the time and the place

080603
To Jim, on the occasion of your fiftieth birthday.
To my brother and my best friend — everything changed, then changed again.
…
bumpty-two
my very first recollection of us together was that once upon a time, a long time ago, we shared a bed.
how many people have you shared a bed with? well, I am one of them.
I’m not sure, to tell you the truth, but I think we were small enough to lay crossways on a single bed. or really on reflection, you were able to lay crossways, and I layed kind of everywhich way. and you may remember that we used to take turns rocking each other to sleep.
I don’t remember when we started or when we stopped, but we used to crawl up the stairs, usually after a lot of complainining, on our hands and knees, up the thirteen steps, past the half iron bannisters into the top half, which was walled, and was crowned with the old hope chest, which was dark before Mom refinished it, we’d make the right turn into our room, BJ and Johnny’s room was on the other side, it always had been and it always would be. and we’d crawl into our bed, but first we’d say our prayers, the way we were taught, without question or reservation, “God bless Mommy and Daddy and Nanny, and BJ and Johnny, and Andy and Jamie.” Yeah, we referred to ourselves in the third person. Isn’t it cute? We might have added and all our aunts and uncles, cousins and pets and whoever else came to mind, but it would normally take too long, and Dad would often be the one to put us to bed, as I recall, sometimes with a story or whatever, and he would let us off without having to enumerate the entire clan, maybe we’d say “and the rest of our family,” or something like that.
I don’t remember any stories Dad actually told us, maybe you do. Maybe Dr. Seuss, maybe stories from the Tall Book of Make Believe, and Winkin, Blinkin and Nod, and all that.
But we’d crawl up the stairs, and we’d get into our pajamas, and kneel at the side of the bed, which I remember was way too high for us, and we’d say our prayers, and he would tell us a bed time story, and kiss us with his rough beard and smelling of smoke and coffee and whiskey, and then turn out the lights and thump down the stairs.
The tv might be on down there, and from time to time you’d hear an adult’s voice, usually dad’s mrmhummumum or whatever. and we’d creep back down the steps and peek out from behind the wall and see if we could see the tv in the reflection of the glass on the picture over the couch. but we’d inevitably get caught and sent back to bed, and we’d lay there, and watch the shadows the streetlight used to make across the wall and the ceiling, which was a complex pattern, because of the sloped ceiling and the geometry of the dormer, and the wallpaper we used to have, which was this kind of pattern of Xs and squares, just like the pattern of the grid across the radiator down in the living room, the metal grate that was ingeniously fit into the doors which opened and we sometimes used to store our board games in there, and the box over the radiator that I think was some kind of add in by Selma’s husband who was a Norwegian fisherman, or seaman of some sort, and part time carpenter, and the big old windowsill downstairs that sometimes we would stand up on like a stage and perform the way we saw the people do on tv sometimes, “attention, ladies and gentlemen and children of all ages” or tie towels around our necks and run around like like so many crazy little supermen in and out and around the furniture, I’m sure it was some kind of madness.
but we’d be laying there in bed, and trying to sleep and it wouldn’t be long before one or the other of us would get up on our hands and knees and start rocking back and forth, saying “bumpty-two, bumpty-two” and the other would lay there, being rocked, maybe unconsciously imagining or remembering being rocked in the crib or cradle or whatever, but anyway enjoying it, until the other got tired and said, “I’m tired. its your turn to bumpty-two.” and we’d take turns like that until we were both asleep.
…
babies and daddies
the next memories I have of us together is of course playing — building forts out of couch cushions and blankets, or outside in the backyard playing in the dirt, with trucks and lincoln logs and whatever came to hand.
but I think we can both take pride, and it may not come as too much of a surprise to anyone who really knows us, that we were, I think, unusually creative players. there were all sorts of things we used to do and imagine, that I remember fondly, and think, that was pretty cool.
one game, I remember, we used to call “babies and daddies” for reasons that don’t matter, and probably made no sense anyway.
we’d go out to the garage, and sneak into the car. we kind of knew we weren’t supposed to, we might hurt ourselves in the car door, and maybe we did once or twice. Did we?
and we got into trouble. usually that’s what it was about, staying out of trouble. but more on that later.
so we’d be in the car, sitting there in the garage. maybe the garage door was open, or maybe the light was on.
and it was one of those old cars, I have no idea which one it was, the mercury comet, or whatever we had before that, but it had the radio on the console with the push buttons, and we’d take turns pretending to be the cab driver and the passenger, like we’d seen on tv no doubt, “where’ll it be buddy?” “tirty-tird and tird! step on it!” and when I was playing cabbie, I’d frantically pound the buttons on the radio, that we thought made the car go, and punch in the destination, and turn the wheel and bounce up and down for a while, and say, “that’ll be toidy bucks!”
then we’d scramble over the seats, changing places, and one time, you were the cab driver, and I was the passenger, and you said “where’ll it be buddy?” and I said “Tokyo!” and you said, “holy cow, buddy, better hold on to your hat! here we go!” and you pushed buttons and turned the wheel and bounced up and down, and in our minds we flew through time and space, and after a while I said “we dere yet?” and you said “keep yer shirt on, keep yer shirt on!” and we’d bounce around some more, and I’d help with the imagining, and bounce around in the back seat myself, and you’d say “bumpy ride, ain’t it?” ha. and we’d both laugh. and finally we’d get there, and I’d say “how much’ll it be?” and I think you said “a googol bucks!”
…
moosie ridesh
like yours, many of my fondest memories of childhood involve the beach.
from our earliest years, we learned the beach was the place where we really existed, where we really felt free.
the ritual began as always with a “big production.” everyone running around, grabbing their stuff, Mom making sandwiches, “did you bring the towels?” “hurry up!” finally, everyone was ready, but we were never really morning people, and the best we could do was maybe be rolling by eleven. sometimes the lots were full, and back in the day they’d let you park out on the grass, and usually Dad would drop us off in that case, and walk, or sometimes, he’d just get home from work early and say, “let’s go” and we’d all pile in and haul on down there at three or four in the afternoon, counting jackrabbits and fighting to be first to see the tower.
and if we got a spot in the little lot out there at field nine with the wacky nautical motif, and the portholes serving as windows on the building and the parking lot would burn your feet, and you’d try to walk on the white lines, reasoning that they’d be a little less scorching, but not much and the paint was blistering from the sun and the seagull shit was everywhere, along with the shattered shells of their erstwhile clam feasts, sometimes we’d watch one, hovering up there in the breeze, with a doomed clam in his beak, and with a “brkaw!” he’d drop it onto the pavement, whack! into a hundred pieces and it was munch time for gullie.
but onward through the tunnel of the little concession stand at field nine, a place that has passed from the world, but which we all posess in our memories, as if it were our own. the smell of greasy dogs, coffee and beer, and the feel of wet gritty sand cooling your feet still burning from walking barefoot on the hot pavement, and the roar of the surf mingling with the sqeals of kids and seagulls and the fat old guys hanging out back by the dune fence for reasons we could not fathom, with beer guts and cigars and back hair, sometimes speaking in Italian or whatever, but none of that for us.
right on through the burning sand, positively running into the water with an unabashed joy that is at once distant and eternal to us now, I still get it from time to time, it takes a long time unwinding from the cares of adulthood, but its worth it — on the slopes of Breckenridge, a hundred feet underwater amidst a coral reef and vasty schools of fishes, driving fast with the top down and my honey on a fine day. but back then, to us, it was just plain free. free as in free beer and free as in free speech. just whatever. still
it was kind of simple. just drop your minimal gear and go. low overhead. I’ve had time to reflect on that over the years and recently, as how families choose to spend their free time kind of define them, or vice versa. I don’t know. like just the other day we watched a family docking their sailboat, and pulling up to a restaurant over here on Chesapeake Bay. very nice life. but different. the sailboat has a captain. and everyone on board has a job, and its all kind of work. and the man is in charge, and if you’re a kid on a sailboat, your job is pretty much to sit there and stay out of the way, and try not to mess with anything. maybe if you’re good, they’ll let you coil a rope or something.
but if you’re a kid on the beach, especially a bold kid with no fear, the world is yours! jump on in! knock it out!
the bigger the waves, the better! let them beat the shit out of you! from time to time they will pound you, so watch out.
and I remember we used to categorize them. “here comes a double daddy-momma! here comes a moosie one!” yeah, moosie ridesh.
but after a couple of hours of that, and sun and salt and sand, and maybe a tuna sandwich on white bread, you’re nothing but an exhausted boy on the beach, snoozing to the sound of the breakers with your buds and your family. as innocent and content as a napping puppy. does it get any better?
…
tether rock
my fond memories of this time almost always revolve around the summer. I do remember school time, though. standing by the bus stop, which for reasons no one knew stood in front of the no-man’s house. that dude no one ever saw. but he had a big purple maple in his yard, we used to use for demolition derbys. again, we seemed to have a knack for creating games. when I exchange stories with other folks about their childhood games, they’re like “… what?” everyone played games like “freeze” or “hide and seek”, but you will remember, we used to play variations like “best fall,” where we would take turns pretending to be getting shot, like the guys in the endless war movies we used to watch, or tv shows like “rat patrol” or whatever, and we would take turns being the shooter and judge of who acted out the most “believable” death. or “sardines” which was a version of hide and seek in reverse, and we’d take kind of a perverse pleasure in the pitiful plight of the last guy who hadn’t found the can of sardines hiding behind the Farrell’s fence or whatever, like Johnny Fitzgerald, wandering around the hood all alone, crying “c’mon guys, where is everybody?”
so, we used to play demolition derbys with our bikes, I particularly remember intentionally running into no-man’s tree at full tilt. pow! and Tony’s neat sting ray with the banana seat and chopped handlebars was no match for the stout Schwinn, welded solid steel tubing, or whatever the hell it was made out of, it was fucking indestructible.
but we used to stand out there in the freezing cold, and the snow, waiting for good old bus #5, and on into the world of nuns and books and all of that.
an early memory I have of this time is of the big blackout of 1965. all the lights went out up and down the eastern seaboard, and of course Dad, being a cop, had to report in for work, whether he had it scheduled or not. so there we were, hanging around in the house with Mom. I’m sure you remember now we still had the camping gear from the great western expedition, I guess the previous year. and Mom insisted we do our homework, no matter what. doing the math, I guess I was in third grade, and you must have been in first grade. what kind of homework could we possibly have had that was so important? but anyway, Mom pulls out the Coleman kerosene lantern and fires it up on the kitchen table with the tar paper tablecloth, or whatever the hell it was made out of, and one thing leads to another, and the goddamned tablecloth catches fire, and all hell breaks loose. there’s screaming and hollering, and our homework burns up in the fire. at least, that’s our story, and we’re sticking to it, right?
when it snowed, we used to wear galoshes out there, which as you know, were kind of like fireman’s boots or something that you would wear over your shoes. I mean, here we were, rough housing kids who would be playing games like “kill the guy with the ball” or “death run” at lunchtime, but they made us wear dress shoes, white shirts and ties. its hard to believe, really. these days we’d just wear hiking boots or whatever. I like to exaggerate these tales with my kids and say “we had to walk ten miles to school through the snow, uphill, both ways, and with a mule on our back! and we were glad to do it, you little whiners!” but, you know, I’m only partly kidding.
most of the year involved school time, though, kind of cold, the grass brown and the leaves off the trees. and after the drudgery of school, we’d play rumble or just pile on each other for the hell of it, or play touch football in the street, which seemed so small and closed in when we went back to see it. but once again, sometimes we got creative.
I remember one time, we went up to Uncle Jack and Aunt Lily’s house. I think it was back when they lived in Glastonbury. And we played with Cindy in her back yard, they had a game called tether ball. It involved basically a volleyball on a rope attached to a pole.
When we got home, we got the bright idea to make a game of our own, based on the tetherball concept. Let’s see, we had a rope, and a tree, but no volleyball or the equivalent. What to do? What to do? So we looked around and found the slate pavement stones Mom and Dad had placed over that spot that always flooded around the concrete patio behind the garage that led to the porch . Yeah, let’s tie this rope to the slate, and play tetherball with that.
Of course you remember that after a short time, that thing whipped around and nearly took your ear off. As the older one, I was responsible. But as on many other occasions, and as in some of the stories to come, I let you down. I was a dope. I didn’t think like I should have, and you paid the price. I’m really sorry about all of that. I hope you will forgive me.
…
pride lincoln merc
but summertimes were full of time to kill, weren’t they? I swear, I don’t even know what time to kill means anymore. I have a todo list with 1300 items on it, for crying out loud. time to kill? time is killing me, it seems like. but anyway.
we’d hang out in the porch, or Dave Houseman’s basement or wherever and play monopoly or risk for a week straight. I remember one time in particular, we got bored of playing monopoly, so we’d go on a ride. yeah, that’s what we used to do, is mount our steeds, the schwinn typhoons or the sting rays with the banana seats, and we’d go ridin’. We were the wild ones, remember?
and we’d ride on up, all the way to Hempstead, play a couple of games of pinball or pool, or air hockey. it was in the days before pong, or any video games, (BP, if you will), but we weren’t really into that anyway, we were just passing time.
now, I don’t remember the sequence of events, precisely, maybe you can fill in the gaps. I do remember we made a practice of “going to church” all by ourselves. they had the youth mass with all that folk singing and stuff in the cafeteria of old St. Willies, and Mom and Dad just weren’t into that. but they thought it was nice that we were all taking it upon ourselves to go to church at 10:45 or whatever on a Sunday morning. what they didn’t know was that we would just as often take a detour and hang out behind the Seaford Avenue School for an appropriate period of time, and then just wander on home as holy as you please.
this worked well enough during the summer months, but as the cooler weather came in, we sought warmer hangouts. we tried lurking in the spaces behind the stairs of the school or other places like that, anywhere but church, which was warm and full of people, after all. that was simply out.
so, we just kind of wandered around.
one day, we wandered by the lincoln mercury dealer, and we just started exploring in there, looking at all the fancy cars. huh, nice.
then the next week, we got a little more adventurous and wandered into the back lot with the cars waiting for repairs of one sort or another.
then the next week, we got a little more adventurous and noticing that one of the cars was unlocked, we just kind of huddled in there for an hour or so, shooting the bull, and wandered on home, all holy from church.
then one time, we noticed there was a car that was not only unlocked, but had the damn keys in it. we were, I don’t know, eleven?
so we got bold enough to turn the key so we could get the radio and not only were we not freezing, but we had jams. cool.
I specifically remember it was on one of these occasions that I first heard Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” I remember thinking, “damn, that’s different from anything I ever heard. I’ve heard lots of love songs, but I never heard a hate song before. he really hates that chick.”
so that went on for a while.
then summer came, and one day, as I said, we were playing risk, actually, I think and someone said, we’ve been playing this fucking game for a week, I’m bored. I think it was someone who had just been knocked out.
but anyway, I don’t remember exactly, but we wandered around and somehow we wound up at pride lincoln merc.
we found a car that was open, and had keys. by this time we knew just where to look.
One of us, I guess it was Gerard, got the bright idea to start the car, and try to practice driving. Brilliant!
So he was backing up and pulling forward a little, but before you knew it, we heard “hey you kids!”
and we were like “what?!” and we got out of that car so fast it was like impossible. and we hauled ass out of there. and the guy chasing us was no slouch, I definitely remember him hopping the short little railing we usually snuck in by, like a gymnast over a pommel horse, and down into the lot, but he was no match for us. the way I remember it, we made it to the chain link fence complete with barbed wire over the top, which I later estimated to be eight feet high. I do not remember scaling that fence, the next thing I remember is being on the other side of it, with cuts in my hands, high tailing it for home, and counting heads behind and ahead of me to make sure we all made it.
we did. in two shakes of a lamb’s tail we were back on the porch, breathless, studiously pretending to be back playing our board game, but comparing wounds with one another in hushed tones, just in case a knock came at the front door.
an adventure. one among many.
…
night life
around this time we were kind of feeling our oats, and we were a little hard to contain.
we were off for the summer, and had no set schedule for waking up, and the sun went down really late, so our internal clocks were kind of fucked up.
we’d wander off to bed around ten or whatever, but we’d be up way past midnight, with nothing to do. but a kid with an active mind never has nothing to do.
once again, I think you and Gerard were the instigators. late at night you planned a rendez-vous. we had a pretty easy escape route, I think. we climbed out the window, usually the side window out onto the garage roof, up and over the top, and crabcrawling feet first down the back side on our butts, hands and feet, to the roof of the porch. and then an easy jump into the branches of the overhanging back yard maple, down and across the street to meet up with Gerard.
now what? we’d just wander around the neighborhood at one or two in the morning, doing whatever. hiding if ever a car came by in case it was a cop or something to bring us home by our ears.
I don’t recall if anything interesting ever really happened while we were out experiencing night life, or if we ever got caught. it was just an adventure to be out there, breaking the rules.
…
mohawks
now I do remember many more innocent, and maybe otherwise unremarkable episodes.
like one time up in New Hampshire, we had one of those cottages, and it had a nice little cove where we could swim and play, and we did, pushing each other off the dock, or wandering out through the mucky leaves that coated the bottom to the sandy part, and we’d soak our heads and fling them back out of the water, making it stand up in a spike, like a mohawk. and we’d splash around and pretend to be indians, and that was the kind of thing that would occupy us for hours.
but we never got far from the tv. I remember camping out on the floor of Dale Place watching cartoons, Sandy Becker or “Sunday” Fox, or Colonel Bleep or Rocky and Bullwinkle or the Wonderful World of Disney. One time up in New Hampshire, we had just watched some live action Disney movie involving a lion escaped from the zoo rampaging over town or whatever, and the hapless sherriff was driving through the town with a megaphone, shouting “we have got the situation under control!” as comical chaos reigned all around him. and as we went driving out to dinner that night, and we sat in the back seat, you turned to me, making a megaphone out of your hand and repeated “we have got the situation under control!” over and over, and I was torn with laughter, so hard I couldn’t breathe. I was at your mercy. often I remember laughing and laughing together at the silliest things for entire episodes. later that night we wound up at some restaurant, decorated with live game — rhinoceros heads mounted on the walls, zebra skins, stuff like that, and I think Dad looked around and said something like, “they’ve really captured a decor” and you turned to me and whispered in a mock “Colonel McBragg” english accent, “I say there, old chap, I’ve been hunting all over the world, and I’ve finally bagged a decor!” and I laughed out loud right there in the restaurant, and we stifled giggles like that all night.
…
psychopsychopsychopsycho
other memories from this time revolve around family visits, to our cousins, the Cullens, the Loftuses, when they still lived in Levittown, and the Currans, who lived impossibly in that little house in Bellerose. I’m kind of ashamed, to this day, I don’t even know for sure how many Currans there were, I have to count: Regina, John, Mary Alice, Janet, Elaine, Kevin, Cathy, Anne, John, that’s nine, right? Plus Aunt Eileen and Uncle John, that makes eleven. and Sometimes Nanny, for twelve. How did they all fit in there? Like the little old lady who lived in a shoe, or some kind of Christly miracle of the loaves and the fishes? But then there would be an occasion, and I remember one time in particular, when in addition to all those kids, we’d descend on them, bringing six Lowes, five Cullens, and God knows how many others, and there would be so much noise and so many people, that we’d literally overflow into the yard and the street.
And I remember it was a fine evening, early summer and the row of houses was protected by a roof of trees overhanging the street, and we’d hang out there tossing a football back and forth, “over here, over here!” but you will remember this one little neighbor kid who had just seen the recent Hitchcock picture, “Psycho” and he wasn’t interested in the football at all. evidently his sensitive mind had been exposed to a concept too appealing for him, and after watching Anthony Perkins doing his thing, he must have thought “that’s for me!” and all he could do was run up to everybody he saw, with his arm raised, elbow straight, and an imaginary butcher’s knife in his hand, bringing it down violently and repeatedly, shouting “psychopsychopsychopsycho!” and we were like “get the hell away from me, you little weirdo!” but sometimes a girl would scream and run away, and he’d chase after her gleefully attempting to stab her. I wonder whatever happened to that kid.
…
roosting and roving
but summers were mainly filled with idleness. we’d watch tv, play games, rough house, and when all that got boring, we’d just roost.
We’d climb a tree, you, me, Gerard, and his cousins Tony Cassano and Artie Billotte, David Houseman, and maybe Johnny and Billy Muller.
Up we’d go, and just hang and shoot the bull. we had a few favorite trees for climbing, mainly one of the maples in our front yard, not the curved one, but the double one. At times like this, maybe infused with the golden glow of nostalgia, in my recollection our conversations were surprisingly mature, our insights then not very different from now. Roosting up in trees, or hanging out on the street corner in front of old man Franz’s, waiting for the Mister Softee truck to come, we’d talk about politics and religion, and girls, and we’d wonder about life in outer space, overpopulation, the war, the atom bomb or whatever. I definitely remember being pretty sure someone somewhere was going to blow one up, probably us or the Russians, probably in Europe or something, and that would be it. We human beings were just too warlike. Stuff like that you might not expect from a ten year old, or whatever.
But not all our activities were of that nature. I remember under the mercury vapor lamps, we used to see who could shimmy up the lamppole and touch the top, and try not to get burns from the brushed metal on the way sliding down, and there was one kid, I forget his name, who came around for a short time, and he engaged us in a competition called “range” to see who could piss the highest, and once, using a special squeeze technique, he managed to get it all the way over the street sign.
But then Mister Softee would come, and we’d all get our fix, except Johnny Fitzgerald, who would take forever to decide, but always wind up with the same thing “oh, I’ll have a Mickey Mouse.”
But the sun would stay up late long into the summer evening and we’d be bopping out on the streecorner like so many little hoodlums until it was maybe 9:00 or later before we’d hear the call, “Andy! Jamie! Time to come home!”
And when roosting or just hanging out got boring, we’d get on our bikes and ride.
We’d ride on up to Hempstead, or Wantagh or over to Massapequa, and the new mall they’d just built, or down into the harbor and play in the construction, or we’d find an old abandoned house and explore it, like “the time and the place” with the creaky floorboards, and the musty smell of water damage, with soggy old porn magazines littering the place. we were like “what is this stuff?” and then we’d hear a sound, and imagine some old bum coming to get us and we’d high tail it out of there as fast as we could.
it was on a trips like this, over to Mays department store, in the winter, though as I recall, that we began to enhance our record collections, shoving albums like Grand Funk Railroad’s Red, or whatever, up the back of each other’s bulky winter coat and with it tucked into the back of our pants, we’d nonchalantly walk on out.
sometimes the pull job made no sense, like that box of cigars we stole from sears and tried to smoke behind Kemman’s bushes until we got sick.
and sometimes our crimes were compoundly stupid. like one time we cut school, and somehow we wound up at White’s department store. and we wandered around aimlessly until one item caught your attention: it was an aerosol can with a picture of a snorting bull on it. it supposedly smelled like bullshit. you were supposed to spray it at people when you called bullshit on them. we never found out for sure what it smelled like though. you grabbed it in an impulse and we tried to walk out of the store, but we got tagged by this overeager black woman gawk, shouting “where’s that booshit spray?!”
she hauled us back into the office, and we were sure we were going to get it. she demanded to know our phone number so she could rat us out to our parents. we were doomed. but to our great surprise and luck, when she called, only Nanny was there. and she said “just send them on home and I’ll take care of it” and so we just walked and Nanny never spoke of it. I don’t know if she chose to indulge us, or maybe she just forgot.
…
moosie pull job
but that was just an early episode in our life of crime.
when we got old enough to go to the beach on our own, either by bus, or hitchhiking, or dropped off by a parent, summer days were a constant stream of salt, surf, and shoplifting. I distinctly remember you and Gerard getting into a pulljob competetion, and Me and Tony were hanging out by the boardwalk, and you’d take turns to see who could be bolder or more innovative in your methods, until we were full from hot dogs and ice creams and whatever, we were like, that’s enough, but you went on and on, devising new and ever more creative techniques: the inside-outside method, the under-the-towel method, the buy-one-get-one-free method and stuff like that.
but after a while, we had to move on from the east bathhouse where the gawks bitch bastardly and the sunglass kid had been brought in to clean up the place, over to the central mall, where there were a lot more people, and the cover was better. it got to the point where it was so easy, it was no fun anymore, so we just moved on.
…
wantage hotel
things went on like this for a few years into high school. we were really still just kids, doing what we had always done, hanging out, playing ball, riding bikes. but some new elements began to enter the picture.
one time we rode up to Wantagh, and saw that the old Wantagh Hotel had just burned down. It was a real relic of a bygone era, next to the old train station, it must have been 100 years old.
the charred carcass of the building stood there beckoning to us from behind the yellow police line tape.
but there was no one in sight, the cops and the firemen had cleared the area and all gone home.
so we stashed our bikes out back and found a little hole that only a kid could crawl through, and went on an adventure.
Artie led, because he was the smallest and was wiry, then you, me, Tony, Gerard and Dave, who was the biggest and had some trouble crawling through the air ducts, which was what we were doing. God knows if we inhaled asbestos or worse, or if the building might have crashed down on top of us. Looking back, we might easily have died.
But this part of the building looked pretty stout, really, and we crawled along, until Artie came to a vent screen, and he shouted “Holy Shit!”
He pushed off the screen, and crawled out into a large, dark, perfectly preserved, obviously well used bar. It was fully stocked with scotch, gin, vodka and everything else.
We were like, “score!”
so I guess we’ve departed from the typical misty eyed recollections of an innocent youth, a bygone time of sandlot baseball and homemade fishin’ poles.
frankly, this later part of childhood or adolescence I remember was a little bit darker. we didn’t think of it that way at the time, for us, it was just the world.
I remember what we called the creek was a fig leaf stand of trees, filled with rusty old beer cans, construction debris and the mountains we used to play “king of the hill” on were piles of fill dirt, probably dumped there illegally by some lazy long ago trucker. and the creek was fed from a freshwater spring called Davis Field, just this side of Seaman’s neck road, that in the winter, when we were little, would sometimes freeze over. that’s where we learned to skate and play hockey. but by this time, Davis Field was being filled for construction of the Seaford-Oyster Bay Expressway, and the creek was polluted, and it was 1969 or 1970, and the world was going to hell.
so there we were, in the belly of the old Wantage Hotel, in a bar haunted by the ghosts of thousands of old commuters and traveling salesmen who spent the night there hiding from their wives, or on the road, traveling on the railroad in the days before everyone had a car, stopping over in Wantagh to try to sell their farm equipment or whatever and they slept in these little rooms we were exploring and they sat at this bar and complained about the commies or the hippies or the hordes of immigrants and their children burgeoning out of Brooklyn and Queens into this old farmland and fisherman’s stomping grounds, filling these thousands and thousands of tract homes popping up on the old potato farms, like mushrooms after a rain.
and we were completely unconscious of these old ghosts, as we cleverly formed an assembly line to haul the goods out of there as fast as we could before we got caught. I remember the debates on what we should take: “should we take the scotch or the canadian or the vodka? what’s the best kind? the four roses or the dewars? what about the creme de menthe?” and it wasn’t long before we had a whole pile, and we dashed across the parking lot to the old barn out back that was still intact and hid most of it there, and took the stuff from there back to the house one or two bottles at a time, and stashed them behind the bushes or buried them in the yard.
and we worked our way through that stuff for months, there was so much, we couldn’t handle it all, and we wound up even selling some of it to our friends. and therein lies many a tale, I’m sure, but for some reason I don’t really remember so clearly.
one episode I do remember, only vaguely, involved a fifth of scotch, that somehow you and I pretty much split, over water and ice.
I do not know how we got it down us or that we got sick. I do remember losing track of you, and thinking that somehow we were going to go to the beach on our bicycles. You made it as far as like Locust Avenue, and I went the other direction like a little drunken clown and crashed and passed out in the woods beside Wantagh Avenue.
When I came to, I got up and walked home, because I couldn’t find my bicycle. Sometime later I wandered back to the scene of the crime, and there it was, right where I had left it, crashed in the weeds.
Over the years, I’ve done a lot of dumb things like that. Its almost like a defining aspect of my personality. Some people think I’m smart or nice or have character or whatever, and some people think the opposite, I’m sure, but deep down, I’m really kind of a retard, or emotionally disturbed or something, and most of the time, I’m just covering. So, if over the years, any of these dumb things I’ve done have wound up causing you any pain, please know I’m really sorry, or I would be if I was even aware enough to know about it.
price and comp
but the way I recall it, we weren’t bad so much as we were just adventurous and dumb.
I remember one time we were coming back from the beach, it was just you and me, and I guess we took the bus back to Wantagh Avenue and Merrick Rd., and we were walking home from there.
It was a Sunday, and all the stores were closed. We turned off Merrick onto Wiloughby or whatever where there was this building supply place. Of course, closed like everything else. Their yard out back was filled with rolls of tarpaper and palettes of shingles and was protected by a chain link fence locked with a chain and padlock. There was enough play in the chain though that two scrawny kids could just squeeze in there between the gates.
Why? no reason. just to play. we played hide and seek in and around the piles of construction materials, and there was a palette of shingles backed up to the back wall of the brick building with a space so tight that no man could squeeze into. but you could. and there you were, hiding from me, when you found the door. “Hey, Andy! I found a door!” and it was unlocked.
Who could resist? so in we went, creeping as quietly as we could. We thought, maybe they have an alarm? Maybe there’s a security guard, or a dog?
But as we crept around the warehouse, there wasn’t a sound but our footsteps squeaking on the concrete floor.
Finally, we made our way to the little front office with a window facing out onto Merrick Rd, and a counter, and what today we’d call an old fashioned mechanical cash register. Back then it was just a cash register.
we crept behind the counter to avoid being seen, on the off chance that a cop was driving by, and noticed two little heads peeking up from behind the counter of a closed building supply store. still crouching, I reached up and hit the big return key on the old contraption. it opened with a rattle and a clang. still reaching up over our heads without looking, we felt around in the drawers to see what was in there.
it was kind of a stash. probably forty bucks and change, plus someone’s lucky silver dollar, I guess. we took it all. we were bad.
…
hollis
so it wasn’t long after this that we got the bright idea to spend some of that loot.
I don’t know how we came up with this idea, but we decided to cut school and buy train tickets into the city. wow. pretty bold, and adventurous. but for some reason we decided to buy one-way tickets. wow. pretty dumb.
I do not know what we were thinking. but again, being the older one, I really should be responsible for that bone headed manoever. then as now, I was kind of smart-dumb, oxymoron man. I was smart enough to figure, here we have x dollars, and the ticket costs so much, we just need to keep enough in reserve to buy a return ticket. ok, I guess, as far as it goes, but then you actually have to remember to keep enough in reserve when the time comes. but why not just buy the return ticket now? no reason.
but we rode the train in, and its really not that big a deal to see a couple of kids on the train on a school day, high school kids did it all the time, like John, going to Molloy in Jamaica, or whatever, but we probably did get a few raised eyebrows.
as I recall it, we were positive geniuses at being dopey. so we had it all planned out. we packed plain clothes into our school bags. I guess we were both still in St. Willies. How old could we have been? we changed and stashed our school bags in the woods, so we wouldn’t be wandering around in our school uniforms. (unbeknownst to us, we were spied right at the outset by Mrs. Galvin, I think, who called Mom, who spent the whole day frantic and worried.)
but she had no idea how worried she should be, because by that time, we were mingling with the pimps and hookers and drug dealers in Penn Station and were wandering up 7th avenue to Times Square. this was before it was cleaned up somewhat and made into a kind of New York tourist theme park or whatever the hell it is now. But back then it was a pretty damned funky place for two tweens from the suburbs with twenty eight bucks and change burning a hole in their pockets.
I remember some old hooker beckoning to us from a stairwell, “come on up, honey.” I actually considered it for a minute. “Sorry, I don’t think we could afford it,” I said. She just laughed. And we quickened our pace a little bit and got out of there. Seriously, how old could we have been? Eleven? Thirteen? Holy shit.
You’ll remember that one way or another we made it all the way to Columbus Circle, where the convention center stood back then. That was the day of the auto show.
I was completely entranced and hypnotized by the shiny cars and the pretty models showing them off, and I totally forgot to doublecheck our reserves when I bought us two tickets to the show.
So that was fun, but time was getting away from us, and we dashed back to Penn Station, I don’t know if we took the subway or what, but when we got there, and counted up our remaining loot, and looked at the price of the return ticket, the math did not compute. Dope! Much later in life, in a totally different context, I met a Texas Sherriff from “hang ’em high” Williamson County where I was serving on a Grand Jury. He said, in his inimitable Texas drawl, “some people say ‘crime doesn’t pay’. I say ‘crime just makes you stupid.'”
So once again we came up with a smart-dumb plan. The best we could do was buy subway tickets out to the end of the line as far as it would go, and studying the map, we found that would take us almost all the way to Nassau and onto familiar territory, where we’d have to hitchhike the rest of the way home.
Turned out the subway line we took came up a little short, and we popped up somewhere in Queens, in a town called Hollis.
We had no idea where the hell we were. So we started asking around, and we probably did seem a little odd, asking questions like “what town is this?” Or, “do you know where we are?” Even laughing at how stupid it sounded ourselves. But no matter who we asked, we got weirder and weirder responses. One old lady looked at us like we were some kind of little aliens. Or maybe she was on her afternoon break from the mental institution. Who knows. No one seemed to speak English. To this day, in my mind the town of Hollis represents a kind of warped twilight zone, a surreal place from another dimension.
Finally, we made our way to the Cross Island and caught a ride, I guess eventually we got someone to take us all the way to Wantagh, and we walked from there.
But by that time, it was already getting dark and we knew we were toast. So we made up some lame story. I remember we were clever enough to realize that we were going to be caught, so our story would be more credible if we “copped a plea to a lesser offence.” I think we used that exact phrase. What kind of nuts were we?
So we admitted that we had played hookie and claimed that we had been playing in the giant dirt piles from the construction down by Wantagh Park, and we claimed that we just lost track of the time. Yeah, we were that dumb.
Of course, they were pissed, and we were in deep trouble for skipping school, but our plan kind of worked, in a way, because they never expected what we had actually done, or where we got the money to do it.
…
I’ll leave a few pages blank here, not because I’m out of stories.. oh no.
as a token of stories the world is still not ready to hear,
in rememberence of old friends lost, some no longer here,
of the paths we’ve traveled my brother,
and adventures to seek tomorrow, and, God willing, together.