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                    Getting Jumped at Pelham Bay Station

It all started when my cousin Richie punched some guy  in the face at the Mahopac fireman’s’ fair in Putnam County where I spent my teenage summers. Richie knocked this guy over the hood of a car in the parking lot. I don’t know how the argument started but the incident was to haunt me for years. The guy that Richie hit was a member of one of the local gangs in Pelham Bay. That’s where I lived when I wasn’t spending the summer in Putnam County. Of course the guy Richie decked would remember me. Richie was from Queens, but had moved to Putnam County several years before. I was the one who had to go back to the Bronx and face the music.

So it happened one day when I was getting off the bus at Pelham Bay Station, on my way home from Dewitt Clinton H.S. I got decked. Pow! Right in the jaw. I went down like a rock.  I looked up and saw the face of the guy Richie had hit in Mahopac. And there were a few more faces too, that I recognized from the gang this guy belonged to. Now, getting jumped while weighing 120 lbs is serious stuff. I was a skinny kid and these guys looked like they lifted weights and shaved twice a day. Why wasn’t I one of those buckskin clad mountain men  – totally without fear , able to beat up grizzly bears with one arm in a sling? How could this humiliating reality be reconciled with the stuff I saw in the movies on Saturday afternoons? Gangs were to be confronted and faced down. Good guys (me) were supposed to prevail over bad guys (them). But there I was, on the pavement at Pelham Bay Station, my jaw hurting like hell and these guys cursing at me and kicking me with their pointy shoes.

In my twenties I became involved with the martial arts. Of course, it was too late to do anything about the Pelham Bay Station massacre. In fact, I probably became attracted to the martial arts because of the Pelham Bay Station massacre.  Achievement has its’ genesis in failure. Years later at age 56, after returning to the martial arts I became a Black Belt. I wonder if I would have tolerated 5 years of hard physical training in my fifties if the Pelham Bay Station incident had never occurred.

So I say thank you for the punch in the jaw. It may have motivated me to do something few men attempt at that stage of their lives.

I still go to the fireman’s’ fair in Mahopac. But I go with my grandsons. I don’t go with Richie.

                    The Elevator

The Bronx six story apartment house that I grew up in had an elevator. I wasn’t born in that apartment house, but since we moved there when I was three years old so that’s almost like being born there so the elevator became a routine part of my childhood and teenage years. The elevator was more than a device that brought one up or down between apartment house floors. It was a kind of mandatory social center of gravity for everyone who lived in the apartment house. I had to take the elevator to throw out the garbage in the basement (after the dumbwaiters were shut down) and I almost always took it going up to our fifth floor apartment. So, I was in that elevator at least a half dozen times a day. And so was everyone else who lived in the apartment house.  Yes, I was forced to say “Hello Mr. Leary” and then stand there speechless for five flights of elevator ride waiting for the elevator to finally stop.  Why was that so hard to do? What inhibitions were at work? And why, when I was alone in the elevator, did I always insist on drumming my fingers against the elevator walls for five flights? If Freud rode that elevator, what would he have done?

The elevator had its’ own code of ethics. One did not hold the door open for more than 30 seconds getting on or getting off. If you tried to, someone on another floor, who was waiting for the elevator, would start rattling the exterior elevator door on the floor that they were on. This was similar to knocking on the radiator. It was one of the many interesting apartment house internal communications systems. It was always amusing to see the look on the “rattlers” faces when the elevator finally arrived at their floor and everyone knew where the rattling came from.

My friends systematically, over several years, busted off the decorations that lined the inside of the elevator along the top of the elevator walls. These decorations were cut into the steel wall but could be broken off by bending them back and forth until they snapped and fell down the elevator shaft. There was one last one that defied being snapped off, it was in the corner and survived for many years. One time as I rode the elevator on my way to visit my mother 30 years later, I was tempted to snap that last decoration off and mail it to my friend Paulie who was the chief snapper of yesteryear, but I never did. One of the big regrets of my life.

When my brothers and I brought the garbage down to the basement in the evening, we had a routine that went like this: You held the elevator door open with your leg as you stretched out as far as you could to minimize the distance between the open elevator door and the garbage can which was on the other side of the room, then you quickly ran to the garbage can, opened it, threw the garbage in, and got back to the elevator before the interior sliding elevator door closed and stranded you in that mysterious and spooky basement. We became so good at this that we never got stranded down there and to this day I can hold any door open with one leg and stretch a good eight feet or so to reach something.

In all of the years of taking that elevator up or down, I don’t recall anyone ever pushing any of the buttons that called for the elevator only once. In fact, the average multi-push sequence was about 5 times. And of course, if you were in a hurry, you pushed the button rapidly about 15 times. Everybody knew that the response of the elevator was proportional to the number of times that you pushed the elevator button.

Somehow, that elevator carried sofas, refrigerators, and other objects that were larger than the elevator.  Getting large objects into and out of the elevator took time, and that really set the door rattlers off. And to add insult to injury, when the elevator got to their floor, it was too full for them to get on.

That elevator forced everyone in the apartment house to say hello to one another at least once a day. Even me. It was the crucible of enforced recognition.

I never took the elevator going down to the lobby.  No hellos. Just two steps at a time and swing around the post at the bottom of the flight. Hellos were for grown-ups anyway.

                Calling For Paul

Is Paul home? There I was in 1954, on Park View Avenue “calling for Paul”.
I would knock on his front door until his mother showed up and I would say “Is Paul home”. Knocking on a door or ringing a bell constituted a significant act that was universally known as “calling for someone”.

Ma. I’m going out to “call for Paulie”.  Maybe we’ll  “call for Chick” (who
lived next door to Paulie), and then we’ll “call for Charlie” and all go to the movies.

Calling for anyone was the key to going out.  “I’m going out” didn’t have enough punch. “I’m going out to call for Paul” was full of semantic value. Calling for someone was the reason for going out. Going out to call for a friend was a way of liberation in the early fifties in the Bronx. Going out meant leaving the confines of the apartment. Calling for a friend carried a social significance known only to those who roamed the Bronx streets on a summer evening in 1954.

Calling for a friend of the same sex had a totally different flavor than calling for someone of the opposite sex. In fact, calling for a girl (if you were a guy) smacked of  domestication. Although it wasn’t a formal date, calling for a girl carried serious implications to a guys’ reputation. It reeked of relationship. Possible pairing. Potential linking up. Going steady. God knows what would come next. Exclusion from the guy group, if only temporary, was a serious step. Calling for a girl had to be connected to intense infatuation. It was the only acceptable excuse. Consequently, “calling for someone” rarely applied to inter-sex door knocking.

Calling for someone constituted universal permission to go out for the evening. “Going out” had to be justified. “Calling for Paul” was justification for “going out”. Together, they were the complete ticket.

I don’t “call for Paul” these days. We are still close friends. He lives in Maryland
and I live in Mahopac, NY. Our wives are also close childhood friends. We’re all
from the same neighborhood in the Bronx. So, I guess we kind of call for each
other in a family sense when we all get together each year. But it’s not the same as knocking on Paulies’ door on Park View Avenue on a warm summer evening in 1954 and asking his mom “Is Paul home?”

                  1610 Mahan Avenue

The apartment house was the center of the universe. New York City was “out there” somewhere, and “The Bronx” was what one could see from the fifth floor window.

On a rainy Saturday the stairs of the apartment house filled with kids “trading comics”. The apartment house was a personal Galleria, a mall before malls. It was at once a sanctuary and a cell.

The apartment house was a haven. It was a retreat when the world got nasty. And it was a place to leave when the world got interesting.

The roof of the apartment house smelled of tar and freshly laundered sheets. Dozens of clotheslines graced the roof before television displaced them for aerials. The door to the roof was made of heavy steel and it always seemed to slam shut behind you. The walls at the edges of the roof were less than waist high and frighteningly inadequate.

The basement smelled of fresh paint. It had rows of Con Edison meters along one wall and contained mysterious rooms that could only have been filled with forbidden fruit. The basement was a modern day catacomb where wash was done, baby carriages stored, and the Super roamed.

The apartment house elevator was a spine connecting a ganglia of tenants. All occupants sooner or later came face to face in the elevator. The elevator may have been physically vertical, but it enforced the quintessential concept of level ground.

The apartment house stoop were the steps of the Coliseum. A place to sit and tell stories and to watch the traffic on Mahan Avenue. A great place to play stoop ball. The rounded steps of the apartment house stoop were worn smooth from hundreds of  legs and thousands of spaldeens.

The apartment house at 1610 Mahan Avenue is still here. People must still meet in the elevator. Kids must still play ball against the brick walls and draw in the asphalt street with chunks of chalk.  A young crowd must still be hanging around on the corner of 1610 Mahan Avenue and Middletown road. Couples must still be making out in the doorway of the grocery store after dark. And, surely, someone must still be cooking chicken heart goulash on the fifth floor.

                The Parkchester Girls
                  (Tight Levi’s)

Oh, there were girls in our neighborhood. But they were just girls. The Parkchester girls were different. They wore tight Levis and had that baby doll look. I lived in Pelham Bay. Parkchester was only a few stops away on the Pelham Bay line of the IRT.  Emigration was easy. Either way.

At first we went to Parkchester, the St. Helenas dances on Sunday night were the catalyst. There were park benches at the Oval where we would sit around and get to know each other. But that didn’t last very long. The Parkchester girls ultimately came to Pelham Bay. And we never were the same.

Tight Levi’s were magic. Infatuation was a function of blue denim. For some reason, none of the local girls wore tight Levi’s. But the Parkchester girls certainly did. They would stride off the Buhre Avenue station and march down Crosby Avenue to where we hung out on Middletown Road, Levi’s and lipstick and God, who knew what the evening would bring.

I remember Dottie, and Faith, and Rita. Calvin Klein, eat your heart out. These girls were 40 years ahead of you. They knew how to walk the denim road. And as we were dazed by their strut, we dizzily became their subjects. A date with blue denim was a date to relish for all time. Our bankrupt morality was in arrears. But those rears were perfect.

Winter From the Fifth Floor

I would wake up just as it was getting light outside and stumble into the bathroom intentionally avoiding looking out our bedroom window. During the winter months, if it had snowed, the frosted glass of the bathroom window would give our bathroom an eerie white glow. This was the way I wanted to discover that snow had fallen during the night.

We lived on the fifth floor, looking south over Bruckner Boulevard and the Indian museum on Middletown Road in the Bronx. Our view was spectacular. The Throggs Neck and Whitestone bridges accentuated a grand panorama of Bronx skyline. Way out, on the horizon, Long Island was a faint blur. Yet on a clear winter day we could see the tops of the tallest buildings of downtown Manhattan. It was the perfect way to watch a snowstorm. A snowstorm at night muffled the lights along Bruckner Boulevard and the intensity of the snowfall could be measured by how many red lights showed through the haze of snow. A street lamp, on the other side of Middletown Road, provided a halo of light for telling which way the wind was blowing the snow. Of course, if the wind were from the Northeast, I would know that we were in for it.

A daytime snowfall displayed it’s own hallmarks. The fence that surrounded the Indian Museum had a horizontal metal bar about six inches from the ground. As soon as this piece of metal was covered, I knew that the snowfall was significant.

Certain sounds from the street were amplified five stories up. A typical snowstorm sound was the sound of the super’s snow shovel. It was a large pushing blade that had a distinct rasping noise to it. It signaled to the neighborhood that enough snow had fallen for serious shoveling to begin.

I knew the weather signs from our fifth floor bedroom window like an old sailing captain knows the sea. I could sense a change in weather by watching the shifting movements of smoke coming from various buildings all along the horizon. I kept logs in old fashioned notebooks and still have them to review and remember.

Weather forecasting was less accurate, but much more intriguing then. The signs from the fifth floor were all I had to work with. I had a lot of fun trying to out guess the official weather forecasts. Now all I have to do is watch the weather channel to see my piece of the world on radar and the earth from 25,000 miles up. It’s a different kind of fascination, but the mystique is missing. The view from the fifth floor, for a young boy, was an experience that no television channel or website will ever replace.

                    Closets

Our fifth floor apartment in the Bronx, at 1610 Mahan Avenue, had two bedrooms, a foyer, a kitchen, and a living room. It also had three closets. My father had his closet at the end of the foyer. Every article of clothing that he owned was in that closet. My mothers’ closet was where the foyer turned toward the bathroom. All she owned was in her closet. The third closet, the closet in the “hall”, where the foyer began, was a kind of community closet that held a variety of household goods and Grandmas’ coat.

Mom used her closet as her dressing room. (She and my father slept in the living room on fold-out sofa). She would open the closet door to block the foyer and have a full four square feet all to herself. Dad just got dressed in the foyer in front of his closet (and whoever happened to be walking through the foyer). I have many memories of walking out of our bedroom (my two brothers and I slept in the one of the two bedrooms) in the wee hours of the morning on the way to the bathroom, and seeing my father getting dressed in the foyer, getting ready to go to work.

My brothers and I did not have closets. We had dressers. In those days, a dresser was a horizontal closet that held every thing that could be squashed into its’ drawers. This included winter coats, gloves, hats, and scarves. As boys growing up in the Bronx, Mom countered the invasion of motorcycle jackets and levis by adorning us with scarves and three quarter length mackinaws. Neither my brothers nor I were ever mistaken for Marlon Brando in the Pelham Bay area of the Bronx.

Dads’ closet was a miracle of consolidation. It contained his fire department uniforms as well as his shoes, boots, fishing gear, shirts, and tools. Boys that grow up on farms in the country must have felt about their fathers’ workshops and barns the way we felt about Dads’ closet. It was a mysterious place that that had leathery smells and hinted at a sense of what it would be like to be a man someday.

Moms’ closet was a private place that only Mom was allowed to enter. Although my brothers and I would occasionally peek into Dads’ closet, we wouldn’t dream of looking into Moms’ closet.

Grandma lived with us and the door to her room was always closed when she wasn’t home (she worked all day as a baker at the Williamsburg Savings Bank in Brooklyn) and my brothers and I rarely got a glimpse into her room. She used the closet in the hall to hang up her coat when she came home from work, but the rest of her clothes were in her room somewhere.

Our kitchen had large cupboards. Cupboards in the Bronx were “kitchen closets”. Kitcheny stuff would take priority in the cupboards. But ultimately, anything that could fit that in those cupboards that couldn’t be stored anywhere else wound up in them.

The closet doors had glass doorknobs and about 50 coats of paint that gave them the aura of gates to special domestic sanctums. The closet doors were portals to the mysterious essence and sensation of what our parents were. Somehow, Mom and Dad seemed to emanate from their closets each day. How they would smell, what they would look like, and how they would behave on any day, all seemed to be somehow stored in their closets.

The apartment defined the contour and space of the world we grew up in. The closets were the loci of that space.

A Bronx day

It’s a May Saturday morning. The sun is streaming through the curtains of our bedroom on the fifth floor of 1610 Mahan Avenue in the Bronx. I’m 14 years old and it’s 1952.The guy who maintains the Indian museum cross the street is cutting the grass. Bruckner Boulevard, down at the end of Middletown Road is humming with traffic. I hear voices coming from the foyer. Ma and Grandma are up, and have been for some time. Dad is working a 48 hour tour with the fire department. My brothers are still asleep. I just lay there and think. Baseball and girls dominate my thoughts. Images of both keep criss-crossing in front of our bedroom ceiling, which is what I’m staring at. The guys will be going down to the park soon. I’d better get up. If they choose up a game, I might miss out. Then again, the fields might be taken and we’ll hitting flies out on the grass outside of the fields. I can show up late for that. But, I’d better get moving. My brothers are stirring. We all share a bedroom. I’ve got the big bed. It just worked out that way. Maybe because I’m the oldest. John and Ed sleep in single beds against the wall. I sleep in a bigger bed in the middle of the bedroom.

When the windows are open on a warm spring morning, the air from five stories up flows over us like honey. It’s Saturday. Baseball for me, and who knows what John and Ed have up their sleeve. There’s always something to do. Hang out, go to the movies up at the Pilgrim on Westchester Avenue, go down to the park by the waterfront, there’s plenty to do. Up and at ‘ em.

Ma, miraculously has breakfast ready by the time I come out of the bathroom. How’d she do it? She” senses” things in the apartment. Knows it’s pulse. Can tell exactly when something or the other is about to happen. Is always prepared. And Grandma does as much on another level that is has a deeper rhythm. Grandma is the long range planner. Mom is the tactical officer. Mom operationalizes daily things. Grandma works in the background setting overall strategies. And Dad just works like hell trying to fund the whole magilla. It’s a pretty good team.

I chug breakfast down, and I’m out. Sneakers are on and grab my glove. I can smell the spring smell as I go out into the hallway outside our apartment door. The super opened the hall windows and warm spring air is sweeping through the apartment house. Life is fantastic. Down the stairs. I never use the elevator going down. Two steps at a time and left hand on the banister and use the post on the bottom to swing and pick up angular momentum for the turn that will take me to the next set of stairs. The same thing again. Five flights. Then down the two or three steps to the lobby and out through the two doors to the street.

-‘

The sun hits me as I hit the sidewalk It’s warm out. Perfect for baseball. The guys are probably around the corner, hanging out by Tony’s candy store. About 20 steps or so to the comer and there they are. Paulie, Miller, Charlie, Chick, and Jack are there aready. Paulie and Miller are having a catch. Everybody is in T shirts. A few of the girls are there too. My cousin Mimi is there. She’s PauIie’s steady.
There’s going to be a good crowd. The day is perfect. In about an hour or so a lot of guys show up and we head for the park Pelham Bay Park is only a few blocks away. It’s got two semi-pro fields that are kept in great shape. Once in a while we catch them empty and choose up sides. There’s enough of us today for a game, but the fields are already taken. Big guys. No way we are going to chase them off. They’ll’ kill us. We pass the fields and go to the long stretch of grass by the stadium. A bunch of guys from somewhere else are playing” fast pitching in” against the stadium wall with spaldeens. No problem, where we play we’re not in their way. One of-the guys grabs a bat and the rest of us run out in the field.

Flies are up. Catch a fly and you get a chance to hit the ball out. also, if you pull in a grounder and the batter sets the bat down in front of him, you throw the ball on the ground toward the bat and if it hits the bat and bounces up in the air and the guy doesn’t catch the ball before it hits the ground again, you get up. So, there’s two ways to get up. Getting up is great because you get a chance to show how far you can hit the ball. The whole idea is to hit the ball over everyone’s
head and back them up as much as possible, That way, their throws home are wimpy and they’ll probably miss the bat that you lay down. A few guys can really sock the ball. It’s not always a size thing. It’s a swing thing. Some guys can get a lot more bat to the ball than other guys can. But big arms do help, and some of the guys who are working out are not only are having a good time just wearing T shirts in front of the girls, but are slamming the ball as well. Pays to work out when warm spring mornings come around in the Bronx.

Some of the guys are hanging around talking with the girls who showed up. They play once in a while but take long breaks on the grass with the girls. Others, like me, are confirmed 14 year old bachelors and play constantly. Not that we’d rather split our time like the others, but we have only connected bat-to-ball in this life, and not lips-to-lips. We play till about 1 o’clock in the afternoon and it’s really getting hot. We’re all sweating and getting tired of what we’re doing.
Someone says he’s thirsty, and that’s it. We pack up and head for Tony’s candy store for egg creams or lime rickys. I go upstairs for lunch. Ma does it again. Lunch is ready on cue. A quick sandwich and a glass of milk and I’m out again. I hear the guys downstairs in front of the candy store below our living room window. I stick my head out and yell “Where we going this afternoon?” Someone says,” Up to the “pillbox”. That’s the name we use for the Pilgrim movie theatre up on the avenue. There’s a matinee that everyone wants to see. The “married” guys have their arms around their girls as we walk up Roberts Avenue, the rest of follow up in the rear, making all kinds of noise and talking about the morning.

“Did ya’ see Paulies’ shot?” “Man, that ball was a mile up there. I could hardly see it, Or, “Jack spent the morning talking with the girls again.” “Said he hurt his finger and couldn’t swing” And it went on and on until we reached the movie.

We hit the movie in the middle of the show. This makes no difference to us. We just stay past the end to the part we came in on. That’s how we see movies. The “married” guys make out over by the wall. Most of us though, just sit there and sound (make remarks about) on the movie. Piss off the matron a couple of times and she almost kicks us out.

The walk back is through the lots on Crosby avenue. The movie was a swashbuckler and the lots have old foundation walls that we climb on and jump off with the sticks that we picked up for swords. The movie is reenacted many times with new endings that favor our individual fantasies.

Home in time for supper. Perfect timing. My brothers are home too. Ma has supper on the table. It’s another miracle. The day has been great. Life is perfect. It will always be like this. But there’s that girl thing, and how come hitting the ball felt better than talking with the girls? What’s Jack know that I don’t? Heck of a choice. Baseball is better. Or is it?

The Apartment

By Frank Schmidt

Well, it finally happened. After 54 years, Mom has to leave the apartment in the Bronx. My brothers and I are clearing it out. going through dresser drawers and closets that contain the artifacts of that other world we came from. We all grew up in the apartment. It’s really all we knew until we went into the Navy. Rumor has it that when we grew too big to pass Dad in the foyer, we had to ship out. And we did, one by one. The apartment was a fifth floor apartment with two bedrooms, a kitchen, living room, bathroom – and of course, a foyer. Years ago it also had a working dumbwaiter, but that got sealed up as the neighborhood calcified. The apartment picked up the hum of Eastern Boulevard (which became Bruckner Boulevard) in the early days, and then picked up the muffled roar of the New England Thruway as the East Bronx underwent renovation. You could see the Whitestone Bridge, and then, later, the Throggs Neck Bridge very clearly from the fifth floor window of the apartment. We grew up I with the hum, roar, and view, that only a fifth floor Bronx apartment could provide. I thought it would be tougher leaving the apartment. But things happened that changed some of the old memories, like getting rid of the old toilet that didn’t have a tank, and replacing the old bedroom windows that had six frames with new modern windows that had a modern single frame. The biggest change was replacing the old bathroom window that had a frosted surface with an ordinary see-through window. As a kid I used to look at that old bathroom window on a winter morning and instantly knew from the glare of the bathroom window whether it had snowed during the night. Recently, the elevator was renovated and the old buttons were replaced with new, modern looking buttons. So, the toilet, the windows, the elevator buttons, all that were part of the feeling of the apartment were gone. Takes the sting out of it, I guess. We’re keeping the apartment for the month of September, even though Mom moved out at the end of August. There’s still some “stuff’ to work through. The secretary in the foyer is a family heirloom and we can’t leave it (better to leave the T.V.) and there may be some things still up in the far reaches of the closets that have been hidden for 30 or 40 years. But, on Oct. 1 we will be out of the apartment and years of memories, attending PS71; playing in the OLA schoolyard; Pelham Bay Park; the candy store we called “Garbers;” staying out after dark when we were kids, throwing crayons out of the window to see the sidewalk turn colors when the sun came up; trading comics on the apartment house stairs on a rainy Saturday; taking the garbage down to the mysterious basement; setting up the Christmas train table and tree; keeping food fresh on the fire escape; listening to the sounds in the hall outside of the apartment door after midnight; making snowballs from the slushy snow on the brick windowsill ledge; playing “Lavball” with a rolled up sock and ruler in the living room/foyer space; falling in love with the girl on the fourth floor-but getting nowhere; going down the stairs two at a time; watching a developing snowstorm obliterate the boulevard; listening to the caretaker cutting the grass in the Indian museum across the way; lying in bed with the flu listening to “Baby Snooks,” and “Captain Midnight; listening to my first rock and roll song:
“Earth Angel”; getting dressed for my first dance (St. Helena’s, of course…); knocking off half a bottle of J&B with my brother in our old bedroom while we got dressed for our youngest brother’s wedding; listening to my mother and father talking late into the night about the war; waiting in the bedroom while Santa Claus came down the fire escape and through the window into the living room; entering the living room with the magic of Christmas eve all around me; lying in bed on a Saturday morning with the sun coming through the bedroom window thinking about baseball; listening to Glenn Miller playing “Sleepy lagoon” on the hi-fi in the living room while the curtains blew softly in the summer breeze; listening to Mel Allen and the Yankee games in our bedroom on that old wooden radio; frying Italian sausage in the kitchen on a winter morning; coming up from the street with my cotton gloves all wet from the snow and balls of ice sticking to the cotton; putting on a white shirt and a red tie for the PS71 color guard; coming up from the street all sweaty from a game of ringaleaveo; eating flank steak in the kitchen with my brothers, Mother, Father and Grandma; going to Bronx Beach for the day and just looking at the ceiling of the bedroom that I shared with my brothers; all will be pure memory without the apartment.

It had to happen one day.

But, maybe it was happening all along…

Underage in the Bronx

There was the time when we figured that we would pull off a major coup. Paulies’ folks were out for the evening and the house was free. We’d order a keg of beer from the local distributor and ask the Parkchester girls to drop in (imports, if you will…we were in Pelham Bay, but the Parkchester girls were oh so cute.) Nothing to it. Charlie would make the call to the distributor because he sounded good on the phone. The keg would be delivered to Paulies’ house and we would have a party. The Parkchester sweethearts would be invited from the infamous Parkchester “Oval”. It took a pretty good party to get them on the train and then hoof it to Pelham Bay. But what the heck, the keg of beer would make the difference. Charlie will make the call. “This is Mr. Blah Blah. I would like to have a keg of beer delivered to blah blah blah.” Charlie was real steady. How could anyone question his resonating voice (he was our Walter Cronkite). It looked like a great evening ahead. Summertime and beer and the girls from Parkchester. Who cares if we were sixteen? We were beer drinking vets anyway. Holy Name meetings at the church assured that.

Charlie makes the call. He really sounds good. He orders the keg. The guy on the other end of the phone, at the last minute, asks Charlie his age. Charlie says eighteen. (Eighteen? That’s too close..) Sounds fishy to the distributor.  He says to Charlie “Is your father home?” Cahrlie says yes and looks at Chick. The distributor says “put your father on”. Charlie hands the phone to Chick. The guy on the other end of the Phone says to Chick “How old is yopur son?” Chick says “Eighteen.” The distributore quickly asks Chick, “How old are you?” Chick says “twenty one.”

Partys’ over folks…Cancel the call to Parkchester. Now it’s just another summer evening hanging out on the corner. But what an evening it could have been.

Schoolyard Anxiety

By Frank Schmidt

Schoolyard basketball. Three on three. Winners stay up. Some pretty BIC’s sitting on the bench, watching and holding our jackets (we, the Gladiators). I’m 6 feet tall now, in good shape, but where was it then? I was too short, too light, and I had sciatica. Useless under the backboard and all the time they watched. Who knew their secret language? Was a good jump shot a virile thing? Did testosterone flow with a drive to the basket? Had to look good. No sneakers then. A layup with leather soles was a dance. The inevitable slide next to the bench was a statement. And if a layup went in, it was Clint Eastwood and Marlon Branda rolled up in a moment of glory. Did they notice? What were they whispering about? Does winning six or seven games in a row mean a movie date? We were very much kings and paupers then.Royalty through passing. Dribble your way to fame. Candy store notoriety will surely come to those who stay on the court. They watched us, and we watched them. And I jumped, but didn’t jump. Sciatica. Not today! Not with them watching! Drive and slide. That’s it. Drive and slide near the bench. It will be as good as the rebound that can’t happen. Sciatica! Sixteen years old with sciatica in the schoolyard. Drive and slide. Thank God I’m not wearing sneakers. Can’t drive and slide with sneakers. Near the bench. Hook shot! In. She’s smiling.I’m sweating. It’s 45° out and I’m sweating. But she’s smiling. Drive and slide. Hold my jacket for one more game.
We won.