Places

Things heard. Things seen

BRUCE JACKSON

BLAZEVOX[BOOKS]
Buffalo, New York
Places: Things heard. Things seen
by Bruce Jackson
Copyright © 2019

Published by BlazeVOX [books]

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without

the publisher’s written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews.

Printed in the United States of America

Interior design, typesetting and Cover Design by Geoffrey Gatza

First Edition
ISBN: 978-1-60964-346-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019939464

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SOMETHING HOWIE BECKER SAID
(San Francisco)

Diane Christian and I were in San Francisco visiting our old friends Howie
Becker and Dianne Hagaman. We had vague plans to Do Things, but, save for
one meal out and an evening visiting two other old pals, we spent most of three
days sitting around their kitchen table telling stories.
Howie had celebrated his ninetieth birthday a few weeks earlier. We’d
missed it because Diane and I had colds courtesy of one of our grandchildren.
The party, Howie said, had been terrific: some of his friends and family had
gotten together at Howie’s and Dianne’s favorite North Beach bistro.
As it turned out, this was a better call because we got to spend all that
time hanging out. We talked about friends and foes, still around and dead and

11
gone. We talked about writing and about making pictures. Dianne had been a
newspaper photographer for years.
As usual with Howie and me, one of the topics was what books we
were working on. Even since we first met (at a drug conference in Buffalo in
spring 1969), Howie and I have talked about our books in progress. We’re
both still at it. In 2015, University of Chicago Press published his What About
Mozart? What About Murder? In 2017, it published his book about data,
Evidence. The week we visited, he was adding two chapters to a new edition of
what is his most famous book, Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance
(originally published in 1963, and never out of print since then).

One of the graduate courses I’m still teaching has to do with fieldwork.
It goes under various rubrics and takes various forms, depending what
department I’m doing it in. I got my current structure for the class from
Howie. In 1992, he had me out to University of Washington, where he was
then teaching, to give a talk on the 1971 Attica prison violence and subsequent
1975 felony and 1991 civil rights litigation. While I was there, he asked me to
do a session of his fieldwork seminar.
“Sure,” I said. “Let me see the syllabus.”
“There isn’t any.”
“What are the readings?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Tell me how it’s structured.”
“It isn’t.”
He said that at the first meeting he told the students they had to “find

12
someplace where people are doing something together; go there; stay there
four hours and write down everything you see or hear.” Readings and
discussions derived from that.
“That’s teaching without a net,” I said.
“So it is,” Howie said.
The following semester, I tried it. It was the best fieldwork seminar I’d
ever had. Ever since, that was the model I’ve used, whether the seminar was
based in Art, Media Study, Architecture, or English.
In our recent discussion, Howie described photographer Aaron
Siskind’s way of doing the same thing. Siskind was giving a course at the San
Francisco Art Institute, then located a few blocks from where we were talking.
Siskind, Howie said, would give the students in his class a piece of paper. His
instruction was, “In the morning, after you have had breakfast, take your
camera and leave the place you’re staying and walk out on to the sidewalk.
When you get there, open the paper I gave you, with instructions not to open
it any earlier. On it, you’ll find a letter, R or L, and a number. Turn left or
right, according to the letter, and walk the number of steps the number says.
Then make some pictures.”
We talked about Howie’s version, Siskind’s version and my version.
Then I realized our discussion wasn’t just about pedagogy. “That’s what I’ve
been doing my whole life. I find myself someplace; I look around; I write about
it.” He said he knew that. I mentioned some articles grounded in places,
published and unpublished. “I’ve got a lot of them. I could make a book of
them.”
“Yes,” Howie said. “You could.”

13
 Something else Howie said to me figures here. It has to do with the
random. We control the parts of our lives we control, but most things that
occur ask our counsel not at all: we just deal with them. We are kids on a street
in a town we did not choose; we go off looking for one thing and another thing
appears before us; we treat our body well but get pancreatic cancer anyway; we
drive carefully but some idiot on a cell phone t-bones our car at an intersection;
the market does astonishingly well and we have more money than we
imagined, or the other way around; we get lucky or we don’t; we find ourselves
in a place and time we could not have imagined, but, once there, we have a
perfectly rational story explaining everything.
Most of these stories are about places I found myself where I could
control only a fraction of what was going on. What they’re really about is
finding oneself in the world and looking around and seeing what’s there.
My friend Robert Creeley’s second wife, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, told
Diane Christian and me that during the period they’d been together they’d
moved households eighteen times. When Diane and I were making a film
about Bob I mentioned that. Bob said, “I wasn’t running away; I just didn’t
know I was going there.”
Who of us ever knows where we were going until we can look back and
say: Oh, that. Yeah.
This all starts in Brooklyn. But before that, a few words about memory.

14
ENTRE CHIEN ET LOUP

The French idiom for “twilight” is entre chien et loup: literally, between dog and
wolf. The French word for “twilight” or “dusk” is crépuscule. It is an ungainly
word, and it has none of the imaginative resonance of the idiom.
Entre chien et loup, like our twilight refers to that vague time—which
changes with the time of year and conditions of the sky—between what is
unambiguously day and unambiguously night, between when you can clearly
see what things are and what, on a moonless night, you cannot see at all, the
time when you still see things but cannot say with certainty who or what they
are or were.
It is also the conceptual space between what is known and what is not
known, between what is safe (and wags its tail and licks your hand) and what is

15
dangerous (its tail is tucked in and your hand is at risk), between what has
already happened and is hence inevitable, and what has yet to happen and is
hence over-rich in possibility.
Memory is not unlike that. Things in memory, even those that seem
clear, are never certain. The fact that you remember something doesn’t mean it
happened or that it looked like that; it means only that you remember it
happening or it was looking like that. If you want certainty, memory will not
help you, though it is good for stories.
If I ever wrote an autobiography or memoir I’d give it the title or
subtitle entre chien et loup.

16
ON THE BLOCK
(Brooklyn)

The Neighborhood
Before World War II, we lived in the ground-floor apartment of a
three-story brownstone: 25 Vernon Avenue in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section
of Brooklyn. It was in the middle of the block, halfway between Nostrand and
Marcy Avenues.
My father had been born on that street. He often pointed to the flat
across the street from where we lived and said, “I was born right there.” I was
born in Bushwick Hospital, a few blocks away.
When my father was growing up on Vernon Avenue, it was (he told
me) mostly populated by Ashkenazi Jews who had made their way out of

17
Manhattan’s Lower East Side tenements. Neither he nor my mother would
have used the word Ashkenazi because, I think, they had no awareness at all of
Sephardic Jews, the ones who spoke Spanish. Both of my grandmothers spoke
several European languages—German, Yiddish, Russian, Polish. But not
Spanish.
The only Jews I knew of who weren’t Jews like us were the Chassids
we’d see from the trolley in Williamsburg when I was on the way to piano
lessons at the Henry Street Settlement, off Delancy Street in Manhattan. My
mother would look at the men in their black hats and coats and curls hanging
down and would always say she couldn’t stand them. She couldn’t stand
Gypsies, either. Gypsies, she said, stole; I never learned what she had against
the Chassids.
By the time I was born (1936), the block was Jews and Italians. One
block away, Myrtle Avenue, the parallel street with an El, was, with one
exception, all black. The exception was the bookie parlor, run by Italians,
where my father spent far too much time.
Beyond that was another street that was all Italian. Another nearby
street was all Puerto Rican. My main interest in Myrtle Avenue was the El: an
elevated train that could, for a nickel, take you on an all-day ride above the city
streets.
New York was like that in those years, and some parts of it still are: you
go one block and you’re in another language, smelling different food odors
coming from the kitchen windows. Nearly all the Els are gone, but you still can
ride the subways forever, if you know how to avoid the exit that tosses you out
into the street. I don’t know why you’d want to, but you can.

18
Family
We had cousins on my mother’s side in two of the brownstones, and
my mother’s sister, Estelle, lived in a fourth with her husband Jack and their
two daughters: Honey and Ginger. Those two cousins seemed hugely older
than I, but it was probably only five or six years. When you’re a kid, five or six
years is a big block of time. Later, it’s nothing. Except, both of them are dead
now, so it matters at this end, too.
My mother’s parents, also Russian/Polish Jews, had moved from the
Lower East Side to Easton, Pennsylvania. I don’t know how that came about.
My mother and father met on a street in midtown Manhattan when
she was working as a clerk in the jewelry district and he was a motion picture
projector operator. When they got engaged, she gave him the sapphire ring
that he wore on his left hand the entire time I knew him. (He wore his
wedding ring on his right hand, Russian-style.) The day he died, an ICU nurse
came out and handed it to me. I’ve never worn any jewelry other than a
wedding ring, so when my son, Michael, was about thirty, I gave him the
sapphire ring. He has no more interest in bling than I do, so a few years later I
asked him for it back. I gave it to my sister, who had it made into a necklace
which, for a while, she wore. I think she gave it to her daughter.
I asked my mother a few times how it was that she got picked up on a
New York street. She got kind of coy about it—a very rare mode for her—but I
never got the details. I don’t know how her Pennsylvania family and our part of
my father’s Brooklyn family wound up on the same Brooklyn street. New York
is a city of coincidence, a place where the random is part of everyday logic.
There are questions I never thought to ask, and now there is no one to

19
ask them of.

Eli’s farts
My grandmother, Sarah Jackson, died June 16, 1940, eight days after
my was born. I was four. She was sixty-nine years old. I remember her. There
are photos of us in Atlantic City. I don’t remember that, but I remember her at
my Aunt Minnie’s apartment near the George Washington Bridge.
Her husband, Eli (that’s what is on the death certificate: his name was
probably Eliazer) died eighteen years earlier, when my father was eleven: June
10, 1922. He was a tinsmith and he had, my father said, one particular skill: he
could emit SBD (silent but deadly) farts at will. This figured, my father said, in
an ongoing, never-articulated battle between him and my grandmother.
They were poor, but she took very seriously the Jewish obligation to
help those who have less than you. She regularly brought home to dinner
derelicts she encountered on the street. They were, my father said, invariably
odoriferous. She was doing a mitzvah, a good deed, so my grandfather couldn’t
argue with her about it. But he could wage guerilla war: every time she brought
one of her street people home for dinner, he’d emit SBDs the entire time.
“You didn’t talk about farts,” my father said, “so he had her. He
couldn’t talk about her bums; she couldn’t talk about his farts. The whole time
that went on, right up until he died, I never heard a word of complaint from
either of them. I still remember the odor of the people at the table and the
odor of my father’s farts.”

The block

20
 My father—who worked in the summer as an auctioneer and shill at an
auction joint in Atlantic City, and the same thing at an auction joint on
Broadway the rest of the year—tended the furnace for the brownstone—
feeding it coal and hauling out the ashes—in exchange for which we got
reduced rent and use of the back yard, which you got to by way of our kitchen
door. My pals and I, we played out there all the time.
One summer day, my cousin Marvin Ort and I collected two fruit jars
of baby fireflies. We brought them into the kitchen. My mother screamed,
“Mosquitoes!” Either Marvin or I, maybe both of us, dropped the jars on the
instant and the kitchen was aswarm with New York summer mosquitoes,
which immediately did what New York summer mosquitoes do.
I hung out with Marvin (whom I remember as always having a white
skim across his upper lip, as if he’d just pulled his mouth away from a glass of
milk; he was blonde; where did that come from?), and Lenny Kaplan (my
mother’s side of the family). I’ve looked for them on the Internet but have
come up empty.
And Danny Rich, whose father had in the basement of their house, a
huge electric train array. A whole room for a grownup’s electric trains!
And another cousin, Jackie Newfield, who lived one house to the left of
us. I’d forgotten him until my mother sent me a 1942 photo of Marvin, Jackie,
me, my kid brother and Lenny in front of our brownstone. She included a note
telling me who everybody was. “Jackie Newfield,” she wrote, “he grew up to be
a writer, just like you.””
You can find Jackie on the Internet. He grew up and wrote for some of
the same places I did (like The Nation), and many I didn’t. The writing came

21
later. In those days, it was cowboy outfits and chalk games in the street, like
Scully. Nobody plays Scully any more. There’s no place to do it: too many cars.

Dominick
Three horse carts came to the street regularly. One was a guy with
vegetables and fruits. I didn’t pay him any attention. Another was the iceman.
We had a refrigerator, but my aunt Estelle had an icebox. I remember her
iceman with his ice tongs, bringing a cubic foot of ice wrapped in burlap to her
second-floor apartment. He’d push it in the top compartment of her icebox,
then leave, the tongs in his hand, the burlap over his shoulder. He didn’t
interest me either.
The third horse cart was operated by a guy named Dominick. He sold
Italian ices. My favorite was lemon, which was the color of old paper. He
would scoop it into a small paper cup. By the time you got to the bottom, it
was melted, so it was a drink sweeter and tarter than any drink you’d have
anywhere else.
Dominick always gave me a sugar cube, which I would immediately
feed to his horse. I used to know the horse’s name, but that’s gone now. It
amazed me: that huge animal with those enormous teeth taking the sugar cube
from my fingers with a moist, gentle touch.
I’d see Dominick’s horse and cart up the block and I’d sit on our stoop,
nickel in hand, and wait for the cup with the lemon ice and the sugar cube.

Across the bridge

My father’s sisters, Minnie and Leah, lived far uptown, at 2 Pinehurst
Avenue near the George Washington Bridge, but we still had one very old

22
aunt on the Lower East Side: Tanta Zadie on Hester Street. Once a year we’d
take the trolley over the Williamsburg Bridge, get off on Delancey Street and
walk over to her building. She lived on the fourth floor. There was one toilet
on each floor and the stairs to her flat always reeked of urine. For years, I
thought it was just something poor people did: they pissed in the hall. Only
recently did someone explain it to me: “One toilet per floor. Somebody’s in
there forever. Two people are ahead of you. What choice do you have?”
That neighborhood became Hispanic for a while, but in recent years,
I’ve heard, it’s become gentrified, so poor people can’t afford to live there now.
An avant-garde theater company—The Wooster Group—is based near where
my Tanta Zadie lived. In 2017, they did a play based on work in I did in Texas
in 1964, The B-Side. I spent so much time with them, they made me an
associate member of the Group. Sometimes, when I’m in a cab on my way to
the theater, we are on the same streets we walked to get to Tanta Zadie’s place.
Something happens: I get a flash of what those houses and stores looked like
before, then I’m back in the present.

Pebbles
Once a year my mother took me to an enormous Jewish cemetery in
Queens. For some reason, nearly all of NYC’s Jewish cemeteries are in Queens.
We never went to Queens for any reason other than that annual visit. I don’t
remember—if I ever knew—whose graves we were visiting. My mother’s
parents were then both alive, living in Easton, Pennsylvania.
There were two graves. I remember the number because that was how
many pebbles I’d have to find. Most of the gravestones had a few pebbles atop

23
them. None of the gravestones had rounded tops: the pebbles would fall off. I
asked my mother why we did that. “So God will know someone visited.”
My atheist mother found nothing inconsistent in a god who roamed
the city’s graveyards, taking attendance of the living. Whenever I hurt myself—
burning a hand on the stove, falling down the stairs, scraping a knee—she’d say
in the next breath, “God punished you.” For what? Who knows? There’s
always something.
She got sad about gravestones with no pebbles and would sometimes
put some on the stones of people she didn’t know.
Then they started building “memorial parks,” cemeteries with flat
bronze markers in the ground. The cemetery owners preferred them because
they were easy to mow. But where do you put the pebbles? On the flat marker?
That’s just moving it from one horizontal place to another horizontal place.
You think the god in whom we do not believe is going to notice that?

Aunt Sadie
We went to Queens only to visit the dead. We went to the Bronx only
to visit the Bronx Zoo (which had a small animal petting area) and to visit my
Aunt Sadie, who was, so far as I know, the only person in my father’s family
who drank booze.
My mother and I fought constantly until I was about forty, when we
became friends; we remained friends until she died. When I was young and we
were fighting, she would sometimes say, “I’ll die and your father will marry
Aunt Sadie. See how you like that!” The implication was: That boozer!
One time I said, “I’d like it a lot.”
“Hah,” she said.

24
 Aunt Sadie was the widow of my father’s youngest brother, Benjamin,
who everyone in the family referred to as “Bunny.” I don’t remember ever
having met him. He died before I was born or before I was old enough to
remember things. They had a daughter, Brenda, about my age.
The trip from where we lived in Bed-Sty to the Bronx Zoo was almost
entirely underground. We entered a subway not far from our house on Vernon
Avenue; we changed trains more than once; we entered daylight near the Zoo.
It was the same with Aunt Sadie: darkness all the way. As a kid, I had no idea
where the Queens necropolis, the Bronx Zoo and Sadie’s flat were in relation
to where I lived.
I have been to the Bronx only twice since I last visited Sadie. The first
time was in December 1971, when I interviewed Attica Brother Herbert X.
Blyden in the Bronx House of Detention. The second was in 1988, when
Diane Christian and I were working on a film about our friend, the civil rights
lawyer, William Kunstler.
When I told my mother that Diane and I were going to film Bill in the
Bronx County Courthouse on Grand Concourse, she said, “That’s where all
the rich Jews live.”
I said, “Not for a very long time.”
“What I remember,” she said, “is that’s where they live.”
My one memory of Sadie is the two of us at her kitchen table in her
Bronx apartment. I was out of the Marines and in college then. I don’t
remember the occasion of the visit. She was drinking shots. My parents’
generation of Jews didn’t drink anything but Manischewitz. I remember us

25
talking for a long time. Sadie tossed one down and told me that she’d always
been in love with my father. “If your mother died….”

Brother
My brother’s name is Moss Alan Jackson. When he was in high school,
he went by the name Alan. Later, he decided he liked Moss better. When he’s
around very old friends, you can tell if they know him from high school or
college by which name they use. In the family, nobody ever called him by
either name. Everybody called him “Brother.” My parents, my sister, the aunts,
uncles, and cousins: he was “Brother.” Me, too.
When Diane Christian and I got together in 1972, she said, “Don’t you
think it’s strange that everyone in your family addresses Moss in terms of his
relationship to you?”
I said that I didn’t know what she was talking about.
“Brother,” she said. “You all call him ‘Brother.’”
“That’s his name,” I said.
“No,” she said, “it’s not his name. His name is Moss or Alan. Nobody
in your family calls him either one of them.”
I told her I’d never thought about that before.
“I bet he has,” she says.
“That might explain some things,” I said.
“I’m sure it does,” Diane said.

Blood
During World War II, my father worked as a riveter on the night shift
in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and we lived at 24 Monument Walk in the Fort

26
Greene projects, which were built to house those wartime workers. There was
no neighborhood there. It had all the anomie of all high-rises. The first year, I
went to P.S. 5, then I went to P.S. 67. I walked to both of them by myself. It
wasn’t like now.
My mother worked in the shoe department at Abraham & Straus, a
Brooklyn department store, long gone. Brother and I were usually alone at
night. We were told that if there was a problem we should go to Mrs.
Robinson, in the adjacent apartment.
One night, Brother and I got to jumping up and down on our beds. I
don’t know what I did wrong, but I did a flip and my forehead hit the radiator.
I went to the mirror in the hall to see if I’d done any damage. I saw a cut, an
inch or so long, flesh on both sides a different color than my skin, and in the
middle, a thin rectangle of white bone.
Almost instantly, blood started gushing from the wound. It hit the
mirror, the wall, the floor. I ran to the bathroom and got two towels. I held
one to my forehead with my right hand and I began mopping up the blood
with my left.
I couldn’t keep up. Whatever I mopped up was replaced by blood
leaking from the towel in my right hand.
“Mom’s going to be angry,” Brother said. He kept on saying it: “Mom’s
going to be angry. Mom’s going to be angry.” If I hadn’t had towels in both
hands, I’d probably have hit him.
I’d had a few stiches in my scalp at the Emergency Room at
Cumberland hospital earlier that year, so I knew what to do. I threw the two
towels in the bathroom sink, got another towel, managed to get my jacket on,

27
and took Brother next door. I told Mrs. Robinson I had to go to the hospital
for a while. She looked at me and said, “All right.” It was that kind of
neighborhood.
I walked the block or two to the hospital and went to the emergency
room. I told them I’d cut my head and I needed stitches. A doctor took me
into an examining room. He looked at the cut. “Yes, you do,” he said.
He threw the towel into a container. He asked where my parents were.
I told him they were working. I also told him that it was very important that
my mother not be told about this because she would be very angry. He no
doubt told me that it was highly unlikely that she would be unaware of it.
Maybe he said nothing.
He leaned over me. I asked him to tell me when he was about to start
stitching my forehead. I wanted to prepare myself for the pain of the needle
going in. He nodded, but didn’t say anything. Then he said, “All right.”
“You’re going to start?”
“I’m done. Four stitches.”
“You won’t tell my mother?”
“No.”
I thanked him and went home. No paperwork, no telephone calls, no
bills, no nothing. Imagine that today. My mother would have been called at
work. A Family Services worker would have beat her to the apartment wanting
to know why an eight- and a four-year-old kid were home alone: a big
mishigas. Some things really were better in the old days.
I fetched Brother from Mrs. Robinson and set about cleaning up the
blood. I thought I did a perfect job. I rinsed out the bloody towels and hid

28
them.
“Mom’s gonna be angry,” Brother said.
I got into bed, turned out the light, and pulled the cover over my head,
so if she came in the room she wouldn’t see the bandage covering the stitches.
Morning was a long time away.
A few minutes later, I heard her key in the lock. The door opened and
closed. I heard her footsteps in the hallway. There was a moment of silence,
then she roared, “WHAT HAPPENED HERE? WHERE DID ALL THIS
BLOOD COME FROM? WHY IS THERE BLOOD ON THE
MIRROR? WHO MADE THIS MESS?”

The Store
After the War, we moved back to Vernon, this time to the second
apartment house in from the corner of Vernon and Nostrand, 7-11, the back
flat on the top floor of a five-floor walk-up. Mail came twice a day. I loved
getting mail. I’d write for everything that was free in magazines so I’d get
whatever it was, and I’d be there when the mailman arrived with his huge fob
of keys to open the top of the brass mailbox. I’m still like that: I check email
like a junkie.
An Italian widow lived alone in one of the first-floor apartments, a few
steps from the mailboxes. My mother spoke of her in quiet tones and said she
had “the consumption.” I never knew what that was: it was just something that
was not talked about. Tuberculosis, the endemic disease of the poor, or cancer,
the disease no one then knew how to address, were both like demons best not
to name. Both killed just about anybody who had them. “The consumption”:
she never said it without the definite article.

29
 My father operated what in New York is called a “candy store” or a
“luncheonette.” It was on the ground floor of the apartment house next to ours,
1-5 Vernon, at the corner. Luncheonettes were that era’s convenience stores,
minus the canned goods and soap. It was a short order restaurant and ice cream
fountain; it sold newspapers and magazines, Alka-Seltzer, pads, pencils, razor
blades. I loved it because I could read all the comic books and, when the ice
cream barrels were too empty for the scoop, I could finish them off with a
spoon. And, in the backs of magazines, I could find offers that, for a postcard,
would get me mail.
Our newspaper rack held The Daily News, The New York Post, New
York Herald-Tribune, Daily Mirror, New York Times, PM, The Brooklyn Eagle,
The Forward (Yiddish), and Il Progresso italo-americano. There was also a
Hebrew paper, and The Daily Worker. One of my jobs was to unpack the
bundle of newspapers in the store entryway and put the papers in their proper
place in the rack. I loved the odor of fresh newspaper ink. I still do.
Many years later, my mother told me she hated the store because it was
seven AM to ten PM seven days a week. “When we had that store,” she said,
“we had no life.”
A glass case on the counter with three shelves held Charlotte Russes, a
sweet that existed, so far as I know, only in New York City. They were sponge
cake inside a cardboard wrap. The cake was topped with a layer of jam,
whipped cream and a Maraschino cherry. A guy would come every few days to
refill the case. The only time I’ve seen a Charlotte Russe in the past fifty years
was in one of my favorite scenes in Sergio Leone’s great gangster film, Once
Upon a Time in America.

30
 Dominic, one of the kids in the film, is sitting on a tenement staircase
waiting for Peggy, the neighborhood tart, to finish her bath. He’s holding a
Charlotte Russe. Give Peggy a Charlotte Russe and she’ll put out for you on
the roof. It’s Dominic first time. He sits there, looking at the door. Then he
looks at the Charlotte Russe. Then he looks at the door. He looks at the
Charlotte Russe and runs a finger along the side, lifting off some of the
whipped cream. He looks at the door, then he lifts some more whipped cream.
He looks at the door again, then, with utter joy, he gobbles the rest of the
Charlotte Russe. I loved Charlotte Russes when I was a kid, but not enough to
have passed up my first chance to get laid. I think.

Geno’s TV, Geno’s fish

The first TV set in our building was owned by Geno, a fisherman on
the fourth floor. I remember all of us—Geno’s family and ours—sitting on the
floor and on the bed watching Roller Derby, Kukla, Fran and Ollie, Milton
Berle’s show, Howdy Doody and, of course, wrestling. A lot of wrestling. I don’t
know if that was because Geno liked wrestling or because there was a lot of
wrestling on TV in those years, and we’d watch pretty much anything that was
on.
When we all talked, we spoke English; Geno and his wife often spoke
to one another in Italian. The first time Diane and I went to Italy I was
surprised to find I understood a lot of things. At the time, I thought it was
because I knew French, but now, writing this, I realize it was probably more
because of those nights watching television in Geno’s apartment.
My mother would often babysit for them in exchange for fish. We were
as poor as everybody else in that building, so she babysat a lot and we ate a lot

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of fish. My mother was a lousy cook. Her basic technique was to cook
whatever it was for a very long time. I still have a difficult time ordering fish in
a restaurant, even though I know properly-cooked fish is nothing like what I
had as a kid. I was twenty-seven before I learned that cooked vegetables did
not have to be soft as mush.

The garbageman’s son

One of my closest friends, Benny Panapento, was the son of a New
York garbageman. They didn’t call them “sanitation workers” then. That term
still brings to my mind someone with an alcohol-soaked rag wiping a surface to
kill bacteria, not someone dumping garbage into a huge noisy truck.
It was, for Benny and me, the coolest of occupations because Benny’s
father brought home all kinds of fascinating, useful things people had tossed
out. Nowadays, there are people who cruise the streets on trash days looking
for useful things. When Diane and I are getting rid of an old TV or piece of
furniture, we always put it out the day before and it is gone before the city
trucks come. But back then, hardly anyone had a car (passenger vehicle
manufacture had been suspended during World War II) so the only people
who cruised the streets on garbage and trash days were the garbagemen.
Benny’s apartment—it was on Sanford Street, which was one block the
other side of Nostrand and across Myrtle—was filled with an astonishing
variety of mismatched things. The kitchen chairs were all different from one
another, as were many of the dishes and picture frames. There were a lot of
books: all sizes, all subjects. The kids in Benny’s family had a lot of toys, some
of which worked and some of which didn’t.

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 Benny and I used to take the trolley to Prospect Park (designed by
Frederick Law Olmsted, whose most complex single project was in Buffalo,
where I now live), where we’d capture frogs, which we would assiduously
dissect in an unused room in the basement of my apartment house. We were,
at that point, preparing for later. That was a time when my mother was telling
everyone I was going to be a doctor. I had a Grey’s Anatomy and I learned
every muscle and bone in the human body. In the English department where I
now teach, I am probably the only full professor who knows the difference
between the biceps radial ulnaris and the biceps flexor ulnaris. I don’t know what
happened to Benny Panapento. Maybe he became a scientist or doctor; I
didn’t.
Every year, Benny’s block had a huge San Gennaro feast. I was insanely
jealous. Jews had no festivals like that. All my family had was Yom Kippur,
which is as far from a fun festival as you can get.

The monkey wrench with a two-inch jaw

There was one kid on the block whose father had a monkey wrench
with a two-inch jaw. Nobody liked the kid very much—I don’t even remember
his name—but we let him hang with us because of that monkey wrench.
A monkey wrench with a two-inch jaw was enormously important in
our neighborhood in the summer because the two lugs that got the cap off a
New York fire hydrant and turned the water on were about two inches.
Ordinary household wrenches wouldn’t do it.
After the hydrant was turned on, one of the stronger guys would hold a
small plank under the pressurized water coming out. The higher he pulled the
plank, the higher the water would arc over the street, where we’d run around in

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bathing suits. There were few cars on New York City streets then, so there was
plenty of room to do that. When we’d see a car coming, we’d move to the
sidewalk. It was summer in the city before air conditioning, so car windows
were always open. As the car passed by, the guy with the plank would hit the
water stream, flooding the interior of the car. The drivers would yell and curse
and we’d go back to running around in our kid-made rain.

School Daze
When we moved back to Vernon Avenue after the War, I went to P.S.
54. Most of the Italian kids went to parochial school. You could tell the boys
who went to parochial school because they often had red knuckles from the
nuns’ rulers. They got whacked with the rulers when they misbehaved or didn’t
do their homework. Or per niente, for nothing.
I mentioned that to someone not long after Diane and I got together.
Diane said that was just a folktale; nuns didn’t really do that. She had been
educated by the Sisters of St. Joseph in Rochester and had become a member
of that order herself. So, she was one of those ladies in black outfits teaching
school. She insisted she’d never hit anyone with a ruler nor seen anyone hit
with a ruler. I believe her on both counts. She is a very gentle person. The
Sisters of St. Joseph were a kind and gentle bunch.
But the nuns who taught the guys in my neighborhood were of a
different order entirely. Over the years, when we’d meet someone who’d grown
up in New York about the same time as I, I’d ask, “Did you get your knuckles
rapped?” So many said, “Yes,” or, “I can still feel it,” that Diane finally gave me
that one.

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 New York schools then had a fast track for bright students. It was
called “SP,” which I think meant “special program.” We were grouped together
in classes that did more work than others at the same school and at the same
level. Over a three- or four-year period, we skipped two terms. I had skipped
fourth grade, so that meant by the time I was a high school senior I was two
years younger than everybody else. What had seemed cool when I was in junior
high school turned into a nightmare: the other guys were getting driver’s
licenses and I was still pedaling around on my Schwinn, and the girls were far
too old for me. Schools handle that sort of thing much better now.
I skipped the term in which you learn about “who” and “whom,” which
I still sometimes get wrong. I’ll write something and Diane will correct me on
it. She converted a “who” to “whom” in the next paragraph.
I started that program when I went into Junior High School 148. The
one teacher I remember from that school, one of the two most important
teachers I ever had, was Mrs. Ehrlich, whom I hated at the time. She was my
English teacher. She made us keep ethics notebooks. Every day we had to
write down three ethical issues we’d encountered or ethical choices we’d made.
This was a class of bright, mostly Jewish and Italian street kids, and we
had to write about ethics. There was a Woolworth store on the walk from my
house to J.H.S. 148 and every so often three of us would go in there and
shoplift pencils. I certainly didn’t need the pencils—my father sold them in his
store. The shoplifting was just for the sport of it. We worked as a team—two
to steal the pencils, the third to be lookout, a role we called “laying chickee.”
I always thought that was an absurd name for a lookout and wondered
if I remembered it wrong. Google just told me I remember correctly: “playing

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chickee” or “laying chickee” was to be a lookout. The phrase comes from
“Chickee!” a 1930s New York street shout that translated, “Watch out! The
cops are coming.” I wish some Google contributor would expand the entry
with a riff on the origin of the word, which still seems to me an absurd name
for a lookout.
I don’t think I ever put the shoplifting of pencils in my ethics
notebook. But it was from mean Mrs. Ehrlich that the notion of ethics was
jammed into my head. It never left. I’m forever grateful to Mrs. Ehrlich for
that.
The only other class in junior high I hated as much was typing, which
my mother forced me to take. I was the only boy in the class. It was
humiliating. The guys on the street made fun of me. Typing turned out to be
as important in my life as Mrs. Ehrlich’s ethics notebooks. I became a very
good touch typist. I’ve written a lot of books, in part because I had that skill.
I still have the Royal portable I got for my thirteenth birthday. I had it
with me the whole time I was in the Marines. I took a lot of ribbing for it
then, too. But being a fast typist kept me out of the brig once.
The other teacher who mattered was Mrs. Gold in third grade. She
realized I had finished reading the week’s reading assignment on Monday, so
she exempted me from the regular reading assignments and brought me books
to read. It was because of here that I skipped fourth grade, which may have
been the who and whom year. She licensed me to go at my own speed,
something I’ve tried to apply in my own teaching.

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Cosimo’s pink pistol pockets
The hot book in 1947 was Irving Schulman’s The Amboy Dukes, which
was about Jewish street gangs in the Brownville section of Brooklyn. All the
boys I knew had read it, even the Italians. There were no kid gangs in my
neighborhood, but there were gang-wannabes, one of whom was named
Cosimo.
He was enough older than me that we never talked or hung out. He
used to lean on the brick wall on the Vernon Avenue side of my father’s store
with one foot on the wall behind him. He always had a cigarette in his hand.
After The Amboy Dukes made street gang culture fashionable, Cosimo
started wearing one of the most popular gang garments: pants with pegged
cuffs and pistol pockets. That is, the cuff was several inches narrower than the
calf, and the back pockets had flaps in the shape of a pistol, always in material
of a different color. Cosimo’s pants were light blue and his pistol pockets were
pink. (Yeah: it was even silly at the time; Cosimo loved those pants.)
He used to come into my father’s store to use the toilet, then he’d go
back to the wall. One time, I guess he zipped up and left the toilet too fast
because his faucet was still running. As he went out of the store, I saw a huge
dark wet stain on the inside of one of his pants legs.
I immediately went onto the block and told everybody. For maybe
thirty minutes, kids—boys and girls—would stroll past Cosimo where he
stood, one leg behind him on the wall, smoking, being cool. I don’t know if he
ever noticed what was going on. Maybe he thought the grins were in
admiration of his light blue pants with the pink pistol pockets.

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 I said there was no kid gang in my neighborhood. I don’t know about
the adults. There was one man who lived across the street who my father
referred to as “Joey, who is in the Black Hand.” It was pronounced almost like
one word: JoeywhoisintheBlackHand.
I asked my father what the Black Hand was. “It’s an Italian thing,” he
said. He said nothing more about it. I don’t know if that was because he didn’t
know anything more or if it was because that was one of the things you didn’t
talk to children about.

Fights and a dead guy

Next to my father’s store was a glazier shop run by two Jewish brothers.
One day they had a fight. Dozens of us, kids and grownups, circled around
them, watching them punch each other bloody. Nobody tried to break it up. In
our neighborhood, you didn’t break up fights; you watched them. (One time I
got into a fight with the son of one of the neighborhood loan sharks. I was
losing badly and I wished someone would break it up. Nobody did. But a lot of
people watched, my father among them.) Finally, the two brothers got tired,
and went back inside their store and worked together on a large piece of plate
glass.
Another day, a guy came into my father’s store and said he was really
thirsty, could he have some water? My father gave him some, he said thanks,
he went outside, took a few steps, and collapsed and died in front of the glazier
shop. He was the first dead person I’d ever seen. I was maybe eleven.
I took pictures with my father’s Kodak folding camera and got on the
subway to Manhattan. The Daily News was always advertising for spot news

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pictures. They developed my roll of film, which turned out to have been
overexposed and out of focus. The photo editor said, “Keep at it, kid.” He gave
me $5. It was my first photograph sale.

Three on the even side

I had two friends and one object of unending lust in the two apartment
houses on the even side of the street, in one of which my father, as I noted
earlier, had been born. The friends were Danny Hyber and ZetzError!
Bookmark not defined.; the object of lust was Sally.
Zetz was a D.P. His real name was Nathan, but everyone called him
Zetz, even his parents. “D.P.” was short for “displaced person,” which is what
we called refugees in those days. I never heard anyone use the actual words
“displaced persons’ for the Jews who survived the camps or the destruction of
their villages and managed to get here after the War. It was just “D.P.”
No one talked in front of children about family who had stayed behind
or had been left behind. Years later, I asked my mother about the relatives who
remained in Russia after her parents and my father’s parents left. “What about
the others?”
“There were no others. Everyone left.”
It could not have been true. Neither could that have been something
my generation’s parents could bear to talk to us about. On both sides, the
conversation was unbearable. I’ve since asked friends my age what their parents
said in those years. The answer has always been the same: “Nothing.”
For a time, Zetz and I played chess every afternoon on the steps in
front of his building. He was a Polish Jew. (Polish Jew, Russian Jew: along that

39
part of the Russian-Polish border, it was often the same town, depending what
year you were talking about.) I don’t remember having any language problem. I
remember that none of the other guys hung out with him and some of them
didn’t think much of me doing it. Maybe it was because so many of us had
family on the block and his family had nobody. Maybe there were language
issues I no longer remember. You don’t need talk for chess. He knew enough
English to tell me wonderful stories about working in the underground, about
shooting a machine gun, about killing Nazis. You can tell a good part of stories
like that with gestures. I remember some of Zetz’s gestures.
Then, one day, I realized Zetz would have had to have been about
seven or eight years old at the time of those stories. I thought of what I had
been doing, and capable of doing, at seven or eight. Making it to and from
Cumberland Hospital was my single epic adventure. None of the things Zetz
had told me was remotely possible or plausible. He’d gotten the stories from
other people’s talk, or from the place the rest of us got our heroic stories:
movies. I believed them because I’d probably seen the same movies, so I would
have known they must have been true.
A switch turned. I had none of the sympathy about need or
understanding of how we inhabit other people’s stories that I have now. I felt
conned and betrayed. I never spoke to Zetz again.
Some time later, my father said, “What happened with you and Zetz?
You were such buddies.” Then he said, “You’re his only pal.” My father rarely
commented on anything I did on the street. I don’t remember what answer I
gave, or if I did anything but shrug.

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 Danny Hyber and I went to P.S. 54 together. We got telephones the
same week. Telephones, like cars, had been in short supply during the War, so
getting one was a big deal. Even though we saw one another on the block and
walked to and from school together, Danny and I talked on the phone every
day. I remember our phone number: EVergreen 7-8701. That was when you
could tell where someone lived by the telephone exchange: CHelsea,
CUmberland, MUrray Hill, BEekman, BUtterfield.
The main reason we had the phone was so my parents could talk to one
another when one was in the store and the other was in the apartment. They
were five walk-up flights apart. For Danny and me, it was something to do. It
was more the fact of doing it rather than having anything to say, much like
kids now with their smartphones. (On my way out of the building in which I
now teach, I recently heard a young man, who was at that point crossing the
street and heading toward the library, say to his smartphone, “Oh, nothing. I’m
crossing the street and heading toward the library.”)
In 1991, not long before she died, my mother said, “You remember
your friend, Danny Hyber?” I said that I did. “I heard he committed suicide,”
she said. We’d been off the block for forty years. I’d never heard her talk about
contact with anybody from back then. I asked where she’d heard it. “Somebody
told me,” she said.
She said that to me before the Internet. When the Internet came along,
I searched Danny Hyber. His name didn’t turn up. None of the names turned
up, except Jackie Newfield. People who weren’t out and about after the
Internet, they’re hard to find. You don’t know if they’re gone, or if they just
haven’t logged in.

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 And Sally. Sally: my first object of unambiguous lust. She was perhaps
a year older than I. She was the daughter of one of the neighborhood loan
sharks. She had breasts I could not not-think of. I remember them as fabulous
breasts and I am convinced they were, even though I know, at that age,
proximity to any breasts at all, on someone close to my age, would have made
them fabulous. The other girls our age were barely budding, but Sally had
those wondrous adult tits, there, just two garment layers away.
I had only recently learned a crude adolescent version of sex (this was a
world before YouPorn, where all is revealed and imagination is superfluous). I
desperately wanted to fuck Sally, whatever “fucking” in fact was. I desperately
wanted to do all sorts of sweet and tender and fondling and stroking things
with and to Sally. I desperately wanted inside those two garment layers. I
imagined us in one of the vacant basement rooms in our apartment houses,
doing things to one another that we’d figure out how to do once we were there,
alone, in the cellar twilight.
It was years before it occurred to me that Sally was perhaps suffering
similar thoughts. I realized it because I remembered that just about every time
we were close to one another, we’d punch each other on the arm, really hard.
Harder than the guys did to one another. Hard enough to show bruises the
next day. I don’t remember us ever talking. Just finding an excuse to draw
neigh, glower, and then to let one go, really hard.

Hair, opera, circus

The most important part of Nostrand Avenue was the barbershop next
to the glazier. I hated haircuts—my neck and back always itched afterwards.

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But I liked Vito’s music. The barber’s name was Vito and, whenever I went in
for a haircut, he always had opera on. Back then, Metropolitan Opera Saturday
afternoon performances were broadcast; Saturday was the day my mother sent
me for haircuts.
The Met broadcasts were sponsored for decades by Texaco. I later
learned that Texaco did that because they had some illegal Nazi affiliation
during World War II and they were trying to build a classier image. It worked.
Vito would sing as he cut, and, since I understood only a little Italian,
he would tell me the plot of the opera, or what he thought was the plot of the
opera. Years before I ever sat in the Met or any other opera house, I knew the
stories—more or less—of just about every opera by Verdi and Puccini. I would,
in later life, go to a performance of an opera I had never encountered and,
part-way through, think, “I know this song.” It was Vito.
Vito gave me tickets to things. Back then, one of the ways shows
advertised was by getting shop-owners to put posters in their windows. Vito
often had posters from the Barnum and Bailey/Ringling Brothers Circus and
from rodeos, both of which took place in Madison Square Garden. Every time
he put one of those posters in his window, he got two free tickets. He wasn’t
interested in circuses or bucking broncos, and he had no family. So I got the
tickets. The circus, the rodeo, and the opera stories more than compensated for
the itchy neck and back.

Fire
There were, as I said, two apartment houses on each side of Vernon
where it met Nostrand. (A Google Earth search shows them all gone. What

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seems to be a single building—five stories, fronting on three streets—now
occupies the space where 1-5 and 7-11 Vernon were, as well as my father’s
luncheonette, the glazier’s store and the barber shop on Nostrand, and the
Cascade Laundry and the bookie parlor on Myrtle.) The rest of our block, up
to Marcy, was brownstones.
One of them was vacant. A few of us used it as a place to hang out. It
would have been our clubhouse if we’d had a club, but we didn’t, so it was just
where we hung out and did things.
There was nothing there at all, save some old newspapers and letters. It
didn’t occur to me, at that age, to look at the letters. One day, one of us, I
forget which one, “Let’s set the newspapers on fire and see how long it takes
the firemen to get here.”
Someone had matches. We gathered the newspapers—all of them old
and dry—in the middle of the room, and lit the match. Then one of us ran to
the corner and pulled the fire alarm. The rest of us dispersed to places where
we could watch the street.
It wasn’t long before smoke came from the second-floor window of the
house. And then the firetrucks came. It was easy for them to spot the house in
question. They dragged a hose inside, did their work, and were soon gone.
I never gave that adolescent mischief any thought until May 1985,
when police in Philadelphia dropped a smoke grenade on a row house in which
a communal group called MOVE lived. The grenade set the building on fire.
The fire spread, destroying sixty-four other houses in the neighborhood. It
killed eleven MOVE members, five of them children.
We were just curious and mischievous when we set that fire. And more

44
than a little stupid. And we didn’t realize that acting on curiosity and engaging
in mischief can have consequences nothing can fix.

The lady in the second-floor window

My sister was born in 1948, when I was twelve. I remember walking
along the sidewalk with my mother when she was wheeling the baby carriage.
People would pass by; people would be on stoops. She’d sometimes stop and
talk; she’d sometimes say hello and keep on moving.
But as we approached one house on the block, she always covered my
sister’s face and sped up. I remember her saying, “Don’t look up.” I asked why.
She said, “That woman on the second floor has malocchio, the evil eye.” She
pronounced it maloik, the way the Italians did.
I looked up. A woman was sitting by the second-floor window, looking
out at the street. I’d often seen her doing that. I asked, “What’s the evil eye?”
“Maloik,” she said again. That was no help, so I repeated the question.
“I don’t know,” she’d say, “but it’s not good.”
My mother, as I said earlier, was a Jewish atheist, hardly at all
superstitious. The only holiday she and my father observed was Yom Kippur,
the Day of Atonement. For Jews of their generation, Yom Kippur transcended
religion. It was as basic as throwing salt over your shoulder after you
accidentally spilled some, or not walking under a ladder even though you don’t
believe in bad luck. They even fasted.
But she wasn’t going to risk my sister being exposed to that woman
with malocchio.

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 When we were both a lot older, not long before she died, I asked her
what that was about. “I didn’t believe in it,” she said, “but that woman did, and
you never know.”
It wasn’t just an old Italian lady in a second-floor window who brought
malocchio into my life. When I was in high school, leaving the house of a girl I
was dating, I would frequently find a head of garlic hanging from my rear-view
mirror.
The first time, I thought the girl did it, as a gag. The second time, I
asked. She shrugged. “It’s my grandmother,” she said. Her grandmother lived
with her family. No one knew how old she was. She was a Sephardic Jew from
Salonika, Greece. She spoke no English and referred to me as “The
Americano.” The girl pointed at my car. “She’s protecting it from the Evil
Eye,” she said.
“What’s that?” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said, “but my nana does.”

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