After a game, especially in the summer, we went to the bar and grill. Mike took us to his large back room where he had a big refrigerator and a gas stove. He stored everything there – cases of beer and soda, glasses, old tables and chairs, paper goods, discarded advertising signs and the like. Mike believed we needed substantial food, especially following a hard fought game. He also said that drinking a few beers under his supervision would not do us harm. He sat us down at a big rectangular table in the middle of the room, put a big pot of water on boil and started to make us spaghetti. While we waited, he served us beer from pitchers he brought in from the bar. A single light bulb in a reverse metal hat dangled from the ceiling, giving the room an eerie feeling. When the spaghetti was ready, he served it to us on plain, white, thick, porcelain dinner plates. He covered it with a splash of olive oil and his thick meat sauce that had been simmering all day on the stove. We ate the food hurriedly and with joy. Mike warned us to drink the beer slowly and we did. We knew that we were breaking the law, but Mike did not seem to care. Cops from the precinct hung out at Mike’s and they knew what was going on. If we sat at the bar, there would have been trouble. The back room was the same as Mike’s living room. He had no fear that anyone, especially the police, would stop him. He believed that if we drank under supervision, and drank only beer, though we were only fifteen, no harm would come to us. He said, “I will help you learn to hold your liquor.” Some did. Others did not. Going home, I chewed gum to get my mouth clean of the smell. It must have worked because my parents never suspected I drank beer.

Radio opened other worlds to me. I followed the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Knicks. I listened to jazz and the blues under the covers late at night, pretending to be sleep. Adults, meaning my parents and their friends, described that music from Harlem as “race music.” They thought it bad for the soul and a corrupter of my morals, whatever they were at that young age. They never realized those voices and music were only about soul. That is where I first heard Billy Holliday, Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Charlie Parker. The music was uplifting and moving, and is still a part of my life. I wanted to learn clarinet to play like Benny Goodman. My mother did not allow it. She said I would blow my brains out and ruin my lips. Instead, I took piano lessons for ten years. I cannot play a tune, except for the opening chords of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.

I was always on the edge of rebelling against my staid, conservative home, family, and neighborhood. I never did because I could not identify my rebellion, though I somehow knew rebellion was necessary to life. I continued to chase girls with little success. I managed to satisfy my father and mother, at least on the surface. I drank more beer and on occasion got drunk. I smoked more cigarettes, some of which I bought myself. I had sore throats and a slight smoker’s cough at 17. I went to Saturday afternoon movies and learned to shoot pool in the Leader Pool room, a dank, narrow place above the Leader movie theater on Coney Island Avenue.

I lived a seemingly normal, typical first 17 or so years growing up in a lower middle-income home in Brooklyn. I grew up in an era of penny candy, home milk delivery, men who collected junk in horse drawn wagons, thirty-five cent hair cuts, nine inch black and white TV screens, radio serials, Saturday movie matinees, cartoon festivals, and fifty cent bleacher seats at Ebbets Field. My life was, well, about the same as the other kids in my neighborhood. As a child, I knew little other than normal discontent.

When did my life change? What made it change? On reflection, it had to be my leaving home and going to college. Then deciding, for whatever reason, that I would never return to my roots. Something about the staid life I led churned inside me, said now things will be different. It was if a switch turned on in my heart and head, a switch, by the way, that is still on and will always be as long as I live. Something had to be going on inside me when I went away to college. It was not just getting up in the morning, going to class, eating, sleeping, hormones on fire. I was not much of a philosopher. I never thought much about the meaning of life. Existentialism became my creed. Life was suddenly in the doing. Breathing. Learning. Experimenting. At the ripe age of seventeen and a half, I was alive without restrictions for the first time.

About eighty miles from Brooklyn in a conservative Pennsylvania town named Easton at a small college called Lafayette I felt free to discover myself. I kept notebooks about my life. I filled them with my thoughts. I included my adventures. I wrote about anything I considered important.

These are some of the images and memories of my childhood in the years before I went to college. I hope they hint at the reason for my notebooks. These memories are my archeology. Perhaps they help answer why I started keeping notes with such fervency when not yet 18 years old. And a life of words that followed.

This completes the introduction to “Notebooks.” I will start posting the journals in the next several weeks. Until then, if you have any questions, thoughts or comments, do not hesitate to send me a note at rsteinman@dvnetwork.net.

I walked home emotionally spent, battered and confused. I fell asleep wondering what had happened, curious to know what went wrong. Had I made a mistake? I would never know. I had promised to say nothing about our misadventure to anyone. I had a streak of honor and I kept those moments to myself until now. Soon Lee stopped hanging out with us on our street corners. I ran into her in school several times, in the hallways and in the cafeteria. We nodded hello and went our separate ways. When the Spring term started February, Lee was no longer in school or in the neighborhood. Passing her house one day I saw a for sale sign posted on the front lawn. Lee had become a memory for a missed opportunity, a wrongfully placed hope or me. She was my first rejection and my first note that women were mysterious. To my surprise, none of my friends asked how I’d done that night. I have to wonder, though, did my friends know what it took me to learn on my one walk with Lee? Did they know all along, alone or together the truth about the girl we all coveted? That, too, would forever remain a mystery.

Public School 217 was my last grade school before going off to Midwood High School. In the schoolyard, we played all manner of games on badly cracked concrete in need of repair. Broken and uneven under foot, we tried not to do serious injury to ourselves. After the school day ended, whatever the weather, we played touch football. Hard tackling and throwing opposing players to the ground spelled survival. Scuffed and scraped elbows and knees were common. Much to the chagrin of our parents, torn pants, shirts and jackets were also common. Basketball games, mainly two or three to the side, played half court well after dark, were also a daily activity, especially when the weather was warm. Basketball was very rough where toughness replaced finesse. No wimps could play on our courts.

We played softball and a schoolyard variation of stickball for two players. We drew a box on the brick wall, and we played one-on-one, with one pitcher and one batter. The pitcher threw the ball as hard as he could on the fly anywhere toward the box. Using one of our cadged broomsticks, the batter swung at a pitch and tried to get a hit. Throwing a curve by snapping my wrist inevitably left me with pain in my arm and shoulder. Sometimes the curveball worked, but mostly it did not. The most I could do was throw a straight fastball in the hopes the batter could not catch up with it. We had designations for singles, doubles, triples and homeruns. A homerun had to hit the apartment house beyond the fence and across from the schoolyard. More often than not, if we hit a homerun, the ball landed on a terrace, and sometimes broke a window or knocked over a flowerpot. Then we ran for cover to protect ourselves from retribution if someone had seen what we did. The next day, as if nothing happened, we were back trying to throw a curve ball or knuckle ball, pretending we were baseball players.

In school, we played softball and basketball as part of our daily PT activity. I was the first in my class in the seventh grade to hit a ball over the fence and onto Coney Island Avenue. After that majestic clout, at least then it was majestic, my gym teacher grounded me from playing softball for the rest of the term. He said what I had done was dangerous to people on the street, the cars driving on the roadway and to the trolley cars that frequently passed by the school yard.

After school closed, we played softball on our own. My aim, as well as all the kids I played with, was to hit a passing trolley car or at least come close to one. As we got bigger, we all wanted to do the same. Our other goal was to hit the Italian deli on the far side of the street where we bought sandwiches, chips, and soda. To our disappointment, and good fortune, we never achieved those goals.

There was never much liquor in my home. Beer never crossed the threshold. My parents and their friends drank only on special occasions, such as the High Holy Days or a celebration. We had a bottle of thick, sweet Jewish wine, Southern Comfort, sweet Vermouth, Rock and Rye, one bottle of Scotch and one of rye whiskey. Never any gin or vodka. Sometimes when the adults played cards, they had what they called a cocktail, rye and soda, a Manhattan, Scotch and water, never a Martini or fine wine. My parents never offered me a drink so I did not learn to drink at home, as some of my friends did.

I learned to drink beer at a gin mill, a bar and grill on Coney Island Avenue near Avenue H owned by the father of a friend with whom we played softball and touch football. Going into Mike’s as a kid, I knew I was entering another world. The place had a highly polished and worn, mahogeny bar that ran the length of the room. There were spittoons, still used by the patrons, and everyone sat on high bar stools that had leather seats and no backs. Cigarette smoke clouded the air. There was no jukebox in Mike’s. A radio played popular music softly in the background. A small black and white TV sat high on a pedestal over the back of the bar in the far corner of the room. During baseball season, the only station the TV had on was the Brooklyn Dodgers, the neighborhood’s favorite team. Mike kept the blinds on the front windows shuttered so tightly that no light seeped in from the outside. It felt like time had stopped in Mike’s. It was always night. Day had no meaning. That was true for the regulars who sat at the bar every day sipping their icy Rheingold or Schaeffer beer served in narrow, seven ounce glasses. Beer cost fifteen cents then. Beads of water slowly edged their way down the outside of the glass. The stale smell of malt and hops hung in the room like a permanent cloud. These men and the rare woman stared quietly into their beer with a vacant look. Cigarettes dangled from their yellow, stained fingers. These people rarely moved, except to lift their glass to their lips. Living in the dimness of the bar, they were in shadows, mysterious, and alone.

We had a girl in our neighborhood we callously dubbed The Community Chest. I recall her first name only but I’ll keep that to myself. Instead, I’ll call her Lee. After all these years, she deserves her privacy. According to my friends, she was the only girl we knew who would allow boys to touch her, their first experience with sex. I spent many an afternoon hearing my friends tell of their conquest of her, a girl featured in our dreams. Dream I did, often to my embarrassment. Thankfully, my mother never said anything to me about my stained sheets. Lee was pretty, a bit overweight, smart in class and sweet. Like most of the girls I grew up with, she was Jewish. On holidays, she and her friends would hang out in on one corner front of the synagogue while the boys staked out the opposite corner.

We were all approaching fifteen. Lee, though was special. She carried herself as someone older and she appeared to understand her sexuality. At least how we defined it. According to the guys, she gave of herself freely when they were with her. For some odd reason I could never bring myself to be alone with her. Among other things my father taught me, was to always be gentle with a woman and to treat her with utmost respect. He said we are bigger, stronger and have more courage than they do. It should not be a man’s way to physically lord himself over a woman.

For all Lee’s surface self-esteem, not that I called it that, I thought her vulnerable. In my way, I became her protector. I am not sure what I was protecting her from, but I assumed the mantle of the good guy among the raucous pack I ran with. When we hung out in the schoolyard, on street corners or near the local luncheonette on Newkirk Avenue, she hovered near me as if I had the ability to save her from them, the guys and ultimately herself. I think. Being her protector did not extend to taking her home. I had no idea what she did after we went home our separate ways, despite the stories I had heard.

One night I decided to change my standing with Lee. I got up my courage and volunteered to walk her home. She said yes. We left. The pack watched us depart, smiles on their faces as I turned to wave goodnight. We headed toward Glenwood Road, a dark street with a center aisle of trees and shrubs, one of the nicest stretches in our neighborhood. It was Fall and cool. The night was quiet. Her hand reached for mine. I eagerly accepted it. Despite the falling temperature, her touch was moist. It was a strange feeling, yet welcoming. As we walked, I became more excited. I tried not to show it. We talked about school, homework, our friends. We walked onto one of the many small bridges on Glenwood Road that linked one side of the street to the other. We stopped. I took her in my arms as actors did in the movies. Having no other role models, I tried to copy what they did on screen. It was the first time I kissed a girl in a romantic setting. The other times I kissed girls were at parties, fleetingly and hurriedly, in the dark, behind closed doors. It was usually unsatisfying, but necessary for me, a growing young man.

Lee and I kissed on the lips. I knew what a soul kiss was, but I was afraid to try it. I did not know if what I did was right or wrong. Somehow, I thought she would correct my moves because she had the experience and I did not. Thoughts of rejection entered my head. As I held her, one of my hands went inside her coat and searched for parts of her that I only had a passing familiarity with from other girl’s I knew. I had been there before, but this would be my most intimate experience to date. I had an idea who to do and even how to do it, but I wondered if I could bring myself to get closer to girl, kin this case Lee, than I previously did.

I kept moving my hand searching for her breasts. Then she told me to stop. She took my hand and removed it from her body. She told me to stop. I could not believe what I heard. Stop. Yes, stop, she said. I’m not that kind of girl she continued. I though, I said. You thought wrong, she said. I stepped back. I did not know what to do or say. I thought, I mumbled. The guys, I said. It is not true about me, she said. I don’t do those things. Why do they tell stories about you? Because I let them. I want their attention. I want people to notice me. Notice me. Not accept me as just anyone. Now they notice you for all the wrong reasons, I answered. Does that make you happy I wondered. Not really, she said. Not really. I thought that for a minute that maybe Lee could be my girlfriend. Then I thought better of it. I could end up the laughing stock in my neighborhood and in school. That was not what I wanted. The thought quickly disappeared.

She began to cry. I never saw a girl cry before. I did not know what to do. We stood on that small bridge on that dark street and we did not touch each other. She moved closer to me, wrapped her arms around me, and we hugged. I felt awkward, out of my element. I did not understand most of what she told me. Say nothing to anyone, please, she said. Don’t tell anyone anything. I said I would not. She stepped back. Take me home, she said. I walked her to the private house where she lived with her parents and a younger sister. At the front steps, she kissed me on the cheek. Thank you, she said and ran up the steps to her front door. She put her key in the lock, turned once to look at me and then was gone.

I built a street scooter from discarded orange crates and my worn metal skate wheels that I removed from my skates if my parents could afford to give me new wheels, which was not always the case. I painted the scoote and drew an insignia on it to set it apart from the others in my neighborhood. Building these took work. First, I had to find the crate, then a two-by-four, and the hammer and nails to put the contraption together so that it might last more than a few days. There were kids in my neighborhoodwho had battles with their scooters in which they ran into each other hoping to spill the other person to the ground or at least destroy his vehicle. I did that a few times, lost the battles and decided that building a scooter for war was not worth the trouble, so I used mine for fun until boredom set in.

I owned a Schwinn bike, a gift from my parents when I turned thirteen. It had big balloon tires and a heavy frame. I rode it with great difficulty but with joy around the streets where I lived. Painted black, my fat bike as I called it, made me tired thinking of riding it, but ride it I did everywhere in the neighborhood.

I smoked cigarettes from the time I was eleven. I lifted them from the open pack of Philip Morris my father left on his bureau. Cigarettes also came from my friend’s father’s candy store where he sold what we called “loosies.” These were individual cigarettes from an open package for those in the neighborhood who could not afford to buy a whole pack even though they cost only a few pennies. When my friend’s father was not looking, we took cigarettes from those open packs to smoke them as the adults did. There was no talk of cancer then. Parents and teachers told us cigarettes would stunt our growth. Some people said that cigarettes would destroy our lungs. We ignored what they said. Actors smoked in the movies. Athletes smoked in magazine ads. They were our role models. Cigarette ads extolled the virtues of smoking. Advertising about the virtues of smoking did not lie, so we thought. We were young. We knew everything. We smoked.

Girls were on my mind and not on my mind. Mainly girls confused me. I chased after girls because that is what my friends and I did. They were more of a curiosity than an object or an obsession. Girls were a mystery and we lusted after them without knowing why. Who were they? Why were they different? Why, even when we were young, did they seem different? My father told me before I reached puberty to “never force your intentions on a girl.” I understood him to mean that I must always be polite, but it took me many years to realize he really meant I should keep my hands to myself and not make sexual advances.

In grade school, we had inkwells on our desks, small jars filled with ink. We dipped our nib pens into these and then wrote our tests and practiced our penmanship on paper. The pen tore and ripped the page. Small dots of ink covered everything. We used green blotting paper to dry the ink on the page. I also used the inkwells for something else. I dipped the pigtails of the girl sitting in front of me into the inkwell so her hair and the ribbons she wore became wet with ink. The girl would scream. The teacher would then punish me by making me stand in the back of the room or in a far corner for the rest of the period. At the end of the session, the teacher gave me a note to take home for my parent’s signature. My parents rarely saw such a note because I learned to forge my father’s and my mother’s signature. I thought it a small transgression to save my backside from a spanking.

Girls were different in every way. They ran in their own manner, funny, not like a boy could run. They could not throw a baseball. They looked awkward on a playing field. They dressed differently. They wore their hair long in an era when no boy wore his hair beyond a crew cut or, at least, cut very close to his head. Boys were almost bald before bald became fashionable. Though we were children even when we reached our teen years, until girls started to change physically, we looked almost the same. Then girls foxed us and changed slyly before we knew what was happening. They grew breasts. Their bodies took on curves that boys did not have. They blushed. They became shy and secretive. When I could get close to them, I noticed they smelled differently than me. I could see and sense the changes, but I had no idea what they really were, what caused them, and what would be the result. Sex education hardly existed in grade or high school. I did not have the courage to get answers from my parents, possibly because I knew my parents would never give me the answers I wanted.

In my teen years, I started to understand that girls would be an essential part of my life. Street talk taught me what I did not learn in school. I did not trust what I learned on dark corners, but I had no choice. Most of it was erroneous. What I learned on the street made me hope that sex might come my way. It was not to be. In high school, my hormones virtually exploding, I went on occasional dates, and in that simpler time, usually a movie, perhaps a pizza, an ice cream soda, then the trip home by subway, trolley or bus. I went to parties. I held hands. I kissed flat on the lips and learned to soul kiss but with very few girls who were courageous enough to try something different. I even petted, but to no conclusion, which drove me crazy and caused me pain I did not want. I wanted sex, but it was not possible, at least in my neighborhood. I had no idea where to start, and if what I tried seemed to work, I did not know where to go next. That would come later in college and then after college. Burlesque and strip shows reigned, if we could get in to see them. Watching a stripper work, gave me a sense of what a woman’s body looked like. Pornography was underground and not readily available. TV in its infancy was simplistic about sex and its place in society. Movies were suggestive, but not instructive. Simply put, I was more chaste than carnal, but not for want of trying. Compared to what kids know today, what I knew could easily fit into a thimble.

I shot marbles where grass and even the weeds did not grow on available dirt in vacant lots, or in front of the old, two-story, private houses that lined the leafy side streets. I collected marbles and stored them in small brown paper bags. Plastic bags did not exist. I traded many of my ordinary, multi-colored marbles for what we called purees. I used these clear, sometimes large marbles as a “shooter.” The object was to move as many marbles as possible into a circle in the middle of the box we played in. I held the shooter in the crook of my index finger and with my thumb. Then I sent the marble on its way in a straight line by pushing it forward as strongly as possible. It may not seem so, but it was a skill developed over hours of practice.

I carried a knife. We all carried knives. Mostly these were pen knives that we kept closed in a side pocket. It made no sense. Not really. I did not need a knife. Yet, there were practical reasons. The game of War or Territory was one of them. You flipped, tossed or dropped the knife into a square box carved into the earth. After the knife landed in an upright position – no other position counted — you cut off a piece of territory in the direction of the blade until one of you had more land that the other. The kids who flipped their knife the best usually won the game.

Speaking of knives, though we all owned penknives, for some reason many of us also owned switchblades, knives that opened with the push of a button. Mine had a three or four inch blade and the handle was dark pink plastic. I bought mine for a few bucks from a kid in school. In the late 1940s, switchblades were a big deal. We all had to have one. They cost a couple of bucks, money that I saved from tips I got delivering prescriptions for a local drug store. I kept it with me at all times. I slept with it under my pillow. My parents did not know I owned that potentially lethal weapon. Occasionally when we stood on a street corner in the early evening I would open and close the knife and listen to the clicking sound of the blade as it released from its spring. I never sharpened my knife and it served no useful purpose, but I had one, as did my friends, because it was a thing to have. Gangs did not exist in my neighborhood. I knew where they were but I never ventured into their neighborhood. We were too smart to go looking for trouble beyond our own neat borders. But we had switchblades because we thought we were hep, the word of cool in the 1940s and 1950s.

In the days after World War II, youth gangs were getting a lot of attention. Homemade weapons called zip guns were frontpage news. Some kids made their guns in shop class from iron pipe. These guns could kill. Other kids in shop carefully tooled their guns from solid pieces of wood. We made our version from the wooden joints of orange crates. The gun had a wood handle, a nail on the wood barrel and a nail on the front of the barrel. We took strong rubber bands from our homes. For ammunition, we used sharp-edged pieces of discarded linoleum that we cut into one-inch squares. We fitted the linoleum into the stretched rubber bands and then released the square into the air. Where it would land was anyone’s guess, but land the square did and often with devastating effect. The linoleum ammo sometimes cut a guy’s face. Other times it caused a gash in someone’s arm. Zip guns of whatever make were dangerous weapons and other than some youthful macho thing, I have no idea why we made these, let alone shot them at each other. But we did, and no one got badly hurt, at least in my neighborhood. But there were many stories of the more serious zip guns used in gang fights and even in robberies.

We were not budding gangsters. We stayed where we were and never strayed into trouble. We were harmless, not fighters, would-be lovers — how we hoped — and good kids. Yet, my friends and I felt drawn to the other side. Perhaps it was the mystery. Knowing nothing of the concept, the outlaw was a daring figure, at least in movies, especially in Westerns. The outlaw was someone beyond the normal boundaries of good, a concept preached to us as uplifting and redeeming. Mainly I think it was the idea of a life different from the one we were leading. It reached beyond our stable existence. Most of my friends and I did nothing but dream. We never acted on our impulse. A few of my friends did and became petty criminals. A few even turned into junkies. I never came close.

Instead of beating up people, we continued playing many different games. We played stoopball by slamming a ball against the steps in front of any house that had a stoop. We tried to hit an edge of the step with the ball and send the ball as far as possible out into the street and away from the opposing fielder. We played curb ball on the street. The idea was to hit the corner of the curb to see how far the ball would travel. If we placed the ball anywhere but the corner of the curb it did not go far, the other player would easily catch it and become the next batter. We played punch ball in the street where you tossed the ball into the air and then punched it as hard and as far as possible. If someone caught what you punched on the fly, you were out. The bases were parked cars, sewers in the middle of the streets and another sewer for home plate unless we had chalk and could mark a real batter’s box on the blacktop.

We played these games with loosely configured teams and no referees or umpires. We refereed and umpired ourselves. Sure, we argued decisions. Sure, we growled and yelled, pushed and shoved. But we never went to the mat over what we thought was a bad decision. We liked to think we were in charge. Only weaklings allowed other people to control their destiny. We were strong and young – though we never thought about it too much — so we made our own decisions. Referees and umpires would come later in our lives, and when they did, having them around took away the fun we had judging ourselves.

As most kids, I had a pair of heavy metal roller skates. The skates had cheap leather straps that went around my ankles, and a metal cup for my toes that I tightened with a skate key to make sure the skates did not come apart or fall off my feet while skating. Some kids played street hockey if they could afford a hockey stick. The hockey sticks I had often shattered during a game. It took the fun out of street hockey. Instead, I skated as fast as I could in impromptu races on the streets.

CALLING INDEPENDENT FILMMAKERS AND VIDEO JOURNALISTS

The American News Project (http://newsproject.org) is dedicated to defending and promoting the public interest through high-quality, investigative video journalism. Our staff includes video professionals who have worked at CNN, BBC, National Geographic, PBS Frontline, Bill Moyers Journal and other respectable media outlets. Our reports (some call them mini-documentaries) regularly end up on prominent media outlets like the Huffington Post.

We are building out our network of freelance filmmakers and video journalists. ANP is run very much like a traditional magazine. Video reports are produced staff reporters and qualified freelancers. Our stories are distributed to hundreds of blogs and major media sites.
We are assembling a community of video journalists and documentary filmmakers who believe in quality, accuracy and in the transformative potential of good multimedia storytelling. Some of the most incisive reporting is produced by those who know the personalities and communities directly affected by issues and events.

If you are a documentary filmmaker or professional video journalist who would like to work with us on stories please click on the link below and fill out your info.

http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/522 … jsp?key=82

We believe that these are seminal times, both in the evolution of media and the project of America. By grinding away at pernicious problems; by holding the powerful accountable; by seeking out universal stories of struggle and transcendence; by highlighting voices overlooked by mainstream outlets; by making a commitment to quality; by partnering with our peers in the independent press; and by assembling an online community of media junkies who hunger to participate, we hope to help pioneer a form of online public-interest broadcasting that is both entertaining and transformative.

So, welcome. We hope you enjoy, and we hope you participate.

Cops usually ignored us but sometimes a person complained and the beat cop, a common presence then, would arrive to straighten us out and chase us away. Usually he was overweight, a middle-aged man in blue who carried a sidearm, a Billy club and handcuffs. He wore black shoes that flopped when he shuffled his way through the relatively calm streets. Cops walked everywhere. They twirled their Billy clubs as they slowly trudged through the streets. I never saw one sitting or resting. They looked around, and talked to people in the street. Everyone was friendly, especially the adults. We hardly ever saw a police car.

An old, burly cop struck me once on the back of my thigh with his club because I refused to move from the schoolyard fast enough when ordered. As I started to run away, he caught me by the neck, whacked me hard and sharply on the back of my leg – he knew exactly where to hit me so there would no mark anyone could see – and told me to take off. My thigh hurt for days, but he gained my respect, mainly because I did not want him to hit me again. Usually, after a cop turned the corner, we went back to our games. Either he had other things on his mind, or he really did not care to be bothered again.

I lived in a highly competitive neighborhood with highly competitive kids, many of whom were my age or slightly older. Perhaps the competition came from observing our parents and their friends. Many of my friends were the children of my parent’s friends, and they were usually the same age as me. We were all in the same circle and we had to learn how to survive and succeed within that narrow sphere. The competition showed in the games we played, and how we played them. Mainly, none of us gave an inch. If our parents were strict with us, we were strict with those who were our age.

In my neighborhood, especially on Avenue H, East 19th Street and then Argyle Road, we played games like those elsewhere on the streets of New York. They were variations of games played in the five boroughs. These were city games. These were street games. They were games with rhythms and rules of their own passed down by street lore in ways we never knew. Many of these games had nothing to with skill or finesse. We played King of the Hill, Horse, and Johnny on a Pony almost every day. These were tough, cruel, and perhaps mean-spirited. Did they prepare us for life later? Whether yes or no, we learned never to give in. We punched, kicked, shoved, and jumped on each other’s backs if that is what the game demanded. It is a wonder all our roughhousing did not permanently damage us. Brute force ruled. Power won. The strong survived. The weak suffered defeat.

With King of The Hill, if you were bigger, stronger, taller, with, perhaps, better balance and no fear, you won more times than you lost. Sometimes you perched yourself atop a pile of leaves, stood on castaway furniture, or, in my neighborhood, on an old concrete foundation behind the apartment house where I lived. When you claimed one of those places, you waited for someone to remove you by pure strength. If they did, they became King of the Hill. They stood tall, alone, and supreme.
For Johnny on a Pony, one of us would volunteer to lean against a wall, head at an angle, back parallel to the ground, legs firmly planted, waiting for the other kids to run and then jump onto your back. The more kids who landed on your back, the more difficult it was to hold your position until everyone would come crashing to the ground laughing and screaming with joy, as perverted as it may seem. After we righted ourselves, we reset the pony with another volunteer. Then the jumping and pounding started again, until, exhausted, we tired of the game and went off to do something else.

We played Hide and Go Seek and Ring-a-levio the same way, physical and harsh. In each of those games, freedom from jail after capture was the goal. Once the opposing side got a prisoner, and put him in jail, he stayed there until someone came running full speed and bounded into the designated jail to set him free. Knocking down, or at least pushing aside, the jailor and yelling “free, free,” the prisoners had a chance to escape, which they usually did. Everyone ran fast into hiding. We waited again for someone to capture us, or if not, until the game ended or we lay on the ground out of breath not caring who was the winner.

All was in the spirit of winning. All was in spirit of coming out on top. Oddly, we rarely got hurt. Battered, yes. Always bruised. Never really were we seriously hurt, not in a way that we would admit. Bleeding elbows and knees were part of the game. Scraping again a healing wound was even better because it proved we had the guts to go on. We rarely let a day go by without taking ourselves apart physically for the sake of showing each other we were men. Sure, every time we engaged in roughhouse games, we used up all our excess energy. We were kids. When we played those games, nothing intruded. Nothing except lunch or dinner ended a game. We had to eat to regain our strength. Why we played so hard, and all the time, was never an issue, never a question we asked. We were young so it really did not matter. So we thought. Looking back, it obviously did affect us in ways we did not understand then and probably do not understand now.

We played stickball on the streets using broom handles that we swiped from the apartment where we lived. When my mother, and other mothers, discovered their mop handle missing, they knew where to look. By then, it was too late. The consequence was a whack on my bottom and a caution never to do that again. But I did because the game had to go on. We found other broomsticks in the cellar of the buildings where we lived and where the super stored his cleaning equipment. Playing stickball on a Brooklyn street had many problems. We had to maneuver between the parked cars on each side of the street. We dodged on-coming traffic, angry motorists, and honking cars to survive to play another day. We were in competition with roller skaters and bicyclers. We measured our ability and strength by the number of sewers we could reach by hitting each slow ball thrown on a bounce by a pitcher who used the pink Spalding ball we all chipped in to buy. Unfortunately, the ball often split after only a few games. But the ball was cheap and we were able to pool the few pennies we had to buy a new one when needed.

When I was very young, my parents let me know that they had big ambitions for me. I had difficulty understanding that concept at five or six when their dreams for me were boundless. I was in first grade. My mother dressed me in a white shirt, a clip-on tie, dark short pants and just shined, brown, Thom McAnn lace up shoes. My mother and I walked many blocks to a school where I would take dancing lessons. Only I did not know that was where we were going. We had no car in those days. Taxis were out of the question. Public transportation could not get us to that location. We walked and when we finally arrived, I was very tired and not in the best of spirits. The room, filled with small girls all dressed the same in white blouses and black, pleated skirts, had only a few boys dressed as I. To say I was mortified and humiliated is an understatement. I assume all the boys felt the same. At least I would hope. A woman teacher sat at a highly polished, ebony Baby Grand piano barking instructions to us students for the steps she wanted us to take. I decided quickly I wanted no part of learning how to dance, certainly not in that group. Much to my mother’s embarrassment, I refused to go onto the dance floor. I managed to find a safe haven behind the piano and behind a curtain from where, despite my mother’s pleading, I refused to emerge until the lesson ended and it was time to go.

I don’t know what my mother was thinking. I knew that I would never let that happen to me again. I vowed that my mortification for the sake of someone else’s desire was not what I wanted. I could not articulate this verbally, but by hiding I let me mother know, never again. It produced my first rebellion and it had a permanent effect on my life. The event, though seemingly minor, gave me a deep-seated sense that I would not allow anyone to take advantage of me again. This is not to say it never happened again in my life. It did because there is no escape from people who attempt to control you.

I lived in a mixed neighborhood. We were of various religions and from different ethnic backgrounds. I had many friends on my block, but few close friends in school. We got along well, except for the occasional fight, something that most boys did. I had very high grades in school but I considered it a place between the games we played on the streets where we lived. Busing did not exist. I walked to whatever school I attended. When I lived on Avenue H, I walked each morning to my grade school, P.S 152. I crossed Ocean Avenue and then moved steadily to the right around Brooklyn College until I reached one of the oldest schools in the city. It looked like a castle and was very forbidding for a young child. For a short time when I lived in Brighton Beach, I walked down Ocean View Avenue to P.S. 100. Later, from my house on Argyle Road, I walked to P.S. 217, a brick and concrete pile with no beauty or charm that sat at Coney Island Avenue and Newkirk Avenues like a colorless lump. Inside the school, the classrooms were devoid of anything that would make it a pleasant experience. I did well in school with very little studying. I concentrated in class, and remembered what I needed for tests. School was there, and unavoidable. I went everyday and never complained.

My father wanted me to be a doctor, a typical ambition of many Jewish families that survived the Depression. I accepted his wish without thinking about it. Call it blind compliance, but it is what a dutiful Jewish son did. Because of my father’s desire, I thought, yes, I would be a doctor, or, to be precise, a surgeon. He thought I had the long fingers required of a surgeon. My father said surgeons needed long fingers with which to operate, so I was partly there already. Though I had big hands, thinking of cutting into someone made me ill. I once broke the middle finger on my left hand while playing catcher in a softball game and my father let me know loudly that my career was at its end. I was twelve years old. I never thought much about tomorrow, but as with all kids, what lay ahead of me in life was infinite. Only I didn’t realize it then.

I never played hooky, was a decent athlete, a fair cartoonist, and I could copy maps as if I was making photocopies. I even tried to paint with oils. I failed. Like many kids, I owned boxes of baseball cards and lead toy soldiers. Both collections disappeared when I went to college, a victim of my mother’s penchant for neatness. Along with my monthly supply of books from Max in Chicago, I read everything in sight, not only some of the many newspapers my father brought home each day, but even read the labels on cans and jars of food. Reading consumed me and brought me to places I never knew existed.

Despite my excellent grades, my conduct in school was poor, a problem for my parents and teachers. I became class president in the 6th grade because I was the most popular and maybe the cleanest kid in class. This made my parents happy. It confused my teachers who had difficulty equating my popularity, my conduct and my intelligence. Many people predicted I would have a great future despite the streak in me that made me stand up against authority. I tried to control myself to please the adults but I was not always successful.

When school was out, and before homework or Hebrew school, I hung out with my friends in the schoolyard and on the streets near where I lived. On weekends at P.S 217, we tore a hole in the heavy, mesh, wire fence that surrounded the schoolyard so we could get inside to play without teacher, that is, adult supervision. Monday morning, the school custodians repaired the fence as best they could knowing we would tear open it again come Friday afternoon.

My parents thought they were middle class, and maybe they were. Their ideas about home and family certainly conformed to those of Middle America. It was an understandable aspiration for a family that survived the Depression. But we were not anywhere near middle income. In the 1920s, my father was on the verge of becoming rich when the stock market crashed and changed his life forever. Sadly, like many of his generation, he never recovered from the Crash. The American dream for him and most people changed forever when the market collapsed. My father carried wounds from that event until the day he died at 96 near the end of the 20th Century.

Though my father struggled for years to make a living, I was not aware of his struggles nor how hard he worked. Growing up, I did not know what I was missing. Thankfully, as a family, we did not want for anything. I missed nothing until I went away to college and started to see the wider world beyond the streets of Brooklyn. My friends and I were in the same situation. Where we grew up, we had the same lives. Some of us, but not all, were grateful for what we had. We learned early not to complain. As long as there was food on the table, a roof over our heads and food on the table, life was not too bad. There was an unwritten fatalism about life. We could not control it or ignore it.

After World War II, we moved from a four-story apartment house on Avenue H and East 19th Street into our first real home on Argyle Road and Avenue H in Brooklyn. It had two stories, a screened-in front porch on the second floor where we lived, a high attic, gray asphalt siding, a one-car garage down a driveway in the back of the house, a huge maple tree on the sidewalk, a small grass plot in front and back and full basement. It was a neighborhood with mostly Dutch style, single-family homes each with a small yard back and front on quiet, tree-lined streets. Many houses had thick hedges instead of fences. These were green in summer and bare in winter. Every house had a porch on each of its two floors with one screened in for outdoor, bug-free living.

Living in an apartment house without air conditioning, we were lucky to live on the ground floor because the building had no elevators. Now my life changed. The new house seemed very grand and for us. Used to small apartment living, it was indeed majestic. My patents were homeowners for the first time in their lives and they reveled in it. Living on the top floor we had use of the attic. We rented the main floor to a couple who had no children. My mother and father had to be careful with money. There was nothing excessive in our lives. We had only what we needed.

My mother was a hard working, stay-at-home wife, proudly called a homemaker. She cared for my younger sister and me. Our home being always neat, my mother’s kitchen always in order, the rest of the house buttoned up tightly as if fixed in amber. Essentially shy, she was usually soft-spoken and sweet. Our clothes were neat and clean. Mother cooked and cleaned the house. She shopped carefully and there was always more than enough food on the table. My mother was a wonderful, creative cook, especially with homey Jewish food. She made great soups, such as pea soup and chicken soup. She cooked enough stuffed cabbage to last for a week. Her stews were legendary, especially lamb stew with potatoes, carrots and a delicious, tomato-based gravy. She made tomato sauce from scratch which we put on spaghetti or fresh egg noodles. She made fresh chocolate pudding and allowed us to scrape the pot clean. After roasting a chicken, she made chicken fat by cooking down the skin, taking the residue and refrigerating it until it was solid. We ate the fried chicken skin, called gribben by the spoonful. We then spread the chicken fat onto fresh rye or corn bread, added a touch a salt, and gobbled up a delicious treat. We had no idea how dangerous that was to our health. We ate as a family at a fixed time every day, usually 6 p.m. My mother rarely sat with us, preferring to serve and then stand, to nibble and nosh, rather than to sit and eat a full meal at the table. My mother made sure the family functioned as a family should in those simpler days. Many nights my father cleaned the kitchen. I helped him wash the dishes by hand, place them in a drying tray and then wipe them before putting them in a cabinet until the next night when they would come out again for another meal.

Sunday nights we sat around the kitchen table and ate grilled American cheese sandwiches on white bread. We coated the thick slices with butter and pressed the sandwich to melted perfection using a heavy clothes iron on top of a dish in a frying pan. We ate them with cold milk and listened to radio serials, and fifteen minute newscasts, staple of radio back then. We were a typical family together at mid-century.

During the week and on weekends, my mother saw her friends. They played Canasta, Ma Jong, and gossiped. Sometimes we saw relatives and had a meal together. Once a week my parent’s friends met in someone else’s home where they ate, played cards and talked.

I have thought about it for years. It is a moment that is never out of my mind. Perhaps it defines who I am, the man I have become. Perhaps not. It took place June 18, 1941 about a month before my seventh birthday. That was the night of the Joe Louis-Billy Conn heavyweight title fight broadcast live across the county on radio at 10 p.m. Joe Louis, The Brown Bomber, the icon of the day, a hero to everyone in then racially-divided America, was to fight Billy Conn, the light heavyweight champion for the heavyweight championship of the world. During his championship reign, he transcended race, but as a kid in those days, I knew nothing of race or class nor what it meant to many in America. He was Joe Louis and along with Joe DiMaggio, a figure my friends and I could look up to. I cannot speak for the adults, or my father, but everyone my age wanted Joe Louis to win. My father rarely, if ever, divulged his prejudices. Over the years, we never discussed what happened to me that night nor did we ever discuss the fight. Ever.

We were living in an apartment on Avenue H and East 19th Street in Brooklyn. I did not want to sleep. I wanted to hear the fight despite it being on well after my bedtime. Already in my pajamas, I went to my father and asked him if I could stay up. He said no. I insisted. He said no again. I persisted. He said I was too young. Boxing was something I did not need to know about. He was also sure it would be in the newsreels and when I went to the Saturday movie matinee, I would see the fight then, which was better than hearing it on the radio. In my small boy voice, I told him that was not good enough. I told him my friends would be listening. He said no again. Then, unlike me, I had something of a tantrum. I stamped my feet. I cried. I made a scene. Normally when I went into that rare mode, my father would slam me on the top of my head, and pound me once or twice on by backside with his fist or his open hand. Standing in front of him, I prepared myself for that eventuality. It did not happen. He did not hit me. What he did was in some ways worse.

He finally relented and said that if I wanted to listen to the fight I could. But there was one condition. I would have to stand in the middle of the living room without moving or saying a word. Stand absolutely still, he said. Without hesitating, I said I could do it, not thinking of the consequences. I nodded my head several times in affirmation. He told me to move into the center of the room. I did. My memory of the room is that it was very dark. There was no ceiling light. We had only one floor lamp by my father’s easy chair. There were lamps and ashtrays on the end tables at either side of the couch. A coffee table sat in front of the couch. As a child, I thought the room very dark. Standing in the middle of the room, I realized how dark it really was.

Ten o’clock came. The fight started. Usually in bed at that time, I was very tired. The living room took on the appearance of a dungeon. But nothing would deter me from my mission. Not that I thought of it that way. I was, after all, a nearly seven-year-old boy with a stubborn streak. I thought I had won some sort of victory. I would listen to the fight through the massive floor model, the centerpiece for entertainment in our living room. The next day I would tell my friends what I did. That is all that mattered. I stood in that spot without moving through the whole fight. I did not whimper. I did not cry. I did not shift my position. My legs hurt. My head hurt. I wanted to sleep. I refused to fold. When the fight ended, my father said nothing and waved me to my room. I did with great difficulty. My legs were numb. I managed to move anyway. My kidney’s about to burst, I went to the bathroom and then dragged myself to bed where I fell into a deep sleep.

Until I looked it up I had no idea who won the fight or how long it lasted. For the record, after nearly losing Joe Louis knocked out an overly confident Billy Conn in the 13th round to retain his title. Now that does not matter. I think without realizing it, I vowed that my father would not defeat me. I think he did not but who really knows. Did the incident affect my life? I am sure it did. I cannot say how. In retrospect I would rather, he had hit me. I could have handled that. The moment, though painful, would have passed. The torture he put me through that night was worse. I am sure he knew what he was doing. For that I can never forgive him.

I did not cry that night. Since that incident, it is hard for me to cry at all, ever, unless the moment is so overpowering that it eclipses my early defenses. Understand, I have cried over the years, but never if I could help it. For me to cry, it would have meant defeat. I had little understanding of what was happening, but something inside me recognized that crying in front of my father would undermine my life forever. It was a test of his will against mine. When the battle ended in the middle of the living room, I still cannot say who won. What took place that night was only the first of many skirmishes between my father and me over who would dominate my life. I only regret we never discussed what took place while he was alive. I wonder what he would have said in his defense.

My father was a man of great pride. A white-collar worker who never wanted to get his hands dirty, he wanted the life he believed a pressed suit would bring. Every day he went to work dressed as a banker, his shirt freshly starched and pressed by my mother, his dark tie knotted just so, his shoes shined, his hands washed, his fingernails cut close and clean. He was fastidious. He was of average height and slim. His size allowed his clothes to fit him well. He wore a pencil thin mustache; his hair neatly clipped, with the back and sides, as they used to say, short. Nothing about him seemed out of place. When he arrived home, he immediately untied his shoes, slipped them off his feet and wandered through the house in his stocking feet. I don’t remember if he owned a pair of bedroom slippers. He showed me photos of the way he looked in the 1920s before the Crash. In them, he had about him the touch of dandy. He wore two-toned brown and white Oxford shoes. He wore custom-fitted suits, buttoned vests, and neatly knotted ties. In summer he wore a straw boater and in winter a dark fedora with a snap-brim. It took me years to understand that dressing as he did, even in the worst of times after the Depression and during the years of recovery, gave him the dignity I think he never associated with the work he was doing.

My father owned a small, one-person insurance agency. He had a desk and filing cabinets in a large open room on John Street that he shared with other brokers who were in the same business. I remember going with him to his office by subway and feeling overwhelmed by the tall, imposing buildings in the Wall Street area. I got bored waiting for lunch or the trip home. I sat in his office and drew on the backs of old insurance contracts. I tried to type on old table model Remington typewriters, but I screwed up the keys while getting black ink from the ribbon on my fingers.

My father had a friend named Max who worked for Bantam Books in Chicago. Every month for years, he sent us the paperback books Bantam published. These were mostly novels, Westerns, mysteries, some science fiction, but there were also biographies and history books. I started carrying a book everywhere I went, even in grade and high school. My only escape, it seemed, was reading those books. Some months I read as many as fifteen books. I also read the funny pages in his newspapers, some sports, and almost nothing else.