first time the year before, with my siblings. We accompanied Zaydeh to the lakeside, so that he could “throw away his sins.” Just prior to Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, Zaydeh, the president of our Fulton Avenue schul, led the male congregants pond-side, for the ritual dumping of their sins into the water. Afterwards, the men stood around talking, gossiping, mingling with hundreds of worshipers from other schuls in the area. While my Zaydeh was chatting, my brother Sid and I explored the lake. We walked to the end of the lake where the rowboats were tied up and heedless of the danger we tried to climb into one. The park attendant responsible for the boats gruffly growled at us, “Scram, you snotnoses, before I kick your asses for you.” We ran back to the safety of Zaydeh’s area. …There was a huge boulder adjacent to the lake, about three times higher than I was. This was the Indian Rock, with a brass dedication plaque embedded in its side and little steps carved in its side, leading to its top. Sid was the first one up and for a few moments he wouldn’t let me climb to the top, shouting, “I am the King of the hill.” This brought a sharp rebuke from Zaydeh, telling him not to disturb the seriousness of the situation. It also allowed me to make it to the top.)

We briefly discussed this Indian Rock, relating it to the western movies that we sometimes went to Saturday afternoons at the Deluxe movie, or the Fenway, on Washington avenue. Based on the stereotypical good-guy, bad-guy movies, it was easy to project the Indian Rock into a fort.

Suddenly I realized that I was famished and the powerful odor coming from my butter-stained, brown bag enhanced my appetite. I took out one of the sandwiches, waved it around, saying, “Listen, guys, let’s eat something and then we’ll be ready to charge down the hill. What do you say?” There was a brief moment of hesitation but when Tevie took out one of his sandwiches and bit deeply into it, that was the signal for all of us to sit down to eat.

We ate quickly, except for Tevie. We were up and around, restlessly waiting for him to finish, anxious to make the charge down the hill to the besieged fort, the Indian rock. Even before Tevie took his last bite we began to run down the hill. Putzie was in the lead, with Lobo behind him and I was just one step ahead of Tevie. Suddenly I noticed a dollar bill lying on the side of the asphalt path and I stopped running, transfixed by what I had discovedred.

I called out, “Hey, look. There’s a buck on the ground.” Before I could pick it up Tevie had scooped it up, saying loudly, “It’s mine. I found it. No aikies.” According to street law, if he said this before anyone could say “Halfie no aikes,” then he didn’t have to share his find.

I said, “It ain’t fair, no. I saw it first. C’mon Tevie, be fair.” He refused, repeating, “no aikies.” I doubled the loudness of my demand but he refused, finding a new excuse, sing-songing, “Finders keepers, losers weepers.” Lobo mediated the dispute by convincing Tevie that the dollar should be shared by the four of us and I accepted the compromise. The usually gentle Tevie grumbled his acceptance of Lobo’s wise decision. We forgot the airport, we forgot the lake, forgot the Indian rock. Instead we headed in the direction of the street on the other side of the park. There were stores there and we agreed that we would go to a candy story where each one of us could buy what he wanted with his twenty five cents.

Just before we left the park we saw a man with a pony, selling rides for a nickel each. Without a word being said we made a new decision about what to do with the money. For the next hour we were living in the wonderful world of the Wild West. Each of us had five, rip-roaring, bronco-busting rides on the docile pony. It was just like in the movies where my favorite cowboy, Buzz Barton, always got the bad guy and rode off at the end, the lone rider.

When our money ran out, we stood around for a few minutes watching other children have pony rides. Then Putzie brought us out of our western reveries by shouting, “The last one to the Indian Rock is a rotten egg.” I was the rotten egg, since I got a late start–and even Tevie beat me.

While the other three were climbing onto the rock, playing “Cowboys and Indians,” I took off my sneakers and socks and sat on the paving-stone lake rim. I dangled my feet into the cool water and by sliding slightly forward, I could just reach the muddy bottom. The soft sliminess of the silted bottom was pleasantly sensuous as I moved my feet in and out of it. I was fascinated by the muddy waters coming up to the surface.

I was shocked to hear a park attendant shouting at me, as he ran in my direction. I hastily withdrew from the water and gathering up my sneakers and socks I ran part of the way up the hill. He stopped, breathing heavily, and pointed his long arm accusingly at me. He yelled, “What do you want to do? Get yourself drowned or something?” I retreated a little further up the hill. With a grunt of disapproval and a dismissing wave of his hand, he moved off.

Resocked and reshod, I joined my friends on the rock. They were playing “Cowboys and Indians.” Lobo and Putzie were on top, “in the fort,” and Tevie had been unsuccessfully storming it. I joined him and the both of us were unsuccessful in getting to the top. I complained loudly that it wasn’t fair so we switched. Tevie and I were the brave defenders of the fort and Putzie and Lobo were the indians. Somehow, they succeeded in getting to the top.

I didn’t care because we were having a great time. After a while we got tired of the game and we began to play tag. When we tired of that game we walked to the end of the lake where the rowboats were moored and we watched two couples take out two boats. We discussed the possibility of getting a rowboat but realized that we couldn’t, because we had no accompanying adult and we had no money.

We moved to a new part of the lake and began to skip flat stones across the surface, competing to see who could get the most bounces. It was Putzie, of course. We watched a man fishing with a thin string and a U-shaped pin for a hook. He had a ball of dough at his feet and he pinched off a piece, finger-rolled it into a little bait-ball and put it on the end of his improvised hook. Then he threw it into the water.

Four times he pulled his line out of the water without the bait on it. But the fifth time the line jerked in the water, he pulled gently on it and then more strongly. With a swift motion he pulled his hook out of the water and wiggling desperately on it was a two inch fish. He plucked the fish off his hook and put it into a glass jar, half-filled with lake water. I watched the little darter in his glass jail, feeling sorry for it.

Somehow, watching the trapped fish reminded me of Norman and I reminded the group that we never got to the airport. The rest of the group was just as surprised as I was that we had forgotten about it. We were hungry and it was too late in the day to go on. We decided to make the trip on another day. Lobo looked towards home, saying that it was late in the day and it was time to start back. Without waiting for the others I took off, shouting, “The last one up the hill is a rotten egg.” This time Tevie was the rotten egg.

The return trip was quick and uneventful. When we got to Fulton avenue we saw a crowd of people standing in front of the new buildings. My mother and father were there, along with my two brothers and sister. In the same worried cluster were Putzie’s parents, Tevie’s mother and Lobo’s mother and oldest sister. My heart began pounding and I had trouble breathing. I knew I was going to be punished.

I felt worse when Norman came running towards us, shouting, “You guys are in trouble. You’re going to get it. What took you so long? Did you get to the airport? Everyone has been going crazy looking for you.” Before anyone could answer he told us what happened. His mother told my mother and she had contacted the other three mothers. Putzie’s older brother was sent to look for us around Indian Lake but we were at the stadium at the time. Later in the day, as the anxiety increased, Tevie’s father and my father, both out of work at the time, went to look for us. We were probably wild-westing it with our pony at the furthest reaches of the park, and when they returned without us the rumor spread that we had been kidnapped. Panic on Fulton Avenue.

My mother tearfully embraced me, kissed me repeatedly and thanked God for bringing me home safely. Then with a serious look and a stern command, she ordered me to go “upstairs.” My father’s red-faced angry looks made me fearful that I was going to get a beating. He had never beaten me before although he had spoken of it, occasionally reached for his belt, or gave me a stern look. That was enough to scare me into behaving.

When I was upstairs, sitting in the kitchen, hungry and apprehensive, my mother came in alone. She gave me something to eat which I was unable to enjoy because I didn’t know what form the punishment would take. Hanging on the wall above the table was the Lukshen Strop (the noodle strap), the cat-o-nine tails, and looking at it now made me shiver fearfully.

My mother decided to use her own instrument of punishment and I was momentarily relieved that it wasn’t going to be a whipping. She talked and talked until I cried hysterically for her to stop. She began her tongue lashing, constantly repeating in a quiet, tense voice, “How could you be such a bad boy. You’ll kill me. After all the sacrifices I made for you children.” She used these sentences in various combinations, occasionally putting in fresh material such as, “You must be crazy to do what you did. That’s what the car accident you had did to you. Don’t you care what happens to me?”

I cried long and hard. I promised again and again, and then again, that I will never again do anything like. That ended the first round. Then she started guilt-whipping me again about making her suffer, about shortening her life, and I cried and repented, and then repented and cried. Finally, I was sent to bed full of remorse, promises to be good and loaded with guilt.

The following day when the guys met, we decided that Norman had tattle-taled; one of the others called him a stool-pigeon. From that moment he became Stooley. He finally had a nickname like the rest of us.