Margolies, however, had one overriding passion. That was handball. He loved any kind of handball – one-wall, four-wall, black ball, pink ball – and its derivatives like paddleball and racquetball. Even when he was a kid, once the exercises were over in gym class, he’d head to the handball court.

Once I asked Mark, whom I met when I worked near his co-op in Brooklyn Heights, whether he played any other games, like basketball or softball. “Well, I learned to swim because I had to. Once I tried touch-football,” he said. “It was horrible!”

When I asked him how he got into handball, he said his father, a working-class Jew from Brownsville, worked for the Post Office, but his passion was boxing. “He was a boxer,” Margolies said, “and he trained for boxing by playing handball. He would go to the Betsy Head handball courts in Brownsville, and I’d go with him and watch.” At the same time, because Mark was very shy and had no friends, he never got into sports like the other kids.

“You know the last time I went to a baseball game? The last year the Dodgers were in Brooklyn—1957,” he said. “My brother took me. I sort of enjoyed it, but I never had any real desire to go again.”

Soon afterward, his family moved to the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn. From there, it was an easy walk to the Brighton Beach handball courts, the mecca of New York City handball. "Everyone," he said, "played there—kids like him, guys in their seventies, A-level tournament players, beginners - everyone." Sometimes he’d have to wait a half hour to get on a court, but he didn’t care. He was hooked.

“When I was playing handball,” he said, “it was like I was taken to another dimension. There was such high energy, I was in such a state of ecstasy, that it was like I was removed from the world. Many of the courts had lights, so sometimes it would be midnight and I didn’t even know it. My parents had to come down and get me. I’d play singles, doubles, sometimes two against one – it didn’t matter, as long as it was handball.”

As time went on, playing on the neighborhood courts got a little boring for him. So he’d get on the trains and go to different neighborhoods all over the city. Even after he got married and moved away from Sheepshead Bay, he continued to go to the courts in Brighton Beach, where the best, most competitive handball players held forth. He went to neighborhoods that most of his peers considered dangerous, like Bushwick or Central Harlem. “Are you kidding?” he’d answer, after someone feared for his safety. “The guys there are some of the best players. They put their all, every part of their body, into it!”

He stopped playing for a few years after he had kids, but when the children got a little older, he went on his handball trips every Saturday and Sunday, while Gabrielle stayed home and pursued her own interests.

 One time I asked him if he'd gone to all five boroughs to play.

“Well, I went all over Brooklyn and all over Manhattan, up to about 168th Street. I never went to the Bronx – it was too far. I didn’t like Queens, didn’t play there except when I worked in a school there. I’d play on my lunch hour, in the schoolyard. The other teachers loved to play me, the custodians loved to play me, even the kids played me. They thought I was over the hill, but when I started to play, they couldn’t believe it!”

Hearing this story, I asked whether he was an “A-level” player. “Definitely not—I was a B-level player. But who cares!” he answered. “Besides, A-level players in handball don’t get that much recognition anyway—it’s just that they get into the record books.”

When Mark was about 45, his wrists were beginning to go, so he switched to racquetball – “not paddleball,” he’d say, “the wooden paddle was too heavy for me.” He joined the Eastern Athletic Club in Brooklyn Heights and played there. When his legs and his back started to go, he switched to ping-pong, but soon, he wasn’t even able to do that.

I saw Mark recently sitting at a counter at the Park Plaza Diner in the Heights. His hair was white, his beard was gray and he had a cane at his side.

“Been playing any ball lately?” I asked politely, thinking that the answer was no.

“No. My doctor forbids it—you know, my back,” he mumbled.

“Do you go to the handball courts at Brighton Beach to watch?” I asked, trying to salvage something good for him.

“Yeah,” he said, sighing. “But that’s all I can do.”

“Well, that’s too bad,” I sympathized.

“I’m not sad,” he said. “Handball gave me more than 50 years of fun. I’m can’t complain!”

And I said goodbye to him and walked away, satisfied that he had lived his life exactly the way he wanted to; that he had done something with it that he considered worthwhile.

Raanan Geberer is an editor at a local newspaper in New York and lives with his wife Rhea and his cat Bonnie in Chelsea. His hobbies include vegetable gardening, working out at the gym and playing rock music with friends. He is a lifelong railfan and has an overriding interest in politics, religion, history and literature.

So, when he arrived at the door of my tenement apartment at 1AM, unexpected, unannounced, I didn't say no. I let him in, against all my instincts.

"Hi. I was at the community center. We just finished working. We were painting and doing construction. I'm exhausted. It's too late to go home. Can I stay here?"

He stood there right before me, Jay Martinez, about 5'10", dark-skinned, a little pockmarked. His hair was close-cropped and curly. His ears were extremely small and curled up at the bottom. He was stocky, but he had a sloppy-full belly that spilled over his belt. Though he looked strong and muscular enough he would always let the other men do the hard work and heavy lifting I'd noticed.

And now, here he was. I had gone to school that day, attended three classes at Hunter, worked at my waitress job on the usual 7-hour shift, taken the subway home to the Court Street station at Borough Hall. I'd just gotten in from a very long day a half hour before. I had hoped to do evening prayers, put on my pajamas, watch a little tv and then fall dead asleep. His arrival ruined those innocent plans.

He was a Headquarters Chief in what was then called NSA. Now known as SGI (Soka Gakkai International), it was and is a group founded on Buddhist principles. Many New Yorkers are familiar with NSA/SGI from their time in the 80s when they conducted huge campaigns to recruit people. They could be found in every neighborhood, out on the streets, handing out pamphlets and intruding upon people with the question, posed with a big smile, "Have you ever heard about Nam myoho renge kyo?"

I had been drawn in not by this method of "street shakubuku" (introduction), but through a girl I worked with, Anna. We were both waitresses in a burger restaurant on Court Street in Brooklyn Heights. She intrigued me. She had a young son, was a single mother, worked for the same tips I did, and yet managed to maintain an apartment in the Heights.

Even more importantly, when everyone else was stressing out about not having a date on Friday night, she seemed genuinely happy and at ease, unconcerned with her single status. She seemed buoyant.

"Oh my God, you will not believe what happened today!" she announced to the lunch shift table as we had breakfast before the restaurant opened. "I was $300 short on the rent. I didn't know where I'd get it. So, I just chanted and chanted Nam myoho renge kyo and what do you think happened? I got a check in the mail this morning - a refund from the telephone company!!! for $296! Can you believe it? Isn't that wild?"

She had stories like this on a regular basis: a friend sending her $50, a birthday card with $100, finding $20 on the street when she had no money for dinner for her son and herself.

I was impressed. It didn't hit me until years later to ask why a young woman with an MA in Psychology (fairly rare in those days) was working as a waitress and not in her own field.

Everything about her seemed to be unencumbered by weighty convention, even her physical being, her lack of breasts (which would have bothered other women), her height (5'1"), her very short hair. She had a Peter Pan quality that men found fascinating.

Anna had tried to introduce me to her "Buddhist beliefs" a number of times. "Maggie, you'd love this." I would never give her a hearing. I thought she was a Hare Krishna or somesuch. When I finally told her that, she cried, "What? No, no. That's a cult!"

And then one day she left one of her NSA magazines open to an article she knew I'd be interested in. She left it right where I'd be sitting to have lunch after the shift ended. My eye naturally alighted on it and I read. It was well-written. My English major prejudice was impressed by the grammatical correctness and fluent style. This was no Hare Krishna klaptrap with appalling spelling and uneven font. This was sophisticated stuff.

And so, I was seduced. One day shortly after she invited me to her apartment to see her altar. She led me to the bedroom where she had a small, unobtrusive altar, laid out artfully with fresh green leaves in a vase, fresh fruit in a wooden bowl, a small vessel filled with water. Suspended on the wall above the altar was what looked like a wooden curio cabinet, in blonde wood. It had an elegant simplicity.

"Do you want to see my Gohonzon?"
"What's a Gohonzon?"
"Gohonzon means 'highest object of worship.'"
"Oh. Yeah. Yes."
"OK," she said in the charming, wry, smiling way I'd become familiar with. She looked happy.

She knelt down in front of the altar, put a small leaf between her lips, reached up over the altar toward the cabinet and opened it.

I was floored. The scroll before me was astonishingly beautiful. It was a little mandela. I'd been taking a course at Hunter in Buddhism and we'd studied these. They were meditation objects, meant to help the practitioner concentrate, meditate. This one was awesome. In length it was about 12 inches, in width, about 6. It contained only characters - Japanese? Chinese? The characters were gold, printed on a tannish brown background which had some kind of pattern emblazoned on it. It had such presence! Such charisma!

I remembered how our professor told us that, after his enlightenment, even Shakyamuni's detractors were compelled to rise up and greet him respectfully because he had such charisma, such power.

"It's beautiful."
"Would you like to try chanting?"
"All right."
"Nam myoho renge kyo.... Try it. Repeat after me...Nam myoho renge kyo."
"Nam myoho? renge kyo. Is that right?"

And now it was 3 years later. The "honeymoon phase" had ended abruptly the moment I finally acquiesed and became an official member. At first, I'd been treated like the loved and wanted golden child who could do no wrong, whose every move was pure delight. Upon joining, the pressure began.

Calls at 7AM Saturday morning: "Where are you? We're doing a 5 hour daimoku toso (chanting session). You have to be here!"

Calls at 11PM: "Tomorrow morning at 8AM you have to bring 40 sandwiches for the Youth Division."

"Our district has pledged to have 12 new members this month. Do shakubuku (introduction)!"

"We have a target of 150 subscriptions to the World Tribune (organ newspaper). So, your target must be 50. Get on the phone!"

"No! Of course you can't have a Christmas tree!"

I was 28 when I first met Anna and was introduced to her beliefs. I'd had a pretty difficult life. I'd been a foster child, aged out of the system without a penny to get started in the world and no one to lean on. But I'd been getting things together. I'd finally decided to go to college and was doing it, enjoying it. I was a waitress at a restaurant that was not bad to work at, at all. You could have your meals there. And I had friends there.

Restaurant people were fun: real, unassuming, and with irreverant senses of humor. Whenever you had an annoying customer you could curse your head off in the kitchen and return to the dining area calm and composed. A typical kitchen conversation during rush would sound something like this:

"Shit. I have that asshole again on Station 2. He's trying to impress his date by running me all over the fucking place. I feel like telling her I heard he has a small dick."

Wild laughter.

"I got that cheap bitch. She was here yesterday. Can't she find another place to go? She wears a cashmere coat and leaves me a dollar."

"You're lucky. I got Sam again. He's sloshed."

After the intense pressure of the rush we'd all calm down, turn in our books, count our tips, and settle in for lunch together. It was during one of these lunches that I discovered the NSA magazine.

Three years later and I was a kumicho, a unit chief in NSA. On the first day I was appointed, I was given a list of 30 members who had left NSA and told I was to get them back. "Start calling. Don't forget to get their World Tribune subscription money. Don't forget your target."

I learned immediately, as all members did, that questioning was considered negative and destructive, "destroying the unity of believers." Good fortune was determined by one's fidelity to NSA, one's unquestioning loyalty. In fact, one's eternal soul was connected to being an active member, a true believer.

It was an important element in the life of a true believer to "receive guidance" from a "senior leader." With any life crisis you were encouraged to do this. Senior leaders were allowed, even encouraged, to scold, ridicule, castigate, scream at junior members. A senior leader who wasn't willing to be resented by their junior members was irresponsible.

And so it was that I went for guidance to Jay Martinez when the relationship I was in was not going well. I trusted him. He was a Buddhist leader, revered and loved by all the members. He was there to protect me, to guide me, to keep me from harm. I was safe with him.

I confessed to him all my hurt and despair over the broken romance, along with details. He was like a father. After this, he began turning up in odd places and at odd hours. I didn't question it. I was flattered: I felt special. This important man wants to be friends with me. He's so busy and a father of 2, a husband, a Headquarters chief and yet he makes time for me.

So, at 1AM, I wasn't completely surprised. He'd come other times, once in the afternoon, once around 5PM or so. But he had never asked to stay over. What was I to do with this request in my little apartment? I had a tiny bedroom with room only for a bed, and a pull-out couch in the living room.

It was awkward. He sat on the couch awhile and recounted his day. I was so tired. After about an hour he asked if he could take a shower.

"Sure."

He came out of the bathroom wearing only a towel. That's when I finally realized his true intention. I scrambled around frantically thinking what can I do, who can I call. It was 2AM. My friends would all be asleep. And what would I say? What could they do? He was a Headquarters Chief! You didn't say no!

"Do you mind if I lay down?"
"No, go ahead."

What would Anna be doing now? Could I call Liz? 2:05 AM. Don't call anyone. You'll be disturbing people. Just avoid him. Wait him out. He'll go to sleep. Maybe you're imagining things. He's married. He has 2 kids. He's a Buddhist. Wait him out. Clean the house. Study. Sort out your finances. Do the dishes.

I vacuumed. I did the dishes. I cleaned, dusted, sorted. I attempted to study. After a long, long, long time he called out, "When are you coming to bed?"

When I heard his voice, so strong, so awake, so insistent, everything inside me collapsed. I knew I was defeated. I was exhausted and completely alone. It was 4AM, the darkest hour of the night. There was no one to call to, no one to help. And you didn't say no to a leader.

Afterwards, he got up, dressed, and went home. Suddenly, it was not so far away that he couldn't make it there.

The days that followed were days of despair. What had I done? It was all my fault.

After 3 weeks I could endure it no longer. I needed help. I went for guidance. Since my problem involved a Headquarters Chief I went to the most senior leader in New York.
In slow, almost whispered tones I told him what had happened. He was Japanese-American. He listened with a sympathetic face, deep brown eyes, tilting his head compassionately toward me. Finally, he spoke, after a long silence in which he seemed to be deeply and wisely ruminating.

"This is your karma. Be glad he didn't use violence."

I left the center that day determined to turn this negative experience into something positive. In the days that followed I chanted more and more to expiate my negative karma. At every meeting I saw Jay. He gave "final encouragement." I saw him giving guidance. He led prayers. He bantered with members. He was introduced as an important leader and an excellent role model. All the time I struggled with my anger, disappointment, hurt, shame.

One day I returned to the New York senior leader to speak with him about my "negative life condition" and to ask why nothing had happened to Jay Martinez. Again, he looked so sympathetic. He seemed so compassionate as he considered my situation.

And then he said, his long lashes lowered over his half-closed eyes, as if rousing himself from deep meditation, "You must protect the organization. You understand? You must never tell anyone about this."

M. O'Connell grew up in Brooklyn. For a time she was a member of NSA/SGI.

The construction worker eyed my father’s neatly pressed slacks and asked, “Who are you?”

“I’m his friend? He told me to meet him here for lunch,” my father said.

“Your name Reilly?”

“Yeah,” my father said.

“Richie’s waiting for you.”

“Where?”

The guy with the hard hat pointed ten stories up to the high steel. And then he said, “Take the cage up.”

At the top, the elevator operator opened the cage and motioned to a group of guys who were sitting on wooden planks, suspended over two horizontal steel beams. They were eating their lunch with their feet hanging over the edge, kicking at the clouds.

“What’re you doing?” my father asked. “Where’s Richie?”

“He’s out there. Just walk.You’ll find him.”

“Are you crazy? I’m not going out there. Take me back down.”

Richie Two-ax was my father’s best friend. He was a bolt man, an ironworker, a Mohawk Indian who rode gray iron girders through the high blue sky as they were maneuvered into place by a huge crane perched atop the skeleton frame of the growing Western Electric Building in late 1950s Manhattan. It was his job to fasten girders together with bolts from the bucket strapped to his waist. Like most Mohawk men, he hung out in the Wigwam Bar on Nevins off Atlantic in a part of Brooklyn known as Little Caughnawaga , a ten-square block area which became home to about 800 Mohawks, ironworkers and their families, during the height of the construction boom in New York.

Little Caughnawaga was like any other ethnic neighborhood in New York, transformed by the arrival of the latest other. Long-time residents complained about the decaying neighborhood, but shop owners saw an opportunity and adapted by stocking new foods. The pastor of the local house of worship, Cuyler Church on Pacific Street, had the same business sense as the neighborhood shopkeepers. He learned the Mohawk language, offered a Sunday service to families in the neighborhood, and increased his flock.

Most of the Irish and Italian residents who lived nearby passed through Little Caughnawaga as tourists. It was alien turf for them, but for my father, it was a familiar place because of his friendship with Richie. For the last forty years, he has been telling and retelling stories about Richie with the regularity of the seasons. I call these his Richie Two-ax stories and I recently tried to stitch them together to figure out what the Mohawk ironworker was like. What I discovered was that the anecdotes my father had shared with me over the years, tell me more about him than they do about Richie.

The story about the time he was supposed to have lunch with Richie at the Western Electric Building is the odd one out of the lot because this is the only story in which my father voluntarily leaves his side. In every other story, my father is the classic, loyal friend.

For example, after the Manual Training High School Prom in 1958, they were walking through Duffy Square as three guys passed them. Richie didn’t like the way the guys leered at the girls, and they may have said something, so he went after them. My father gets really animated when he tells this part of the story: “He didn’t say a word, didn’t wait for me. He just went shithouse. Two big guys squared off against him, and when Richie dropped one of them with that right hand of his, the other one lost heart. The guy opposite me was more interested in getting his friends away from Richie than in fighting, so I helped him break it up.”

But it was hard to stop Richie once he started fighting, so soon the cops got involved. According to my father, “Richie was still hot when the cops showed up and there was a lot of pushing and shoving. One of the cops pushed Richie and he pushed back. Richie always pushed back. Didn’t take shit from nobody. And neither did the cops, so out came the Billy Clubs. The cop started pounding Richie, but he refused to go down. Two other cops jumped in and they eventually cuffed him and pushed him into a patrol car.”

My father talked to the cops after they had calmed down and explained to them what had happened. “The guys insulted the girls,” he said. “What would you do if someone insulted your girlfriend in the street?”

“He pushed me, kid,” one of the cops said.

“He’s a hothead,” my father countered. “Give the guy a break. He’s an ironworker.”

“He’s Mohawk?” the cop asked.

“Yeah. C’mon, cut him some slack. He’s a good guy.”

“Where does he work?”

“At the Western Electric Building on Broadway and Fulton.”

“Go see if he knows our guys down there,” the cop told to his partner. And after a brief conversation, which my father couldn’t hear, they released Richie.

My father was by Richie’s side in 1957 when they walked into fraternity dance at Prospect Hall, on Prospect Avenue between 5th and 6th, in Brooklyn: “As soon as we got in, someone threw a bottle of Bushmills in Richie’s direction. It didn’t hit him, but he knew it was intended for him. He had had a beef with some Italians a few weeks earlier. So he went after an entire table of them. No words. No warning. Just steel violence. It took four of us to pull him away. Richie started swinging at us when we pulled him off of one of the Italians, but I managed to calm him down. Once we had a few drinks and everything was fine.”

The best example of my father’s loyalty to Richie takes place on the night of the riot at the Wigwam Bar. This is my favorite Richie Two-ax story. Each time my father told his seasonal story about the Wigwam riot, his blue eyes lit up and he became animated: “One night, after we dropped off our dates, Richie told me he had to go see his cousin who was the barmaid at the Wigwam, and he asked me to come along. We walked into the bar just in time to see her rip a stone tomahawk off the wall, almost knocking down the huge picture of Jim Thorpe that was right above it. She swung it at a guy who had grabbed her arm, and she hit him square on the head.”

Sometimes, during this part of the story, my father reached up to an imaginary tomahawk and swung it down into the air. When he did this, I could almost see the picture of Jim Thorpe swaying on the wall.

He used to get up during the next part of the story, but the arthritis in his feet make him less animated today: “Richie jumped on the guy who had grabbed his cousin, and before I knew it, the place had erupted into a riot! I remember yelling, ‘I gotcha ya back, Richie,’ but before I could take a swing, a huge ironworker I didn’t know picked me up and carried me outside. I yelled at him when he put me down: ‘My friend Richie’s in there!’ Before the guy ran back in, he said, ‘This is a Mohawk fight. No white men allowed.’”

“I tried to go back in, but something was blocking the door. I looked around and saw a black and white police car down the block on Nevins, near Dean Street. So I ran up to the car and told them about the fight. The cops were ambivalent, and when they didn’t do anything, I told them, ‘Hey, my friend’s in there.’ One of the cops said to me, ‘Don’t worry about it, kid. It happens all the time. We’ll take care of it.’ Just then, a guy came flying through the plate glass window and the cops called for backup.”

My father avoided moralizing at the end of his stories and left it to me to figure out what they meant. It took me a while, but one night, years later, as I was watching a National Geographic episode on the salmon's mating ritual with my young son and my father during a Sunday visit to Brooklyn, it hit me. My father had always been obsessed with the salmon’s difficult journey to return to its original spawning ground. He was particularly amazed at how a male salmon would sacrifice itself for its mate. If a female salmon had inadvertently landed on the shore as they leaped upriver, the male would join her and try to push her back in the water so she could continue her journey to lay her eggs where she herself had hatched. Or he would die trying.

As my father explained this ritual to my son, just as he had explained it to me, I realized that the salmon’s spawning ritual was the perfect explanation for my father’s persistent retelling of his seminal stories, which touched in his friendship with Richie, his membership in gangs, and his life on the streets of 1950s Brooklyn. Each of his seasonal retellings of these stories was his journey upriver, back to his spawning ground. And each time he brought me along, pushing me back into the river of his dreams.

Don Reilly received his MA in Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama from University College Dublin. He is an Associate Professor of English and Chair of the English Basic Skills Department at Bergen Community College in Paramus, New Jersey. Reilly is a reluctant suburbanite and lives in Wayne, New Jersey with his wife and children, but his heart remains in Brooklyn, the borough of his birth. He is currently working on his MFA in Creative Writing at the City College of New York.

The first time I tired to pass as a senior I told the young man at Paragon Sporting Goods that I was 62. He asked me for ID. I said I didn’t have any on me. He asked me what year I was born. This is where my math skills messed me up. Even though I’d prepared for this question with a pen and paper before I’d gone to the store to try to save on my tennis permit by adding five years to my age, I gave him the wrong answer.

I said I was born in 1950. He punched a few keys on his computer and looked puzzled at the result. “It says you’re only 61,” he said.

I was sweating already because I’m out of practice lying to authorities. True, it wasn’t like lying to the IRS or unemployment, but still I was out of practice.

“Oh, so I’m too young? I asked him.

“Yeah,” he said.

My friend Trevor from the East River Park courts told me about the scam and said it was easy to pull off because you didn’t have to show any id. Plus the Paragon clerks who you have to fool didn’t care much one way or the other. The other thing that made it such an easy hustle, although I’d just blown it, was that for anyone in their teens or twenties, the difference in looks between anyone over 45 and a tennis player who has reached the magic age of 62 is indistinguishable.

I knew I’d never be as cool as my 57-year old English buddy, Trevor, from the courts under the Williamsburg Bridge. He is the charming scoundrel type of sometime painter, sometime photographer, sleazy in the best way, émigré artist type of New Yorker who’s scraped out a living in the city for the last few decades. He lived in the Chelsea Hotel, dated Madonna before her career got off the ground, and won a huge settlement from his landlord after not paying rent for years.

Now he works as a bartender at the hottest restaurant in the West Village, runs an antique lingerie web site and spends a few hours in the middle of most days at the East River Park tennis courts, or as he calls it, the East Village Country Club.

I think he is impressive in his way. And it is an approach that as we boomers get closer and closer, some of us are already there, to not having to scam for the geezer version of the city’s tennis license, that is disappearing. Trevor is a throwback to the Max’s Kansas City era and some of the more glamourous scenes from the city’s past. Plus he’s an expat who stayed, which to someone like me, who barely made it out of Jersey, also has a kind of allure

One of the things about aging is if you miss that chance to date Madonna in the 70's or to play in the NFL, Brett Favre aside, the opportunity, like all the years that add up to only having to pay $20 for your permit, is gone.

So while some of Trevor’s accomplishments are out of reach, no matter how much I might want to emulate his sleazy brand of cool, his reinvention of himself as a sophisticated, expat New Yorker, I thought, couldn’t I at least pull off his tennis permit ruse?

I did the math again. If I was going to be 62 in May 2011, I would have to be born in 1949.

This time at Paragon, there was a young woman running the permit desk. I said I wanted to buy a senior tennis permit. She asked me for ID. I said I didn’t have any on me. She asked me to spell out my name. She asked me when my birthday was. “November 2, 1949"

After some more clicks on her computer, she asked me to take three steps to the left and stand on the red line so she could take my picture for the permit.

A few days later I ran into Trevor at the courts. I showed him the plastic id-like card. It wasn’t as good as dating Madonna. It wasn’t as good as running an antique lingerie web site. But it was OK for me, a guy from Jersey who passed for 62 on only his second try.

Brent Shearer is the book critic for Long Island Tennis Magazine. He is the only reporter to have been kicked out of the 2008 U.S. Open.

When I left the theatre I crossed the street and stood in front of a white apartment complex that had once been the hospital where Rudolph Valentino died and Marilyn Monroe was hospitalized while studying at the Actors' Studio.

When I looked at my LCD screen to review the photos, Scarlett looked like Marilyn in all of her slow shutter-speed close-ups. A young girl, no more than 10 years of age was leaving the apartment complex, and  she asked me what I was photographing.

"Ghosts," I answered.

"Well, " she replied. "There's a lot of them around here!"

John Quilty is a writer who lives in New York City.

When we were growing up, she knew everything about me. In our grandmother’s Brooklyn three family house Bets and I lived downstairs with our parents and grandmother, and my mother’s two sisters and their families were in the smaller upstairs apartments. The family was close, if not always peaceful, and the house was always filled with drama, feuding sisters, loud card playing uncles and arguing cousins passing through. There were no secrets in those close quarters. Everyone knew everybody’s business and if someone upstairs farted, someone downstairs said, “Excuse me!”

When Bets started junior high we even had to share a room. Our parents divided their bigger bedroom in half for us and moved into the smaller one. Bets was more like another mother than a sister then. She caught me doing things my real mother, my grandmother and my aunts didn’t. When I was six, Bets caught me in the hall closet under the stairway comparing body parts with Susie Solomon, the girl from up the block. She sent Susie home and me to my half of our bedroom, but she never told our mother. When I was eleven Bets married John, her childhood sweetheart from across the street, and they moved into an apartment just three blocks away. Shortly after that my parents promptly tore down the partition, moved me out and moved themselves back into their old room.

Over the years the time gap between us narrowed as I started catching up with Bets. There were some who said I overtook her somewhere around fifty. I started jokingly to introduce myself as Bets’s older brother, and there were people didn’t get the joke.

“I think we left the city just in time,” my sister says.

I look through the gritty windshield at the cars that are already crawling in the building rush. By four o’clock they will be at a stand still and the expressway will be locked up tight. “Remember when ‘rush hour’ used to be a couple of actual hours and not the whole day? This HOV lane is the only way to fly, Bets. I think I just may invest in one of those Safety Man dummies and keep him in the car. That way I can live the rest of my life in the HOV lane even when I’m alone.”

About six months ago Betty let her hair go gray and cut it short out of necessity. It looks good on her. “I like your hair that way,” I tell her. “It’s natural and soft. And I love the waves. I hope you aren’t going to color it again.”

“I really haven’t decided.”

In the transition Bets has become a kinder, gentler version of our mother, an unnatural blonde until well into her 90s. She was a woman whose social calendar until she died at 96 consisted of regular beauty parlor appointments and doctor visits.

“Live long enough,” she said, verbalizing my thoughts, “and eventually we become our parents.”

In that respect in the past few years we both have become our mother, taking our turn doing the medical thing. The proof was that we were returning from our different doctors in different offices in different hospitals in Manhattan. Usually we didn’t overlap. She had her appointments and I had mine. But this time we did, so I was able to drop her off and pick her up for the return trip home.

Mine was the third follow up appointment, nine months out from a July surgery at the robotic hands of Dr. Ash, which left me prostateless on Long Island. It also left me with damp underwear, a definite improvement, I suppose, over the adult diapers and feminine sanitary pads I had worn for months, and a small price to pay not to die of cancer!

“These aren’t for me,” I assured the check out girl in Rite-Aid. But she was more interested in the cell phone conversation that was going on in her ear, and she just rang up the sale.

Another post-operative advantage was that without a prostate I no longer peed in stuttering fits and starts. “Now I pee like a race horse,” I announced proudly at my first follow up meeting with Dr. Ash. “Of course, sometimes I start before I am in the gate and continue until the race is over.”

Dr. Ash laughed politely at my comment. When I met him I discovered he was not a robot, and Ash was the shortened form of his unpronounceable first name. After my cancer diagnosis, while I was deciding on a course of action and researching doctors, before I had actually met him, I thought his last name, filled with a bunch of vowels, might be Italian. But one look at Dr. Ash removed all thoughts that our grandparents knew one another in Sicily. Dr. Ash was dark as a nut, a little man who looked like he would be more at home driving a cab in New York City than operating a Da Vinci robotic machine. He had the mandatory mustache that would put him on the “No Fly” list, or at least insure that he’d get to know Homeland Security intimately whenever he flew the friendly skies over the U.S.A. He also had little hands, an asset, I imagine, piloting the Da Vinci into the sides of a cancer-filled prostates.

At my second follow up appointment Dr. Ash asked, “And how is the other thing?” referring to the other minor side effect of prostate surgery, erections, or more specifically, the lack of them.

“Well,” I said, “the little soldier isn’t standing at attention yet, but he is leaning against the wall.” Of course I could have told him that the he had been hugging the wall for years.

“You are a funny man,” he said. “Are you using the pills?”

“Oh, the blue pills. Yes.”

“And do they help?”

“A little,” I said. “But only if I duct tape them onto two tongue depressors on each side of my penis.”
“Ah,” Dr. Ash nodded his head, “then next time instead of seeing me, we make your appointment with Adam, my assistant. That way you can explore other alternatives to duct tape and tongue depressors.”

“It’s amazing how far we have come, Bets.” She is quiet and I think she is napping with her eyes open. “So there I was,” I say, “with my pants and underwear around my ankles and young Adam holding my frightened little wee wee in one blue-gloved hand.”

She laughs. I wonder if she is thinking of that day she caught me and Susie in the closet as I described in detail the trauma of seeing the hypodermic needle drawing closer to Little Joe. “And just before impact he actually said, ‘You’re going to feel a little prick.’ The little prick! And then he told me he would go out for about ten minutes while I tried to stimulate myself. Right there in the office! ‘What,’ I called after him, ‘no mood lighting? No Barry White?’”

“And?” Bets asks.

“So, in about ten minutes I felt the earth move. Well, maybe not the earth, and it wasn’t like the big one that hit Japan, but there was a stirring in my lower regions. Not anything to hang my hat on, but a definite improvement. When Adam came back I had to show him and rate it on a zero to ten scale. I told him I gave it a five because I liked the words, but it was hard to dance to. Since he’s about eleven he never heard of ‘American Bandstand.’ He didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. And thought Dick Clark was that old guy with a stroke who tries to count down the New Year every year.” I pause for the dramatic effect. “And how did you spend your day, Bets?”

But I knew. Not to be out done, my sister pre-trumped my puny prostate cancer by a little more than a year when she was diagnosed with cancer in her liver. Cholangioma. How bad could it be? It sounded musical, like a Caribbean dance with those shakey things or that instrument you scrape with a stick, or like an exotic drink made with tequila, Triple Sec and coconut cream. “I’ll take two cholangiomas, one frozen and one on the rocks.”

Actually it was a “little spot,” according to the surgeon at Columbia Presbyterian who removed it with about half of Bets’s liver more than a year ago. He then pronounced her “cancer free,” which she was, for about six months, until her liver grew back. It is an interesting fact that the liver is the only human internal organ that does grow back. And with it, her damned Spot, that very persistent cholangeoma, reappeared. Because of its location so close to the hepatic vein another surgery was out of the question, so Bets found an oncologist who put her through a year of intense chemo alternating with radiation. Five days a week for months the family took turns driving Bets into the city for daily radiation and weekly blasts of chemo. And even after a CAT scan showed Spot was dead, the doctor ordered a second round of chemo stronger than the first, to be sure he just wasn’t playing dead.

“Oh, the usual. Two bags of poison, one bag of flush with nausea and vomiting to follow.” She hasn’t lost her sense of humor.

“Who’d a thought, Bets? How far we’ve come since that day you caught me and Susie Solomon in the closet. Do you remember that?”

She laughs into her hand. “Yes, I do. You were so cute holding your little winky in one hand and a flashlight in the other shining it on Susie Solomon. Well, now you’re out of the closet and telling everybody who’ll listen about your winky.” She laughs again remembering. “The surprised look on your face. And that cute little winky.”
I can feel me face getting red from my sister’s good memory. “Sweet Susie Solomon. Hers was the first vagina I ever saw and that started me down the road to Perdition. I wonder what happened to her.”

Bets is lost in her own memories. “If you think you came a long way, imagine how far I’ve come since my junior high school days.”

As far as I knew Bets had only two men in her life. She married John who lived across the street when he came back from Korea. He was her childhood sweetheart.

That wasn’t so unusual where we grew up. The young people in the neighborhood didn’t travel very far for romance and they tended to date and marry one another. There were many couples on the Brooklyn block, many marriages, some that even lasted. Cousin Maryanne married Pat from across the street, cousin Joann married Tommy from 56th Street, John’s sister Chickie married Frank who lived in the same two family house, Nancy married Donald, John’s brother, and I married Jenny, my first wife, the girl next door. Then after John, Bets met Nels, the quiet Norwegian, at the Arthur Murray Studios the night she went there with people from her bereavement group. Nels, a widower, had just dropped in on a whim. He became the second great love of my sister’s life until his death from an unsuccessful battle with cancer. Both of Bets’s men were gone, but not the way my two wives were gone. Hers died; mine left me for dead after two costly divorces. And in my book that made her the winner.

“We sure have come a long way,” Bets says again. “I remember when I thought masturbation was the worst sin in the world.”

I snort and grab the steering wheel. “I didn’t think my old sister even knew that word. Do you really want to go there, Bets?”

“You’d be surprised what your ‘old sister knows. And besides, I just listened to you go on and on about your penis the whole ride. Now it’s your turn to listen.”
We both laugh.

There we were, bruised and battered, still alive in the HOV lane of the LIE, both of us much too old even to be thinking about erection injections or masturbating. But we were thinking about it, and we were talking about it too. The best thing about Bets and me is that we could talk about anything.

That is what I am thinking, what I say is, “Bets, remember that time that you cleaned out my toy closet and threw everything away?”

“I sure do. You were so mad at me.”

“Well, Bets,” I turn to look at her wrapped in her blanket, “I just want you to know that I finally forgive you for throwing out all my Brooklyn Dodger baseball cards.”

Brooklyn born and raised, Joseph E. Scalia taught English and Creative Writing to reluctant junior and senior high school kids on Long Island for 33 years. He started his "real life" as a writer in 1997. He began writing as a child in elementary school, what he calls "terrible rhyming poems" on bathroom walls. Over the years he made the move to paper and has written and published five books, including a young adult novel, FREAKs, Pearl, a novel inspired by his years of teaching Steinbeck, No Strings Attached, an eclectic collection of his short stories, Brooklyn Family Scenes, a collection of family inspired stories and poems, and Scalia vs. The Universe Or: My Life And Hard Times, a collection of humor.Presently he 1s looking for a publisher for his collected poems, Poetry In Alphabetical Order. In addition to writing he also paints watercolors.

© 2011 Joseph E. Scalia

If we require just a modicum of excitement and slight adrenalin rushes, considering these as essential elements for attending any sporting event . . . well, baseball at any level might just not satisfy the casual fan. I realize that to so disrespect the national pastime borders on sacrilege, but I have to be honest: watching baseball brings on a level of boredom that is unparalleled even in typically mundane lives. I will admit openly that perhaps I don’t fully understand or appreciate the nuances of the game, the primal battle between pitcher and batter, the intricate strategy that underlies every movement on the field, every facial tick, every spit of excessive tobacco juice, every embarrassing grab of the pants and the constant twitchy movements of every player on the field. This is absolutely true. Perhaps it’s because baseball is a game that must be played and tit fails as a spectator sport. It’s too slow, too long and has too many breaks. It’s the only sport in which fans need a 7th inning stretch. Are you kidding . . . a professional sport that builds in a break for the spectators? Is it to catch our collective breaths, refocus our attention on the action or to refuel for the last two acts for a primordial battle? Hardly.

So as much as I am not looking forward to another baseball season of somnolence, I mark this time of year as a reminder. When I was younger, I actually played baseball with the neighborhood kids in the park across the street from the apartment building where I grew up. We rented a railroad tenement flat—four rooms all in a row—that shook when the trains rumbled by. It was a time, before cynicism reigned, when baseball was my entire world, and playing the game taught me something significant about life.

During most summers as a kid, I played baseball in Columbus Park along with the other boys in the Flats—a neighborhood made up of mostly immigrant families. The park, in the shadow of the New Haven line, transformed every spring and most of the summer to become our ball field. Neighborhood kids of all ages and abilities met in the park to play right after breakfast, sometimes took a break for lunch, and then played until dinner. On many long hot days we met again after dinner to play again until the street lamps and swarms of moths warned us that it was getting late. The next day the schedule was the same. We didn’t spend endless hours practicing. We just played. Everyone played and uneven sides meant that the team with the extra man usually did something to make it fair: they got one less strike, one less foul ball, one less out.

In particular, I still remember one neighborhood player, Vito—or “Veets”—a severely handicapped kid who played with us every day in the park; he had a deformed arm and hand and wore an unwieldy metal brace on his right leg. We didn’t know the cause or name of his affliction, but Veets could throw, catch and hit one-handed shots without any problem.

He labored terribly when he ran the bases after a hit, so if we didn’t need an out and he was close at first, we didn’t call him out. We didn’t announce this silent deal nor did we meet to discuss the value of this. We just did it. Veets wasn't the fastest player or slickest fielder, but he always played—almost always as the designated underhand pitcher for both teams. On the mound, he kept his glove tucked under his bad arm when he pitched and then deftly reversed the process after the ball left his working hand. Veets managed pretty well, and he always got picked to play. We never thought of him as anything else but another kid who wanted to play baseball.

Sometimes at bat, he would hit the ball just right with his one-arm lash and send it far out into our imaginary outfield—better identified as anywhere past the sidewalk that dissected our field. But even the longest drive meant only a double for Veets; I can still picture his wide grin, as he turned his head quickly from side to side just to make sure he had really beaten the ball to second.

The park where we played, Columbus Park, wasn’t actually designed as a ball field or recreation area for kids, so home plate was just a rough pentagon we drew in the dust in front of a huge rock emblazoned with a copper relief of Christopher Columbus, the park's namesake. First base became a well-worn oak tree, second a bare spot in the grass, and third an old shirt that somebody usually remembered to bring. If we forgot, we improvised by making a trip to one of the steel-wire trash baskets, and a paper bag or a flattened can was called into service. The pitcher's mound, an oval bare spot, was worn after days, weeks and months of someone—usually Veets—digging his Keds into what could never remain grass for long. We learned to make do with what we had and accept our situation—an attitude Veets modeled for us every day.

We loved to play baseball back then, and we learned to play with kids of all abilities. Instead of making someone feel bad for missing a ball or striking out, we learned quickly that it would be better to encourage him so that next time he might make the play. We won or lost, for what it was worth those days, with the guys we had on the field. So we tried to make major league plays, and if we failed . . . we just came back to the park the next day to play again. No one coached us in the ways of hitting, throwing, catching or sliding. We naturally acquired these skills by watching someone who could do them. And if someone didn't show up, we didn’t forfeit the game; we just agreed that if you hit the ball to right, where we could not field a player, it was an automatic out. Everyone always agreed and understood. You had to know when to compromise if you wanted to play in Columbus Park, but we were always ecstatic when we’d see someone in the distance running to the field to join us.

The beginning of spring training reminds me of those days in the park and especially of Veets. Where is he now? Does he remember those days in the park? As kids, we were never overtly schooled in accepting others with differences or those with physical handicaps; it just seemed natural for us back then to accept a kid like Veets. We learned a lot from watching a boy who struggled just to walk, to keep up with this rest of us. I can imagine now how difficult life must have been for Veets. In my mind’s eye, I can still see him in the distance limping towards the field dragging his bat and glove—ever smiling his wide grin. We never faulted him for what he couldn’t do, and we never prevented him from doing what he could. We couldn’t play without him—he was our pitcher.

So, as spring finds its way to us again, I admit that part of me misses those halcyon days. I must further admit that I am not looking forward with any degree of excitement to another baseball season; I am overjoyed through, that all this talk of spring training has allowed me to reurn in memory once again to a time when the only reason I rode my bike to the park was to play ball with my friends -- Veets included.

Joe Antinarella, a proud Native New Yorker, has been teaching Writing and English for thirty-five years. He has found talented writers in search of their voices in a middle school, an alternative high school, in a prison, at a university in St. Petersburg, Russia, and for the last eighteen years at Tidewater Community College in Virginia.

I got a beer, walked into a corner and rested against a broken office chair. The Lower East Side looked like a bunch of moving lights from the opaque glass in the windows. The ceiling used to be white at some point but had now turned brownish grey. Words and shapes were drawn all over it. It looked like a used piece of paper that had been flying out in the wind for too long, from one garbage heap to the other. Behind the bartender, the wall was filled with all sorts of stickers and tags: some ironic, some radical and some obscene. The bar was packed. Every stool around the bar table was taken. Those standing made a parallel line near the glass windows, leaving hardly a foot’s space to walk between them and the people sitting. But no one was doing too much walking that night. Everyone just drank and talked to their companions. Every once in a while, someone started talking to the group next to them and formed another group.

A middle-aged woman sat across from me and sipped her drink. Someone came from behind her and spanked her hard on her large buttocks. The slap made her rise up a little from her stool. She looked at the person behind her, recognized him and gave him an affectionate hug. They must have held each other for at least a minute, after which he spanked her again a few times and then went across the bar to meet other people. A few minutes later an older man walked in and caressed the woman’s hair. She kissed him. They sat together and made out for the next hour or so.

A few skateboarders stood against the wall next to me. Their group kept changing as new people came in and some people left. A beautiful black woman with a mohawk sat on a windowsill, her arms wrapped around a girlfriend, as she chatted with the skateboarders.

I sipped my beer and talked to the woman standing on the other side of me. She was a music journalist from San Francisco and told me that it was hard for her believe New York had legalized gay marriage before California. She was at Mars Bar because she wanted to sit somewhere and think things through. She didn’t want to say which things. As we talked more she told me about finding a broken flip phone in the middle of road. Who uses a flip phone these days?, she asked me. And how would a phone be in the middle of the road like that? “Maybe some stupid hipster thought it was ironic to still use a flip phone and dropped it while speeding on his fixie?” I said. “I have a fixie.” she said. A few minutes later she left and I got my second beer.

Seven years ago, my first year in New York, I tried to go to CBGB one Friday night. It was the last sign of the edgy punk days of the Lower East Side, I had heard. When I got to the door they asked me for a twenty-five-buck cover. The neighborhood had gentrified so much, apparently, that even the temple of un-gentrified times was charging heavy money. I didn’t pay it. CBGB closed down and was replaced by a John Varvatos store, where you can pay a lot of money to buy clothes that remind you of artists that didn’t have a lot of money. A very fitting tribute, I feel.

East Village and Lower East Side dive bars weren’t like that. They remained cheap and they remained dirty even as the neighborhood around them cleaned up. Mars Bar had been one of those places. But instead of being dirty, relaxed, and lazy like some others, say Holiday Cocktail Lounge, it was dirty, edgy and alive.

On a New Year’s Eve, six years ago, I sat there and sipped my last whiskey of the night. It was about 3:30 in the morning. The man in the next seat had flopped down on the bar table and was snoring. He woke up, grabbed my shoulder and said, “You think this is cold? Vermont is cold.” I wished him a Happy New Year and he went back to sleep.

During my first four years in the city I went to Mars Bar quite often for their four-buck shots of Jack Daniels. It reminded me of another time: not of New York City — I didn’t live here in that another time — but of bars, when bars were simply places you went to meet people you knew and drink or to hide away from people you knew and drink. No big-screen TVs, no bouncers. There was also the beauty of my own hypocrisy; I loved to be around a rough-edged group of young semi-punks and older crusties, drink cheap drinks, and then take a cab back to my luxury apartment 10 minutes away. As time passed, Mars Bar got into more tourist guidebooks, blogs and best-of lists. Slowly more people like me started showing up. They were happy to be in a seedy dive bar like they would have been in a zoo. I stopped going.

When I heard it was closing, I wanted to go there at least once more. So there I was. There was a constant flow of people coming in. Some stayed- but most came in, took a look, and left. A couple wearing small backpacks walked in. The woman had a New York tourist guidebook in her hand. They discussed, deliberated for a moment and decided to stay. He went to the bar to get drinks and she put their backpacks in a corner.

A few minutes later, a man from the other side of the bar decided to walk on the bar table. People cheered and clapped. He put his hands up and touched the ceiling and walked a couple of times back and forth while pushing up against the ceiling. The crowd shook their beer bottles and sprayed them on him as he strutted past them. He looked around the crowd as if for a signal. The crowd cheered. He unzipped his trousers and shook his penis around. Then he proceeded to do a few pushups on the bar table before zipping himself back up and going back to the corner he had come from. People went back to their conversation. I looked for the couple with the guidebook. They had left.

I left after one more drink. That stretch of Second Avenue was bustling. Beefed-up gay dudes in yuppie clothes stood outside Urge Bar, and a few guys in tight undies and wife-beaters stood outside Cock Bar. A flock of pretty girls in short black dresses shuffled around on the road and tried to flag down cabs that were off duty or taken. I walked towards the Pak Punjab deli for a samosa chaat, got it to go, and jumped in a livery cab.

Mars Bar closed down this week, for good.
 

"Now you’ve gotta realize that no one ever shopped on Mermaid Avenue. The store was one block away from the boardwalk, one block down from Nathan’s, but no one ever walked in that direction. Why would they? The only signs of life were the Italian pork store and my dad’s ridiculous little shop with a hundred shiny crosses in the window.

"One time toward the end of winter, my parents wanted to go on vacation, but my dad was concerned about leaving the st unattended. You know, because there were so many customers.

 "I was twenty years old.  I wasn’t doing anything with my life. I’d finished a degree in merchandising and I quit working at my Uncle Al’s electronics place because I hated electronics and I hated merchandising. I didn’t do much then but ride the bus back and forth across Brooklyn all day. I was thinking a lot, though, which didn’t seem to get me anywhere, so I said sure, I’ll run the shop. Maybe run is not the right word; it was more of a crawl. So my parents said goodbye and then up and went.

"For two straight weeks, I was there from ten in the morning till six at night. I had a three-legged chair about the height of a barstool, and next to the chair I kept a pile of books I was reading. We didn’t keep the heat running in the store ’cause my dad didn’t want to waste money, so I sat there on my stool in one of my bomber jackets and read books all day. Once or twice some middle aged women would come in and I’d take down the trays of crosses from the display case and show them off but no one ever bought.

"Jackie the Dog-Faced Boy, from the freak show in Coney Island, he came over a few times a week and sat with me. Some of the others too. Really good people, especially Jackie. Up close he didn’t even have too much of a deformity. I barely noticed it, just that his cheeks and forehead were too wide and his nose sunk sort of inward, and he always looked cold. I didn’t care if people came in or not, but it was nice to talk to Jackie when he stopped by.

"Every day for lunch I went next door to the salumeria and ordered a roast pork sandwich that I ate at one of the folding tables. I never locked the door when I left the shop. There was nothing in the store worth burgling and there were never any customers, so there wasn’t any money in the cash register.

"Most days my friend Boksembaum, who worked for the New York Public Library, came by in the Bookmobile. Boks would lendme books, because I was going  through my stack pretty quickly. Usually he brought this guy with him, Victor San Miro. The day I met him, he asked me if I smoked grass and if I liked bop. This guy Victor, he was into the music scene, knew some real good jazz musicians. So every night after I closed the store at six, the three of us drove up in the bookmobile to Harlem to buy dope and go to the jazz clubs. I always waited till six o’clock ’cause I felt guilty leaving before then.

"On the fourteenth day my folks were away, when the weather was starting to get warm, this woman in her thirties came in. She was the kind of person who knew exactly what she wanted. I was very confused by this attitude, you see, because whatever it was she wanted, I didn’t think Marcelle’s would have been the place to find it. All we had were plastic crosses.

"‘Is Mr. Marcelle here?’ she asked. People thought my dad’s name was Marcelle and he never wanted to correct a potential customer.

"I put a marker in the book I was reading and walked over to the counter and said, ‘No, but can I help you with something?’

"She pointed to the display case. ‘I want that amulet,’ she said, and then she pointed to another bracelet, ‘but I want it with that chain.’ My dad was the one who knew how to work the silver pliers and it took me about fifteen minutes to switch the two. But finally, I snapped it on the woman’s wrist.  I was so pleased. I wanted my dad to be proud when he got back. I made a dollar.

"About an hour after that, Boks and  Victor, came by in the Bookmobile and at six, I locked up the store and we headed uptown to buy some grass. I didn’t realize till later that I’d left my bomber jacket in the store, on top of my stack of books.

"When I went to open the store in the morning, my dad was already there, rearranging the pendants in the window.

"‘Different chain,’ he said, looking at the bracelet I'd changed.

"They’d come back early in the morning and the first thing he wanted to do was check on the store. My mom, who thought my dad was crazy, was sleeping at home.

"‘A woman wanted the other one,’ I said.

"‘You use the pliers?’

"I nodded and my dad smiled. I emptied the register in front of him, even though he hadn’t asked how much we made while he was gone. He was very happy, he said, that we made a dollar, and asked if I had read any good books while he was gone? I pointed to the stack. My jacket was gone.

"‘Where’s my bomber?’ I asked.

"‘Ahhhh,’ my dad said, nodding his head very slowly. ‘I give it to Jackie this morning.’

"I was instantly furious. Two weeks of sitting on that damn chair with a stack of books and just one customer, and my dad gives away my favorite jacket.

"‘What did you do that for?’ I asked.

"My dad shrugged and closed the register. ‘He need it more than you.’

"I couldn't come up with a reply, so I helped my dad pull up the metal gate in front of the
shop. Then he flipped the plaque on the door so it said OPEN. He pulled the stool over to the counter and he patted it twice with his hand.

"‘Here,’ he said. ‘You sit. We wait for a customer.” I sat and watched my dad fiddle with the pendants in the display case.

"‘Dad,’ I asked, ‘why do you keep this place?’

"I’d always wanted to ask him that but there’d never been a good time. I don’t think a single month had passed when he made the rent in sales, let alone a profit. But he could afford the hundred bucks a month it cost to rent, and I’m sure now, thinking back, that he was wholly honest when he finally answered me, because my dad was always honest, even if he didn’t make much sense.

"‘I always wanted to have my own store,’ he said. And that made sense to me.”

Mara Grayson is a fiction writer and poet originally from Sheepshead Bay. She now lives in Inwood and teaches English at The City College of New York.