Postscript: Snakes In The Grass

Returning, fifty or more years later, to where you grew up has its hazards.  Particularly if  your old neighborhood has deteriorated as badly as the Lower Olney section of North Philadelphia.

Even after discounting for nostalgia, there really were – safe, clean streets, row houses, trimmed hedges, purple and white hydrangeas, cool porches under striped canvas awnings – a patriarchy of two-parent families headed by bus drivers, cops, mailmen, factory workers – summer Sunday mornings after Mass, the sound of living room radios spilling out the clickety-clack of kids tap dancing on Stan Lee Broza’s Horn and Hardart Children’s Hour – late afternoons, the aromas of three dozen dinners cooking, coal ashes spread on icy sidewalks – the glow of gas lamps, milk and bread on doorsteps, twice-a-day mail delivery, and traffic so sparse we played, biked and sledded on the street almost without fear of interruption.

The down side of cheek-to-jowl living is largely forgotten.  Hot evenings on open porches just inches away from incompatible neighbors.  You were careful of everything you said, not wanting others to know any more of your family business than they already knew.  The walls did have ears.  When the unhappy couple two doors up squared off to trash each other, everyone had ringside seats.  Nothing was missed.  Nothing went unnoticed.  The guy up the street wobbling home, late for supper with a bag of quarts, never went unnoted in the ledger of the collective consciousness.  There were an infinity of minor, but critical distinctions; Catholics-Protestants, Phillies-“A’s”, possession of a few bucks or virtually none, blue collar or marginally white collar.  If you did come into a little money, it became common knowledge as soon as the new furniture or TV was delivered, or when the “new” used car pulled up to the curb of our narrow one-way street.

The times seemed simpler.  Everyone was just like us, the same color anyway.  In truth, the world then was as complex and uncertain as it is today. It was me that was simpler, not the times.  I was a child, and that fixes and simplifies those days in my mind.  The arrival of black people, of other minorities, was not the real cause of change in our neighborhood.  The changes, like the qualities that gave our street and most of the city’s older row house neighborhoods their flavor, were organic. They were structural and were woven seamlessly through the incidental conditions of the moment.

Now, when I hear or read the earnest urban experts promoting the idea of community, “the community”, of “creating communities,” I shudder.  Community, I’ve come to believe, is a binary condition. It exists or it doesn’t.  I don’t think that any amount of wishing, funding, or organizing will create meaningful community.  The unreflective sense of living within a defined community that I had as a child was the natural result of a set of definable environmental constraints.  As those constraints came undone, so too did the feeling of community that had made living on our narrow street of row houses tolerable, and on so many other crowded streets in so many other city neighborhoods.

We had a community on our street not because we were a better class of people, or because we were more enlightened or more civic minded than the people who live on that same street today.  We simply lived at a time, in a place and within a system that was ordered; socially, technologically and economically, to foster the one essential ingredient of any real community – a continuing, high level of personal interaction by almost every inhabitant of the block.  On our street, interaction with your neighbors was not really a matter of choice.

The blight, alienation and isolation that seems to characterize so many of today’s inner city streets begs questions about what had once made life work on small, crowded streets in blue-collar areas. Or, coming at it from a different angle; what were the agents of change that could have blown away a period, however brief, of stable, inclusive social patterns.  There’s a measure of truth in almost every theory propounded; fill in the blanks – a changing economy, poverty, the racism of them versus us, blockbuster realtors, drugs, sex, UFOs, rock and roll.

More likely however the changes were brought on by phenomena somewhat like the species of snakes unknowingly imported to the island of Guam.  The very presence of the snakes went undetected until they had eaten almost every bird on the island. 

The reptilian intruders into my childhood community remain all too familiar.   To this day, they sun themselves out in the open, and they continue to devour what’s left of a more congenial world.  They slithered onto the scene of my childhood and their infestation offers a partial clue to the ensuing decline in the viability of neighborhood life.  My choice of serpents in the urban garden of my childhood are three of the most ubiquitous applications of accessible, affordable consumer technology.  One that had already arrived in those days was the automobile.  I witnessed the arrival of the other two, unqualified blessings we thought at the time; the television set and the air conditioner.

At the end of World War Two in 1945, very few families on our street owned a car, maybe four cars out of thirty-five households.  TV was not yet an affordable reality, and the only air conditioning was in a few upscale movie houses and stores.  The absence of those three elements meant that people on our street had no easy way of going anywhere else, no good reason to stay in the house, and a positive incentive to go outside when it got hot.  The result was a lot of people spending a lot of time rubbing up against each other in a relatively small public area.  The arrival on our street of those three heralds of change – cars, TV and air-conditioning – in the decade or so following 1945, meant people no longer had to stand on the pavement and chat with the neighbors.  They did not have to sit exposed upon their porch chairs suffering the scrutiny of every sidewalk passerby.  They could now run from their houses, hop in their cars and escape the eyes and ears of their neighbors.  In the evening, instead of rocking on the porch, playing ball, or strolling up or down the street in search of amenable conversation, they could stay inside and watch Milton Berle, Ed Sullivan, or the cardboard rocket ships of Tom Corbett, Space Cadet.  The final blow to the vitality of life on the street came with the arrival of the window-mounted air conditioner.  There was no longer any reason why you had to sit outside in the stifling heat and put up with that ignoramus who happened to live next door.  Your sixteen-foot wide Airlite house in Olney, Torresdale or Crescentville now offered you the cool privacy of a “Main Line” mansion.

With the postwar climate of accelerating social and economic change, the addition of cars for almost everyone, with television and air-conditioning, communal life in places like Lower Olney began to unravel.  The cohesive elements that made neighborhoods more than just the collections of housing they have become, lost the power of necessity.  Given choices, people increasingly retreated into the interiors of their homes, into their cars, into private spaces.  Those who were able, and in the 1950’s upward mobility didn’t take extraordinary ability, were lured away to the even greater privacy of the suburbs.

In many changing neighborhoods, as young people left for the suburbs, as new and seemingly different people began moving in, the lives of those left behind, particularly older people, became increasingly isolated.  New people may become acquainted with their immediate neighbors, but no one now has to be bothered if they don’t wish to be bothered.

On my own street in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s everyone knew everyone else.  Often they knew far too much about each other.  No stranger could walk up our street without being noticed.  It would have been almost impossible to abandon a car along the curb or spray graffiti on a wall.  In the days before most people had cars, before TV, before people could seal themselves in closed-up houses, there were always witnesses.

Today drug dealers can operate from a row house, and four houses away people can choose not to see it.  If they do see it, they don’t have to know anything of the people living in that house.  Crime and blight can go unresolved because people can, to some degree, escape by locking themselves up tightly with fifty-seven cable channels and an automatic thermostat.  And, there’s usually a getaway car parked out front.

McLuhan wrote that while we have no idea of who discovered water, we know it wasn’t a fish. It may be our nature to remain oblivious to the invisible structures and hidden dynamics of our surrounding environments.  The complex interactions of the ordinary; the infinite and innocuous daily changes just slide on by unnoticed, until one day we awaken to worlds that no longer make sense.

We’re no wiser today, no more prescient with our surround-sound, iPhones, or five-bedroom/four-bath homes than were my old neighbors in row-house Olney in the late 1940’s. Like us they were much too busy discovering the present, celebrating that wonderful first car, that first TV set, that first air-conditioner.

Now, a half century removed from my old neighborhood, I still keep a sharp eye out for snakes.  Are they coiled in the Internet, in fast food restaurants, are they digital now?  What new guises have they assumed, those silent, sneaky vipers of radical change.  There’s no knowing of course, not until it’s too late, not until the venom of irrevocable loss is already within our systems.

Chapter Thirty-Three: Poor, Poor, Pitiful Me

I hadn’t seen Joanie Cannon since the previous August when our brief but intense romantic interlude had ended with her tossing me off like an old sweat sock. Joanie was eighteen-months my senior and drop-dead good-looking. She had come out of Jimmy’s Tomato Pies one July evening on the arm of Howie Wells, a guy generally regarded as one of the neighborhood’s heavy-hitters. I hadn’t seen her before, and that first sight of her made me light-headed. Struck dumb, I didn’t notice that she was scanning the crowd of guys gathered in front of Jimmy’s for prospects. Howie Wells didn’t know it, but he was already history, one more notch on her gun. As they passed through the crowd, she looked right at me and smiled. I took it as an honor to be next on her list. 

I was willingly defenseless and within less than a week, we were an item. Three weeks later it was all over. I was left dazed, confused and disoriented. I felt like I’d been put through an emotional sausage machine. From the start, she had been scouting new talent from among my own friends, and in those few brief weeks she played me off first against Ray Vileos and then Georgie Ryan. By the time I got over my moping, both of those guys had been dumped. 

So now it’s the following Spring, a good eight months since I’d so much as spoken to her. I come out of the A & P on a Thursday night, the store had just added Thursday night hours, and there’s Joanie Cannon waiting for me. She still had the stuff to make go wobbly in the knees. We stood along the low wall of the parking lot and went on awkwardly for a couple of minutes doing the “how you been” business. In the middle of our third or fourth innocuous gambit, she looks at me with those big soft eyes and says, “You know, I’ve missed you.” She was really good, and she may even have believed she meant what she was saying. 

My capacity for foolishness is something I‘ve come to understand as innate, constant and always to be guarded against. Here was one of the most desirable girls I’d ever known, a girl who had led me on to new levels of infatuation and then kicked my legs out from under me. Here she was telling that she had made a terrible mistake,  that I just might be the only one. Underlying the combustible mix of high-octane emotions was a dangerous rush of puffed-up self-regard that threatened to override my frail powers of judgment. Whatever brought her there that night, a little light-bag workout, an impulse to see if she still had the right stuff. I didn’t know and I didn’t care. It was like I was up on the big screen, vindicated, the star in my own fantasy movie, a magnanimous, if reluctant, swooning object of desire. It would have been oh so easy.

The balloon of heady romantic ambience that had transformed the darkened sidewalk in front of a dumpy supermarket on Fifth Street was punctured when I heard myself say, “Hey Joanie, a lot has changed since last summer.”  Just as I spoke those words, and before I could take them back, Freddy Krug’s lime-green ‘40 Ford two-door rumbled up to the curb. I signaled to Freddy to wait a minute and asked Joanie if we could drop her off. She shook her head and walked away. 

The essence of what had transpired was not about love or about a relationship, it was all about me, and I felt like a God, an idol. When I got into the front seat of that old Ford, I could see myself in a Tony Curtis role casually brushing off some starlet. I was so full of myself, so flattered to be the cause of a beautiful girl’s attentions that I scarcely heard Freddy say, “You ain’t going to start messing around with that again, are you? Man, she’s a fucking nut case and you know it.” 

The next day, still awash with waves of euphoria, it began to dawn on me that what I had said to Joanie was the truth. A lot had changed since last summer. I had changed. Not that too many people would have noticed, but I had begun moving away from the pointless, aimless and self-destructive drift that had been the hallmark of my adolescence. And not long after Joanie Cannon had humiliated and then dumped me, I had met a girl, a girl very different from Joanie Cannon. 

I had met her in September. By Christmas, we were going steady. The idea that we can know essential things about ourselves, about what we want or don’t want, about life itself was obliterated in the course of my getting to spend time with this girl. At seventeen years old, I was a veteran of a thousand, if not thousands of infatuations, of years of free floating desires, of a continuous string of puppy love affairs, linked, layered, one after another. And there was the constant, dominating, primordial teenaged lust that burned inside me like a continuing coal mine fire. All of the above were present in this new relationship, particularly the physical attraction. But this time there was more.

To the adult world we were just another pair of kids going out together. But I knew better. What bothered me was that I knew that this was different in ways that mattered to me as nothing had ever mattered before. I didn’t understand it, but I knew. The kind of playing with each other’s minds, the insincere stroking, the kind of head games that Joanie had rolled out the night before, those things were entirely absent in this new relationship. Most importantly, for the first time in my life there was someone I wanted to think well of me, someone in whose eyes I wanted to be better than I would otherwise ever be. On the trolley car going to school that Friday morning, at lunchtime catching a smoke under the bleachers, working that afternoon and evening in the A & P, I knew that for the very first time in my life, I was really in love. And it wasn’t with Joanie Cannon. 

About ten minutes before closing time the next night, Friday night, turning around from my register, I got the signal through the store window from my new steady that she’d be waiting for me across the street. And like every Friday night for the past six months, she’d be in front of O’Dea’s house between Leon’s Luncheonette and the eye doctor’s office. She wouldn’t stand in the light in front of Leon’s and be mistaken for one of the girls who hung out there. She didn’t hang out. I had made up my mind that I would say nothing about the previous night. It was over, all over except for giddy rushes of “oh man. Who would have ever believed that …” The self-congratulatory interior monologue distracting me continued me, but with ever diminishing frequency. Thinking that all was well in the best of all possible worlds, I heard a sharp knocking on the window that turned every head in the front of the store. It was Joanie Cannon. 

Until then I had spent most of my conscious life trying to speed up time. When would I be old enough to drive, to smoke in the house, to get laid, to drink in a bar? The ten minutes till nine-o-clock went by in a microsecond.  I was always among the first out the door at quitting time. That night, I was still dawdling in the back room when Big Stanley went to the fuse panel and began turning the lights off. As the store manager, Charlie Watson walked past me, I got an aside. “Peter, don’t you have anywhere to go this evening. You can’t stay here. We’re closing.” Charlie liked to laugh at his own remarks. The closest I’ve ever felt to what I felt that night was standing at the open door of an airplane four thousand feet above the earth waiting for the signal to jump. Irene Rudinski was standing by the store’s door with her keys. I was the last one out other than her, Charlie, and Big Stanley. 

Out on the sidewalk, I immediately looked across Fifth Street to see if my now steady girl was still standing in front of O’Dea’s steps, waiting for me. Then swiveling my head back and forth, I looked up and down Fifth Street. No Joanie Cannon anywhere. What was going on? What had happened?  I started across the street, dodging an approaching trolley car that clanged its bell at me. Walking up to her slowly, I began to try and explain what had gone on. With an abrupt wave of her hand, she stopped me. “I don’t want to hear about it,” she said. We didn’t say anything all the way up Fifth Street to Olney Avenue where we stood and waited for the Twenty-Six car to take us up to her neighborhood. The noise of the trolley going up Rising Sun Avenue didn’t encourage conversation, and I knew enough not to try and explain anything while we walked to her door. “Call me tomorrow,” she said letting herself into her mother’s house. I walked back through the dark streets to catch the trolley car home.

 

In the more than fifty years since, that we’ve been together, I have yet to get an explanation of exactly what took place that night during those ten minutes outside of that A & P on Fifth Street.

Chapter Thirty-Two: Do You Believe In Magic?

In September 1954, my senior year of high school had just begun, just barely. I had flunked summer school, my third summer school in as many years. According to the rules that meant I wouldn’t be going back to my high school. I would have to go to a public school and repeat junior year.

One part of me really didn’t give a shit. Had I cared, I would have at least attempted to do the course work. Maybe even study, do some homework. Nah. The subject this time was Spanish. But, if it hadn’t been Spanish, it would have been something else. As a thoroughly confused, and genuinely screwed-up kid, my ambivalence was stronger than the pull in any one direction. That September there did emerge, out of the contending contradictions in my head, a muted thought that maybe it might be a good idea to try and salvage what remained of high school.

In the aftermath of the summer school debacle, I went with my mother, over to school where she tried to plead a case. With actors, writers and stand-up comics now mining the horrors of their Catholic upbringings, it’s a good time for a little revisionist history. I don’t know what those Christian Brothers saw in me. My record was a disgrace. I was an academic disaster. My demeanor and attitude were outside any acceptable prep school standards. The school was a prep school of sorts, a day school that catered to the upwardly-mobile, blue-collar parents of bright kids, and to the newly middle-class Catholic families seeking something with a little more cachet than the crowded diocesan high schools. Getting into the school was through competitive examinations, and even now, I test far better than I can perform. My decision to take the test was an afterthought. My cousin was there a year ahead of me, and the kid across the street had signed up for the test. When the eighth-grade nun asked who was interested in applying, I casually raised my hand.

Invisible machinery clanked and rumbled and in September of 1951, I parted company with most of my friends, they on their way to the diocesan “Big House” for boys, me bound for elitism. Today, my alma mater is a true college preparatory school and it is elite and expensive. I would have trouble getting in, and if I made it with the baggage I was then carrying, I wouldn’t last through the first semester.

My easy successes in elementary school crashed head-on into the rigor needed to pass subjects like algebra and Latin. It was awful. Faced with “a” plus “b,” or the conjugation of Latin verbs, my brain and my will went limp. I suspect now that in addition to my oft-cited bad attitude and laziness, there were some low-level learning disabilities at work. My inability to begin to understand even the instructions for abstract mathematics or the mechanics of a foreign language plunged me into what I know now to be a kind of depression. What compounded my situation was an inability, or an unwillingness, to try and do anything to make things better. My parents were to be put through a lot of grief.

Like Joyce’s young Stephen, I was also attempting to deal with a monster whose presence drove academic concerns to the margins of triviality. I was obsessed with all things sexual. So obsessed in fact, that virtually all things became sexual. The context or ground for this teen-aged wasteland or battleground was the continuous raging of implacable hormonal firestorms against a total and inescapable immersion in the Latin/Irish Roman Catholic Church. The results were predictable; failure in school, attractions to the margins of my world, bad companions, beer, auto-eroticism and an almost complete apathy about anything to do with my future.

All of the above worked themselves out during my first three years of high school. What a mess. The good Brother who listened to my mother’s pleas could have waved me off on the basis of the rules. I had blown it; go somewhere else. But he didn’t. He suggested that I enroll with a tutor in Spanish. At the start of the school year I would be given a test put together by the language faculty, and if I could pass that test, I would be allowed to return as a senior. If I failed; goodbye. The offer went well beyond the extra mile.

I took the tutoring. An eight or nine block walk, three times a week in the row house of an inscrutable middle-aged Polish woman. She was a public school language teacher. It was hopeless. She was getting paid and went through the motions. I was paying her out of my own money and I went through the motions. It was all kind of weird.

At the start of the school year I took the test. It was another disaster. Meeting with the guidance counselor in the principal’s office, I was severely taken to task. It was all over. Public school here I come. Inexplicably, as Daffy Duck would say, I was to be given yet another chance. The deal was that I would start my senior year on academic probation. I would be reviewed at the end of the first marking period. If I did well, I could stay. If not, hit the road. My Irish-born grandmother had always held that “good luck beats early rising.” Once again, I had dodged a bullet.

While all of this was playing itself out, I was also involved in a torrid relationship with a girl, torrid of course by the standards of the time, the place and my own vast experience.  I was sixteen, she was seventeen and considered among the more desirable neighborhood beauties. Her mother worked nights as a waitress and the father was not on the scene. It was before air-conditioning and the feel of our co-joined perspiration against the coarse cut plush of her living-room couch is secure in my inventory of erotic memories. A succession of warm twilights, into dusk, into darkness on that couch played against do-wop ballads from a black radio station at the far end of the AM band. That whole summer was a heated, but ultimately a constrained 1954 version of Bob Seger’s “Night Moves.” She wouldn’t go all the way. Thank God. I can only guess how badly I would have handled a fully consummated union at that stage of my life.

Unfortunately or not, my magnificent obsession of that summer was also a bit of a head case. Whenever my tumescence would subside, I realized that I was being taken places I didn’t like going. I was being played off against other guys, my devotion was being constantly put to the test, “If you love me, you won’t go hanging out with the guys tomorrow. If you really love me you won’t…” And, my not having access to a car was always just below the surface. Worse yet, she continued to keep what I believed was the big reward out of reach. Beyond our sessions in that warm murky living room, we didn’t seem to have much else in common. Most nights that summer however, it seemed more than enough.

By the time the good Brother made me the offer to turn around my life in school, I was ready for a change. Knowledge you can’t use is worthless, and until that exact moment when you actually do get it. At that time, all the wisdom of the world couldn’t help me. But the big wheel had begun ever so slowly to turn.

It was the first weekend following the first full week of school, always a disorienting time of distraction. It’s still summer, but out of context with the season, you’re suddenly trapped in the regimen of a full-time school week. Time warp, culture shock. The preceding summer months, despite summer school and a part-time job, had been an interlude of wonderfully shapeless freedom. You could stay out at night, any night of the week without getting too much hassle at home. And, the days were made for drifting, sleeping late and just hanging out. There were also those hours spent on that sofa in that hot, dark living room.

I now had a sense that school just might be different this year. Nothing concrete, more the absence of that feeling of dread, of waiting for things to turn bad, as they always had before. In some minor way I had begun, tentatively, secretly, to take charge of the course of my life. I wasn’t in any way sure of what I was doing, but I knew I was beginning to feel just a little better about everything.

An onerous part-time job the A & P on Fifth Street kept me in cigarettes, spare change and enough to pay for the quart bottles of beer that I spent emptying on Friday and too many other nights. In fact, the ordeal of a full Saturday working in the store was often compounded by a sour hangover from the preceding night out. At sixteen into seventeen I had no idea of what I wanted to do with my life. What I did know, however, was that my life was going to have nothing to do with places like the A&P.

Saturday nights were always the payoff. While the evening often held little more than drinking beer in the back seat of a car, the possibility of exciting alternatives was real. I would try to keep my Saturday night options open. I could just hang out and see what developed, I could catch a movie, or I could even go where there were girls, to one of the neighborhood parish dances.

To get into a dance meant having to dress up in a suit or a sport coat. My Saturday night dance outfit which I thought was an irresistibly cool, devastating knockout included a long, dark blue single-button, suit coat, baggy pegged pants with a hi-rise, blue suede shoes and one of my father’s good shirts. Getting out of the house wearing his shirt was a challenge. Close attention was given to my long greasy hair that I combed up and back into the definitive hoodlum’s insignia, the D. A. or duck’s ass. There was no mistaking me for an honor student.

The Saturday night dance in the parish hall of a neighboring Catholic Church was just far enough away that much of the crowd was made up of strangers and thus seemed exotic. Dances at our own parish, held on Sunday night, drew too many people that you knew too well, or worse they knew you too well. There was no sense of the foreign or the exotic, no excitement, no romance.

After my day in the A&P, after supper, after getting washed and dressed, and after making sure my father didn’t see me wearing his good shirt, the white one with the green pinstripes, I left for the corner. As I grew up, I drifted in an ever-widening circle away from home. Initially, you played on your own street. At about age twelve or thirteen, the lure of adventure, the lure of tales about great events occurring on neighboring streets, schoolyard tales spread by kids living on those distant streets, bred a kind of urban wanderlust. Usually your passport to cross over into other streets was a schoolmate or schoolmates from those streets. It never occurred to us that the kids from other streets coming around our way were creatures lured by the same promise of something different.

The magnets for our evolving social groupings, for the sorting out by birds of a feather, were any one of the dozens of Mom and Pop variety stores that occupied the corners at the ends of nearly every block of row houses. The stores that were operated by people with any business sense at all wouldn’t tolerate corner-lounging kids,  much less allow them to congregate inside the stores. And yet there were store owners, so far gone in failure and apathy that they hadn’t the will required to keep chasing away the crowds of adolescent boys seeking escape from the weather, from boredom, from the close confines of family life in small houses. Kids in fact, seeking freedom or the closest thing to freedom many of them would ever know. Like the Springsteen song about being free on the street, we were free on the corner, and on some corners we were freer than on others.

My own social evolution in the world of corner-lounging was advanced. By the summer of 1954, I was a member in residence at what was probably the ultimate corner in the neighborhood. Isolated from any nearby houses by an abandoned ice house and a foundry, we never had to concern ourselves with neighbors calling the cops to complain about us. That was the death knell for many corner crowds, unhappy neighbors and zealous cops. We bothered almost no one, no matter how obnoxious our behavior, no matter how loud or how late. You had to be there to be outraged by us and hardly anyone but us ever came there.

It was a pizza joint before pizza. They sold tomato pies. How the guy who ran the place ever made a living was never a concern of ours. He did some take-out business, there was a public high school across the street that gave him day-time customers, and the foundry operated a middle-shift with an evening lunch hour. I know that in the three years plus that I made it my home away from home, I didn’t spend ten bucks in there. Our business didn’t cover the heat we absorbed.           

Late summer, early September, seven-o-clock on a Saturday evening, headed for the corner; the air warm, the sky still full of angled orange sun, dressed to kill, ten-to-twenty dollars in my pocket and nothing in my head but vague expectations of undefined excitement. It wasn’t bad. The six or seven block walk to the corner took me through back alleys, driveways and past rental garages, body shops and small manufacturing buildings.  We had no curiosity at all about what went on in any of the factories, machine shops or warehouses that filled the neighborhood. Like one of Gasset’s post-modern savages, I moved unconsciously through my environment, utterly unaware of its purposes. I wasn’t alone in this kind of socio-centrism. The larger world existed only to the degree that we bumped into it, or it into us, like the cops, or a job, or the draft board. It was an adolescence of existential, if not entirely moral innocence.

Looking down the final stretch to the corner, you could make out who was already there by the cars lining the curb. This was the early 1950’s, and the cars of blue-collar kids then as now, were marginal heaps; ‘41 Plymouths, ‘46 Ford sedans, a couple junkers that went back into the mid-1930’s. There were a few classy items, like customized ‘40 or ‘41 Fords, but taste in cars was largely a function of aspirations. We knew what was cool, but nobody had the kind of money it took to be really sharp on wheels. My family had no car at all. I didn’t even have a driver’s license.

On a pleasant Saturday night there would be a good turn-out of the local elite. Those with girl-friends, or dates, or somewhere to go would usually check in on their way out. By about eight, the hard core would be left. “Whaddaya wanna do? I dunno, whadda you wanna do?” The parodies are close to the reality. What most often followed was a night spent riding around drinking beer from quart bottles. What then followed that was unpredictable, and often a bit edgy. There could be confrontations with other kids, sometimes ending in fights, there could be girls, there could be trouble, vandalism and usually there would be someone throwing up in the street. It was exciting, it was trashy, and I think I was beginning to see that it was also sad and wasted.

As a kind of experiential opportunist, I was prepared for whatever happened to present itself. I was dressed for a dance, but the outfit would work equally well for crashing a wedding reception or for getting into a five-dollar night where, if you weren’t carded at the door, the price of admission included as much draft beer as you could drink.

When the corner crowd began thinning out, I turned to one of my fellow leading lights, who with one foot propped behind him on the stucco wall was spitting methodically on the sidewalk next to his other foot. “Wanna go to the movies,” I said. As a budding proletarian intellectual, I was given to reading, among other things, movie reviews. Jaques Tati’s “Mr. Hulot’s Holiday” was running at an art house in a Jewish neighborhood next to ours. “To see what,” I was asked. I recapped the review and asked, “who wants to go? There’s an eight-fifteen show.” My spitting friend, who happened to have a car, said “sure.” We had people in the theater turning around to look at us as we went into near convulsions during the train arrival scene that opens the movie. A little after eight-thirty we came out of the movie, drained from laughing. We were back to “Whadaya wanna do?”

While my spitting friend was company and transportation for the movie, spending the remainder of the evening with him was not a promising prospect. His idea of a good time was removing intake manifolds from flat-head V-8’s. In my full juvenile delinquent finery I was ready for finer things. I was for the dance. He wasn’t dressed for it. I doubt he owned the suit jacket needed to get into a neighborhood dance. We split a quart of beer as he drove me to the dance.

My arrival was late and casual. The muted sound of a recorded dance band standard leaked through the closed doors of the hall out into the lobby – A freebee, nobody there to collect the twenty-five cent admission charge. Inside, the music and the light from a rotating mirror ball turned a darkened parish hall into a teenaged fantasyland. The room was charged with the heat of several hundred overactive kids who had been at it for over an hour when I arrived.

If you thought you were cool, if you wanted others to think you were cool, or if you were by yourself, the first thing you wanted to do upon arriving a dance was to circle the room. I moved through the clusters of people, acknowledging the kids I knew, letting myself be seen. If you were a nerd or a drip or a geek, or if you were fourteen, you didn’t have to do all of that. In fact, it was better if you didn’t. Visibility had to be a natural part of your aura. And, if you came alone, it was a necessity to scope the room for trouble. There was a crowd of genuinely nasty Italian kids from an adjacent neighborhood, occasional marauders who showed up like animals of prey. They operated as a group in choosing their victims. If you were too visible, you could become a candidate. Once in a while they would go after the wrong guy, somebody with enough backing to turn their easy stomping session into a full-scale rumble. That whole scene was too mean for my tastes. I knew guys who had been badly beaten up in those encounters.

If things looked dicey, and you were not with your own crowd, the most politic move would be to seek out the indigenous tough guys and pay your respects. By some unstated code of honor, if your presence was acknowledged by the baddies who knew you, you could then count reasonably on their aid if challenged by outsiders. Security, your personal safety at a Saturday night dance, had all the complexities of Bismarck’s alliance system or membership in NATO. People talk about the untroubled days of their youth. It’s always a matter of context. 

If your tour of the hall revealed the presence of outside bad guys, and the absence of enough guys you knew who could balance the equation, then the wise move was to get out as quickly as discretion would allow. You might be out two-bits, and you definitely would be out the possibility of walking some girl home, of maybe groping in a doorway, “batting it out,” trying to get your hand inside a blouse or sweater. But, you did get out with your teeth intact.

That night there were no real sharks in the water. A gang I occasionally hung out with after school was the dominant presence, and I joined their cluster at the end of the hall. I can’t even remember what the music was like that night. In 1954, rock and roll hadn’t yet arrived, and the people running parish dances had no tolerance for the rhythm and blues or jazz that we affected as our hipster credentials. The mainstream pop music of those times was generally awful.

I danced one slow dance with a girl I had known since grade school. We were “friends,” not romantically linked, but I was not entirely disinterested. The number of girls I had categorized in that way approached the infinite. I practiced a kind of romantic opportunism. The slow dance, the primitive one-two-three-shift, box step was my outer limit. Despite my cool guy posing, I was far too self-conscious to go out on the floor and fast dance, jitterbug. Some things never change.

Scanning the room’s darkness, I spotted a group of girls. I knew a few of them, the rest I knew of, rather than knew. They were from an adjoining neighborhood. A few of them had gone with guys from our corner. They were my own age, seniors, and that was the problem. Seventeen-year-old girls didn’t go out with seventeen-year-old guys. They went out with guys older than themselves, older than me, guys who had cars. In fact, I was surprised to see them at a dance where most of the crowd was socially beneath their notice. I found out later that they had come to the dance with a group of younger girls from their high school, as a preliminary to a 1950’s girl-type phenomenon, a pajama party.

In the sparse patches of moving light, I picked out a couple of new faces in that animated crowd of girls. Hmmm! What have we here? Before I knew it, I had focused on one girl. In my memory of that moment, now over a half-century ago, she seemed to be isolated from the group and the little bit of light in the room seemed to be drawn to her. I found myself watching her, moving as she moved, to keep her in sight. The next number was a fast one, and she jitterbugged to it with one of her girl friends. I moved as close as I could without drawing notice to watch as she danced. Again, despite my “Mister Cool” pose, I was anything but aggressive in going after girls. The truth was that in most of my relationships up to that time, I had been the object of pursuit. I tried to hide my shyness, my debilitating self-consciousness and a paralyzing fear of rejection behind a non-committal, jokester’s facade. It probably didn’t work, but I couldn’t face the alternatives.

Something beyond my conscious understanding was overriding my emotional survival instincts, an unreflective courage, a boldness. Who was this girl? What was happening that could cause me to put my persona at risk?  Remember now, the personality crushing-rejection, the angst,  the lifelong chilling effect on your ability to form lasting relationships that resulted when some unthinking teen-aged object of your desire responded negatively to your “wanna dance?”  

As the jitterbug number ended, a slow piece began. I crossed the few steps separating us and asked her to dance. I passed the first cursory inspection and we moved together out into the flow of the dance. I remember those moments. We didn’t exchange three words during that first dance. At the end of the song, I said thanks, and with feigned casualness, I strolled back toward my friends. I was bothered, bothered, bothered and I didn’t know what it was. My head was already mapping plans. I wouldn’t push this tonight. I knew several of the girls in that group, and on Monday or on Tuesday, I would call one of them. I would find out who I had been dancing with, where she lived, and I would take it from there. This was completely out of character for me; not the ardor, but the taking of action in response to the ardor.

Not more than five minutes had gone by since that dance number when the voice on the P.A. system announced a “ladies choice.”  Once in a while, I would be the recipient of such a choice. It was flattering and might even indicate that a girl was interested in you. More often, it was no more than a friendly invitation from someone you already know, someone who just wanted to dance.           

I turned to look across the room and found myself face to face with my immediate obsession. She had crossed the hall and was asking me if I wanted to dance. This time it seemed I couldn’t shut up. I asked her name, where she went to school, what was she doing with that crowd, and on and on and on. The music seemed to end almost as it had begun, and I immediately felt that I had just blown my chances, prattling away like an idiot. What kind of a jerk-off impression had I made?  I dove into my emotional bunker and began thinking in terms of damage control. I would keep away from her for the rest of the night and maybe I could figure out a way to make a better second impression.

The dance went on forever. I kept my distance, but I kept a close eye on her the rest of the evening. I couldn’t help myself. Promptly at eleven-thirty, the syrupy lines of “Goodnight Sweetheart” began playing, the lights came up and the dance was over. Instead of heading outside to hang with the guys, I took a perch on the foyer railing so that everyone coming out had to go past me. I’m sure my taking up this strange position was noted by more than a few of the people who knew me. “What the hell’s he doing up there?” But, not even my awful self-consciousness was a factor at this point.

Near the end of the crowd coming out of the hall was that gaggle of chattering girls. And, there she was among them. Throwing myself to the fates, I dropped from my perch on the counter and cut my way through the crowd, heading her off before the door and the world outside. Without explanations, without niceties, in the moving crowd, I asked her for her telephone number. Somehow in the midst of the people milling through, I got the number. The kid who couldn’t remember the simplest lesson in eleven years of school, immediately committed the exchange name and the number to the hard disk in his head. While I was repeating the numbers, she disappeared.

I got a ride to the corner. Jimmy’s Tomato Pies was closed for the night and three or four of the guys were standing around under the street light. I hung out for a while, but I was  feeling bored, restless. A kid who lived a few blocks from me announced he was going home and I joined him on the late night walk through the neighborhood. We stopped on the darkened street in front of his house and sat on the concrete steps under the fast moving clouds of a blue-black September sky. I remember talking, feeling compelled to talk. My companion on the step could have cared less. I was like young Stephen on his walk with Lynch. I had to have an ear to articulate in some way what was happening to me. I told him that I wanted to start doing things differently. I wanted something more. I told him that my life had become a kind of a drag; just hanging out, drinking, always in trouble. It wasn’t all that much fun anymore. I told him that I had met a girl tonight.

Chapter Thirty-One: Turn, Turn, Turn

Asked the circumstances of his breakthrough theorem, French mathematician Henri Poincaré was reported to have said, “As I stepped up to get onto the bus…”  In similar ways, recovering alcoholics and drug addicts, when asked to describe the turning point that led them into sobriety, more often than not talk about some seemingly disconnected, mundane occurrence. “I reached in my pocket to buy a bottle and thought, I don’t want to do this anymore.”  Or, “I was brushing my teeth one morning and…” 

The exact moment of the minor shift, the microscopic movement of the tectonic plates of my life, came on the morning of the day after my seventeenth birthday. Standing in the misery of a beer hangover at my cash register in the check out lane of the A & P on Fifth Street, I began to get just the faintest flicker of a recognition that my life was not preordained to continue along the self-destructive path I’d so passively been following.

I don’t remember there having been any special commemoration of that particular birthday. I had to be in work at four in that afternoon, and with what was going on in my life at that time, I wasn’t on very solid ground at home. When the store closed at nine that Friday night, Freddy Krug was waiting for me in the parking lot. With him in his ‘40 Ford two-door were “Tough” Tony Somik and “Dippy” John Nerze. I climbed into the back seat with John and waited for Freddy to do his classic testosterone exit on to Fifth Street. The tires screeched, the flathead V-8 screamed at the limits of the lower gears, and the dual, steel-packed mufflers roared a badass anthem through eight-inch, chromed echo cans. We were cool. We knew how to piss people off.

Our first stop was Jimmy’s Tomato Pies across from the Olney Foundry on Duncannon Avenue. Before cell phones, you had to physically check in to find out what was happening. At nine-thirty on a Friday night, the sidewalk in front of Jimmy’s was uncharacteristically deserted. Aside from a few adults going in and out for pizzas, the only person hanging out was Bull Moose. None of us knew his real name. Bull Moose was a bullet-headed mental defective who wandered the neighborhood stopping and standing around, and just as unpredictably moving on, going from one to another of the corners where teenagers congregated. I don’t ever remember him threatening or bothering anyone, but instinct and common sense kept anyone from hassling him. His name fit his face and his impressive physique. Like most of the guys, I would nod and say, “Hi, Bull.” Bull would nod back and grunt. The few times I heard him try to do more, all that came out was a chirping kind of gibberish. What went on inside his head was as incomprehensible as his attempts at language. I think he lived somewhere near Fourth Street, but that was all anyone seemed to know about him. 

None of us paid much notice when he arrived on the corner one night earlier that summer. He stood, as he usually did, off to the side of the crowd. A causal observer would have assumed him to be a part of the gathering. Up the street, Eileen Harshaw and Babs Mulvey were coming toward the corner. Both were considered fast and trashy. Both were just unhappy, unattractive kids, “disadvantaged” by today’s terms, who gravitated toward places where they weren’t always so disadvantaged. As they got closer, I watched Bull Moose begin getting agitated, adjusting his shirt and belt. He then quickly pulled a comb from his pocket and ran it over the stubble on his pointed head. Just before the girls, who didn’t even see him, got to where he was standing, he had gotten himself back into a pose of studied nonchalance. 

 Freddy Krug, who had a reputation as a madman, was one of the few people who was overtly nice to Bull Moose. Several times over the course of that summer, if we were piling into Freddy’s car to go get hoagies or to look at a car somebody was thinking of buying, or just going cruising, Freddy would invite Bull Moose to join us. “Hey Bull! Wanna go for a ride?” Bull’s face would go into a big-toothed smile and he’d do his rolling swagger walk over to the car. Bull Moose of course had no money, and Freddy would treat him if we stopped for sodas or ice cream. I once split a hoagie with him. 

The night of my birthday, we hung around the corner for a half-hour or so with nothing going on. The ever predictable Tough Tony Somik suggested getting some beer and going for a ride. I had just been paid and had about fifteen bucks in a small, brown A & P pay envelope. I volunteered that I could kick in for gas, and we each gave Freddy, who could get served at a dumpy bar on Second Street, a buck for beer. As we headed for the car, Freddy turned back and asked Bull Moose if he wanted to go with us.

As the soft, warm early September night wore on, I found myself once again half drunk in the back of another old car, this time seated between Bull Moose and Dippy John, each of us now nursing our second quart of Ortliebs. Dippy John wasn’t really all that dippy. He had a pronounced speech impediment and some residual effects of what might have been birth defects. But John, unlike Bull Moose, was in no way mentally impaired. John worked as an automobile mechanic in a greasy shop on Mascher Street, having dropped out of Olney High at sixteen. Early on, Johnny Nerze had been assigned his part, “Dippy John.” He didn’t like it, and there was a sad, angry edge about John, an edge that I intuitively felt was within his rights. My not dealing with him as if he were dippy didn’t make him any nicer to me. In fact, he seemed to resent me more than the guys who treated him like Bull Moose. John had grown up next door to Freddy Krug who had taken on the role of his protector. But Freddy also could be merciless in making mean fun of John. 

At every turn that night, the clanking sound of empty beer bottles arose from the trunk behind us. Freddy had tried to wire a rear shelf speaker for the car’s radio. He and Tough Tony had stolen a speaker from a drive-in movie but couldn’t get it to work in the car. The hole left in the shelf became a convenient drop for the disposal of empties. By the end of my second quart, I was wasted and headed toward an internal crying jag. The mess I’d made of so short a life was laid out before me like a dog’s breakfast, whatever that was. Here I was on the night of my seventeenth birthday, a world-class loser. Half or completely drunk; no real money and no prospects of ever getting any; no car; a lousy, dead-end supermarket job that I hated, and the prospect of not being able to go back to school for my senior year. I had just flunked summer school. And while I feigned indifference to my academic fate, I knew that I really didn’t want to have to drop out of high school. On top of all that, I was coming off a disastrous and painful summer romance. I looked around as the old Ford took a corner and threw me up against Bull Moose and then back over into Dippy John. Is this what it comes to? My mother’s words poured into my head, “show me your friends and I’ll tell you what you are.” 

The next day, trying to get through a busy work shift at my checkout counter on three hours of alcohol-disturbed sleep, I stumbled my way through the motions of working while my head pounded, my eyes itched and my digestive system pumped noxious green beer farts into the atmosphere around me. Two different baggers jumped ship on me to work at other counters. Somewhere deep in the unconscious prehensile reaches of my jumbled brain, I began to grope ever so slightly in the direction of thinking that just possibly it might be time to change the course of my life. And ever so slowly, from that day on, I did.

Nothing happened immediately except that through the twin miracles of good luck and Christian charity, I was allowed to return, on probation, to school.  I did not distinguish myself academically in any way, but I passed. I graduated, if not dead last, then just ahead of a couple of well-connected vegetables. I continued to drink until there was none left or until I passed out, but the frequency of those occurrences began to decline. And then I met a girl. I met a girl who became more important to me than what anyone thought of me on any of the corners in the neighborhood. I didn’t know it, but I think I had decided it was time for me to start growing up.

Chapter Thirty: Tell Them I’m Not Home

I got in from school around three-thirty. At a quarter to four, the phone in the living room rings. “Oh shit,” I thought. As my mother moved to pick up the receiver, I shouted downstairs from the landing, “tell them I’m not home, Mom. Tell them I’m not home.” I knew who was on the phone. It was Rudy Bederman, the assistant manager at the A & P on Fifth Street, and I knew what he wanted. It was Thursday. I wasn’t supposed to work until the next day, Friday. 

Somebody hadn’t shown up and they wanted me to fill in. I had nothing on my afternoon agenda other than walking over to Fairhill Street to hang out with the crowd at Geever’s candy store. My mother was not to be trusted in these matters. To impart a sense of urgency, I kept up my chant. “Mom! Mom! Tell them I’m not here.”  Unfortunately, in the seconds that my mother hesitated with the receiver in her hand, Rudy Bederman heard me shouting that I wasn’t home.

When Bobby Mulford, a kid up the street, got drafted in the Spring of 1953, and gave his notice at the A & P, he told Charlie Watson, the manager, that I wanted a job there. The A & P supermarket on Fifth Street was, by the standards of the day, a supermarket. Actually, it wasn’t much bigger than the suburban super-convenience stores that have sprung up in the past few years. Bobby had worked in the produce department, but I was hired as a grocery clerk and told that if things worked out, I might be trained to run a register.

I was fifteen and not unhappy with my paper route. But I had begun to feel that delivering newspapers with the twelve and thirteen-year-olds was somehow demeaning. Even though I felt I had mastered the codes of teenage hoodlum posturing and costuming, how could I maintain my credibility if I was still a paperboy? So I came in out of the cold, and in out of the heat and the rain and the snow. I freed myself of the seven-day-a-week commitment that was the big downside of having a newspaper route. At the A & P, I went on a part-time, fifteen to twenty-hour-a-week work schedule, working Fridays after school until closing at nine, all day Saturday and two afternoons a week. At a then serious pay rate of seventy-five cents an hour, I grossed under fifteen dollars a week, which after deductions; taxes, social security and union dues, netted me about twelve bucks. That was about four dollars a week more than I made serving papers. On the numbers alone, it seemed a good move. I went in only four times a week and made half again what I was getting for tying up parts of every single day on a paper route. What I quickly learned, however, was that life is about more than numbers. I hated working at the A & P. 

I had made a bad trade. Serving papers, I had been a free agent. I had been on my own. Eight times a week, I would walk the almost four miles of city streets – Six afternoons and Sunday mornings delivering papers and a couple of hours on Saturday mornings knocking on doors and ringing bells and buzzers to collect from my customers. I moved at my own pace and smoked whenever I damned well felt like it. Whenever I wanted, I stopped and talked with whomever I had happened to bump into. I stopped for sodas and to browse comic books in various corner stores. I daydreamed. I unconsciously participated in the changing seasons, getting rained on, slipping on ice-crusted steps and sidewalks, nearly collapsing under the weight of seventy or eighty fat Tuesday papers in plus ninety-degree heat. 

The A & P, an entry-level introduction into the adult world of work, confirmed everything I suspected about being a grown up. Adults, it seemed, existed in a kind of voluntary form of mercenary penal servitude. They spent long hours under close supervision, faking it, having to look busy even when they weren’t. It was just like school only you had to pretend you were a willing participant. In exchange, you got paid, never enough, but not so little that you could do without it. A bad bargain, I concluded. 

On a different level, my part-time job was my first interaction with grownups on anything like a peer level. Although I was still a kid, there were unstated rules of engagement. This is the real world, a workplace, not a hangout. If you didn’t want to do what was expected of you, if you didn’t pull your weight, there were no special considerations, no pleadings. If you didn’t want to accept the conditions of your employment, so be it. Goodbye. Having failed abjectly at high school, for reasons I still can’t adequately explain, I felt a sort of compulsion, if not to succeed or excel in a retail grocery career, then to at least stay the course and function on some kind of acceptable terms – Until something better came along.

 

On the day following the phone call from Rudy Bederman, a Friday afternoon, I pushed open the big front door of the store a full ten minutes before my starting time. It had been pointed out to me that a four p.m. start time meant being aproned and ready to work when you put your card in the time clock. You didn’t punch in and then go into the back room and get ready. As I headed past the four checkout counters, I heard one of the older lady checkers giggle, and then the kid bagging for her, Freddie Cadden, stage whispered, “tell them I’m not here, Mom.” As I passed the canned fruit and vegetable aisle where Tommy McLaughlin was stocking shelves, I heard it again this time loud enough to carry over to where the produce guys could pick it up. “Mom, tell them I’m not home,” rose in a chorus from behind the counters filled with potatoes and onions. The supercilious dairy guy, Walter, couldn’t bring himself to participate but smirked at me as I ducked into the darkened back room. As the door closed, I caught the start of a three part harmony rendition of  “hey Mom, tell them I’m not…” from the singing butchers at the meat counter. Inside the back room, Rudy Bederman was waiting for me. 

I didn’t get fired and I didn’t quit. I stayed on at the A& P for another two years, always a part-timer. After high school, there was some pressure both at home and at the store for me to go full time. I sensed that the summer between high school and my going into the Army just might be my last time of true freedom. I didn’t want to spend anymore of it in the A & P than I absolutely had to.  

For twenty hours a week, a few more whenever they could catch me, I watched the clock. I stood out front cranking the long, striped awning up or down. I snuck smokes in the back room. I mopped up broken jars of pickles, pushed hand trucks loaded with bulky cases of toilet paper, or heavy with five-pound bags of sugar or flour, or cases of soda. I spent an eternity of afternoons stocking shelves with canned goods, stamping the price on each individual can; Ann Page Fruit Cocktail, three for forty-nine cents; Campbell’s Cream of Chicken, two for thirty-nine cents. Even more mind numbing was going back with paper stickers, covering the stampings when prices changed. I cleaned the foul toilet in the back room and swept the aisles timing my pace to make sure I wouldn’t be too available for further assignments before closing time.

Most of my tenure was spent up front, at one of the four checkout counters, first as a lowly bagger and then working a register as a checker. As a bagger I learned that the best response to an unpleasant customer was to plant a “time bomb.” A time bomb was the strategic placement of heavy, hard-edged items like number ten cans in proper proximity to eggs, bread, tomatoes or any other soft fragile item. Ideally when the bags were moved, the full weight of the hard items would inflict the maximum damage on the soft ones. The ultimate time bomb was the positioning of a wet or potentially leaking item near the bottom of the large brown paper grocery bag with heavy items pressing down on it. Done properly, the offending customer would just make it out the door before catastrophe struck. 

I was sixteen when Irene Rudinski replaced Mrs. Bailey in the cage. The cage was the store manager’s small, elevated stand-up office along the wall at the end of the checkout counters. Irene’s job was to handle all the store’s administrative loose strings; payroll, schedules, keep track of cash and generally help out the manager, the hopelessly mad Charlie Watson and the wise-guy assistant manager, Rudy Bederman. Irene was probably twenty or twenty one and newly married. She was a diminutive cutie, button-nosed and red cheeked and I was smitten the moment I saw her. 

I had come in grudgingly for a three hour, mid-week, after school stint. As I punched in at the time clock on the outside wall of the cage, the door opened and there was Irene in a white coat apron standing next to the open safe counting stacks of tens. I looked at her and it was instantaneous. I was in love. For three hours that afternoon, I kept finding excuses to go to the front of the store, to walk past the cage, anything to get another peek at this wondrous creature. Just before closing time, on my fifth or tenth or twentieth walk past, our eyes met. I immediately betrayed myself, my face flashing the colors of a Key West sunset. Before she could lower her eyes, Irene Rudinski, so much older than me, married or not, turned a shade of crimson equal to my own. Distracted as I was, I didn’t notice Rudy Bederman standing next to her in the office. He’d witnessed the whole scene. 

My five-hour, four p.m. to closing, shift on Friday and the full day Saturday were now spent in a kind of deliciously sweet torment. I couldn’t stop mooning over Mrs. Rudinski, and neither of us could stop blushing. The word had gotten around the store and everyone but the two of us were having a grand old time with it. At first, I couldn’t believe my good fortune. All afternoon on Friday, Rudy Bederman kept sending me on errands to the cage. Oblivious with infatuation, I didn’t notice that every time I came to the front of the store to stand red-faced and stammering in front of an equally discomfited Irene Rudinski, all four checkers and their baggers had stopped what they doing. Nor was I alert to the fact that the produce clerks were poking their heads around the end aisle, or that Rudy Bederman and one or more of the full time grocery guys always happened to be at the front end of one of the aisles near the office. 

By Saturday morning, I knew that I had, as my father repeatedly observed, allowed myself to be carried away by my enthusiasms. But at that stage of my life, the tortured pleasures of being in love with being in love had become a central factor of my existence. If on that previous Wednesday afternoon when I clocked in, Irene Rudinski hadn’t been there to knock me off my feet, there just might have been some other sweet young thing coming into the store and creating a similar emotional dislocation in my volatile consciousness. At the age of sixteen, I was in love all of the time. I could be in love with one girl or with many more girls than one, for weeks or months on end.  During those same weeks or months of serial or concurrent emotional fixations, there would also be an infinity of short features, momentary infatuations, interesting possibilities that stimulated, excited and held my attentions. I had become an absolute master of romantic multi-tasking, almost all of which took place entirely within the confines of my own mind. My self-absorbed attractions to Irene Rudinski, unlike the objects of most of my warm daydreams, just happened to spill out into a limited public domain.

Just before lunch on that Saturday, I was in the back room stacking cases of Del Monte canned fruit on a cart when Charlie Watson came in and motioned me away from where Big Stan was chopping the ends off cabbages.  Even then, I had to give Charlie his due. He could have cared less if Irene Rudinski and I were carrying on like a couple in a smoker movie.  Charlie had a store to run. “Listen,” he said to me. “We’re both grown men.” I was sixteen and flattered. “Mrs. Rudinski,” he didn’t call her Irene, “is a married woman.” That was all he said. I nodded my understanding. Until then, I’d regarded Charlie as just another pathetic, stressed-out lunatic clinging to a job beyond his capabilities. His tactical implications that I had even the remotest chance of consummating any kind of serious relationship in the matter under discussion were calculated to let me slip easily off the hook, and I knew it. I also recognized how much I had underestimated Charlie both as a person and as a manager, and I never did that again. By the following week, Irene Rudinski and I were able to smile and nod at each other without embarrassment. And as time passed, she even began to kid me about the state of my love life. 

What little room for maneuver I had as a grocery clerk; ducking out back for a smoke, dawdling while I brought in carts, hiding in the back room, evaporated when I was called up front to work a register. My selection by Charlie Watson to become a checker was touted as if I was being promoted. There was no additional money that went with the added duties. The problem of working one of the store’s four registers is that you were trapped, a captive locked into your checkout booth, and the row of booths stood directly in the line of vision of Charlie’s office. Monday through Thursday, it wasn’t that bad. Customer traffic was light or sporadic and my usual work stint was three hours at most. And, by being up front, near the door I could get a look at every girl who came into the store. Better yet, there was that flattering rush when a girl would choose my line even when it wasn’t the shortest. Friday and Saturday were different. The store was crowded and busy until the nine p.m. closing on Friday night, and the action on Saturday was non-stop all day.

The big electro-mechanical cash registers chugged, clacked, banged and chimed, producing long paper tapes listing each figure we entered. There were no scanners, no bar codes. We read the price of each item and entered it, doing the divisions when a customer bought one can of LeSuer Peas at three for forty-nine cents, a seventeen-cent charge. I got to know which sour-faced housewives would challenge my display of flash and dash on the register’s big buttons by demanding to go over the tape item-by-item in hopes of catching a pricing mistake. One woman who had a reputation for doing it every week did catch me up one Saturday. I had undercharged her significantly on a large ham. When I smiled, apologized for the mistake and thanked her for finding it, she was pissed. For a few moments I was a hero among my peers, but the following Saturday she had the checker next to me doing another item-by- item recount. We had to weigh and price the fresh produce that was sold by weight, using daily price schedules for string beans or cabbages by the pound. Instead of powered conveyor belt surfaces, the counters had wooden handled frames that we used to pull the groceries up to our registers, and we had to know how to make change. In over two and half years, my till came out wrong only twice. Once, a buck-thirty short and the second time, twelve dollars over. 

Sometimes you had a bagger working with you, most of the time you didn’t. On a Saturday working from eight in the morning until the five p.m. closing time, you got a ten-minute break in the morning and afternoon and an hour off to go home for lunch. It wasn’t anything like “breaking rocks in the hot sun,” but I was sixteen years old, and spending all day Saturday cooped up and supervised while I worked a cash register non-stop for seventy-five-cents an hour sure seemed like kind of a drag. But then again, nobody was coming around to offer me anything any better.

Right or wrong, by the time I was at the A & P, I had begun to feel like I was always on the outside looking in. Other kids got these desirable jobs; carrying mail at Christmas time, construction labor jobs all summer at three fifty an hour, city jobs where you painted fences or didn’t, and still got paid. Even then, nobody would tell you how they happened to get those plums. It seems we didn’t know anybody in positions to look out for us. What I couldn’t see was that there were kids in the neighborhood who probably wondered how I had gotten my job at the A & P.

I was sweeping the cereal and cookies aisle when Charlie Watson came up to me. With see-through seriousness done entirely for effect he said, “Peter, can I ask you to stop what you’re doing for a moment.” I think “yeah right, Charlie. I’m busy sweeping the floor.” Charlie also always called us by our proper names as if we were all equal partners in the fate of The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company. “Walter is going to be out for a while. I’m going to promote you and Edward and Thomas to handle his duties while he’s gone.” I’d already had a couple of Charlie’s “promotions,” a term understood to mean more work, but no more money. Walter was a full-timer with a wavy hairdo and a horse-toothed, on-and-off smile that only the women ever got. He ran the store’s dairy counter, a job generally considered a soft deal. Between Eddie Ricks and Tommy Ward, both of who went to North Catholic, and me, all of us part timers, we’d take turns covering the dairy. At least it would keep me off a check-out register for as long Walter was going to be out. At seventeen, I had no curiosity at all why charming Walter was to be out. We learned later it was for a hemorrhoid operation. 

The dairy counter was in the back of the store near the butchers and the back room door. The centerpiece of the counter was a tall, red double-batch coffee grinder with selection handles like the bridge controls on a great ocean liner. The A & P sold its own brand of coffee in one and three-pound bags; basic Red Circle in yellow bags, richer Eight-O-Clock in red bags, and the seriously strong and aromatic Bokar in black bags. Charming Walter, who always wore a necktie and a white smock instead of an apron, would grind customer’s coffee to order, selecting the right setting on one of the big machine’s two control handles. The area around the dairy counter would fill with the efficient sound of hidden machinery and the delicious smell of freshly ground coffee. A customer’s “thank you,” particularly an attractive woman’s “thank you,” would be Walter’s cue for an oily, leering recitation like “it’s my pleasure dear, I like to do everything I can to please my customers.”

Along the wall next to the coffee counter and running to the back of the store was a brightly lit refrigerated case where milk, eggs, butter and cheese were kept. The dairy person was responsible for stocking and maintaining the display. Behind the counter itself were glass cases filled with cartons of cigarettes. The dairy counter also had its own cash register, a convenience for customers who came in for cigarettes or coffee, or with small orders, could have their purchases rung up and bagged right there. 

During my second week on the dairy, a Thursday after school, I was out of smokes. It was still a day till payday. At quitting time Friday night, Irene Rudinski would hand us the small brown envelopes that held our pay, the bills wrapped around our time sheet vouchers and the change loose in the envelope. I thought, “what the hell.” I’ll just grab a pack of cigarettes from behind the counter. I’ll ring up the twenty-seven cents on Saturday. Looking around to be sure nobody was watching me, I did the old drop down and pick up something from the floor routine. Squatting behind the counter, my right hand went into an open Camel carton and slid one pack of cigarettes into my pants pocket. 

A solid pack a day smoker, I ran out again at work on Friday night, smoking the last of the purloined Camels during a soda break in Leon’s Luncheonette across the street.  Again, it was the old “what the hell.” I’d ring up fifty-four cents tomorrow. On Saturday, Doreen, one of the checkers called in sick. I was given a till and had to spend the entire day up front. Tommy Ward worked the dairy. It was Tuesday before I was due back in, and by then I was broke and out of smokes. 

The slide into allowing the A & P to finance my cigarette habit was inexorable and seemingly inevitable. Within a week, I was copping Camels two packs at a time. I mean, I still needed smokes even when I wasn’t working. I knew it was wrong. There was never any doubt, but it wasn’t like I was stealing from anybody, not from any real person who needed the lousy twenty-seven cents a pack. It was just too easy. With reliable if erratic periodicity, a news story will appear on TV or in the paper about a trusted employee caught with their hand in the jar. Or it’s the toll taker playing one for the bridge, one for me, or the devoted dad or mom who rips off the kids’ hockey or soccer club for fifty-grand. People always react with “he was good guy” or, ”she had a good job. Why did they do it?” But I know why. I know exactly how it can happen. 

At closing time on a Tuesday afternoon about a week before Walter was due back, Charlie told me to come in at four the next afternoon. I wasn’t scheduled to work, but he said he wanted to talk to Edward, Thomas and me together. I don’t believe I slept that night. Wednesday in school took a month to pass. I felt sick and wanted to go to Argentina, anywhere but over to that A & P at four. I considered not showing up, but in the context of who I was and where I was, that wasn’t an option. 

I didn’t bother going home from school. I sat on the low wall of the store’s tiny parking lot smoking stolen cigarettes and worrying. Eddie Ricks showed up. He looked angry. I didn’t say anything. He started absentmindedly kicking the cinderblock wall and assuming I knew what was going on, he said, “What the fuck are they going to do, send us to jail?” I thought, maybe they will, and I felt even worse. Again I didn’t say a word. 

Four-o-clock and no Tommy Ward. Eddie and I went inside. Irene, who knew everything that went on in the store, didn’t even turn to face us. “Mr. Watson’s waiting for you in the back,” she said. It felt like a death march. Charlie was talking to Big Stan who took his cue and left. Silence, a long silence with Charlie just staring at us. “I think you know why I asked you to come in,” he said in his best serious manager’s voice. “Where’s Thomas,” he asked us. It was every man for himself. Neither Eddie nor I gave a shit where Tommy Ward was. “Good enough,” said Charlie. “He had his chance.”

“Edward, you know why you’re here,” said Charlie. He waited and waited and waited and waited. The pressure of the silence was awful. I was ready to blurt out, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do it. I’m sorry.” But before I said anything, Eddie Ricks looks at Charlie and says, “how much do I owe you, Charlie.” Charlie had a number that he said was the average difference between Walter’s receipts and Eddie’s.  “Eighty-two dollars,“ he said. Eddie dropped his head. Charlie went on. “It’s your choice,” he said pausing. “If you agree to return the money you’ve taken, fine. If not, you wait right here until the police arrive. Your friend Thomas outdid you, and because he isn’t here he is not going to get the chance I’m giving you.” 

Neither Eddie Ricks or Tommy Ward smoked cigarettes, but they each had found the unsupervised cash register too much of a temptation. Over the seven-week period when the three of us had been working the dairy, the receipts for Eddie’s and Tommy’s shifts had kept coming up noticeably shorter than when Walter had been running the ship. Now it was my turn. I stood with my stomach fluttering and my muscles beginning to twitch. “Oh shit,” I thought. “How could I have gotten myself into something like this.” Charlie turned to me and said, “Peter, did you know anything about any of this?” Rays of sunlight began to peek out from behind the clouds, birds started to chirp, feeling slowly began returning to my extremities. My sphincter unpuckered for the first time in almost twenty-four hours. “No I didn’t Charlie,” I heard myself say. 

What had happened was that while I was lifting a half dozen packs of Camels every week, my register tapes were close enough to the Walter standard that I was assumed to be on the up and up. But only up to a point. Once again, Charlie demonstrated a managerial savvy beyond general appreciation. I had been scooped up in the same net with Eddie and Tommy, just in case I had anything I might have wanted to get off my chest. Charlie did send the company’s security people to Tommy Ward’s house, and since nothing more was ever said I figured either he or his parents made good. I walked out of that store that afternoon with a clear understanding of the nature of moral imperatives, an understanding that’s continued to guide me now for over fifty years. 

Not long ago, we began buying bean coffee and grinding it fresh as a weekend indulgence. It soon became a daily entitlement. Every so often, early in the morning, when the scent of the pulverized beans comes up at me, I’m back behind the big red grinder surrounded by colorful stacked bags of Eight-O-Clock, Red Circle and Bokar. I believe now that what I experienced at the A & P dairy counter in 1954 was nothing less than a very close call with the Devil himself.

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Lost Highway

After supper on a damp, mild Wednesday night in February of 1955, my father said he had to go somewhere and that he wanted me to go with him, highly unusual. We took the Twenty-Six car up Rising Sun Avenue, getting off at Knorr Street, the same stop I would get off to visit my current steady girl friend. My first panicky thought was that her parents had figured out what was going on in their basement while her mother was at work. But no, my father turned the other way and began walking toward the showroom of the Ernest Jones Ford agency. I still had no idea of what was going on. As we went through the front door, my father turned and said, “I bought a car.” 

 

My father was forty-four years old, and by this time I had just assumed that if anyone in our family were ever to buy a car, it would probably be me. Years earlier, on a cold, overcast New Years Day, we had gone to a matinee at the Carmen Theater at Germantown and Allegheny. Going to the Carmen was a big deal, a holiday treat. At the Carmen, you not only got a first run movie, but after the movie, the stage lit up, the curtain opened to a live orchestra with an emcee and you got three or more acts of vaudeville. My mother had put the traditional New Year’s roast of pork in the oven on low, and we’d gone off for the show. Coming home, we had to change trolleys at Fifth and Allegheny. Light snow began falling as we shivered in the fading light on the deserted corner waiting for the Forty-Seven car. Behind us, a timer clicked the lights in the showroom windows of Ronan Motors. It was a Dodge dealership and the brand new 1949 models were on display. My father began talking about each of the models in the window, which one would be a better purchase, which the more practical. I didn’t know it then, but had he been describing the qualities that differentiated Indian elephants from African elephants, the bases of his expertise would have been every bit as sound. 

 

“You bought a car?” I was stunned. All of the wonderful possibilities began flooding my mind. I was already behind the wheel, already making an impression, already a big deal. Before I could ask the next question, “what kind of a car?” A guy in a suit was pumping my father’s hand and leading him into a cubicle. While my father sat filling out papers, I wandered the showroom looking at the new cars, hardly able to contain myself. My father and the salesman came out of the office and I fell in behind them. Through a door and into a semi-darkened shop, we stopped at a shiny gray and blue 1954 Ford, a four-door Victoria. Only a year old, it looked brand new. As soon as I saw the Victoria logo, I knew that even though it was a four-door sedan, it still had the minor cachet of being a V-eight. Ford had gone to overhead valve V-8’s in 1953, and the higher-end Victoria had the big engine. Any car would do, but my image might have taken a hit if the car, a car I hadn’t yet been told I’d be allowed to drive, had come with a wussy little six-cylinder motor. I started projecting cool improvements on the car my father hadn’t yet gotten to drive.  How would it sound with a set of dual exhausts and a couple of discreet chrome echo cans protruding from under the rear bumper? I‘d really look cool rumbling around in something like that. The salesman handed my father the keys and began raising the big garage door. 

 

Getting into the car, I started peppering my father with questions about my being allowed to use the car, and could I go tomorrow after-school and get my learner’s permit. That he might have been nervous didn’t enter my mind. He raised his hand to shush me and began trying to figure how to start the very first car he had ever owned. The ride home approached harrowing. Other than his driving test with a state trooper sitting next to him, this was his first time on his own behind the wheel. It was before seat belts and his first attempt at stopping, the red light at Martins Mill Road, sent me flying forward into the dashboard. Although accustomed as I was to riding with some of the most irresponsible automotive lunatics in the neighborhood, this was a different order of scariness. “Pop! Pop! For Christ’s sake it’s a red light.” Or, “he’s blowing his horn at us because you’re doing fifteen in a thirty-five zone.”  After two abortive attempts at parallel parking in front of our house, he pulled back out into the street and told me to go inside and get my mother and my brother. During the third trip around the block, punctuated by at least two of my mother’s “Jesus, Mary and Josephs,” we convinced him to try and park the car and let us out. 

 

The next night, Thursday night, was my mother’s novena night over at the Immaculate Conception Church in Germantown. That I might be the primary cause of her having to make novenas hadn’t yet occurred to me. The weather had turned cold again, and at the supper table, I said, “We’ll Mom, tonight you don’t have to take the trolley car over to Germantown.” I went on painting my father into a corner. Whether it had occurred to him to drive my mother to the novena, I didn’t know. But I was in the process of making a more compelling case to take out the new car than just, “hey let’s go for a ride.”  I applied the next layer, “you know Mom, if Pop drives you over, you won’t have to stand on that dark, windy corner waiting for a trolley after church.” Switching to the collective plural, I added, “we’ll take you over and then come back and pick you up.” My brother had gone into the living room to practice his clarinet, another good reason to get out of the house. 

 

We drove over Olney Avenue in the February darkness. In the magic passage of a single day, we rode past those now less fortunate than us, the huddled masses waiting for trolley cars on an icy night. With the heater on and the radio playing, we had arrived. Then my father almost ran the light at Broad Street. I shouted, “Stop. Stop!” My mother gasped, and my father managed to stop just inches from the speeding cross traffic. With no further adrenaline surges, we arrived safely in front of the Church of the Immaculate Conception. Rolling down the window, I stuck my head out and shouted, “See you at eight-thirty, Mom.” 

 

Before the arrival of instantaneous universal access to standardized mass media, city people were presumed more sophisticated than their rural counterparts. Perhaps we were the exception that proved the rule. Until 1955 when my father bought that used Ford,  we only occasionally ever got more than a few miles outside the neighborhood. The belt of suburbs, the nearby towns and small cities that surrounded the city might as well have been in another hemisphere. I had no more idea of our location vis-à-vis the communities adjacent to the city’s boundary lines than I had of the latitudes or longitudes of the antipodes. If I hadn’t been carried past a place on a trolley car or bus, it was all the same to me. And if anything, my father was more geographically challenged than I was. 

 

About twenty minutes into our Thursday evening joy ride, I began to lose my bearings. The familiar lettering on the signs that had read “Germantown Avenue” had changed to a different script and a different color. Now it read “Germantown Pike.” And, the tracks for the Route Twenty-Three car had disappeared from the street. I couldn’t read the name of the detour that sent us a dozen blocks down a darkened side road. When we emerged back onto a major, but unknown thoroughfare, I knew we were in trouble. And, I didn’t want to say anything that would make the already nervous driver anymore rattled than he seemed to be getting. Now at every intersection, my father would ask, “What do I do here? Turn, go straight?” How the hell did I know? It was dark, nothing looked like any place I recognized, and in fifteen minutes my mother would be out on that freezing cold, windy sidewalk looking for us. 

 

Like storm-blinded sailors, we plunged on. Eight-thirty came and went. At last, at an open gas station, I ran inside; not asking, but begging for directions. It was twenty minutes after nine when we passed slowly along the deserted sidewalk in front of the Church of the Immaculate Conception. In the nervous silence going back down Olney Avenue, I went into my “we couldn’t help it. We got lost. It wasn’t our fault.” My father knew better.  We turned the corner and saw my mother walking up the street. She was less than twenty feet from the house. She refused to even acknowledge the explanations I offered from the passenger side window of the car. As my father began the first of the many attempts he needed to successfully park the car, my mother went up the steps and into the house, slamming the door behind her. 

 

She had stood in the cold for almost forty minutes before taking a trolley car home. Half-frozen and almost sick with worry, she knew only that my father and I were lying dead somewhere in the wreckage of what she now referred to as “that goddamned thing.”  She didn’t talk to my father for several days, and it was over a week before he was able to get her back into the car. 

 

Whether because he started driving so late in his life or because he just couldn’t manage it, my father was an awful driver. And for as long as he lived, we had to supply him with simplified, detailed directions that only rarely kept him from getting lost. But he and my mother both came to love having a car. It was the official, tangible sign that the bad luck and hard times that had marked the first nearly twenty-years of their marriage were really over. They developed a routine of simple pleasures built around riding in their car, one that lasted as long as my father was alive. For almost two decades, there would be a Saturday afternoon trip to a shopping mall and a Sunday afternoon ride through rural Bucks County, ending each week with the same early dinner at the same dairy restaurant. The heart attack that killed my father in 1973 at the age of sixty-two, hit him while he was behind the wheel, driving south on Second Street, just above Erie Avenue. My mother was banged up in the ensuing crash, but that was the least of it.

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Duncannon Avenue

On a beautiful Spring evening in 1953; fifteen years old, in trouble for drinking beer, staying out, flunking three subjects, clueless, confused and desperately hoping to find a way out, I sat alone with a Frosty Root Beer on the sidewalk in front of Joe’s candy story on Duncannon Avenue. A large flowering magnolia tree dropped its electric-pink blossoms on me and on the sidewalk all around me. 

My father said that if Joe had granted me bathroom privileges, I’d never have to come home. Joe was an untidy guy, an overweight chain-smoker with a full head of greasy, black hair. He was an easy-going and liked to chat, continually lighting each new Chesterfield from the butt end of the last one. Hanging out at Joe’s was my first real excursion into the wider world of people not from my family, my street, my school, my church or even my age group. The kid across the street from our house, Bobby Yanks knew some of the guys who hung at Joe’s, as did an older kid up the street. I wandered down to Joe’s one night early in my second year of high school and found a home. 

Joe’s shared an entryway with a Mom and Pop grocery store. A guy named Ed and his wife ran the store. Ed was a nervous type who wore a white shirt and a necktie and did what he was told to do by his outspoken wife. I think Ed hated us for our carelessness. His wife would shout to him from inside the store. “Tell those kids to get off the steps. Right now! Tell them to move, or I’m calling a Red car.”  Philadelphia police cars at the time were black and white, but they had been tomato red for years and the threat to call a Red car was generally and unequivocally understood. Running one of those neighborhood grocery stores at a time when the supermarkets were just coming in must have been a tough way to make a living. The friction arising from Joe’s candy store and Ed’s Market sharing a set of front steps was mitigated somewhat by Ed’s closing at five each afternoon. Serious hanging out was an evening activity. 

Joe wouldn’t have a pinball machine in the store, and that kept us from congregating inside. What he did have was a very old four-stool soda fountain. For fifteen-cents, Joe would spade out a generous two-flavor serving of Abbott’s ice cream. My own favorite was butterscotch-vanilla and vanilla fudge. Joe would pack the ice cream into conical paper cups that sat in black Bakelite holders. There was also one scarred and wobbly booth up against the wall. You had to be consuming an item purchased in the store to be allowed to sit in the booth. And, you had to vacate the booth when you finished. Joe let us hang out as long as we observed what he felt were reasonable rules. He refused to sell us loose cigarettes. He believed that if you were old enough to smoke, you were old enough to buy them by the pack at twenty-two cents per.  Prior to my achieving financial independence at age thirteen via my paper route, I would put up a dime or eleven cents and go halfers on a pack of Camels or Luckies with another kid. Unless the pack was split up immediately, the endeavor usually ended up in a dispute over who had gotten more than their share of the cigarettes. Joe held down a full-time factory job on rotating shift work. When he couldn’t be behind the counter, his wife or daughter would take over. The wife went with the flow. But the daughter, a very plain girl with glasses, a couple years older than me, took pleasure in showing her disapproval of the lot of us. She took every opportunity to let us know that she was quite certain we’d all turn out to be bums. 

The stretch of Duncannon Avenue at Joe’s surfaced again a couple of years ago when the name John Baron made the news. Fifty years ago, Jackie Baron was everything I wasn’t. He was handsome, self-assured, a star athlete, a Protestant, and on his way to becoming an Eagle Scout.  He lived directly across the street from Joe’s, but he didn’t hang out. We developed a nodding acquaintance when he would come over to pickup the evening paper for his father, or to take home a bowl of ice cream dippers. Big things were expected of Jackie Baron. His picture had appeared several times in the Olney Times citing his various athletic and academic accomplishments at Olney High School. I had every reason I needed to resent and dislike Jackie Baron. Meeting on the street, we began to stop and talk. Despite myself, I had to admit even then that Jackie was a nice guy. When one of the kids on the corner started dating a girl from the same Methodist Church as the Barons, I was invited to tag along to one of the church’s youth nights. Talk about a fish out of water. My friend was going to fix me up with a girl who would be just right for me. The girl was a knockout, but her only interest turned out to be Jackie Baron. She barely acknowledged my presence.

Forty or more years later, the Philadelphia news media were alight with a major financial scandal involving some of the oldest, largest and best-established institutions in the region. It seems that a charitable organization had mismanaged hundreds of millions of dollars belonging to these venerable outfits. The head of the troubled charitable organization turned out to be Jackie Baron. There was much glee in the papers and among people I knew who were following the unfolding debacle. Jackie was in it up to his neck. I held a minority opinion, and I still have trouble believing the guy would have knowingly done wrong. My take is that Jackie Baron was a straight shooter who got in over his head, and for the right reasons made some bad decisions. The courts eventually took a similar view, but Jackie did end up doing some time. 

A fringe benefit of hanging at Joe’s candy store was my discovery of Ed’s and Jack’s barbershop two doors up the street. One of our first declarations of teenage independence was getting the kind of a haircut we considered cool, and Ed’s and Jack’s catered to that need. With a paper route’s cash flow and a kid’s compulsion to establish an identity in opposition to acceptable norms, I couldn’t wait to plunk down my seventy-five cents for a D.A. haircut. The D. A. or “Duck’s Ass” hairdo came east from California in the early 1950’s. It required that a head of longish, oiled hair be cut in a blunt straight-ended box across the back of the neck. The hair in the front had to be combed up into a pompadour, and the sides swept back around into an overlapping center at the back of the skull. Then with the edge of a comb, you made a crease down the hair in the back of your head to form what looked like a duck’s ass. We thought it looked great, a precursor of the freak flags flown by a later generation of hippies. 

Ed the barber was an innocuous guy who would cut your hair and make small talk. Jack on the other hand, was an interesting guy. Rumors were that he had something going with the blond crossing guard assigned to the corner in front of the shop. She would shelter inside the barbershop when the weather was bad, and she and Jack seemed to get along. I think now that she was the subject of gossip simply because she was pretty.

Jack had a face like Shemp Howard, and he had been in the Marines, not during the war, but before, in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s. He had been a China Marine serving on a gunboat going up and down the Yangtze River. I liked to get him talking about firefights with warlord troops, about what it was like to have been in China during that period. Years later, reading “The Sand Pebbles,” I put Jack the Barber’s face on the lead character, and it stayed even after Steve McQueen played the part in the movie. 

My tenure at Joe’s lasted for a little over a year. During that year, the all-male universe centered upon Joe’s would offer me the non-judgmental sanctuary I needed to survive an unsettled time in my life. Nobody at Joe’s ever asked how I was doing in school. Nobody there seemed to have any concerns about amounting to anything. In a shifting assortment of characters, maybe two dozen of us in all, we hung out in front of the store and waited for something to happen that might fit our idea of excitement. Ironically, my fuzzy definition of excitement was almost synonymous with transgression and oblivion; trouble and alcohol. There was also always an aching hope for the possibility of sex. But most of us were too afraid of real girls, and the sex never really materialized. Probably just as well. Instead, there were the adrenaline jolts of being in cars going too fast, too late at night, half drunk and sometimes being chased, once or twice by a police car.

The time spent at Joe’s candy store was where I did my undergraduate work in the fine art of hanging out, gathering the needed credentials and qualifications to make it into the major leagues of hanging out, the corner scene at Jimmy’s Tomato Pies. Moving east those two blocks on Duncannon Avenue to Jimmy’s was the corner-lounging equivalent of entering a master’s program at one of the Ivies. Jimmy’s was the perfect corner, a place where the rules were minimal and you could hang out with impunity. Across the street from a large foundry, with an abandoned icehouse next door and diagonally across from Olney High School, there was rarely anyone around after dark to complain about us, on one to call the cops or chase us, No matter what we did. 

Early on a chilly Saturday evening, with the usual crowd leaning against the wall in front of Jimmy’s, a cop came by on a three-wheeled motorcycle. It wasn’t a pleasant night. In fact a steady, cold drizzle was falling, and the cop was not wearing a raincoat. That the cop was working middle-shift on a Saturday night, that he was riding a motorcycle in the rain, and that cops in Philadelphia in the mid-1950’s were notoriously underpaid never entered any of our minds, particularly the limited mind of  a kid named Don Carney. It puzzled me that Don Carney had reached the age of seventeen with all of his own teeth. He had a big mouth. 

In the instant that Carney spotted the white three-wheeled motorcycle with its icebox-like trunk behind the seat, he opened his legendary big yap and shouted, “hey ice-cream man, what flavors you got?” Hilarious to all of us, but the cop it seems, was not amused. As he swung the cycle around in the middle of the street, we were already in full flight. Carney of course got away cleanly, but Willie Williams, Johnny Nerze and Ray Vishio who didn’t move quickly enough were pinned to the wall by the cop’s rumbling motorcycle. Fortunately, something stopped the cop from going at them with his nightstick. Skulking a block and half away, we waited until the motorcycle left before returning to the corner. The three guys who had been left behind were not too happy with Carney, but that wasn’t something that Carney would even have noticed. He thought the whole thing had been a scream. 

It wasn’t fifteen minutes after the motorcycle cop rode off when three police cars and a meat wagon converged on the corner. Those were the days of two cops to a car, and trying to run away seemed pointless. “Oh shit,” I thought. “What now?” There were nine of us. Don Carney, of course, had left just five minutes before the arrival of about half of the force assigned to the city’s Thirty-fifth Police District. Within seconds, we were all being shoved roughly into the meat wagon to the accompaniment of “fucking punks, fucking juvenile delinquents.” And more ominously, “wait till we get you assholes over to the district.” If they were trying to scare us, their efforts succeeded with me. 

The patrol wagon bounced across streets and slid around corners throwing the nine of us together in the darkness like so many bags of oranges. Nobody was making jokes, not even Eddie Mulvena or Frank Eugene, two of the few real bad-asses in the crowd. When the wagon finally came to a stop and the back doors were opened, we were a sad lot of teenagers. Billy Wiley was already in his weasely mode of “I didn’t do anything. It wasn’t me. It was Carney. He was the one who did it.”

We piled out on to the sidewalk and were surrounded by a half a dozen stern-faced cops, one of whom started in with “look at the little pansies. Were you little girls playing with each other in the dark in there,” and worse. At that, a big cop with stripes on his arm leaned toward us and said, “I’m counting to five, when I get there, I don’t want to see any of you assholes within my sight, One. Two. Three…” We were all off and running. 

What they’d done was take us for the longest ride they could within the district, and dumped us. It was raining, and we were a good twenty-five city blocks away from where we’d been picked up. We drifted away from each other into groups of twos and threes as we walked silently over Olney Avenue. There was no solidarity in defeat, and it was a long, wet, quiet walk. I didn’t even go back to the corner. I went home. My parents watching Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, feigned shock at seeing me home so early on a Saturday night. 

Being a part of the crowd at Jimmy’s satisfied a compulsion I had to belong to something, anything other than what I was ordained to belong to. The noise in my head, my failures in school, and my fears about having to perform in any way that would expose my inadequacies, made me desperate for some kind of non-judgmental acceptance. On the corner, nobody cared if you were on the honor roll. Nobody even noticed if you’d already quit school. As long as you weren’t a cigarette or money moocher, or a demonstrated craven coward, you could hang out. However, if you exposed any weakness or vulnerability, you were fair game. The bullying and harassment could be cruel and relentless.

Tony Somik had a face ravaged by acne. A shameless bullshit artist, he had to ignore the casual references to “Pizza Face.” He had a choice of accepting the insult or of challenging his tormentors. Tony wasn’t a fighter. Older and much bigger than me, he was easily intimidated. I could call his bluff. I did it once and remember feeling not good about myself afterwards. Referred to once by Freddy Krug as “Tony the Tough Guy,” he started getting “Tony the Toughie,” and finally just “Tough Tony.” While the mention of Tony’s name usually included the antecedent of “that asshole,” he had earned an irrefutable and legendary spot in the pantheon of neighborhood folk heroes. On the occasion of his grandfather’s death, just after Tony’s sixteenth birthday, he had come into ownership of the old man’s car. Possession of a car, even a car rumored to be nearly as old as the deceased grandfather, gave an immediate boost to Tough Tony’s status on the various corners he was then frequenting. 

The evening following the grandfather’s funeral, Tony showed up at Jimmy’s behind the wheel of his dilapidated inheritance. The fact that he didn’t yet have a driver’s license, and that the 1936 Packard four-door sedan was on its last legs, took nothing from Tough Tony’s moment of glory. 

On that nearly perfect June evening, Tough Tony’s inquiry to the assembled crowd of corner loungers seemed eminently reasonable. “Hey,” he shouted. “Who wants to go down the shore?” As many as could, stuffed themselves into the smoking relic. Tough Tony and his eight or nine passengers took off into the sunset for Wildwood, New Jersey, a full ninety-miles from Mascher Street and Duncannon Avenue in North Philadelphia. 

Surprisingly, they made it all the way to edge of the beach in Wildwood. There in the dark, where the streets ended in sand, youthful exuberance combined with blind ignorance led Tony to wonder what it would be like to drive up and down the beach. With wheels spinning and slipping in the loose sand, he somehow got the car down to the firm, water-packed surface at the tide line. For the next couple of minutes, Tony was the master of the evening. With the headlights off, he raced the Packard along the edge of the beach, sending up walls of spray as his tires caught the tips of the incoming waves. In an attempt to turn around and retrace his course back up the beach, he inadvertently crossed back over into the soft sand above the waterline. 

With a combined passenger weight of about fourteen hundred pounds, the old Packard went down to its axles in the porous sand. After a lot of futile wheel spinning and engine revving that put a final end to the car’s fragile clutch, everyone got out and stood around trying to figure out what to do next. The efforts of all nine of them to push the car out of the deep sand were to little avail. Clueless, they watched as a figure with a flashlight approached from one of the beachfront houses.

The guy told Tony he could use his phone to call a gas station on Rio Grande  Avenue that had a tow truck equipped for the beach. Tony came back to say the guy at the gas station wanted fifteen dollars to come out. With all nine guys anteing up, the total disposable assets amounted to three dollars and forty-two cents. If the holdouts in the crowd had been forced to come clean, the revised total probably wouldn’t have topped five bucks. The guy with the flashlight then dropped his bomb. “Well then,” he said. “I’d guess you‘ve got about another forty-five minutes or so before the tide comes in and covers that car.”

Breaking the point from a switchblade that Tommy Walters had in his pocket, Tony fashioned a screwdriver to remove the tags from the car. He was hoping the Packard wouldn’t be traced back to him. With waves beginning to lap at the rear wheels of his late grandfather’s bequest, Tony, no longer in the lead, joined the march back over the beach and down the street toward the bright lights of the Wildwood boardwalk.

A phone call to Tony’s older brother Stanley brought him, not too happily, down to Wildwood just before sunrise. Tuffy and four of the guys rode home with Stanley who loaned the remaining adventurers bus fare back to Philadelphia. It was early evening when the last of them got home, seedy and tired, nearly twenty-four hours after Tough Tony had pulled up to Jimmy’s, blowing the horn of the now twice-flooded Packard. On the advice of several of the street-corner attorneys, Tony went over to the Thirty-fifth District, and with a straight face, reported the car stolen. Since no one had gotten around to canceling the dead grandfather’s car insurance, Tony ended up getting book value on the old Packard. He didn’t get much, but what he got was probably a couple of times the car’s actual worth. 

Years later, a guy who had hung with us expressed his disdain for Tough Tony by saying that Tony was the kind of guy who would continue trying to bullshit you, even after he knew you were on to him. I think that was precisely the thing I liked best about Tough Tony. 

You had no tenure when you hung out on a corner. Implicit in every interaction was an unstated code of survival. If you didn’t like the way somebody treated you, your options were to eat it, and risk eating a lot more once it was noted that you could be backed off. Or, you could simply leave, go away, come back later or not come back at all. Or, you could get right into the offending person’s face. If you weren’t prepared to get physical, then you had only the first two choices. One summer, a kid named Al Sinkowski started coming around to Jimmy’s, and quickly earned the mocking tag of  “Can I Go Joe.” He wasn’t a bad guy or a fool. In fact, he could be sharply funny and had a streak of wild zaniness that should have served him well in the corner crowd subculture. But in his abject desperation for inclusion and acceptance, he offered a cautionary tale. His inability to understand the ground rules of the environment, and his willingness to allow himself to be humiliated sent a clear message to everyone that he had no business coming around. In the rough and tumble, push and shove of hanging out, I always had to give as good or better than I got. But I knew that the minute I allowed a true insult to go unanswered, I could never again walk up and stop on that corner. And at the time, I was afraid that there wasn’t any other place I could be. 

As an adult, I’ve joked that the only discernable talent I’ve ever displayed was an ability to hang out. And yet, despite all the time I spent between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, sitting on the steps or leaning against the walls of neighborhood candy stores and sandwich shops, I realize now that I was never more than a marginal player in the circles I frequented. In the hierarchies of an auto-centric world, I didn’t have a car. I certainly wasn’t a tough guy. And as much as I would like to cast myself in a starring role, I was more like Eliot’s Prufrock, never a Prince Hamlet, but rather a minor attendant lord, one who would do to swell a progress or start a scene. In fairness, my peripheral status among the more colorful members of street corner society was as much a function of my age and my personality as it was of my lack of wheels. I was a good two years younger than most of the guys on the corners I frequented, a serious factor at age fifteen or sixteen. And I met the welter of insecurities and confusions raging inside me with a contradictory mix of brazen wise-guy sarcasm and a non-committal reserve. I belonged, but I never had the charisma of a central figure, and I doubt my absence was much noted when I stopped coming around.

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Car Talk

 

Cars, “wheels,” automobiles; owned, borrowed, or just dreamed of, were the unifying element for the crowd that gathered at Joe’s candy store. With our ages ranging from fifteen through to about twenty, in a blue-collar city neighborhood, it’s not difficult to imagine the kinds of cars that were parked along the curb at Joe’s. The newest were high-mileage, well-worn 1941 Fords, Plymouths, ‘39 Chevy’s, an occasional vintage Buick or rusted Pontiac. Difficult to keep running, the cars were money pits that continually challenged the mechanical and economic skills of their teen-aged owners. Harsh necessity often meant risky trips to “Midnight Auto Parts.” 

When a contractor working up the street left his compressor parked on the sidewalk overnight, the casual observation that it rested on two good looking sixteen-inch tires was silently noted by more than one of the youthful motorists at Joe’s. Walking past the work site the next morning, I saw that the compressor was tireless, resting on two cinder blocks.

Rudimentary customizing of these relics mimicked the ascendant California hot-rodding subculture so dear to teenage hearts in the early 1950’s. But no fender skirts from Pep Boys, no amount of gray or red-lead primer, no steel packed dual exhausts could hide the reality that these cars were low-end junkers on their last legs, held together with used parts and piston sealer. But none of that mattered. In Olney, they were hot rods, iconic symbols on wheels, mobile and audible manifestations of teenage autonomy and rebellion. An old car with dual echo cans protruding from under the rear bumper, roaring away from a street corner was an affront to conformity and respectability, a deliberate act calculated to provoke and annoy the adult world. And it certainly gave the cops something to do. 

To have a car, any car, or to have access to a car was the ticket to paradise. Suddenly your options became limitless. Friends, excitement, freedom and maybe even girls might be yours. There were geeky kids, horrendously uncool kids, who gained immediate cachet with the possession of a car. And if the car was really sharp, an aura of renown could attach itself to its otherwise unremarkable owner. One night, late, close to ten on a weeknight, we were visited briefly by the legendary Jojo Migliori, legendary because he drove a glossy magazine quality street rod known of, talked about, but never before seen by most of us. It was a chopped 1939 Ford convertible, bright red and powered by a chrome-laden Oldsmobile engine. Oh boy! Wow! He was dating the sister of a kid on our corner and stopped for just a few minutes, leaving the object of our awe and desire running. It sat right there in front of us on Duncannon Avenue, rumbling and growling, and every one of us knew just how far removed in light years we were from the realization of our dreams. 

My first experience behind the wheel began in a singularly inauspicious way. Going out on to the porch to catch a smoke after supper, I saw Bobby Yanks coming out of his house across the street. It was late March, 1954, a warm, wet Saturday night and just starting to get dark. Bobby had his girlfriend with him, a local stunner named Susan Devine. My feelings of diminishment vis-à-vis Bobby Yanks weren’t helped by the fact that while we were both sixteen, he already had a car and I didn’t. And my sense of my own worth wasn’t enhanced by my suspicions, later confirmed, that he was also regularly getting into the divine Miss Devine’s pants. At the time, I had no imminent prospects of any untimely loss of my virginity. I didn’t even have a girl friend. 

“You doing anything,” Bobby asked me. “Nah,” I said, casually flicking my cigarette butt off into the street, a vain attempt to establish myself as cool in the eyes of the worldly Miss Devine. Bobby said that he could use my help, and went on to explain the situation. Bobby, not me, was the owner of a 1940 Ford convertible with a white top and a V-8 engine that spoke in the coded dreams of teenaged fantasy through a set of sweetly rumbling dual exhausts. He had that car and I didn’t. And then there was business of him and Susan Devine. 

 Bobby’s ‘40 Ford convertible was a work in progress. The car had seen some hard use in its fourteen years before coming into Bobby’s hands. He had already replaced the transmission, the cloth top and sundry engine components. I was aware that he was in the market for a used Oldsmobile V-8 and also that he was searching for body parts to replace a couple of rusted fenders and a left rear quarter panel. The source for most of these parts was known to every car freak for miles around, Hershkovitz’s junkyard on Rising Sun Avenue south of the Boulevard.

I’d been to Hershkovitz’s a couple of times, accompanying some of the local motoring world’s low-end members. The place was a classic junkyard in the context of a pre-environmental public consciousness. Dirty, greasy and chaotic with car wrecks piled upon car wrecks. In pursuit of window cranks for a ‘41 Buick or a water pump for a ‘39 Plymouth, we scaled the teetering piles of junked cars while around us burning tires and who knows what else sent columns of dirty smoke into the air. You were on your own in Hershkovitz’s.

Hershkovitz himself was an edgy but cheery fat guy in greasy coveralls. Dirty hands and a dirty face, an unlit but chewed-down cigar always in his mouth, he’d bark out seemingly arbitrary prices on the parts retrieved by his scavenger customers. Richie Eberts, who had nurtured more than one old, piece of crap car back to life, claimed that Hershkovitz always came within ten percent of the book value of any used part.

Somebody told Bobby Yanks that Hershkovitz had an engineless ‘40 Ford convertible on the property. When Bobby offered fifty bucks for the hulk, Hershkovitz squirmed and with evident reluctance told Bobby he couldn’t sell it because the car was a stolen car that the police had towed in and left at his gate. He said that he didn’t have a title and that the car wasn’t even on his property, but was sitting on the shoulder of the street, outside his fence. Not long after, it came out why Hershkovitz had uncharacteristically deferred the offer of a quick fifty-bucks. He, along with a couple of well-known Sixth and Pike Street wiseguys made the newspapers, arrested in a federal organized crime probe. Bobby Yanks’s father said that Hershkovitz probably was afraid to spit on the ground, let alone sell an untitled car.   

 With the unsettling Susan Devine in the middle between Bobby and I, we drove down Rising Sun Avenue to the darkened junkyard. Bobby backed up to the derelict Ford while I did my best “c’mon back, c’mon back, hold it” routine. Bobby produced a coil of clothesline and began tying the back bumper of his car to the front of the other car. I stood focusing on Susan Devine, listening to the mellow rumble singing from the big echo cans below the rear bumper of Bobby’s car.

The car being towed had no brakes. Bobby had theorized, not altogether incorrectly, that if the two cars were lashed tightly together, he could pull the other car without it crashing into the back his car. My job was to sit in the dead car, steering it in the turns and keeping   the wheels otherwise straight. Accepted wisdom held that if the front wheels turned sideways, the drag would rip the rear end out of the towing car. 

No big deal. There wasn’t much traffic early on a Saturday evening, and all I had to do was keep the steering wheel in line with Bobby in front of me. We almost made it. Just three blocks short of the garage that Bobby rented on the Fourth Street lots, the edges of the bumpers finally cut through the last of the clothesline. I began rolling free along Fourth Street, no engine, no brakes, no lights, nothing but a steering wheel. Bobby had been doing under twenty, and I managed to coast to a stop against the curb, just short of the Duncannon Avenue intersection. 

Bobby backed up once more to the clunker, but the remains of the rope were useless. As we stood pondering what to do, a car approached slowly flooding us in the glare of its high beams. Bobby and I at once recognized the clacking tappets of the Ford overhead valve V-8 as trouble. It was a cop car, a police patrol car out of the Thirty-fifth District. 

Cops then still rode two to a car. The driver stayed behind the wheel, keeping us fixed in his high beams. The other cop, unlit flashlight in hand, approached us with a “what the fuck’s going on here,” followed immediately with an “excuse me, Miss.” I went into a defensive panic. It wasn’t me. I didn’t steal anything. I don’t even know how to drive. But somehow without knowing the statutes, I had a fair understanding of the legal concepts of complicity, of accessories before and after the fact. “Shit!”

Then, Bobby Yanks proceeded to astound me. In a transition I wouldn’t have guessed possible, his thuggy demeanor, his signature swagger and the physical manifestations of his bad attitude disappeared into a voicing and a manner appropriate to a Boy Scout training film. It was all  “Officer this” and “Officer that.”  The cop surveyed the remnants of the clothesline and commented that that “fucking stuff wouldn’t hold an express wagon.” Another “excuse me, Miss.”

After a few more nervous minutes, the cop said, “you guys wait here. Don’t go anywhere. Ha, ha, ha, that’s a joke.” The police car made a U-turn and disappeared down Fourth Street. I had no doubt as to what we should do. With no “excuse me, Miss,” I said “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”  “Nah, we can’t” Bobby said. “That other cop wrote my number down.”

While we stood around, I gallantly shared my last cigarette with Susan Devine. The cop car was back in less than fifteen minutes, and this time, they both got out of the car, the first guy carrying a coil of heavy-duty cording. “Here. Let’s try this,” he said. In another five minutes, thanks to the outstanding efforts of Philadelphia’s finest, we were once again secured and rolling a stolen car away toward the safety of Bobby’s rental garage.

Within two weeks, Bobby Yanks’s ‘40 Ford was sporting three red-oxide primered, rust-free fenders, a new trunk lid, and a host of other upgraded accessories. A few weeks after that, near midnight one night, Bobby towed the remains of the Moskat Ford, this time with Billy Dougherty at the wheel, from his garage to the railroad embankment at the Sixth Street dead-end.  To further cover his tracks, and in what some saw as a hallmark of his insolence, he doused the car in gasoline and took off, leaving the blaze for the arrival of the fire department. 

Susan Devine broke up with Bobby Yanks later that spring. Rumors began in September when she didn’t show up at Little Flower for her senior year. She and Phil Walls, who worked at the Sunoco Station on Mascher Street, and who drove a brand new 55’ Ford Crestliner, were quickly and quietly married in the Incarnation rectory just before Halloween. Bobby Yanks was a fortunate guy on more than one count. 

 

More than a year would pass after the Bobby Yanks incident before I found myself driving another car. In fact, it wasn’t until my father got his own first car in 1955 that I bothered getting my license. My association with the car culture at Joe’s candy store, and later at Jimmy’s Tomato Pies, was vicarious. I was a running dog of the automotive elite, a hanger on at the mercy of those who had wheels. I tried to balance my dignity against my desire not to be left out. It was embarrassing, but not embarrassing enough to forgo the humiliation of wanting to be one of those invited to get in and go for a ride – to Mayfair, to Lawndale, to Xanadu or Araby. An impromptu excursion in a 1939 Chevrolet four-door sedan might include scoring some beer, or maybe there would be girls who might be enticed into the car. It could have happened. The beer scenario was more likely, particularly in the late years of high school and after. But by then I could occasionally get my father’s new used-car, and I had several close friends who didn’t use car ownership for purposes of social control.  My revenge didn’t come until I had returned from the army and bought a 1953 Oldsmobile Super Eighty-Eight, about as cool a car as a young man of my time and place could possess. But it was too late. I created a few momentary stirs on the parking lots of some all-night diners, but my time was past. I had a grownup job, I was about to get engaged, and in truth I no longer had the needs that had made me want to turn heads among the car freak crowd.

Chapter Twenty-Six: A Rotten Peach

 

I was standing on the corner of Fifth and Wyoming early on a Friday night, mid to late summer, probably seven-thirty. We always ate dinner early. My father got home from work about four-thirty, so while everybody else was still eating, I was already out for the night. 

 

What I was doing at Fifth and Wyoming, or even how I got there, I can’t remember. It was way out of my home territory. What’s more I was with Joey, “Willy,” Williams. Nineteen or twenty years old at the time, Willy was considered a little slow. Today he might be called “challenged.” After repeating several grades at Incarnation, he was probably sixteen when he started ninth grade. Ninth grade, which should have been the first year of high school, was held at the parish level because the diocesan high schools were too crowded to accommodate all the kids coming in. When Sister Mary Gregory, the Incarnation ninth-grade nun, gave Willy a wallop, he walked out of class, forged his mother’s signature on the enlistment papers and was off to infantry basic Fort Jackson, South Carolina. That was September 1950. By April, Willy was in Korea. On his second day at the front, an artillery air burst sent a piece of shrapnel into Willy’s upper left arm. The wound was slight, but painful enough that he confessed his age. By July he’d been discharged and was on his way back home. The tale told on the corners was that the sixteen-year-old combat veteran was going to return to his desk in the ninth-grade classroom of Sister Mary Gregory at the Incarnation parish school. He didn’t, but it would have made a better story if he had. 

 

I think I was sixteen. I was between girl friends, or I wouldn’t have been on the corner of Fifth and Wyoming on a Friday night with somebody like Willy Williams. We stood there in the heat of a fading summer sun. In fact the first image of that night to come into my mind is the intensity of the warmth and the powerful orange cast of the light. We stood there, hands in our pockets, hanging out, smoking, waiting for whoever else was going to show up and for whatever shape the coming evening was going to take. That was part of the whole thing of being a certain kind of a kid in a city neighborhood at that time. Every night was a study in open possibilities, weekend nights more so. I accepted the possibility of an adventure, of maybe meeting girls, of beer or of an adrenaline rush as my due, as part of a natural order of things. There wasn’t much else offered that could compare to potentials kinds like those. 

 

As a kid, I can’t remember ever having seen an adult having anything I would have called fun. How could you take anything they said seriously? They all seemed like zombies, oblivious to the fact that your hormones, your whole body chemistry, was screaming at you from inside your head, distracting you from doing anything that didn’t involve sexual gratification or some sublimated substitute, some reasonable approximation of transcendence, like breaking windows, getting drunk or being in a car that was just about out of control.  On any given Friday night in the company of people like Willy Williams, a dozen more like him, or worse, I knew I had a reasonable expectation of having what I then believed was a good time. The open-ended possibilities of those kinds of nights were what gave them their sweet, scary attraction. The down side was finding yourself in a situation that might actually involve getting in a fight. No way. No way. Or getting that sick feeling that came when whatever was going on began heading in a truly bad or ugly direction – Something mean, nasty, or the possibly of getting arrested. I think that in the current criminal justice climate of near zero-tolerance many, if not most of us would be in serious trouble. 

 

At Fifth and Wyoming at that time, the Route Fifty trolley car coming north on Fifth Street, made a right turn to go east on Wyoming Avenue, over toward the Jewish neighborhoods near C Street.  The Fifty Cars were big, green, squared-off, turn-of-the-century relics. The kind where the motorman stood up, where the doors opened and the steel-edged wooden slatted steps unfolded and fell into place. 

 

As the nearly empty trolley turned, steel wheels screeching in steel tracks, and slowly passed by, I absently noted that sitting in the rear bench seat of the car were three sailors. There was little air-conditioning in those days, other than in a few taprooms and some of the higher end movie theaters. The trolley windows were screened with metal bars designed to keep people from climbing in through the back of the car and dodging the fare. The three sailors were sprawled across the rear bench seat of the car with their arms extended along the sills. White summer uniforms, starched probably, all the more dazzling against the dark green and maroon of the trolley car. It hadn’t entered my consciousness that we were standing in front of a closed-for-the day fruit and produce market. In fact, at that moment, we were standing within a step of several large, rusting oil drum trash barrels. 

 

Georgia is the Peach State, but New Jersey peaches, trucked across the bridges to Philadelphia in late summer are amazing. They grow large and are picked almost ripe so that when you bring them home they’re sweet and juicy. For a day or so they just keep getting sweeter and juicier. Shelf life is a problem. They go quickly, and when they go, they are a mess. The cat’s tongue fuzziness of their skin gives way to a squishy softness, and the slightest push of your finger can take you in up to your second knuckle. 

 

The rotting Jersey peach perched on top of the trashcan nearest to us was a big one. It rested on the rim, rising above the empty crates, smeared papers and damaged cantaloupes. Its surface broken on one side, jagged, dripping goo, as if someone had taken a large bite from one side, and then deciding that it was just too ripe to eat, dropped it in on top of all the other garbage. Maybe they got their money back. Maybe they didn’t  even pay for it, maybe it had just been sampled to get a feel for how ripe the peaches were that day. 

Willy had been talking, and he never broke stride in whatever it was he was saying. But in a single graceful and efficient motion, his right hand moved toward the trash can, his arm arched up, around and out. The peach must have weighed close to a pound. It went through the air in accordance with all of the physical laws governing the motion of masses in space. The smooth clean side turning to better meet the resistance of the atmosphere, the ragged, torn juicy edges extending like the tail of a comet. 

 

The peach hit the bars on the back window angled closest to where we were standing. It hit with just enough force to create a wondrous explosion of liquids, semi-liquids and solids. The core mess skidded along the bars across the back of the car. The only thing stopping its passage through the bars and into the darkened interior of the trolley car was the snowy white uniforms of those sailors. Like a fireworks display, glop seemed to fly in every direction. It all took place in a fraction of a second, but also in a kind of slow motion that remains locked onto my brain over fifty years later. I didn’t even bother to say, “What the fuck did you do that for,” to Willy. Almost before I realized the extent of the mess that the peach was making, I was also in motion. I was sixteen and deep into a pack and a half a day cigarette habit, but I could still run. 

 

Run is not really the right idea of what I did. I had never in my life, before or since, wanted so earnestly to put distance between myself and the consequences of an action. I knew instinctively that if those sailors ever caught up with either of us, we were dead. I believed that to be true in the most literal sense of the word. It’s at least seven and a half blocks from Fifth and Wyoming to our house on Delphine Street. Add the extra two blocks of my evasive actions to get off Fifth Street, the most likely escape route, and I arrived home, most unexpectedly, in less than six minutes after the peach had detonated against those dress whites. 

 

Jumping in our screen door, soaked in sweat and wheezing like a marathon runner, I got the “what’s going on? what’s going on?” routine that I dodged in much the same way I dodged every question put to me by adults. My younger brother looked at me knowing that I was once again deep into some dumb variation on my usual kind of trouble. 

 

I actually stayed home that night. And I stayed far enough away from our front door so that anyone coming up on the porch and looking in wouldn’t be able to see me. My mother and father watched some vaudeville variety show on TV called Bonny Maid Vers-A-Tiles that included a bleached-blond in kilts and two guys called Wear and Tear who tried to break the Bonny Maid floor tiles. All night I flinched whenever I heard footsteps on the pavement or whenever a car came up our street. At any moment I thought there might be a pack of vengeance-crazed sailors at the door. Later, climbing the steps to go to the bathroom, I noticed that my knees were wobbly. 

 

It would have been nice if my fears had taught me some kind of a lesson or had led me to make more productive uses of my time but they didn’t. The next night, Saturday night, usually the best night of all, found me with a dozen or so of the leading lights of the neighborhood, including Willy Williams, standing in front of Jimmy’s Tomato Pies waiting for something to happen.

Chapter Twenty-Five: Fishers Avenue

The four-hundred block of Fishers Avenue that backed up to our house was an unbroken stretch of row homes distinguished by oversized white columns supporting the small front porches. An anonymous 1920’s architect-designer must have been pressured by a builder to add these overly grand, pretentious touches to what was just another string of low-end row houses. Over in the Jewish neighborhoods west of Ninth Street, the same impulse got completely out of hand and resulted in an overload of pediments, columns and railings. But those Ninth Street neighborhoods were built on unstable fill, and in the 1980’s the houses there began collapsing.   

 

In summer, Fishers Avenue enjoyed the dappled shade of the towering trees planted by the city on some streets and not on others. Compared to our wooded neighbors just one street away, our block was barren and stark. The spotty and seemingly capricious nature of the plantings was common throughout the neighborhood, the workings of the city’s tree lords were beyond the ken of mere mortals. 

 

It was on Fishers Avenue one Sunday Morning when a case of mistaken identity almost changed the course of Bobby Yanks’s life. Bobby had a pronounced bump in his more than ample nose, a facet he shared with a look-alike and not too bright kid from the next block of our street, a kid named Teddy Rausch. Teddy Rausch had earned a reputation for perpetrating some of the neighborhood’s more extreme forms of mindless vandalism and mischief making; window breaking, preferably large commercial plate glass, defecating in unlocked cars, and a classic stunt that involved sticking a garden hose in a front door mail slot and turning on the water. 

 

One tale circulating the neighborhood put Teddy’s capabilities into context. The way I heard it was that on a warm, drizzly Friday night, Teddy and another leading light of the neighborhood, Frank O’Dea, a kid thrown off the Olney High School Football team because he couldn’t remember even the simplest of plays, had climbed to the top of the Trimfit Hosiery factory’s water tower. Once up there, they began tossing firecrackers down onto Second Street. According to the story, when the factory’s night watchman started up the ladder after them, they had waited until he was too high to get back down and still too far down to reach them. At that point they both unzipped and pissed down the ladder on the guy. Between the furious watchman’s descent and the arrival of the cops, Teddy and Frank somehow made their escape. The tale may have been embellished for effect, but based upon what I knew of the two of them, I had little reason to doubt any of it. 

 

The proximate cause of Bobby Yanks being misidentified as Teddy Rausch was a deranged old recluse known variously as the “Cat Killer” and as “Crazy Billy.” Billy lived in an upstairs apartment over Conroy’s butcher shop on Third Street just below Fishers Avenue. By the time I had become a teenager, old Billy was known as “The Sickle Man,” a name earned when he was arrested for threatening people with a grass scythe. 

 

On a Sunday morning in April of 1952, supposedly on my way to Mass, I met Bobby Yanks on Fourth Street. We both decided to bag church and head instead for Schneider’s candy store at the corner of Third Street and Fishers Avenue, coincidentally adjacent to the Sickle Man’s backyard. Old Billy was out and leaning on the black wrought iron fence that surrounded his yard. The grin on his face was not a reflection of good humor. Without warning, he pointed a bony finger at Bobby Yanks and bellowed, “you, you hooked-nosed son of a bitch. I didn’t get you last night, but I’ll get you.” Pulling aside his dirty old suit coat, he exposed the wooden-handled sickle that rested under one arm, and sticking up from his belt, the handle of a large pistol. Bobby went white, and we hurried along toward the sanctuary of the candy store. I was shaken myself and just prayed that I hadn’t been included in the curse on Bobby. 

 

It seems that on the preceding evening just after dark, Mssrs. Rausch and O’Dea, having discovered a cache of spoiling and already rotted food in a disabled refrigerator, paid a visit to the Sickle Man.  Standing under his window, they taunted him until he came storming out into his yard. At that, Teddy and Frank began pelting him with the contents of the dead refrigerator. According to Teddy, the “crazy old bastard” had fired at least three, if not more shots at their retreating forms. 

 

A shaken Bobby Yanks told his father of the threats, and the police paid Billy another of their many visits. For about two weeks, Bobby wouldn’t leave the house without his father. How the Sickle Man discovered his mistaken identity, I don’t know, but eventually he finger Teddy as the culprit. Several times coming up Third Street in the late afternoon, I would spot Billy standing up against the wall around the corner from Teddy’s house. Crossing the street to avoid getting too close to him, I could see both the queasy grin on his face and the bulges under his coat. 

 

Fortunately for Teddy Rausch, the Sickle Man was soon removed by the cops after neighbors complained of him chasing stray cats from his yard by firing at them from his second story window. We never saw him again. Somebody said that he had been sent to Byberry, the big state hospital up on the Boulevard. Bobby Yanks came back out into the light of day in time to play Legion baseball. 

 

Helen’s grocery store was jammed into a basement storefront at the northeast corner of Fourth and Fishers. Helen and her husband Phil didn’t belong to any of the retail grocery associations like Unity Frankford that let local, corner grocers compete just a little longer before being finally overwhelmed by the supermarket chains. Helen’s was independent and idiosyncratic. Though less than a block from our house, I wasn’t inside Helen’s more than a dozen times. Like almost all the kids attending the Incarnation parish school, I walked home every day for lunch. It was assumed that someone would be there to provide a meal. On the rare occasions when my mother ran out of something, my brother or I would be dispatched to Helen’s for a quarter pound of American cheese, a quarter pound of lunch roll, or a loaf of Bond Bread. 

 

Going down the steps into Helen’s was like entering a smoky nightclub. Neither Helen nor Phil was ever seen without a cigarette, either in hand or hanging from the lips. Helen had an Appalachian face right out of Walker Evans, gaunt, thin-lipped and hair pulled back into a bun. Phil always wore a felt hat, a dirty, gray fedora with a wide brim. He worked the night shift in a factory somewhere, stopping at Dock Street on his way home in the morning to stock the store for the day. Phil had a weathered face covered with little lumps. 

 

Other than the sweaty, refrigerated lunchmeat case lit from within, everything in Helen’s had an ad hoc, provisional quality to it. The produce was laid out on worn boards supported by sawhorses. They had the basics; a couple of different kinds of potatoes, cabbages, turnips, and whatever fresh produce Phil had been able to pick up that morning. They had a minimalist selection of meats, dairy products, canned and packaged goods. And yet the place never seemed short of customers. My mother however, never went to Helen’s, dismissing it as too expensive. I would look longingly at the stacks of Tastykakes in Helen’s. They were another thing, like soda, that my mother refused to buy, citing price. Phil and Helen knew that our family didn’t regularly shop there. When I did have to go in there, I was never the recipient of any of the cheery familiarity given out to other kids. In fact, I might be made to wait out of turn while a regular was given preference. I grew to dislike being sent to Helen’s. When I could, I would try to get my mother to send my brother instead. “I can’t go Mom,” I’d whine. “Send Jack. I have to go to the bathroom.” On one unavoidable lunchtime errand, as I entered Helen’s, I found myself being ushered right back up the steps and out the door by Phil. He made shushing motions with his hands to his lips. I was out on the sidewalk, but not before having seen Mrs. Keeley from the three hundred block of our street sobbing and pleading with Helen. Looking inside, I could see other women in housedresses trying to comfort Mrs. Keeley. We waited outside for another couple of minutes before Mrs. Keeley came out with her head down, but carrying a bag of groceries. Phil motioned that I could go back inside. I got my quarter pound of lunchmeat and went home. 

 

Later I learned that much of the business conducted at Helen’s was done on credit. Helen and Phil charged a little more for each item in return for deferring payment until payday. Entries were made in a large copybook after items were tallied up in pencil on the side of a brown paper bag. There were families in the neighborhood, like the Keeleys, living much closer to the edge than ours, and often there were heads of households, like Mr. Keeley, who held down regular stools at one of the local taprooms. Many of the women who patronized Helen’s had to walk past several grocery stores to get to Helen’s. It was either Helen’s, or no dinner on the table that evening. 

 

Another low-end establishment on fishers Avenue about a block east of Helen’s was Zimmer’s candy store. Zimmer’s was a scary place, scary because of Zimmer himself and because of the crowd that hung out there. Like Helen’s, Zimmer’s was another also a basement store. Lit by unshaded, low-wattage light bulbs that created a dungeon atmosphere, the place complimented Zimmer himself only too well. The neighborhood mythology, or demonology, was that Zimmer had done time for indulging unsavory predilections toward children. 

 

Zimmer had what we called “Beaky Buzzard” features; an emaciated, cadaver-like head capped with a green eyeshade, and he wore rimless glasses that hung from the end of a bony nose. His voice was an unpleasant nasal whine, and when he wasn’t gruff, he was hostile. I tended to avoid going into Zimmer’s. 

 

As I got a little older, I had another good reason for staying away from Zimmer’s corner. The guys who hung out on that corner had a reputation as malignant as the store’s proprietor. If some corners were characterized by reputations for drinking or mischief, the crowd at Zimmer’s had a taste for meanness and gratuitous intimidation. 

 

One afternoon, in my first year of high school, I walked down Fishers Avenue to catch a “J” bus at Second Street. Approaching American Street and Zimmer’s, my radar picked up Frannie Magee and Mike Shaner among the crowd of a half dozen guys standing in front of the store. I had gone through eighth-grade at Incarnation with Frannie Magee, a big, gangly kid two years older than the rest of us. He’d been left down twice, and was considered trouble. Shaner had gone to public school, to Morrison, and was then in the process of dropping out of Olney High School. 

 

I sensed a problem, but knew enough not to show it. I kept my pace and casually nodded a general recognition to the crowd as I crossed American Street. Not good enough. “Hey Byrnsie,” Magee shouted for everyone to hear. “C’mere.” It was not an invitation. Doing my best to maintain appearances, I ambled over to where Magee and Shaner stood, half smirking at me. Behind them stood a couple of the neighborhood’s really hard guys; Bobby Wile and Jack Simon, two or three years older, guys who didn’t even acknowledge the existence of people like me. Magee and Shaner, as barely tolerated hangers-on among the fledgling heavy hitters, were going to try and impress the big boys at my expense. “You got any cigarettes,” Magee asked. Throughout our year together in eighth-grade, I’d never had any trouble with Frannie. In fact, we’d often walked home from school together. While I had no fear of the weasely Mike Shaner, I knew I was no match for Frannie Magee. 

 

As slowly and as low-keyed as I could, I responded that “yeah, I got some, a half a pack. You guys out?” The inquiry kind of threw them off stride. Had I done anything defensive, they would have had the cue they needed to grab me, smack me around or worse, take my smokes and probably my bus fare. By feigning good will and acting as if I didn’t know what they were doing, I had thrown them off their game. I pulled out the pack, ripping off the top, I quickly noted that I had ten cigarettes left. Before either of them could react and grab the pack, I said “I can give you guys three apiece and that will leave me with three.” Then without a pause, as I looked at Magee and handed him three Camels, I casually asked, “Hey Frannie, is your brother home today? I want him to serve my papers next week, I’m going down the shore with my aunt and uncle.” I had somehow grabbed control of the situation and all I wanted to do was get out of there before they realized what had happened, before they got really pissed off. “See you guys,” I said, and giving another respectful nod to the real hoodlums who had stood silently watching all of this, I turned and walked away down Fishers Avenue grateful to be minus just six cigarettes. I felt like Brer’ Rabbit just after he’d gotten one over on the Fox and the Badger. 

 

 I made a point after that of always walking the block or blocks it took to avoid having to pass Zimmer’s and that corner. It seemed a small price. I don’t know what ever happened to Magee or Shaner, but three or four of the other guys in that crowd ended up going to jail while I was in the Army. They got caught breaking into houses of people who had just died. Scanning the death notices in the paper, they would note the time and date of the funeral and then ransack the place while the family was out at the cemetery. Nice guys. 

 

Late on a hot, humid summer morning, between high school and the Army, I ran into Jackie McGuire. I was crossing Fishers Avenue at Fourth Street and spotted him mixing cement in front of a house near the end of the block. Changing directions, I walked down to say hello. It was already pushing ninety degrees, and despite being in the shade, Jackie was dripping wet. I opened with the usual “how ya doins,” but Jackie wasn’t having any of it. He put down the hoe he was using to stir the concrete mix and sat down on the shaded curb. Lighting a smoke, he looked up wearily and answered, “not too fucking good.” 

 

Jackie McGuire was an engaging character. He was smaller than me, but built like a fireplug, and he carried himself with an air of sardonic detachment. He didn’t show you a lot, but he was funny in a dry, cynical way. Jackie was cool. He was a heavy-duty jazz fan, and there were undefined hints of danger about him. Two or three years older than me, Jackie had been in the Army in Germany. The word around the neighborhood was that he had gotten a dishonorable discharge for something to do with drugs. Jackie had already established a reputation as a formidable drinker. 

 

In my most disinterested way, I casually asked, “What’s wrong, man?” Jackie looked up and said that Jiggs McNalley and Eddie Shea had been in a car accident. Jiggs was dead, and Eddie was in a Jersey hospital in a coma. “Holy shit,” was all I could I say. I knew Jiggs by sight and Eddie Shea and I had occasionally hung out together. Jackie went on to say that Jiggs and Eddie were coming home from the shore after a night in the bars, when they went off the road and into a pole or a tree somewhere outside of Atlantic City. “That’s bad,” I commiserated, asking if Eddie Shea was going to make it. Jackie kind of moaned and said, “hey man, that ain’t the half of it.” “Eddie had my ID on him.”  Eddie was my age, and he had been using Jackie’s draft card to get into the bars. 

As Jackie went on about the potential complications to his own life in all of this, I realized that he couldn’t have cared less that Jiggs was dead or whether Eddie Shea lived or not. The residue of any romantic illusions I had ever entertained about the brotherhood of the corners, about generational group identity translating into loyalty or solidarity, about my own place in a social configuration, began dissolving that morning. While Jackie McGuire went on with his anguished soliloquy about the implications of his missing ID card, I knew that Jiggs’s body was headed for Quinn’s Funeral Home, and that Eddie Shea was comatose, somewhere between life and death over in New Jersey. I also knew that the plans I had made to get away, to sign up for the Army in September, were a good idea.

Without a pause, Jackie seemed to throw off his despair, and with it, any further thoughts of Jiggs and Eddie. “Did you ever hear of a singer named Helen Humes? She used to be with the Basie Band.” I hadn’t. “Oh,” he said, “how about leaving me a couple of smokes?”

Three nights later, I went to Jiggs’s wake at Quinn’s. Eddie Shea survived and became the talk of the neighborhood when he was awarded a large insurance settlement for his injuries. Years later, I learned that his father mismanaged the money, and that Eddie never saw a dime of it.