We live in the Village, off Christopher Street. The greeting card store has cards with jokes I’m not sure I totally understand and there is a bakery with X-rated cakes. I want Carvel. My mother is experimenting with baklava.

The city is filled with perverts, junkies, pushers, muggers and arsonists but, at the same time, we roam freely. My best friend’s mother has left her conservative husband behind in the suburbs and her boyfriend is bisexual. They live in a loft on the boundary between the West Village and the meatpacking district. It had been the office for a gay magazine and they kept the original bathroom, complete with urinals and a toilet cubicle sporting graffiti with drawings of penises. Their father recalls my friend and her younger sister to the suburbs the next year. The city, clearly, is no place for children to grow up. I missed her.

I am friends with a man who works in a store on Christopher Street called The Soap Opera. He has salt and pepper hair. He goes to drag balls in Alphabet City, which is where he lives. It seems then like a faraway land. He loves the glamor and the illusion. I see how the store itself is like a stage set, with a brocade curtain covering a squalid and miniscule bathroom, a tiny kitchenette, a painted-over window, the shop cat’s box and food. It is the opposite of the boudoir atmosphere of the shop, though its products are destined to sit on the tiled windowsills of so many tenement bathrooms just like it. He sells lip balm that comes in a little tin with a sliding lid and Victorian lettering. They become popular at school and I take orders from friends to buy them, always getting the new flavors as soon as they are in stock.

I had all of this in mind when I wrote Lunch in Brooklyn, a novel of a pre-coming of age in the late 70s, commuting to school, feeling in it and not of it, at the age of extreme social conformity in an era of hedonism. I set the book in my friend’s loft because it expressed that better than our townhouse flat. I loved being on the roof. From the roof, it’s all beautiful and it all makes sense.

...

The Gift of Tongues
I go up to the roof after dinner, after the dishes are done. I tell them I come here to think, which is true, although it’s not the whole truth. My mother thinks it’s important to give me private space. From the roof, which is five stories up, you can see down to the river, although, because of the old West Side Highway, you can’t really see much. This is the edge of Greenwich Village. On one street is a row of little townhouses with planters of ivy spilling down from the window boxes. Around the corner, on Hudson Street, men are carrying in the antiques they had displayed outside their store. They have a cat called Sheba who sleeps in the window.

Across Hudson is the meatpacking district. The street widens for the trucks and the loading docks, where sides of beef are connected to pulleys, and the spaces between the cobblestones shine with blood in the morning. In the evening, when the meat-packers are gone, men dressed as disco queens and Catholic schoolgirls appear. They stand on the corners and stroll down the side streets, swinging their purses by the straps, dragging their satin jackets along the pavement.

From the roof, the loading dock looks more like an abandoned railway station. It feels quiet up here, despite the fact that you can still hear the rattle of trucks and the rush of traffic. An airplane tears slowly across the sky. Down in Corporal Seravalli Playground, the boys play basketball. From here they are graceful and you forget the way they show you their tongues, French kissing the air. Hey baby, come sit on my face.

The sky is a dark, streaky, polluted turquoise. I sit on a wooden crate, like a raft in the curling, blistering, tarpaper sea. My mother used to want to have roof parties until she learned how much it would cost to deck it over. My father has carefully explained to me how the upstairs neighbors will sue us if I walk on the tarpaper and damage the roof and they get a leak.

“They’ve heard you moving around up there,” my father has told me.

“Fred,” my mother says, “Kate is very responsible.”

I started smoking in sixth grade with my friend Stephanie. She lives in New Jersey now. I miss her a lot. Stephanie was my best friend more than Monica was. She used to come over all the time. My mom was happy for me to be “entertaining.” She bought us frozen yogurt bars and didn’t tell us when we had to have lights out. We shaved our legs and practiced with makeup. We read the instruction book that came in Tampax so we would be prepared. We pored over my mother’s Erica Jong books for the sex scenes. Some days, anything made us laugh, especially the recipes for game in The Joy of Cooking:

“Place rabbit on serving dish and pour sauce over it. Serve with: noodles, 213.”

“Use young animals only.”

“After scraping away blood clots...”

“You guys are so sick,” Monica would yell us when we phoned, laughing so hard at first we were just gasping, making her think it was a prank call.

“Singe and clean the insides well: Pigs’ ears,” Stephanie joined in.

“Lucky indeed is the cook with the gift of tongues!” I retorted.

“The testicles of young lambs are a great delicacy. To prepare, first cut into the loose outer skin for entire length of the swelled surface.”

Seventh grade was not as good without her. I had tried to cheer myself up with the notion that I would go back to school a woman of the world and all the cute, new boys would fall in love with me. I was tan and blonde and knew what an erogenous zone was. But there were only the same old boys and it was harder to stay a changed person in your mind when you realized you were still plain old, flat Kate.

This fall, starting eighth grade, I have vowed not to be disappointed. Everyone is ruling the middle school, but if you ask me, it’s a hell of a domain. Sixth graders are practically lower schoolers; seventh graders are either your friends or you ignore them. But at least we no longer have to worry that the eighth graders are having all the fun.

I drop my cigarette into the can with all the others and slosh the liquid around to be sure it’s out. It’s almost dark now. A boy runs through the park. The basketball he is carrying under his arm slips and he swoops down to retrieve it while still running. It is an amazing moment of total coordination. Harry Finch has this grace, flicking his hair over his shoulder, tapping his pencil on the desk in time with whatever music is playing loud in his head. The boys are bigger this year. Maybe, at long last, this will be the year that I find someone. Lucky indeed.

Rebecca Moore blogs at wertis.wordpress.com and is author of Lunch in Brooklyn, (lunchinbrooklyn.wordpress.com)  available on iTunes, Amazon and Smashwords.

The tenant, a clammy, heavyset woman in her thirties, bustled through an obstacle course of whirring floor fans that seemed to do little to mitigate her harried, overheated condition. She pointed to light fixtures and patches of wall in need of minor repairs, and spoke highly of the time she and her husband had spent in the apartment. She emphasized that though they were breaking their lease, they were by no means fleeing. The couple had unexpectedly purchased a home elsewhere in Brooklyn and felt eager to occupy it. “I don’t think I’ve seen a single funeral the whole time we’ve been here,” she told us for the second or third time.

The apartment, I had to acknowledge, was well suited to us. It had a comfortable living room and a large bedroom with a nook that would make for me a practical workspace. It possessed certain old-world details: pressed-tin ceilings in the kitchen and living room, and crown molding throughout. Even the oddly tilted hardwood floors proffered a bit of charming whimsy. Rent was modest and the building much nearer the subway than any property we’d seen in the preceding weeks. Once I’d accepted that we would enjoy no convenient baklava, no spanakopita or stuffed grape leaves—that any fringe benefits we might incur as a result of our relationship with the landlord lay with any luck in the very distant future—the woman’s assurances about the business’s fallow state began to sound comforting. The facility below was no workshop of ghastly human taxidermy, merely a quiet office in a retired state of final dormancy. An ex-beast gone blind and toothless with age. After a brief caucus in the privacy of the bathroom, Jenna and I emerged resolved: We would take it.

Prior to attending college outside Boston, I had lived the whole of my life on one block of a tiny colonial town a few miles from Philadelphia. The summer before I entered kindergarten, my family moved from one side of the Hluchan’s immaculate redbrick home to the other, into an imposing stucco affair that proved, over the years, to require literally inexhaustible repairs. Floors were refinished and, some years later, replaced. Walls were painted and shingles flung from the rooftop. After years of carrying buckets of muddy water from the basement in the wake of thunderstorms, my father commissioned the installation of waterproof lining and a sump pump. Long before my parents became aware of the necessity for any of these projects, however, during their days of house hunting, my father felt drawn again and again to a particular sort of home.

Several were scattered about the area. Each built of clean, precise brick, with tasteful, white-pillared porticoes and mullioned windows. The owners seemed to share a landscaper; for each lawn presented martial trimness and their hedges appeared plastic in their perfectness. Lights rarely brightened these interiors, at least not in any way visible from the street, and an unnatural serenity seemed to pervade the properties. These were hushed and leafless grounds. To my father, for whom cleanliness and quietude know few superiors, they seemed ideal locales. “Here is nice house,” he would say driving through town, dropping the article in his characteristic eastern European fashion.

At some point early in my childhood, my father began to do the family’s grocery shopping, and he quickly acquired a reputation for not reading labels. As a result, our pantry often held jars of saltless peanut butter and tins of anchovies he had mistaken for sardines, and which, in due course, found their way to food drives. This ignorance of labels and signs assured his repeated disappointment in finding that each winsome home he identified from the car was, of course, a funeral parlor. Perhaps I inherited something of this trait, if such a thing is heritable, for I too neglected at first to notice the abundant signage that tags my building as a mortuary. It seems fitting, though, that some 20 years after my father coveted the funeral facilities in my hometown, I managed to locate a building in Brooklyn in which, despite its funereal purpose, I am welcome to stay.

Mr. Cusimano—that is, Dominic J., my landlord—has a son, Robert, a managing director at an investment bank, who describes his father as “the last of the Mohicans.” The lone remaining practitioner of a business that once sustained several branches of the family. Mr. Cusimano’s grandfather arrived in Brooklyn from Sicily in 1929 with his wife and a three-year-old boy who would grow to become Mr. Cusimano’s father. The couple established their first storefront mortuary on Kane Street, in modern day Cobble Hill. Sacred Hearts Catholic Church stood just across the street, and its congregants supplied a natural customer base until progress intruded some 12 years later in the form of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, whose advance saw the demolition of both buildings. The Cusimanos re-established themselves a few blocks away at the corner of Court and Baltic Streets, in a building that has served for subsequent generations as a place of both business and residence.

His grandparents, Mr. Cusimano tells me one morning in his funeral home’s front parlor—known formerly as the smoking room— ministered to a community of factory workers and longshoremen so overwhelmingly Italian that the couple’s deeply broken English represented no impediment to commerce. “We were part of the neighborhood,” he says. “We shopped in the stores. We treated people right and when they had a need they would call us.” During World War Two, his father’s bilingualism proved a boon to the neighborhood and served to further establish the business at the heart of the community. Italian immigrants, especially mothers desperate for contact with sons away at distant fronts, arrived in the foyer almost daily to enlist the teenager’s aid in translating and transcribing correspondence. “There were some Saving Private Ryan type situations,” Mr. Cusimano says with evident pride.

In those days, and during the years his father and two uncles ran things, several funerals a week represented the standard pace of business. “We used to get a couple hundred people in here,” he says, indicating the room’s cramped, dingy spread, and the small chapel toward the building’s rear, where bodies are laid for viewing. For decades, whole extended families and networks of friends and their children from the old country and new lived on the surrounding blocks. When a member of the community passed, they often turned up at the Cusimano home for 72-hour wakes that culminated in floral crescendos with a funeral on the fourth day. “It’d be standing room only,” Mr. Cusimano says wistfully.

Since taking the helm some three decades ago he has seen business slow nearly to standstill. Two satellite locations have shuttered and sold. The Dominic J. Cusimano Court Street Funeral Home hosts few services and almost no wakes. The funerals it does perform last only a day. On a good week, it will have one. Mr. Cusimano does not blame death industry conglomerates that have claimed a great portion of the market, or the increased preference of the public for cremation. He does not blame the five other local funeral directors, some of whom, he says, employ underhanded tactics to attract the patronage of the bereaved. “The neighborhood is just entirely different,” he says. “Go out on the street and you hardly see anyone over 50.”

It’s true. On the sidewalk beneath our living room windows, Bugaboos far outnumber Rascals. Where Sicilian stevedores and their families once shopped and gathered, young couples steer scooter-borne progeny around labradoodles and sidewalk antique galleries, fair-trade cappuccinos in hand. The odd pork store or bakery remains, but other storefronts—the cobblers, tailors, butchers and fishmongers that once catered to fervent old-world demand—have largely dissipated. It is not gentrification as such, however, that has sapped Mr. Cusimano’s business.

“Everybody’s all over the place,” he tells me, meaning families formerly resident to the neighborhood, many of which have relocated to the suburbs of Long Island and New Jersey, to Arizona and Florida. The corner of Court and Baltic no longer represents a nexus for newly immigrated Italians and their children; it has not for some time. Mr. Cusimano estimates the exodus began in earnest in the 1950s. Descendants of the family’s first customers have spread across the country and beyond, and increasingly few hearken to traditional loyalties when the time comes to make final arrangements. “The children don’t know who to call, so they use someone local,” Mr. Cusimano says. “Or they say, ‘Why should we call Cusimano?’” Still, he does not begrudge these flouting offspring, who are likely merely ignorant or practical, or simply see no reason to return to Brooklyn to bury their dead, to do as those that came before had done. Mr. Cusimano’s daughters, after all, are lawyers, and his son the aforementioned financier.

We did not observe a single funeral in our first months living above the Dominic J. Cusimano Court Street Funeral Home. I went frequently to the mortuary’s office to speak with John, the superintendent—an enormous, cloudy-eyed man who received packages for us in our absence—and could not imagine, based on the facility’s interior condition, that anyone would hire the venue. The parlor was a dim, musty room, outfitted with gray industrial carpeting and mismatched yard sale furniture. Crooked family pictures from a variety of eras hung from the walls, and odd luggage pieces and half-opened Fed Ex packages lay strewn haphazardly about. In one corner, a sprawling model trainscape presided with a somehow proprietary air. A yellowed and claustrophobic alcove, which passed for a front office, stood behind a sliding glass window with a metal shelf, as can often be seen at ticket counters. The overall effect was of a rail station in desuetude. In its apparent ineligibility to host funerals, this tableau provided some reassurance. John insisted, however, that Mr. Cusimano had an active business, and that things had merely gotten a little quiet for the moment.

Quiet, near silent, they remained for many weeks. Though returning at each day’s end to a mortuary proved at first an eerie experience, a memento mori in constant refrain, the structure’s disuse began to take on a semi-comic quality. Here was this big old creaking building dedicated to stuffing and painting corpses that seemed never to arrive, to be altogether in short supply. A hearse came and went but ferried only the living. The streets were full of the chatter of new parents, the squeak of stroller wheels. In Cobble Hill, it seemed, the mortician had with the VCR repairman joined the ranks of technicians whose services had lurched into irrelevancy. Death had become somehow rare, incongruous with the present community. Like an outbreak of bubonic plague in the American West, something very nearly amusing in its outrageous anachronism. A line from a Hemingway story looped in my head: “(Nick) felt quite sure he would never die.”

Downstairs, though, the local cessation of human demise itself represented a fatal portent. Sitting on a worn velvet sofa in the old smoking room in a preppy salmon-colored oxford shirt and olive cords that belie his gruff local accent, Mr. Cusimano, gray and in his sixties, expresses an irremediable sort of regret. He mourns the passage of time. His family, he estimates, has hosted more than 10,000 funerals since 1929. “We got to know thousands of people,” he says with a look that is at once warm and distant. “Wherever we go, anywhere in the world, we run into them.” It is their absence he laments, that they have passed on to whatever their futures held, and that they will not return to him. He misses the camaraderie of the old neighborhood, the community of immigrants and their children that greeted on another by name in the street.

I get the impression he misses the bustle and call of Italian women through the parlor—after his young father to translate their letters—long before he was ever born. Profits are way off, but they concern him little, and he makes limited efforts to attract new business. It would only be strangers, after all. The property is worth a small fortune and Mr. Cusimano receives offers almost every week. But great sentiment attaches to the dank old place, and he is reluctant to sell. He remembers when this part of Brooklyn had residents old enough to die. He remembers the children who grew up and fled to the suburbs, where they lay their dead in neat brick houses with white columns. Soon, he seems to think, he too will take his leave.

This funeral parlor, it appears to me after six months in residence, was never any ghastly workshop after all. Many have laid below at their final rest, it’s true. But funerals, as my mother told me many years ago, are for the survivors. The places where they take place must be too. And who are the survivors, but all of us? I cannot wish for people to die, but they are dying, of course. Somewhere, if not in Cobble Hill. Maybe it would be possible to route a few bodies to the Dominic J. Cusimano Court Street Funeral Home. Maybe a little upswing would inspire Mr. Cusimano to clear out the clutter and straighten family portraits. Maybe the business could regain its footing, though it wouldn’t be the same, I know. I almost wish I could see it working now, in the clamor of the old neighborhood. I wouldn’t even mind sharing real estate with the bodies. I just know it’d be something to see it humming along in the infancy of the Cusimanos’ faded and repurposed world. A crossroads and a meeting place, amidst all the living and the dead.

When I was ten and living on the top floor of a building in the New York City Housing Project called Pomonok -- a word the Algonquin Indians used for Long Island -- I dreamed of stabling my horse in that elevator. The fantasy of actually having my own bay mare, white blaze down the middle of her face flanked by nostrils that would flare with joy at the sight of me each morning, lulled me to sleep at night. I had given up as childish the habit of clutching in my fist each night a plastic horse that I told my mother galloped me off to miraculous adventures, but truly, I half believed that a way could be found to accomodate both the relatively simple needs of my mare and the requirements of the other residents of the seven story building. I never claimed to be a very realistic child.

But now I was an grown-up. Of a certain age. Now, my parents were both gone, I was the mother of a young adult and I was back to visit the 93-year-old last remaining friend of the family -- the woman I had grown up calling Aunt Sylvia despite the lack of any common blood between us. The woman who always recalled me as the most beautiful baby she had ever seen. After a hiatus of more than four decades I was once again pressing the bulbous brass button in the shabby lobby and waiting for the elevator to arrive.

The elevator arrived -- no bell to mark its appearance but a light behind the wired glass window where there had previously been only darkness -- and I pulled open the heavy metal door and stepped inside as I had perhaps thousands of times before. But where there had once been space for hay, oats, a water bucket and a 16-hands-tall mare, was now barely room for me and the appliance repairman who had been waiting behind me.

I know people always talk about how the summers were hotter, the winter snows deeper, the waves at the beach wilder in their youth, but to my knowledge, no one has ever been gob-smacked by the sad reality of a shrunken elevator. I pushed the button labeled 6 and leaned deep into a corner, squinting a little, hoping to recover the original propotions. The repairman pushed 3 and in a moment got out. Even without his presence, there was barely room for me and a good-sized Bernese Mountain dog, and I know good-sized Bernese Mountain dogs, believe me.

The elevator reached my floor and I got out, turned right and walked to the end of the hallway, which -- surprise, surprise -- had also shrunk. As had Aunt Sylvia. But here's the magic part: in the six or so weeks since that visit, everything has once again regained its former glory. Thank goodness.

Ellen Greenfield is a poet and novelist living in Brooklyn and Jefferson, NY with her husband and two extremely loving and wayward Bernese Mountain Dogs. Her novel, Come From Nowhere, has recently been published by 3Ring Press.

A game of extreme constraint, played in the tight confines of a handball court with the diamond grid of the ballpark chalked in miniature on the buckled cement, it demanded more cunning than real skill, more spryness than hand-eye coordination, more gumption than athletic prowess.

As an aphorism is to an epic, so slap ball shrank the expectations of the ballpark to bite-sized proportions. For whereas the vast sweep of the playing field ringed with onlookers had always seemed intimidating, invariably bringing on bowed shoulders of defeat and an asthmatic wheeze, its microcosmic equivalent squeezed into the confines of an outdoor handball court felt strangely comforting. It was as if the safe haven of my childhood nursery had been lifted, walls and all, from home and plunked down in a distant corner of the schoolyard where nobody noticed it. That precisely was the game’s greatest attraction and its greatest fault: that nobody noticed.

Slapball victories were won way off the radar of public approbation, and any attempt to boast about them would have been met with blank looks.

But I can still recall the day in sixth grade when a few of the same champions, gruff Kenny P., tall Mark R., glib Gary S., and my nemesis Robert H., not a one of whom would ever in the grand public sphere of the spectacle have deigned to choose me for their team, stood there holding their ground with meager expectations, when somebody pitched. Bluffing with a grin at Gary S. and a wink at Robert H., I swung with the flat palm of my hand, putting a devilish spin on the red rubber ball so that it went careening, almost perpendicular to my slap, in between the legs of a disconcerted Kenny P, grazed the crack at the chalk baseline near third base, and bounced toward a rattled Mark R., who fumbled with and dropped it, while Robert H.’s jaw dropped, permitting me ample time to round the bases and make my way to home plate.

They stared at me as if I had just stepped out of my loser’s skin and revealed a hidden side of myself, like the bespectacled Clark Kent morphing into Superman, or the wimpy Peter Parker into the spry Spiderman, a local hero who had recently made his first appearance in the pages of Amazing Fantasy. Just this once I might have earned bragging rights, were it not for the news report from Dallas.

It was just after the start of recess, approximately 11:35 Eastern Time, Friday, November 22, 1963. The teachers suddenly called us into the auditorium for an unexpected assembly, at which the principal announced in a solemn voice that the President had been shot, simultaneously perhaps also the death blow for slapball, and we were dismissed for the day. Expecting adulation, I could barely choke back my disappointment. Dallas seemed as far away as the moon. All everybody really cared about was the half day off from school.

A writer in multiple modes, Peter Wortsman is the author of fiction (A Modern Way to Die), drama (Tattooed Man Tells All and Burning Words), and travel writing for newspapers and websites, and selected for five consecutive issues of Travelers’ Tales’ The Best Travel Writing 2008-2012. He has also translated numerous books from the German. His forthcoming books include Ghost Dance in Berlin, a rhapsody in gray, Travelers’ Tales/Solas House, 2013; Tales of the German Imagination, From the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann, an anthology, Penguin Classics, 2013; and Selected Tales of the Brothers Grimm, a new translation, Archipelago Books, 2013.

Annie didn’t reveal much about her life. All that we the friends knew was that she lived with her aunt and uncle in Baldwin Harbor. I think she mentioned having a brother, but I wasn’t sure. It never occurred to me to ask her if she had other family, but that was more about my alcoholic family secret thing. I was well trained in the keeping of secrets and turning a blind eye to reality. And, after all, this was suburbia; land of superficiality, where honest questions were rarely posed. And if they were, dodgy answers were the norm.

Turns out, Annie’s mother, Brigid, was a beatnick poet/playwright who lived with her lover, and son, Cado, in a cramped, two room apartment on the fifth floor of 175 Bleecker Street. The reason for our visit was to celebrate Brigid’s birthday. The apartment was packed with some of the strangest people I’d ever met. First off, there was Brigid herself, a very nice looking woman in her forties, with a few missing teeth, a joint in her hand and a tough, bossy way of talking to people. When Annie introduced me to her, she acted like she could have cared less about who I was, which Annie told me wasn’t true. "She treats everyone like that," she said. “And then there was Brigid’s best friend, Jenon, the Gypsy/Playwright/Social Worker from Turkey. Jenon’s lips were purple from drinking wine, her hair was in a wild afro style and when she flashed her eyes on me, I became extremely unsettled and tried to get away from Jenon, but she stood directly in front of me, practically nose to nose and asked me, in a heavily accented dramatic Gypsy dialect, “Ven ver you born?” I answered, “June, 16th,” and she went wild. She grabbed my two hands, pulled me up over to the couch and sat me down. I was so scared, my heart felt like it was nearly beating out of my chest. Jenon looked deeply into my eyes and said, in her gypsy speak, “I must tell you that you are a very high Gemini. James Joyce wrote his masterpiece, Ulysses, about June 16th.” She continued, still staring in my eyes, “You have tremendous energy, sensitivity and awareness. Your soul is on fire with wisdom and light. I know this for I, too, was born on June 16th.”

I managed to get away from Jenon and grabbed a hold of Annie. I was asking her for a joint or some kind of pill when the front door blasted open and in came two scruffy looking men in t-shirts and jeans. One I recognized immediately as Michael J. Pollard; I had just seen him in Bonnie and Clyde. The other curly headed character was introduced to me as Gregory Corso, Annie’s Godfather, who also happened to be, I later learned, an infamous Beat poet who traveled in circles with Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Bowles, etc. The two of these guys were both wasted. Gregory went into the living room, laughing and talking some crazy shit while Pollard positioned himself next to the stereo player. He had a Woody Guthrie album under his arm and he put it on the turntable and played it over and over. Every time someone else came into the party, Pollard grabbed them and said, “Hey man, you got to listen to Woody Guthrie, man. He’s a genius, man” and he would drag them over to the stereo and make them listen. Whenever Pollard headed over towards me, I would take him by the shoulder, turn him around, and give a push, and he would walk back to the stereo. Meanwhile, Corso jerked off in the living room, and went wandering around the apartment with a handful of cum. He found Brigid and asked her what he should do with it. “Throw it down the toilet, you asshole.” I smoked a joint, drank some more wine and tried not to listen to the Woody Guthrie album, for the seventh time.

Get me the fuck out of here, I thought, as I moved to the other side of the room and poured myself a glass of wine and lit a cigarette. There was a very pretty woman, with blond curly hair, leaning against the wall by where Brigid kept the wine. She was quietly drinking and eyeballing the crowd. She noticed I was freaking out, and said, “Hi, I’m Jill. Are you Annie’s friend?” “Yes, we go to school together.” I replied. “So, you’re still in high school, huh ? This scene must really be blowing your mind.” “Yeah, kinda,” I said with a deep exhale. The woman introduced herself as Jill Freedman. She told me that she was a photographer and her next project was to travel with a circus. Brigid was riding shotgun as the cook. They were leaving in a few days to catch up to a circus in Philadelphia. The phenomenal document of this experience, Circus Days, was published two years later.

When I returned home late that night, I was amazed as I thought through the wild scene I had witnessed at Brigid's apartment. I may not have been ready to shift into hanging with the crazy, creative, bohemian scene at 175 Bleecker Street just yet, but I was definitely being primed for the journey.

Mary Shanley is a NYC poet/writer who has been reading and performing her work for the past 25 years. She has published: Hobo Code Poems and Mott Street Stories and Las Vegas Stories. Allen Ginsberg suggested she publish her first poems in Long Shot Magazine.

And I always tell them, “I am an elevator operator.” I say that I drive an elevator in downtown Manhattan.
The reaction to my announcement varies. Some people smile politely and then move on to more interesting people. Some ask questions about the art of piloting an elevator in a skyscraper, if I ever forget the route, if I ever get lost. Almost everyone quips, “I bet that job has its ups and downs.”

Generally, when that happens, I’m the one to smile politely. And then I respond with some variation of the retort I learned my first day on the job and have repeated many times over the years: “It sure does have its ups and downs, but it’s the jerks in the middle that cause the most trouble.”

Operating an elevator was not my career choice. I actually taught English for 33 years to reluctant high school kids who preferred drinking beer and getting laid to learning English grammar. Teaching I discovered, like the operation of elevators, is also a job where “the jerks in the middle” can be the most difficult.

The reason I tell strangers who ask that I operate elevators is because of first impressions. I figure that people won’t expect much of some “mobile doorman” who also drives them up and down before opening and closing the door. That way if I say or do anything stupid, their reaction will likely be: “Well what can you expect? He operates elevators for a living.” And conversely, if I am witty, charming and brilliant, their after-conversation will go something like this: “He’s so cultured for an elevator operator. He reads books. He appreciates fine wine and he is a great conversationalist!” For me it is a win/win situation.

I did, in fact, operate an elevator at The Equitable Building, a 38-story office in New York City, located at 120 Broadway across from Trinity Church in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan. The building is a landmark engineering achievement designed by Ernest R. Graham and completed in 1915. Originally it was supposed to be 40 stories high, but it was reduced on the advice of consulting engineer Charles Knox. He determined the lower height as being optimal for its elevators, the very ones I operated for one summer, the year I graduated college and before I started teaching. My friend John’s father worked in the Maintenance Department at the building and he got the job for me, and for Sal, a high school/college friend who was also going to teach in September. After our interview, Sal and I in civilian clothes took the elevators for a spin in the middle of the mid-day rush under the watchful eyes of veteran uniformed operators. We both passed our driver’s test, and reported for duty the following Monday.

The boss, a man named Andy Rattazzo that everyone called “The Rat,” but not to his face, had a glass eye that glittered under the overhead florescent lights and a jutting jaw. He looked like Benito Mussolini, and like Mussolini, The Rat prided himself on keeping his elevators running on time. He had risen from the ranks of elevator operator to become the “boss of all bosses,” the final boss of temporaries and hangers-on in a dying industry, at a time when all the elevators in the building were slowly being automated. Progress meant forced retirement or unemployment for the many who had spent their lives and logged millions of miles going up and down the insides of skyscrapers. It was summer employment for a select few.

That fact that he was on a sinking ship didn’t deter The Rat from running a taut ship. So every day, before every shift, he conducted mandatory inspections of the crews, checking the cleanliness of uniforms, the starch in the collared brown shirts, the shine on shoes and the condition of fingernails. If someone didn’t pass muster, he was banished, with instructions to stick his shoes under the electric polisher or put on a clean shirt, to the Break Room, a dingy sub-basement filled with discarded office furniture and a leaky toilet the operators shared with the rats. It was where we spent time between our shifts, where the old timers griped about their changing lives, complained about the bosses and played practical jokes on the temps.

Spencer Something-son was a particularly favorite target. A big, beefy kid from Utah, he looked like a gorilla with his blond hair and glasses in his brown starched shirt and uniform pants with the satin stripe. Although he had started weeks before Sal and me, Spencer was eager to please and still so naïve he believed all their war stories from the “glory elevator operating days.”

“We used to have these contests in the old days, to shoot up the fastest to the Penthouse without getting caught, or to see who could pack the most people into one elevator.”

“But isn’t that dangerous?” Spencer asked.

“Only if the cable breaks.” They all laughed. “And then there was that contest to see who could wait until the very last minute before putting on the brakes and stopping the levelest at the Main Floor without crashing into The Pit. I think Rattazzo won most of them contests, before he became The Rat, of course. He won a lot of money and he still holds the building record for getting twenty-six people into a car designed for twenty.”

The elevators at 120 Broadway were organized in banks. The Local cars patrolled the ground floor up, stopping at each of the 35 floors of the 38-story building. They were the most difficult to operate because they involved the most stops, the most people and had the highest margin for error. The Express banks left the ground floor and traveled through a dark, enclosed shaft like a vertical tunnel that opened at the floors they serviced. The three Express banks were floors 11 to 20, 21-30, 31-35. There was also a separate, private elevator that went directly to the top three floors where the exclusive Bankers Club was located. Only the most senior operators ever got to drive that one.

As a safety precaution, a large red #3 bull’s eye was painted on the walls of each Express shaft to alert the operator that he was approaching the ground floor. It served as a warning to apply the brakes, which meant returning the control handle to the center position, so the car would glide to a smooth stop that was also level if the operator timed it right. None of the cars had automatic leveling devices, and each elevator had different accelerating and stopping characteristics, so stopping level at any floor depended on the car, the weight inside the car, the speed of the elevator as it approached the floor and the experience of the operator. In the event of an uneven landing, which was not unusual when there were too many people on board, or the driver was new, “leveling off” required slowly taking the car well above the desired floor and letting the weight pull it down again. Sometimes the maneuver had to be done more than once. The hope was that it would eventually settle relatively level with the floor. Failing that, the customary warning to passengers was: “Please watch your step. Jump up! Jump down!”

Stopping level at the ground floor with a full elevator hurtling down the shaft from above required great skill and a greater amount of luck. Seeing that red #3 bull’s eye was crucial to brake the elevator in time and avoid disaster. Of course the people who designed elevators had taken into consideration the possibility that a distracted elevator operator might occasionally overshoot a landing, so they built catchers in each shaft, at the bottom, called The Pit, and top, The Claw, with heavy springs to cushion the impact and steel hooks to hold the car in place until Maintenance was able to free the car and its contents.

What happened to Spencer the day he was fired was the topic of discussion in the Break Room for weeks after the event. Some speculated that he was trying to earn elevator history glory and outdo The Rat by setting two new building records – for most people in an elevator. They later counted twenty-seven. And for waiting until the last instant, which he seriously miscalculated, before applying his breaks. Others said that Spencer likely missed the red #3 bull’s eye and crash landed in the basement at full speed. Whatever the truth, neither the twenty-seven people trying to get out of the building for lunch, nor Andy Rattazzo were amused. The instant my friend John’s father and the maintenance crew freed everyone from The Pit, a shaken and dazed Spencer was stripped of his uniform and sent walking.

The building operated twenty-four hour schedule, seven days a week, three hundred sixty-five days a year. Work shifts and elevator bank assignments were a matter of seniority or favoritism. The career guys, soon to be searching for new careers, mostly opted for Express elevators on weekdays from 9 to 5. The temps got what was left. Daytimes were busy and nighttimes were lonely. Some old timers preferred working the graveyard shift so they could nap, drink or pull pranks on the unsuspecting. A favorite was pressing the call button on every floor to get a new guy in motion, and then scaring him by jumping out of the shadows when he opened the elevator door.

If the Local elevators were the most difficult, the freight elevator was the most peaceful, but only after hours when there wasn’t much freight to move. Temps never got the assignment during the day because the freight operators often got tips. Whenever I got the opportunity in the middle of the night, I thoroughly enjoyed it. There was no roof on the freight elevator, so it afforded an unobstructed view of the entire shaft, all 38 floors, and piloting it was like taking a slow rocket ship into the dark heavens.

During my brief tenure at 120 Broadway, I tried to be a good elevator operator. I showed up for my shifts on time. I worked over-nights. I passed inspection. My shoes were shined and I smiled whenever I interacted with the public. I was even relatively consistent whenever I had to “level off,” accomplishing it with a minimal number of tries. But still there was a part of me that was curious, distracted, a part of me wanted to test the limits, to see just how far I might go up without getting hooked, how low without ending up in The Pit. Of course I didn’t want to kill anybody or myself in the process. Perhaps that was that wonder that caused the problem on my last day of work. Or maybe it was the image of a smiling Spencer climbing the maintenance ladder through the escape hatch in the elevator, wondering how it felt riding full tilt into the springs below. In any event, I missed the red #3 bull’s eye and kamikazed my elevator filled with Japanese office workers from Mitsubishi on the 28th floor into the The Pit. I don’t remember much, but I am sure it wasn’t me who shouted, “Remember Pearl Harbor!” as somebody reported hearing on the descent.
Of course I was fired in full view of everyone.

My friend Sal later told me The Rat gathered everyone in the Break Room and announced that my crash landing made a bigger impact on the building than the one he had witnessed in March 1942. That was when a seven-inch artillery shell fired by an anti-aircraft battery near the East River by mistake struck the 37th floor.
“It was one of eight,” The Rat told them. “The only one to hit. And I was right there when it happened. The other rounds all fell harmlessly into the river. That shell caused less damage, and no injuries.”
So my career came to an abrupt and crashing end. But I did make it into elevator operator lore, and in September I started on a new career path, teaching high school.

© 2011 Joseph E. Scalia

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.

By the 2nd Grade in New York, surrounded by Jews of every degree of enlightenment and gentiles with their kaleidoscope of religious beliefs, I became ever more resistant to what seemed to me to be the senseless sacrifices I was forced to endure to my mothers increasing piety.

We lived on the upper west side of Manhattan where there were few other Orthodox German Jewish refugees. Most of the indigenous Jews were Conservative (they wore Yarmulkes in Synagogue) or Reformed (Yarmulkes were optional). My mothers’ extended family, who began arriving a year or two after us, had all settled further north in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan, which became a major German Jewish Refugee enclave. There, the Jews were classified according to the Rabbis who led the Synagogues that they attended. There were (Rabbi) Breuers’, (Rabbi) Jungs’, and (Rabbi)Sterns’, the three most prominent Congregations all German and all Orthodox. My Mothers relatives belonged to Rabbi Breuers congregation. They were as clannish as Hatfields and McCoys. They too, grew more religious as the times grew more perilous, the headlines more horrific.

They sensed my apostasy and looked at me as a dangerously aberrant infidel even at the tender age of seven. For my part, I couldn’t accept their unquestioning fanaticism, the men’s black hats, the constant prayers, or the traditional sheidels (wigs) worn by the married women. Fortunately we were separated by the geography of Manhattan Island and the restriction against travel on the Sabbath. Thankfully, the two branches of my mothers family only got together on Holy days or for occasions like weddings and Bar Mitzvahs. I hated those events even more than Saturdays.

Removed from this intensely conformist culture I soon began to rebel at what I felt were the onerous Sabbath taboos. Riding in an elevators was proscribed although we lived on the fifth floor. Lights were left on from Friday night until sundown Saturday. The same for the stove. The light in the refrigerator was even removed because it went on when the door was opened. Carrying money was forbidden. You couldn’t even carry keys in your pocket although, arguable, it was permissible to pin them to your clothes. It was a sin to tear a piece of paper even by accident, so the Sabbath toilet paper supply was prepared in advance. The pay telephone that was downstairs in the hall was off limits. The usual reply to my impertinent questions about the paradoxes of these rules was that “these are the rules set down in the Bible and the Talmud and if you break these rules God will curse you.” I didn’t buy these less than factual answers, I couldn’t see the analogy between modern electricity and Biblical camp fires. Nor could I find where work was involved in dialing a telephone or pressing a button. Tearing papyrus was different from tearing toilet paper, and how could riding in a car or subway be forbidden ex post facto?

Most of every Saturday was spent inside a dimly lit apartment converted into a Synagogue, chanting prayers in Hebrew which I did not understand, and listening to interminable sermons in German that I didn’t understand either. To my mind the boredom was another level of torture. Here I was confined in an expatriate German Orthodox Synagogue. I stood and sat in unison with the congregation while inwardly I seethed with anger. My thoughts were with my neighborhood friends and non-refugee contemporaries who were playing stickball and baseball or street hockey on those warm summer Saturdays or ice skating and sledding in Riverside Park in the winter snows.

I wanted badly to be an American, to be like my American friends. Their parents spoke unaccented English and didn’t worship in two foreign languages. And, oh yes, when our histrionic Rabbi grew particularly intense during his sermons he sprayed spittle over me and the congregation.
In stark contrast to the Saturdays, our Sundays were often wonderful. We would go on outings. In the summer the whole family would go to Coney Island. We’d ride in the first car of the IRT with our noses pressed against the front door watching the endless ribbon of track streaming towards us out of the dark tunnel and disappearing under the train. Once there, at the crowded beach, we’d claim a blanket's worth of sand and have a picnic. After the obligatory one hour cramp wait, we’d swim in the murky salt water, jumping up and down in the weak surf.

My brother and I would often explore the cool, damp sand under the boardwalk, crisscrossed by thin lines of sunlight through the shadows, looking for dropped coins and other lost treasures. We’d press up against a fence to watch the rolling Steeplechase ponies carry their riders to the finish line. We watched as white captive silken parachutes slowly carried young couples up cables to the cupola at the top of the huge tower, where, with a snap, they would be released, the canopy filling and the passengers descending, screaming into earshot as they floated back to earth. My father would give us a few coins and we’d go to the penny arcade.  I loved the machine gun device there, fantasizing that I was a fighter pilot shooting at planes on the screen inside. I also liked the mechanical boxing ring, where I controlled one of the two robotic figures, flailing steel arms against my brother's boxer without the peril of a bloody nose and working off some of my accumulated anger.

Another favorite excursion was a subway ride to South Ferry. We’d take the Staten Island Ferry and a bus to Silver Lake Park. Before the bridge was built Staten Island was a completely rural enclave. The bus went past working farms before reaching the small lake that was as pure and clean as a beer commercial. My father would cut a woody stem from the shore of the lake with his penknife. Then he would loosen and remove the intact tube of bark. Part way down the core of wood he’d cut a half moon notch, and above this he flattened about an inch of the core to the end. When he put the bark back on it became a tunable whistle that we would blow on for hours until it finally dried out and split.

In winter, we would go to Central Park and ice skate on the lake underneath the Belvedere Castle. Sometimes we’d explore the still raw Hudson River shore where Robert Moses was building his Riverside Park and West Side Highway.

When the weather was bad we’d go to one of the City’s many Museums all of which were free. For us, the Museum of Natural History was a regular stop on rainy days as well as an after school hangout. Nearby, the Museum of the City of New York featured real antique fire engines, Currier and Ives prints and life-size dioramas of early New York and Nieuw Amsterdam.

However, what excited us more than any other museum was the Museum of Science and Industry, at Rockefeller Center. The industrial displays of this unique museum were like magic. I didn’t understand all that I was seeing, so the actions and effects seemed even more amazing. I would stand transfixed in front of an exhibit that featured ball bearings being tested. The shiny metal balls would pop out of a slot one after another, onto a flat steel plate, ball bearing after ball bearing, bouncing high and true in endless perfect arcs and out through a small exit hole. There were displays of things that belched smoke. There were working models of steam engines and gasoline engines. There were arc lights and wire recorders and radios and all kinds of operational displays that showed how a watch or a toaster worked.

Even though we were young kids, we were well aware that the world was heading down the greased path of crisis. The tension of the gathering omens war preoccupied our parents and teachers and filtered down to my brother and me with a sense of impending doom. We heard the names Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Franco, and Churchill; we knew who the good guys were and hated the villains. We sensed that the world was sliding headlong into an awfulness that could not be prevented.

One cold dreary Sunday early in December, when I was seven and a half, my father, my brother and I went to the Museum of the American Indian. It was in a building on the West Side near Columbia University, a long walk from our apartment. There is something about the American aborigine that is endlessly fascinating to anyone from Germany and there is no better market for the prototypical American Western Film. Having been born German, my brother and I were infected with this obsession, and we lost ourselves in the artifacts that had been stolen from the proud native tribes of North America and deposited in a huge incongruous Greek Temple. There were peace pipes, moccasins and wampum. Feathered headdresses, rugs and blankets. Tomahawks, papooses, buckskins and bows and arrows. Beautiful things that even someone as young as I was able to appreciate.

Stimulated by the beauty of the artifacts, we walked home along West End Avenue. As we passed the Tennis Courts that used to occupy the block between 95th and 94th a boy about 10 years old came running up to us breathlessly.

“The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor,” he shouted at us and then spread his news to some other people across the street. It meant nothing to us. We had never heard of Pearl Harbor. We shrugged and kidded about his excitement. A twin engine plane heading east flew overhead. “Maybe that’s the Japanese bombing New York,” we joked.

We lived on 93rd near an equestrian statue of Joan of Arc that sat on a land island park off Riverside Drive. We were home in a few minutes and my father turned on the radio. There were news bulletins on every station affirming the now-terrifying news. Did this mean that Hitler and the Nazis were on their way to invade New York? Frightened, I sat on my father’s lap as he tried to reassure us that the real danger was still thousands of miles away far across the wide Atlantic. We looked up Pearl Harbor in the Atlas and learned that it was in the middle of the Pacific and that Japan was many thousands of miles from the US. We weren’t reassured because, somehow, they had managed to attack it. We knew planes could cross the Atlantic in hours- hadn’t Lindbergh proved that? Was Hitler, the monster scourge, following us to America? Was there no place to hide, no escape? I remember the sheer, trembling terror.

Over the next weeks, months and years the world assumed a feverish pace. War was declared. We were issued small cream colored plastic ID tags that we wore on a chain around our necks. Rationing was imposed on almost everything. Gasoline was hard to get. Norman Rockwell painted the Four Freedoms. My male cousins began disappearing into the Army. We collected paper, tin foil, even donated our prized cast iron toys to the incessant scrap metal drives. We started collecting posters of Air Force planes. Because we were of German origin my father had to have the short wave section of his Grundig Console radio disconnected.  But every day, that AM radio brought us news of the Allied victories in Africa, the battle for Italy, the D-Day invasion, the shock of FDR's sudden death and at last, the ecstatic joy of victory over the Nazi scourge.

Fred Abrahams has had an interesting life. Fleeing Germany just before the Holocaust, he spent his childhood on the upper west side of Manhattan. He graduated from Stuyvesant High School and the University of Pennsylvania before serving a tour of duty with the US Army in Germany. A career in marketing grew into a stint as a writer/producer of TV Infomercials. A quad bypass started him writing about his experiences, including; travels in post-war Europe; partying with the abstract expressionist painters of the Chelsea school; his 270 minutes of fame as a champion on a TV Quiz show; visits to the original Studio 54; co-founding The Improv comedy club and the interesting people he's met along the way.An avid skier and amateur photographer he now lives in Brattleboro, Vermont.

When the company needed a production assistant, they hired one of my musician friends, a handsome Texan who went on to become so famous that years later, I learned about his death from an obituary on the front page of the New York Times. He’d played with everyone from Yoko Ono to Judy Collins, Bette Midler to the Talking Heads. But that was later. Back then, he needed a day job and we worked together in the studio, saw each other in the same West Village bars at night. It was a cash economy, before credit cards and ATMs, five and ten dollar bills passing from hand to hand.

One evening, as Don and I rode the elevator heading to the southbound 8th Avenue subway, I handed him the $5 I had borrowed the night before. He grinned and said, in his Texas drawl, “I may not be free, but I am extremely reasonable.”

And the elevator full of stone-faced New Yorkers laughed aloud.